on papyrus or parchment
are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,
In the poem we as poets are or aspire to be makers of some immortality, that an instant, a syllable, a least thing pass “beyond death” into song. Whatever love claims and care works may have its name, that once only kings had. “I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way:” Olson writes:
the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed . . . it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . . it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born.
Mercury is mercurial—evasive, sleight-of-hand, tricky, a
thief. Quick-silver. Back-of-the-mirror.
Hermes is hermetic—hidden, sealed, occult, a messenger.
A glass vessel closed by fusion, soldering or welding. Alembic
There was “the meaning that words hide” she had felt in The Walls Do Not Fall:
they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned
to hatch butterflies . . .
In the revelation of psychoanalysis there had been a trick between the mind and the ear, an incest or insect of that brother to this sister, the syllable that hid the pun within the word. Care, attention, had opened doors for souls in what they were saying, doors of other things they were saying.
III.
Ibis of Egypt, Ibex of Switzerland, come. Karnak 1923, where H.D. sought in the banquet chamber of Thothmes for a wish or a key, to read hieroglyph—the Luxor bee, chick, and hare still haunt her in London 1942. I was four in 1923 and learning “I” is for Ibis. “I” is for Ibex. Switzerland, Zurich, where H.D. wrote her letters in 1959, 1960, 1961, until in a stroke the letters were gone, the sequence of syllables was broken.
Ibis and Ibex were, before I could read, bird and animal of the alphabet “I.” Not of that other “I,” my own person “I.” In time, as incidents of “bear” and “owl” occurred in life and then in the course of poems, my bird and animal were to be owl and bear. They came to me, but also, by afterthought, by fascination, by saving the words and the images towards a design, by noticing how things referred to them, how news or gospel kept coming in of bear and owl, what was occurring in life and in poems was recognized in them—signs of event.
I accepted the owl, as I remember, during a seminar on Marx which I attended in 1948. The professor had just said that perhaps man’s great insights always came at the wrong time—“like the owl of Minerva,” he said, “that flew by night.” The message of the light, of mankind’s commune in life thru work, came in the dark—too late, after its day; came, looking forward, too early, before its time. And hadn’t I, as a young poet, to fly blind for ten years—not until Medieval Scenes did I know what I was doing; not until “The Venice Poem” in 1948, ten years after I began, did I know how to do it.
I had not accepted it before, when I was little, with my crossed eyes squinting to focus, with my round-eye glasses, when they said I was owl-eyed.
A word game. Ibex was the king of the mountain crags, native of the land of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “Little Rudy,” a lure of the heights. In the tale there were two maidens: one, Babette, his betrothed, is human, but “she is far above you,” her angry father says to Little Rudy; the other, the Ice-Maiden, is a spirit of the Alps. The “heights,” I find again, looking up the derivation of “Alps” in the O.E.D.; or, from the Latin, albus, “white.” For the Ice-Maiden is also an “alp”—a night-mare or demon of the dream. In “Little Rudy,” “Alps” and “alp” are one in the lure of the heights.
There is in the height of my fantasy, not an obsession but a thought that persists, a fancy that psychoanalysis has found entertained by many children, of an other more real mother than my mother. In the play of dates, my birth year 1919 and the death of my first mother in the complications of child-birth and the flu echoes in my mind the birth of H.D.’s child in the complications of the London flu epidemic. In the play of the initials H.D., my birth name Edward Howard Duncan—E. Howard Duncan echoes her signature; and in the increased risk of the play, the name of the author in my dream, E. Nesbit Trilby may conceal—between the childhood charm of E. Nesbit’s world and the fatal delusive career of Trilby where charm is sinister—its warning.
In H.D.’s The Hedgehog, searching for the meaning of a word herisson, the little girl Madge climbs “like a bird or a mountain goat or wild sheep,” like an ibex then, up where “The steep side of the hill was a very Swiss side of the hill,” where “A cloud was nosing its way up over the edge of the rock wall like the nose of a very white and very woolly big sheep,” where “The blinding silver across the white cloud a little dazed her.”
H.D. is writing at Vaud in 1925 this story of what life is like told for her daughter who is six. Just here, in the heights, Madge, daughter of the story, comes into this “dizziness on hill-paths.” “ ‘Who-eee.’ A voice up above Madge made Madge pause a moment, one foot fitted in a boulder, the other carefully planted on a space of dried grass . . . ”
But the poet, too, may have known how such a call can interrupt, in the heights of writing, suddenly, some voice that recalls an inner voice, that brings one down to earth, as we say. In a moment of panic we remember who and what we are. There is a way in the rising, climbing melodic airs of poetry that those other feet, of the poem’s climbing, are in the imagination “like a bird or a mountain goat or wild sheep.” Here we must follow, as if we could trust it. Or find ourselves suddenly having those other, unimaginative, feet that make the way, as it is for Madge in the story once she comes to herself, “steeper than she had thought.”
“Madge found”—but it is something the poet found too—“that it’s better never to stop and think in the middle of a path that goes up the side of a hill or down the side of a hill like a snail-track on a house wall.”
For where our feet are on the ground, how unreal it seems that heads are in the clouds.
The other, as early as the alphabet animal I-is-for-Ibex, was there in the nursery. The figure of an Ibis, of the Ibis-headed wisdom. Not on my building block, but on the page in my grandmother’s book. It was an emblem of my parent’s world. There was then in the beginning the sense that this bird brought with it, him, a reminder of how I did not understand what was going on around me. In the adult world there were always hermetic, sealed, meanings. Beyond my ken. The marsh or river bird, with its long stalk-legs and its fantastic long curved beak, was holy, was adult, was a word in a language we would not read, hieroglyph.
Was there, in old Mrs. Rogers’s anteroom, in the room of the Elder Brother as they called her, or Teacher, where I waited while my mother went thru to the other room . . . was there a stuffed ibis? or heron? Or a screen with an ibis—no—a heron on it?
“Now Madame Beaupère said hérisson, which is the French and the Swiss-French for hedgehog. Madge, who understood most anybody’s French, somehow for the moment couldn’t remember just what was a hérisson. Some kind of heron, perhaps, she thought.”
It was a screen. The shadowy little scene has stayed with me since I was six or seven, because I was guilty of something that I can’t recall clearly. I looked behind the screen and saw—was it a wash-basin and pitcher on a table, a lavatory? the laver and kettle of Van Eyck’s altarpiece at Ghent? I thought later I had seen a chamber-pot, and that this was what was unmentionable. One didn’t mention going to the bathroom, I had been taught.
The door to the inner chamber had a double or triple bead curtain which obscured the opening. When they had meetings, I think my mother explained, this was the Veil of Isis. “Iris; I don’t really think of iris here,” Helen Fairwood says in “Secret Name”: “It’s so essentially a Greek flower. But Isis, it’s almost the same thing.” However, it was really of the birds she thoug
ht.
In Cocteau’s Orpheus the poet and his angel Heurtebise and his death go thru a mirror as if thru water. Into glory and terror. When Orpheus is returned to life, separated from his angel and his death, he is, in the movie, an ordinary man writing poetry, a facteur of literature. The other, the beyond, has left him. “Let him return to his mire,” Heurtebise says.
These others—my parents, my grandmother, and the Elder Brother, old Mrs. Rogers, were not poets. They were—what everybody laughs at California for breeding—middle-class occultists. Grief in the loss of her first two children had brought my grandmother to the spiritualists’ tables of the seventies. In the twenties of our century, forty years later, passions, wishes, thoughtfulness, vanity, wisdom, hopes and despairs in my family were colored in terms of this despised way—in terms of reincarnation, astrology, and initiation. It was a muddling of an other world and this world, the mirror, and the mire.
Their master was the magnetic old lady who lived in this stuffy little apartment that they called—no, I don’t know that, but I suspect—that just this little suite of rooms, this plan of inner chamber and outer chamber, was also the temple of that god Thoth, the Ibis-headed man, of Osiris and Isis. I was in the waiting room.
As I write now, I am in the waiting room again. I do not see any more than my eyes saw. My eyes have seen the veil, the double or triple moving depths of bead curtain, that in my work may still be my fascination with the movement of meaning beyond or behind meaning, of shifting vowels and consonants—beads of sound, of separate strands that convey the feeling of one weave. Of words games then. Of Ibex, Ibis, Isis.
In Charles Olson’s warning to me in 1954, Against Wisdom as Such, he writes: “I wanted even to say that San Francisco seems to have become an école des Sages ou Mages as ominous as Ojai, L.A.”
There is something about looking behind things. There is the fact that I am not an occultist or a mystic but a poet, a maker-up-of things.
Chapter 3
[MARCH 12, Sunday. 1961.]
It is time now for the projected configuration, the visual projection of The War Trilogy. Not only the images of the poem arise from vision but the formal concept relates primarily to illumination, painting, or tapestry, in contrast, for instance, with the musical concept of Eliot’s Four Quartets or Pound’s Cantos. Music enters in—the “O, What I meant / by music when I said music” of Tribute to the Angels XXII comes as a poignant yearning:
music sets up ladders,
it makes us invisible,
it sets us apart,
it lets us escape;
“but from the visible,” she continues: “there is no escape.” What is seen and in the poem the matter is always the seen, is what cannot be escaped, the ground of responsibility. For H.D. the eye in seeing is involved:
but from the visible
there is no escape;
there is no escape from the spear
that pierces the heart.
Vision itself may be the spear; the eye being struck, the necessary vulnerable spot, where reality can get at the hero-poet. Yet this reality in what is seen is just that web of appearance that we also mistrust as the phantasmal, the Celtic glamour or faerie. H.D.’s intensity of image arises in her stricture of the eye to see in the clear, to penetrate the elf-skin or shimmer of excited vision and to locate the object. She holds a limit in poetry against the riot of the imagination, for she seeks a conscious recognition of what is going on. The very tenseness of her line is an attention that functions to hold back from the potency poetry has to produce its own luxe of the unreal, the world seen thru a glass darkly, the shadow of the dome of pleasure, the strange thunders from the potency of song, and the magic casements that open upon fairy seas. This reverie or “escape” in ascent or descent beyond the scale of the consciously analyzed is the medium of what she calls music that she resists. Dream and day-dream are a source of image, as ecstatic states in her waking life are a source, but in the poem she does not dream or day-dream but strives to render an exact account of what she has seen.
In the first panel, The Walls Do Not Fall, there is the war, the City (London) drawn under the rain or reign of fire, that in late Medieval Christian painting would have been Sodom and Gomorrah. In classical history, it is “Pompeii has nothing to teach us.” In my family’s theosophical fantasy this City in its last days was Atlantis:
over us, Apocryphal fire,
under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor,
slope of a pavement . . .
The ruins, the pressure, the fire, where:
the bone-frame was made for
no such shock knit within terror,
yet the skeleton stood up to it:
revivifies the image she had known twenty years before of that burnt-out triangle of iron: the inner psychic state finds its fulfillment in the conditions of the bombardment. Reality for H.D. is an identity between the self and the event.
The tapestry itself weaves the theme of the City under fire to haunt all other areas of the poem. It is not only a figure but a thread. In the foreground are woven, recalling the ground of flowers and small animals of Medieval tapestry, the first forms of our life, shell-fish, worm on the leaf, serpent. In verse XXXVIII the analogy with tapestry is openly drawn in answer to the counter questioning of her own thought. The antagonist of the poem argues:
This search for historical parallels,
research into psychic affinities,
has been done to death before,
will be done again;
and the protagonist of the poem defines clearly that search and research, parallels and affinities here are not operations toward a philosophy but operations of a fabrication, open possibilities of design. History, psyche, biology, the physics of the universe are elements of the artist’s creation. The poet and her reader, the animal and plant worlds, the stars and events are revealed in a fabric the poem weaves.
my mind (yours),
your way of thought (mine),
each has its peculiar intricate map,
threads weave over and under
the jungle-growth
of biological aptitudes,
inherited tendencies,
This sense of the interrelation of figures, each particular “map” having its “inherited tendencies” and in turn its “aptitudes,” is on the one hand a sense of life in terms of correspondences and evolutions of form, Darwinian and ecological; on the other hand the artist’s sense of the work itself in which each part derives from and is source of the design of the whole.
Randall Jarrell is snide and means to dismiss H.D.’s work from serious consideration when in Partisan Review he comments glibly: “H.D. is History, and misunderstands a later stage of herself so spectacularly that her poem exists primarily as an anachronism.” Yet the statement “H.D. is History” is curiously right; for she takes her identity in her vision of history.
I make all things new.
I John saw. I testify,
So, in Tribute to the Angels she reminds us of another text where John at Patmos “misunderstands” a stage of history—for it is a puzzle of the Christian apocalypse that it mistakes history in order to create a history that had not been there before. So too, Bosch, seeing the conflict of rising nations and warring churches in the light of his Adamite heresy as an Armageddon, misunderstands the “history” of his times. But to speak of misunderstanding thus is to misunderstand History itself, for historians, no less than artists, are creative and make all their things new. Gibbon and Spengler have their fire in their “misunderstanding.” Thoth, Mercury, is patron of thought itself, mercurial where it informs.
•
“To show how the worm turns” means something mercurial about the psyche, about the worm turning into its butterfly; means too something hermetic about the evolution of the psyche—the worm or dragon, the old serpent, that turns to betray us in ourselves. Following the tradition of the tapestry, the worm on the leaf is just such a detail of the flowering ground
as we have seen in medieval work; and turns or leads into other figures of the scene:
Gods, goddesses
wear the winged head-dress
or horns, as the butterfly
antennae
to reappear in “the erect king-cobra crest,” the uraeus of the god-crown of Egypt.
•
From The Book of the Dead I find: “Understanding said of him, ‘He is like that which he creates’.”
March 12, Sunday
In The Walls Do Not Fall, the quick-changing mercurial and the conspiring hermetic appear in the experience of the War itself.
We have seen how the most amiable,
under physical stress,
become wolves, jackals,
mongrel curs;
“Let us, therefore,” H.D. turns: “entreat Hest”
in her attribute of Serqet,
the original great-mother,
who drove
harnessed scorpions
before her.
I.
In the background—a scene resembling the City under Fire in Lot’s Daughters, a painting attributed to Lucas of Leyden, reproduced in Verve, January–March 1939. For H.D., it is not a City of the Plain but does recall Pompeii, Nineveh, and Babel. In Tribute to the Angels, in the central panel, it is compared to Rome, Jerusalem, Thebes. Above, there is the night sky with stars—Sirius, Vega, Arcturus; the constellations—Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Waterman, Aries—“the wandering stars” and “the lordly fixed ones.” Over the world-city, over actual London, the skies open up and pour out their flames. It is the old wrath of god; it is the actual new incendiary attack. Fallen walls and blackened dwellings stand out, silhouetted in the raging light.
So, when in the poem, the poet says:
O, do not look up
into the air,
The H.D. Book Page 31