INTERROGATING THE LAMB'S SEXUAL BEING The Eternal Man's rhetoric is so persuasive at this point that if the contexts of this utterance are not acknowledged, it appears to be Blake's own univocal dogma. Throughout Night VIII, Los and Enitharmon were engaged in creating Jerusalem, through which action the Lamb of God was able to enter the narrative (especially revealed at 103:37-104:4). Los and Enitharmon's role is obliterated from the Eternal Man's consciousness as he perceives the relation between the Lamb and Jerusalem inversely to the poem's prior narrative accounts. Further, the narratively marginal fact that Jerusalem is the Eternal Man's Emanation, just as Ahania is Urizen's, is mystified in the Eternal Man's consciousness, being replaced by his desire to live "in Jerusalem" as the Lamb's child along with Urizen ("we his Children"). The speech's redemptive language obscures the Eternal Man's awareness of his lack of a regenerate counterpart to guarantee his own immortality. Jerusalem is the only candidate for this role, but she is "bride & wife" (simultaneously a virgin and a sexually experienced woman) to the Lamb of God who thereby causes ("Because the Lamb of God creates...") the sexual cycle. Because there is reason to suspect that the Eternal Man's relation to Jerusalem is essential to all male/female relationships, the importance of sexuality in this speech should bring this dilemma to the Eternal Man's awareness and leave him impotent and alienated, but the powerful redemptive rhetoric which accompanies his beholding the Lamb and Jerusalem totally obscures this situation in his consciousness. This speech is again addressed to the "Prince of Light" (121:43), the aspect of Urizen's sexual potential that explicitly fell in Night III and refused to respond to the Eternal Man's first attempt to stir Urizen. It is "Urizen," not the "Prince of Light," who responds to the Eternal Man's regenerative speech-if his words are a response at all. Urizen's words completely break away from the intricate network of the Eternal Man's lecture on sexual regeneration, constituting a kind of hallucinatory non sequitur that literally functions to break the narrative chain and occasion the bursting of the chain-like universe (122:26). Minimal narrative con- nections appear in this brief speech, but they are concealed by the speech's radical evasiveness. For example, his reference to the "river of light" (122:22) denies the "Rivers dark" (121:42) upon which his daughters wept, and he again admits to "Error" but does not even specify this time what it might be, nor does he indicate any desire to repent as before. His words make explicit one feature of his earlier speech: he reifies memory by saying, "my Error remains with me," just as the Lamb "self renewed remains" (122:2). This conscious acknowledgment is crucial, for it immediately enters into the narrative proper (of the Urizen embedded structure) as the ground for vengeance which then constitutes the decep- tive "Cloud of the Son of Man": "And all the marks remain of the slaves scourge & tyrants Crown" (123:1). Urizen's speech gesture is compulsively evasive in that he turns every way to avoid the concrete language of the Eternal Man under the guise of The Eternal Man is una- ware of Los and Enithar- mon's role in creating Jerusalem and of Jerusalem's role as the Eternal Man's own female counterpart. "Bride" as a virgin: a narrative residue from Ahania's first appearance in the poem as Urizen's "Pure Bride" (16:17): Ahania's death is the context of the Eternal Man's utterance. Urizen's response more compulsively evades sexuality.