DANGERS OF BEHOLDING THE CLOUD


momentary breakthrough of the maleness of this vision and faintly echoes
Urizen's self-deceiving clothing in "aged venerableness" in Night VI
(73:30).
 Although both sacrifice and authority could have vanished when the
Judge sprang from his throne (123:23), the bloody Cloud perpetuates
ritual victimization and sacrifice, and the throne and pavement reasserts
authoritarian power. The Cloud and the throne/pavement are interlocked,
condensed aspects of this voluminous, tantalizingly treacherous event,
covertly connected by the perceptually mediating term dazzling. The
most perceptually luring, yet obscure moment in the vision which
acquires energy as the description proceeds, is the image of the "four,"
easily taken by the reader to be the Four Zoas themselves:
 The Cloud is Blood dazzling upon the heavens & in the cloud
 Above upon its volumes is beheld a throne & a pavement
 Of precious stones. surrounded by twenty four venerable patriarchs
 And these again surrounded by four Wonders of the Almighty
 Incomprehensible. pervading all amidst & round about
 Fourfold each in the other reflected they are named Life's in Eternity
 Four Starry Universes going forward from Eternity to Eternity
 (123:33-39)

 Blake's sudden shift to the passive "is beheld" allows the narrator to
 refrain from committing himself to affirming the gap between what is
 beheld and what is controlling the act of beholding. Since we learn
 immediately after this vision that Urizen is on the Rock with the Eternal
 Man (possibly beholding this vision with him), and we know that Los has
 disappeared, the components ofUrthona have been buried under the ruins
 of the universe, and Luvah remains hidden ("Consummat[ing]" [120:32]
 or, by proxy "Consum[ing]" in the form of Orc), the united and explicitly
 interconstitutive (mutually reflecting) "four Wonders" cannot be univo-
 cally or unproblematically identified as the Four Zoas. This vision could
 be an ideal to which the fragmented Zoas should aspire. It could equally be
 a sinister delusion, a bloody transformation of the powerful Luvah in
 Night III-a vision "Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen
 pure he hover'd / A sweet entrancing self delusion, a watry vision of Man /
 Soft exulting in existence all the Man absorbing" (40:4-6).
 Even more than in the case of the Eternal Man's vision of the Lamb of
 God and Jerusalem, it is primarily the narrative/ontological context,
 rather than internal discrepancies, which permits the reader to locate sub-
 versive aspects of this vision of the "four Wonders," although surprisingly
 few of these details are inherently suspect. Terms such as "venerable pa-
 triarchs" and "Incomprehensible" bear only indirect negative associations
 from earlier contexts. The phrase "Four Starry Universes" harks all the
 way back to the beginning of the poem in the narrator's description of Los
 as "the fourth immortal starry one" (3:9) and thus tempts the reader to
 connect that dimly remembered, ostensibly primordial image with this
 apocalyptic vision. This image is fundamentally unassailable internally


The exclusively patriar-
chal nature of the Cloud
complex


















"from Eternity to Eter-
nity": see Urizen's des-
cent in Night I (12:18).

The reappearance of
Urizen and the Eternal
Man implies a shift back
to the South, now
mediated through the
perspective of the Uri-
zen bracket.











The vision of the Cloud
powerfully lures the
Man (and the reader) to
overlook what it re-
presses or excludes.