The H.D. Book
Page 50
II.
I had gleaned from some reference to a dictionary that the word verse, our verse in poetry, like our prose in poetry, was backwards and forwards, as a man ploughing goes along one line and returns. Prose, forward in the row or line; then “turning to begin another line” (as now I find in the O.E.D.) versus.
As men plough forward and back, did they once write, turning
?enil eht fo dne eht ta
But in verse now, we return to begin another line. We do not reach the end or margin.
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It is a fanciful etymology. To demonstrate that, once words cease to be conventional, customary or taken-for-granted in their meaning, all things begin to move, are set into motion. In the figure of ploughing, we see that prose and verse are two necessary movements in the one operation of writing. That here what we call the ploughing of the field we also call poetry or our own operation in language. Writing that knows in every phase what it is doing.
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Forward and back, prose and verse, the shuttle flies in the loom.
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“It means against too,” Spicer noted in the margin of an article I had written on Ideas of Form, and he asked me to look the word up in the O.E.D. There was pro and versus. My polemics. Lines of a poem “employed in Law to denote an action by one party against another.”
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There is from vertere to turn, version: “a rendering of some text or work, or of a single word, passage, etc., from one language into another”; and too, “the particular form of a statement, account, report given by one person.”
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aversion
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There is the verso or “the side presented to the eye when the leaf has been turned over.” The other side of the fabric, where the colors are more vivid for not having been brought to light. The underside of the weaving.
There is the verso, the world beneath the stone, the underworld. Where not only mystery but misery hides. Where not only occult wonder but obscene infection swarms. Life revealed when the stone is turned over, reversed.
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For wasn’t there, as Freud found, dug out, exposed: anal and oral phantasy—shit and devouring demons everywhere. The witch in the wisewoman?
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There is in the operation Freud describes as the screen image a standing of one thing in the place of another. “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess,” he writes in “Screen Memories” (1899). The fabric of history, of memory, then, must be continually woven in order to exist because it is not the fabric of the past but the fabric of the present that we weave.
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We find meanings and significances to make up the Presence in which we, I, are, am.
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“Out of a number of childhood memories,” Freud had pointed out, “there will be some scenes which, when they are tested (for instance by the recollections of adults), turn out to have been falsified.” Fabricated or forged, made-up, worked, to be a scene at all means that facts have been taken over by the restless human creativity. In the terms William James gives of a plurality of reals, we read: “there will be some scenes which turn out to have only a personal, not a conventional, reality.”
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Then, describing this operation—it is the operation of our weaving, the classical operation or pretension of the magician, Freud observes: “They are false in the scene [sense?] that they have shifted an event to a place where it did not occur . . . or that they have merged two people into one or substituted one for another, or the scenes as a whole give signs of being combinations of two separate experiences.”
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As in the charade which the poets and lovers play in War-Time London, the loss of Paradise is brought into the loss of the pre-War world, and in their impersonations the personalities of Lawrence and H.D. become linked to the archaic personae of Jehovah and the Forbidden Tree.
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“She had the same feeling,” H.D. writes in Bid Me to Live, “that she had had in Capri, her word would call any Spirit to her, but she must be careful how she spoke. How she thought, even. It would be tempting something, luring something too poignantly near.”
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Screen-images or screen memories Freud calls them, these things too poignantly near. Figures of the veil, we have called them. The heart figured to clothe the heart. He speaks in that essay of “the high degree of sensory intensity shown by the pictures and the efficacy of the function of memory in the young.” I have suggested that we are not only creators, but, if and where we are creators, we are creatures of the veil we weave, children out of the whole cloth, charged with the intensity of the transforming work itself.
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Then Freud warns: “these falsifications of memory are tendentious, that is, they serve the purpose of the repression and replacement of objectionable or disagreeable impressions.” But he goes further to question whether we have any memories at all from childhood. He almost raises this picture of everywhere objectionable or disagreeable realities giving rise to the what we are in what is, creatures of our own transformation of what we could not satisfy in life, satisfying realities disappearing into their satisfactions.
“In these periods of revival,” Freud continues, “the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time.”
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What we are involved in now, after the brooding thought, the penetrating analysis, the pervasive suggestion of Freud, is that our recognitions must go two ways. Though, after Freud, enthusiasts have tended to see the underside as the true and the overt statement as a cover, we would see both as present terms of the weave of truth.
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As what sent me off along this line of prose, verse; versus; version, aversion, verso, was that bit out of Vaughan’s Anthroposophia Theomagica:
This fire is the vestment of the Divine Majesty, His back-parts which He shewed to Moses; but His naked, royal essence none can see and live. The glory of His presence would swallow up that natural man and make him altogether spiritual. Thus Moses his face—after conference with Him—shines, and from this small tincture we may guess at our future estate in the regeneration.
“But I have touched the veil,” Vaughan continues, “and must return to the outer court of the Sanctuary.”
“The trembling of the veil of the Temple,” Yeats had called the generation of Mallarmé. Between the high-mindedness and the low thought-forms a Void—but it was also a Maelstrom—trembled, shimmered, began to cast forth its old fascination. What is on my mind is that Yeats too, like Freud, poetics as well as psychology, was drawn to find out hidden content, working to bring us into a new consciousness in magic, away from the abstract and absolute, towards the coordination of above and below.
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street . . .
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There was a time of the trembling; then a time of the forcing of overt images. We now have our sanctuary only within the open secret in which the tissue of life reverses and restores the face, as Waite in a footnote to Vaughan quotes the Vulgate: ignis involens.
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We no sooner saw the backside that God showed Moses, because the Glory, the face, was forbidden, was too much, than we saw the sexual figure with which this image was charged, the other back-side that Freud forced us to admit existed in our thought.
As Satan, the Goat of Mendes, presented in parody, in a charade of the verso, his ass-hole to be kissed by the devout. Where, too, the face of the devotee “shines and from this small tincture. . . . ” When Madame Blavatsky tells us that Isis has revealed to her “the secret meaning of her long-lost secrets,” in the context of a garment that becomes more transparent, the sexual reference of the word contends to take over the te
nor of the statement.
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H.D.’s allegiance, like Freud’s, belongs to the high mind. Pound, we remember, called her, long long ago, “that refined charming, and utterly narrow minded she-bard ‘H.D.’ ” and yet, had wanted her to keep the “few but perfect” position in poetry. But in Ion, in her apostrophe to Athene, H.D. addresses “this emanation of pure-spirit” with a new sense of what high-mindedness might mean. Reading the passage again, in the context of the Hermetic “above and below” (the “As above, so below” of the Smaragdine tablet) and also of the Freudian idea of displacement above and below, we see that the above must work in the below and the below in the above, there must be a circuit for thought to be creative, for desire to be intelligent: “This most beautiful abstraction [the Athene] pleads for the great force of the undermind . . . that so often, on the point of blazing upwards into the glory of inspirational creative thought, flares, by a sudden law of compensation, down, making for tragedy, disharmony, disruption, disintegration.” In our task, we must have “the desire actually to follow all those hidden subterranean forces,” if we would come to the reward of thought. “ ‘You flee no enemy in me, but one friendly to you,’ says the intellect, standing full armed. . . . ”
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High mind must labor—Williams in Paterson calls up the figure of Madame Curie working the pitchblende—in obscure matter. But just where the mind disavows its sexual motivation or where the genital organ disavows its mental imagination, a contention begins in man’s nature. What a dark filthy fabric of lies and richness the political figures of our day seem to weave towards their precipitation of “tragedy, disharmony, disruption, disintegration”—as if driven by necessity—the old Judeo-Christian dream of a War to end the trials of Creation in a holocaust of fire. What does it mean? In 1935 and 1936, as Jung began to first publish his studies of Alchemy, that matter of the Second World War was gathering in men’s minds everywhere. These falsifications of memory were tendentious. Possessed by the thought of the enemy, in fear and anger, men turned their high minds to the invention of the nuclear explosion in matter, to the cultivation of last diseases, to research in gasses that would cripple the minds of whole populations.
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In Alchemy, so too in psychoanalysis, the work depended upon some equivalence or ambivalence between the gold (the Good, the life, the essential) and the shit (the waste, the contamination—but it was also that which was returned to the life or richness of the soil). The Tree had been of Good and Evil, but in the contention of Man’s knowledge it had appeared as the Tree of Good contending against Evil, a universe in agony. For the Christian convert Augustine the very curiosity to know at all could appear as adversary to faith, as the primary evil.
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It was the work of Freud in psychology to follow an adverse curiosity, to bring to light just those references that had in the old religion or magic been sacred-taboo, hidden in order to be revealed, set aside, filled with awe / awful. Privates or secrets: penis, testicles, vagina, labia, clitoris, intercourse—words hidden in their latin propriety, proper in their place. In the doctor’s inner offices, in the medical report or in the criminal courts, the words might appear as symptoms or charges: sodomy, unnatural relations, perversions—acts that had once been communal in ritual or initiation. Driven, out of mind, out of the community of men, as the old gods went. In bad taste. Or, in bad smell, bad repute. Virtu, that Olson suggested to me once must have meant man-smell. “That smells,” we say of some work of art that offends our taste.
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Freud is a hero in a work that had begun to bring up out of the festering darkness (out of the darkened backrooms, the atmosphere of evil thought and shamed confession, in which the decadents of the nineties found their vices; out of the misery and suffering in which the realists found their doctrine of sexual bondage) into the light of day the vanished goods. The rich store underground was to be restored in the sight of man and god.
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In the Judeo-Christian mythos, as in the Orphic tradition, God—Jahweh or Phanes—is Maker or Poet of a universe that as a work of His art, is good. Day by day of creation the “and God saw that it was good” is reiterated, the sublime assurance of the artist. But in the Christian myth, Lucifer, light-bearer of the high mind, is adversely critical of What Is and declares matter itself to be bad, the breeding of animal life vile and the image of Man distasteful. Shame in their nakedness is one of the first illuminations knowledge brings to Adam and Eve. Lucifer becomes the Enemy as he becomes the Critic, and in the Below, which now is a Hell where criticized or condemned men are in pain, he appears as Sathanas, the Adversary.
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But in the work itself, the Creation as a work of art, Lucifer-Satan and Jahweh too, the author, are parts. The reader who is concerned with the structure, with form and content, will exclaim “it is good” at the appropriateness of even adversity in light of the composition. But now, as we begin to see this mythos as having just the truth of its composition, the truth of any story, it itself becomes a part of our own story in which we may try to restore the whole of experience or, rather, within that whole, to bring back the sexuality of man into his common goods.
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The work was in Joyce’s interior monologue, where Bloom’s thought works back and forth between the vision of the nymph Gerty MacDowell where “all melted away dewily in the grey air” and the versions of sexual excitement, the screen weavings of “Licking pennies,” “that’s the Moon,” “Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom.” to romantic phantasies “Dare say she felt I. When you feel like that you often meet what you feel . . . ” announcing the sexual urgency: “Well cocks and lions do the same and stags.” He is avoiding, his conscious mind is playing over, or above, a below, where “lions do the same.” Bloom discharges his excitement. “Mr. Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil.”
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The mutoscope pictures are “for men only,” but Ulysses itself in the installments of The Little Review took its place immediately in the high mind, and broke down in its directness the double standard that had divided what was proper for men to think of from what was proper for women to hear. When Virginia Woolf speaks of Ulysses as “an illiterate underbred book . . . egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating,” it is she not the book that fails. The bare, simple words—the sexual words that belong to an inner poetry—begin to appear with the poetic ramblings of Molly Bloom: cunt, cock, fuck, “Let out a few smutty words,” Molly Bloom says. But they were let out of their smut into the light of day, having their place with the other nouns of Molly’s soliloquy: “that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colors springing up even out of ditches. . . . ”
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Then in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover Mellors must talk the speech of the lower orders too but these lower orders are the country-folk, the dialect of pagany then. “A woman’s a lovely thing when ’er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good,” Mellors says echoing the words of the Creator.
It was there, in those pages of a novel, between Mellors and Connie, made up out of some other thing between Lawrence and Frieda that had or hadn’t happened. For us, that Mellors and Connie, after arguing and accounting for the tribal lore of sex, as they do; after setting things to rights; make love, and that Lawrence has words for it, is—like the other sexual revelation of Freud’s and like Molly Bloom’s sexual reveries—a breakthru, a release of withheld words into the common language, a release then of withheld feelings into the possible grace of common understanding.
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There’s “a woman’s a lovely thing” and “cunt’s good” given as threads of the loom, as themes of working good.
And just this earnest, ardent thing in Lawrence, this assertion and affirmation in the words “lovely” and “good” has called forth, calls forth, the smut-hounds and censo
rs who believe that women and cunt are evils, powers over them, and the smirking sophisticates who believe women and cunt are commodities. “Don’t you think all that stuff is old hat?” an informant for Time magazine asked me when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was going to be republished. “How dated the novel is!”
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As, in its way, Sally Rand was dated and showed up something in me. Mellors and Connie are in a strip-tease for some readers. Mis à nu in order to find naked reverences, the old reverences of the earth, Elysium, they are naked, exposed not only to the love of some readers in those pages but naked to the ridicule of others.
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“He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o’clock. It was Monday morning.” We too are reminded of the industrial practical realities of men’s lives, of the living that must be worked for. This is the reality James described as utilitarian. Beyond ideal relations, sensual immediacies, imagination and the supernatural, this distant hooting is from a world where reality is fitted to men’s uses and productions, the reality of up-to-date. How silly, once we are aware that what we are reading is in the light of other men’s opinions, Lawrence’s nakedness appears. The hooting is in the background. It is the factory whistle. The conclusions of reasonable men are bearing in upon the scene.
“He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen him.”
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In Tribute to the Angels H.D. invokes (against the hooters?) by the sound of bells and by the sign of candle, guardian angels to stand with the old daemons or demons.
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H.D. in her work does not bring the anglo-saxon words, banned by genteel proprieties, into use. In her generation, heirs of the suffragette fight for equal rights, women began to claim an equal share in the right to consciousness, including sexual consciousness. “Bearing in mind that all men conceal the truth in these matters,” Freud in 1905 writes of his initial enquiries into the sexual disturbances that underlay neurotic disorders. With Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1920s and then, in 1937, Pound’s Canto XXXIX, where in Circe’s ingle: