The “blood” of the Aranda, the “libido” of the Freudian, may also be the “light” of our Kabbalist text. “En Sof,” Gershom Scholem tells us in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:
is not only the hidden Root of all Roots, it is also the sap of the tree; every branch representing an attribute, exists not by itself but by virtue of En Sof, the hidden God. And this tree of God is also, as it were, the skeleton of the universe; it grows throughout the whole of creation and spreads branches through all its ramifications. All mundane and created things exist only because something of the power of the Sefiroth lives and acts in them.
The simile of man is as often used as that of the Tree. The Biblical word that man was created in the image of God means two things to the Kabbalist: first, that the power of the Sefiroth, the paradigm of divine life, exists and is active also in man. Secondly, that the world of the Sefiroth, that is to say the world of God the Creator, is capable of being visualized under the image of man the created. From this it follows that the limbs of the human body are nothing but images of a certain spiritual node of existence which manifests itself in the symbolic figure of Adam Kadmon, the primordial man. The Divine Being Himself cannot be expressed. All that can be expressed are His symbols. The relation between En Sof and its mystical qualities, the Sefiroth, is comparable to that between the soul and the body, but with the difference that the human body and soul differ in nature, one being material and the other spiritual, while in the organic whole of God all spheres are substantially the same. (Scholem, op. cit., pp. 214–15)
“The world of the Sefiroth is the hidden world of language,” Scholem continues, “the world of divine names.” “Totemic names,” Roheim calls the whispered passwords of the Australian rite. “The creative names which God called into the world,” Scholem calls the Sefiroth, “the names which He gave to Himself.” It is the alphabet of letters revealed to the initiate as at once the alphabet of what he is and what the universe is and the alphabet of eternal persons.
As Scholem hints, “the conception of the Sefiroth as parts or limbs of the mystical anthropos leads to an anatomical symbolism which does not shrink from the most extravagant conclusions.” Man’s “secret parts” are secret names or hidden keys to the whole figure of man, charged with magic in their being reserved. In the communal image, the human figure is male and female. Ass-hole, penis, cunt, navel, were not only taboo but sacred, words to be revealed in initiations of the soul to the divine body, as at Eleusis the cunt of a woman in the throes of birth was shown. In what we call carnal knowledge, in the sexual union of male and female nakedness, God and His creation, the visible and invisible, the above and the below are also united.
Ham, who sees the nakedness of his father, is the prototype of the Egyptian who in an alien or heretic religion knows the secrets of God. To steal a look, like the theft of fire, is a sin, for the individual seeks to know without entering the common language in which things must be seen and not seen.
“At the initiation ceremony the point is to displace libido from the mother to the group of fathers,” Roheim writes. In the contemporaneity of our human experience with all it imagines, there may be not a displacement but an extension of libido: the revelation of the mother remains, the revelation of the male body is added.
Some old men stand in the ring and catching hold of their genitals tell the boys to raise their eyes and take particular notice of those parts. The old men next elevate their arms above their heads and the boys are directed to look at their armpits. Their navels are exhibited in the same way. The men then put their fingers on each side of their mouths and draw their lips outward as wide as possible, lolling out their tongues and inviting the special attention of the novices. They next turn their backs and, stooping down, ask the novices to take particular notice of their posterior parts.
For Roheim, the images and magic of Australian story and rite are one with the images and magic of all dreams:
After having withdrawn cathexis from environment, we fall asleep. But when the cathexis is concentrated in our own bodies we send it out again and form a new world, in our dreams. If we compare dream mechanisms with the narratives of dream-times we find an essential similarity between the two. The endless repetitions of rituals and wanderings and hunting are indeed very different from a dream; but when we probe deeper we find that they are overlaid by ceremony and perhaps also by history. The essential point in the narratives as in the ritual is that man makes the world—as he does in sleep.
These natives do not wander because they like to . . . Man is naturally attached to the country where he was born because it, more than anything else, is a symbol of his mother. All natives will refer to their ‘place’ as a ‘great place’; as they say ‘I was incarnated there’ or ‘born there’. Economic necessity, however, compels him time and again to leave his familiar haunts and go in search of food elsewhere. Against this compulsion to repeat separation, we have the fantasy embodied in myth and ritual in which he himself creates the world.
Where the nursing woman and the countryside itself are both “Mother,” and where in turn the men of the tribe man initiate and reveal maleness as an other Mother, “Mother” means unity, what Gertrude Stein called the Composition. What we experience in dreaming is not a content of ourselves but the track of an inner composition of ourselves. We are in-formed by dreams, as in daily life we experience that which we are able to grasp as information. We see, hear, taste, smell, feel, what can be drawn into a formal relation; to sense at all involves attention and composition. “It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different,” Stein writes in “Composition as Explanation”:
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.
The endless repetitions of rituals and wanderings and hunting as the pattern of life for the Australian is a living inside the Composition; and in their exhibiting the secrets of the male body to the boy, the men of the tribe are making a composition where what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. In the ritual, song, parts of the body, parts of the landscape, man and nature, male and female, are united in a secret composite of magic names.
“One of the main sources of male creative power,” Roheim tells us, “is the incantation itself.”
When I asked old Wapiti and the other chiefs what makes the animals grow? the spirits? the ancestors? O, no, they said: jelindja wars, the words only. The form of the incantation is an endless, monotonous flow of words, and actually the men urinate very frequently while performing the ceremonies. This parallelism between the words and the fluid is brought out in a description by Lloyd Warner: ‘The blood runs slowly and the rhythm of the song is conducted with equal slowness. In a second or two the blood spurts and runs in a rapid stream. The beat of the song sung by the old men increases to follow the rhythm of the blood.’
We may begin to see, given Stein’s concept of insistence that informs composition, and then thinking of the pulse of the living egg-cell itself, that beat, rhythm, underlies every pattern of our experience. Life itself is an endless, monotonous flow, wherever the individual cannot enter into it as revealed in dance and melody to give rhythmic pattern; the world about goes inert and dead. The power of the painter in landscape is his revelation of such movement and rhythm in seeing, in-formation, in what otherwise would have been taken for granted.
Gertrude Stein, reflecting upon permanence and change in the artist’s vision, sees that “the only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doin
g everything.” Close to the Cubist movement in Paris, she had experienced how painting or writing in a new way had revealed coordinations of what was seen and heard toward an otherwise hidden unborn experience of the world, so that one saw and heard with a profound difference. “A new cadence means a new idea,” H.D. and Richard Aldington tell us; here too, cadence is how it is done. To make clear the meaning of cadence they refer to the choral line of Greek poetry that was also the movement of the choral dance, strophe and antistrophe. So too, Roheim, initiate of Freudianism, as Stein was initiate of Cubism, or H.D. of Imagism, sees in the narratives of his Australian informants how “in all of them environment is made out of man’s activity,” for he had himself experienced a conversion in which a new environment for man had been made out of analytic activity. The “man-made world” in which “environment is regarded as if it were derived from human beings” is the narrative itself—the unity of things in how the story is told.
Parts and operations of the human body, but also parts and operations of the cosmos, are related in a new ground, a story or picture or play, in which feeling and idea of a larger whole may emerge. The flow of sound from the throat and the flow of urine from the bladder, the flow of energy from the dancing feet, the flow of forms in the landscape, the flow of water and of air felt, translated in a rhythmic identity disclose to the would-be initiate what man is but also what the world is—both other and more than he is himself, than the world itself is.
Cézanne working at his vision of Mont Sainte-Victoire and Dalí at his paranoiac vision of the Catalonian landscape not only draw but are drawn by what they draw. From body and from world toward an other body and other world, man derives meaning in a third element, the created—the rite, the dance, the narrative; the painting, the poem, the book. And in this new medium, in a new light, “man” and “environment” both are made up.
The power of the poet is to translate experience from daily time where the world and ourselves pass away as we go on into the future, from the journalistic record, into a melodic coherence in which words—sounds, meanings, images, voices—do not pass away or exist by themselves but are kept by rhyme to exist everywhere in the consciousness of the poem. The art of the poem, like the mechanism of the dream or the intent of the tribal myth and dromena, is a cathexis: to keep present and immediate a variety of times and places, persons and events. In the melody we make, the possibility of eternal life is hidden, and experience we thought lost returns to us.
“The eternal ones of the dream,” Roheim observes, “are those who have had no mothers; they originated of themselves. Their immortality is a denial of the separation anxiety. Separation from the mother is painful; the child is represented in myth as fully formed, even before it enters the mother . . . The tjurunga from which it is born is both a phallic and a maternal symbol.”
The tjurunga, like the cartouche that encircles the Pharaoh’s name as the course of the sun encircles the created world, is a drawing of the spirit being, an enclosure in which we see the primal identity of the person. But all primal identities are Adamic containing male and female, man and animal, in one. We are each separated from what we feel ourselves to be, from what we essentially are but also from the other we must be. Wherever we are we are creatures of other places; whenever we are, creatures of other times; whatever our experience, we are creatures of other imagined experiences. Not only the experience of unity but the experience of separation is the mother of man. The very feeling of melody at all depends upon our articulation of the separate parts involved. The movement is experienced as it arises from a constant disequilibrium and ceases when it is integrated.
“Composition is not there, it is going to be there, and we are here,” Stein writes. Between “there” and “here” or “then” and “now,” the flame of life, our spirit, leaps. A troubled flame—“The time in composition is a thing that is very troublesome,” Stein tells us:
If the time in the composition is very troublesome it is because there must be even if there is no time at all in the composition there must be time in the composition which is in its quality of distribution and equilibration. (Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” Selected Writings [1946], p. 461)
An anxious flame—“In totemic magic the destroyed mother is reanimated and in the totemic sacrament, eternal union of the mother and child is effected,” Roheim tells us. But the eternal separation of the mother and child is also celebrated therein: “As a religion it represents the genitalization of the separation period and the restitution that follows destructive trends.” War, Heraclitus called the flame, or Strife.
“All men are bringing to birth in their bodies and in their souls,” Diotima, who here speaks as an Eternal One of the Mother, says to Socrates in Plato’s dialogue:
There is a poetry, which, as you know, is complex and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all arts are creative; and the masters of all arts are poets or makers . . . What are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? . . . The object which they have in view is birth in beauty.
Beyond beauty—birth in the eternal and universal.
“According to the natives of the Andjamatana tribe,” Roheim tells us, “children originate in two mythical women known as maudlangami”:
They live in a place in the sky. Their long hair almost covers them and on their pendulum breasts are swarms of spirit children who gather their sustenance therefrom. These women are the source of all life, each within her tribe producing spirit children of her own moiety.
The two maudlangami from whom all spiritual identities come are creatures of the story itself in which the germinal function of the storytelling is embodied. In the communion of the Story, the narrator and the listeners have their spiritual source, and all life has its source and draws eternal nourishment.
Each Aranda or Juritja native has an immortal part or spirit double, whose immortality consists in eternally rejoining the Mother in the sacred totemic cave. From time to time they reidentify themselves with the eternal in them.
It seems to Roheim that in the story “they deny their great dependence upon Mother Nature and play the role of Mothers themselves.” But Mother Nature in the eternal bond with Man is Herself, as He is, the member of the cast in a drama. In the rites that Roheim sees as denials of dependence, we see the dancers reviving the human reality in all that is disturbing to union, involving themselves in, insisting upon, and taking their identity in, the loss of their identity, keeping the rhyme of their separation alive in the sound of their unity, rehearsing their exile in the place where they are. The flame springs up in a confusion of elements, times, places.
For the Freudian, it all rests in a “psychical survival of the biologic unity with environment.” “This ‘oceanic feeling’ (Freud) or ‘dual unity situation,’ ” Roheim argues, “is something we all experience in our own lives; it is the bond that unites mother and child.” “By taking the tjurunga along on his wanderings the native never gives up the original bond of dual unity which ties the infant to his mother.”
From the unity once known between mother and child, the boy is initiated in a rite in which things once unified in feeling are shown as separated. This is the anatomization of the Australian scene, where parts of the body are exhibited as independent entities; but it is also the anatomization practices in which the poet is born, where words once unified in the flow of speech—the mother tongue which in turn had been articulated from the flow of sounds in the child’s earlier initiation—are shown as articulated—separated into particular sounds, syllables, meanings—in order to be reorganized in an other unity in which the reality of separation is kept as a conscious factor. The “Mother” is now the World, and the “Child” is the Self. The World is revealed as a “Creation” or “Poetry” or “Stage,” and the Self, as “Creator” or “Poet.” The man or the hero begins his life that demands something of him, a wandering in quest of somethin
g known in the unknown. Taking with him the quest itself as his Mother—as the Australian takes the tjurunga or the devout Kabbalist the Shekina—he is to be most at home in his exile.
•
Roheim telling about his Australian natives does not mean to initiate us into the Aranda but through his creation of the Aranda in our minds to initiate us into the psychoanalytic fiction. The old men prancing, bleeding themselves, and showing their private parts; the emu ancestors, the eternal ones who come in the dream, the primordial Mother and Child, are people not of the Australian bush but of a creative book, haunted by “the wanderings of human beings from the cradle to the grave in a web of daydream,” as the author of this mankind himself wanders in a web of psychoanalytic reverie.
“In the eternal ones of the dream it is we who deny decay and aggression and object-loss, and who guard eternal youth and reunion with the mother,” Roheim writes in his coda:
The old and decrepit men of the tribe become young and glorious once more. Covered with birds’ down, the life symbol, they are identified with the eternally youthful ancestors. Mankind, the eternal child, splendide mendax, rise above reality . . . The path is Eros, the force that delays disintegration; and hence the promise held forth in the daydream and in its dramatization is no illusion after all. The tjurunga which symbolizes both male and female genital organ, the primal scene and combined parent concept, the father and the mother, separation and reunion . . . represents both the path and the goal.
This tjurunga we begin to see not as the secret identity of the Aranda initiate but as our own Freudian identity, the conglomerate consciousness of the mind we share with Roheim. “Above and below, left and right,” the Kabbalist would have added in drawing his figure of the primordial man. The whole story is “daydream,” a “web,” and we are not sure of that because the path is Eros, the child, but he is also splendide mendax, a glorious maker of fictions, in which all the conglomerate of what Man is might be contained.
The H.D. Book Page 19