VISIONARY CINEMA
-559
Blake shatters this blending with a single insistence; as he does- not be–
hold the outward creation, so he can affirm for himself that his Giant
Forms are stationed in no remembered land!1cape, but only in the vision–
ary finding of his own pulsation of an artery, that moment in each day
that Satan's Watch-Fiends cannot find.
At the end of "Night the Fourth" of
The Four Zoas,
the Giant
Form named Los, who will at last compel an imaginative salvation,
wearies of the terrible task of hammering the falling Urizen into some
kind of definite shape. Himself a malformed Imagination, Los, the af–
frighted Titan, at this point cannot bear the consequence!1 of his own
necessary labor. Instead of the heroic stance of the artificer before his
own free creation, we are given the wavering of an enforced illusionist
who "became what he beheld / He became what he was doing he was
himself transformed." The final lines of "Night the Fourth" read
The bones of Urizen hurtle on the wind the bones of Los
Twinge and his iron sinews bend like lead and fold
Into unusual forms dancing and howling stamping the Abyss.
This vehement grotesquerie seems, at firrt, only an instance of what
Blake's friend Fuseli charmingly called "Meester Blake's emancipated
anatomy," prompting those Blakean manuscript sketches that impress our
skepticism as being only so many flying geek!1. But the rhetoric this vision
emancipates in Blake at the very start of the next book, "Night the
Fifth," is monumentally impressive by any standards. This is the
totentanz
of Los :
Infected Mad he danced on his mountains high
&
dark as heaven
Now fixd into one steadfast bulk his features stonify
From his mouth curses
&
from his eyes sparks of blighting
Beside the anvil cold he dancd with the hammer of Urthona
Terrific pale. Enitharmon stretchd on the drears Earth
Felt her immortal limbs freeze stiffning pale inflexible
His feet shrunk withring from the deep shrinking
&
withering
And Enitharmon shrunk up all their fibres withring beneath
As plants witherd by winter leaves
&
stems
&
roots decaying
M eit into thin air while the seed drivn by the furious wind
Rests on the distant Mountains top. So Los
&
Enitharmon
Shrunk into fixed space stood trembling on a Rocky cliff
Yet mighty bulk
&
majesty
&
beauty remaind but unexpansive
As far as highest Zenith from the lowest Nadir. So far shrunk
Los from the furnaces a Space immense
&
left the cold
Prince of Light bound in chains of intellect among the furnaces
But all the furnaces were Ottt
&
the bellows had ceast to blow
