The H.D. Book

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

  Beyond or within the physical presence of the gods and elemental daemons in the world of H.D.’s early poetry, where the Image was the nexus of the individual consciousness and the Presence, and the sense (awareness as feeling) of Presence was all, now H.D. must search out the sense anew in the meaning sense has of import (awareness as knowledge of meaning); she must read the message the Presence presents.

  To read the universe as a palimpsest, “from which one writing has been erased to make room for another,” and yet to find the one writing in the other, is to see history anew as a drama in which the One is in many acts enacting Itself, in which there is an Isis in history, history itself being her robe of many colors and changes, working to restore in many parts the wholeness of What Is as Osiris. This is a form that exists only in the totality of being, a form in our art that exists only in the totality of that art’s life; so that in any particular work this form appears as faith or on faith. In the study of the Epsilon at Delphi, Plutarch finds in the highest orders of meaning that his EI is “Thou art”—“the assertion of Being.”

  “The fact is,” Plutarch continues: “that we really have no part nor parcel in Being, but everything of a mortal nature is at some stage between coming into existence and passing away.” “He, being One, has with only one ‘Now’ completely filled ‘Forever;’ and only when Being is after His pattern is it in reality Being.” So that Reality—of our selves and of the universe, is a Thou. We may look back from Plutarch’s peroration at the close of his study to the philosophy that is also a poetry of Heraclitus, and we may also look forward to Hegel’s vision of history as Spirit and God in process, just as we may look forward from Plutarch’s exposition of Apollo and Dionysus to the vision of Nietzsche. The formal unity of history, like the formal unity of H.D.’s prose in Palimpsest is “laid away and guarded,” hidden. Our experience of form throughout is a faith in the voice’s telling that we follow. If we are not moved in faith, where we do not accept the voice and follow the presentation of images, then the prose, the history, and the universe are empty. What we follow is the Way of Isis, for in reading we must search and gather what we are searching for as we do so, even as H.D. followed the way of Isis, the path of a prose that is all the robe of Isis, the weaving of many disclosures in which there is some “apperception of the conceptual.”Palimpsest is a book for Heracliteans.

  In our time again the garment is riven. We had seen, pure and simple, our Christos or Osiris or resurrection, in the vision of a free society—“a voluntary state,” Vanzetti called it—in which all properties were communal as in the vision of St. Francis, and the individual volition was the mover of government. Now Typhon has torn apart the sacred writings, and the search has begun. In the darkness of Bolshevist doctrine, the individual volition is denied, and the Communist Party is substituted for the communality. In the darkness of industrial capitalism, in the name of free enterprise, the communal goods are denied and massman or the statistical majority abstract is substituted for the individual. The Typhonic States, “communist” and “democratic” alike, prepare to destroy all possibilities of the Osirian dream in a storm of war and outrage. We had seen . . . it was one of those . . . the robe of Osiris, of Man’s first Nature, “shining through the soul like a flash of lightning.” And those of us who saw and acknowledged what we saw came into a work or quest: to gather up out of the darkness the betrayal of the ideas of democracy and of communism the truth of that vision that was torn asunder. It was the new Adam, this individual man who was the brother of all men; this worker whose work was for the good of all. It was the new Eros that Psyche must now again seek even in Hell. Hipparchia may not have been mistaken then in taking Horus, the god of resurrection, to be Eros. For as Plutarch tells us in “Isis and Osiris,” Horus is himself completed with the strength of Typhon whom he conquered; and Hermes, the patron of poets, cuts out the sinews of Typhon and uses them as strings for his invention of the lyre. Not only in Osiris but in Typhon is the secret of the new Eros hidden, the strength and sinews of whose song must gather from the war.

  Chapter 5 Occult Matters

  This is not the beginning of the book. That was later, or, coming later, it was written earlier. What was to become our study began surely long ago. In one sense it began before writing or reading began, when as a child I lay drifting in the environment of voices talking in the next room. I would be put to bed among the potted plants by the wall that was all windows of a sunroom or herbarium at my grandmother’s, and, as my elders talked in the inner chamber, I, outside, could gaze at the night sky where some star was “mine” and watched over me, stars were eyes, or the first star seen was a wish or would grant a wish. My soul, they told me, went out to the stars or to other worlds. I laid my body down to rest in the bed as if it were a little boat and sailed on a voyage I pretended. “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” the rhyme went:

  one night

  Sailed off in a wooden shoe—

  Sailed on a river of crystal light,

  Into a sea of dew.

  “Where are you going, and what do you wish?”—so the old moon questions the voyagers. “I know where I’m going and who’s going with me,” another old song went. The rhyme was a child’s fancy by Eugene Field, who was to become, when one was grown-up, a repressed, even despised, source, put away among childish things. In Maxfield Parrish’s picture—“Show us the picture,” we used to ask as Mother read—still glowing in memory, they go out into a sea of stars, into the blue of the night sky. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

  The soul, my mother’s sister, my Aunt Fay, told me years later, was like a swarm of bees, and, at night, certain entities of that swarm left the body-hive and went to feed in fields of helium—was it in the upper atmosphere of the Earth or in the fire-clouds of the Sun? The “higher” ascended nightly, and in its absence, the “lower” dreamed, flooding the mind with versions of the Underworld. “While the cat’s away, the mice will play.” There were not only pretend dreams or plagiarized dreams like making up the Wynken-Blynken-and-Nod Boat out of the poem by Eugene Field to be one’s own, but there were rare dreams of the higher realms, instructions from angels of the Sun, and there were dreams of one’s own “lower” nature, messages from the Underworld, rebellious images that flooded the mind in the absence of its King, when genitals or liver, heart or bowels, took over the imagining screens of the brain for their own drama.

  My aunt’s name—Fay—had to do with illusions or enchantments, bewilderings of the mind in which men saw an other world behind or under “reality,” and at the same time it meant the enchanters themselves, the folk who lived under the Hill. Fate, faith, feign, and fair, we find, following the winding associations of fay, fey, and fairy, in the Oxford English Dictionary, are closely related. From many roots, words gathered into one stem of meaning, confused into a collective suggestion. There is fay, too, from old Teutonic *fôgjan, to join, to fix. In the American of the nineteenth century the word referred to the fit of a garment: “Your coat fays well,” the O.E.D. gives us. The casting of the image is high fairy, phanopoeia; but the image itself, as Pound conceived it to be, a nexus—“an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” he wrote in “A Stray Document,” “which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth”—the image itself is fay, at once an apparition and a joining of two into one.

  The little poem by Field was fay, for it cast its spell. And in the inner chamber, the adults, talking on, wove for me in my childish overhearing Egypt, a land of spells and secret knowledge, a background drift of conversation close to dreaming—spirit communications, reincarnation memories, clairvoyant journeys into a realm of astral phantasy where all times and places were seen in a new light, of Plato’s illustrations of the nature of the soul’s life, of most real Osiris and Isis, of lost Atlantis and Lemuria, and of the god or teacher that my parents had taken as theirs—the Hermetic Christos. This word teacher, as I f
irst heard it, before I went to school, meant the same as a god. God was not a god, but from His Being He sent out teachers or gods. True teachers—Christ, Buddha, Hermes, or Lao-Tse—were Light Beings, messengers of the Sun Itself, a Sun to which our sun but referred. Hermes, Mercury, was the one with winged helmet and winged sandals I had seen in the bronze figure that stood on the piano at Aunt Fay’s. He was the god of the high air, of those helium fields, carrying a rod around which two snakes twisted. This wand or caduceus meant, Aunt Fay explained, that he was god of Life, of the systole and diastole of the heart beat, and also of the ascent and descent of the soul. But the real image of the god was the picture Grandmother showed me in The Book of the Dead. In Egypt was the hidden meaning of things, not only of Greek things but of Hebrew things. The wand of Hermes was the rod of Moses, and my grandmother studied hieroglyphics as she studied Hebrew letters and searched in dictionaries for the meaning of Greek roots, to come into the primal knowledge of the universe that had been lost in the diversity of mankind. This god, the Egyptian Thoth, was Truth, the truth of what life intends that we know in death or judgment. He appeared not in the high air but was a Being of the Sun Below the Earth, a Lord of the Dead. He held the scales and weighed the soul; he judged between the fair and unfair. He had another title in The Book of the Dead—He-Who-Decides-In-Favor-Of-Osiris.

  Fay from fata had to do with the dead. The fairies as fates or norns were spinners of the threads from which life was woven, who measured man’s span and cut the cord to deliver him into his death as once they had cut the first cord or chord when the music began. But the word fey came too from another root that meant fated to die, cowardly, or weak, as the O.E.D. tells us—unmanned. In our common speech it meant “crazed,” “touched,” and then “clairvoyant,” “in tune with the dead.” The lords of the dead were, in the Egyptian writing, the ibis-headed Thoth, the lady Isis with the disk crown, the lion-headed Sekmet, the winged-serpented Sun, showing the animal mystery in which our souls had evolved.

  Just as, when that rhyme of Eugene Field’s was all but forgotten, in the study of Pound’s Cantos I was to come again to a “river of crystal light,” and in the study of Yeats or André Breton, I was to come to hear of a “dew” or a “sea of dew,” so in Whitman’s “eidolon yacht of me,” in D. H. Lawrence’s “Ship of Death,” and in the “caravel” that in Helen in Egypt carries the hero Achilles to the shore of dreams where his Helen waits, I was to come again to that “wooden shoe,” the Wynken-Blynken-and-Nod Boat. When I was no longer a child but a boy in my early teens, I found it again in the fairy ship of Avalon. The Boat of Dreams, the Boat of the Dead, was one of the great vehicles or images of Poetry. In the late Cantos of Pound it has appeared as I saw it, almost as early as that other picture by Maxfield Parrish, in the Egyptian picture-writing my grandmother studied—the ship that makes its way on the journey in the other world—Ra-Set Boat. “And then went down to the ship,” Pound had begun the established text of those Cantos, moving with the phantoms of Odysseus and his descent to the dead upon a sea of the imagination.

  In the fairy-world, the otherness or alien nearness of the dead and of hidden elements, of illusion and delusion in our daily life, the witchcraft of phantasy and the bewitched obsessions of madness, all the psychological dangers, combined as if they were the heart’s wish. The specter that haunts Europe Marx had called the hidden wish of the human spirit in history. The traumatic image Freud had called the repressed wish of the psyche, the primal scene. The underground uprises into the place of what is above-board. Justice demands it. The verso appears, so vivid that we see the surface of things had faded in the sunlight, and what we most feared we must now become. The living seem dead and the dead most alive. The words fey, fay, and fairy had a meaning I was to learn among schoolmates that in the common usage superseded all other meaning: “queer,” “perverted,” “effeminate.” Old concepts of sodomy and of shamanism—the cult that Orpheus was said to have brought from the forest world of the North to corrupt Greece, a cult of mediumship, poetry, and homosexuality—carry over into our vulgar sense of the word fairy, where men’s fear and mistrust of a sexual duplicity are most active.

  The Above and the Below, the Left and the Right—in Hermetic doctrine the universe was itself, like sexuality, duplicit. Love, I was taught, had once been, in another life, hatred; and hatred, love. There were times when, in anger against my mother’s domination, I could hate her. That was in the law of karma, my mother would explain, that hatred and love were so intertwined. This too was shown in the caduceus, in those two intertwined snakes on the magic wand, above which the wings of the mind hovered. Male and female were mixed too, for we who were men had been women in other lives and understood what to be a woman meant out of those depths of our human experience, the source of sexual sympathies and powers, the source too of antipathies. Thus, a poet like Shakespeare, calling upon his memory of lives beyond his own immediate life, had inner knowledge of a woman’s soul in which to fashion a Lady Macbeth as well as his man’s knowledge of Macbeth. Being was the ground of an ambivalence that was the key in turn of the universe hidden and disclosed in all things.

  In the beginning I heard of guardian angels and of genii, of vision in dreams and of truth in fairy tales, long before Jung expounded the gnosis or Henry Corbin revived and translated the Recitals of Avicenna. For these ideas were properties not only of the mind above, the high thought of neo-Platonists or of Romantic poets, but they were lasting lore of the folk mind below too, wherever old wives told their tales. Gossip had preserved stories and brought rumors of the divine wisdom into American folk ways. From the popular movement of nineteenth century American spiritualism, where witch tradition out of Salem, shaman rites out of the world of the American Indian, and talking in tongues or from the spirit common in congregations of the Holy Ghost in the Protestant movement, mingled to become an obsession at large, so that in the last decades of the century, in town and in the country, groups met to raise the dead at rapping and levitating tables, new affinities with more ancient mystery cults of spirit and of a life beyond life were awakened. The theosophy of Plutarch, of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the hermeticism of Pico della Mirandola, with The Light of Asia and the Bhagavad-Gita, joined in the confusion of texts and testimonies of libraries that could include accounts written by trance-mediums of travel to past time or far planets, manuals of practical astrology and numerology, or Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (“Its Message and Mission: A Sane Mind. A Soft Heart. A Sound Body.”).

  My grandmother, as a young wife of eighteen, so I remember the story, had lost two babies in a polio epidemic, and she came down to San Francisco from what is still backwoods Sierra country in California to go from one spiritualist circle to another, seeking consolation or communication, some continuity of her relation with the dead. The Indian guides must have seemed not out of place, for she had been born in Indian country in the wilderness of the Modoc territory in Eastern Oregon in the 1850s. My father’s family had moved West too, first into Ohio at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then on, at the frontier, or beyond the frontier, of America, into California. Tales of pioneer days, of Indian wars and of Indian sympathies, pacts with the Indians, lingered on, along with the new lore of strange ways, of pacts with the other world. From Modoc County in northeastern California, where she had gone as a young bride, my grandmother brought Indian baskets and beaded belts, feathered charms and wampum or strings of shells, her curios. In my childhood, there were still mediums who talked in Indian voices among those adults meeting in the other room. But my grandmother had gone on from the spiritualist circles, and, sometime in the eighties, she had joined with a group to form an Hermetic Brotherhood.

  Their thought rose from a swarming ground that had been prepared by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Isis Unveiled had appeared in 1877; The Secret Doctrine in 1888. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, the popular presentation of theosophical ideas, had appeared in 1883. Into her al
embic or witch’s pot, Blavatsky had stirred whatever hints, scraps, legends, lore, visions, phantasies, things she made up herself, into a muddle or stew. “Pot and Pan-theism” a contemporary wit dubbed it in scorn. Though she ransacked demonologies, histories of magic, studies of religion, encyclopedias of Gnosticism and neo-Platonism (“about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copies at second hand . . . without proper credit,” an angry critic wrote: “Nearly the whole of four pages was copied from Oliver’s Pythagorean Triangle, while only a few lines were credited to that work”), the material of Isis Unveiled, H.P.B. insisted, was her own, not out of reference books she had read, a matter of her research and imagination, but was revealed to her in the Akashic or Astral Records. So her disciple Olcott describes how, in the evening when he would return from his office and sit opposite her as she wrote “with the vacant eye of the clairvoyant seer” (but we see it also as with the vacant eye of one recalling what she had read that day), she would “shorten her vision as though to look at something held invisibly in the air before her, and begin copying on her paper what she saw.”

  Did she pretend, as I used to pretend as a child, to sail out in the boat previous to dreaming? Why? Her references were actually all there in books that Olcott and she had gathered in their library in that very room or had borrowed from the libraries of occultist friends. She had an insatiable curiosity and energy in gathering information. She talked with everyone and read everything. In those very years (1875–77) when Isis Unveiled was conceived and written, she had drawn upon the learning of a friend, Alexander Wilder, an American occultist, who had edited and annotated Thomas Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries and had translated the Theurgia of Iamblichus. Blavatsky insisted that her guides were spirits. “One such collaborator,” Gertrude Williams tells us in her book on Blavatsky, Priestess of the Occult, “was the Old Platonist who, remaining invisible, talked by the hour, dictating copy, checking references, answering questions.” “The spirit Old Platonist would be more convincing,” Mrs. Williams comments, “if there had not been an Old Platonist in the flesh—Dr. Wilder, who also talked by the hour, checking references and answering questions.”