VISIONARY CINEMA
561
founded on his stupidity; he cannot see that the hammering of error
into definite shape, however repugnant, will lead to salvation. The great
description of the dance of Los founds its irony on visionary counter–
point; the imagination is accepting a naturalization that is wholly un–
necessary; it is yielding itself to the context of space. But it is recalcitrant
to that context, and the landscape cannot hold it. With an eye made
active by an awareness of cinema, we see what Blake gives us
in
his pas–
sage: a series of shifting views that are not in continuity with one an–
other, and whose juxtapositions suggest an intolerable confusion between
an inward world rolling outward and an outward world that stands
apart, and is objectified as a mockery of our visual powers. Los is "In–
fected" because he is becoming what he beheld in the changes of U rizen;
he is "Mad" because he cannot bear such transformations in himself. He
dances "on his mountains," which are truly his, for they are forsaken
elements of his own self. In the earth of Eden, before the FaIl, the
Imagination dwelt in underground caves, which were the auricular nerves
of man, and identical with the apocalyptic sense of hearing. In Blake,
the FaIl turns everything inside out; the stonified ears have become the
mountains on which the deafened Los dances. We see, in succession, but
again without continuity, the following images: a mad Titan dancing
on mountains as high and dark as an inhuman heaven; then a steadfast
bulk, a horror of natural sculpture, with stony features, a cursing mouth
and eyes from which sparks of blighting come a t us. Next we see the
dancer again, but he
is
pale, and dances beside a cold anvil, ironically
brandishing the now useless hammer of Urthona, his name in Eternity.
The next shot shows us his female, emanative portion, Enitharmon,
stretched on a denuded earth, and freezing and stiffening into that
ground of unbeing. In the eye of vision we suddenly see both figures
shrinking and withering from the feet up, and immediately the next
frame shows us two plants withered by winter, uprooted, decaying and
then dissolving in a furious wind, that carries the unseen seeds to a
distant mountain top. We see the two more than human figures again ,
still mighty in bulk and majesty and beauty, but curiously confined- look–
ing, and then a shot of the cold furnaces and unused bellows is given u s.
The two figures tremble on a cliff at the edge of an abyss, the female
clinging round Los's knees. The wind blows, and we hear her shriek;
there is a chorus of soft instruments and silvery voices, but she shrieks
louder to drown it out as the daylight wanes. The darkness comes in
the shapes of the turning wheels of giant miIls, as though industrial
specters were planted in the skies, and the earth responds to the dread
