FALLING FROM THE DENSITY OF THE SOUTH


eyes. As Urizen enters the East, there is literally "no living thing" (71:17)
for him to address. Yet he will soon become subject to the remnants of
organic life, to a cycle of vegetation, a mindless form of life, which,
nevertheless, eventually makes it possible for him to speak.
 Urizen turns around from his backward glance and throws himself into
the void space before him which corresponds to the empty "futurity" that
was an agent of his fall in Night III:


 falling he fell & fell
Whirling in unresistible revolutions down & down
In the horrid bottomless vacuity falling falling falling
Into the Eastern vacuity the empty world of Luvah


(71:21-24)


This nightmarish repetition and vertiginous loss of control is a version of
the worst thing that could happen to Urizen's consciousness (anticipating
his descent as the dragon of lust in Night VIII). In his attempt to avoid his
sexuality, to deny awareness ofAhania, he has forced himself to experience
one manifestation of his worst fears. And suddenly, in the last line quoted
above, Blake names the character -the coordinate in relation to which this
bottomless downward plunge takes place. The fall of Urizen is "Into"
somewhere after all, and the fact that the poem indeed continues mitigates
the sense of utter hopelessness of this repetitive downward whirling. This
action recapitulates Urizen's fall in Night III, when he "Fell down down
rushing ruining thundering shuddering / Into the Caverns of the Grave &
places of Human Seed" (44:2-3). Urizen's fall here, though, is not from
high on a starry throne, but from the horrors of his own disguised "ter-
rific" children.
 The binding of Orc has made possible the confrontation between Uri-
zen and Tharmas -a confrontation being acted out, not in words but in
spatial imagery. In being bound down, Urizen's own children became a
version of Orc; Urizen now perceives Ore as landscapes and multiple
inhabitants of the world he construes to be his prior domain. Because the
Demons in Night V overlap Ore's identity with Luvah's, Urizen's uncon-
scious act of perceptually relocating Orc drags the whole of Luvah's
"world" into Urizen's "South," leaving the East "empty." The imagery
with which Urizen enters Luvah's world fulfills Tharmas' prediction of
what Urizen's entire journey would be: "Eternal falling / Thou shalt pur-
sue me" (69:20-21). But Urizen experiences his chasing of Tharmas as an
"Eternal falling" only as he enters Luvah's world, for Luvah and Tharmas
function structurally to interfere with each other's relation to any context
whatsoever. Thus, Urizen experiences Luvah's world initially as
absolutely nothing at all, non-existent, then as the total form in which
Tharmas perceives the pursuit.
 The unusual cycle that follows and absorbs the narrator's and Urizen's
attention for three pages of the text transforms the sowing of seeds in
Night II (out of which the rectilinear universe of Urizen sprang) and


Line 71:24 is an addi-
tion by Blake that fills in
a spatial gap in the text
between "falling" and
"The ever pitying one."








Urizen's fall in Night VI
is, eventually, into the
place of seed, as it was in
Night II (44:3).









The narrative logic of
Luvah's "empty" East