LOSS, EMANATION, ENION


It could be that the nar-
rator has lost his Emana-
 tions in the process of
 attempting to begin the
 narrative.








The reader loses control
of the object of "Lost."






















Line 4:7 is divided into
 three segments with
 three elements in each
 segment.


speaker (presumably Tharmas) is declaring that his "Emanations" are
unequivocally "Lost!" In order to retain a fixed identity to the text at this
point, the Newtonian reader is faced with a conflict of interest: should the
continuity between 4:6 and 4:7 be preserved by equating the disappearance
of Emanations with the disappearance of light,4 an event that occurred in
the text itself between lines 4:6 and 4:7? Or should the privileged status ofa
primordial event existing prior to the text overrule the drive for the con-
tinuous identity of the text and be preserved by interpreting the disappear-
ance of Emanations as an entirely different event from the vanishing of
light, a privileged event that occurred prior to the beginning of the narra-
tion? This dilemma reflects back on the first third of the line itself: sud-
denly it seems crucial that it is the reader who is in the process of losing
control over the object of "Lost!" at exactly that point where the ostensi-
ble object (Emanations) manifests itself in line 4:7. More important,
however, is the way Blake has segmented the line so that both "Lost! Lost!
Lost!" and "are my Emanations" form separate units-"Lost! Lost! Lost!"
by virtue of its repeated words and its repeated punctuation, which both
separate the words and bind them together, and "are my Emanations"
by virtue of its being a complete syntactic unit, a question (with punctua-
tion deleted) which could be rephrased as "Do my Emanations exist?" or
"Do my Emanations have being?" Because of this line's spatial/syntactic
arrangement, what first appears to be a statement defining or naming the
object of loss turns back on the reader and questions the very existence of
the presumed lost object. The declarative meaning is, ironically enough,
not "lost" by the emergence of the interrogative, but rather the latter is
superimposed over the former, co-existing with it, asserting its
immediate commonsense identity in the face of the potentially disinte-
grating interrogative.
 Far beyond their overt simplicity, the final three words of line 4:7-
"Enion O Enion"--relentlessly undermine the Newtonian reader's drive
to reduce the line's preceding conflicting meanings to a unity. Because the
line is segmented into thirds, it seems likely, despite the absent punctua-
tion and additional empty space between "Emanations" and "Enion," that
the speaker is addressing "Enion"; if this is the case, then this new character
Enion is distinct from "Emanations," since they are presumably what has
been "Lost." The layout of the line does not rule out the possibility that
Enion is the name of the aggregate of the "Emanations" whom the speaker
is addressing in absentia by the name of Enion. Thus, in one reading Enion
is a being with an identity separate from the Emanations, and in a second
Enion is a consolidated form of the Emanations. Blake's visual layout of
the line leaves open other possibilities, however, perhaps the most
identity-disintegrating of which syntactically links the second and third,
rather than the first and second, portions of 4:7: instead of "Lost! Lost!
Lost! are my Emanations" read "are my Emanations Enion[?]" While
this is ostensibly a question concerning the identity of (Tharmas'?) Ema-
nations, it is actually a question the text is asking of itself: which of its