•
So that Blake in his “personal” relations to his patron Hayley or his contemporaries Flaxman and Fuseli, may have all the petty annoyances, we call them, of daily life, all the individual originality of the actual closed cell, and write in irritation TO F[LAXMAN]
I mock thee not, tho’ I by thee am Mockèd.
Thou call’st me Madman, but I call thee Blockhead.
•
“Blockd” would have been the cruder rime. Men in their contention dramatize the stupidity of cells in their place, some ever present quality of the locus to insist upon its own life independence to be a reality in itself, a closed form. But Blake in his contention is irritably aware of his belonging, to a design in the history of the visual imagination, one member of a figure in which the two other members are Fuseli and Flaxman. What we call movements in art are melodic figures in history, passages in which there is a tendency so that individual instances lose their immediate importance in the sense that something beyond is happening. The cells in all the complexity of their specialization and variation are alive because they are chemically unstable, factors not products of creation, creator-creatures. They come into, each into a form that is all and only his, what they are authorized in a melodic coherence that belongs to a coherence within and yet without what we can imagine. This imagination of what we are lies along our senses of belonging: kinship, meaning, and then the rarer sureness the artist knows of correspondences and harmonies belonging to scales we cannot define. “The authors,” Blake wrote, “are in eternity,” and in All Religions Are One he draws the following among principles:
Principle 1st. That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
•
This Poetic Genius is our melody or movement to which notes in music or events in history come to belong. We may rationalize our existence, insist upon a rational, sensible personality, only as we increasingly dwell as if we were in ourselves sufficient and meaningful: electing the guarded manner of “science” to defend what we can know as fact against what we can only know as feeling, and beyond such knowledge against rank feeling and doubtful intuition.
•
Against which Blake wrote: “I. Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho ever so acute) can discover.
“II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.”
•
May it not be that the reality that James called fictive has its illusion of the highest truth—the vividness of Lear or the sylph Ariel having a lasting quality of having happened that exceeds that of most inhabitants of the actual—includes finally the “scientific,” because in the Poetic Genius man is inspired by or derives his vision from, not such eyes as sensible own cornea, retina, lens, and optical nerve are, but from the melody of seeing thruout the universe along which human eyes have evolved. The Poetic Genius having just that center and circumference, that “nowhere and everywhere” of Christian mystic definitions at which to communicate impulses of the whole in which we see more than we see.
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Physics, our imagination of the universe in which we live, confronts, even as the poetic does, the ultimate mystery in which the melos imagines the melody; the cell imagines and lives to make vivid its body; the person imagines and lives to make vivid his manhood; the man imagines and lives to make vivid his poet; the poet like the scientist imagines and lives to make vivid his universe. The “our,” “his” impersonates the belonging, the feeling of being along the line of some form or the longing for some other among others where we will become member among members of a divine feeling. In physics as in poetics reality unfolds in thematic developments, leadings, and harmonies in the light of which all previous “truths” take on new meaning.
•
We seem to have come to a point distant from the initial proposition of my chapter: “Art to Inchant.” To sing upon or to sing into things so that lines of melodic coherence appear.
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When we follow, for instance, the changes of astronomical physics and the corresponding shifts in metaphysics we may have the illusion of a science advancing towards a surer and surer picture of What Is, in more and more fitting corrections. Yet the facts remain, the reasons change—the factors remain, the ratios change—from Copernicus to Newton, from Newton to our modern physics the imagination of the universe proves delusive or illusive. In what scale can we find the ratios? It is the fascination, the communion a man’s mind has in longing for the form of What Is thru the stars, that comes to belong to What Is—it is the being drawn toward, the quest or tendency that remains.
I
If the psychic life may be the Kama-Loca or Astral Light of theosophy, in turn the Leuké of Helen in Egypt, it is not What Is. It is not the source but the medium of the dream. So in our poem the veil appears as a secret of the whole: Helen may manipulate her veil as an agent of the veil in which she appears as a figure in a pattern. Thus, Helen draws Achilles, enchants him within the enchantment.
•
The haunting Helen has of being possessed by or speaking for Thetis and of seeing the signs of her father Zeus attendant upon Achilles her lover is the nexus in one note of a “higher” and “lower” melody. Helen is Thetis, just as a single actual tone may belong to more than one line of movement in musical pattern.
•
On the human level some pattern appears in which Helen, Clytaemnestra, Iphigenia, belong to one “theme.” As in Wagner, the leitmotif recalls all. And the interplay of leit motifs may bring gods, men, and the ghosts of the dead into one melodic mingling. The leading that H.D. builds on—from association to association—is only incidentally reasonable in relation to what we already have established in the poem. For the poet, the poem is unfolding, not conforming to but tending towards “Formalhaut,” its creator beyond, and the line of the gathering form itself.
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In “Palinode” the line of Helen as Enchantress began in the opening lines: “the old enchantment holds.” And in the foreword to “Palinode” III, the question “Is it possible that it all happened, the ruin—it could seem not only of Troy, but of the ‘holocaust of the Greeks,’ . . . in order that two souls or two soul-mates should meet?” may be translated into our language of musical reference where all the happenings of the whole establish the nexus each note might be of other tones. Significance springs along the line of preparedness, and in the enchantment of gathering melodic figuration everything before and after contributes to certain “moments.” Thinking of the host lost in the war, “the holocaust,” Helen in “Palinode” II.2 tells us: “I feel the lure of the invisible,” where we may see too that she feels the lure of a lyric strain that moves to find its way in the passage from the thousand and one to the one Helen to the “another and another and another” that Helen and Theseus exchange.
•
In “Eidolon” I.8 Helen tells us:
it was dream, a catafalque, a bier,
a temple again, infinite corridors,
a voice to lure, a voice to proclaim,
“Are you still subjugated? enchanted?,” Paris had asked. “The script was a snare,” Helen says. The difficulty of who and where that haunts Helen, the knowing-the-script and yet not being able to read where, as in Palinode II.2:
I can not “read” the hare, the chick, the bee,
or in The Walls Do Not Fall, some fifteen years earlier:
still the Luxor bee, chick and hare
pursue unalterable purpose,
is the knowing as feeling yet not knowing to read that a factor has within a series of patterns where it may simultaneously function.
•
Who and where becomes confused in the increased possibilities of belonging that are awak
ened thru the act. Words in a poem must be exactly where and what they are—have a “Maximus” of life—not because they have independent reality, integrally themselves—but because they depend and tend everywhere in the poem, from a variety of patterns on which they function. The eloquent tendency and dependency is fascination, lure, the enchantment.
•
So, in “Eidolon” II.4, we find:
What was the charm?
a touch—so a hand
brushes the lyre-strings;
a whisper—a breath
to invite the rose;
and:
was Troy lost for a subtle chord,
a rhythm as yet un-heard,
was it Apollo’s snare?
was Apollo passing there?
And in II.6, the poet tells us: Indeed it was ‘Apollo’s snare.’ None other. The war at Troy, Helen herself, the leap forward of Achilles to “fall in love” at last, the ships and souls of the holocaust, the stars of the galaxy were in order that Troy be sung, for the Song’s sake. The passage of Helen from Egypt to Leuké, and then to her echo on the walls of Troy, from the command of Oenone, that “if you forget—Helen” of the Shepherd’s hut on Mount Ida where “who will forget Helen attends,” that passes in turn into the sessions in which Theseus and Helen recall what was—all these are passages of a music, in which the “Helen” recurs in the changes of changing environments of the music, as the same note may be recognized in new measures of the one song.
•
The song itself is felt thruout the song. “I tremble,” Helen says in “Eidolon” VI.6:
I feel the same
anger and sudden terror,
that I sensed Achilles felt,
II
Oct. 29 / 61
The felt world, the world as it “moves” us, we say, where sympathies and antipathies make things most intensely real, is one with the imagined world—symphonic in its movement, where things are real in each other. Or have “body,” “substance,” in each other. The human cell, having its own autonomous life, must define its own most concrete real, beyond which its role or function in the tissue to which it belongs is more vaguely known. But in the higher orders, just as there are poets who come to imagine—vaguely, obscurely, or abstractly to be sure—their place in a larger order, might there be an imagination of the Man, a formal apprehension in the cell?
•
In our manhood, we find the idea of the reality of the cell as troublesome to hold as the corresponding idea of our belonging in turn to some larger order or happening. In Helen in Egypt Achilles had his autonomy as a hero. Like Helen, he too is a collective or immortal person. Not only has the image, the Imago of the Achilles or the Helen, been fed by the imaginations of thousands who are participants—writers, readers, and before them singers, listeners—in the poetry or making, but in turn these fairies of the human dream, these likenesses in which the heroic, the demonic or the divine may appear or move, have been fed by actual men and women—models, actors, and impersonators. So, here, too, there is a holocaust of war-dead who have contributed to the reality of Achilles, a constellation of women who have gone up into the Helen.
•
What Nietzsche and then Cocteau from Nietzsche has called The Eternal Return, reincarnation of certain fates or myths or plots in the lives of those who do not know consciously their own story, so that unknowingly a ground is prepared once more for Helen and Achilles or, as in Cocteau’s great movie, for Mark, Tristan, and Isolde to undergo again, to make new, their signatures, has a biological counterpart in the reincarnation of Man in each man. In the code-script of the genes, the cell is predestined or fated, under the human order or command, bears the imperative and lives towards the fulfillment of a person; as in the tradition or mythos or gospel persons in turn bear the imperative and lives towards the fulfillment of ideas, ideals or eìdola.
•
As “Associations” or memories they appear in the psychologies of our times. The stream of consciousness and the track of the analysand are modes of creating the past, following the cues or tendencies of the psychic worlds imagined by Bergson or Freud, and in the stream or along the track certain psychic entities arise. What any psychology is is a choreographic scheme in which its psyche may appear. This scheme is a map of time, a plot of event—as with the code-script of the genes, its form lies in its sequence. It is when our familiarity with time expands, so that we know not one history but many histories, that our human nature expands. The Imago of Helen comes into new powers as she comes into new understanding. As we come to find the Helena Dentritis, the Maiden or Helen’s Tree of Rhodes, celebrated by Theocritus, our idea of Helen becomes more complex. We have only to form an allegiance to the worship of Rhodes, a complicity with Rhodes in our love of Athens.
•
As long as we are convinced of our unique claim to human respect and of the superstition, primitiveness, sillyness, ignorance, irrationality of all other (heterodox) human thought and feeling, our truth or worths will be measured most real against the fabrication of divine life. It is part of the sad story of monotheism that where it first forbade worship of other gods it divorced its people from the communion of the human spirit (“for the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God”) and set over them a racial law. For the Jews, and after them, for the Christians and Moslems, all that was not lawful and in the book was error and falsehood. Just as the mixing of races was forbidden the Jews (so that ironically the anti-semite Hitler, because he was a racist, performed to the letter the will of Jehovah (Yahweh) as a consuming fire to cleanse the chosen race of its nephelium—those who had broken the laws) so all other traffic with images, dreams, sacred foods, arts was forbidden. “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse”: so the commandments were laid down. Never again would the divine intrude, but the people under the law would know the divine only in the law: so, Moses is the last to see the Burning Bush.
•
Dec. 27 / 61 The narrative art is in weaving at once a story and a fabric, bringing into play whatever threads towards the full ground in which the figures become meaningful and tendencies become designful. But these “threads” are voices; the telling directive in verse or in prose shows in the way the immediate area is working. For the master of this art—for the art-full story teller, there is just this transformation of telling into spinning—there are those rare folk geniuses who can still spin a good yarn—for whom words pass into phrases like wool into thread, and threads fly into sentences. We gathered to hear the story, are following the thread. All of this is a voice—and if it isn’t a voice, and then a voice into which other voices enter—there is no story. Mythos the Greeks called it, what the mouth uttered, and Aristotle said that mythos was plot.
Helen in Egypt belongs to the high art of the narrative. H.D. draws not only upon what Stesichorus in his Palinode told to be the truth of Homer but also upon how he told it. [Just as Plato or Herodotus praises Stesichorus for having seen the light and rendering Helen true to life, tell us too.] We learn from Plato or Herodotus that Stesichorus saw the light and told at last the true story of Helen; but we learn too from Greek historians of poetics the Stesichorus found a new way of the high art, alternating prose and choric verse in his narrative. He took up the story from the Homeric tradition and told it anew in the light of an alternate weave. “Truth” here is in the fitting figure, the turn of the plot that has the highest economy in complexity. The Helen on the ramparts of Troy being a wraith, the Helen in Egypt being the truth, fitted the truth of war and its causes. So in Euripides’ Helen, we hear Helen in Egypt in a speech that has the warp of what happened in the Trojan war and a woof of what is happening in Athens’ own phantasmagorical war with Sparta. And—this is the full magic of the art—we see anew our own war obsessions. It was all, Helen tells us:
thus to drain our mother earth
of the burden and the multitude of human kind—
and then:
fou
ght for me (except it was not I
but my name only).
It is most fitting then that H.D. [illegible] the alternate tradition, where we fight for freedom and the Soviets for communism (these two: freedom and communism being the two vital expectancies of the human spirit in our time), but both in that delusion of the name only. Communism no more truthfully the cause of the Soviets than freedom the cause of the American forces.
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But it is not for such a political persuasion that H.D. writes in Helen in Egypt. Plato’s Socrates in referring to the Palinode of Stesichorus had been struck by the implication that the truth of Helen in Egypt gave the lie to the cause of the Greeks at Troy, but his concern here was not that of a pacifist seeking to discredit war, but that of a seer and teacher seeking to illuminate the nature of human life itself. Our greatest delusion is the lure of the ground in which we appear: our own liveliness is our wraith, we are not deluded by the false causes of the enemy but by our own.
•
It is not misfitting that in our common speech “to tell a story” has already the underthread and overthread of two meanings. We must always be in the full enchantment of the voicing, the telling phrases, the rhythmic successions that lead us on—aware that all the intensely alive thing is the one thing that is alive—the human voice or mythos. What they said. The rest of history is dust. And we are misled if we think the facts have this significance in them. War has terrible repercussions—all of a sudden in the fabric of the human community the threads of a thousand tendencies are realized. There is not only the mythos but there is the dromenon: men not only tell their story but they enact it. If men imitate in their arts, they imitate in their lives. And the intensely alive actor like the intensely alive narrator intends towards crisis. To have community with other men at all is to become a member of a communal peril beyond our individual fate. At the heart and from the heart of this awful communal mind the mythos, just like the dromenon, springs. The story teller begins and the dynamics of his art takes force from the compelling voice that transforms us from individually responsible men into listeners and leads us on—that’s one charge of the tension that makes for attention—and from the alert mind that attends that voice and works to articulate and relate. There are only two living poets in our language of the stature of H.D.—William Carlos Williams and Pound. Both Edith Sitwell and Eliot at a crucial phase ceased to develop as poets and never entered the major phase of the man for whom all thought and feeling has become “poetic,” transmuted into the medium of his art.
The H.D. Book Page 69