‘Every Angel is Terrible’. So said the German poet Rainer
Maria Rilke in his ‘Duino Elegies’, and indeed mention of Angels has always
caused fear, confusion and even violence. The Headmaster of my prep school
encouraged us to mock and sneer at the mediaeval scholastic philosophers who,
he told us, would argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
But then, he encouraged us to mock and sneer at any opinions other than his own
narrow conservative ones, which were of course not opinions but facts.
As a boy William Blake used to go for long walks into the
countryside not far from his home in London’s Soho. He would see angels in the
trees and then tell his father, who would thrash him for it. That was in about
1780, when belief in angels was perfectly respectable, but presumably one
wasn’t supposed to actually see them;
to do so merited severe punishment.
We have advanced since then: we no longer thrash people who
see angels but instead declare them schizophrenic and send them to the funny
farm.
It seems now that the man who got into trouble at the
addresses made before Nelson Mandela’s funeral for making wildly inaccurate
sign-language interpretations has said that he was distracted by angels, and
has ‘admitted’ that he was ‘suffering’ a ‘psychotic episode’. The
possibility(?) that there were indeed angels present, visible to certain
privileged people, has been officially ruled out.
Luckily for us, William Blake lived before schizophrenia had
been invented. He continued to see, write about, engrave and paint angels all
his life. Good for him.
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