The H.D. Book (18 page)

In the Hellenistic synthesis, as Lord of the transitions of Life, Osiris stands for the order or intent in the work, and he is most experienced by the artist at the crossroads of his art.

A gloss of
The Book of the Dead
tells us: “
As for yesterday,
that is Osiris.” Osiris may be the “mutual immanence” of all events in the present that figures in Whitehead’s
Process and Reality.
“Present and future equally,” H.D. names him in
The Walls Do Not Fall.
What is his name? Can it be hidden (the earliest script in the palimpsest), erased, in:

O, Sire, is this the path?
over sedge, over dune-grass,

as H.D. hides or erases it in xlii of
The Walls Do Not Fall
?

O, Sire, is this the waste?
unbelievably . . .

as if the Way were hidden in the Wasteland. Freud reinforces H.D.’s Hellenistic leanings. In dreams and in the psychopathology of daily life, we are prepared to see the pun, as the name
Ra
may be hidden in
Rafton
of “Secret Name,” or to hear the pun in “O, Sire, is.” In the epigraph for “Secret Name” H.D. quotes from a hieratic papyrus of the XXth dynasty:

But Isis held her peace; never a word did she speak, for she knew that Ra had told her the names that all men know; his true Name, his Secret Name, was still hidden in his breast.

The secret name of Greece is hidden in Egypt, and we must go to Luxor to read the hieroglyph of its birth-house, as the initiate in Freudian analysis must go to Yesterday to find the clues to his soul, or the Pacific Northwest Indian must go into the solitude of the forest to find his name. In her last great work,
Helen in Egypt,
again Egypt is the warp upon which the woof of the Greek weaves.

“You’re always talking about the Greeks,” Rafton says to Helen—he is addressing the high-minded Helen, the Pallas Athena Helen—“The Greeks came to Egypt to learn.” To go deep within the self for Raymonde Ransome in “Murex” is to go deep within history where back of Greece Egypt was primal, the Depth to be sounded. Hipparchia in her fever sees the Greek Helios-Phoebus as the god of her anguished upper-mind; and then, back of or below the bird note of anguish, she sees or hears Osiris who waits to recall her. “Some god (Osiris loved her, but Life, Helios, cheated her.)” “She had said then, ‘Phoebus speaks doubly and his word cuts doubly’.”

“Phoebus had cut her doubly from herself so that she might regard an image of absolute peace that would recall her. Osiris to recall her.”
The Greek Helios appears as the bird note of pain, the pains-taking upper-mind, the painful ambiguity of higher thought, the glaring light of the Sun, driving her to seek out the alien god who stands in the shadows of the room—Osiris. The voice within the pain is Egypt’s. In the confusion of the fever, as in the confusion of Helen Fairwood’s fatigue, Egypt begins to appear back of the Greek:

A voice from far and far and far webbed over with its pain of actuality, its bird-note of insistent anguish, the pain of mental striving . . . something from far and far about some ‘suave and golden Eros—’ suave and golden. Osiris was waiting to recall her. [Then, later:] Helios, a god of poetry, did not forget her. Helios, a god of anguish, had not forgotten her. Helios, a god of Greeks, was insistent, bird anguish and song notes of unassailable desire. Osiris. Far and far and far, surrounded with a web of old illusion.

In the poem the music, the melodic
strain,
arises along some line of anguish. We hear it in the poet’s voice, any poet’s voice, as a mode of grief—lamenting the Mother, so the Freudian persuasion has it, wrapped round in the illusions of the restored Mother. The Helios, the upper poetic mind, opens in grief a window in which as poets we see the object of our “unassailable desire.” The double play of the art, the gift of Helios that “cuts doubly,” opens a wound in the pain of which we have vision. Osiris here is the vision of poetry. Egypt may be the fever in which Hipparchia sees at last her fever-vision—the islands of Greece restored.

Her mind in fever goes out in what we call its wandering or stream of consciousness, or, after Freud, its free association—but what we find is a wave in its fullness revealing an organization of time, in-bound throughout to its own particular tenor or pattern, a
gestalt
—free, but committed to a message that is not arbitrary, moving from the thought that haunts her—“Greece is now lost,” towards a melody that releases the pain into beauty.

“Greece is now lost, the cities dissociated from any central ruling,” her lover Marius had taunted Hipparchia. And now, from the seeming dissociation (her reviewers were to find H.D.’s prose in
Palimpsest
guilty of being “dissociated”), from the darkness of Egypt, a voice comes:
“My father collects everything that is Greek.” It is the voice of a young girl attending Hipparchia in her illness. “Greece is now lost. Greece is now lost” had run in Hipparchia’s head. But now in her delirium, Greek things appear: “Hipparchia had only to sink back, to drift out, out, out to tiny island upon wave-lapped tiny island. They were all in her head—an attendant lover to recall her
.
”

To remember is Osiris but Hipparchia’s
Yesterday
is Greece, Helios out of Osiris. “From far and far and far—some golden Eros sometime
—.
” She had mistaken a statue in the room for Eros earlier. Then she begins to see that the actual figure is Egyptian. “Done in dark metal with a seated Eros; Horus precisely
.
” But Eros and Horus in the Hellenistic mysteries were combined in one—Harpocrates. Just there or just beyond, the voice comes that releases her anguish into its rapture: “Some said
Greece is a spirit. Greece is not lost.
I will come with you
.
”

The sentence, “My father collects everything that is Greek,” which comes in the patterning of Hipparchia’s interior monolog to define a dramatic crisis, has a possible origin in H.D.’s memory of her own father. The astronomer, Professor Doolittle, had, in a sense, such a collection in the stars and planets that were the objects of his profession. He was most familiar with them and would not have thought too consciously of the presences of the old gods that lay back of their names, but, in the father’s talk, before she could read or write, H.D. heard the names—Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn. In the palimpsest, the Greek gods were behind the Roman names. They were her father’s familiars.

Seven years after the writing of “Hipparchia,” that line “My father collects everything that is Greek” was to echo again in H.D.’s life when Freud, who collected everything that belonged to another “Greece,” another lost land, the dream, was to take H.D., back of the analysis room, his office, into his other room, his study, where he too—a father figure (in her
Tribute to Freud,
H.D. calls him throughout “the Professor,” recalling deliberately her father’s title)—had a collection of everything that was Greek, his own private museum of god figures. Art objects, but they were also cult objects in a time when psychoanalysis had brought all the divine images back as figures of a new psychecult. He brought “everything Greek” into the collective treasure of
the valuable—the ivory Indian figure of Vishnu in the same room, the presence of the little bronze image of Pallas Athena. “He had said,” H.D. writes of Freud:

he had dared to say that the dream had its worth and value in translatable terms, not the dream merely of a Pharaoh or a Pharaoh’s butler, not the dream merely of the favorite child of Israel, not merely Joseph’s dream or Jacob’s dream of a symbolic ladder, not the dream only of the Cumaean Sybil of Italy or the Delphic Priestess of ancient Greece, but the dream of everyone, everywhere.

•

The great Hellenistic source where the lore of Egypt and the lore of Greece are gathered together in the synthesis of a common religion as they are in the synthesis of H.D.’s creative imagination is Plutarch’s “Isis and Osiris,” dedicated to Clea, priestess of Apollo at Delphi, followed in the fifth book of the
Moralia
by his essay “On the
EI
at Delphi,” in which he expounds the interpretations of the Delphic Epsilon for the poet Sarapion of Athens. Following the involutions of Plutarch’s exposition, we begin to see how fully in Hipparchia’s mind H.D. has portrayed the inner structures of emotion and intellect characteristic of the syncretizing Hellenistic spirit. Whatever else she is, Hipparchia is an authentic reconstruction or restoration of the Graeco-Egyptian devotee typical of the intellectual society of the post-Alexander “Roman world.”

EI,
Plutarch tells the poet, is the second vowel, the Sun is the second planet, and thus
EI
is the sign of Apollo. We may remember that in the Empire a cult of Helios as
Sol Invictus
was to become the cult of a state in its unifying and universalizing period. For Plutarch,
EI,
if it was the sign of the sun was the sign of a governing power, but it also, he reminds us, means “
if
” and is the mode of wishes and prophecy, of “If I only could” and of “If this is so, then that shall be.”

The meanings of the word multiply as meanings within the Hellenistic Empire multiplied in the confusion of civilizations that deepened in the new cosmopolis of Rome or Alexandria. Not again until our own world which has emerged from the universalizing imperialisms of the nineteenth century will there be such a mixing of local identities and even of ancient cultures, East and West, South
and North, to form the multiphasic language of Man in such a complex of associations. The sign
EI
multiplies in its significances. It is the sign of such proliferation. As the sign of the number five, Plutarch tells us, it is formed in the conjunction of two, the first even number, which resembles the female, and three, the first odd number, which resembles the male; so it is “generative” and was called “
Marriage
” by the Pythagoreans. “There is also,” Plutarch continues:

a sense in which it has been called
Nature,
since by being multiplied into itself it ends in itself again. For even as Nature receives wheat in the form of seed and puts it to its uses, and creates in the interim many shapes and forms through which she carries out the process of growth to its end, but, to crown all, displays wheat again . . .

so five reappears in its square, twenty-five, and likewise in its higher powers:

It has a unique characteristic, when added to itself, of producing either itself or ten alternately as the addition progresses, and of doing this to infinity, since this number takes its pattern from the primal principle which orders the whole . . . as that principle by change creates a complete universe out of itself, and then in turn out of the universe creates itself again, as Heracleitus says,
and exchanges fire for all and all for fire
. . . .

If, then, anyone ask,
What has this to do with Apollo?
we shall say that it concerns not only him, but also Dionysus, whose share in Delphi is no less than that of Apollo. Now we hear the theologians affirming and reciting, sometimes in verse and sometimes in prose, that the god is deathless and eternal in his nature, but, owing forsooth to some predestined design and reason, he undergoes transformations of his person, and at one time enkindles his nature into fire and makes it altogether like all else, and at another time he undergoes all sorts of changes in his form, his emotion and his powers, even as the universe does today.

In a Mediterranean world invaded not only by Egyptian and Near Eastern but by Hindu thought, a world that, following Alexander’s period of conquest, had experienced wide-spread deep-going changes, the intellectual saw himself in the terms of a transitional identity. From the transformations of symbol in Plutarch’s account, and then from the
metamorphoses of the god, we begin to get a picture of a multiphasic psyche. Not only is the god the one called Apollo he tells us, “because of his solitary state, and Phoebus because of his purity and stainlessness,” but he is also the one called Dionysus. His is not only the paean, “music regulated and chaste,” but also the dithyramb, “laden with emotion and with a transformation that includes a certain wandering and dispersion”:

And as for his turning into winds and water, earth and stars, and into the generations of plants and animals, and his adoption of such guises, they speak in a deceptive way of what he undergoes in his transformation as a tearing apart, as it were, and a dismemberment . . . They construct destructions and disappearances, followed by returns to life and regeneration.

Osiris, Plutarch tells us in his study, may stand for the unity or truth of some wisdom text that has been dispersed and must be gathered together, as we gather what we know. Isis becomes the seeker of wisdom or the would-be knower, and Typhon the enemy of knowledge:

He tears to pieces and scatters to the winds the sacred writings, which the goddess collects and puts together and gives into the keeping of those that are initiated into the holy rites . . . the end and aim of which is the knowledge of Him who is the First, the Lord of All, the Ideal One.

The robes of Isis are of many colors

for her power is concerned with matter which becomes everything and receives everything, light and darkness, day and night, fire and water . . . [which robes] they use many times over; for in use those things that are perceptible and ready at hand afford many disclosures of themselves.

But the robe of Osiris has no shading or variety in its color, but only one single color like to light . . . They lay it away and guard it, unseen and untouched, [for] the apperception of the conceptual, the pure, and the simple, shining through the soul like a flash of lightning, affords an opportunity to touch and see it but once.

•

From the pagany of her early poetry, with its gods evocative of woodland and headlands of the sea, from the elemental Athena, Demeter, or Hermes of the Ways, by 1926 H.D. had come to be concerned, as we have seen Plutarch in his theosophical writings was concerned, with the gods as personae of states of mind, yes, but also as guides or messengers leading toward some gnosis of the universe. Here, the Image that comes in the poem is also a Sign of a reality beyond the poem. A content impends in everything and demands to be known. The stream of consciousness mode in writing, as Raymonde Ransome realizes, is a form of search for a further content in experience, predicated upon the immanence of meaning and self in the universe and of the universe in self: “It saw a world (James Joyce was right) in a grain, in nothingness; superstitiously in the fact that the fourth candle had burnt out, in the fact that the table needed dusting
.
” This “superstition” may be the old doctrine of omens and signatures, or it may be the new psychoanalytic doctrine that asks,
What does it mean that the fourth candle had burnt out? Who are you that the table needed dusting?
Image and Fact are now presentations of Logos, revelations of a message that we must receive. The Universe is a book of what we are and asks us to put it all together, to learn to read.