The H.D. Book
Page 60
It is the originality of Pound that mars his intelligence. The goods of the intellect are communal; there is a virtu or power that flows from the language itself, a fountain of man’s meanings, and the poet seeking the help of this source awakens first to the guidance of those who have gone before in the art, then the guidance of the meanings and dreams that all who have ever stored the honey of the invisible in the hive have prepared.
IV.
March 29, 1961. Wednesday.
From Bunyan’s Apology to Pilgrim’s Progress:
Would’st read thy self, and read thou know’st not what
And yet know whether thou art blest or not
By reading the same lines? O then come hither,
And lay my Book, thy Head, and Heart together.
—from this verse of Bunyan’s we may go on to the close of H.D.’s poem “Good Frend,” where H.D. calls upon Shakespeare as her author, with “Avon’s Trinity”:
When one is Three and Three are One,
The Dream, the Dreamer and the Song.
Chapter 11
MAY 25, 1961. Thursday.
Glimpses of the Last Day: In the West some intense fire burned, red in the evening. Fires were scattered over the landscape, descending suddenly as if cages or caps of flames had been clamped down from another realm above over men where they were, working in the fields or on their way home, or as if footsteps of angelic orders, fateful and yet oblivious of the individual, had burst into flame. At random the incendiary blows fell and yet with a purpose everywhere to charge the world with the realization of its last day. Just here, and then just here, blows shook the earth, fires broke out, and men swarmed to recover the ground.
The landscape was out of Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony or Brueghel’s Dulle Griet, a countryside with fields and hamlets laid waste by war or by industry and mining. For I have never seen a city under fire, but hitch-hiking thru West Virginia and Pennsylvania, I have seen such desolate and wrathful landscapes at night where man’s devastating work has raised great mountains of slag and left great pits in the earth, burning wastes and befouled rivers that appear an earthly Hell. In the dream, the visitation is, like these actual landscapes, a just rendering of some desire of man’s fulfilled. One of the afterthoughts of the dream was that this Last Day had to do with all men coming into one reality out of the—unreal, I called it in the dream, when I was conferring with the Doctor at the spring. It would be many things for many men but for all at last, not just for men in Europe and Asia but for America too, there would be the fires, the laying waste. It was “the lightning shattered earth and splintered sky” of the poem I have kept as my text, the “zrr-hiss” of Tribute to the Angels.
•
The scene of the Flemish apocalyptic paintings was a pervasive reference. It had transformed or taken over the locus of San Francisco where the Flemish valley lay between Twin Peaks and the Bay, and the far-away incandescence glared out of the darkness of Playland-at-the-Beach, where the Pacific now meant the Abyss itself. The distant circle of burnings was the horizon. The spring, where the Doctor (Charles Olson) and I met to work the drawing of the waters in the primal direction, was in the East—it would have been the Berkeley hills. But here, the reference to my own city was gone (as too, there was no likeness to Olson’s Gloucester). The Place of the Spring was in the high mountains. Yet even as I write this the sense of high mountains seems wrong. I saw the mist-cloud realm of Ibsen’s Professor Rubek and Irene in When We Dead Awaken, as I saw those heights long ago reading the play, and then another high place from Ibsen’s Little Eyolf—for a second, Allmer’s “Upwards—towards the peaks. Towards the stars. And towards the great silence.” Then, replacing the idea of high mountains, I see as I write that the Place of the Spring was a cleft of the Mother Earth between low-lying hills.
The Doctor was certainly Olson, but that certainty did not belong to my first recognition in the dream. The important thing at first was that he was Jewish, not the Messiah, but that other beneficent power, the hidden rabbi, the Zaddik. So I told myself in the dream he is Einstein, he knows the numbers of the cosmos. He may have been Freud—Freud, the new Master over Love in H.D.’s life, but also Freud the Master of dreams. But Freud did not occur to me in the dream itself. No, I thought, it is not Einstein, it’s Charles. As I saw it was Charles, it was in his glance, how those familiar eyes beamed with the thought of our task together at the spring.
As, early in the dream, there had been another poet I knew. The youthful master of the incandescence was Robin Blaser. He existed on two levels or in two orders. In one, as a fellow in that earlier stage where all of us men sometimes courageously battled the fires that sprang up, sometimes cowered in panic, he told me of his dream concerning that incandescence. It was as he told me of it that I first saw that disk of fire. And then, thru his telling, thru his dream within my dream, I saw another Robin—Redbreast, I thought when I woke from the dream, and tried to figure: Who killed Cock Robin? Suggestions of an old rite seemed hidden in the dream figures. Along this line of half-waking digression I was led by that other haunting nursery rime, The Hunting of the Wren. “We will go to the wood, says Robin to Bobbin.” There may have been some distant periphery where the Wren Boys made their rounds. The Robin of the dream may have been Robin Hood, a person of the life drama, like the Child in childhood or the Man in manhood. There was too, ever ready in my post-Freudian associations, “red Breast” and “cock robbing.” But the fact of the dream or vision remains: for the disk was not of fire or flame or destruction but was a pool of heat and light that drew all of us men out of our selves into its incandescence. The Robin of my dream was the fire man I saw long ago in the séance at Woodstock before the War.
So there was the other pun: Blazer. The white that was also red-hot, that burned, that was-to-burn something of me into a black charcoal, and to fire something of me into a radiance, was a blaze, a blazon or sign or seal of God as a pure intensity. Robin Blaser was a shepherd of this place of seal. The incandescence may have been the Fleece then. He was the tender. Now it comes to me that within this radius, this blazon was the spot that flares up, the tender spot as well as the threatening spot.
I was afraid, I told him. As if there were some great pain or agony in the blaze, and yet knowing there was no pain, no agony—only radiance. Robin’s dream made a bridge between the Last Day (my dream time) and the Blazon (his dream place) where it seemed I went to try the fear I had, for I did in the dream anticipate my burning up in the heat to a black clinker, my entering the light.
Yet, with this vision of what was at last, of lasting things, there remained the works of the last days. As Robin tended the region of the incandescence, but also related his dreaming of that place, so I had my work to do. I was among men fighting the fires that sprang up bewilderingly where the steps fell. I was terrified as they were, cowering and praying in the dream that these strokes pass over my head.
Then came the break-thru of astral forms, a streaming down into this landscape, where Bosch’s vision and my own San Francisco were already mingled, of another world, a coming together of universes. Giants and monsters, phantasms of Norse and Greek gods from story-books of childhood, images of past eras, Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, fell as if poured out of their imaginary being into this one time and one world. It was the sign in the dream whereby I knew what must be done. I had known from the beginning and told those about me that we were in the Last Days, in the Glory then. Now the change came.
“The astral worlds have fallen down,” I told those about me. “We must redirect the spring” or “we must draw the springs in the first direction” or “the right direction.”
The Doctor came into the picture then. We went together or we met at the spring to draw forth the waters once more. I told him about the fall of the giant orders into the world. “How can the unreal have as much effect as the real?” I asked.
He was Einstein, Doctor of the Cosmos, and then Olson. Where I see now the cover of Olso
n’s O’Ryan with the giant Orion drawn in his stars by Jess. The falling of the astral worlds may be, then, the falling of the sky, where giant stars and dwarves, monstrous constellations and regents of the planets stream down in the collapse of time. Here, the Doctor and I must restore the Milky Way, the spring of stars that is our universe.
The Doctor had a key to the old science of the spring. I had to find the lock, but now it seems that I draw the waters forth by the physical magnetism of a shaman, witching, pulling invisible reins of the stream with my hands.
“You who are nearest to me,” I said to the Doctor, “are unreal.” I could see thru his form, yet just then he seemed most dear. A sentence of Heraklitus comes to mind now which had been a theme in Olson’s San Francisco evenings in 1957: “Man is most estranged from that which is most familiar.”
The Doctor belonged to a supernatural order. At this moment of estrangement, there was a more powerful return. It was here that his eyes, most Charles’s, beamed upon me, that I saw Charles in the Doctor or thru the Doctor, at once my superior and my companion in the work at the springs.
I.
To have a companion is a happiness. But these were not the springs of happiness but of meaning.
•
“The pursuit of happiness,” of good fortune then, of la bonne heure, good time, that inalienable right that those merchants, bankers and farmers set high who made their Declaration of Independence for these United States, is a vanity, even a vice, when it blinds men to life as a work. Le bonheur comes as a gift. It is easy to think of good times as a gift, but bad times too are a gift. It is the hour itself that comes as a gift, the time of the Work; and the artist learns early that it is not happiness, but what is meaningful, an appointment, what verges upon the mystery of his being, that may be hard to bear, that opens once more, more than happiness or unhappiness, the joy or flower of life. It is not a chance on the wheel of fortune but a chance to work he must seek, where from the many roots of what he is and of what he has known streams of humanity, of animal life, of divine wish, flow towards the beauty that can be terrible, the flower, that precedes the good fruit.
•
“I shall have no peace until I get the subject off my chest,” Pound wrote, sometime in 1932, in his ABC of Economics. He was never to have that peace. The subject itself was to lead him from the claritas of this little book, with its interweavings of ideal and practical views, on to the disturbed and then contentious pamphlets against those great windmills of the capitalist order—the usury of investment capital and the economy of war. “After about forty pages,” he wrote in the ABC, “I shall not ‘descend,’ but I shall certainly go into, ‘go down into’ repetitions and restatements in the hope of reaching this clarity and simplicity.” “ ‘Capital’ for the duration of this treatise implies a sort of claim on others, a sort of right to make others work. My bond of the X and Y railroad is capital. Somebody is supposed to earn at least 60 dollars a year and pay it to me because I own such a bond.”
•
What he wanted was to restore time for the communal good. The necessary work must be distributed among all able to work. This would mean a shorter working day and time for creative work. It meant production for social needs, not for speculation. What Pound wanted was not the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of the good. This taking thought toward the distribution of goods was an extension of early democratic thought in America. It meant finally that all men must be citizens, living in the imagination of the common good, against privilege. Which Adams saw “requires the continual exercise of virtue beyond the reach of human infirmity, even in its best estate.”
•
“Any spare time not absolutely obsessed by worry can be the means to a ‘better life’ ”: this was the crux of Pound’s concern. It was 1932. The Depression—the meaning of “worry”—was economic (as now it is psychological and becoming apocalyptic). For the poor, enslaved by want, idle hours meant jobless hours. For the rich, idle hours meant time to waste, money to waste, profit to waste. Men selling their hours, so that labor came to mean a commodity of so-much time and not a means towards some good, struggled to get more of the profits, to increase the price of work-time, or feared for their livelihood. We have left from the waxing twenties, fat after the holocaust of moneymaking in the war, records of what life was like for those who had lost the goods of the intellect for the commodities of a cultured sensibility: the deracinated drift of Scott Fitzgerald or the inhabitants of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Capitalist society, as Marx had rightly pointed out, exploited materials and men’s labor towards a profit that was empty of meaning. The whole speculative possibility of the market grew up around panics of inflation and depression, sales-manias, war-manias, and time-wasting.
•
“Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work. Leisure is spare time free from anxiety”: that was one side of Pound’s sense, quickened by his knowledge of how men were wasted in the job-commodity market, by the spectacle of drifting rich and destitute poor in the early thirties. The corollary of such leisure as Pound wanted was not only time freed from wage-slavery by a shorter working day but time free for work, for what the artist, the poet of The Cantos, knew as his life work, as other men wanted time free for their households or hobbies. Hours that might be the means for poetry, for taking thought, for singing about the piano in the evening, for crafts, and for the variety of exercises—these leisure hours depend in turn upon hours devoted to the common goods, to the raising of food, the furnishing of clothes, houses, minds, workshops, to distribution and transportation. The two are interdependent. Where anything was done at all, vision and work cooperated in one act. Such leisure could not be earned or given; it could only be created. The rest was exploitation, or obsessional competition in which men strove for an evil or hold over other men, a politics and a business that drove the souls of all before them with threats of war and unemployment.
•
There is a sense in which men’s hours are their souls. This buying of men’s hours under the threat of poverty and war rises in the same history that saw the new order of the devil wherein Mephistopheles buys men’s souls with the lure of happiness. In The Zohar, Moses of Leon in the thirteenth century sees a man’s being as his space and time. Not only must a man care for and account for every cell of his body, but he must account for every second of his life. A man’s being is not his but a communal property, for “his” body and “his” time are held in trust to be returned to God. These men, the Abrahams or Davids of The Zohar, are creatures of a communal imagination. They have no right to themselves or right in themselves. They can not even, we read, judge; for the judgment was with God: it came from their communal identity.
•
What time is, what man is, what work is—these are elements of a use we make of living. Pound’s thematic concern with the nature of economic evil and good must be ours too where we are concerned with evil and good at all.
•
In the late thirties, when I was just coming into young manhood, men still thought and talked about some total social good. Even while “Socialism,” “Communism,” and “Democracy” were written large on banners of contending nations in war, and total turned totalitarian, we had known—as younger men now have not known—a time when it seemed there could have been the choice for a peaceful economy. We had seen the good cast down and a convenient evil taken up and followed. Now in the “Communist” countries and “Democratic” countries alike a new era of military rule begins.
•
H.D., like Pound, shows scars of the experience men had during the Depression years. In 1933 she went to Freud to undertake a work or to become able again to return to work. She was in a depression. The term here is psychological, but the terms cross over—it is economic too. Thus: “obvious sentiment,” she lists in her cross examination of her limits in The Walls Do Not Fall:
folder round a spiritual bank-account,
with credit-loss too starkly
indicated,
•
There is a thematic continuity we must keep, a sense of the appointed work and its time, to which our imagination and our making or poetry must return, to release life from its disappointments. We too, if we would restore the streams of vitality that in the dream are called the spring in the first direction or the spring in the right direction, must know no peace but work in a scene of war, as once men worked in a scene of depression. My sense is not figurative here, for our world economy and politics moves now not by the threat of depression but by the threat or hope of war; and the work to be done—to bring back the place and time, the event or conjunction we have called in this study the Presence or the Present, or to bring ourselves to it—means a change at the roots of the world-order for the good in the place of an evil. As men came to know the depression on a psychological level, we will experience in our turn the war within the psyche.
•
Where the hour, the work, and the body are thought of as terms of outer and inner economy, we begin to understand the burden of Pound’s theme in Thrones:
The temple is holy because it is not for sale
and we see that it is not accidental that it follows upon:
In a buck-board with a keg of money: Damn you, I
said I would get it (the wages).
•
From the “Time is not money, but it is nearly everything else” of ABC of Economics; from “The temple is holy because it is not for sale” of Thrones, we may see deeper into the tenor of Pound’s Usura theme. But now I would gather here another tenor of correspondences where economic practice is a key to spirit, so that to imagine a new spirit, we imagine a new economic practice. So, we’ve got to go to the roots of things, to find new terms or new orders. From H.D.’s: