The H.D. Book (50 page)

The triumph of utility over beauty in the square unornamented functional architecture of the “International” style is the dominant idea in our contemporary utilitarian City, appropriate expression of the will-to-power of large corporations over all individual variation; as, in turn, the dominant idea in international affairs—the Atomic War—hints at the anger, outrage, despair, fear suffered by corporation-men themselves living in their own system.

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H.D.’s apocalyptic vision in The War Trilogy, like her identification with Hellenistic decadence in the period between the first two World Wars, provides an historical perspective in which the experience of London under attack in the Second World War becomes meaningful in relation to depths and heights of personal reality—depths she had
come to know in her psychoanalysis with Freud and then in new terms with the study of occult and hermetic lore, heights she had known in aesthetic and erotic ideals earlier inherited from Pre-Raphaelite sources and developed in Imagism. To be a poet appeared as a challenge of existing things, and poets seemed to form a heretical group. Among poets, “Imagists” in turn were viewed as heretical by conventional versifiers. “She is fighting in her country,” H.D. wrote of Marianne Moore in 1916 in
The Egoist,
“against squalor and commercialism. We are all fighting the same battle.”

She had known too in the war years the persecution that dogged the little pacifist group around D. H. Lawrence, for Frieda and Lawrence had taken refuge in the house where H.D. lived. “Victims, victimised and victimising,” she writes in
Bid Me to Live:
“Perhaps the victims came out, by a long shot, ahead of the steady self-determined victimisers.” They were, she and Lawrence and Pound, not of the lost generation but “they had roots (being in their mid-twenties and their very early thirties) still in that past. They reacted against a sound-board, their words echoed . . . What was left of them was the war generation, not the lost generation.”

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Beauty under attack,
Imagism
under attack, pacifism under attack, and, as the Wars like great Dreams began to make it clear, life itself under attack—H.D. had an affinity for heretical causes. In psychoanalysis again she found a cult under attack. “Upon my suggestion to H.D. that psychoanalysis seemed to affect some people as does Christian Science,” Robert McAlmon argues with the contempt commonsense has for such things, “she took me seriously and said yes, it was a religion.” It was, Freud felt, to take the place of religion, and he thought always of psychoanalysis under attack as Truth under attack, for the civilization itself—indeed, civilization itself—was at war against knowing anything about, much less recognizing within, the contents of the unconscious. “My discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy,” Freud tells H.D.: “There are very few who understand this,
there are very few who are capable of understanding this.
”

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To be analysed was not only an initiation, a learning to read the meaning of dreams, of daily life, of the poem; it was also a trial. “ ‘I am asking only one thing of you,’ he said,” H.D. tells us in
Tribute to Freud;
then: “Even as I write the words, I have the same sense of anxiety, of tension, of imminent responsibility that I had at that moment.”

What he asks is that she not defend his philosophy. (Is it in some way like Augustine’s perception that while Rome falls to the barbarians, the Christians, seeking out the meaning of Rome, must not defend the city or truth against the enemy but convert the enemy to the city—a “City of God” that Rome may be but that is not Rome.) “At the least suggestion that you may be about to begin a counter-argument in my defense, the anger or the frustration of the assailant will be driven deeper. You will drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper . . . The only way to extract the fear or prejudice would be from within, from below.”

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The apocalyptic picture of the world that is also the heart under attack is a complex image of correspondences between what is felt as inflicted and what is felt in projection, of wishes for vengeance that are also fears of punishment seen fulfilled in actual events. “Pompeii has nothing to teach us,” H.D. begins the Trilogy:

we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,

pressure on heart, lungs, the brain . . .

The events of the London blitz illustrate the wrath of the Father, and the arguments of the pro-war forces in English society demanding the adherence of all wills to the war effort reappear as voices of the Protestant Ethic, the very spirit of industrial and commercial capitalism, in attack upon art, sexuality and Woman. Behind the war is an old war against Tiamat. On a psychological level, an analytical level, the war is sensed in pressures of inner wrath—of the “Jehovah” within—upon living organs. Such a condition demands of the imagination a new heart and a new reality in which there is the germ of survival.

III
.

So the Trilogy is the story of survival, the evolution of forms in which life survives. In the tides of oceanic life-force, the
élan vitale,
the individual heart appears as the shell-fish. “That flabby, amorphous hermit / within” is the brain in its skull-shell, and its limit the limit of thought in the overwhelming element of what is. But it is also the heart, holding against too much feeling:

it unlocks the portals
at stated intervals:

prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow:

A correspondence is felt between the tide of the sea and the tide of the blood, between ebb and flow and the systole and diastole, between the valves of the heart and the valves of the shell-fish who lives in the tidal rhythm, as the brain lives in the tidal flow of the heart, fed by charges of blood in the capillaries.

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Here (
The Walls Do Not Fall,
iv) the individual life begets itself from and must also hold itself against the enormous resources of life, against the too-much, “beget self-out-of-self,” take heart in what would take over the heart in its greater power. The theme recurs: in xvii: “the tide is turning”; in xxv: “my heart-shell / breaks open.” It leads forward in
Tribute to the Angels
to Gabriel, the Moon-Regent, Lord of Spiritual Tides, and, in
The Flowering of the Rod,
to the echo of the sea and of her Tiamat-identity that Woman brings with her to the Christ.

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The “indigestible, hard, ungiving” thing, of iv, that “living within” begets “that pearl-of-great-price,” may be a coal, in xvii, “for the world’s burning”; for, in xxv, we learn that the phoenix dropped “a grain, / as of scalding wax” from its burning, that “lodged in the heart-core, / has taken its nourishment” and, in xxviii, that the grain fell
“between a heart-beat of pleasure / and a heart-beat of pain.” We see readily the statement that the nucleus of the poem itself as a pearl may grow from a painful “indigestible” thing. Underlying it we may sense the statement that the poet has taken heart in a long-forgotten burning event.

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As, in the systole-diastole reference, the
consecration / affirmation
of xxxix is charged with biological meaning:

We have had too much consecration,
too little affirmation,

too much: but this, this, this
has been proved heretical,

too little: I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide . . .

The presentation of intellectual alternates—the orthodoxy arising from convention and the consensus of authority versus the heresy of the individual experience—would seem farthest from referring to the physical image of the heart, but in its form of alternating beats, of a flux between too much and too little, it proposes not the image of opposites but the image of a circulation, the returning flood from the ventricle of the heart into the arterial circuit, where the sense of the more-than-enough in the word “too” may refer to the crisis or strain. The “hermit / within” who would survive and create “self-out-of-self” in the tide flow of oceanic feeling must keep his limits, “of nothing-too-much.”

In the opening poems of
The Flowering of the Rod,
this theme of crisis or heart-beat in a duality flowers in full song, beginning with the “I go where I love and where I am loved,” (ii) and continuing thru viii—a song of assent and affirmation in the alternating current of human will. Here, beyond the of-nothing-too-much, she acclaims “the insatiable longing,” “the eternal urge,” “the despair,” then the desire itself “to equilibrate the eternal variant.”

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“To charge with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” Pound had commanded the poet. To the heart’s limit? “Meaning” may be then H.D.’s new Master over Love, that is also a new heart taken in poetry and appears as the key from which the new feeling of history distributes its rhythm. The “but gods always face two-ways” of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
ii, charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, means that times too always face two ways. “Every hour, every moment,” H.D. tells us in
Tribute to the Angels,
“has its specific attendant Spirit”; there is no time that is not a god, the dying and rebirth of self. “The tide is turning,” of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
xvii, where “we” are “coals for the world’s burning,” refers not only to a turning-point in the orders of human history but to a turning-point in the body’s history, the diagnosis of a crisis; and, back of these, to a turning-point in which we know the intent of life itself manifest.

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“When I first tried animal experimentation for the purpose of discovering the motions and functions of the heart by actual inspection and not by other people’s books,” Harvey writes: “I found it so truly difficult that I almost believed, with Fracastorius, that the motion of the heart was to be understood by God alone. I could not really tell when systole or diastole took place, or when dilation or construction occurred, because of the quickness of the movement.”

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It is in the “I could not really tell when” that only the imagination pleads us on—the
affirmation,
H.D. calls it. The vision of history in
The Walls Do Not Fall
grows from a seed of light or pulse—it is an old occult tradition. A heart-beat, a seed of time, a mustard seed, so immediate that it precedes our sense of it:

then I woke with a start
of wonder and asked myself,

but whose eyes are those eyes?

“All that we can observe,” Whitehead argues in
Adventures of Ideas,
“consists of conceptual persuasions in the present . . . Literature preserves the wisdom of the human race; but in this way it enfeebles the emphasis of first-hand intuition. In considering our direct observation of past, or of future, we should confine ourselves to time-spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even of fractions of a second.”

IV
.

[July 31st, 1964.] Conceived first in the Spring of 1961 as a daybook—allowing for sketches of thought, digressive followings of impulse, and searchings for content, for design within design, a demonstration of what occurs as I take H.D.’s War Trilogy as the ground of interpretation, days haunted by passages of her poem, introducing new elements, rendering new possibilities—three years later in the Summer of 1964, as in those drawings at the cave-temple of Pech-Merle in the Hall of Hieroglyphics “superimposed, drawn by fingers in the soft clay (soft and pliable even now), with no dominant direction, crossing and interpenetrating one another,” where, Giedion tells us in
The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art,
“Aurignacian man gained magic possession of coveted animals by drawing their outlines in the darkness of the caverns, illuminated only by a flickering torch,” or, as in Marie and Pierre Curie’s working the pitchblende, following the lure of an unseen-as-yet element, who appear in
Paterson
Four as personae of the poet himself working the language where “A dissonance / in the valence of Uranium / led to the discovery”:

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
!

the book returns again and again to this material in which the lure of a seed or a heart-beat or a minimal nucleus of consciousness lingers. Thought here, not expository but experimental, trying the materials, and operative, the matter itself changing in experiment, the immediate work in its working creating itself anew as gold or goal. In places I am thinking-thru lines twice thought thru before, not to come to the conclusion of a thought but to return to its movement, to old traces, drawn by the idea that is a generative force, inhabiting these lines, along these lines, to find out what draws me, in the dark by the light of what I have known towards the light of what I do not yet know, am about to know as I draw; the drawing, a dramatic rehearsal.

A finding then, a finding out of a way in going, of the poet in the figure of the poet traced from lines where H.D. before me worked along these lines. Life of poet crossing and interpenetrating life of poet in the imagination of something “to gain magic-possession” of that most coveted animal power, the lion-voice, the serpent-wisdom, the nightingale-song, the antlered crown—to commune with the animal force felt in the poem return to the working of the poem. So, the rehearsals of self as “that craftsman, / the shell-fish,” or, “when I, / the industrious worm, / spin my own shroud,” or “erect serpent” in
The Walls Do Not Fall;
so, the ecstatic flight as “the first wild goose,” having the migratory bird’s instinctual drive to “hover / over the lost island, Atlantis.”

For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions nor an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics. There are times when my primary work here, my initiation of self as poet in the ground of the poet H.D.—and also my working of what is now a “matter of Poetry” (as the Arthurian lore is called the matter of Britain) and in turn an element in the great matter of the Creation of Man—there are times when my work has given way to literary persuasions and arguments, as if I might plead the cause of my life experience before the authorities at Nicaea and have my way, no longer heretical, taken over by those good bishops who control appointments and advancements as established dogma, a place won for H.D. in the orthodox taste and opinion of literary conventions.