URIZEN'S VERBAL CREATION OF FUTURITY source of his present disenchantment, and thus bringing into conscious existence exactly what she appears to be trying to undo. The indeterminate identity of the "Boy" whom Urizen says he pre- sently serves, however, makes possible Urizen's next strategy to deny his present subservience: he attempts to gain control over the present by creating "futurity" through his speech act, even though he first "beheld" futurity as part of his reflex to Enion's appearance in Night II (23:15). Though the most immediate candidate to fill the role of this strategically pivotal "Boy" is Los, born of Tharmas who is associated with the ocean, this "Boy is born" -not simply and unequivocally was born -a verb form that opens up the possibility that Urizen's utterance is contemporary with Los's birth in Night I and collapses the past into the present, a metaphysi- cal compression he will invert in creating the future. Given the causal loophole that Urizen's refusal to pin down the Boy's identity creates, Urizen incorporates a modal auxiliary of compulsion or obligation when he asserts that he "must serve" the Boy, marking a temporal transition whose ambiguity displaces Urizen's present slavery into a future ser- vitude. In the next line Urizen uses this same modal auxiliary to displace his inevitable servitude into an even more distant future: the Boy "must grow up to command his Prince." Urizen slips by referring to himself as "Prince" (38:7) rather than "King" (38:4) in the process of defending his present power by creating the future through his manipulation of modal auxiliaries and verb tenses. Urizen's creation of the future by a speech gesture retroactively provides the conditions for the close of Ahania's previous speech: "Why wilt thou look upon futurity darkning present joy" (37:10): Ahania thus experienced the future narratively before Urizen verbally created it. Since Ahania is in the process of translating for Urizen the information she gathered from Enion's lament in Night II, this moment in Night III establishes the conditions for the moment at the beginning of Night II when Urizen first took control: "Pale he beheld futurity; pale he beheld the Abyss / Where Enion blind & age bent wept" (23:15-16). His recoiling from the knowledge Enion bears took the dual form of the Abyss and futurity: in Night II Urizen concealed the Abyss with his geometrical heavens; in Night III Ahania mediately causes Urizen to create the future in response to the information she has interiorized from Enion. Urizen's creation of the future in order to put off (deny) the reality of his present servitude is both the temporal version of his spatial architecture of evasion and enclosure and also the ground presupposed in his anxiety about the future and depression about the past in Night II. Urizen apparently decides that if the event is far enough in the future he will have time to prevent it from happening-"But hear my determined Decree" (38:7);6 yet the words that follow serve only to recreate the initial situation. He decrees that Vala be sexually embedded in Enitharmon, and Luvah embedded in Los, which are exactly the conditions under which these characters entered the narrative out of Los and Enitharmon's sexual parables in Night I. He simply decrees that the relationships that already By manipulating the sequence of verbs he uses, Urizen creates futurity to assuage his anxiety.