FOUR ZOAS VIIA / 78:8-80:35 (12:44-101:20) Perceptual labyrinths repress the sexual labyrinths ofTharmas, Los, Enitharmon, and Luvah in Nights I and II. The Tree of Mystery as the relational ground for Urizen and Ore to con- stitute one another Urizen and Ore do not speak to one another through parables of events in the distant past but make reference to each other's present condition Urizen's daughters emerge as an analysis of Orc's vision of Urizen. dragon form is a consequence of the Tree's role as Urizen's mystification of his own sexual energy by detouring it through a transformed perspective of Orc. Because of his distaste for sexual generation, Urizen plots to lure the Shadow down to the Spectre so that the generative sexuality that Urizen projects onto Los might cease: "Lo how the heart & brain are formed in the breeding womb / Of Enitharmon how it buds with life & forms the bones / The little heart the liver & the red blood in its laby- rinths / By gratified desire by strong devouring appetite she fills / Los with ambitious fury that his race shall all devour" (80:22-26). Urizen is unaware that his perception of Enitharmon's sexuality precisely parallels the operation of his own Tree: it first appears as "intricate labyrinths" (78:8) and will shortly be budding into life. By unconsciously engender- ing the Tree, through which gestation becomes manifest, Urizen makes possible the sexual events he despises. The modulation of the Chain ofJealousy into the Tree of Mystery is at the center of much enigmatic action in these later Nights. The verbal conference between Urizen and Orc in VIIa results in Orc winding around the Tree of Mystery in a serpent form. In the process of this transformation of Orc-from a fiery character bound down by the Chain ofJealousy to a serpentine character winding around the Tree of Mystery -the Tree permits Urizen and Orc to perceive and interconstitute one another and allows Urizen's "Daughters" to reappear with the "book of iron," the codified compulsive "tracing" in language of Urizen's own distorted sexual fantasies. When Urizen and Orc first confront one another verbally, after the Tree shoots up as a perceptual barrier, neither hears the other speak in a straightforward conversational way. What the narrator records as verbal statements are perceived by Urizen and Orc as bodily images and gestures. Thus Urizen perceives the verbal speech Orc delivers as Orc's dissolving visual form; Orc perceives the words Urizen utters as Urizen's bodily image-form. The Tree's perceptual mystification allows Orc and Urizen to interconstitute one another dialectically (through polarized images such as fire versus ice) while mutually repres- sing each other's verbally constituted identity. Urizen becomes aware that he cannot defeat Orc in the standoff in which Orc perceives Urizen's words as landscape and thus suddenly turns to a narrative element that had allowed Urizen to speak in the silence of Night VI-his plural "books," which he now commands Orc to "Read" (79:20). These books dropped out of the plot in Night VI after they made it possible for Urizen to speak and fix his foot (as lines of a text are fixed); they reappear at the moment he becomes "Envious over Orc" (77:19). The most important is the book of iron, which becomes lodged in the Tree of Mystery. Urizen seems to be aware that if he can get through to Orc with his words as words, he will be able to control Orc. By calling on his female (sexual) offspring-the "daughters" he cursed in Night VI-to aid him in subduing Orc, he inadvertently acknowledges his own sexual divided- ness: when they come to his bidding, the "Daughters" carry the "book of