The H.D. Book (51 page)

But just here I would admit those crossed lines, mixed purposes,
almost of a literary scholar, an historian, a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions, overwriting the poet and the figure before us that we are striving to realize.

We have only this one way to go, to the knotting and the untying of knots, moving along the line of our moving, the sometimes multiphasic sentence, we follow, trace of this coveted animal or animating power we address, crossing and recrossing and re-recrossing its charm as if we could so bring over into our human lot the form it is of a book we are writing or of a life we are leading, is the nucleus itself of our work which we feel as an impending lure, the turning point where we are, leading us on.

•

We are—where a work of art is thought of as organic, related to a concept of life itself as a process of form in creation—always where “the tide is turning.” In the opening of
The Walls Do Not Fall:

unaware, Spirit announces the Presence;
shivering overtakes us,

The Presence in which we shiver is the entity of the poem itself in which the poet shivers, the immanence of the design of the tapestry in the weaver’s held breath as he works.

•

The heart, felt in the very beat of the verse, expressed in the insistent figure of alternating ebb and flow, consecration and affirmation, “hot noon-sun” and “the grey / opalescent winter-dawn,” appears in the foreground of the design as a jar carried by the Mage Kaspar to a new Master over Love (over the heart then). And Life appears as genius, an odor of myrrh, where the seal of the jar or heart was unbroken, that comes from the Christ-Child as if from one’s own heart. Life is the Presence, “spectrum-blue, / ultimate blue ray,” H.D. addresses it in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
xiii: “rare as radium, as healing,” toward which or from which the memory of the Curies from William Carlos Williams’s
Paterson
may have come. So, too, Wilhelm Reich saw Life in each cell, as he tells us in
The Function of the Orgasm,
as a blue flame. In poetry,
perhaps, we can allow the vision, though H.D.’s critics were suspicious of poetic fraud; in psychiatry, it brought disgrace for Reich and, ultimately, actual imprisonment for medical fraud upon the seer.

•

We can allow the blue light? But once H.D. presents it, the “ultimate blue ray,” what we could not really tell then, is not a passing fantasy but some ultimate term of the reality of the poem. The empire of her thought and feeling is always precarious, in excess of critical permission, and now to bring in this remnant of theosophical color-theory? of romantic dream-key? the blue flower of Novalis’s
Heinrich von Ofterdingen?
The very names
Theosophical
and
Romantic
are pejoratives in the great court of that Nicaea I am tempted to address.

•

So, we are lost, we have lost our argument and must go on deeper to follow the lead of this Heart, as if the heart were itself an organ of intelligence and we would find more than a figure of speech in the intuition of “to know by heart” or “to know in one’s heart.” But now it is a jar that we follow in the poem, and the blue light is an odor. . . .

•

When the first announcement comes in
The Walls Do Not Fall
of the Christos, we are told:

His, the Genius in the jar
which the Fisherman finds,

He is Mage,
bringing myrrh.

The “stone-marvel” of the sea-shell, the “egg-shell,” are little alabaster jars. Stars, too, are “little jars of that indisputable / and absolute Healer, Apothecary,” and contain something; as words and then poems are containers, where meaning and presence are myrrh and the odor of myrrh.

•

O heart, small urn
of porphyry, agate or cornelian,

how imperceptibly the grain fell
between a heart-beat of pleasure

and a heart-beat of pain;
I do not know how it came.

As in Kaspar’s vision of the unfolding of the seed or pearl as a nucleus of light in the world is contained and revealed: “no one will ever know / whether the picture he saw clearly / as in a mirror was predetermined” or “no one will ever know how it happened / that in a second or a second and half a second” there is a gnosis beyond knowing. “Of the order of magnitude of a second, or even of fractions of a second,” Whitehead says. “I could not really tell,” Harvey testifies. “A small molecule,” Schrödinger tells us, “might be called ‘the germ of a solid’.”

•

It is not abstract, a separate mental conception, apart from the material instance; but ineffable, elusive to definition. “The sense of having lived,” Henry James writes in his Preface to
The Wings of the Dove,
trying to recapture the germ of that work—the idea of Milly Theale desiring “to achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived.”

•

So, “the hidden seed, the myrrh or meaning, the heart’s rapture” may also be such a sense of having lived, for it is to live that I find myself returning to the poem.

•

As it was the title
What Is Life?
that drew me to Schrödinger’s work, and the sense of life, the excitement or immediacy in the writing of Schrödinger that leads me on to read. To bring forward into fullness of consciousness and involvement “the sense of having lived.” That must then spring from the immediate presence of one’s having lived in the only area the sense of anything can take place or time in—in the present
intuition. The writer’s having lived in the writing the reader in turn lives in.

“The image so figured would be, at best, but half the matter,” James writes: “the rest would be all the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious experience somehow compassed.”

•

The image and the tissue of the image, the weaving and the woven tapestry, contain something, the sense of having lived, so that where we respond to books or to works of art intensely we think of them as living, we have the sense of having lived in the world of our reading. In
Tribute to the Angels,
the Lady, Mother of God, appears to H.D. bearing not the Christ but a book, as if Life or Love were also Poem or Work of Art—“her book is our book; written,” H.D. confides in xxxix:

or unwritten, its pages will reveal

a tale of a Fisherman,
a tale of a jar or jars,

•

“I have trouble following,” my friend Thomas Parkinson had noted in reading the first draft of the Day Book at this transition from James’s evocation of the picture or image, the adventure, the gain or loss, and the precious experience somehow compassed, to H.D.’s “her book is our book.” The passage from James had come abruptly to my mind as I wrote, and I, following, also had trouble. Certainly, the intensity of James’s living in the writing itself, life in turn the germ of the book, comes near to the sense I have of H.D.’s cult within the poem. Now, going back to the passages in which the Lady appears, from the xxiv with its beginning lines I have quoted more than once in this work: “Every hour, every moment / has its specific attendant Spirit” thru xli with its return of the Angels as bells tolling the Hour—“our purpose, a tribute to the Angels,” the lines leap up from xxxvi: “she brings the Book of Life, obviously.”

•

This is the religion of the Book. The People of the Book, so Islam denoted the Jews, Christians, and themselves. And we who take our lives in the afterlife of Christendom in writing and in reading must come across hints of the Word as we follow the word and of the Presence as we find a book lively. The Lady in
Tribute to the Angels
may be the Mother of the Word—the writer herself:

She carried a book, either to imply
she was one of us, with us,

or she may have been the Bride of the Word, the reader:

or to suggest she was satisfied
with our purpose, a tribute to the Angels;

At the close of the work itself, in
The Flowering of the Rod,
we see Her again, here Kaspar brings forward the jar in which the old lore or sacred orthodox but esoteric story has been stored. But the bearer of the gift has met a woman along the way, the myrrh has become mixed perhaps, the story even as the woman tells it passes into another lore belonging to the world of Woman, the Mara of bitter experience to become “Mary-myrrh.” Receiving the gift for the Child, the Mother may be the Muse receiving the poem on behalf of the Poem or Poetry. “Sir, it is a most beautiful fragrance, / as of all flowering things together.” As, we realize, in the presentation of the poem itself H.D. as bearer of the content of the poem is like Kaspar for she is not sure the content has not been “changed,” mixed, and yet she comes to know the gift—for the poem comes as a gift to the poet writing—is one of having lived in the pleasure of “a most beautiful fragrance,” the music of the poem.

•

The ambivalence of the heart (“facing two ways”), the secretiveness of the heart, these are to be brought before the Christ Child; He Himself a sealed jar, yet a-jar somehow, for the essence escapes everywhere—mercurial, hermetic. He had been declared King, heir of the Fathers, even as the myrrh had been the secret or secretion of the Fathers, yet the suspicion lingers that another intention, a Woman’s, has interfered.

The hardness of the heart is brought before the Child in the gift, for it is contained in the “small urn” of alabaster. As in “Narthex” almost two decades earlier, where H.D.’s seeing-in-depth first appears, she must bring the burnt-out triangle of painful experience into the hieroglyph of Solomon’s seal, a woman’s message worked into the sign of the Mage, so here, the odor of a woman’s bitterness, of brine, “a Siren-song” is brought into the myrrh: “in recognition,” she tells us in
The Flowering of the Rod,
xx, it might be “of an old burnt-out / yet somehow suddenly renewed infatuation . . . ” Alabaster and salt of the sea had been terms of her first poems.

But then, as if love everywhere, even bitter love, burnt-out and lost love, were Love, it is not from the jar, whatever became of its myrrh, but from the Jar, the heart of the matter:

the fragrance came from the bundle of myrrh
she held in her arms.

“I am the Way,” this God had said. And the way as we write may be the Christ; its music, the fragrance. “I am the Life,” the sense of having lived, of its living, the closeness to essential Life in which our recognition of any work of art is involved may be our sense of its Mastery. He is the book she carries as she appears to the poet, and in the close of the book the poet writes, as at the close of The War Trilogy, He appears as the Child. “The Kingdom is within,” He also said, where the Way, Word, Life, Master, World are one, in the Heart.

MARCH
14, Tuesday. 1961 (1963)

1.

Without thought, invention
you would not have been, O Sword.

“Rails gone (for guns),” the poem begins, with the officers of the State, in the name of the War Effort, taking over all the conditions of personal reality into their own use, “from your (and my) old town square.” With the declaration of war in the modern state, which claims to represent the authority of the people, the means and ends of the war become the ultimate reality (as in the interim between wars, which we call “Peace,” to face reality means to accept and work with the terms of the dominant mercantile capitalistic and usurious system). The critical contempt that met H.D.’s War Trilogy was in part the contempt of the Protestant ethic for womanish ways, and back of that the old war between the Father and his hero-sons and the heathen realm of the Mothers, anticipated by H.D. in the “they snatched off our amulets, / charms are not, they said, grace” theme introduced in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
ii. But there was also the contempt of those concerned with the War Effort for H.D.’s sense that ultimately the War was to be subject to Writing itself
as a higher prime of reality. To bring up the old gods of Egypt, already proved false and declared out-of-bounds by the historical victory of the Bible, was anachronistic in the face of the air attacks on London. The critics of the day—Dudley Fitts and Randall Jarrell—found her concept of history silly, if not dangerous, an offense to any common sense. The “still the Luxor bee, chick and hare / pursue unalterable purpose” and the “eternity endures” of the opening passage of the poem was the declaration of a personal real equal in its terms to the real terms of the war, i.e., political and national contentions, and H.D. had known from her experience of the pillory undergone by the Lawrences and other friends in the First World War that the cost of such a declaration was to suffer an all but overwhelming rejection. Here too the criticism is anticipated in the poem, where, in xxxi, the main statement of the voices of the adversary begins, accusing the poet of “intrusion of strained / inappropriate allusion, / illusion of lost-gods, daemons; / gambler with eternity . . . ”

Robert Lowell’s
Land of Unlikeness,
published the same year as
The Walls Do Not Fall,
with its “Tonight the venery of capital / Hangs the bare Christ-child on a tree of gold,” was acceptable, for it recognized the victory of the industrial order over Christendom as ultimately real; Lowell held no unreal confidence in a higher reality of Christ. He was appropriately despairing in his opposition to the facts of the war. He acknowledged what Tate calls in his introduction to Lowell’s first book “the disappearance of the Christian experience from the modern world.” The young poet in despairing anger refers to Christ thruout with the realistic recognition that He is a lost cause or an absent spirit, like a Hamlet crying “Looke heere upon this Picture, and on this.” “The ghost of risen Jesus,” “my carrion king, Jesus,” “the Hanging Jesus”—the Jesus that history crucifies haunts his mind. At one time only, in “Cistercians in Germany,” does the ahistorical, anachronistic, or eternal image of Christ appear: “To Bernard gathering his canticle of flowers, / His soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers, / And all his body one extatic womb, / And through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom.” The poet is upon the verge of an epiphany, but he remains intellectually discrete and clearly takes this near appearance of Christ not as an Image but as a description of Bernard’s scene. Perhaps
upon later consideration Lowell felt even this spiritual pretension false; he does not include it in the canon of
Lord Weary’s Castle.