In The Zohar, Abraham it is said gives account of all his moments, hours, days, years; rendering up his life in the wholeness of its living, as Proust strives to remember the fullness of his time. Freud, here as in many things continuing the Kabbalistic tradition, brings into the modern science of the soul such an accounting for one’s world. Not only in the Jewish world but in the Greek world of Orphic mysteries there was such a concept of being responsible for the whole of one’s life—for the redeemed souls had to drink not of Lethe but of a fountain of memory.
Beyond confession or remembrance, this dual creation of self and consciousness that Lawrence reacted against—as surely he would have reacted against the “I’m just finding myself in this book,” the million pages instead of a thousand, mode of my own writing here—in their being “so absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel,” these writers of the new interior monolog read their lives as the Kabbalists read the Torah, exploring the permutations of meaning in each letter and diacritical mark. As in H.D.’s version of the Ion of Euripides where Ion, who might be Lawrence, demands unreflective action: “to strike at evil, is pure:” and the Pythia replies “you must know why you strike,” the ordeal of the contemporary psyche was to recreate the meaning of its life.
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“Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed,” we would recall from Pound writing of the germinal consciousness, as he called it in 1916: “And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth. And this latter sort of mind is close on the vital universe; and the strength of Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe.” As in “Religio” he writes: “A god is an eternal state of mind.” But that the germinal consciousness, affecting mind about it, was dark as well as light, Pound can never accept. Again and again in The Cantos, the question of dualism troubles him. Like a Christian Scientist he wants to say that suffering is a mental error. Yet what Pound called “the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease”—the brooding mind correspondent with suffering and corruption, as well as the radiant mind correspondent with joy and purity, rested in its being ever at the interpretation of the vital universe. Pound demanded that the mind take thought only in “the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge”; wherever he faced muddle, the digestive and excretory functions of the universe or the digestion and excretion involved in transmuting the meanings of experience, he could no longer think, he could only—closing his mind in distaste—react.
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Wherever Hell appears in earlier Cantos it is exterior to Pound. The light is fluid and pours, but Plotinus commands: “Keep your eyes on the mirror.”
Prayed we to the Medusa,
petrifying the soil by the shield.
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Then, after the trauma of the Second World War experience, when in the debacle of the Fascist last days he was forced almost to admit the disorder, the Hell, of Mussolini’s reign which he had held as a model of order, the later Cantos pour forth the contradictions of the mind no longer removed from its underworld. “Tho my errors and wrecks lie about me,” he will sing in Canto CXVI: “I cannot make it cohere.” “But the beauty is not the madness,” he confirms.
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In The Pisan Cantos, as the voice of Pound ransacking his broken consciousness begins, like Lear, his testimony of what the heart knows, outrage as well as tenderness comes. God Himself, Boehme argued in the sixteenth century, was the fire of Hell as well as the light of Heaven, wrath as well as love. Ugly flarings up of the Turba—the unrest of all creation—must be there if a man bear witness to what he is and feels, even though he is aware his thought and feeling are dis-eased. For the business of the artist is to bring things to light. In Pound’s Canto XCI, it is the light that presides:
ab lo dolchor qu’al cor mi vai
entoned, then:
that the body of the light come forth
from the body of fire
And that your eyes come to the surface
from the deep wherein they were sunken . . .
It is in this context of a testimony to the light, evoking the lore and vision of light:
Over harm
Over hate
overflooding, light over light
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the light flowing, whelming the stars.
that the harm, the hatred, rises into the light of day. Marx, who would compel the mind to take up the cause of the oppressed, and Freud, who would compel the mind to take up the cause of the repressed, appear as enemies of the high mind. Here, no Athena comes as she comes in H.D.’s version of Ion to declare the alliance between the intellect and the great forces of the under-mind. The out-raging voice breaks (as in the text, the italics indicate the interjected mode) and the poem shifts abruptly to low-minded rant:
Democracies electing their sewage
till there is no clear thought about holiness
a dung flow from 1913
and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud
and the american beaneries
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He might have used the high King James tone that he had used in the Usura Cantos. But Pound had written: “You can be wholly precise in representing vagueness. You can be wholly a liar in pretending that the particular vagueness was precise in its outline.” And here, in this discordant passage, where his hatred of American policies beginning with the First World War, of Jews, and of colleges, in images of sewage and dung flow stands contrasted with his adoration of great women with their lovers, queens of nature and heaven, in images of light and crystal waves, Pound does not pretend to the urbane anti-semitism of Eliot but breaks into the true voice of his feeling—not only what he feels but exactly as he feels it. Because of this, we see, as we are never quite sure in Eliot, the nature of Pound’s hatred of Jews.
•
Baudelaire in Mon coeur mis à nu had raged not only against women but against Jews:
Belle conspirations à organiser pour l’extermination de la race juive.
Les juifs Bibliothecaires et temoins de la Rédemption.
The dis-ease or out-rage is presented in the high tone of his Dandy style; it is incorporated in the Baudelairean attitude. But in Pound, to express these feelings at all breaks the voice. Sewage, dung flow, kikery, beaneries are raw words and deliberately low. The contrast may be between the man Baudelaire and the man Pound, or the times; but what we would note here is that the imperative in The Cantos is to expose the character of the thought and feeling involved; where the journalistic notes of Mon coeur mis à nu are governed by manner.
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To render it true, then. Not only the truth of outrage in Swift or Baudelaire, in Pound or Céline, that suddenly forces us to recognize the virus (these passages, out-rages, are lesions of feeling and thought) that others would keep hidden or dressed up; but the truth of how consciousness moves, where form has been developed to bear testimony to undercurrent and eddy, shifts, breaks and echoes of content. In a conventional art, the sense of Beauty is a sense of what other men will find beautiful, pleasurable, enhancing, and exemplary in their social terms. Poetry would present models of feeling, and reviewers of this order commend or chastise the poet’s being to their taste or exciting their distaste. But there is a higher or larger order of poetry where Beauty is a sense of universal relations, of being brought into intensities of even painful feeling. Here, the virus is life, the hatred is emotion, the breaks in consciousness—that in conventional thought seem inroads of natural chaos or damaged passages that need surgery or correction—are surfs or sun-spots of the deep element.
V.
March 24, 1961. Friday.
If Truth lived in a well, and I do not remember where that was, she appears as a Pre-Raphaelite illustration—perhaps a drawing by H. J. Ford in one of Lang’s Fairy Books—a beauty in rags.
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Diogenes, a man looking for Truth, lived in a barrel. Another figure in rags. And Truth in the Well, in Les Enfants du Paradis is presented by Carne and Prévert as a woman in a barrel of water. Garance, the naked truth, a nineteenth century strip-tease.
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But when I first took a name for that Greek philosopher, I mistook the name. Demosthenes, I thought it was, but I knew, too, that I was wrong. That was the name of another, somehow, misfit, learning to speak with pebbles in his mouth. “What was the name of the one who was looking for truth with a lantern, the Greek philosopher?” I asked Jess. “Demosthenes,” he answered, reiterating my thought.
•
Old figures, the well of wisdom or the well that reappears in the lives of the Jewish fathers and the maiden drawing water from the well, reappear in low guise: a strip-tease artist in a barrel, a pesty old man with a smoky lantern. “The well is dry,” the ravens cry.
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Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” strikes another image that is not Keats’s but our common speech. When an arrow has been shot to its mark we say, “The aim is true, that’s a beauty!”
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But when I go to Keats’s text, as I must, following the path of my associations here, to find the truth of the matter, I see Keats addresses our Truth who lived in a well in the fairy tales: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” he calls her. “Thou foster-child of silence and slow time . . . ”
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The figure of Diogenes as he comes to mind searching for Truth, or rather daring the Truth, is a dismisser of words, accuses our speech everywhere of hiding or disguising the truth, of deceiving then. Here the lie is a mask some truth wears, a false face. Truth speaking tells us a story, the story takes over from the teller. Unmask her!
But Garance in the movie wears only a smile, she does not speak. She wears the curving lure of silent lips and the seductive reflection of eyes dwelling in a woman’s “quietness,” “silence and slow time,” that we have seen before in Leonardo’s vision of La Gioconda. Just beyond this moment at which she is Keats’s “unravish’d,” she is, we see, as the poet saw her elsewhere, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. “Unravish’d” means not only that she has been had by no man, but that we too are not to have her. Truth, Beauty, here is pure lure. She will be the Sphinx, even the Medusa.
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The other figure that came to my mind—Demosthenes—is the rhetor. We see him walking by the sea-shore, trying his voice against the waves. Just as Diogenes in his barrel in the Greek world had his counterpart in the Celtic fairy tale of Truth in a well, so Demosthenes has a counterpart in Canute trying his voice, his command, over the waves. In whose defeat, his word is proved false. Here it means powerless against the waves. He has no such command.
Our Demosthenes must work with only that Truth that can persuade the waves. These waves are the people.
•
Both the skeptic and the rhetor bring to light conditions of human concern where poetry does not work. In the hardness of heart where it has gone so hard by a man’s heart that he searches after the bitter truth—truth, to expose his mother to the light of day—poetry, that’s-just-poetry—means playing it false. Words are not to be trusted. At last, in the last of the world’s suffering, all of What Is he will claim to be Maia, the false mother of meaning, the deceit of wish, where the powers of heaven and hell raven in a smile.
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Looking for Diogenes, I find in Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational: “As Tylor pointed out long ago, ‘it is a vicious circle: what the dreamer believes he therefore sees, and what he sees he therefore believes.’ ” “But what if he nevertheless fails to see?” Dodds asks: “That must often have happened at Epidaurus: as Diogenes said of the votive tablets to another deity, ‘there would have been far more of them if those who were not rescued had made dedications’.”
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The skeptic voice in the interior dialogue of The War Trilogy that finds the paraphernalia of the mysteries “trivial / intellectual adornment” decries the poet’s uselessness in the time of war, seizing the opportunity to put him in his place. But back of the accusation against the Poet we find another accusation, against the psyche of Woman. “They snatched off our amulets,” the Poetess tells us: “charms are not, they said, grace.”
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“We have them always with us,” Pound wrote in The Spirit of Romance: “They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry, especially lyric poetry, must be simple; that you must get the meaning while the man sings it.” Against the trobar clus, against Truth veiled in charm or in a woman’s smile. In the tradition of the mystery poem that Pound traces from Apuleius to Dante the figure of a woman is central: Isis, then the Venus of the Pervigilium Veneris, the Lady of the troubadours, and Beatrice. They are ancestresses of our Bride of Quietness, Truth at the Well of the fairy tales, and the language of this poetry is the old speech, the lingua materna, as Dante called the Provençal.
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In the lure of Beauty, Truth seems untrue. And wisdom likewise is a lure, so that in Gnostic cults wisdom is a woman. The Brotherhood of Poetry answering the Fellowship of the Sword in The Walls Do Not Fall are no better than women, asserting against the realities of work and war, against the claim that crisis makes in truth, a way of alluring promise. Recalling another passage in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage where, following upon thoughts of the toiling masses in their struggle for socialism against exploitation, the thought of Yeats comes to Miriam’s mind, “the halting, half man’s half woman’s adoration he gave to the world he saw, his only reality.”
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In the face of what we call reality, the poets in H.D.’s Trilogy claim a prior reality. They are pretenders to a throne in Truth that does not seem real to common sense:
we are the keepers of the secret,
the carriers, the spinners
of the rare intangible thread
that binds all humanity
to ancient wisdom,
to antiquity;
our joy is unique, to us,
grape, knife, cup, wheat
are symbols in eternity . . .
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“A list of facts,” Pound had written to Williams of the old themes of poetry, “on which I and 9,000,000 other poets have spieled endlessly.” Spring, Love, Trees, Wind. This voice of sound sense putting the merely poetic in its place will often take over in Pound. But in another vein, a rare intangible thread or umbilical cord binding him to the womb of pre-history, to the Mutterrecht, Pound loses the “spiel” of the American businessman who knows that poetry is a commodity among commodities. Then he sings, not with 9,000,000 other poets, but with those few who practise the trobar clus, for whom Spring, Trees, Love, Wind have enduring and hidden meaning. As in The Pisan Cantos he will recall: “in the hall of the forebears / as from the beginning of wonders. . . . The wind is part of the process.” In the Rock-Drill he will present an ideogram of hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. These things, like the “grape, knife, cup, wheat” of H.D.’s poem, like “the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and meditation of our forefathers had entered” of Rilke’s letter to Von Hulewicz, are not a list of facts but are “vessels in which they found and stored humanity.”
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This art, Pound writes in The Spirit of Romance is good “as the high mass is good art.”
Man-to-man the poetic voice had broken with embarrassment in our American self-consciousness. In the generation to which Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams belonged there was still the break between man-talk, that presented a show of even brutality in defense against any hint of vulnerability—it was the tone required for the competition and profiteering of the capitalist society—and the woman-talk to which all things that required inner feeling and sensitivity had been relegated. Poetry belonged among womanish things, a song Herakl
es sang while sewing for Omphale.
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The trobar clus was outlawed. The Spirit or the sacred in man’s being appeared in the old order as a woman, an angelic presence or Truth in which a man took his being, as Dante took his being in Beatrice. Bound by the rare thread to—“the ancient wisdom,” H.D. calls it—some unmanly otherness.
Pound and Williams, whose art belonged to the trobar clus, in their dis-ease were often ashamed of their Spirit. In Paterson the split, that in H.D.’s War Trilogy comes between the official society of church or army and the secret society of the poet, appears as a divorce within the language itself, a hidden divorce between man and woman. In The Cantos, where Pound is concerned with economics or politics, “men’s affairs,” he will put on the man-in-the-street persona or, as in early Hell Cantos or in Canto XCI, break into a subliminal voice from some barracks or locker-room—“The petrified terd that was Verres,” “fahrting through silk,” “frigging a tinpenny whistle,” “sh-t.”
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Even for women, areas of poetic feeling must contend with limits that social attitudes would set within the psyche itself against womanish excess. In The Walls Do Not Fall H.D.’s accounting of her experience is an accounting for such an excess:
so mind dispersed, dared occult lore
found secret doors unlocked,
floundered, was lost in sea-depth,
We are prepared—Freud and Jung have prepared us—for what “depth” means in the contemporary cult of analysis. It is as real as “hell” once was. And in the depth, where the earliest human time stirs us, we know that wisdom and occult lore are an old wives’ tale—“sub-conscious ocean where Fish / move two-ways and devour.” Then a self-mocking voice begins, where H.D. anticipates the reproof of the utilitarian realist: “jottings on a margin, / indecipherable palimpsest scribbled over / with too many contradictory emotions.”
The H.D. Book Page 56