NOTES


such an assumption problematic. On the other hand, to assume that these state-
ments, and other pseudo-propositional utterances in the poem, are somehow
context-free is to be fundamentally misled by Blake's perspective strategies. As the
poem unfolds we retroactively realize how limited and futile this attempt at begin-
ning by propositional definition is. Though it hovers over the entire poem, this set
of definitions (whose ostensible subject is Los) is so different from the subject that
the revised title announces -"The torments of Love &Jealousy in / The Death and
Judgement / of Albion the Ancient Man"-that even the reader open to anti-
Newtonian impulses may be frustrated by it.
 It is more than a coincidence that contemporary structuralist mathematicians,
such as the Bourbaki, have used the phrase "Parent Structures" to characterize the
basic groups out of which all mathematical forms are generated. Blake's use of
"Parent" in The Four Zoas implies the same kind of structural/generative meaning
while also retaining a literal sexual meaning. For further discussion of "Parent
Structures," see Piaget, Structuralism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968),
pp. 23-28. The events of Night I unfold as if they were being generated out of the
primary Tharmas/Enion conversation.
 4 At this point Blake tempts the Newtonian reader to turn outward from the
 text toward neo-Platonic theories of sexual generation of the universe and emana-
 tive theories of light, which powerfully attracted and repelled Newton himself.
 For the sexual dimensions of emanation, see Ault, "Incommensurability," 289, and
 Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, pp. 69-73. For the connection between
 emanation and light, see, for example, Andrew Lowth, The Origins of the Christian
 Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p.
 39, where a key analogy Plotinus uses to illustrate how everything emanates from
 the One is "light from the sun." In Jerusalem 54:1-2, Blake makes this connection
 explicit: "In Great Eternity, every particular Form gives forth or Emanates / Its
 own peculiar Light[.]"
 S Tracing the fate ofTharmas, The Four Zoas' ostensible narrative origin and the
 first primary character to act in the poem, reveals how conflicting the discontinu-
 ous appearances of character names can be. Following his initial conversation with
 Enion, his sinking into the sea, and his Spectre being drawn out, Tharmas' name
 defines one of the "worlds" through which Los and Enitharmon wander. Tharmas
 then reappears as a character in the Song of the Demons of the Deep, around the
 wedding Feast of Los and Enitharmon, where he is neither the shifting speaker of
 his opening lines nor the violent, sexually potent Spectre. Instead he is one who
 could not endure the "battle" the Demons describe:

 Tharmas ended not, he fled howling, then a barren waste sunk down
 Conglobing in the dark confusion, Mean time Los was born
 And Thou O Enitharmon!
 (15:18-20)

 Blake's syntax is characteristically double-edged. This passage intersects the
 moment earlier in Night I when Tharmas "sunk down" into the sea; the phrase
 "barren waste... Conglobing in the dark confusion" reveals Tharmas' impotence
 as one who flees and withdraws from activity (a characteristic he retains through-
 out the poem). His withdrawal divides knowledge into conscious and unconscious
 knowledge: his impotence and his fleeing are treated as a "dark confusion," much
 like his opening evasive utterances. The image of "dark confusion" "Conglobing"


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