The H.D. Book

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

  Let us measure defeat

  in terms of bread and meat,

  and continents

  in relative extent of wheat

  fields;

  thru Olson’s “Variations Done for Gerald Van de Wiele” which brings forward into the contemporary world Rimbaud’s Season in Hell: “Le Bonheur! Sa dent, douce à la mort, m’avertissait au chant du coq,— ad matutinum, au Christus venit,—dans les plus sombres villes:” “what soul / isn’t in default?” Olson takes up Rimbaud’s words in his own:

  can you afford not to make

  the magical study

  which happiness is? do you hear

  the cock when he crows? do you know the charge,

  that you shall have no envy, that your life

  has its orders, that the seasons

  seize you too, that no body and soul are one

  if they are not wrought

  in this retort? . . .

  •

  In the dream of the spring it was the work itself that was the magical study.

  •

  This work, this sense of what happiness is, is somehow missed or mussed in American experience. The O.E.D. gives among the roots of the word: Old Norse verkja, virkja, to feel pain; Danish virke, to operate, act, weave. Greek organon, organ; orgion, orgy. Work then was once of the earth that brings forth in travail and is still, where the real work is done, where the fields are tilled and planted, the clothes are worked with pains-taking craft, the stone cut to fine measure, the sentences brought to their exacting senses. And we’ve to hold this happiness, against the prevailing sense in which happiness is when and where we do not suffer or take pains. As against that Declaration of Independence, we must remember now the communality we have with all men, our interdependence everywhere in life.

  •

  Is there vir, man, and virtus, manliness, in the word virkja, suffering? Is there orgaeo, to swell and teem with moisture; is there orgeon, “a citizen chosen from every demos, who at stated times had to perform certain sacrifices, being in fact a sort of priest”; is there orge, “one’s temper, temperament, disposition, nature, heart”; is there orgizo, “to make angry, provoke to anger, irritate,” among the roots of this idea of Work or Life, as the O.E.D. tells us there is organon, “an instrument for making or doing something” and orgion, “secret rites, secret worship”? What part has that Man-God upon the Cross that is also the Life Tree in our American right claimed as the pursuit of happiness?

  •

  In the Gospel of St. John at Ephesus, the Christ tells John: “And if thou givest ear to my round dance, behold thyself in me the speaker. And when thou seest what I do, keep my mysteries silent. If thou dancest, ponder what I do, for thine is this human suffering that I will suffer.”

  •

  For most Christians of church faiths, their Master suffered for their sins, a surrogate. Here Christ is Redeemer. It is this truth: that in our concern to redeem, to save or keep alive the wholeness of what we are alive, we discover the work to do.

  •

  For the Gnostic Christians, their teacher was two—the one, the human Jesus, suffered, and the other, the divine Logos, did not suffer. Here again there is truth, for to know suffering as an act of the soul’s drama is something other than suffering, is more than a happy thing. Ill hap or good hap, the happening or chance, belongs to the inertia of man’s pleasure or displeasure. But in searching out what we suffer or enjoy not as happening to us or belonging to us but as belonging to a design or creation, taking our strength there, we discover a new person who does not suffer but who creates in our suffering, coming into an increase of meaning.

  •

  So, for the poet, for the man already transformed in making some work of art, for the carpenter, the meaning of the crucifixion scene is not the unhappiness of a lynching party nor the mere suffering of a passion, but it belongs to a poem in the actual world, the fulfillment of a prophecy or story-form. There is in the man and in the god a perfume and a radiance, a flower that portends; and in the passions of the two in One upon the cross or tree, we see the ripeness of what the story demands, the mystery of the whole thing in which nails, blood, and the cry, the Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani are designed to fit, to charge with meaning to the utmost degree, the crisis of the poem enacted.

  •

  In our work we lose our selves, our independence, the Jesus of each one, or it is fused and enters into the radiance of another power of the same being, another person we imagine in the community of language and our work there, that we call the poet. It is in passion, in suffering, that, even as we cry out, we become workers, organs, instruments of our Art that is fateful or formal. The Christ is the music, the sense of needed form, the “over Love, a new Master.”

  In the Gospel of John it is called the Round Dance. “If thou wouldst understand that which is me,” the Christ says: “know this: all that I have said, I have uttered playfully—and I was by no means ashamed of it. I danced, but as for thee, consider the whole. . . . ”

  •

  This being in suffering and in happiness and yet—and just there—being in the Dance or play is the experience of being in the poem, awakening to the demand of the language. We know it as longing unrequited, as our voluntary quest for fulfillment or fate or justice, which is not happiness, la bonne chance, nor the freak of chance that stands in Zen for the immediacy, but is Lord over all, the command of What Is that it come into Its Own, that has Beauty and fullness.

  •

  In the poem this fatefulness is the commanding sense of the form, of an inner course in action, a power then of the orge, of one’s temper or nature or heart in action. The volition of the artist is to fulfill the form or will that he feels or discovers in the thing he is making.

  •

  The man’s soulfulness disturbs the poet’s spirit; and the poet stands above the cross of anger or of love-anguish, and yet will himself cry out, as the Christ says to John that He cried: “And if those whom thou seest by the cross have as yet no single form, then all the parts of him who descended have not been gathered together.” It is in the poem that the parts of the poet are gathered together. Where in terms of the Egyptian mysteries, we see Isis as the Muse or Mother of the poet, gathering together, remembering (as in Greece, Mnemosyne was mother of the arts) the Osiris-Christ in the Horus, the sufferer and redeemer of the poem in the new work and its worker.

  •

  “Liberty” too is a demand of the anti-poetic. The poet cannot take liberties in the poem. For just there, where the arbitrary, self-expressive or self-saving, where the self-conscious voice comes, the idiotes, private howl or moan or the urbane sophisticated tone breaks or takes over from the communal voice. In the communal consciousness, the idiot is a member; is, in a sense, any and every individual member if he be separated from the imagination of the whole. But self-expression and likewise self-possession in verse would set up an “I” that is the private property of the writer in the place of the “I” in which all men may participate.

  •

  The “our,” “my,” “us,” “we,” “I,” “me” of the poet’s work, and the other “you,” “your,” “they,” “them” are pronouns of a play, members or persons of a world drama in division. These are no more at liberty, no more seek liberty than they pursue happiness, for the sense of poetic justice or form that is history reveals them all as actors or chorus of a work that now we see is a self-creative drama at play. The ideals of the revolution are also its hubris. Under the banners or the oracles, the content of the dream must be played out to its resolution, which we see in the burned and smoking countryside of the dream.

  •

  “All that I have said, I have uttered playfully,” this god says.

  II.

  It was to unmask play that Freud set about his life task. “Mein goldener Sigi,” his mother still called him in her nineties, Jones tells us. “From his mother came, according to him, his ‘sentimentality’.” Had she given h
im his name Sigmund? For Sigmund—and Freud was to be a hero of the psyche-world—Sigmund belonged, not to the Jewish consciousness, but to the Germanic fairytale or play world. Freud was born with a caul; that was part of his mother’s legend of him. “Thus,” Jones writes, “the hero’s garb was in the weaving at the cradle itself.” Freud had genius, and to have genius is to be a member of the Dream, to be a creature of wish, of the mother’s wish (incestuous wish, Freud was to say) or prophecy of a great man in her son. Freud was to call this Mother-world of wish and fulfillment or failure the realm of the Pleasure-Principle.

  •

  The whole play of Freud’s mind, his true heroism, belongs to that source. His life task was to expose the fiction of dreams at work in man’s reality, to show up wishers for what they really were. He could descend in this guise of the scientist upon the nursery world with a vengeance, as if there would be an end of childish things and a full confession of infantile guilts. “We will have none of that nonsense in here,” we seem to hear some Victorian papa declare. Whatever phantasies attended the wetting of the bed, his father demanded an accounting for what really happened. “It was from such experiences,” Jones relates, “that was born his conviction that typically it was the father who represented to his son the principles of denial, restraint, restriction, and authority; the father stood for the reality principle, the mother for the pleasure principle.” But what, we might begin to ask, in this Freudian determination, did the child stand for? The father’s voice and the mother’s voice might direct Freud, but he agreed with the father that the child was wrong. There was to be no childish principle.

  •

  Among those childish things had been playing religion. There must have been the play of the name Sigmund, the incestuous hero of the Nibelungen saga. There had been too another plaything. Freud’s nurse, Jones tells us, was a Czech: “and they conversed in that language, although Freud forgot it afterwards.” He may have put it away; “repressed it” is the later Freudian term. “That prehistoric old woman,” he called her later, meaning perhaps to deny that she belonged to his history. For she was Catholic, Jones tells us, and more importantly, “She implanted in him the ideas of Heaven and Hell, and probably also those of salvation and resurrection. After returning from church the boy used to preach a sermon at home and expound God’s doings.” There may then have been caustic, if not angry, reproof from Freud’s liberal, free-thinking father at his infant son’s taking up with such alien ideas.

  Let only Ananke and Logos be our gods, he proposes in The Future of an Illusion, where in the name of Science he belabors religion—as wish, but then as failing to repress evil wishes. Sometimes seeming to uphold the child: “I think it would be a very long time before a child who was not influenced began to trouble himself about God and the things beyond this world. Perhaps his thoughts on these matters would then take the same course as they did with his ancestors; but we do not wait for this development; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion at a time when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping their import.” It is never clear in The Future of an Illusion that there might have been a particular child protesting here that he had been led astray. But there had been a time when Freud’s beloved nurse and he had formed just such a “we,” talking a language together, Czech and Christian, foreign to the Jewish and rationalistic persuasion of his fathers, a vernacular eloquence such as Dante says “we acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses,” that provided the medium that nursery languages provide for children of making an other world, where Father and Mother, reality and pleasure principles, give way to the Child, to the principle of play or enacting what is, a sense of form that demands its creative ends over whatever reality or pleasure.

  There must have been some moment of apology, of putting the blame off on Nurse, of recanting, that we see reflected in the plea: “Perhaps his thoughts on these matters would then take the same course as they did with his ancestors.” For liberal and free-thinking as the senior Freud was, he must have, with humorous and kindly point perhaps, but with the severity of the nineteenth century Papa surely, reminded the infant Freud (he was barely two, or two and a half, Jones tells us) who disputed like the infant Jesus in the temple that this God of the Catholic faith was the enemy of his ancestors. If the nurse was Catholic, she plays the role in Freud’s childhood of the heretic. Was she a Moravian Czech? H.D. did not know this story of Freud’s old nurse, but along the lines of her own association in Tribute to Freud she drew the course religion had taken with her ancestors, the way of the Unitas Fratrum or Moravian Brotherhood, and the way she had taken in psychoanalysis into one design. “Livonia, Moravia, Bohemia—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.”

  Freud remembers that he gave his nurse all his pennies, and Jones remarks of the memory: “Perhaps it got connected with her dismissal for theft later on when he was two and a half years old.” Did she play the Promethean role, stealing the fire that the father had forbidden the child, the fire of the soul’s realms, Heaven and Hell, and of the soul’s drama of salvation and resurrection, that Freud was to bring from the cathedral into the doctor’s office in the name of scientific reason?

  The Future of an Illusion is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. “Certainly this is true of the man into whom you have instilled the sweet or bitter-sweet poison from childhood on.” But this man is Freud himself, the man who followed his genius, his Sigmund, to lay bare the incest-wish in the psyche, his life work with dream and play, his obsession with the City of God or Rome. “But what of the other, who has been brought up soberly?” he asks. This man is that other person of Freud, who lays down the conditions under which dreams and play can come into the question at all. There was truth, William James saw, in the worlds of fiction—it was the truth of religion and poetry in one. But for Freud that truth might be various was at times intolerable. It was his lasting communication that the heroic struggle for the reality principle took place in the earliest years. In the little scene some intolerable action takes place: the beloved Nurse is banished, the child surrenders childish things and undertakes his father’s ways. But the “prehistoric old woman” that Freud tells us was ugly too is still to be banished from the thoughts of the Master in his seventy-first year. It was never to be done; the father was never entirely to win over the child in Freud. He wrote to Ferenczi while The Future of an Illusion was still in press: “Now it already seems to me childish; fundamentally I think otherwise; I regard it as weak analytically and inadequate as a self-confession.” The dramatic fiction remained, the ‘As If’ reality could not be dismissed.

  •

  As it is played at the close of the second act of Wagner’s Die Walküre, first produced in 1857 when Freud was a babe in arms.

  Wotan, the Father-God, drives out Brunnhilda, his own Psyche or Sympathy. He had commanded, “Death to Sigmund! This be the Valkyrie’s work.” She defends Sigmund against the ancestral law. “In greatest need, I must falsely abandon the true one!” she cries. She becomes then an exile from the Father, dwelling in his wrath; and just there, she becomes Nurse or Muse of Sigmund in his incestuous love for Siglinda. The hero, shielded by his Valkyrie, strikes out to kill Siglinda’s husband, but even as he aims his blow, Wotan as Father appears. “A reddish glow breaks through the clouds, heralding Wotan, who stands above Hunding” so that the son’s sword is shattered and the husband’s spear strikes home.

  •

  Did Freud never question or search out his namesake in that old story? There were, he argued, instinctual wishes “born anew with every child.” These he believed most real and grievous—“such instinctual wishes are those of incest, of cannibalism, and of murder.” But there were other wishes that appeared to Freud not with the reality of instincts but with the unreali
ty of inhibitions or illusions. “Think of the distressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble mentality of the average adult,” he is moved again to argue, thinking here of religious ideals as an adult contagion. Yet he can, identifying with the adult, view religion as a weakness of childhood in the same passage: “From this bondage I am, we are free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes. . . . ”

  “I am reminded,” he tells us proudly, “of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by a peculiarly marked sense of reality. When the children were told a fairy tale, to which they listened with rapt attention, he would come forward and ask: Is that a true story? Having been told that it was not, he would turn away with an air of disdain.”

  Here we are reminded in turn of another scene that Freud does not recall, where Freud himself comes home from the cathedral, from the imaginative world of the Nurse-Mother, of the Christ and Sigmund, to enact before his father a play he had come to know. “To preach a sermon and expound God’s doings,” Jones tells us. But what of the ritual he had seen? In the charmed or incestuous circle of the nursery the mythos had been told. In the temple of the Child a mystery had been seen, the magic transubstantiation of the Mass. What confused, inspired gospel had our two and a half year old Freud to tell and to play out? Here it is not Freud’s son, but Freud’s father who is “distinguished by a peculiarly marked sense of reality”—for the senior Freud had a sense of being Jewish, a sense of being rational, before this insult of Christian fairy tales. “Bitter-sweet poisons,” Freud was to call them later. It is the father who turns from the son “with an air of disdain.”

  •

  Ananke (“external reality” Freud defines it as) is “force, constraint, necessity,” Liddell & Scott tells us: “Fate, destiny”; “actual force, punishment.” It is Freud’s reality principle as a god. For the poets, the lexicon says, it stood for “bodily pain, anguish, suffering.” It had then internal reality. It meant too “like Latin necessitudo, the tie of blood, relationship, kindred.” And Logos is the Christ. Surely that Catholic or perhaps Moravian Nurse, among the bitter-sweet poisons that had included doctrines of Heaven and Hell must have told something of the Jewish Child who was the Logos, expounding the word of God in the temple among the rabbis. He had come to give a new dispensation from the Law of the Father.