FOUR ZOAS III / 39:11-17


 Urizen's inauthentic
 acknowledgment of his
 servitude




 Condensing the visual
and the auditory: "listen
 to the vision"




Ahania's vision, like Eni-
 tharmon's in Night I,
 involves Luvah, Vala,
and the Man with a sub-
ordinate appearance by
 Urizen.


Urizen/Luvah relationship as a corollary of the creation of"futurity." It is
also important that as a voice of repressed information Ahania is aware of
the existence of the Divine Vision while Urizen, at this point, seems not to
be.
 Ahania's vision is in two parts. The first part transforms Urizen's con-
scious function of cosmos-building in Night II: the actions that even the
narrator credited to Urizen are now a product of his being controlled and
compelled by Luvah, who previously appeared to be Urizen's slave.
Ahania's utterance thus translates Enion's lamentation of Night II by plac-
ing Urizen in the role of the oppressed, the role Enion's voice assumed
there (and from which Urizen had recoiled at the outset of Night II).
Throughout the first part of Ahania's speech, Urizen is structurally but
covertly identified with the "slave grinding at the mill / And the captive in
chains" (36:9-10) ofEnion's lamentation in Night II; at this point in Night
III, however, it is impossible for him to feel those aspects of his present
condition consciously. While she had begun to speak by asking Urizen to
look, the second part of Ahania's response shifts to her insistence that
Urizen listen to her, reinstating the auditory/visual dialectic of the Los/
Enitharmon visions in Night I: "Then O my dear lord listen to Ahania,
listen to the vision / The vision of Ahania in the slumbers of Urizen /
When Urizen slept in the porch & the Ancient Man was smitten"
(39:12-14). Ahania's vision supplies the unconscious information that
Urizen repressed in the different versions of his "sleeping."
 Ahania links the fates of Urizen and the "Man," (this time called
"Ancient," as in the poem's title), by uttering their names together, re-
enacting under a new perspective the entrance of Urizen and the "Man"
together into the poem in Enitharmon's vision of Night I: "The Fallen
Man takes his repose: Urizen sleeps in the porch" (10:10). In that earlier
context it was not clear whether Urizen and the Fallen Man were the same
or different characters-both were at rest and connected textually by a
colon, and both functioned in the present tense while the rest of the vision
was in the past. In Night III, Ahania's use of analogous parallel tense,
syntax, and imagery for the two characters indicates both a concealed
identity and a surface differentiation between Urizen and the Man. When
Ahania refers to Urizen as a character in her vision, she acts as if the story
were not about him or as if she were not speaking to Urizen: she does not
say, "While thou slept in the porch & the Ancient Man was smitten."
Although at the beginning of her speech at the opening of Night III she
addressed Urizen by name, she avoids doing so in this part of her utter-
ance. Even the narrator does not refer to Urizen by name during the
interchange between Urizen and Ahania in this Night, except in the line:
"Am I not God said Urizen. Who is Equal to me" (42:19). Thus,
Ahania's vision simultaneously transforms Enitharmon's Song of Vala in
Night I and fictionalizes Urizen's present state by identifying him with
and at the same time separating him from "Urizen" and the "Man" in her
vision.