The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

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  The life experience of any individual is not simply a matter of its actualities but of its realities. The man who would present himself without the dimensions of dream and fantasy, much less the experience of illusion and error, who would render the true from the false by voiding the fictional and the doubtful, diminishes the human experience. In the extreme state of such an anxiety for what truth can be held with certainty, he has left only the terms defined by logical positivism with which to communicate; the rest is poetry, the made-up world—the forging of the conscience of his race.

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  In classifying “the various worlds of deliberate fable”—the world of the Iliad, of King Lear, of The Pickwick Papers—with the various worlds of faith—the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the world of Swedenborg’s visa et audita—William James proposes that such fictions must each be “a consistent system” within which certain definite relations can be ascertained. “It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe did not really marry Rebecca, as Thackeray falsely makes him do. The real Ivanhoe world is the one which Scott wrote down for us. In that world Ivanhoe does not marry Rebecca.” It is curious, given his pluralism, that just here James cannot allow that after the Ivanhoe world of Sir Walter Scott another Ivanhoe world could have reality. The history of Christianity is a history of bloody persecutions and wars waged in the high mania of true against false doctrines of what Jesus was and what the Christ was.

  In the classical case, there is a strong tradition in Greek thought that Homer falsified the story of Helen. The poet Stesichorus was blinded (blind like Homer to the truth) after writing his Helen and wrote then a recantation of Palinôdia of which only a fragment remains: “That tale was never true! Thy foot never stepped on the benched galley, nor crossed to the towers of Troy.” Whereupon, as the legend goes, he recovered his sight. The historian Herodotus tells us that he learned from the priests in Egypt that Helen was given refuge at the court of Proteus in Memphis thruout the war. “Within the enclosure stands a temple, which is called that of Aphrodite the Stranger,” Herodotus testifies: “I conjecture the building to have been erected to Helen, the daughter of Tyndarus.” And at the conclusion of the Egyptian account, Herodotus proceeds to give his own reasons as an historian for finding this tradition convincing. So too, Helen in Euripides’ great drama testifies that she was never at Troy: “Let me tell you the truth / of what has happened to me.” (Following here Richmond Lattimore’s translation that carries into our tongue something of high poetry):

  But Hera, angry that she was not given the prize,

  made void the love that might have been for Paris and me

  and gave him, not me, but in my likeness fashioning

  a breathing image out of the sky’s air, bestowed

  this on King Priam’s son, who thinks he holds me now

  but holds a vanity which is not I.

  Euripides does not recant the Homeric account of Troy but imagines in his drama the fiction of an historical Helen and a spiritual Helen, the one in Egypt and the other in Troy, the one the real body and the other an eidolon.

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  Yet James would stress the definite and consistent within each system of reality. “Neptune’s trident, e.g., has no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven; but within the classic Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not.” “The various worlds themselves, however, appear to most men’s minds in no very definitely conceived relation to each other,” he continues, speaking here of the larger sub-universes of reality—the world of sense, the world of science, the world of ideal relations, as well as the world of creative fictions: “and our attention, when it turns to one, is apt to drop the others for the time being out of its account.” But even within the world of fictions, as James’s own trouble with Thackeray’s Ivanhoe exhibits, men find it difficult to entertain contradictory accounts it would seem, much less to imagine new syntheses in which all accounts can be seen as contributing to the truth. Both the historical telling of Jesus and the spiritual account of the Christ in the New Testament present inconsistencies that must be held in one system, and a Robert Graves who is obsessed with reducing the variety of realities to what really happened must labor to establish a true Nazarene Gospel by clearing away what he would persuade us is false in the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

  •

  In the same year of James’s Psychology (1890), Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough began to advance another sense of supernatural systems, where in place of separate and discrete worlds or churches, nations or races of the spirit and mind, incomparable truths, self-consistent, he raised the picture of a field of religious order where Neptune’s trident was no longer assumed to have no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven. To the consternation of such a view, Frazer was to look for Neptune and trident in all other orders—“emblem of Hittite thunder-god, emblem of Indian deity . . . ,” composing a language of persona, symbol, image, and emblem that would dissolve the pluralism of cultures and civilizations in the monism of a larger language of human meanings.

  •

  The exclusive truth that defines any individual order, in what it excludes, may be seen as false to the larger fabric of orders. Every factor of human experience has its own truth in its potency. It is more fluid, more interwoven with other realities than James allows. Neptune’s trident that had no status of reality in the Christian heaven rose from the same ground, was child, as Heaven was, of man’s imagination become most real. Toynbee in his Study of History, some fifty years after James’s Psychology, would trace the Kingdom of Heaven back to the idea of a cloud kingdom as it appears in Aristophanes’ fantasy of Cloudcuckooland. And if we look not in the upper world of Christian belief but in the lower world, we may find Neptune’s trident in the pitchfork among the instruments of Hell’s monitors.

  •

  Besides things as facts, there is another aspect of things as information, what sets up those widening circles of meaning and influence, what rings true. Neptune’s trident that once seemed discordant, out of mode or system, now is heard in another, larger or higher sense of scale to be true. By the inspired subscription of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. it is true and only it is true of Christ that he was the only begotten Son of God and was of the substance of God, who was incarnate, made Man, and suffered the Crucifixion. But by the inspired testament of The Acts of John the Lord not only suffered but he did not suffer. The Christ of this Gnostic gospel is a Heraklitean Christ and His revelation is the suffering of the cross that is also the playing upon the Cross of the Contraries. “For you I call this cross of light,” He says to Saint John: “now logos, now spirit, now Jesus, now Christ, now door, now way, now bread, now seed . . . ” “God and the World,” Whitehead proposes in Process and Reality, “are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast.”

  •

  I take the poem, any poem, as a product of this “Creativity” as the individual experiences it in language, to convey the transformation of a multiplicity of impressions into a unity of expression, that now becomes in its own order part of a new multiplicity of what poetry is, a pending material of the need for a new transformation.

  •

  Here, the poet’s sense of the truth of his matter is not that it belongs to some previous system, that it happened or didn’t happen in history, that it is defined as orthodox or heretical, but that it belongs to the work in which he is engaged. Here, his responsibility to the truth is to test the action of sound and sense in the process of its creation of its own definition. He must recognize what is going on. In his Maximus, Charles Olson insists the ear must listen, and he speaks in terms of sea depths; “a peak of the ocean’s floor he knew so well the care /
he gave his trade, his listening / at 17 to Callaghan (as Callaghan, / at 17, to Bohlen, / Bohlen to Smith), Olsen,” as Olson in the language:

  could set his dories out

  as a landsman sows his fields

  and reap such halibut . . .

  •

  Gloucester, for Olson, is not a small town boundary for the mind, but a locus of the Earth. The continent and the sea are real, or elemental to the great reality. The nation or state of mind is another thing, a project of certain men to exploit the communities of other men. So there is “pejorocracy”; there is ownership of utilities—the sea or land or language—proprietorships men would make over truth or means to close off—the wondership, Olson calls it—the freedom any man has to take thought and to create in what he is.

  •

  “Evil was active in the land,” is, in The Walls Do Not Fall, not only the War-Rule, usurping the creative will from each individual and forcing all action and language into its own terms, but it is also “tricked up like Jehovah,” the Puritan ethos or its descendant the capitalist ethos or its ancestor the monotheistic ethos. “They were angry when we were so hungry / for the nourishment, God” refers not only to the Laws of Moses that ban certain actual foods, but to the banning of some food of the soul, of some experience. “They snatched off our amulets.”

  •

  they whine to my people, these entertainers, sellers

  they play upon their bigotries (upon their fears

  Maximus cries.

  •

  At the end of the nineteenth century, when William James was writing his Psychology and James Frazer his Golden Bough, even intelligent men, men with something larger than small-town minds, still thought, not of all men being civilized in a variety of civilizations, but of “civilized” men and of “primitives” or savages, and of “advanced” civilizations and “retarded” civilizations. It was a late version of the old Christian sense of the City and the wilderness—heathen land or pagany; or back of that of the older division between the City and the barbarian world.

  But today there are some, men in every field of thought and feeling who begin to picture in their work a species of humanity, a “we” where Australian bushman and Manhattan cityman each have community, where mud beehive forms and concrete tower forms are differing, contrasting but not opposing, expressions of being men. “There is no more striking general fact about language,” Edward Sapir writes in 1921 in Language, “than its universality. One may argue as to whether a particular tribe engages in activities that are worthy of the name of religion or of art, but we know of no people that is not possessed of a fully developed language. The lowliest South African Bushman speaks in the forms of a rich symbolic system that is in essence perfectly comparable to the speech of the cultivated Frenchman. . . . Scarcely less impressive than the universality of speech is its almost incredible diversity. Those of us that have studied French or German, or, better yet, Latin or Greek, know in what varied forms a thought may run.”

  THE CHRIST AS PERSON OF THE POEM

  Helen is at Troy; Helen is in Egypt. The spectral Helen in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is desire “performed in twinkling of an eye,” Beauty that would draw a man’s soul forth from him. The Helena of Goethe’s Faust is an intelligence, where Joy and Beauty are known in one and lost. One Helen is the other Helen. Herodotus will be concerned to find the historical Helen: the truth was, he tells us, she was in Egypt. The Trojan Helen was a wraith of men’s minds. But the poetic truth has to do with the existence of a real unity or creation seeking its fullness in many personae, in many places, in many times. We will never understand the power of the mistress of Simon Magus if we believe her to be only a whore from Tyre, for it is an important part of her meaning that she is also the great Helen who was born from the egg of Leda, and was daughter of Zeus.

  •

  So too the persona of the Christos is continually created in the imagination. Mythos and drômenon, gospel and rite, are events first of poetry. This god Christ will not rest in an historical identity, but again and again seeks incarnation anew in our lives. The religious will takes the Divine as given, “uncreated,” and seeks to use the god as an authority against any further creation of the idea of the god, drawing upon the spell of magic voice and action in which the Christ is real to convert, yet working thruout to establish prohibition and dogma to limit the creative energy to the immediate purpose. The powers that a Paul must use to set up one Church or one authoritative Christ in the place of many meanings and images, against the authors, come not from an historical Jesus where the truth of things can be located and done with but come from the fullness of a person that is hidden in the creative life, from a dangerous source. Creation and persuasion contend in the use. The cause must be drawn from the expression.

  “Yet every cause,” Burckhardt writes in Force and Freedom, “is in some way alienated and profaned by being expressed.” “In the course of time, religion realizes how freely free art is behaving, moulding its material.” The Church seeks to impose an unfree style, “the function of which is to represent only the sacred aspect of things, i.e., it must abandon the totality of the living object.”

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  “Art is the most arrant traitor of all, firstly because it profanes the substance of religion,” he continues. For the artist there is no established Truth, but events, ideas, things have their truth hidden in a form yet to be realized. “Secondly, because it possesses a high and independent selfhood, in virtue of which its union with anything on earth is necessarily ephemeral and may be dissolved at any time. And those unions are very free, for all that art will accept from religion or any other themes is a stimulus. The real work of art is born of its own mysterious life.”

  •

  It is in the mystery-life of poem and novel, picture and drama, that Helen and Christ emerge as eternal persons of our human spirit, and again and again must be drawn from their conventions into their own life. Here the high and independent selfhood of each work of art is the vehicle of the reincarnation. H.D. working anew the Christos-Amen of her War Trilogy must free her figure from the predispositions of old ideas towards a life of its own. “The Christos-image / is most difficult to disentangle,” she writes in The Walls Do Not Fall:

  from its art-craft junk-shop

  paint-and-plaster medieval jumble

  of pain-worship and death-symbol,

  The difficulty of the separation coming into the operation of the poem, the medieval jumble and even the junk shop have been brought up and must haunt the picture then as a negative image. So Fitts finds his after-impression that the poem is “pseudo-medieval.”

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  The Christ that is “the Presence . . . spectrum-blue, / ultimate blue ray” is not medieval but belongs to the Alexandrian orientalizing Greek world, to Gnostic doctrines of the Light Body and to neo-Platonic theories of the soul being moved spiritually thru the senses. This world of thought was revived by the Renaissance Platonists, following Pletho and Ficino. Sound was thought of as spiritually effective because it had movement, but color, though it came second to sound in order, was not primary because it was thought of as a static appearance. Following Newton’s demonstration that white light could be broken up by a prism into the spectral colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, theosophists identified the seven colors with the seven archangels, as before they had so identified the scale of seven tones. And following the early nineteenth century theories of color as vibration, the whole world of spirit was identified with a world of vibrations in which now color and sound were equally primary as spiritual forces. Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art speaks theosophically as well as psychologically when he tells us that in the color blue “We feel a call to the infinite, a desire for purity and transcendence. Blue is the typical heavenly color; the ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest.” “Rare as radium,” H.D. describes her blue ray, “as healing.”

  It is a rarefied Christ H.D. would evoke
here, the power of a pure color, the presentation of a dream where “deftly stage-managed” the bare, clean meeting-house interior suggests the spirituality of innerness, the language of inner light of the Moravian communion stripped bare of the morbid fascination with the wounds and blood of the Crucified. At last, it is the image from Velasquez that emerges and here where the terror and agony that would “stun us with the old sense of guilt” is hidden by lowered eye-lids, in the remove of high art, the figure is accepted.

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  But, “most difficult to disentangle,” in its high and independent selfhood, the persona is haunted thruout by past lives. Long before the art-craft junk-shop of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before the dolls of Christ with up-rolled eyes, leaking piety from nailed palms, there was another Image that appeared in the Gothic world of Christ in torment. In a Christendom torn by savage wars of church against church and church against heresy the very ground of Christ was one of abject and evil suffering. With the great plagues of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sweeping the crowded populations of the new cities, not only wounds but sores ran from the Image. Is it against such Images, as if they were not true—against the Christ of Perpignan in the fifteenth century or the Christ of Grünewald in the sixteenth century—that H.D. would avoid the “medieval jumble / of pain-worship and death-symbol” and pose the Image of the Velasquez crucifixion?