FOUR ZOAS IX / 133:27-134:2 (10:17-137:33)


 Sitting: perceptual
 lethargy

 The divisions of the
 Eternal Man unite at the
 calling of Morning into
 Beulah.


















The attempt to light the
(repressed female) dark-
ness as a source of female
 power


into multiple "Eternal Men,"so the act of speaking separates the "Eternal"
from "Man," thereby banishing the female from consciousness. And yet
the speech constitutes a subversive reintroduction of Man as an integral
feature of the Eternals and of the female: "So spoke the Eternal at the Feast
they embraced the New born Man" (133:27). The female, who was seen as
"born to drink up all his powers" and who reappeared obscurely as their
"shadows born," now becomes a feature of the "New born Man" himself.
This nomenclature "New born" disappears, having emerged momentar-
ily to embody and subvert simultaneously the Eternal's speech act: in this
sense the act of embracing the "New born Man" crystallizes the Eternal's
total speech gesture into a narrative event.
 The "joy" that the Eternal says will ensue upon the embrace is prob-
lematic since, to the Eternal, it is "joy" Man wearies of when he seeks sleep
in the Flowers ofBeulah (i.e. heterosexual embrace).Joy does not emerge
in the narrative proper, however, until the Eternals sit down at the feast,
initiating a new phase of deceptive lethargy. Since music constitutes the
feast, their sounding of musical instruments to express theirjoy and create
the feast is not surprising. What is surprising is that their "sounding loud"
imitates the trumpet of apocalypse to such an extent that it "Call[s] the
Morning into Beulah the Eternal Man rejoicd" (133:30). Through this act
of calling the Morning into Beulah, the New born Man, the multiple
Eternals, the singular Eternal (separate from Man), and the multiple Eter-
nal Men instantly collapse back into the single Eternal Man, who appears
for the purpose of rejoicing (inevitably in Night IX a dangerous act) then
disappears for more than a page, only to return again in the act of rejoicing
(135:4).
 The reunion of the narrative divisions of the Eternal Man occurs because
the imitated trumpet pulls together the primordial delusive false dawn,
whose agent or medium has been, since Night I (10:17-25), the castrating
female, here obstructed from their view (and yet constituted) by their
strong impulse to deny reality to the female. The underlying clue, which
the Eternal Man misses in his joy, is that morning fundamentally conflicts
with Beulah, even in the Eternal's own speech, but more primordially in
the original account, in Night I, of Beulah having been created by the
Lamb of God, as a "Moony Universe" (5:30), a retreat for "those who
sleep / Eternally" (5:31-32). Is the Eternal Man rejoicing because he
believes calling Morning into Beulah means illuminating darkness and
thus eliminating the secret refuge from joy? Is calling Morning into Beu-
lah then equivalent to the Eternal's speech that attempts to deny the female
and thereby gives her power? Ifso, and it is likely, then this radical perspec-
tive misjudgment gives rise to (makes possible, provides the ground for)
the primordial delusive power of the female herself-embodied in the false
morning. This event thus reveals the extent to which in this context the
female's power derives from being denied real existence by the Eternals.
 Given the drastic nature of this revelation, it is appropriate that the
advent of dawn (whose potential falsity remains concealed from the