CONTRASTING ENION'S LAMENTATIONS


who, like Enion, is "distant far." Urizen's location when he glimpses the
Abyss (23:15) reveals that the world he will soon believe he is creating in
Night II (his golden heavens) already exists and is, in fact, presupposed in
his initial vantage-point-the "golden porches" of the brain (23:12-13).
Because line 23:16 conjoins two minutely different details of the closure of
the Tharmas/Enion bracket of Night I, Urizen's glimpse must also indi-
rectly sight the heavily repressed ("forgotten") Ahania, Urizen's ("Pure")
sexual partner who will be gradually objectified and displaced into the
guise of his golden heavens. This line (which focuses Urizen's glimpse)
also extends the melancholy mood and obsession with death that attended
Enion in Night I.
 By the end of Night II, however, Urizen's architecture actually causes
Enion's wail in the Abyss as a direct consequence of the universe that
Urizen built to prevent his consciousness of Enion's lamentation. Thus
Enion's lament both begins and ends Night II: it is both a cause and an
effect of Urizen's attempt to rebuild and redeem the universe through the
aesthetics of geometric structure. While Urizen himself cannot perceive
this intentionally self-deceptive, causally circular process, Ahania, his
"Pure Bride" of Night I (16:17), will come, through the agency of Los and
Enitharmon's sexual plot, to an acute, indeed obsessive, awareness of
Enion's state: "And never from that moment could she rest upon her
pillow" (36:19); Urizen, however, "slept on his couch" (36:16). This
polarization between the insomnia of Ahania and the slumbering of Uri-
zen not only creates a new backdrop for Urizen's sleepy entrance into the
poem in Night I but more urgently reveals that Urizen's unconscious
knowledge (hunger/objectified sex) has migrated to Ahania.
 Enion's lament at the close of Night II differs fundamentally from that
of Night I: around the Feast, she sang of hunger within the cycle of animal
existence; after Urizen's creation, she sings of human appetite satisfied at
the expense of others. This cost must be ignored if human appetite is to be
satisfied, exactly as Urizen must ignore the ultimate social and sexual
consequences of his creation. This change in Enion's lamentation reflects
the emergence into narrative consciousness of the torture, suffering, and
petrification that went into the building of Urizen's Mundane Shell.
 Night II opens with "Albion" actually participating in the plot, not just
wandering, languishing, reclining, or weeping as he did in Night I. Blake
resists giving the "Man" the name of "Albion," except on a very few
occasions in The Four Zoas. As usual, his use of the name here involves a
revision:2 "Rising upon his Couch of Death Albion beheld his Sons /
Turning his Eyes outward to Self. losing the Divine Vision / Albion called
Urizen" (23:1-3). The period Blake inserts and the ones he omits call
attention to (constitute) an underlying perceptual confusion of Night II.
The single floating period between "Self" and "losing" subverts the read-
er's natural tendency to equate "losing the Divine Vision" with the act of
"Turning his Eyes outward to Self." At the same time, the absence of a
period (between "Sons" and "Turning") makes the act of "Turning"


Urizen's awareness of
Enion passes to Ahania,
the forgotten Bride who
compulsively remem-
bers.

















The intrusive period at
the loss of vision