•
But there is, too, a deeper suspicion, not only that men are prejudiced to keep their dominance in the society but that men find genius itself unwomanly, unmanly. Women too have had that fear and then envy or hostility towards genius in men. Strindberg, Joyce, Lawrence, Williams have given expression of their creative isolation even in marriage, and defend or apologize for the shadowy other daemonic male being.
In sexual love between man and man, where there is creative genius, where the lovers have their daemons, there may be a counterpart to the Isis between the man and the woman in Lawrence’s The Man Who Died or to the new Master over Love in H.D.’s Trilogy—a God, governor of the creative powers in whom they love. Thus, Socrates, who has his daemon, argues that love is most true when addressed in the name of the First Beloved, the One because of Whom we love. He, like Christ, is a Sun, or is the Love the Sun has for us. Apollo Musagêtes, Leader of the Muses, of the female powers, and Director of the Genii, of the male powers. Whitman called him “the President of Regulation.”
So too, in sexual love between man and woman Christian magic teaches not falling in love but rising in love to a mutual love in God, where Christ is the First Beloved. To exorcize the daemonic or to compose the daemonic.
•
The narrative of The War Trilogy is the story of the restitution, of the daemonic and of woman, cursed by the Fathers, into the sight of God or among the Goods. It is the story told in George MacDonald’s Lilith in the nineteenth century. The bringing up into the fullness of the Self of the most disturbing contents, of what the persona most fears.
As poets in the romantic tradition have identified with Lucifer (Milton unconsciously, Blake and Hugo, then, consciously) and sought the wedding of heaven and hell, the poetess H.D. identifies with a Mary Magdalen who brings up all outcast spirit into the new dispensation.
It is the prostitute; it is venery, venereous, venerate, venerator in the star Venus, the same light that shines so brilliantly just after the sun has gone down or just before the sun rises, Hesperus at sundown or Phosphorus at dawn, Lucifer-Venus. It is the card of our Tarot reading then—L’Étoile. It is Mary of Magdala, where:
through my will and my power,
Mary shall be myrrh;
•
But this will and this power, this Mary and this myrrh is the genius of the poem, the genius of the jar.
It is not only Mary in the presence of the Wise Man, seeing as he does “it was unseemly that a woman / appear at all . . . ,” it is the poetic or daemonic creativity of the woman. “Turned towards the world,” Jung writes in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, “the anima is fickle, capricious, moody, uncontrolled, and emotional, sometimes gifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful, bitchy, double-faced, and mystical.”
•
“ La femme est naturelle,c’est-à-dire abominable,” Baudelaire confesses. “Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pederaste.” “J’ai toujours été étonné qu’on laissât les femmes entrer dans les eglises.”
•
It is not only the lady, in whom this gospel says were seven daemons forgiven—Isis, Astarte, Cyprus—Lilith, one born before Lilith, and Eve—and back of them Gemeter or Demeter. Earth-mother and Venus. . . . It is not only this woman kissing the feet of Him Whom they call Master, but it is the woman H.D. too, this poetess, with her presumption—the poem itself—it is, was, will be to some unseemly that she be there at all.
•
We may see then behind or over or included in the scene between the Wise Man Kaspar and the Fallen Woman Mary another scene. Let us not imagine now a critic—the distaste of the fundamentally unsympathetic and then antagonistic Fitts or Jarrell must not stand for the caution, the discretion, that Kaspar with his tradition and profound gender carries. It must be the poet Williams or the poet Pound or the poet Baudelaire then that confronts the poetess:
he drew aside his robe in a noble manner
but the un-maidenly woman did not take the hint;
she had seen nobility herself at first hand;
nothing impressed her, it was easy to see;
she simply didn’t care whether he acclaimed
or snubbed her—or worse; what are insults?
•
“De la nécessité de battre les femmes,” Baudelaire writes. He is not writing here his heart stripped bare. He is not writing that fiery book that Poe had proposed. “No man dares write it,” Poe had said, “true to its title.”
But Baudelaire’s own daemon projects the persona of the dandy; he strives for the telling mot, the keys of a Baudelairean attitude. He is a litterateur. It is a disease of the French literary world that infects Cocteau in his phantasy and Artaud in his madness alike. They hear or sound the currency of their own phrases ringing upon a stage and let their masks speak what they will.
But: “Quelles conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?” he asks.
•
As Simon in H.D.’s story of the hidden essence, questioning the Master’s allowing her to kiss His feet, may question the gift she brings:
this man if he were a prophet, would have known
who and what manner of woman this is.
II.
In “Murex” the poetess Raymonde Ransome has a pen-name Ray Bart. We find ourselves in the story in the mixing ground of two persons, the woman and the poet, of what we are in the actual real and what we are in the real of the imagination. There is the atmosphere of London itself: “an ineffable quality of merging so that one never knew the barrier of day or night” that relates to a state of suspension in the story, the “cocoon-blur of not-thinking that was her fixed and static formula for London.”
We are at the inception of a poem. In the stream-of-consciousness two things impend. For Raymonde Ransome there is a recall, the bringing up of an old betrayal with associations involving the loss of a child in birth and with the loss of a lover. For Ray Bart, there is a poem impending, and these losses now are gains in intensity.
•
“Raymonde Ransome had wanted to drift and dream through the obliterating afternoon. Nothing to do but listen, nothing in London to do but wait. Listen to what? Wait for what?”
•
It was, in 1926, a prose prepared to find its way along lines of association. The process we have now in the verb “to dig” had begun. Opening distances back of things, as Proust had, or digging to uncover layers of meaning as Jane Harrison had in her Prolegomena and in Themis, or searching out psychological levels as Freud had, writers sought a new syntax that could provide shifting perspectives in consciousness.
•
Somewhere, working on Mrs. Dalloway or on The Waves, Virginia Woolf had the sensation of digging out a space in which her characters had their existence. “Whenever I make a mark,” she says of working on The Waves, “I have to think of its relation to a dozen others.” These are the rudiments of a projective-feeling in writing, of composition by field. August 30th, 1923, she writes of Mrs. Dalloway in progress: “The Hours and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight in the present moment.” Monday, October 15th: “It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunneling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it . . . One feels about in a state of misery—indeed, I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—and then one touches the hidden spring. . . . ”
•
It was to touch the hidden spring, “that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight in the present moment,” that I read Ulysses or The Tempest, the De Vulgari Eloquentia of Dante or “The Guest” of H.D.—as I read cards, water, signs in dreams or the tenor of life around me—not to find what art is but thru the art to find what life might be.
•
How Virginia Woolf labors at her art, suffers under t
he thought of what her writing might be worth as literature. Her journal reveals, if our reflection or common rumor had not told us before, that she labored to bring forth her own life out of a dark place. There is: “I was walking up Bedford Place is it—the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon—and I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer. And no one knows how I suffer, walking up the street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died—alone; fighting something alone. And when I come indoors it is all so silent—” Against which, the elaborate structure must hold. The art draws upon the anguish, brings illuminations that lift the heart up, breaks thru to the light; the art draws the writer up out of the anguish into the writing, setting into motion what had been the matter as if frozen underground.
•
The cards when we read them, anyway, open fearful ways into the light of day: the goat of Mendes, the card of abject grief, the inversions of goods, the cards that show my own soul swollen with vanity or darkened in deceit—these were parts of the ideogram drawn out of the Tarot reading for this book.
•
In every story of the soul there is this anguish of giving birth to one’s self. For Virginia Woolf and for James Joyce those cards were dark at the end of life, darkened by the beginning. As in Between the Acts: “Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too . . . It was the night before roads were made or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks.” Or in Finnegans Wake: “it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father . . . One in a thousand of years of the nights?”
•
The content of the dream, that Freud tells us must be read as a pictographic script. Or, as Schrödinger tells us in his essay upon the nature of life: “this tiny speck of material, the nucleus of the fertilized egg . . . contains an elaborate code-script involving all the future development of the organism.” The cast of the play or the members of the major arcana of the Tarot, the themes and persons of the poet, the periods and recurrences of dark and light of the artist—likewise in a configuration of events we have our own unique patterns or soul stories. But in the works of man, in the testimony of painting, music, and writing I find an other self as if I belonged to a larger language where minds and spirits awaken sympathies in me, a commune of members in which myself seems everywhere translated. If there are, as Freud argues, no memories from childhood but only memories referring to childhood, it is not surprising that all writing that contributes to one’s consciousness in the present belongs to one’s own past, or is lost.
•
What I am trying to get across is that just as there are threads weaving H.D.’s trilogy The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod to form a moving coherence, out of and into the lore of the human past—in art what Schrödinger called in physics “an aperiodic solid”—a ministry of sympathies, so, the three works are in turn one articulated cell of a larger fabric. These almost extraneous sorts I have drawn out of Virginia Woolf and Joyce, out of Baudelaire, out of my dreams—the Sally Rand theme then, and the “aroused” being a key, to remember “aroused” as well as “excited” and “inspired”—refer to some larger form or soul-self of which all of H.D. comes to be a part. To which I belong, in which I have my present/presence or womb of myself.
•
Thru time this fabric extends. It is my own creation as I mistake it. I have never found another human being who does not exclude from his fabric some star of first magnitude in mine; who does not include in first magnitude some “blindspot” or “aversion” of mine.
•
Yet just this tissue is the cosmic extension of the aperiodic solid of me. These are the works whereby I have come to know the Work. Thus have I bound Tiamat; in this series, out of these stuffs come into my code-script.
•
There is no such unique net of being, no code-script, that does not dance in the outpouring rays of the stars, no knot of my work that does not tremble between truth and falsity as it touches the human fabric that extends thru time.
This net is not now my creation but my creator. Where the caves or the cold feary mad father of the “earliest” memories of the Fathers reappear in other caves that “come to daylight at the present moment.”
•
Freud in “Screen Memories” gives us a vision of men weaving the past as the tissue of the present. That is all a tissue of lies, yes—of the imagination. But then there was “when they are tested (by the recollections of adults).” There are tests or trials in which the communal fabric becomes the over-truth.
•
Heraklitus said of our great imaginary web or fabrication or reality of realities: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger. But he undergoes transformations, just as fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named after the savor of each.”
•
The net is not the world; it is the imagination of the world.
•
Of our great net, of our humanity or ministry of sympathies, Heraklitus said: “Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.”
III.
So, Mary of Magdala may have brought her marah into the myrrh, brought her genius or her daemon or her seven into the Presence, into the Child—as we, too, bring our selves into what we call our Childhood.
•
If there is some exchange, some rumor of Virginia Woolf in the caves of the ice age, some cold draft of that inner dark in James Joyce; if I too now find these rumors or drafts or odors everywhere that I find what I am as a man; if I too, because I have come into touch with the work of some neurotic woman—it is only the inbinding or sentence a Virginia Woolf makes of words we use all the time, “the great hooded chairs had become enormous,” so that a spell is cast—if I too become the ground in which the words of others grow and change my soul; so I understand then the translation of the myrrh in H.D.’s narrative and how
the house was filled with the odour of the ointment;
•
Gospel is rumor or news, a good spell. We have only rumor or news of what is. The real world, Thomas Vaughan tells us, is invisible. And in our contemporary physics too thought must work beyond the visible with ideas of the unseen or not yet seen seeking the nature of the real world.
•
Thomas Vaughan refers then to the mustard seed, the smallest of generative particles in which the esoteric meaning of things hides itself awaiting its season and new ground in those whose hearts are receptive and whose minds are willing. In the Christian mystery given in Matthew, Mark and Luke, “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field.” Christ telling this parable says that he means to speak of “things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.” But this seed is, He tells us, the word: “Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.”
It is this passage that H.D. draws upon when, in The Flowering of the Rod, Kaspar stoops for the lady’s scarf and sees “in that half-second” a fleck of light in a jewel that opens like a flower to disclose the real world—the kingdom of heaven, “the lands of the blest, / the promised lands” H.D. names the kingdom in terms of the Hesperides and Atlantis. In The Walls Do Not Fall, the heart portrayed first as a shell-fish in the systole and diastole of the tide-flow, then as a psyche or butterfly, “dragging the forlorn / husk of self after us,” in xxv is revealed in terms of such a seed, the heart-shell now breaking open like the husk of a grain:
the Kingdom is a Tree
whose roots bind the heart-husk
to earth,
after the ultimate grain,
lodged in the heart-core,
has tak
en its nourishment.
The mustard seed of time and the mustard seed of light, invisibilities, in which Kaspar sees, are immediacies of knowledge contrasting with “the old tradition, the old, old legend,” expanses of time and space that characterize learning. In Tribute to the Angels, H.D. uses the language of spiritual alchemy so rhyming the terms of the word and of “mer, mere, mere, mater, Maia, Mary” with the elements in the alembic where the stone is being made, that meaning and odor and the jewel are identified with the marah, the sorrow of woman, and with the myrrh. The jewel in which the fleck of light comes to Kaspar’s vision then is the Philosopher’s Stone. It seems almost not to happen for its moment of time is a grain in which his spirit dwells but invisible to his mind.
Some ten years before H.D. wrote this passage, Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas wrote in a passage we have considered earlier:
Literature preserves the wisdom of the human race; but in this way it enfeebles the emphasis of first-hand intuition. In considering our direct observation of past, or of future, we should confine ourselves to time-spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even of fractions of a second.
•
H.D. will see the mustard seed as Thomas Vaughan, the Rosicrucian, does. “So in me,” she tells us in Tribute to Freud, “2 distinct racial or biological or psychological entities tend to grow nearer or to blend, even, as time heals old breaks in consciousness”—as in the alembic of the alchemists diverse elements are brought into one work. She relates herself here to the esoteric tradition as “a descendant of one of the original groups of the early 18th-century, mystical Protestant order, called the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian or Moravian Brotherhood” and she goes on then to associate Count Zinzendorf and Freud: “Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the renewed Bohemian brotherhood, was an Austrian, whose father was exiled or self-exiled to Upper Saxony, because of his Protestant affiliations. The Professor himself was an Austrian, a Moravian actually by birth.” It seems part of H.D.’s design to leave no more than this hint that we must search out for ourselves. In The War Trilogy again we can see these two as entities that tend to grow nearer or to blend: the New Master over Love who commands “name it,” when, in Tribute to the Angels, the poetess cannot name the color of the jewel in which “venerate” and “venereal”—a break in consciousness—are united, is surely Freud; but when in the dream sequence of The Walls Do Not Fall He appears in “a spacious, bare meeting house”—“the Dream / deftly stage-managed the bare, clean / early colonial interior”—the figure of Zinzendorf has replaced Freud. We are no longer in the psychoanalyst’s rooms but in the environs of Herrnhut, the Lord’s House, where “The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed,” as Zinzendorf named the revived Moravian church, meets. Or in the environs of the first log house at Bethlehem in Pennsylvania which Zinzendorf dedicated himself on Christmas Eve in 1741, for Bethlehem was not only H.D.’s ancestral city but the city of her birth and her first eight years, of her “childhood” then.
The H.D. Book Page 54