The H.D. Book
Page 53
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In the “suddenly we saw your name / desecrated” passage of Tribute to the Angels xi-xii in an alchemical alembic of the poem a flame burns between the star Venus and venery or “desire is venereous” to sublimate the name until the word “to venerate, / venerator” is restored. But following the word “venereous” the name passes thru the blackness of its contradiction:
while the very root of the word shrieks
like a mandrake when foul witches pull
its stem at midnight,
and rare mandragora itself
is full, they say, of poison,
food for the witches’ den.
The poet may have meant to rescue the name Venus from its desecrations—“knaves and fools / have done you impious wrong,” she protests; but in the actual operation of the poem not only is the name brought to its sublimation but it has been brought thru its nigredo. We are meant to remember the lurid scene of witches’ sex magic in which the root of the word (Venus) appears as a phallic mandrake full of seminal poison—an image from the underworld of the mind, the more potent because we may remember now also from Hesiod’s account of the origin of Aphrodite that she grew from the white foam of the penis of Ouranos which Chronos had cut off and cast in the sea, and that men called her Philomedes “member-loving” “because she sprang from the members.”
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The important thing here is not only the sublimation but the accumulation of experience in that sublimation, the union of opposites, yes, but also the having passed thru the dialectic of these opposites. Here again we are in the tradition of the Gnostic cults that in The War Trilogy has begun to inform H.D.’s mythopoeic thought. Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion gives us from Irenaeus’s report the teaching of Carpocrates that “the souls in their transmigrations through bodies must pass through every kind of life and every kind of action” and, again: “their souls before departing must have made use of every mode of life and must have left no remainder of any sort still to be performed: lest they must again be sent into another body because there is still something lacking to their freedom.” We might see in a new light the evolution thru the spiral of animal forms that the Psyche claims in The Walls Do Not Fall and the passionate yearning for opposites—“the insatiable longing / in winter, for palm-shadow / and sand and burnt sea-drift”—in The Flowering of the Rod. This doctrine of salvation as freedom thru the fulfillment of all servitudes under all powers is at least near the concept of The War Trilogy. Jonas points out that the doctrine of Carpocrates is one of the antecedents of mediaeval Satanism and of the Renaissance Faustian myth. My reading of the mandrake-mandragora passage then not as a protest but as a bringing in of the phallic nigredo to the poem has in mind H.D.’s Freudian persuasion and also her Gnostic sympathies. We may read in the light (or darkness) of the Carpocration creed the “parasite, I find nourishment: / when you cry in disgust, / a worm on the leaf” in The Walls Do Not Fall; the “I am yet unrepentant” is not a cry of defiance against the Father in a Protestant belief that sin is an act against God, but a resolution of acceptance of experience in a Gnostic belief that all human life is a manifestation of the Father’s creative will. Mary Magdalene in The Flowering of the Rod does not repent to put away, but the demons cast out of her, the poem tells us, “were now unalterably part of the picture.” Lilith, the carrion owl-goddess, the Satanic female, is “forgiven,” taken into the new dispensation.
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The imagination raises images of what a man is or what a woman is again and again in order to come into the shape of our actual life; or it seems in order that we come to live in terms of imagined being where we act not in our own best interest but in order to create fate or beauty or drama. The Christos and the Magdalene-Ishtar of The War Trilogy are persons in whom the divine may become real for H.D.; they are begotten in a matrix of the word’s “mediation” where “Dream” and “Vision” are at work. They are begotten in the operation of the poem in which they occur then, thru which they come into our consciousness, and H.D. is very much aware of this. Reality is not only received but also created, a creation in which the poet, the language, the beings who have arisen in man’s dreams and vision as far as we know them, all participate as creators of a higher reality.
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Robert Graves is most consciously concerned in King Jesus or in The White Goddess with correcting the image of Jesus from its creative flux; the mode of his Muse is argumentative. He protests that his Jesus is not an entity of the imagination—tho for him dream and vision are the sources of authority, and his Jesus is drawn as is H.D.’s from Gnostic and cabbalistic traditions—but an actual entity to be discovered only once righteous reason has rendered him free from imaginative accretions. In Grave’s knotted reason, like most Christians he cannot accept the Christos Who belongs entirely to the realm of desire and creative will but he demands the verification of an historical Jesus.
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The Christos in The War Trilogy and the persona of Mary Magdalene, though they arise from a common ground of lore with Graves’s Jesus and Mary Magdalene, are closer to the story entities of D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died, where we are concerned with the imaginary life of Jesus as “Reborn, he was in the other life, the greater day of the human consciousness.” In this new life, the Lawrencian Jesus turns away from his being the Master, putting away “the young, flamy, unphysical exalter,” and living in a nausea, awaiting his physical awakening. In Lawrence’s Madeleine we see not the aloof lady of The Flowering of the Rod but another person of H.D.’s, the “I” of The Walls Do Not Fall, who cries in The Man Who Died, “Master! . . . Oh, we have wept for you! And will you come back to us?” In the curious turn of Lawrence’s vision, the spiritual man—but Lawrence does not say the spiritual man, he says the “unphysical” man—is the old dead self and the physical man, the indwelling in the body’s awareness, is the new. For Madeleine, the woman who worships him as the Messiah, he has pity and revulsion, a nausea of disillusion. In the new life a second figure of the woman appears, the priestess of Isis, who attends not his image but the image of the woman’s powers. In the first part of The Man Who Died the crow of the cock may be the Word, the young cock Master of his hens “tipping his head, listening to the challenge of far-off unseen cocks, in the unknown world. Ghost voices, crowing at him mysteriously out of limbo.” When the Lady of Isis presses him to her in the ritual of healing the wounds: “the wailing died out altogether, and there was a stillness, and darkness in his soul, unbroken dark stillness, wholeness.”
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So at last he saw the light of her silk lanthorn swinging, coming intermittent between the trees, yet coming swiftly. She was alone, and near, the light softly swishing on her mantle-hem. And he trembled with fear and with joy, saying to himself: I am almost more afraid of this touch than I was of death. For I am more nakedly exposed to it.
Life, here, is the revelation of Isis thru her priestess: “dimlit, the goddess-statue stood surging forward, a little fearsome, like a great woman-presence urging.” Not in their selves but in the presences of Isis and Osiris they meet.
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He had been, before, the Messiah, the spirit of the crisis in self, the great Critic or Savior, but now, as he tells Madeleine: “I am glad it is over, and the day of my interference is done.” Beyond lies the other, “the greater day of the human consciousness.” “My public life is over,” he says, “the life of my self-importance.”
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In The Walls Do Not Fall the Messiah or the Christ is not the embodiment of a self-importance or Messianic inflation of the ego that Lawrence saw in him. Love, itself, was for D. H. Lawrence mixed with the day of interference. For H.D. He comes as a new Master over Love; but this Christos, like Lawrence’s Man Who Died, must be freed from “old thought, old convention,” the nausea of His false image “of pain-worship and death-symbol”; and, like Lawrence’s Christ again, H.D.’s Christ passes thru this stage to be united with the person of Osiris. As,
in turn, we can see the Mary Magdala of The Flowering of the Rod as the psyche-woman “I” transformed in the magic of the daemons of womanhood—Isis among them—like the Priestess in The Man Who Died, belonging to the greater day of the human consciousness.
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The more correctness, the authoritative touch of Laura Riding’s Lilith Outcome, the “mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men” in which Lawrence’s Man Who Died had had his share—and the concern with what shall and shall not be included in literature, with arbitration and the exemplary, that has made for our Age of Criticism—this critical superego is embodied in H.D.’s Simon, as the Poet may be embodied in Kaspar.
But Simon the host thought,
we must draw the line somewhere;
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It is not fair, H.D. tells us, to compare Simon with Kaspar, for Simon
was not conditioned to know
that these very devils or daemons,
as Kaspar would have called them,
were now unalterably part of the picture;
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We are concerned here with the daemons or genii of the woman, her powers as a creative artist. Simon, like Kaspar, in the poem is one of the dramatis personae—he, too, is unalterably part of the story. In the conception of the whole fabric there is, unalterably part, a contentious demon, an adversary—the “Dev-ill” of The Walls Do Not Fall, “tricked up like Jehovah.” We hear his voice in the legion that the poet answers in her passages of apology. He appears in the third person plural they of “charms are not, they said, grace” and of “we fight, they say, for breath, / so what good are your scribblings?” Is he then, the Spirit of our New Criticism, the one addressed as “Sword” in The Walls Do Not Fall?
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,
your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over.
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In The Flowering of the Rod Kaspar, who knows the story the stars tell, what is “now unalterably part of the picture,” knows:
the first actually to witness His life-after-death,
was an unbalanced, neurotic woman,
The myrrh which he carries in the jar is also the genius and the gospel or lore of the poem itself. In The Walls Do Not Fall words, we were told, were little boxes that hid or kept meaning; as stars were “little jars of that indisputable / and absolute Healer, Apothecary . . . to hold further / unguent, myrrh.” So, now:
though the jars were sealed,
the fragrance got out somehow,
and the rumour was bruited about,
“fragrance” and “rumor” are identified. Kaspar, the Mage, bringing his gifts in recognition of the birth of the Christ Child brings (fragrance/rumor) the gospel of the Christ-Life as a present in the beginning:
or another—Kaspar could not remember;
but Kaspar thought, there were always two jars,
the two were always together,
why didn’t I bring both?
or should I have chosen the other?
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The two myrrhs or two genii refer on one level to the two traditions of Christ—the Christ of the exoteric Church and the Christ of the esoteric Mysteries. They may refer too to the Law of the Father-God and to the Realm of the Mothers; for Kaspar brings his essence from the tradition of patriarchal Zoroastrian shepherd kings, and the essence which Mary Magdalene comes for, related to “those alabaster boxes / of the Princesses of the Hyksos Kings,” is the odor of her own, “incense-flower of the incense-tree,” and of the sea. The two not at war but mixed; once separated, but now reunited in the birth of the Christ-Child.
So Proclus in his Commentaries upon Plato’s myth of Atlantis tells us that it is a myth of two orders in the ancient world: “beginning from the Gods, of Olympian and Titanic divinities” or
beginning from the intellect, of permanency and motion, or sameness and difference; or from souls, of the rational and irrational; or from bodies, of heaven and generation; or in whatever other way you may divide essences, according to all divisions, all the genus of those within the pillars of Hercules will be analogous to the better, but of those without to the less excellent co-ordination of things.
“It was always maintained / that one jar was better than the other,” Kaspar remembers in the poem:
but he grumbled and shook his head,
no one can tell which is which,
now your great-grandfather is dead.
For H.D. heralds the mingling of the essences, the confusion of the traditions, in the first century, echoing the neo-Platonic confusions of the fifth century, in the twentieth century. “Hence,” Proclus concludes:
whether you are willing Orphically to arrange the Olympian and Titanic genera in opposition to each other, and to celebrate the former as subduing the latter; or Pythagorically, to perceive the two co-ordinations proceeding from on high, as far as to the last of things, and the better adorning the subordinate rank; or Platonically, to survey much of infinity and much of bound in the universe, as we learn in the Philebus, and the whole of infinity in conjunction with the measures of bound, producing generation, which extends through all mundane natures,—from all these, you may assume one thing, that the whole composition of the world is co-harmonized from this contrariety.
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Kaspar, like Simon, was disturbed by the thought of a woman, but he cannot exclude her. In the mingling of the myrrhs in one jar there was the mingling of sexes: the Christ uniting not only the contrary orders of history and prehistory, Athens and Atlantis, but as the new Adam uniting again the Eve and Adam. Nowhere does H.D. fuse male and female in one body, except in the implied fusion here in the identity of the Child. Not only Simon, who abhors the female, but Kaspar, who is troubled by her but moved to ecstasy in her presence, remains male; as Mary Magdalene remains ultimately female. Yet “though the jars were sealed, / the fragrance got out somehow / and the rumour was bruited about”—in the most real the two were always at one. H.D. would have found such a tradition in the neo-Platonists, or in the Kabbalistic tradition of the Adama Kadmon; she must have come upon it in the period of her psychoanalytic conversion, for the psychic bi-sexuality of man is an axiom of Freud’s. There was also, more immediate to our study here, the fact that a woman’s genius had come into the genius of the Poet thru her own operations as poet in this work.
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In Tribute to Freud, writing of the signet or “sign-manual—the royal signature, usually only the initials of the sovereign’s name,” she suddenly sees that her writing signet, her H.D., has something “remotely suggesting sovereignty or the royal manner.” The initials H.D. present the suggestion of a hidden identity, something more poetic certainly than the immediate plainness of Hilda Doolittle. But were those initials in the beginning not only this but also to suggest the Poet, without suggesting a woman, to help the reader to overlook or confuse the gender of the writer?
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“Averse to personal publicity,” Charlotte Bronte wrote in her 1850 preface to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, “we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine. We had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.”
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Aroused to battle by the claims of genius wherever they are made—for genius is itself of the old titanic order—male guardians of the literary Olympus have been the more aroused when the titaness appears, with the sense that
it was unseemly that a woman
appear disordered, dishevelled;
it was unseemly that a woman
appear at all.
for the dominance of man’s rules must be maintained over woman’s realm. Woman, identified with the whole Atlantean sequence of disorder, irrationality, change—Dame Mutabilitie herself—may be permitted to operate in her place, if it is clear that he
rs is the inferior claim. Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Dame Edith Sitwell, H.D., Mary Butts, coactive in the avant-garde of the nineteen-twenties with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams, form in the conventional estimate a second rank, and where their work has exceeded that allotment their presumption has been bitterly attacked and derided. Marianne Moore who established early and definitely the propriety of her claims has escaped the worst censure. Laura Riding who argued the superiority of her reasons in Poetry over the false and distorted reasons of other poets was ridden out of town. With Dame Edith Sitwell her presumption of noble class as well as of sibylline genius and gender added to the fury of status-conscious verse-writing and reviewing professors of English Literature. Even Virginia Woolf, wrapped round as she was by the genteel literary guarantee of the Bloomsbury group and writing as a sensitive and sensible adherent of their high civilization, smarted under the goads that would keep woman in her place.