NOTES


[love] and [friendship] of those with whom to be connected, is to be [blessed]"
(E, p. 143,145).
 13 It is interesting to note that Newton's own personal strategy was exactly the
opposite: he suppressed public acknowledgment of any doctrine he felt might
"prejudice" his readers against him or make them think he was an "extravagant
freak," Ault, "Incommensurability," 289; see also J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active
Principles, and Newton's Invisible Realm," Ambix, 15 (1968), 165. The phrase,
"doors of perception" comes, of course, from Blake's implicit manifesto in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 14 (E, p. 39).
 14 A classic example of the more conservative view of the relation between
reader and text appears in Wolfgang Iser's account of the "virtual" dimension of the
text created by the interaction of reader and text in "The Reading Process: A
Phenomenological Approach," LH, 3 (1972), pp. 279-99
 1 "Interrupts" may not seem to be a completely accurate characterization of
Blake's narrative gesture at this point in that the pseudo-invocation seems to have
been completed with the words "Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead"
(4:5), and the imperative "Begin" parallels syntactically (though not visually) the
earlier command, "Daughter of Beulah Sing..." (4:3). Despite these narrative
facts, "Begin..." is a sudden swerving away from Los/Urthona toward Tharmas,
for whose appearance Blake has given no warning. Line 4:6 is also discontinuous
with those preceding it in that it is visually set apart by void spaces in the text,
isolated from that which preceded and that which follows it. Because the verb
"Begin" appears at the beginning of 4:6, its syntactic parallel with "Sing," which is
at the end of 4:3 is obscured. Although 4:6 seems to be uttered to overcome inertia,
to respond to the desperate need to begin somewhere, the ontological gestures in
this line are so complex that they will occupy a good portion of the opening
section of Region A of Narrative Unbound.
 16 In presenting this reductive summary of the episode in order to bring the
 causal paradox more clearly into view, I have omitted numerous important details
 that actually intensify the argument here. In resorting to a brief description of how
 some of the details function, I warn the reader that much of this will make more
 sense if read after the discussion of narrative principles in the text proper. Blake
 indicates the parallelism between the departures of Tharmas and Enion by mark-
 ing their departures with brief, repeated utterances: "So saying-From her bosom
 weaving" (5:6) and "So saying he sunk down" (5:13). When Blake uses the phrase
 "So saying" it usually means that the saying is a version of the doing (bodily
 action). In this case, Enion had said she would "die" and "hide from [Tharmas']
 searching eyes" (5:5)--reversing Tharmas' earlier accusation of her (and thus
 anatomizing her) -hence her ability to weave from the fibres of her own "bosom.
 Yet it is Tharmas who hides and dies by sinking beneath the sea in the form of a
 "pale white corse" (5:13). Signaled by the repeated "So saying," these two speech/
 bodily acts interconstitute each other in such a way that the "Sinewy threads" from
 her bosom (5:6) reappear as the fibres she draws from the descending Tharmas: "In
 gnawing pain drawn out by her lovd fingers every nerve / She counted. every vein
 & lacteal threading them among / Her woof of terror" (5:16-18). Though she
 begins weaving in the textprior to Tharmas' turning around the Circle of Destiny,
 the fibres do not become explicitly the residue of Tharmas untilafter (in the surface
 of the text) he has turned around the Circle of Destiny and sunk down into the sea.
 In any case the causal series is irreducibly circular. Features of Blake's text (such as


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