The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

A classroom had been a meeting room. I had come at the appointed hour with a lover’s joy in her company who had given me the most gracious of gifts, these things she loved she gave me to love. Books were the bodies of thought and feeling that could not otherwise be shared. There was more. Certain writers so revealed what a human being was that each of us had a share in that being. Love and Poetry were so mixed in the alembic that they coinhered in a new experience. “When in the company of the gods,” H.D. writes in that passage of The Flowering of the Rod, “I loved and was loved”—That was long ago in childhood hours of Mother’s reading myths and fairy tales in which that world appeared. In the new experience old layers of being found a pathway and welled up into the present:

  never was my mind stirred

  to such rapture,

  my heart moved

  to such pleasure,

  as now, to discover

  over Love, a new Master:

  Every resonance had been prepared, for I had found—as when I was sixteen I had found a new teacher who brought me to Love—a new Master over Poetry in the work of H.D. In these things my mind likewise was stirred to rapture, my heart moved to such pleasure. My first teacher had given me a key to my future resource. She had presented the work that was worthy, and the work was to be the ground of Eros. For that winged bright promise that the soul seeks in its beloved appeared to me in the life that the inner sensitive consciousness of Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, or H.D., had found for itself in their writing, thriving there, hidden from the careless reader, surviving the scorn and even hatred of the antipathetic reader, a seed that would chance somewhere, sometime, upon the ground that awaited its revelation, for the reader who would not misunderstand or revile but who would come to find therein his own kindred life.

  Chapter 3 Eros

  The work, the ground, and Eros lie at the heart of our study here. The work itself is the transformation of the ground. In this ground the soul and the world are one in a third hidden thing, in imagination of which the work arises. It is the work of creation then. It is Poetry, a Making. It is also the opus alchymicum of Hermetic and Rosicrucian alchemy. The rhymes of this poetry are correspondences, workings of figures and patterns of figures in which we apprehend the whole we do not see. The path that poetry creates between reality and the soul is the path of a conversion. Our path here must often come close to the path of depth psychologies and of theosophical schools, but we are tracing the path of Psyche and her Eros as workers of a fiction in the art of poetry, projecting not a cure of souls or an illumination of souls, except as the secret of fictions may cure or illumine, but the inner works of the poetic opus. Our work is to arouse in a contemporary consciousness reverberations of old myth, to prepare the ground so that when we return to read we will see our modern texts charged with a plot that had already begun before the first signs and signatures we have found were worked upon the walls of Altamira or Pech-Merle. Mythos Aristotle defined as the plot of the story. The plot we are to follow, the great myth or work, is the fiction of what Man is.

  Soul and Eros are primordial members of the cast. To imagine ourselves as souls is to become engaged in all the mystery play, the troubled ground, of a poetry that extends beyond the reaches of any contemporary sense. Eros and Psyche are personae of a drama or dream that determines, beyond individual consciousness, the configurative image of a species. Just as the source of the song lies in an obscurity back of the first writing on the wall, so, in my own childhood, in the dawn of story, before I could read or write, there was a tale told to me of Cupid and Psyche. In the beginning I heard of this god Eros and of the drama of loss and search. I understood only that there was a wonder in this tale.

  If the Work has to do with Eros—and for the poet the poem is a return to the work in the charged sense we would pursue here—the would-be poet stands like Psyche in the dark, taken up in a marriage with a genius, possessed by a spirit outside the ken of those about him. That there be gold or wonder or the beloved in such a blind matter, no one else can believe. So the poet William Carlos Williams in Paterson Four sees the work of poetry in the chemistry where Madam Curie works the pitchblende:

  A dissonance

  in the valence of Uranium

  led to the discovery

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  by the hour, the day, the week

  to get, after months of labor .

  a stain at the bottom of the retort

  without weight, a failure, a

  nothing. And then, returning in the

  night, to find it .

  LUMINOUS!

  For my middle-class parents the work I was to undertake was as fearful and doubtful as that calling that Psyche, in the story Apuleius tells, knew in the dark. The genius of Poetry appeared to them “not a son-in-law of mortal birth but a dire mischief,” “a winged pest.” They, like Psyche’s parents, were dismayed and strove to dissuade me. They tried to make me see this alien calling in the light of common sense. And there was every reason to mistrust, for I had no sure talent. I was in the dark about what poetry was. How badly first poems turned out! If one looked at them at all in a critical light, the charm might be broken. What garbled and even monstrous expressions stood for the first articulations of poetic feeling! “Knowledge, the contaminant,” Williams writes. Luminous in the dark, and so Madame Curie works—it haunts Williams that it is a woman—for she is the poet, but also, here too, she is Psyche:

  And so, with coarsened hands

  she stirs

  And love, bitterly contesting, waits

  that the mind shall declare itself not

  alone in dreams

  Hints of the old story appear in the workings of the new.

  •

  There was the Palace of Eros. Psyche was to inherit all, on the one condition that she not seek to see her Eros in the light. Her mind must not become involved in the knowledge of love. “When well inside the palace she came upon splendid treasure chambers stuffed with unbelievable riches; every wonderful thing that anyone could possibly imagine was there.” This Palace, as it appears in the beginning of the story, is like the wealth of works the imagination has left us, that we call our Culture. Writing, painting, architecture, and music seem to exist to enrich our appreciations, to furnish forth our taste, to suit or not our predilections. Some men believe that mountains, streams, animals, and birds, that the plenitude of the world, exists like this, a storehouse of commodities for human improvement and uses. And the Palace of Eros has another likeness to the world that exists in works of art—“No single chain, bar, lock, or armed guard protected it,” the story tells us. It lay an open secret for those who discovered it to live in.

  Psyche, before her sin, is a dilettante. To read, to listen, to study, to gaze, all was part of being loved without loving, a pleasure previous to any trial or pain of seeking the beloved. The light must be tried; Psyche must doubt and seek to know; reading must become life and writing; and all must go wrong. There is no way then but Psyche’s search, the creative work of a union in knowledge and experience with something missing. At the end, there is a new Eros, a new Master over Love.

  Eros, like Osiris, or Lucifer (if He be the Prince of Light whom the Gnostics believe scattered in sparks throughout the darkness of what is the matter), is a Lord over us in spirit who is dispersed everywhere to our senses. We are drawn to Him, but we must also gather Him to be. We cannot, in the early stages, locate Him; but He finds us out. Seized by His orders, we “fall in love,” in order that He be; and in His duration, the powers of Eros are boundless. We are struck by His presence, and, in becoming lovers we become something other than ourselves, subjects of a daemonic force previous to our humanity, that, as the poet Hesiod pictures Eros, “unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” This Eros is a primal authority, having the power of a cosmic need. Men knew His terrors before they knew anything of Him as Cupid with his darts, before men had invented arrows.

&n
bsp; There was an Eros before there were Titans or Gods. But then there is a second Eros. After the Titanic Kronos cuts away the genitals of the Father Uranus, the Great Sky, and casts them away behind him upon the raging sea (that may be the sea of the act itself), “they were swept away over the main a long time: and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it grew a maiden”—Aphrodite—and, with her, Eros and Himeros. A transformation has taken place. In this Greek figure the Father’s parts, the essential “Father,” reappear in three persons: his penis becomes the goddess Aphrodite or Beauty, and his testicles become the attendant gods, Eros and Himeros.

  In the Zohar of Moses of Leon in the thirteenth century A.D., there appears another figure of the Father that may be related to his Greek figure from the Hesiod’s Theogony of the eighth century B.C. In the Kabbalistic lore, the Glory of En Soph is a womanly power of God, the Shekinah. And we learn too that there is a mystery of the two sides, the Left and the Right, that are testicles from which the souls of the living come. Souls, in Kabbalistic thought, are seminal.

  Love, desire, and beauty, in the poet’s Theogony, precede mankind. They were beings before they were human feelings. The meaning of things seems to change when we fall in love, as if the universe were itself a language beyond our human language we had begun to understand. It is the virtue of words that what were forces become meanings and seek form. Cosmic powers become presences and even persons, having body to the imagination. We fall in love with Love.

  In the old rites, Eros appeared as an unwrought stone. And from our childhood, for some of us dim, for some of us vivid, memories remain of the way a stone could seem to be alive. The presence or protective genius of a stone could become a secret ally of oneself. For the sculptor the stone “speaks” and his work emerges along the lines of a colloquy between his listening and—out of a dumbness or meaninglessness of matter, were it not for this listening—a language of space which the stone has evoked for him. For what we call our common sense, for the consensus that is even contemptuous of being influenced by mere things, the stone is properly inert. But for the imagination, for the mind seeking communication, to create in its life a serious play, even inert matter is alive with person. So, for the Orphic poets, the seed or egg of the universe is created by Hyle, the primal chaos of matter.

  Again and again in our lives we find our vital sense of the universe must return to this muddle, to begin again in the unspeaking obstruction of the stone. It is the artist’s block that heightens his awe of the other power in which his material speaks to him. The block itself is the blockage of a breath. The inspiring stone “breathes” as the artist awakens to his work.

  From the unwrought Eros, once the work begins, the form of a vital spirit flies up. Chaos itself, the abyss—but it is a block—is alive with that personal possibility. In its obscurity, Chaos corresponds to the psychoanalytic unconscious, for the idea of the unconscious is also that of a vitality that, unless a man enter a colloquy with what cannot sensibly speak and take instructions from what he cannot know, may show itself as a deadly and deadening matter. But once he take faith in what he cannot see, from a World-Egg, where once there was demonic Chaos, the universe of Creation comes forth, and, as Jane Harrison observes in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, “it is almost inevitable that there should emerge from the egg a bird-god, a winged thing.”

  Hidden, Eros is the very vitality felt by the sculptor in the stone. Revealed, he is shown to be an idea, a youth flying up from the head of a Titanic Mother or Matter awakening or come alive in the ground, the Earth-goddess, Γη or Gaia. This Earth is also the artist’s content, the subject of the conversation with an otherwise speechless matter, the ground of potential identity in which he works. In the figure shown by Jane Harrison on page 639 of the Prolegomena, attendant upon the work, are two satyrs with pickaxes, breakers of the ground; the giant female head uprises. And from the aroused head two erotes spring—the primal Eros and Himeros.

  In Hesiod’s Theogony, the second Eros and Himeros appear as transformations of the Father’s testes, and back of this erotic replacement, there is the scene of a chaotic or psychotic episode—the castration of the Father. In the mysteries of the Mother, the awakening of Chaos giving rise to Love and Desire seems also to follow upon such an attack, but here it is upon the Mother. One satyr holds his pick swung high for a blow; the other has completed his stroke. Describing an earlier figure shown on page 279 of the Prolegomena, Jane Harrison sees this as the anodos or calling-up of the Maiden: “The colossal head and lifted hands of a woman are rising out of the earth. Two men are present. Both are armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them strikes the head of the rising woman.” It may be the same rite as that of the breaking of the world-egg. We see them attacking the stone, breaking the ground or egg—it is the mothering head—to release from its container the ideas of a new order: Eros and his other.

  •

  In Athens, Jane Harrison tells us, the cult of Aphrodite gave way to the cult of the male Eros. “There is no Aphrodite,” the poet Alcman sang:

  Hungry Love

  Plays boy-like with light feet upon the flowers.

  The power of Love that had been a woman in an other phase is impersonated by youths.

  “O Menexenus and Lysis, how ridiculous that you two boys,” Socrates says at the close of Plato’s dialog Lysis, “and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you, should imagine ourselves to be friends—this is what the by-standers will go away and say—and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend.”

  In the aristocratic cult of the homo-Eros, the winged images we saw drawn upon the vases become winged ideas in full. The daemonic force of Eros remains, but within the created world of Plato’s book the cosmos itself has been idealized. Empedocles had called Eros Philia; and now in Lysis, Plato’s Socrates speaks of a first principle, a higher Eros, the πρτον λον. In his Hexameters, Xenophanes had remarked:

  If oxen and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

  In the idealizing philosophy of Plato the true form of God is the ideal of the Good. Whatever of the old divine world cannot be incorporated in the ideal of the Good must be put down as the falsification of Art or Poetry. Just as men may imagine themselves to be friends but cannot come to discover what is a friend, so men may imagine immortal gods with immortal bodies, but

  no such union can reasonably be believed to be; although fancy, not having seen or surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time.

  The young men flying in a sexual rapture now are called to school their bodies, serving a new rapture of the rational mind. For them, there is to be a rational Eros, the Love because of Whom men try to love, the First Beloved, the most dear, because of whom men hold life dear and would imagine themselves friends. Caring in itself becomes an adventure of the imagination that is wed here to the great adventure of Eros and desire.

  But the old power of the old Eros haunts the new love of friends. We do not quite know what makes us find things most dear. Just here, in the unknowing, Plato must call upon the primal force to make real the idea. The Good has power in men’s minds, but it comes not in their knowledge but in their desire that there be good. Eros and even Dionysos, desire and intoxication, Plato argues are daemons of the Good.

  But then the story turns, as life itself turns. The light spills. Eros is burned or betrayed. Some five hundred years after Plato, a Christian contemporary of Apuleius, Ignatius of Antioch, said, “crucified”—“My Eros is crucified.” It is the beginning of our era.

  Eros, in Apuleius’s story, when he comes to Psyche in the dark, is something she knows not what. He is what the oracle at Miletus said he was—a monster that bel
ongs to the old order, an unwrought stone. But he is also an other, for he carries arrows. She is curious about those arrows; her investigating hand trembles and she wounds herself. She bleeds. Psyche becomes soul; the figure of the human Eros comes to light—the Divine Bridegroom to be. Who might have been a dilettante becomes an exile from delight. What might have been pleasure is to be joy, that is the new faith. It is in exile from Eros that this love and this faith appear depending upon a promise that is unbelievable. In the new myths, Orpheus turns to look, and Eurydice is lost. “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” the Christ says to his mother or bride or woman. In the Gnostic interpretation, the spirit loses or puts away the soul. Psyche disobeys the law and raises the light to know Eros, and the separation of soul and spirit follows. Something like this happened in our history in the Western World, so that, for men of the second century after Christ, that there was a Life within life, a Love within love, became a promise only faith could believe. Eros had been seen in the flesh, a figure the light drew out of the old dark to husband the soul. The great dark reality in which body, soul, and spirit had been one in unknowing was reft. “Knowledge, the contaminant”—and then—“Uranium, the complex atom, breaking / down.” Men revile the body they had seen. Psyche is set to those tasks by an offended Aphrodite. Life and history appear to travail in punishment that is necessary before the restoration of paradise. The spirit retreats from its incarnation and is removed to states of ecstasy and despair, heaven and hell.

  The god had said: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” As H.D. tells of Him in The Flowering of the Rod:

  He was the first to say,

  not to the chosen few,

  his faithful friends,

  the wise and good,

  but to an outcast and a vagabond,

  The passers-by jeered at Him, so Matthew tells us. We remember, that for Plato too, there had been the sense of what “by-standers” would say, mocking the Eros of those who imagined themselves to be friends. “Even the robbers who were crucified with Him,” so Matthew testifies, “abused Him in the same way.” There may then have been mockery when one said, as Luke testifies he did, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom!” Eros, being taunted, would have replied likewise—“I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” For Paradise is the inexorable power of Eros.