Authors: Michael Boughn Robert Duncan Victor Coleman
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High mind must labor—Williams in
Paterson
calls up the figure of Madame Curie working the pitchblende—in obscure matter. But just where the mind disavows its sexual motivation or where the genital organ disavows its mental imagination, a contention begins in man’s nature. What a dark filthy fabric of lies and richness the political figures
of our day seem to weave towards their precipitation of “tragedy, disharmony, disruption, disintegration”—as if driven by necessity—the old Judeo-Christian dream of a War to end the trials of Creation in a holocaust of fire. What does it mean? In 1935 and 1936, as Jung began to first publish his studies of Alchemy, that matter of the Second World War was gathering in men’s minds everywhere. These falsifications of memory were tendentious. Possessed by the thought of the enemy, in fear and anger, men turned their high minds to the invention of the nuclear explosion in matter, to the cultivation of last diseases, to research in gasses that would cripple the minds of whole populations.
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In Alchemy, so too in psychoanalysis, the work depended upon some equivalence or ambivalence between the gold (the Good, the life, the essential) and the shit (the waste, the contamination—but it was also that which was returned to the life or richness of the soil). The Tree had been of Good
and
Evil, but in the contention of Man’s knowledge it had appeared as the Tree of Good contending against Evil, a universe in agony. For the Christian convert Augustine the very curiosity to know at all could appear as adversary to faith, as the primary evil.
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It was the work of Freud in psychology to follow an adverse curiosity, to bring to light just those references that had in the old religion or magic been sacred-taboo, hidden in order to be revealed, set aside, filled with awe / awful. Privates or secrets: penis, testicles, vagina, labia, clitoris, intercourse—words hidden in their latin propriety, proper
in their place.
In the doctor’s inner offices, in the medical report or in the criminal courts, the words might appear as symptoms or charges: sodomy, unnatural relations, perversions—acts that had once been communal in ritual or initiation. Driven, out of mind, out of the community of men, as the old gods went. In bad taste. Or, in bad smell, bad repute.
Virtu,
that Olson suggested to me once must have meant man-smell. “That smells,” we say of some work of art that offends our taste.
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Freud is a hero in a work that had begun to bring up out of the festering darkness (out of the darkened backrooms, the atmosphere of evil thought and shamed confession, in which the decadents of the nineties found their vices; out of the misery and suffering in which the realists found their doctrine of sexual bondage) into the light of day the vanished goods. The rich store underground was to be restored in the sight of man and god.
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In the Judeo-Christian mythos, as in the Orphic tradition, God—Jahweh or Phanes—is Maker or Poet of a universe that as a work of His art, is good. Day by day of creation the “and God saw that it was good” is reiterated, the sublime assurance of the artist. But in the Christian myth, Lucifer, light-bearer of the high mind, is adversely critical of What Is and declares matter itself to be bad, the breeding of animal life vile and the image of Man distasteful. Shame in their nakedness is one of the first illuminations knowledge brings to Adam and Eve. Lucifer becomes the Enemy as he becomes the Critic, and in the Below, which now is a Hell where criticized or condemned men are in pain, he appears as Sathanas, the Adversary.
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But in the work itself, the Creation as a work of art, Lucifer-Satan and Jahweh too, the author, are parts. The reader who is concerned with the structure, with form and content, will exclaim “it is good” at the appropriateness of even adversity in light of the composition. But now, as we begin to see this mythos as having just the truth of its composition, the truth of any story, it itself becomes a part of our own story in which we may try to restore the whole of experience or, rather, within that whole, to bring back the sexuality of man into his common goods.
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The work was in Joyce’s interior monologue, where Bloom’s thought works back and forth between the vision of the nymph Gerty MacDowell where “all melted away dewily in the grey air” and the versions of sexual excitement, the screen weavings of “Licking pennies,”
“that’s the Moon,” “Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom.” to romantic phantasies “Dare say she felt I. When you feel like that you often meet what you feel . . . ” announcing the sexual urgency: “Well cocks and lions do the same and stags.” He is avoiding, his conscious mind is playing over, or above, a below, where “lions do the same.” Bloom discharges his excitement. “Mr. Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil.”
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The mutoscope pictures are “for men only,” but
Ulysses
itself in the installments of
The Little Review
took its place immediately in the high mind, and broke down in its directness the double standard that had divided what was proper for men to think of from what was proper for women to hear. When Virginia Woolf speaks of
Ulysses
as “an illiterate underbred book . . . egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating,” it is she not the book that fails. The bare, simple words—the sexual words that belong to an inner poetry—begin to appear with the poetic ramblings of Molly Bloom: cunt, cock, fuck, “Let out a few smutty words,” Molly Bloom says. But they were let out of their smut into the light of day, having their place with the other nouns of Molly’s soliloquy: “that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colors springing up even out of ditches. . . . ”
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Then in Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Mellors must talk the speech of the lower orders too but these lower orders are the country-folk, the dialect of pagany then. “A woman’s a lovely thing when ’er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good,” Mellors says echoing the words of the Creator.
It was there, in those pages of a novel, between Mellors and Connie, made up out of some other thing between Lawrence and Frieda that had or hadn’t happened. For us, that Mellors and Connie, after arguing and accounting for the tribal lore of sex, as they do; after setting things to rights; make love, and that Lawrence has words for it, is—like the other sexual revelation of Freud’s and like Molly Bloom’s sexual reveries—a breakthru, a release of withheld words into the common
language, a release then of withheld feelings into the possible grace of common understanding.
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There’s “a woman’s a lovely thing” and “cunt’s good” given as threads of the loom, as themes of working good.
And just this earnest, ardent thing in Lawrence, this assertion and affirmation in the words “lovely” and “good” has called forth, calls forth, the smut-hounds and censors who believe that women and cunt are evils, powers over them, and the smirking sophisticates who believe women and cunt are commodities. “Don’t you think all that stuff is
old hat?
” an informant for
Time
magazine asked me when
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was going to be republished. “How
dated
the novel is!”
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As, in its way,
Sally Rand
was dated and showed up something in me. Mellors and Connie are in a strip-tease for some readers.
Mis à nu
in order to find naked reverences, the old reverences of the earth, Elysium, they are naked, exposed not only to the love of some readers in those pages but naked to the ridicule of others.
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“He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o’clock. It was Monday morning.” We too are reminded of the industrial practical realities of men’s lives, of the living that must be worked for. This is the reality James described as utilitarian. Beyond ideal relations, sensual immediacies, imagination and the supernatural, this distant hooting is from a world where reality is fitted to men’s uses and productions, the reality of up-to-date. How silly, once we are aware that what we are reading is in the light of other men’s opinions, Lawrence’s nakedness appears. The hooting is in the background. It is the factory whistle. The conclusions of reasonable men are bearing in upon the scene.
“He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen him.”
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In
Tribute to the Angels
H.D. invokes (against the hooters?) by the sound of bells and by the sign of candle, guardian angels to stand with the old daemons or demons.
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H.D. in her work does not bring the anglo-saxon words, banned by genteel proprieties, into use. In her generation, heirs of the suffragette fight for equal rights, women began to claim an equal share in the right to consciousness, including sexual consciousness. “Bearing in mind that all men conceal the truth in these matters,” Freud in 1905 writes of his initial enquiries into the sexual disturbances that underlay neurotic disorders. With
Ulysses
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
in the 1920s and then, in 1937, Pound’s
Canto
XXXIX, where in Circe’s ingle:
Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,
All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,
as the physical realities of sex, referred to in the language of the Protestant ethic as “privates” or “secrets,” begin to be thought of as communal goods, the words for organs and acts begin to appear in works no longer written for private circulation but to be “published.” “
James Joyce was right,
” rings as a refrain in the prose of “Murex” which follows the mode of the interior monolog, but, though H.D. is a poet for whom the revelation of inner truth is primary, delineating changes of erotic emotion from tensions of withholding to raptures of release, she does not and perhaps could not refer to the sexual parts of the body openly. Not until Denise Levertov’s “Hypocrite Women” and “Our Bodies” in 1963 will the right Joyce had won be claimed by a woman and the words “cunt” and “balls” take their place with “hands,” “eyes,” “mouth,” “feet” in the language of the physical body in a woman’s poetry.
But not only sexual names had been banished by the Protestant ethic. Indeed, the names flourished wherever they were used to express scorn or irreverence. Back of the sexual organs and the names, more feared and hated were the sexual mysteries and powers. Calling up Lilith, “and one born before Lilith,” and Eve, Isis, Astarte, Cyprus in
The Flowering
of the Rod,
H.D. would bring back other banished names in which the daemonic sexual nature of woman is evoked. The Puritanism of Augustine in the 4th century or of Calvin in the sixteenth would censor spiritual as well as physical possibilities. So, Mary Magdalene in
The Flowering of the Rod,
“outcast,” “unseemly,” is City-goddess of Magdala and also “myrrh-tree of the gentiles” and also a Siren of the sea—a numinous power of the ancient Mother-world—as well as a whore. She returns like the very sacred and taboo divinity of Woman as ruler of sexual mysteries that in the nineteenth century began to be called pornography. Having called up:
a word most bitter,
marah
a word bitterer still,
mar
H.D., in turn, invokes the star of morning, Lucifier above:
Phosphorus at sun-rise,
Hesperus at sun-set.
Then she calls upon the disturbance below, what Boehme called the
Turba:
xi
O swiftly, relight the flame
before the substance cool,
for suddenly we saw your name
desecrated; knave and fools
have done you impious wrong,
Venus, for venery stands for impurity
and Venus as desire
is venereous, lascivious,
while the very root of the word shrieks
like a mandrake when foul witches pull
its stem at midnight . . .
thru to:
O holiest one,
Venus whose name is kin
to venerate,
venerator.
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It is this trouble with names, or this trouble of a name, that is followed by the section we have already considered when I wrote about searching for the name of something, of
hérisson:
it lives, it breathes,
it gives off—fragrance?
but then:
I do not know what it gives,
The patron who said “name it,” who said, “if you cannot, if there is no name,
invent it,
” was, if not Freud himself, very like Freud.
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A long way round. “Beating about the bush” is our common expression. I gather what I mean as I go. And must write as if I gathered my sense as a man would gather water in a sieve.
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Lady Chatterley “had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul washed transparent.”
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Yes, it is true. Writing in this book on that Saturday, just after I had smashed my finger, I was out of touch with the pain. The finger, insulted as it was, after all, hooted.
What I was going to write but dissented, but still must go on with, is that in the higher orders they do not hear the hooters? they are not
offended? but “perfectly still,” “washed transparent”? A realm of ideas that is above the distraction of an injured finger.
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Dame Edith Sitwell has turned like an outraged falconess from the higher orders swooping down, distracted, clawing and tearing at the self-esteem of petty critics and versifiers, at the journalistic smirk and hoot. Is it—
lady
like?
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Where the hooting is, there is a division between the upper and the lower; there is a war in the void.
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Working towards this study, I have found H.D.’s deriders, hooters of the daily press, of the current literary reviews. It is part of the polemic, the store of outrage, my hearing at times not the Michael, Raphael, Gabriel of the angelic orders, not the bell-notes over the waters, over the medium of language where those great rimes sound, but the derisive Monday morning reproofs, denials, and smirks of Randall Jarrell, Louise Bogan, Robert Hillyer, industrious literary businessmen, and back of them, the conspiracy of silence. Into the texture of the poem H.D. has woven their voices, as life does weave into the tissue of our physical bodies memories that make for a lasting resistance against insult, for possibilities of repair.