The H.D. Book (12 page)

There may have been a wish, a power of that god
Wunsch
that the folklorist Grimm believed must have existed. I was to go forth then, from a wish she had, the hero—not the hero of Carlyle’s essay, but the other, unlikely younger brother or little one or silly one of the fairy tales, following a hint given by a maiden or a lady, and I would come some day under the protection of the Moon’s grandmother, of the Sun’s grandmother, of the Wind’s grandmother, or the Devil’s grandmother, whose book this is to be.

She had left behind a wish. And, coming to Bakersfield, in her teaching she had had that inspiration to open for me the wish that underlies, informs, and directs, the writer’s way toward a pouring out of self that turns out to be an opening up of self in the light of men’s love. A wish, and a desire. It was desire, Eros, that, unknowing, I knew attended my awakening.

“You were a wonderful boy,” she told me years later. But I was a miserable boy. I had found the wonder in her.

Love showed me the way and bid me to follow. My work in life must be likewise to reveal inner forces, to make articulate what pulse, nerve, and breath knew. Shame or guilt, weakness or sin—these were lifted
up to be the very material, despised among men, that gave the gold of experience. Hiding what others might scorn or revile, showing forth what others might value or reward—all this was the very misery of life in that town where hidden indulgences grew and values dwindled to fit shop-front presentations. Where truth is the root of the art, to come to fullness means to let bloom the full flower of what one was, the truth of what one felt and thought—a flowering of corruptions and rage, of bile and intestines, as well as of sense and light, of glands and growth. For it was not the ideal or the model of feeling that I saw as my work, but the revelation of the nature of Man in my own being. I knew nothing of Baudelaire, but I knew that the heart must be stripped bare. But so much of what I felt and thought sickened me or frightened me. I longed to come into the trust of mankind but what in me trusted? The wish and the trust were what I must search out.

I was to undertake the work in poetry to find out—what I least knew myself—what I felt at heart. But in the beginning the work was a gift to my teacher. I was to undertake the work to present what I felt at heart to someone who had a trust I did not have in the heart, who wished for just that gift for love’s sake. I was to undertake the work in order that Eros be kept over me a Master.

“Folks expect of the poet to indicate the path between reality and their souls,” Whitman writes in his 1855 “Preface.” There was, anyway, a path between Miss Keough’s reading that poem of H.D.’s, a path taken because of love, and the reality of this book that is my soul way. Not because I read everything H.D. wrote, as I read all that I could of Lawrence in those early years. It was not until
The Walls Do Not Fall
that H.D. would take her place, along with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, as a Master for me in my art and as one of the few primary authors among moderns in my reading. Then, recognizing in her writing a gospel of Poetry, I was to read everything in a new light. So that, when, in the third book of The War Trilogy,
The Flowering of the Rod,
I came to read the lines:

I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity;

I go where I belong, inexorably,

the very lines themselves, even as they spoke for my own intense feeling of so taking in the things I loved the path between reality and my soul, belonged too to those things. They fitted. I had an old sense in which my life was involved, in which there was an alliance with H.D.’s sense. Between that first poem heard as a gift of love and as news of the gods, a secret then of what the path was to be, and charged with that portent, between the poem “Heat” and
The Walls Do Not Fall,
there had been a way. What had been loved had, along some path, come to be most valuable. The path of H.D.’s work, between that poem and the many levels of consciousness mastered in The War Trilogy, and the path of my own recognitions in poetry and life, between that classroom where I had resolved to devote my life to poetry and the first formative crises when I began to see what that poetry was to be, had their coordinations.

A classroom had been a meeting room. I had come at the appointed hour with a lover’s joy in her company who had given me the most gracious of gifts, these things she loved she gave me to love. Books were the bodies of thought and feeling that could not otherwise be shared. There was more. Certain writers so revealed what a human being was that each of us had a share in that being. Love and Poetry were so mixed in the alembic that they coinhered in a new experience. “When in the company of the gods,” H.D. writes in that passage of
The Flowering of the Rod,
“I loved and was loved”—That was long ago in childhood hours of Mother’s reading myths and fairy tales in which that world appeared. In the new experience old layers of being found a pathway and welled up into the present:

never was my mind stirred
to such rapture,

my heart moved
to such pleasure,

as now, to discover
over Love, a new Master:

Every resonance had been prepared, for I had found—as when I was sixteen I had found a new teacher who brought me to Love—a new Master over Poetry in the work of H.D. In these things my mind likewise
was stirred to rapture, my heart moved to such pleasure. My first teacher had given me a key to my future resource. She had presented the work that was worthy, and the work was to be the ground of Eros. For that winged bright promise that the soul seeks in its beloved appeared to me in the life that the inner sensitive consciousness of Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, or H.D., had found for itself in their writing, thriving there, hidden from the careless reader, surviving the scorn and even hatred of the antipathetic reader, a seed that would chance somewhere, sometime, upon the ground that awaited its revelation, for the reader who would not misunderstand or revile but who would come to find therein his own kindred life.

The work, the ground, and Eros lie at the heart of our study here. The work itself is the transformation of the ground. In this ground the soul and the world are one in a third hidden thing, in imagination of which the work arises. It is the work of creation then. It is Poetry, a Making. It is also the
opus alchymicum
of Hermetic and Rosicrucian alchemy. The rhymes of this poetry are correspondences, workings of figures and patterns of figures in which we apprehend the whole we do not see. The path that poetry creates between reality and the soul is the path of a conversion. Our path here must often come close to the path of depth psychologies and of theosophical schools, but we are tracing the path of Psyche and her Eros as workers of a fiction in the art of poetry, projecting not a cure of souls or an illumination of souls, except as the secret of fictions may cure or illumine, but the inner works of the poetic opus. Our work is to arouse in a contemporary consciousness reverberations of old myth, to prepare the ground so that when we return to read we will see our modern texts charged with a plot that had already begun before the first signs and signatures we have found were worked upon the walls of Altamira or Pech-Merle.
Mythos
Aristotle defined as the plot of the story. The plot we are to follow, the great myth or work, is the fiction of what Man is.

Soul and Eros are primordial members of the cast. To imagine ourselves as souls is to become engaged in all the mystery play, the troubled ground, of a poetry that extends beyond the reaches of any contemporary
sense. Eros and Psyche are personae of a drama or dream that determines, beyond individual consciousness, the configurative image of a species. Just as the source of the song lies in an obscurity back of the first writing on the wall, so, in my own childhood, in the dawn of story, before I could read or write, there was a tale told to me of Cupid and Psyche. In the beginning I heard of this god Eros and of the drama of loss and search. I understood only that there was a wonder in this tale.

If the Work has to do with Eros—and for the poet the poem is a return to the work in the charged sense we would pursue here—the would-be poet stands like Psyche
in the dark,
taken up in a marriage with a genius, possessed by a spirit outside the ken of those about him. That there be gold or wonder or the beloved in such a blind matter, no one else can believe. So the poet William Carlos Williams in
Paterson
Four sees the work of poetry in the chemistry where Madam Curie works the pitchblende:

A dissonance
in the valence of Uranium
led to the discovery
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
by the hour, the day, the week
to get, after months of labor .

a stain at the bottom of the retort
without weight, a failure, a
nothing. And then, returning in the
night, to find it .

LUMINOUS
!

For my middle-class parents the work I was to undertake was as fearful and doubtful as that calling that Psyche, in the story Apuleius tells, knew in the dark. The genius of Poetry appeared to them “not a son-in-law of mortal birth but a dire mischief,” “a winged pest.” They, like Psyche’s parents, were dismayed and strove to dissuade me. They tried to make me see this alien calling in the light of common sense. And there was every reason to mistrust, for I had no sure talent. I was
in the dark about what poetry was. How badly first poems turned out! If one looked at them at all in a critical light, the charm might be broken. What garbled and even monstrous expressions stood for the first articulations of poetic feeling! “
Knowledge, the contaminant,
” Williams writes. Luminous in the dark, and so Madame Curie works—it haunts Williams that it is a woman—for she is the poet, but also, here too, she is Psyche:

And so, with coarsened hands

she stirs

And love, bitterly contesting, waits
that the mind shall declare itself not
alone in dreams

Hints of the old story appear in the workings of the new.

•

There was the Palace of Eros. Psyche was to inherit all, on the one condition that she not seek to see her Eros in the light. Her mind must not become involved in the knowledge of love. “When well inside the palace she came upon splendid treasure chambers stuffed with unbelievable riches; every wonderful thing that anyone could possibly imagine was there.” This Palace, as it appears in the beginning of the story, is like the wealth of works the imagination has left us, that we call our Culture. Writing, painting, architecture, and music seem to exist to enrich our appreciations, to furnish forth our taste, to suit or not our predilections. Some men believe that mountains, streams, animals, and birds, that the plenitude of the world, exists like this, a storehouse of commodities for human improvement and uses. And the Palace of Eros has another likeness to the world that exists in works of art—“No single chain, bar, lock, or armed guard protected it,” the story tells us. It lay an open secret for those who discovered it to live in.

Psyche, before her sin, is a dilettante. To read, to listen, to study, to gaze, all was part of being loved without loving, a pleasure previous to any trial or pain of seeking the beloved. The light must be tried; Psyche must doubt and seek to know; reading must become life and writing;
and all must go wrong. There is no way then but Psyche’s search, the creative work of a union in knowledge and experience with something missing. At the end, there is a new Eros, a new Master over Love.

Eros, like Osiris, or Lucifer (if He be the Prince of Light whom the Gnostics believe scattered in sparks throughout the darkness of what is the matter), is a Lord over us in spirit who is dispersed everywhere to our senses. We are drawn to Him, but we must also gather Him to be. We cannot, in the early stages, locate Him; but He finds us out. Seized by His orders, we “
fall
in love,” in order that He be; and in His duration, the powers of Eros are boundless. We are struck by His presence, and, in becoming lovers we become something other than ourselves, subjects of a daemonic force previous to our humanity, that, as the poet Hesiod pictures Eros, “unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them
.
” This Eros is a primal authority, having the power of a cosmic need. Men knew His terrors before they knew anything of Him as Cupid with his darts, before men had invented arrows.

There was an Eros before there were Titans or Gods. But then there is a second Eros. After the Titanic Kronos cuts away the genitals of the Father Uranus, the Great Sky, and casts them away behind him upon the raging sea (that may be the sea of the act itself), “they were swept away over the main a long time: and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it grew a maiden”—Aphrodite—and, with her, Eros and Himeros. A transformation has taken place. In this Greek figure the Father’s parts, the essential “Father,” reappear in three persons: his penis becomes the goddess Aphrodite or Beauty, and his testicles become the attendant gods, Eros and Himeros.

In the
Zohar
of Moses of Leon in the thirteenth century
A.D
., there appears another figure of the Father that may be related to his Greek figure from the Hesiod’s
Theogony
of the eighth century
B.C
. In the Kabbalistic lore, the Glory of En Soph is a womanly power of God, the Shekinah. And we learn too that there is a mystery of the two sides, the Left and the Right, that are testicles from which the souls of the living come. Souls, in Kabbalistic thought, are seminal.

Love, desire, and beauty, in the poet’s
Theogony,
precede mankind. They were beings before they were human feelings. The meaning of
things seems to change when we fall in love, as if the universe were itself a language beyond our human language we had begun to understand. It is the virtue of words that what were forces become meanings and seek form. Cosmic powers become presences and even persons, having body to the imagination. We fall in love with Love.