FOUR ZOAS IX / 124:31-125:26 (16:5-125:26)


Urizen's ability to plow
 up the universe after it
 has exploded in his pre-
sence is a property of the
branching of the narra-
 tive as well as of the
 embedded structures.




































The dialectical relation-
ship between Tharmas
and Urizen reappears in
 covert form.


there should be no sun or moon remaining for Urizen to plow up. (Los's
tearing down of the Sun and Moon at the outset of Night IX presents
similar problems for this sequence.) If we attempt to invoke an invisible
narrative substructure in which Urizen's plowing is fictionally prior to
both Los's action and the bursting of the universe but is simply narrated
later, then Los could not rip down the Sun and Moon, for Urizen would
have already plowed them up. The sheer existence of Urizen's apparently
unproblematic plowing of the universe at this precise narrative juncture
not only undermines the possibility of a linear causal sequence of events
lying behind the surface narrative but also subverts the assumption that
these narratively sequential events are happening simultaneously (which
would require that the order of narration is indifferent to sequential
unfolding and would invoke another kind of mysterious world behind the
text). Rather, the surface structures retroactively transform actions in such
a way that Urizen's plowing is able to intersect aspects of those narratively
prior demolitions of the universe precisely by virtue of not happening
narratively or ontologically at the same time as those prior events, as if it
were an alternative way the earlier events occurred, a branching of the
narrative.
 Urizen's plowing and sowing in Night IX gathers details simultane-
ously from Nights II (28:9; 32:16-17) and VI (71:28-29; 73:9), even though
in Night II Urizen is in control of mathematical sowing, while in Night
VI he is completely subject to the sowing process, becoming himself like a
seed. But in Night IX the imagery of Urizen sowing the "Seed of Men" is
a narrative response (detoured through the Sons ofUrizen) to the vision of
the Cloud of the Son of Man, even though that vision has since vanished
from the surface of the text. Urizen's sowing in Night IX is significantly
uncontaminated by the mathematical imagery that pervaded Night II; and
yet the power he acquires in his role of sower is at the expense of the
seed-like souls who are terrified and suffer dire torment in the process of
their implantation. Though no distinctions seem to be made ("The
trembling souls ofAll the Dead"[124:31]) in constituting Urizen's "seed"
(125:3), it is the "warriors," "Kings & Princes" who are singled out for
their responses (125:8-10). (These lines significantly repeat almost exactly
the desolation of lines 117:20 and 22 while they specifically repress refer-
ence to slaves being set free in line 117:21.) The winds that earlier blew the
trumpet now drive the seeds, as if by some pre-ordained force which
remains conspicuously absent, to their "appointed [by whom?] places."
When Tharmas first emerges at this point as the Trumpeter, it also makes
Tharmas the hidden wind that drives the seeds (anticipating and recalling
Tharmas' association with whirlwinds and the vortex that arises from his
fleeing). Perhaps the most deeply hidden clue to the perceptual signifi-
cance of this section resides in the lines, "The Kings & Princes of the Earth
cry with a feeble cry / Driven on the unproducing sands & on the hardend
rocks" (125:10-11). While the desolation of this event reincarnates the
events of the Demons' Song in Night I (16:5ff), the King and the Prince