The H.D. Book (60 page)

Helen thinks, but Achilles already sees something in her and turns upon her in horror:

What sort of enchantment is this?
what art will you yield with a fagot?
are you Hecate? are you a witch?

a vulture? a hieroglyph?

Vulture crown but also serpent crown. The eyes of the woman in Stuck’s painting
Die Sünde
watch with the eyes of the anaconda or boa constrictor who is coiled about her, its head flattened in the nape of her seductive neck. Lying in wait. In the depths of intimacy, the hidden will show itself to strike. In such flashes of hate, the Great Mother shows her Hecate face. The jeweled and painted fan upon the floor of the dream was I had to remember the spread hood of a cobra treacherously disguised. “Hated of all Greece!” the cry rings as a refrain in
Helen in Egypt,
an echo or imitation of “Desired of all Greece.” And now with naked feet I walked among snakes. In the Hindoo story a wife walking so at night in the dark wood among snakes proves the strength of her faith and devotion to a new Master over Love.

But the Pythian oracles, shamanesses of Attic snake cult, the bird priestesses in winged and feathered robes of owl or sea-hawk, the carrion Lilith or Eve with her familiar, must have turned fanatical eyes, painted eyes of peacock blue and red and gold, cobra eyes. Angry hurt
and hurting eyes. Fearful eyes. The gorgoneion mask whose snaky locks writhe with power.

•

September 3, 1964

“An art is vital only so long as it is interpretive,” Pound proposes in “Psychology and Troubadours”: “so long, that is, as it manifests something which the artist perceives at greater intensity, and more intimately, than his public.”

“We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive,” he continues: “When we do get into the contemplation of the flowing we find sex, or some correspondence to it, ‘positive and negative,’ ‘North and South,’ ‘sun and moon’ ”:

For the particular parallel I wish to indicate, our handiest illustrations are drawn from physics: 1st, the common electric machine, the glass disc and rotary brushes; 2nd, the wireless telegraph receiver. In the first we generate a current, or if you like, split up a static condition of things and produce a tension. This is focused on two brass knobs or ‘poles.’ These are first in contact, and after the current is generated we can gradually widen the distance between them, and a spark will leap across it, the wider the stronger, until with the ordinary sized laboratory appliance it will leap over or around a large obstacle or pierce a heavy book cover. In the telegraph we have a charged surface—produced in a cognate manner—attracting to it, or registering movements in the invisible aether.

The
trobar clus,
the cult of love in Provence that was also a cult of poetry, was “an art, that is to say, a religion,” Pound suggests, of a way to the experience of “our kinship with the vital universe.” “Did this ‘close ring,’ this aristocracy of emotion, evolve, out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult—a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate ascetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul by the refinement of, and lordship over, the senses?” Does the Lady stand to the lover, as his Muse to the Poet, to inspire and cooperate in the art, to demand and command in the name of Amor or of Poetry—a new
Master over the Art, so that the poet gives his will, his hunger and the satisfaction of his hunger over to a higher authority—
donna della mia mente
—that appears to him in the art. In faith he writes in the dark upon a ground that may writhe with the thrill in which he walks, but, devoted to the rule of the art, he is saved in the increase of his phantasy.

In the heightened state, exceeding immediate satisfaction, the goal of genital release is increased from a physical to a spiritual tension, and the original object becomes an instrument towards a sublimation. “The Greek aesthetic would seem to consist wholly in plastic, or in plastic moving towards coitus, and limited by incest, which is the sole Greek taboo,” Pound observes in the Cavalcanti essay. In the aesthetic of Provence “the conception of the body as a perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades”; beyond the sensory reality, “the impact of light on the eye,” and its ideal forms, in the spirit of Romance, the poets sought “an interactive force: the
virtu.
” A magic begins, and the poem as an operation of the new theurgy—love, sexual intercourse, as operations of the new theurgy—becomes other-worldly centered. Beatrice and Virgil, spiritual beings, are the true inspirations and hence critics of
The Divine Comedy.
In the high humor of the tradition, Blake will truly declare that he writes not for this world but for his true muses or lovers or readers in the spirit.

“Sex is, that is to say, of a double function and purpose, reproductive and educational; or,” Pound continues in “Psychology and Troubadours”: “as we see in the realm of the fluid force, one sort of vibration produces at different intensities, heat and light.” Then:

The problem, in so far as it concerns Provence, is simply this: Did this ‘chivalric love,’ this exotic, take on mediumistic properties? Stimulated by the color or quality of emotion, did that ‘color’ take on forms interpretive of the divine order? Did it lead to an ‘exteriorization of the sensibility,’ and interpretation of the cosmos by feeling?

“Thirteen years ago I lost a brother,” Blake writes to his patron Hayley, upon the death of Hayley’s son in May of 1800: “and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the Spirit, See him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice and even
now write from his Dictate.” And in a letter to Flaxman in September that same year, he writes:

And Now Begins a New life, because another covering of Earth is shaken off. I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels. . . . I see our houses of Eternity, which can never be separated, tho’ our Mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.

In his excited state—“my Enthusiasm,” he calls it in his letter to Hayley, “which I wish all to partake of, Since it is to me a Source of Immortal joy . . . by it I am the companion of Angels”—Blake sees in terms of his Divine World, radiated with Love, a feeling as in Heaven above earthly feeling. This “Above” in Blake contrasts sharply with a “Below”—there seems to be a gap in feeling; for Hayley in Blake’s earthy moods is “Pick Thank” and Flaxman, “Sculptor of Eternity,” is “Blockhead.” Between 1808 and 1811, feeling mocked by Flaxman who had been his teacher and driven by Hayley who all Blake’s life was his patron or “angel,” Blake reviled them in epigrams and verses:

Anger & Wrath my bosom rends:
I thought them the Errors of friends.
But all my limbs with warmth glow:
I find them the Errors of the foe.

He had come to suspect that Hayley was patronizing and that Flaxman put him down as a madman. Hayley’s commissions for prints that had not been done yet pressed him and then depressed him. “I curse & bless Engravings alternately, because it takes so much time & is so untrac-table, tho’ capable of such beauty & perfection,” he writes Hayley or, again: “Your eager expectation of hearing from me compels me to write immediately,” Hayley’s very “generous & tender solicitude,” Blake calls it when Hayley paid his bail and court costs in Blake’s sedition trial,
leave the artist feeling indebted and driven. “I received your kind letter with the note to Mr. Payne, and have had the cash from him.”

. . . Mr. Flaxman advises that the drawing of Mr. Romney’s which shall be chosen instead of the Witch (if that cannot be recovered), be ‘Hecate,’ the figure with the torch and snake, which he thinks one of the finest drawings.

September 4 [10], 1964

Joey, the “Mechanical Boy” of Bruno Bettelheim’s study in the
Scientific American,
March 1959 (“A case history of a schizophrenic child who converted himself into a ‘machine’ because he did not dare be human”), lives as a creature in a world created by an inaccessible creator, as a machine charged by invisible “pretend” electricity. “He functioned as if by remote control, run by machines of his own powerfully creative fantasy. Not only did he himself believe that he was a machine but, more remarkably, he created this impression in others,” Bettelheim tells us. “Entering the dining room, for example, he would string an imaginary wire from his ‘energy source’—an imaginary outlet—to the table. There he ‘insulated’ himself with paper napkins and finally plugged himself in. . . . So skillful was the pantomime that one had to look twice to be sure there was neither wire nor outlet nor plug. Children and members of our staff spontaneously avoided stepping on the ‘wires’ for fear of interrupting what seemed the source of his very life.”

The higher claim to reality of Joey’s created world over the uncreated world is a counterpart of the higher reality the world of his creation has for the artist over the world as material from which it is drawn. The “charge” we feel in the recognition of high art, the breaking thru into special truths or keys of existence, is a power the artist has evoked in transforming a content from a private into a communal fantasy. At certain conjunctions, where form and content are suddenly revealed in full, waves of excitement, as if a current had been turned on, pass over the brain and thru the nervous systems, and the body seems tuned up in apprehension of what is happening in the work of art. “Many times a day,” Bettelheim tells us, Joey “would turn himself on until he
‘exploded,’ screaming ‘Crash, crash!’ and hurling items from his ever present apparatus—radio tubes, light bulbs, even motors. . . . ” It is as if he were seized by the reality of his conception. It is not Joey’s retreat into a private world that we experience, but rather the intensity of his communication, the obliterating power of the language he has made, that takes over not only his reality but also that of those about him. Even at night he is governed by his work, fixing apparatus to his bed to “live him” during his sleep, “contrived from masking tape, cardboard, wire and other paraphernalia.” With such an intensity, Orpheus in Harold Dull’s poem transforms the actual events of his life into fantastic events—questions that refuse their answers—that are really strings upon a lyre that is a triumph of the imagination. The poet would give himself over to the charge of song, or, beyond poetry, the seer Blake would give himself over to the charge of vision, as Joey gives himself over to the charge of his made-up machine.

Certainly at times we confront in Joey’s work the operations of metaphor, correspondence, persona, and word play that govern the poem, and like the poet, Joey must be obedient to laws that appear in the structure he makes. “He was unable to designate by its true name anything to which he attached feelings. Nor could he name his anxieties except through neologisms or word contaminations.” But the artist too must find new names and knows that the true name is hidden in the work he must do, as Isis knows that Ra’s Secret Name is not the name that all men know but is hidden in his breast. (“They are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies,” we remember from
The Walls Do Not Fall.
)

“For a long time he spoke about ‘master paintings’ and ‘a master painting room,’ ” Bettelheim continues, and translates “(i.e. masturbating and masturbating room).” But now it is as if “masturbating” were not the true word until we also understand it is “master painting,” an ideogram is forming that when complete may reveal the hidden, as yet unexperienced, term; something that masturbating and master painting are but instances of. As here, from Orpheus transforming his life into an instrument of music, or Natalia Saunderson transforming her sexual seizure into an electricity, or Pound’s concept of a universe of fluid force, Joey’s idea of being lived by an electric current, I would gather a picture
of a power the artist knows in which the fictional real becomes most veridical, in which art comes closest to religion—as in Blake’s world, in which man appears as a creature of his own creative force.

Like the poet, Joey must face his adversary in his work. “One of his machines, the ‘criticizer,’ prevented him from ‘saying words which have unpleasant feelings.’ Yet he gave personal names to the tubes and motors in his collection of machinery. Moreover,” Bettelheim tells us, “these dead things had feelings; the tubes bled when hurt and sometimes got sick.” The excitement and the discharge of excitement in the work of art, “master painting,” and the aesthetic requirement, the inbuilt ‘criticizer’ of the artist that determines appropriate material, appear in a grotesque guise in Joey’s universe. His tubes and motors are personae of his poem that has overcome all terms of identity outside of its own operation; as in “Good Frend,” Claribel, no more than a name, is so a person. Joey’s tubes and motors are not dead things, for they are words in a language that would be living. Deprived of communication, for the adults about him would not listen, “When he began to master speech, he talked only to himself.” We gather that his parents cut off that current of questioning by which a child participates in first communications, taking apart and putting together the machinery of language which before he had known only as a vehicle of electric emotions and persuasions. But Joey turns to another mute or frozen language embodied in man-made objects about him. “At an early date he became preoccupied with machinery, including an old electric fan which he could take apart and put together again with surprising deftness.”

Bettelheim is concerned with the loss of the flow of feeling, represented in the universe of Joey by the need to be turned on or charged; but we are concerned here with how Joey’s powerful creative fantasy is like the poet’s creative fantasy, the poetic imagination that must have a higher claim to reality than immediate “distractions,” in order for the poem to come into being, and how much Joey, run by his own fantastic machinery, is like the inspired poet in his divine madness. Pound, Williams, and H.D. do not make that romantic claim, but all three are disturbed by the power of words over them. Memory (the past), awareness (the immediate), wish (the future) are all heightened and demand satisfaction in the excitement of the work; and more, in that nexus of
three, a creativity is at work to change the nature of truth. Blake gave the Imagination highest authority and sought to live in Creation. He could call up the shades of Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton—“majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men” and converse with them by the seashore. In his marginalia to Lavater’s
Aphorisms
Blake writes: