URIZEN'S SELF-CONTRADICTORY RECANTATION


tial sitting (to which both will soon return). Urizen's veneration of "pleas-
ure which unsought falls round the infants path" (121:11) allows him to
congratulate himself masochistically: "I alone in misery supreme /
Ungratified give all my joy unto this Luvah and Vala" (121:17-18). The
absence of sexual exile in this vision of self misery is underscored by Los's
contrasting speech in Night VIIa, uttered in the face of Enitharmon's
supposed sexual excesses with all but Los: "All things beside the woful Los
enjoy the delights of beauty.... I alone exempted from the joys of love /
Must war with secret monsters of the animating worlds" (82:4-6).
 Further, what "joy" has Urizen to "give" to Luvah and Vala if he "Alone
enjoy[s] not"? The status of Urizen's gestures at this point is complicated
by the decree that issues out of them: "Let Orc consume let Tharmas rage
let dark Urthona give / All strength to Los & Enitharmon & let Los self
cursd / Rend down this fabric as a wall ruind & family extinct"
(121:23-25). Although the Eternal Man had commanded the Dragon/
stony form only to "Let Luvah rage... even to Consummation" (120:32),
Urizen invokes the rage of Tharmas, Los, and Orc who is "consum[ing]"
rather than "Consummat[ing]" as the Eternal Man had said of Luvah.
Urizen thus decrees (and thereby assumes implicit control, in the process
of denying control, over) events involving the other central characters
who have already entered into the narrative proper as preconditions of the
Eternal Man's act of calling on Urizen in the first place. Urizen's gesture is
ambiguous in that it is indeterminable whether he is claiming that his
decree makes possible these events that occurred in Nights VIII and IX as
effects of Urizen's fall into Dragon form, or whether he is claiming to
cease preventing these events, a power which in the Dragon/stony form he
does not have.
 Blake's systematic substitution of"futurity" for "remembrance" in his
revision of Urizen's speech (121:19, 20, 21, and 22) ironically connects
Urizen's words to the Eternal Man's question expressing his desire that the
future be like the world he is remembering: "When shall the Man of future
times become as in days of old" (120:5). Blake's revision reveals how
"remembrance" and "futurity" constitute inverse temporal fictions that
function to conceal. For the Eternal Man, the future is the locus of pro-
jected hope; for Urizen it is the time of dread. What Urizen is performing
in the present moment is itself a form of explicit hiding, denying, conceal-
ing (analogous to the textual deletion itself), a mode of inverse remember-
ing (forgetting) by turning his back on that which disturbs him. The
spatial metaphor of "turning" is resilient, however, because as he turns his
back on futurity he is squarely (though implicitly) facing "remembrance."
Thus his present act of turning his back on his previous act of turning his
back on the "present" enacts his primordial denial at the very moment he
denies his denial. Even the way Urizen phrases his denial of futurity
(turning his back) recalls the moment he turned his back on his Golden hall
(and Ahania) in Night II (30:26-27), and thus resurrects the residual pres-
ence of his repressed sexual desire for Ahania.


Urizen's renunciation
evades awareness ofhis
sexual separation.





Urizen is aware of the
initiating event of Night
IX performed by Los, to
which the Eternal Man is
oblivious, despite the
fact that Urizen has
apparently been asleep in
his Dragon/stony form.



Urizen relinquishes
power he apparently
does not possess.















"futurity" versus
"remembrance"




Turning his back on
"futurity," which Blake
added to the text, causes
Urizen to face
"remembrance," which
Blake deleted from the
text: Urizen's action
inverts Blake's revision.