The H.D. Book (45 page)

                the great cloud is about her,

She has entered the protection of crystal.

Here the “river of crystal” appears, carrying the soul-boat up out of the carnal and psychic mire into “the body of light come forth from the body of fire,” a sublimation that contrasts sharply with H.D.’s impassioned evocation in
Tribute to the Angels,
“re-light the flame,” where venery and the venereous (the body of
heat
) are called forth from the body of fire and re-related to venerate, venerator in the name of Venus-Aphrodite.

•

H.D. sees the gods not only as eternal states of mind, higher beings, or great images cast in a phanopoeia, but as expressive entities of the worshipper’s own creative life:

Shall I let myself be caught
in my own light?

Later, her Freudian persuasion will reinforce this view, but as early as “Pygmalion,” the worked image (each particular intellectual and emotional instance that becomes experience then) is thought of not only as being realized in itself, an expression, but as an entity in a psychological process, a projection. She has passed from the idea of the artist’s work as having its end in the object, the image, as if captured in stone, the closed system of beauty, to the dramatic perspective in which the art
is a magic ground in which thought and feeling come into being and meaning returns from the object to inform the artist as he works—a way of participation thru the created object in a self-creating life; from:

I made image upon image for my use,
I made image upon image, for the grace
of Pallas was my flint

to the more involved recognition of poetry as a creative process, as in 1917 she had concentrated in a stanza:

Now am I the power
that has made this fire
start from the rocks?
am I the god?
or does this fire carve me
for its use?

the questions that in the 1930s will lead Malraux to his massive
Psychology of Art.
In turn, the creative process is recognized as a life quest or romance—Psyche’s quest for Eros, the soul’s quest for salvation, a new Master. She had passed from the persona or mask worn in the play to the psyche, the soul of the play that comes into being thru its masks. When, in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
Christ appears in the Image “stepped out from Velasquez,” her sight of the painting, as with the statue of Pygmalion, has broken the boundaries of the aesthetic into meaning. The work is not self-contained but serves another purpose, that eyes “look straight at you”—a magic efficacy, the very presence of Christ.

In such a transformation, paint or stone take on body, as in the Christian mystery the word is incarnate; there is a charged carnality in amber eyes that would shine so in the poem, as if they could shine so in the painting. Here H.D.’s insistence that she is, we are, involved in the poem as if it were a field of associations brings us up against such a bias in aesthetic as Dewey has in
Art as Experience:
“If the perception is then eked out by reminiscence or by sentimental associations derived from literature—as is usually the case in paintings popularly regarded as
poetic—a simulated aesthetic experience occurs.” The criticism would seem to apply to my own appreciations as I go, where the poem and the painting are not objects but operations in a field of reminiscences, the perception eked out everywhere by associations that are sentimental, these senses of life and the mentality so identical for me. There can be no accident that along with my changing sense of poetry in my reading of H.D.’s work, and in my own writing the flooding out into literary derivations, has come a breakthru or breakdown of aesthetic evaluation of painting to include literary qualities in early Cézanne, Moreau, Böcklin, or the Pre-Raphaelites Burne-Jones and Rossetti, painters long exiled from the dominant taste of my day because of their false poetics. H.D. has been dismissed by adverse critics with slurring references to William Morris; as Pound has been put down with hints of Swinburnism; Joyce with aspersions of Pater. “There are works of art that merely excite,” Dewey warns: “in which activity is aroused without the composure of satisfaction, without fulfillment within the terms of the medium. Energy is left without organization. Dramas are then melodramatic; paintings of nudes are pornographic; the fiction that is read leaves us discontented with the world in which we are, alas, compelled to live without the opportunity for the romantic adventure and high heroism suggested by the story-book.”

For Ezra Pound, the operation of the work outside the spirit of its art, the excess in which what might have been aesthetic, beautiful, or later, in Vorticism, energetic, becomes psychological—sensually, sexually, or religiously sentimentalized—the psychic chiaroscuro of and in any thing—is distasteful, even abhorrent. After
The Spirit of Romance
in 1910, Pound goes no further in the matter of Dante, though he pays homage to Dante’s mastery as a poet, for Pound would put aside the heart of the matter, the imagination of a Christian synthesis; as in
The Cantos
he can include the Greek gods in his history but must dismiss those unchaste aspects that the Cambridge classicists and the Vienna psychoanalysts had begun to suggest; he must exclude too the mire and the star in which Christ is born. There is a threatened chastity of mind in Pound that would put away, not face, the thought of hellish things, here in considering the Divine World, as later in considering fascism, where also he cannot allow that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure,
with the obscene—what goes on backstage. Spirit in
The Cantos
will move as a crystal, clean and clear of the muddle, even the filth, of the world and its tasks thru which Psyche works in suffering towards Eros.

“The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades,” he writes of Cavalcanti. He is naturally repelled when in Rubens he sees the flesh portrayed as meat. He rages like a Puritan bigot faced with the Whore of Babylon at the adulterous—latinizing—syntax of Milton, who “shows a complete ignorance of the things of the spirit.” Usury brings “whores for Eleusis,” corrupts the sacred orgy; the art too, under usury, becomes whorish and profane.

Healthy mindedness is an important virtue for Pound’s art—the clean line. Clean mindedness, then. “The old cults were sane in their careful inquisition or novitiate,” he insists in
The Spirit of Romance.
Here and in the Cavalcanti essay Pound insists upon the “well-balanced,” the “
mens sana in corpore sano
” base. “All these are clean, all without hell-obsession,” he writes of Ventadour, Guido, Botticelli, Ambrogio Praedis; and then, it does not occur to him that we must turn to others if we seek information concerning the nature of darker matters. To think at all, to imagine or to be concerned with, that state of human psyche whose light is Luciferian and whose adversity is Satanic—much less to admit that in our common humanity we are ourselves somehow involved in that state is, for Pound, to go wrong, to darken reason, a morbidity of mind. “We seem to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge,” Pound writes of the change from Cavalcanti to Petrarch, and he relates the change in poetry to a change in world view, the loss of “a world of moving energies ‘
mezzo oscuro rade,
’ ‘
risplende in se perpetuale effecto,
’ magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s
paradiso,
the glass under water”; “untouched,” he concludes, “by the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease.” In reviewing
Love Poems and Others
by D. H. Lawrence in 1913, Pound, who praises Lawrence’s narrative verse, finds “the middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection . . . a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so.” In writing on the work of Henry James, he tells us: “The obscenity of
The Turn of the Screw
has given it undue prominence. People now ‘drawn’ by the obscene as were people of Milton’s period by an equally disgusting bigotry;
one unconscious on author’s part; the other, a surgical treatment of a disease.” Where we begin to see that Pound’s aesthetic disgust is not unmixed with psychological factors that he would like to disown.

Virgil was O.K. for Dante, it seems to Pound, for Dante knew no better. It is not the poet-portrayer of the Underworld and prophet of the coming Christos, but the high-minded master of the Superworld, Plotinus, who leads Pound up out of the mire of mud, bog-suck, and whirl-pool that is Pound’s Hell. Holding the Medusa-head downward, Plotinus petrifies the evil; and perhaps Pound sees Plotinus in history as having petrified into the clear crystal of neo-Platonism the murk of the Alexandrian period, the chiaroscuro in which Christ was synthesized. “You advertise ‘new Hellenism’,” Pound writes to Margaret Anderson of
The Little Review:
“It’s all right if you mean humanism, Pico’s
De Dignitate,
the
Odyssey,
the
Moscophoros.
Not so good if you mean Alexandria. . . . ”

It is to the art of music that Pound looks, to the time “when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it.” There is an echo of Carlyle’s concept of poetry as musical thought here, but it is important too that in music the material of the artist seems most to have transcended the “slush” of flesh and earth, to be furthest from “the metamorphosis into carnal tissue” that represented the decay of values in Rubens. The avoidance of Christ in
The Cantos.
A poem that is after all primarily an epic of the gods and of the divine reality, is complex; but even with those gods who do appear in
The Cantos,
Pound avoids all knowledge of their aspects of embodying our carnal experience of suffering and mortality as a value in life. Aphrodite appears in Her light body, having no association with whorish simulacra men have made of her. There can be no compassion whereby the high suffers in the low. In the highest vision there are not then the eyes of the crucified, with their secret that life’s victory lies in the passion of the love-death, but there is the love-light of “the stone eyes again looking seaward” and the Sphinx’s riddle in Canto CXV “of man seeking good, / doing evil.”

“Unless a term is left meaning one particular thing, and unless all attempt to unify different things, however small the difference, is clearly abandoned, all metaphysical thought degenerates into a soup,”—so
the art for Pound must strive for the dissociation of ideas; in
The Cantos
he strives for the clear entity of things and beings in themselves. For H.D. terms are either duplicit or complicit, the warp and woof of a loom. As in
Paterson,
William Carlos Williams pictures poetry, like a city, “a second body for the human mind,” he quotes from Santayana’s
The Last Puritan,
having all the complication of one thing in another a city has. Neither H.D. nor Williams is concerned with metaphysical thought. Pound’s soup into which metaphysical thought must fall when associations are allowed may be the dream. “
Paterson
is a man (since I am a man) who dives from cliffs and the edges of waterfalls . . . But for all that he is a woman (since I am not a woman) who
is
the cliff and the waterfall.” In such a poem or such a dream no entity is unmixed, there is no form that can be satisfied in itself or fulfilled in its own terms.

Since 1938, when at nineteen I began to read
The Cantos
and then in the library the files of
The Little Review,
I have had a strong sense of this quality of a thing in itself, the intensely realized form of Brancusi’s columns and heads, the deliberate design of syntax in Joyce’s
Ulysses,
the absolute sense of language in context in
The Cantos,
the changes in energy—movement and tone—so exactly made. Here it is the composition, not the exposition, of content that counts, and this count is a mathematic of numbers and the ratios that have been learned in the working hand and in the ear, having to do not only with soundings but with equilibriums, beyond the calculation of the brain alone. I have still this excitement about the masterpiece, the mastery of weights that lie at the edges of intuition, the informed impulse of each nerve in training, the skill that extends our apprehension of what is going on. In my mind H.D.’s War Trilogy and
Helen in Egypt
have been placed, “weighed,” with such works of art, realized forms having, as Pound writes of Brancusi, “a mathematical exactitude of proportion.” Our awareness of life itself springs from such an aptitude for intricate formulae, keeping the numbers dancing in proportions, the living mechanism of the body and the brain in its analyses and syntheses performing, to be alive to things at all demanding, a high cybernetics. The lasting thrill of the artist’s work is that it fits, as our actions fit, when we feel them to be most alive, more than we imagined or longed for, so that we gain a heightened expectation of proportion.

I am sure that these apprehensions do not come from the unknown but are the very beginning terms of consciousness, the first factors of our human communication. The rumor remains of the unconscious, the incommunicable below, and of the super essential, the incommunicable above. But where numbers or images or persona occur we are in the realm of consciousness, for to figure and to sense is the mode of awareness. Even the rumors of psychoanalysts and metaphysicians are, like all rumors, elements arising in consciousness. The unconscious is, to apply the formula of theology, the uncreating; the super-essential, the uncreated. Myths and archetypes, like the structures Plotinus or Jung pursue in thought, are the stories and pictures we know as creation, the ground the collective conscious makes for experience. It is our consciousness not our unconscious that strives to imagine the real and the unreal, that would make a body even in the unrealized, so that the toil of creation is never done. Even these haunting rumors of the beyond consciousness, of the unknowable, appear as creatures of conscious language. Words propose “a Word beyond utterance, eluding Discourse, Intuition, Name, and every kind of being.”