LOS AND ENITHARMON SEIZE CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE


Voice of Enion to Ahanias midnight pillow" (34:4). Because they have
become victims of their own desires, Los and Enitharmon directly oppose
Urizen's repression of sexuality. Conducting Enion's voice to Ahania
transmits to Urizen's rejected female aspect (and thus to his unconscious
state) the very information that caused him to recoil from Enion's lament
and to shut himself up in "darkning Clouds" (30:49), an action that is
repeated from a different perspective in the Los/Enitharmon conversation
of Night II. What is it that "Urizen saw & envied" (34:5)? Los and Enithar-
mon's descent? Their planting divisions in Urizen and Ahania's Soul?
Their conducting Enion's voice to Ahania? Each of these actions is prog-
ressively less visible, and each is progressively more disturbing to Urizen.
He "sees" these separate actions as a cluster and transfers them into his
emergent universe. His consequent depression about the past and anxiety
over the future generate, in the context of Night II, the cosmological
defense mechanisms Urizen manufactures to evade his vision of the
present.
 Urizen compulsively forms his (depressive/anxious) fantasies "For
[because] Los & Enitharmon walkd forth on the dewy Earth" (34:9). The
reappearance of Urizen's "clouds" in the context of the Los/Enitharmon
conversation makes Urizen's compulsive self-enclosure (an alternate ver-
sion of his closing himself in a geometrical universe) now function as a
jealous response to the Los/Enitharmon sexual dialogue. Los and Enithar-
mon preserve residual "all flexible senses" (34:10), in contrast to the
severely bound elements of Urizen's universe. They are the remnants of
fantasized pastoral flexibility projected into a sexual context. The perva-
sive pastoral landscape and diction of this segment contrast so dramati-
cally with Urizen's hard-edged geometry that they induce the reader to
forget just how sinister the context of this action is. Los and Enitharmon
openly discuss Los's sexual frustration because Enitharmon "evades his
embrace" (34:19) by taking on the vanishing, dissolving qualities of the
landscape. Though they address each other directly (and not through
visionary parables as in Night I), their syntax is so full of discontinuities
and overlapping that it both mirrors their action and enacts its evasive-
ness: their language is a version of their sexual abstinence and jealousy.
Dying and reviving is the central motif of their conversation, and the
obscure "God" who, enraptured, enfolds Enitharmon in "clouds of sweet
obscurity" (34:24-25) anticipates Urizen's jealous self- enclosure in "dark-
ning Clouds" (34:43). Neither Los nor Enitharmon indicates whether this
"bright God" (34:30) is indeed Urizen, however, leaving open the possibil-
ity that this "God" is another, previously unknown figure. Nevertheless,
when Enitharmon called Urizen down into the narrative in Night I, he
entered insisting that he was "God" (12:8) and was characterized by the
narrator as "Prince / Of Light" (12:9-10).
 Enitharmon's power to transform herself into Ahania and Enion (34:38)
to tempt Los into sexual infidelity extends her ability to assume Vala's
form in order to deplete the sexual powers of the Fallen One in Night I


Urizen's hiding in
"darkning Clouds" is a
precondition for the
events of Night III.














The contrast between
the narrative
frameworks of Los/
Enitharmon and
Urizen







Los and Enitharmon's
speeches in part serve as
an analysis of their jeal-
ous, evasive relationship
prior to their conversa-
tion in Night I.