The H.D. Book

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

  He proceeds to tabulate passages from the two volumes of Sylvie and Bruno where “abnormal states occur.”

  •

  “And also, in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others,” Carroll had written of his first Sylvie and Bruno volume and its child readers: “some thought that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.” The effort in theosophy too was to bring into harmony the seeming conflicts that appear between the graver cadences of Life that were orthodox in Christianity and other cadences of Life in other human religions.

  •

  The eerie voices of the Looking-Glass world do seem out of harmony with orthodox possibilities, but the key to its authenticity (and to the mis-take that parodies of Carroll must make) is that it does belong in its humor, not among trivial farces, but to the graver cadences of the human spirit in its heterodox possibilities. The cult of Childhood, in the work of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, as a realm bordering upon Fairyland or Wonderland and likewise upon the Kingdom of Heavens, the Child as revelation of the divine self and the Dream as revelation of the divine World; and in the Romance, the shifting impersonations of a faërie or phantasy mode: these orders reappear in our work by H.D.

  Sept. 17

  The proposition of Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism: “The individual consciousness, it is argued, cannot be in two places at once. But first of all, to a certain extent it can,” appealed, in a period when belief in the Christian world was newly challenged by developing sciences of geology and biology, to a childish make-believe in Sylvie and Bruno, the belief in the fairy world and the belief in the divine world stand in the same need of a child-like innocence of mind. The graver cadences more and more, like the fun of an open and inventive phantasy, must be carried by the imagination.

  For the theosophists Wonderland, fairyland, dreamland are one in the realm of the Astral light. For Carroll, as a churchman, there is on the one side the letting go of the serious imagination where “God has become a myth, and heaven a poetic fancy” so that “the light of life is gone.” More and more the reality of God seems to belong to the reality of dreams and child-like make-believe. Unless you become like little children, you shall not see the Kingdom of Heaven, took on new meaning. “Heaven” too was an “other” world.

  •

  So in MacDonald’s Lilith, written in 1890, child, dream, sleep, being two places at once—and above all the imagined or fictive real—are keys to its structure.

  •

  “You see that large tree to your left, about thirty yards away?” [asked the Raven] “It stands on the hearth of your kitchen and grows nearly straight up its chimney. That rose-bush is close to the lady at the piano. If you could but hear the music! Those great long heads of wild hyacinth are inside the piano, among the strings of it, and give that peculiar sweetness to her playing.”

  “Pardon me: I forgot your deafness!”

  “Two objects,” I said, “cannot exist in the same place at the same time!”

  “Can they not? I did not know. I remember how they do teach that to you. It is a great mistake—one of the greatest mistakes ever made! No man of the universe, only a man of the world could have said so.”

  •

  Sept. 21

  Back of Helen in Egypt, H.D. tells us, lies Stesichorus of Sicily’s Palinode and Euripides’ Helen in Egypt with the word of a phantom Helen at Troy and of the illusory reason for the War then. But Helen in the play of Euripides is not a magic power, we know nothing there of the real Helen’s complicity in the War. The phantom is a thing of air, cast, not in Helen’s desire but by Hera out of the vanity of Menelaus and Paris. Helen’s hubris is in her deranged matronly propriety: against the memory of Aphrodite’s singing with flute and drums that once had changed the grief of Demeter, and against the passionate orders of the Great Mother Herself; and then, so the chorus accuses Helen, against the abandon, “the whirled course of the wheel in the air.”

  The Helen of H.D.’s phantasia takes from this ancient tradition her other Helen, but she is a complice of that wraith at Troy. She was at once in Egypt and at Troy. The scene of Euripides’ play, no more than Egypt before the house of Proteus, no more than King of Egypt, in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt has become likewise complex: for Egypt is dreamland and Proteus is the agency we find of the dreamer:

  This is Formalhaut’s temple,

  not far from Athens,

  not far from Eleusis,

  yet Egypt; not far

  from Theseus, your god-father,

  not far from Amen, your father

  but dedicated to Isis,

  or if you will, Thetis;

  not far from the blessèd isles,

  the Hesperides, or from Amenti;

  not far from life-in-death,

  another portal, another symbol.

  •

  From the second century we hear news of another Helen. One Simon, who claimed to be an incarnation of “the Great Power,” according to our legend, had learned a magic in Egypt and had found in that magic a Helen or the Helen. The Church Fathers said that Simon’s Helen was a prostitute he had picked up at Tyre. But in the Gnostic circles, where thought moved not towards orthodoxy and dogma but towards a multiplicity of meanings and imagination, this Helen was not only a prostitute, she was the Moon, not only the Moon but also the World-soul; A. E. Waite in his edition of Lévi’s History of Magic tells us that “it is said otherwise that she was Helen of Troy in a previous incarnation.” This Sun-Logos-Simon and this Selene-Anima-Mundi-Helen were persons in magic of a charlatan and a prostitute. This magic, so the rumor went, was practiced in sexual intercourse, was something “known” in each other.

  •

  G. R. S. Mead in his discussion of Simon Magus tells us further there was something about a Fire and a Concealment; the spark and the veil of H.D.’s poem may have their origin in the Graeco-Egyptian Hellenistic world where after the conquests of Alexander a border upon India had been opened. It is the expansion of empire beyond the confines of “western” civilization—in the time of Alexander when the Greek world was exposed to the Indian world and in the time of Victoria, again, when the English world was exposed to the Indian world—that borderlines, not only of race and national character mix, but religions too, wherever thought is not rigidly defensive, fuse. The Alexandrian Helen of Tyre and the Helen of our text come to life and multiplicity of being not only out of the Egg of Leda but also from the sphere of Kama.

  •

  [from Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom: “And in a magical papyrus of the second century we find certain Hindu beliefs mentioned; Isis is compared to My, name and personification of the Buddha’s mother and also of the Great Illusion.”]

  •

  The Simon Magus of Hellenistic Gnostic legend may have known something of the Kama-Loca and sought along the lines of an erotic magic in a proto-Kamasutra to find his apotheosis, his ascension, to become a star. In the Acts of Peter Simon gets high, or flies higher than the Saint.

  •

  And is brought down, deflated in Christian legend, to Hell, to be Simon the Magician. Where Helen is finally only a shadow. For in the rule of orthodoxy, the restrictions of truth between the fourth century and the breaking up of the Holy Roman Empire, all other thought and feeling existed in the extensions of falsehood. Gods became daemons, heroes became ghosts, priestesses became witches, magi became magicians. False faces and false names appear everywhere. If the magic is white you look into a crystal; if the magic is black you look into a mirror. We think of them now as doors to the future, “fortune telling,” we call it. But the mirror-world is the world of Through the Looking Glass and of MacDonald’s Lilith. What we see there is an illumination of things. “Of a familiar type,” Edith Butler notes in Ritual Magic, “is the one in which a pure lad of about ten who has been born in wedlock looks into the stone whilst the Cabalist prays to St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, who was said to have rediscovered the cross of C
hrist.”

  •

  For in the mirror one might have seen, not St. Helena, but Helena of Troy.

  The Faust, we know, called up a wraith of Helen, “Spirits in the shape of Alexander the Great, of his paramour, and of Helen of Troy,” the dramatis personae reads in Marlowe’s play. “Be silent, then,” Faustus says: “for danger is in words.”

  “[Music sounds, and Helen passeth over the stage]”

  •

  Is there some hint of the Helen of the shadows, the familiar of the Kama-Loka, in Marlowe’s phantom? “To glut the longing of my heart’s desire—” Faustus says he would have Helen for his paramour.

  •

  It is from this first Helen of our English tradition that H.D. draws certain themes. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships” is immortal as “And burnt the topless towers of Ilium” somehow is not. And later in the same speech Faustus-Simon cries:

  “Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars”

  •

  So “the legions lost” in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, “the host,” “the holocaust,” are numbered. In “Palinode” II.2 “the thousand-petalled lily; / they are not many, but one;” in “Palinode” II.4 “all the thousand petals of the rose,” but “the thousand sails,” “the thousand feathered darts / that sped them home.” In “Palinode” III.2: “can one weigh the thousand ships / against one kiss in the night?” We recognize in passing the Thousand and One Nights of Shahárazád, “City-freer” Burton notes, told to rescue her sister Dunyázád, “World-freer” or Dinázád “Religion-freer.”

  •

  “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,” Faustus demands or requests. [Kisses her.]

  Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!—

  Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

  Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips.

  •

  This kiss, and the dwelling in a kiss, is a wisdom of the Kamasutra. Or the eroticists or “kamatists” were wise to it. The tongue searches in all adult kisses for an electricity that a child’s kiss has, or “thrill” that floods the body. Sexuality may feed upon this thrill, but—this is our concern here—Heaven feeds there too. We remember the passage in H.D.’s romance Bid Me to Live where the Hesperides, the paradiso is the locus or the presence of the husband where: “she faced the author of this her momentary psychic being, her lover, her husband. It was like that, in these moments. She touched paradise. He too. But he did not think of that.” Had he thought of it, paradise would have touched her. The kiss, the touch, the coming together sought some ultimate exchange or reciprocity.

  •

  “He’s looking for another book—the Hesperides? he’s wandering. He’s not here. No, he wasn’t there. It was almost better when she was alone.

  “All of the Hesperides was there, nearer than the table, than the mantel piece . . . ”

  •

  “This star in the night” Helen calls it. Achilles springing forward in the spark of his anger, or is it pain of death?

  mine, the one dart in the Achilles-heel,

  the thousand-and-one, mine.

  Is there some rumor that in a thousand spermatozoa one may be magic, or as we call it, fecundating, one may be hers? He “covers her” we say of birds; Achilles was no longer Achilles but from the realm of fathers, the pitaloka the Hindus called it, the Father. Zeus then. “This is the spread of wings,” and the eternal angry or blood-reddened Fatherhead giving up into the mothering womb its semen.

  I read the writing when he seized my throat,

  this was his anger,

  they were mine, not his,

  the unnumbered host;

  mine, all the ships,

  mine, all the thousand . . . .

  That one strike, that one come home to Leuké, the white island, the egg-sphere or prayer, the quickened circuits of the child.

  •

  It is the burning ember

  that I remember

  heart of the fire,

  Helen tells us.

  •

  Is the “hieroglyph, repeated endlessly,” that Helen tries to read the code-script of the chromosomes? My legions lost, the father cries;

  “the flower of all-time,

  of all-history,

  my children, my legions”;

  •

  The “arrows” of Eris and then of Eros, the thousand, and the one that strikes home, brought me back then to Kama-Loca of the theosophists, to the Kama-Loka of the Hindus, as Zimmer in Philosophies of India told of him, Puspa-bna “whose arrows are flowers,” lord of the flower-shafts.

  •

  In “Palinode” III.4—the thousand is “a cloud in the night,”

  must I tell him again their name,

  the one name for the thousand lost,

  Eros, the Hawk Horus?

  We begin to realize that the veil is the thousand and the spark that strikes is the one. “A touch in the dark,” it is called in “Palinode” III.5. The veil, itself, may here be what we call “coming” in crude vulgar speech, more true to poetry than the scientific “orgasm” or “ejaculation.” But “orgasm” had something to do with our spark of anger, and ejaculation with our throwing of the thousand and one arrows.

  •

  In VII of “Palinode” the Image of Eidolon of Thetis [“It is Thetis,” H.D. tells us “(Isis Aphrodite)”] says:

  A woman’s wiles are a net;

  they would take the stars

  or a grasshopper in its mesh;

  The stars, the Galaxy, we learned earlier, are the thousand. And, like an echo here or a resonance from an untouched octave, we realize there was one star too.

  what unexpected treasure,

  what talisman or magic ring

  may the net find?

  fishing for a clue or a child or particular star. Proteus reveals to Helen, the shape-shifter to the immortal face:

  when they reach a certain degree

  they are one, alike utterly,

  though Achilles woke from the dark

  and her Lord was cast

  into the lowest depth

  •

  Is Achilles, the mate, Simon the Magus, Faustus the Magician?

  “Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,” Marlowe’s Faustus asks, and then for the thousand-and-one: “and—at last—be saved!”

  •

  yet even Cimmerian embers,

  H.D.’s Helen seems to reply

  burnt out, extinguished and lost,

  will flame anew if God

  wills to re-kindle the spark;

  •

  God may be the Thousand-and-one. In “Palinode” VII.6:

  I have talked with Proteus—or—

  another (whoever he be,

  he manifests variously);

  Nameless-of-many-Names he decrees

  that Helena shall remain

  one name . . . .

  •

  H.D. was familiar with all this; as an initiate of Freud’s in psyche-analysis, she knew that the “lover” could be read everywhere in the “higher.” There was an encoding in the dreamscript that revealed something going on in a realm of sexual phantasy.

  •

  The old teaching was that “as above so below” might mean also the orders of the stars could be read in the spermatozoa, the anima mundi might be a common whore in the port-town of Tyre, the logos could be found in any word anywhere. Christ was not selective when he said the Kingdom is within you, or that we were gods. “Ye are gods,” He said to the crowd. Now we begin to see galaxy upon galaxy, there may be as many suns as there ever have been men.

  •

  (Paris said, why must you recall

  the white fire of unnumbered stars,

  rather than that single taper

  burning in an onyx jar),

  “ART TO INCHANT”

  It would seem that the human community itself has
tides where even the most “independent” minds are swept along, even as the cells that have each “a unit-life centred on itself ” belong to a body. Here we are creatures of a society, taking on life as units of a larger economy. We may migrate from one association to another depending upon our reality in the new economy—this is a transfer of functions: an automobile mechanic may be directly transferable to another society in which there are automobiles. But those of us who live as units in relation to the language of a society in its functions of suggestion, even as we become most aware of belonging to mankind at large, have come into this realization along the lines of a particular language. Nearing the center or centers of our own language—most aware of the Germanic geist, the Roman spiritus, the Greek psyche that meet in English along the pathways of invading peoples—we are more and more aware, more near, to circumferences of language. Drawn into the fascination of the language, beyond the little civilized or semantically defended area of defined words, we come into another area where meanings appear as design. There are no words in themselves, just as in the thought of the human body itself, transformed by passion and desire, there are no cells in themselves—but all local meanings, the threads of German, Latin, and Greek, and the knottings of individual words, save as bonds in a total illusion, an image of images in which the personae may appear: not only our own psyche-identities, our own experience that seems the most real, that is built up of the invisible actual in which the real life of the cells goes on; but the greater images in kind to which our own lives contribute, the roles in the drama of history as we come to play them—that may be ghosts or luminous spirits. The Helen and Achilles, Paris and Theseus of H.D.’s poem are in turn members not only of history (for the siege of Troy belongs still to historical memory) but of the love of mankind. They are Eternal Ones of the dream.

  •

  The design now is of such an order that all loci seem to contribute to their own loss of identity in the larger figure: the poet takes over as a higher person from the immediate social personality of the man who sits down to write.