FOUR ZOAS V / 64:17-28


 Urizen translates the
 hiding/searching
 dialogue between Thar-
 mas and Enion in Night
 I into a political context.





 Urizen's material
 division



 "0 fool fool to lose my
 sweetest bliss" (45:1)



 Shift of perspective
 transforms the being of
 events in Night II.



The devious evasiveness
of Urizen's self-divided
 account







 See above, p. 155.









As did the Sprectre of Ur-
thona "well remember"
an event in the narrative
 proper as an entirely
 different event (50:1 ff);
 See above, pp. 174-75.


parallel question) his act of closing his treasuries with roofs with his
refusal to relinquish the horses. The consolidated materialistic image of
his treasuries with "roofs of solid stone" initiates the second phase of
Urizen's defensive gesture:
 O Fool to think that I could hide from his all piercing eyes
 The gold & silver & costly stones his holy workmanship
 O Fool could I forget the light that filled my bright spheres
 Was a reflection of his face who called me from the deep
 (64:17-20)

The first line of this passage reveals that Urizen has attempted to hide
himself from the "all piercing eyes." This revelation is retroactively
revised in the next line by a defensive gesture which indicates that Urizen
attempted to hide, not himself, but the "costly stones." Yet this defensive
gesture implicates Urizen in the theft ofthejewels which three lines before
were unequivocally "my treasuries" but are now "his holy workmanship."
 Because, in his sudden repetition of the word "Fool" Urizen closely
echoes Tharmas' response to his casting out of Enion in Night III, Urizen
could at this point recognize and lament his casting out of Ahania. But
instead he turns to another set of images, inadvertently connecting the act
of hiding the treasuries with forgetting Ahania. Urizen refers obliquely to
the creation in Night II of the Golden Heavens, which enclosed his
Shadowy Feminine Semblance Ahania, as a radically different event:
rather than being an attempt to redeem a fallen universe, the act of closing
up is now remembered by Urizen as a selfish act of hidingjewels from the
mysterious "all piercing eyes," an act which Urizen syntactically identifies
with having held back the horses. But if the "him" who is ambiguously
referred to here is Urizen himself, from whom the horses were held back,
then the gesture is an attempt to hide from himself, and the imagery
suddenly makes bizarre sense: Urizen ironically believes he cannot hide
from himself, which is precisely what he is doing by separating out phases
of his action and projecting them onto different ambiguous characters;
thus the light becomes literally a "reflection" of "his face who called me
from the deep" (64:20) because it is his same face. Throughout her speech
in Night III Ahania consistently substituted aspects of the "Man" for
Urizen, so that when the Man frowned in the vision, Urizen frowned in
hearing of it: the two frowns were the same frown. There the Man
explicitly split into himself and his "watry shadow"; now Urizen
implicitly splits into himself and his "reflection."
 Blake's deliberate inclusion of hiding and forgetting in the previous
four lines should alert the reader to question the status of Urizen's memory
in his next utterance:
 I well remember for I heard the mild & holy voice
 Saying O light spring up & shine & I sprang up from the deep
 He gave to me a silver scepter & crownd me with a golden crown
 & said Go forth & guide my Son who wanders on the ocean
 (64:21-24)