He is Mage,
bringing myrrh.
The “stone-marvel” of the sea-shell, the “egg-shell,” are little alabaster jars. Stars, too, are “little jars of that indisputable / and absolute Healer, Apothecary,” and contain something; as words and then poems are containers, where meaning and presence are myrrh and the odor of myrrh.
•
O heart, small urn
of porphyry, agate or cornelian,
how imperceptibly the grain fell
between a heart-beat of pleasure
and a heart-beat of pain;
I do not know how it came.
As in Kaspar’s vision of the unfolding of the seed or pearl as a nucleus of light in the world is contained and revealed: “no one will ever know / whether the picture he saw clearly / as in a mirror was predetermined” or “no one will ever know how it happened / that in a second or a second and half a second” there is a gnosis beyond knowing. “Of the order of magnitude of a second, or even of fractions of a second,” Whitehead says. “I could not really tell,” Harvey testifies. “A small molecule,” Schrödinger tells us, “might be called ‘the germ of a solid’.”
•
It is not abstract, a separate mental conception, apart from the material instance; but ineffable, elusive to definition. “The sense of having lived,” Henry James writes in his Preface to The Wings of the Dove, trying to recapture the germ of that work—the idea of Milly Theale desiring “to achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived.”
•
So, “the hidden seed, the myrrh or meaning, the heart’s rapture” may also be such a sense of having lived, for it is to live that I find myself returning to the poem.
•
As it was the title What Is Life? that drew me to Schrödinger’s work, and the sense of life, the excitement or immediacy in the writing of Schrödinger that leads me on to read. To bring forward into fullness of consciousness and involvement “the sense of having lived.” That must then spring from the immediate presence of one’s having lived in the only area the sense of anything can take place or time in—in the present intuition. The writer’s having lived in the writing the reader in turn lives in.
“The image so figured would be, at best, but half the matter,” James writes: “the rest would be all the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious experience somehow compassed.”
•
The image and the tissue of the image, the weaving and the woven tapestry, contain something, the sense of having lived, so that where we respond to books or to works of art intensely we think of them as living, we have the sense of having lived in the world of our reading. In Tribute to the Angels, the Lady, Mother of God, appears to H.D. bearing not the Christ but a book, as if Life or Love were also Poem or Work of Art—“her book is our book; written,” H.D. confides in xxxix:
or unwritten, its pages will reveal
a tale of a Fisherman,
a tale of a jar or jars,
•
“I have trouble following,” my friend Thomas Parkinson had noted in reading the first draft of the Day Book at this transition from James’s evocation of the picture or image, the adventure, the gain or loss, and the precious experience somehow compassed, to H.D.’s “her book is our book.” The passage from James had come abruptly to my mind as I wrote, and I, following, also had trouble. Certainly, the intensity of James’s living in the writing itself, life in turn the germ of the book, comes near to the sense I have of H.D.’s cult within the poem. Now, going back to the passages in which the Lady appears, from the xxiv with its beginning lines I have quoted more than once in this work: “Every hour, every moment / has its specific attendant Spirit” thru xli with its return of the Angels as bells tolling the Hour—“our purpose, a tribute to the Angels,” the lines leap up from xxxvi: “she brings the Book of Life, obviously.”
•
This is the religion of the Book. The People of the Book, so Islam denoted the Jews, Christians, and themselves. And we who take our lives in the afterlife of Christendom in writing and in reading must come across hints of the Word as we follow the word and of the Presence as we find a book lively. The Lady in Tribute to the Angels may be the Mother of the Word—the writer herself:
She carried a book, either to imply
she was one of us, with us,
or she may have been the Bride of the Word, the reader:
or to suggest she was satisfied
with our purpose, a tribute to the Angels;
At the close of the work itself, in The Flowering of the Rod, we see Her again, here Kaspar brings forward the jar in which the old lore or sacred orthodox but esoteric story has been stored. But the bearer of the gift has met a woman along the way, the myrrh has become mixed perhaps, the story even as the woman tells it passes into another lore belonging to the world of Woman, the Mara of bitter experience to become “Mary-myrrh.” Receiving the gift for the Child, the Mother may be the Muse receiving the poem on behalf of the Poem or Poetry. “Sir, it is a most beautiful fragrance, / as of all flowering things together.” As, we realize, in the presentation of the poem itself H.D. as bearer of the content of the poem is like Kaspar for she is not sure the content has not been “changed,” mixed, and yet she comes to know the gift—for the poem comes as a gift to the poet writing—is one of having lived in the pleasure of “a most beautiful fragrance,” the music of the poem.
•
The ambivalence of the heart (“facing two ways”), the secretiveness of the heart, these are to be brought before the Christ Child; He Himself a sealed jar, yet a-jar somehow, for the essence escapes everywhere—mercurial, hermetic. He had been declared King, heir of the Fathers, even as the myrrh had been the secret or secretion of the Fathers, yet the suspicion lingers that another intention, a Woman’s, has interfered.
The hardness of the heart is brought before the Child in the gift, for it is contained in the “small urn” of alabaster. As in “Narthex” almost two decades earlier, where H.D.’s seeing-in-depth first appears, she must bring the burnt-out triangle of painful experience into the hieroglyph of Solomon’s seal, a woman’s message worked into the sign of the Mage, so here, the odor of a woman’s bitterness, of brine, “a Siren-song” is brought into the myrrh: “in recognition,” she tells us in The Flowering of the Rod, xx, it might be “of an old burnt-out / yet somehow suddenly renewed infatuation . . . ” Alabaster and salt of the sea had been terms of her first poems.
But then, as if love everywhere, even bitter love, burnt-out and lost love, were Love, it is not from the jar, whatever became of its myrrh, but from the Jar, the heart of the matter:
the fragrance came from the bundle of myrrh
she held in her arms.
“I am the Way,” this God had said. And the way as we write may be the Christ; its music, the fragrance. “I am the Life,” the sense of having lived, of its living, the closeness to essential Life in which our recognition of any work of art is involved may be our sense of its Mastery. He is the book she carries as she appears to the poet, and in the close of the book the poet writes, as at the close of The War Trilogy, He appears as the Child. “The Kingdom is within,” He also said, where the Way, Word, Life, Master, World are one, in the Heart.
Chapter 5
MARCH 14, Tuesday. 1961 (1963)
1.
Without thought, invention
you would not have been, O Sword.
“Rails gone (for guns),” the poem begins, with the officers of the State, in the name of the War Effort, taking over all the conditions of personal reality into their own use, “from your (and my) old town square.” With the declaration of war in the modern state, which claims to represent the authority of the people, the means and ends of the war become the ultimate reality (as in the interim between wars, which we call “Peace,” to face reality means to accept and work with the terms of the dominant mer
cantile capitalistic and usurious system). The critical contempt that met H.D.’s War Trilogy was in part the contempt of the Protestant ethic for womanish ways, and back of that the old war between the Father and his hero-sons and the heathen realm of the Mothers, anticipated by H.D. in the “they snatched off our amulets, / charms are not, they said, grace” theme introduced in The Walls Do Not Fall, ii. But there was also the contempt of those concerned with the War Effort for H.D.’s sense that ultimately the War was to be subject to Writing itself as a higher prime of reality. To bring up the old gods of Egypt, already proved false and declared out-of-bounds by the historical victory of the Bible, was anachronistic in the face of the air attacks on London. The critics of the day—Dudley Fitts and Randall Jarrell—found her concept of history silly, if not dangerous, an offense to any common sense. The “still the Luxor bee, chick and hare / pursue unalterable purpose” and the “eternity endures” of the opening passage of the poem was the declaration of a personal real equal in its terms to the real terms of the war, i.e., political and national contentions, and H.D. had known from her experience of the pillory undergone by the Lawrences and other friends in the First World War that the cost of such a declaration was to suffer an all but overwhelming rejection. Here too the criticism is anticipated in the poem, where, in xxxi, the main statement of the voices of the adversary begins, accusing the poet of “intrusion of strained / inappropriate allusion, / illusion of lost-gods, daemons; / gambler with eternity . . . ”
Robert Lowell’s Land of Unlikeness, published the same year as The Walls Do Not Fall, with its “Tonight the venery of capital / Hangs the bare Christ-child on a tree of gold,” was acceptable, for it recognized the victory of the industrial order over Christendom as ultimately real; Lowell held no unreal confidence in a higher reality of Christ. He was appropriately despairing in his opposition to the facts of the war. He acknowledged what Tate calls in his introduction to Lowell’s first book “the disappearance of the Christian experience from the modern world.” The young poet in despairing anger refers to Christ thruout with the realistic recognition that He is a lost cause or an absent spirit, like a Hamlet crying “Looke heere upon this Picture, and on this.” “The ghost of risen Jesus,” “my carrion king, Jesus,” “the Hanging Jesus”—the Jesus that history crucifies haunts his mind. At one time only, in “Cistercians in Germany,” does the ahistorical, anachronistic, or eternal image of Christ appear: “To Bernard gathering his canticle of flowers, / His soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers, / And all his body one extatic womb, / And through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom.” The poet is upon the verge of an epiphany, but he remains intellectually discrete and clearly takes this near appearance of Christ not as an Image but as a description of Bernard’s scene. Perhaps upon later consideration Lowell felt even this spiritual pretension false; he does not include it in the canon of Lord Weary’s Castle.
In contrast, H.D.’s insistence upon the Living Christ, her sense that not only the Christian experience but the Greek and even the Egyptian experiences have not disappeared from the modern world but gather immediate to our own experience, does not recognize what the consensus of opinion of reasonable men has determined is the true nature of history. For all of human history appears to H.D. as if it were a Creation or fiction of reality, involving wish as well as world in its works—and here, the war as much as the writing is wish, but the writing triumphs, for it most approximates the total configuration. It is the “unalterable purpose” of the poem to convert the War to its own uses; the bombings of London are read as signs in the Poem Effort which claims priority over the War Effort. “Eternity endures” means not only that the eternal themes of the poem, the images—the cartouche or the sword—last beyond the war, but that they, like the poet, endure, as one endures the insolence of those who cannot understand, the War’s usurpation of human life from its most real purposes. There is the sense too that—as in the Gospel of Saint Luke, Jesus’ “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” or His “He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event” in The Acts of Saint John—the War is not to be taken for granted as simply an economic or political opportunity or as a disorder, but it is also a Mystery play or dream projection to be witnessed and interpreted, to be endured in order to be understood. The War rises from the dramatic necessity and informs: “Pompeii has nothing to teach us, / we know crack of volcanic fissure,” H.D. testifies. So, there were gnostics who taught that the human soul must come to know the depths of hell and sin as well as the heights of heaven and the good before it completes its human self or experience. In Freudian terms, the War is a manifestation of the latent content of the civilization and its discontents, a projection of the collective unconscious. “And beyond thought and idea,” H.D. continues: “their begetter . . . ”
Dream,
Vision.
•
“The total world of which the philosophers must take account,” William James writes in his Principles of Psychology in 1890, “is thus composed of the realities plus the fancies and illusions.” What we must deal with in such a totality of the human experience demands in poetry, as James saw it demanded in philosophy, a new structure of thought and imagination. “For there are various categories both of illusion and of reality, and alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to single individuals) but still within the world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by the complete philosopher) there is the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the supernatural world.”
•
It is “the total world which is” that concerns James; and in his sense that What Is is multifarious, in his insistence upon the many strands we must come to see before consciousness have something like the fullness demanded by What Is, James is kin to Emerson before him and to Dewey and Whitehead after. The quest he projects is not only that of the philosopher who would approach the nature of human experience in its complexity but also that of the poet who seeks a poetics adequate to convey various levels of feeling and thought toward the complete. Whitman’s “Self,” expanded to include the variety of human existence, is such a concept. The at-homeness in many persons, times, and places, that characterizes The Cantos, The War Trilogy, or Paterson, represents the tendency to think of completeness in terms of the variety of human life, even of life itself, beyond the less-than-total individual sub-world: “to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which is.”
•
In the world of the imagination, of fiction and fable—the world of creation—James includes “the various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology” with “the world of the Iliad, that of King Lear, of the Pickwick Papers.”
•
Money and war are also fictional entities, for men believe in them, as they believe in elves and gods, to make real their lives. Swords, spades, hearts, diamonds, and the drawings upon the walls, poems keeping their time, too, are conditions of the real, of What Is, man-made. All makers are at work between thought and the actual, feeling their way. It is what we call Poetry of The Making that articulates the feeling in language—the wish manifest in the image, Sword or new Master over Love—toward the fullness of experience. We see our Way and create our Thing in the world about us as desire illumines. “The ‘larger universe,’ here,” James writes, “which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Supernatural.”
•
Conventional poetics, which belongs to the Age of Reason that sought to reduce even religion to a consensus of the opinion of reasonable men, had reduced the frame of mind to exclude the supernatural from individual experience, to rationalize genius and make a metaphor of inspiration, to confine reality to what, as Dryden has it in his Preface to All For Love, “all reasonable men have long sin
ce concluded.” In philosophy, in poetics, in science, and in politics, men strove to make and to hold a world of sense, practical knowledge, ideal relations, logical conclusions, around which what Freud calls the Super-Ego, grown enormous, built its authority, against an enemy world of the irrational—fearful, to be avoided or rendered harmless—the world of fictions (romance, supernatural, vision, and dream), of “sheer madness and vagary.” Howling hairy madmen and shrieking desolate virgins appeared in the imaginations of Fuseli, Blake, Goya, Hoffman, Potocki, the Marquis de Sade.
•
James’s world of fictions is the real of the creative imagination. It is in the work of realizing, composing or bringing into cooperation the various worlds of senses, sciences, fictions, opinions, ideals, ideas, and “sheer madness and vagary,” held as one creation or poetics, that the artist develops the imagination “to charge with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
•
To recognize madness as a term of the real extends our life in What Is. This is the revelation of Goya’s Caprichos or of Gérard de Nerval’s Chimeras, that what otherwise had been isolated obsession and hallucination is brought into the communal imagination to become mystery and mystic vision. As, again, in the ritual of the Christian Mass, “madness and vagary” have been brought over into the order of the communal reality—a play enacted in which the body of Christ is eaten and His blood drunk, that must be held by the communicant as a mystery, an idea, but also an actual happening within a world of its own; that must also be not a play but a greater reality. The power of the Mass, its numinous force, its real, is that of a fiction where ideal and madness become contrasting elements of one structure. Conflicting elements, love and devouring cannibalistic hunger, are sublimated or condensed, held in a third element of devotion, the intensity of the created feeling arising from the incorporate disturbance.
The H.D. Book Page 39