FOUR ZOAS II / 27:9-30:22


Luvah's accusation con-
nects him with Urizen -
Luvah sees blotting out
 the "Human delusion"
as positive: "to deliver all
the sons of God / From
bondage of the Human
 form"; Urizen called
 Jesus the "soft delusion
 of Eternity" (12:25).

















 The incompatability of
measurement and vision






Imagery of nets, string
music, and planting of
seeds is interwoven into
 the fabric of Urizen's
 creation.












 The first slaves to be
 specified are female.


immediately implicates the Lamb of God in his plight and blames his
condition on Urizen's "stern ambition" in order to displace responsibility
from himself for blotting out the "Human delusion" (27:17). Internal
connections between Luvah's words and Urizen's creation are partially
revealed when Luvah's molten form (or his words) becomes the substance
of Urizen's world: "the molten metal [made from Luvah] ran in channels /
Cut by the plow of ages held in Urizens strong hand" (28:3, 8-9). The
words of Luvah reveal interior relationships between events previously
perceived as exterior to one another; but to Urizen, Luvah's deeply sexual
utterance is disguised as the metal that pours (sexually) into the channels
cut by the plow of ages. In one sense, as Luvah's words enter the narrative,
they appear to Urizen as the material of the Mundane Shell, whose struc-
ture renders unknowable the social, sexual, and visionary consequences of
his creation.
 At this point Blake inserts (by revision) another section (28:11-24) that
analyzes, by means of the divided "Children of Man" (who have multi-
plied, by detours through Jerusalem's and Luvah's children, from Albion's
"Sons" at the outset of Night II), the perceptual and cosmological implica-
tions that parallel the sexual and political. Blake divides these Children
into two groups: those who (like Urizen in his initial reflex upon glimps-
ing Enion) "with trembling horror pale aghast" see Urizen's creation as a
nightmare he himself cannot grasp, and those Children who can see "no
Visions" (28:17) at all, and automatically feel the impulse to measure in
order to gain control over their situation. These Children prefigure Uri-
zen's compulsive activity from this point on: because he is blind to the fact
that measurement originates in the loss of the ability to see Visions, for the
remainder of Night II Urizen constructs an edifice primarily through
measurement.
 When the narrative shifts back to Urizen's perception of his creation as
genuinely redemptive, Blake must tempt the reader to forget (as Urizen
forgets) that the creation is the fall, if he is to reveal the mechanisms by
which Urizen can succumb to his own perspectival fantasy. Blake achieves
this effect in part by means of a radical division of labor-even light
imagery itself is derived from divided and competing structures (waves
and particles). While from one perspective the woven "curtains" enlighten
the deep, they enclose it as well. Blake's division of the workers into
"strongest" (who weave curtains of light) and "weak" (who ensnare spirits
in nets) reveals two modes and degrees of the same perceptual obfuscation.
The surface details are sufficiently attractive, varied, and dense to lure the
reader into Urizen's perspective from which these events are happening as
a stay against the fall, even though "Stern Urizen beheld / In woe his
brethren & his Sons in darkning woe lamenting" (28:21-22). Yet, even in
the context of Urizen's perspective (which the narrator's voice
approximates [28:25-30:22]), this creation sequence is a nightmare of
oppression and slavery ("female slaves the mortar trod" [30:14]).
 Into the midst-indeed into the center-of Urizen's architectural crea-