PERSPECTIVE INVERSION IN AHANIA'S VISION


of that fictional event, the plot between Urizen and Luvah which has
previously served to displace responsibility away from other speakers.
Ahania's version, that Luvah persuaded Urizen to give him the horses of
light (rather than, as in Enitharmon's account, that Luvah seized them, or,
as in the Messengers' account, that Urizen offered them to Luvah and he
refused them), works simultaneously to invert and contradict both previ-
ous accounts. It comes as a surprise when Ahania confronts the reader (and
Urizen) with the information that the animals and tools which the nar-
rator unhesitatingly placed in Urizen's control in Night II (24:15; 25:1-5)
can be perceived as under Luvah's sway. Despite scattered hints that Luvah
seized power, such hints have been overwhelmed by contrary narrative
information so that it could not be suspected that Luvah, who in Night II
was seen exclusively as a distorted victim and slave of Urizen's creation,
could from any perspective be in control of the workings of Urizen's
geometrical heavens. Ahania's vision has the power to invert the Luvah/
Urizen slave/master relation, however, because Ahania's words function
as a translation of Enion's lament-which in one of its aspects threatens to
topple Urizen's universe and in another reveals that his universe is the fall
itself.
 The inversion itself is couched in characteristically ambiguous syntax:
it is unclear whether the "steeds of light," Luvah's "deceitful hands," or
Urizen himself is

 No longer now obedient to thy will thou art compelled
 To forge the curbs of iron & brass to build the iron mangers
 To feed them with intoxication from the wine presses of Luvah
 Till the Divine Vision & Fruition is quite obliterated
 They call thy lions to the fields of blood, they rowze thy tygers
 Out of the halls ofjustice, till these dens thy wisdom framd
 Golden & beautiful but O how unlike those sweet fields of bliss
 (39:4-10)

Ahania's speech radically transforms Urizen's previous awareness that he
is serving the "Boy" (most likely Los). But if creating futurity is equiva-
lent to enclosing Luvah in Los's loins, then in her vision of the past Ahania
can substitute Luvah for Los, whom, as the prophetic Boy, Urizen pre-
sently serves. This perspectival logic reverses Enitharmon's original dis-
guising of Los as Luvah in her first interpolated vision. Even in this crisis,
however, a perspective is still available to Urizen from which his heavens
remain golden and beautiful, and Urizen needs desperately to cling to this
perspective. Now, however, his relation to his heavens is one of a slave
compelled, not a master. Ahania, the sexual underside of Urizen's con-
sciousness, reveals that what Urizen had perceived to be his redemptive
stay against chaos is a pervasive delusion through which he was duped by
Luvah. Of course Ahania's version is no more "true" than any other: while
it directly intersects the narrator's revelation in Night II that Urizen's
architecture is identical with the "fall," at the same time it also inverts the


Ahania's speech presents
another account of the
Urizen/Luvah plot
regarding the horses of
light.










Inverting Luvah's role in
the power struggle






"Those sweet fields of
bliss": memories of a
pastoral state existing
prior to the narrative
unfolding of The Four
Zoas-Ahania is here
expressing her experi-
ence of being repressed
out of the pastoral wan-
derings of Los and Eni-
tharmon (as well as from
their dialogue) in
Night I.


Conflicts in the first
phase of Ahania's speech






Already Urizen had seen
himself as "Commanded
here to serve" (38:4) the
"Boy."