FOUR ZOAS VIIA / 80:27-45


Urizen's self-defeating
 attempt to assimilate
Los's sexual appetite to
 Orc's hungering



 The account of Orc's
emergent serpent form
 in Night VIIa


 One form of Orc's
 division








Another form of Orc's
 division


gestation and breeding of offspring. Urizen is thus unable to separate his
consciously hypocritical social doctrines from his plot to obliterate the
"devouring appetite" for sexual gratification that he projects onto Los but
which is equally true of himself (as witnessed in the book of iron). The
structure of Urizen's speech thus embeds within the terrifying, almost
uncontrollable, sexual hunger the more manageable hunger for food, a
problem he solves by telling the poor they are not hungry (in other words,
providing the hypocritical "bread of Orc"). But sexual hunger, whose
overthrow Urizen consciously believes will be as easy as the exploitation
of hunger in "the poor," forces Urizen to introduce, and thereby inadver-
tently create from his own repressed sexual fantasies, a character who has
not existed before-"the Shadow of Enitharmon" (who will modulate in
Night VIII into the Shadowy Female, the great sexual temptation for
Urizen). Urizen sees his political speech as a cause for drawing the Shadow
of Enitharmon "beneath our wondrous tree" (80:5) to a sexual tryst with
the "Spectre of Urthona." This speech itself immediately effects Orc's
organization of a "serpent" form, which is one way the descent of the
Shadow of Enitharmon appears to Urizen. Orc begins to stretch as a
serpent around the Tree while beneath the Tree Orc remains the Shadow's
"sweet boy."
 Orc's assumption of a serpent form-which in Night VIII becomes the
"fruit" of the Tree, a kind of excrement from Orc of the bread that the
Daughters knead, and which thus functions as an aspect of Urizen's speech
-achieves a two-fold appearance: 1) from the perspective of Orc's own
utterance as he feels himself becoming a "worm" (which could mean
serpent or dragon but which Orc seems to use in its most benign or flaccid
sense); and 2) from Urizen's perspective which constructs Orc's serpent
form from the words Orc speaks. Orc explicitly feels himself being
"divided": he arises like a worm "in peace unbound" (80:29), while
another aspect of himself rages but "my fetters bind me more" (80:30). In
an insight that is dropped as soon as it is uttered, Orc identifies these two
aspects of himself: "The Man shall rage bound with this Chain the worm
in silence creep" (80:35). Orc feels himself split into the raging "Man"
bound in the Chain ofJealousy and the benign form of "worm" which, by
the mediation/constitution of Urizen's paranoid perspective, will develop
into a more threatening form of serpent. Yet at this crux Orc slips syntacti-
cally and indicates it is Urizen who is becoming a serpent: "already round
thy Tree / In scales that shine with gold & rubies thou beginnest to
weaken / My divided Spirit" (80:27-29). In Night VIII, Orc's serpent
form is retroactively revealed to be the "fruit" of the Tree which intox-
icates the Shadow and the Spectre and which Los and Enitharmon eat as a
precondition of their fabricating/weaving activities.
 In the context of his division, his weakness, and his extremely ambigu-
ous syntax, Ore suddenly recognizes Urizen as "Prince" and simultane-
ously remembers himself to be the thief of light but never explicitly names
himselfLuvah: