Laying eyes on the first page of the poem, I found myself able to "re-vision" the matter of
revision itself, seeing through (not with) the words to the incomplete erasures. I realized how
much this object is the work Blake made. Its pull is straight on, perpendicular to the axis of the
viewer, holographic and extra-dimensional. Seeing/reading becomes tactile, like moving
through veils to touch the body of the "real poem"; yet one finds instead a vibrant openness. The
"direction" of reading is multivalent, and, while in every moment perception is definite and
unique, the reader is not encouraged to find unity and consistency but multiplicity and difference.
The act of reading is in various ways involved in the very process of revision-seeing again,
writing again, following the literal underwriting as a cue to retrace the activity of "Blake" the
revisioner. This "accident" of the text, that it comes to us in manuscript and somehow still a
work-in-progress, inescapably offers an insight into its transformative poetics.
 To read the poem in this "physical" way is to be haunted by what it chooses not to say,
undermining the "authority" of what is said. It asks not to be taken at face value but to be used as
the site of continuous self-re-vision. The past-either as previous text, the nostalgia for unity, or
the projection of an origin-is creation, a fictive option of the virtual narrative in which the
reader is inevitably co-creative. Anterior reality, that from which the present is presumed to arise,
is not "back there" but "in here," interior to the moment of reading, and is constantly being
rewritten. To embrace this truth, as Blake urges, is to escape induction into the trance of
consensus, the compulsive drama of personal perspective and the binding logic of linear narra-
tive; in short, to gain conscious choice.
 Habituated as we are to reading typeset editions, we easily confuse The Four Zoas with "ordi-
nary text," literature. A by-product of ignoring its non-ordinary, very special reality is mistaking
its evident unfinished state for incompletion and underestimating the complexity of Blake's
realized intentions. To acknowledge its completion (which is not to say its revisionary process
could not have continued) is to accept its invitation to be willingly disrupted by its narrative
interruptions and to engage transubstantially with its matter. The appropriate frame of mind for
this unexampled species of mental travel is certainly akin to Negative Capability, the art of
experiencing doubt and mystery as possibility; and,just as usefully, Positive Incapability, an art of
accepting the impossibility of right interpretation as an opening to initiation into Fourfold
Vision. This is a retentional art, leading to energetic dialogue (Visionary Forms Dramatic) rather
than the orgasmic release of reified apocalypse. Blake says, "Rest before labor," not after, for
"with enlarged & numerous senses" one is "living going forth & returning" and thereby empow-
ered to act in the world.
 The Four Zoas is an emergent work, evolving with its readers and just now coming fully into
view. This perspective is enhanced, as we go to press, by the publication of The Four Zoas by
William Blake: A Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript with Commentary on the Illuminations, by
Cettina Tramontano Magno and David Erdman, as masterful and indispensable as Erdman's The
Illuminated Blake before it. Donald Ault's Narrative Unbound also reaches for the actual Book,
respecting the integrity of Blake's poetics by commitment to the poem as intrinsically complete.
Responding to virtually every written mark on the page as well as every created gap in the
narrative, he accepts the challenge of the text at the level of radical intentionality. He relentlessly
steers between the interpretive Scylla and Charybdis ofoverconcretization and unlimited associa-
tion, and keeps to the bounding line of the poem's energetic trajectory. Narrative Unbound meets
The Four Zoas face to face, risking full embodiment of Blake's subversive poetics, his unending
inquiry into conscious reading,his uncompromising stand -willing to have no readers to create
the possible reader-for the unbounded. George Quasha
 George Quasha