The H.D. Book (29 page)

Williams’s local condition and his “no ideas but in things” must ring true, find their resonance, in “the dreams of the race” and in a relativity of measurements that applies to everything, even as H.D.’s elect, the lovers or the writers, must somehow in their vision prove to keep the dream of “everyone, everywhere.” The very heightened sense of the relatedness of everything set poets apart. The very secret of the impulse in poetry is the troubled awareness the poet has of meanings in the common language everywhere that those about him do not see or do not consider so important. “We,” H.D. writes in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
“bearers of the secret wisdom,” and then:

but if you do not even understand what words say,

how can you expect to pass judgment
on what words conceal?

The ancient instruction “As above, so below” from the Smaragdine Tablet may be “the secret wisdom,” but H.D. was an initiate of the Freud cult where she had learned in analysis that for the good of her soul she must bear the wisdom of “what words conceal.” She tells us Freud said to her, “My discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy. There are very few who understand this,
there are very few who are capable of understanding this.
” But he might also have said “very few who are willing
to understand,” for the crisis of the new psychoanalytic wisdom lay in the resistance men have against knowing what is above or below, the strange refusal to see what they are doing or to hear what they are saying just when they are most engaged in their own self-destruction—“the untamable nature of men,” the epic of Gassire’s Lute says. So, Oedipus cannot and will not understand the vatic warnings of Tiresias or the fears of Jocasta but must pursue his blind course in order to expose the conflict within only at the cost of catastrophe for all. He seems to seek in the drama a compelling reason to make his blindness actual.

The great compulsion of our own states with their war economies and compulsory military servitude, the history that is now all written upon verges of a total war to come, about which we can do nothing and which we can imagine only in terms of total destruction, bears a curious resemblance to the hubris and fate of the Greek drama.
The People of the Truth
and
the People of the Lie
the Zoroastrians called the adherents of peaceful agricultural ways and the adherents of war; but Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Truth, was to become a War-Lord, for His was the
One
Truth, and all other truths were lies. “And now just look at what is happening in this wartime,” Freud writes in a letter to Van Eeden in 1914:

. . . at the cruelties and injustices for which the most civilized nations are responsible, at the different way in which they judge of their own lies, their own wrong-doings, and those of their enemies.

“The individual in any given nation has in this war,” he writes in “Thoughts on War and Death” in 1915:

a terrible opportunity to convince himself of what would occasionally strike him in peace time—that the State has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong doing, not because it desired to abolish it, but because it desires to have the monopoly of it, like salt and tobacco.

For Freud, as for Lawrence, H.D., Pound, Joyce, or Eliot, the immediate experience of the First World War brought an intensified experience of the “we” and the “they.” “The individual who is not himself a combatant—and so a wheel in the gigantic machinery of war,” Freud
writes, “feels conscious of disorientation, and of an inhibition in his powers and activities.” So, in “Cities” H.D. in 1914 could still imagine the task of the “we” to be to awaken the “they” from their hideous larval life, to “recall the old splendor” toward a “new beauty of cities.” In an essay on the work of Marianne Moore in August 1916, she speaks of Marianne Moore’s work as if it were questionable: “these curiously wrought patterns, these quaint turns of thought and concealed, half-playful ironies” that readers “have puzzled over . . . and asked—what is this all about?” This poetry might be her own as well, with its curiously wrought patterns. Even among the literate, the few who made any pretense at all of being concerned with poetry, the Imagists were ridiculed and reviled. And among the less than few who appreciated, appreciation was not the same as understanding. In the conclusion of that essay, the “they” that had been readers appear as the other “they” of “Cities,” and likewise, the identification of herself with Marianne Moore in a “we” is outright: “She is fighting in her country a battle against squalor and commercialism. We are all fighting the same battle. And we must strengthen each other in this one absolute bond—our devotion to the beautiful English language.”

The war experience had revealed a division in which one side could no longer communicate with the other. Freud writes in “Thoughts on War and Death”:

It rends all bonds of fellowship between the contending peoples, and threatens to leave such a legacy of embitterment as will make any renewal of such bonds impossible for a long time to come. Moreover, it has brought to light the almost unbelievable phenomenon of a mutual comprehension between the civilized nations so slight that one can turn with hate and loathing upon the other.

But this abyss of incomprehension appeared not only between opposing states, but, within each state, between the few antipathetic to the war itself and those obedient to or sympathetic with the war. In the poem “The Tribute,” H.D. sees the “we” and the “they” divided by a will on the part of the “they,” not to hear, not to see—a resistance against beauty and any hope of peace, but also a compulsion toward ugliness
and war, a conspiracy that these shall be the terms of the real. The City of the Gods, “set fairer than this with column and porch,” no longer, as in the poem “Cities,” what once was or what will be, the city of an historical task, is now in “The Tribute” a dwelling place of youths and gods “apart.”

Augustine, when Rome fell to the Vandals in the fifth century and the Christians were accused of betraying the Empire in their disaffiliation from the war, answered in
The City of God
with the ringing affirmation of an eternity more real than historical time, a life eternal or supreme good more real than the good life of the philosopher. “And thus it is written,” Augustine tells us: “The just live by faith, for we do not as yet see our good, and must therefore live by faith.” For Augustine—as for Freud, there was the incomprehension between nations, or for poets the incomprehension between writers and readers, or for Sapir the incomprehension between the individual happenings and the language as communication itself—for Augustine too, in the world beyond the household and the city, the world of human society at large “man is separated from man by the difference of languages
.
”

For if two men, each ignorant of the other’s language, meet, and are not compelled to pass, but, on the contrary, to remain in company, dumb animals, though of different species, would more easily hold intercourse than they, human beings though they be.

But the imperial city has endeavoured to impose on subject nations, not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless.

He continues:

This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description—and with these the whole race has been agitated either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak.

For Augustine, convert of the Christian cult, Latin words themselves had a difference of meaning, and in that difference there was a disillusionment with all the values of the Roman world. Only in a total conversion could the “they,” the would-be good and just men of the Empire, understand the “we,” the little company of would-be saints. The rest—the whole “realistic” approach—meant utter misery.

But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrong-doing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars, and this wrong-doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be a matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrong-doing. Let everyone, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.

•

To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness. But this “commune” is not, even in the broadest sense, the language of the human society at large. To write in English is not only to belong to a language-world different from French or Aranda but also to belong to a language-world different from, though within, the English-speaking world at large. Writing and reading is itself an initiation as special as the totem-dance of the Aranda, and just as the Aranda learns to read his own parts in the parts of the landscape about him, so that the body of the world becomes one with his own consciousness, so we learn to find our life in a literature, and, in turn, literature itself is valued as it seems true to life.

But once we would derive our life not in terms of tribe or nation but in terms of a larger humanity, we find our company in Euripides, Plato, Moses of Leon, Faure, or Freud, searching out keys to our inner being in the rites of the Aranda and in the painting processes of Cézanne. We must move throughout the history of man to find many of our
own kin, for here and now those who think and feel in the terms we seek are few indeed. But from each of these the cry goes up—to whom other than us, their spiritual kin—from an intense solitude. Not only Freud’s “There are very few who understand this,” but Stein’s “Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know. (Silence) My long life, my long life,” or Joyce’s “Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?” or Pound’s plea from
Canto
CXVI:

I have brought the great ball of crystal,

who can lift it?

Can you enter the great acorn of light?
but the beauty is not the madness

Tho my errors and wrecks lie about me.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I cannot make it cohere . . .

Before war and death the whole world of the higher culture seems to be an illusion indeed. For Freud, the war evoked a powerful disillusionment. The cosmopolitan man, as Freud portrays himself in “Thoughts on War and Death,” in peace-time dwelt in an “other” world, leaving the Mother-land or Father-land of the national state and entering a new Mother-land of an international dream:

Relying on this union among the civilized races, countless people have exchanged their native home for a foreign dwelling place, and made their existence dependent on the conditions of intercourse between friendly nations. But he who was not by stress of circumstances confined to one spot, could also confer upon himself, through all the advantages and attractions of these civilized countries, a new, a wider fatherland, wherein he moved unhindered and unsuspected.

The generation of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and H.D., living in the dream of European culture, or of Lawrence living in the dream of Western Indian culture, is the last to live abroad so. The generation of the twenties—the “lost” generation, as Stein called it—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mary Butts, Henry Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Robert
McAlmon, live in Europe or Mexico as if in limbo, forerunners of the Jet Set and the New Wave. The cosmopolitan son of an imaginary world-father pictured by Freud had his roots in a time “before the War,” in an illusion of peace, and thought of the achievement of the past as his spiritual heritage.

“This new fatherland was for him a museum also, filled with all the treasures which the artists among civilized communities had in successive centuries created and left behind,” Freud continues:

As he wandered from one gallery to another in this museum, he could appreciate impartially the varied types of perfection that miscegenation, the course of historical events, and the special characteristics of their mother-earth had produced among his more remote compatriots.

This dream of European Culture must recall the Palace of Eros. But Freud’s heir of the ages and of the earth finds his reality not in daydream but in an actual sea and actual mountains, in the treasure store of men’s actual works. “Property is not capital. The increment of association is not usury,” Ezra Pound insists in
Social Credit: An Impact
(1935) and prefaces his pamphlet with Jefferson’s saying—“The earth belongs to the living.” In the rites whereby man became cosmopolitan man, he came into an increment, an environment enhanced by his realization of the work and experience of others involved, into an increase that was not taken from things but taken in them.

In the cult-life of Freud’s cosmopolitan man, as in the life of the Imagists, the gods and the heroes, the imagined beings and the men who in their creative work have increased the store of the imagination, are ancestral, Eternal Ones of the Dream. A new father-land is taken in the image of a world-father of man-kind. And a new kin is found in the ancestors—those who have contributed to the association of man “any and all of the qualities which have made mankind the lords of the earth.”

“Nor must we forget,” Freud concludes his picture of this illusion of the civilized man: