The H.D. Book

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

  •

  This must be an oldest and most common magic of women—the dropping of a glove or a kerchief or a scarf or fan, some hint of disclosure that must be acknowledged and returned. Here the scarf is lure.

  •

  In Helen in Egypt night after night Achilles had watched the phantom Helen on the walls of Troy signal with her scarf. The information here—between the fold of Aphrodite’s radiant vesture in Homer’s narrative, and the scarf-magic of Mary Magdalene in H.D.’s The Walls Do Not Fall, the everyday magic of women to cast lures in the way of would-be lovers, and the scarf of the phantom Helen that had captured Achilles’ gaze and maybe his soul in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt—the pattern is musical. The cloak or veil or scarf of a woman may not be symbolic but thematic. In “Palinode” of Helen, book four, we are told: “The symbolic ‘veil’ to which Achilles had enigmatically referred now resolves itself down to the memory of a woman’s scarf, blowing in the winter-wind”. Crossing Lethe, Achilles loses his sense of the War: only the salt air and a gull hovering

  seemed real, and an old sailor

  who greeted me as a lost stranger,

  resting his gnarled hands

  on the oars, where would you go?

  I did not know,

  I saw her scarf

  as the wind caught it

  one winter day; I saw her hand

  through the transparent folds,

  and:

  I only remember the turn

  of a Greek wrist,

  knotting a scarf

  Achilles tells us later. And we remember the steps in the magic between Mary Magdalene and Kaspar (1) “and her scarf slipped to the floor,” (2) “As he stooped for the scarf,” (3) “and as he straightened,” (4) “as his hand just did-not touch her hand,” (5) “as she drew the scarf toward her,” (6) “as he dropped his arm in the second half-second” and in the seventh step

  what he saw was a woman of discretion,

  knotting a scarf,

  Style is an effort to exorcise or to control the magic or glamour of sound in music, stone in sculpture or evocation in words. The effort in style is to increase an awareness of the rationale of the works. Thinking now of the lure of women’s hair and dress, we see that in periods of style women cut their hair or keep it most in place, and that style in dress means the effortful projection of effect—all aims at increasing our awareness of what is there as a thing in itself. Sorceresses wear their hair coiled and loosened, their robes flowing and with scarves and bracelets, pinpoints of jewel-light and beads, for they do and undo their hair and dress weaving their spells. Lure is the opposite of style; the sentence and thought must wander to distraction before the reader becomes hopelessly involved. And hopeless involvement is the underlying psychic need of the magician. Had magic intended power over all things it could have found power, but the deep desire the magician hides from himself is the bewilderment he seeks. Lucifer does not betray, he brings to light our secret wishes to be undone.

  I

  Aineias all but mortally wounded—the crushing of his thigh is itself a step in another magic—the crippling or anticipation of divine retribution (as in vaccination we anticipate the disease we fear)—cannot rise. “The darkness of night veiled his eyes” Homer tells us, and it is in this confusion of the selves, this breach of the war itself where Aineias is no longer aware of the war, that Aphrodite is able to spread this fold of her own vesture.

  We are in this passage of Homer in some charged account of the most dangerous passages of one magic—Aphrodite’s—entering the field of another magic—the War—where it has no powers. Aphrodite here is bereft. It is my sense here, not Homer’s, that what happens is that Aineias is partly aware of the battle around him, partly in the deep night where his mother’s power may help him; and in this partial awareness of the battle, he threatens his mother’s art. Aphrodite herself becomes vulnerable wherever thru Aineias the reality of the battle may invade.

  Wounded, with a great cry she lets fall her son: “him Phoebus Apollo took into his arms and saved him in a dusky cloud.” The magic is the same magic Aphrodite had attempted but could not carry thru because Aineias was her son and she was undone in him. Apollo has no such psychic share and we see now the steps of this magic substitution as it parallels the substitution of Helen recounted first by Euripides.

  The steps are these:

  1. The god casts a glamour or vesture or sheath at a point of confusion in the human consciousness. As in the Iliad, Aphrodite can enter upon Aineias’s swoon, where “the darkness of night veiled his eyes” and substitute for that darkness “a fold of her radiant vesture”, and then in turn in the cry or dismay of the goddess, Apollo can take over “in a dusky cloud.” So, too, perhaps less clearly than a swoon, but certainly a confusion, in the confusions of gossip and emotion after Paris’s winning Helen and before his taking her—think how much this is like the confusion of falling in love that opens a place for daemonic interference—Hermes, in Euripides’ Helen, spirits away the actual Helen.

  I myself was caught up by Hermes

  sheathed away

  in films of air

  2. The god moves the protégée from the breach to a refuge. In the Iliad, Aineias is removed from the battle to the temple of Apollo in Pergamos where he is glorified. In Helen of Euripides, Helen is set down in Egypt, having secretly the glory of marital honor.

  Yet I have heard

  from the god Hermes that I yet shall make my home

  in the famous plain of Sparta with my lord, and he

  shall know I never went to Ilium, had no thought

  of bed with any man.

  3. The god creates a double to stand-in for the hero. Apollo “made a wraith like unto Aineias’ self.” Hera, in Euripides’ play,

  angry that she was not given the prize,

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

  so Helen tells us:

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

  a breathing image out of the sky’s air,

  We note here that the double or doppelganger is a phantom cast upon the air, a mirage, an atmospheric seeming—related then is the clouding of consciousness in the first step of the magic. The shield of radiant vesture, dusky cloud or films of air, becomes the vehicle in which the hero is transported and at the same time is the medium in which the wraith appears.

  •

  This high magic, like the fascinations of the scarf, has its counterpoint in the magic of everyday life. It is the very nature of confusion that we are not in some sense ourselves; “it is not the true you,” those about us say. We are shielded on our swooning or panicking or being upset or falling in love and in a way are not really there. When the time of confusion passes our true self seems to emerge, untouched by it all. And it is very difficult remembering our own composed accounts of acute trouble—to believe that we were really ourselves at all. Aineias torn in two between his craven terror as he is thrown to the ground and his heroic identity, and Helen torn in two between her faithfulness to her husband and her temptation for “the love that might have been for Paris and me” prepare a ground not extraordinary in human experience for magic to take hold.

  •

  The statement may be that tho the wraith of Aineias continued in battle, the real Aineias was to be glorified in refuge; tho the wraith of Helen continued in adultery and cause of the war, the real Helen was to be sought after but faithful—a counterpart of Penelope. The formula of the magic involved is on one side of the equation an unreal but apparent person in the real situation and on the other side a real but hidden person in an unreal or foreign refuge from the situation.

  II

  Not only Helen, then, in the narrative traditions of the Trojan war had a wraith so that behind the apparent truth of the war was a very different truth waiting for its own denouement. Aineias, himself, had a wraith, was in some sense duplicit. In his study Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics, Rhys Carpen
ter relates the tradition of Helen of Egypt to a suspicion that the victory at Troy itself is a substitute for an Egyptian disaster:

  On the walls of the temple at Medinet Habu in Egypt is a series of reliefs depicting a great naval battle in which the forces of “the northern countries . . . who came from their lands in the islands in the midst of the sea” (as the accompanying hieroglyphic text declares) are being annihilated by the navy of Rameses III. The date is about 1190 B.C., almost precisely the year of the sack of Troy according to one of the most widely favored classical computations of that distant event. The often-quoted account in the Egyptian record may bear one more repetition here:

  The Isles were restless, disturbed among themselves . . .

  As for those who advanced together on the sea . . . a net was prepared to ensnare them . . . At the Nile mouths the full flame was in front of them, a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore: they were dragged, hemmed in, laid low on the beach, slain, made into heaps: their ships and their goods were as if fallen into the sea.

  •

  “True,” Carpenter continues, “the Egyptian texts chronicle the utter defeat”—etc. to end of paragraph pp. 62–63.

  •

  There was at Troy a defeat hidden in the midst of triumph; a triumph hidden in the midst of defeat. In the Iliad where only hints of Egypt appear—Carpenter points out that the suspicion that Helen never went to Troy may haunt the Odyssey, if not the Iliad. Carpenter points out that Menelaus and Helen of the Odyssey go to Egypt after the fall of Troy—and that Ulysses-Odysseus upon his return in his account for his years to the old swineherd says he had been in Egypt seven years. The return of Odysseus from the fabulous victory at Troy is thru waters of a nightmare troubled sea towards the real homeland where he arrives having lost all men and ships. In the tradition of Hesiod, Stesichorus,—Herodotus and Euripides—the cause of the war was fraudulent.

  •

  So, too, we in our own time have seen two fraudulent wars and prepare now for a third, where no cause is raised but the threat of disaster. Freedom, Christianity, democracy—whatever wraith upon the walls to be defended or liberated—has not been in our lands since the beginning nor in the hands of the enemy, but spirited away to Egypt while we must be at it again to loose ourselves and our forces in the ruin of cities.

  this to drain our mother earth of the burden and the multitude

  of human kind

  Helen says in Euripides’ play.

  . . . fought for me (except it was not I but my name only)—

  •

  The tradition that Helen was in Egypt—the tradition in which out of Euripides (and, as we shall develop later, out of Goethe) H.D. takes her narrative dramatic poem is record of man’s self-betrayal in love and in war. These two greatest of confusions are fields of deception—the issue in either must be as mixed as the ground of desires intolerably mixed that seeks its satisfaction there. In Helen we see the issue of love, the issue of war.

  III

  “Playing with fire,” the common expression goes for the confusions of passionate love and for the confusions of war and we may live in a very confusion of war now for the threats and fears now on all sides: the expression has grown dreadful and trite, “You are playing with fire.”

  •

  In the “Palinode” of Helen in Egypt, Achilles, drawn to the shores of Egypt because the magic of the scarf survives the waters of Lethe, finds Helen or she finds him—they meet upon a shore where he has been ship-wrecked from the Ship of Death and she had been waiting for the arrival of her soul-mate. In “Palinode” it is Achilles, but she knows it is also someone else. He gathers brushwood and builds her a fire. Then the playing with fire that follows the playing with the scarf begins.

  Because a magic is here we watch, as we watched the scarf, how the scene is developed—but that was the scarf-magic of Mary Magdalene and Kaspar in The Flowering of the Rod, this other scarf magic lies ahead in the “Palinode,” or it shows itself in the scene over the bonfire on the beach.

  •

  Achilles lights the fire with an old flint he finds in his pocket.

  “I thought I had lost that”, he says and then:

  “I am ship-wrecked, I am lost,”

  “I am a woman of pleasure,” Helen says.

  •

  He has come with the mistaken flame of the war in his eyes

  the bane of battle

  and the legions lost

  and another “sea-enchantment in his eyes” of Thetis, his mother. He had kindled the fire for Helen, and now she seeks to use it, confusing herself with Thetis, his mother—and thru that confusing (as thru a scarf he had once seen her hand) showing her hand.

  A night-bird flies up. “Strive not,” Helen says to him when he questions:

  it is dedicate

  to the goddess here, she is Isis”;

  “Isis,” he said, “or Thetis,” I said,

  •

  They are playing with fire, asking who are you? where are we? in such a way that the scene begins to throng with powers beyond their own persons. Feeding the fire with the presence of Thetis his mother and Zeus her father so that when she reaches for a blackened stick in the burning, she is not sure whether she reached to blacken her face, to mask herself among the dead or whether it was an ember.

  •

  The thought of “Helen, hated of all Greece” burns in him as an ember

  as the flint, the spark

  of his anger,

  the poem tells us. There are not only persons but times that begin to throng now, and a magic rage possesses Achilles—it is the War that arrives here with all its hosts. The actual night-bird that “hooted past”—such is the pull of the magic to shape things towards its necessities—becomes anonymous even as it flies.

  he started, “a curious flight,

  a carrion creature—what—”

  (dear God, let him forget);

  What?—forget what? It is the name, owl, that he is prevented in the magic from reaching—and “a carrion creature” leads, as Helen saying “it is dedicate to the goddess here” leads us not to owl-Athene but to the fatal substitution vulture-Isis, “or Thetis” she adds, for the sea Achilles had been over was the sea of the dead, and had Helen blackened her face he would have seen the mask of the carrion-Mother. He does, even in her gesture see that face: “Hecate!” he cries.

  •

  By the actual night-bird, they evoke the vulture, bird of Isis; by the actual sea beyond the fire on the beach, they evoke Thetis; by the vulture and by Thetis and by the actual blackened stick they evoke Hecate and the hosts of the dead. So that all the human loss is there, the sea of the dead, the dead lost at sea in the war:

  the fury of the tempest in his eyes

  the bane of battle

  and the legions lost

  Now the fire on the beach is another fire.

  consuming the Greek heroes;

  it is the funeral pyre;

  By the actual flint, he begins the playing with fire; by the actual ember they evoke his anger, but his anger is desire. Hatred of Helen, hatred of his mother, hatred of the carrion Isis, evokes the legions of the war as the Holocaust—the fire sweeping the whole of the man, consumed with passion. Achilles leaps forward to strangle Helen

  what heart-break, what unappeasable

  ache, burning within his sinews,

  He leaps towards his own confusion, for there is a scarf about her neck or, she tells us,

  it was they, the Holocaust,

  a host, a cloud or a veil

  who encircled, who sheltered me,

  when his fingers closed on my throat;

  •

  Sept. 1 / 61

  There were only these things to work with:

  the sea, the shore, the night

  as we walk, heel and sole

  leave our sandal-prints in the sand,

  though the wounded heel treads lightly

  and more lightly follow,

&
nbsp; the purple sandals

  his limp then; the brushwood fagots, the flint, the fire, the blackened sticks then and the ember, the night-bird, her purple sandals (“I am a woman of pleasure,” she could suggest), her scarf or veil, his “shield, helmet, greaves.”

  •

  How to the carrion-bird vulture, Isis; hawk, Horus; and swan, Zeus come! Mother, son, and Father gathering in along one line of association. And in those wings of the night-bird greater wings of the war itself, feathered with all of the dead, a thousand arrows and one—the arrow in war that mortally wounded immortal Achilles. Thetis was to blame for that, for the fatal vulnerable spot, the thousand ships. “This is the spread of wings.”

  •

  In the poem to these actual things, where the man and the woman huddle over a fire in the night on the beach, a gathering begins. This is not the magic of symbols, but the magic that goes on in the practices of psychoanalysis—the magic of associations until a host of incidents, impersonations, tendencies precipitate what is called “the content” and in the precipitation the crisis. Not those streams of consciousness that in Proust’s magic opened out from one impression vistas of the past recaptured; but as if this magic were reversed and all the glowing and modulated fabric were to be called in from its dispersion to increase the pressures of a single moment.

  •

  They seek to draw themselves out of the fire—ash and ember; to look from the blackened mask, to flame forth anew out of the things at hand. They seek too to resurrect their old selves, to bring forth just what was intolerable—the spread of wings, the fascination of the veil. The spark must be the spark of war and love, Eros and Eris is one. The holocaust itself, the burnt offering of Iphigenia and the wholesale burning of the war-dead is needed for Achilles to be this Achilles, Helen to be this Helen.