The H.D. Book (71 page)

•

Somewhere, working on
Mrs. Dalloway
or on
The Waves,
Virginia Woolf had the sensation of digging out a space in which her characters had their existence. “Whenever I make a mark,” she says of working on
The Waves,
“I have to think of its relation to a dozen others.” These are the rudiments of a projective-feeling in writing, of composition by field. August 30th, 1923, she writes of
Mrs. Dalloway
in progress: “
The Hours
and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight in the present moment.” Monday, October 15th: “It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunneling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it . . . One feels about in a state of misery—indeed, I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—and then one touches the hidden spring. . . . ”

•

It was to touch the hidden spring, “that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight in the present moment,” that I read
Ulysses
or
The Tempest,
the
De Vulgari Eloquentia
of Dante or “The Guest” of H.D.—as I read cards, water, signs in dreams or the tenor of life around me—not to find what art is but thru the art to find what life might be.

•

How Virginia Woolf labors at her art, suffers under the thought of what her writing might be worth as literature. Her journal reveals, if our reflection or common rumor had not told us before, that she labored to bring forth her own life out of a dark place. There is: “I was walking up Bedford Place is it—the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon—and I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer. And no one knows how I suffer, walking up the street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died—alone; fighting
something alone. And when I come indoors it is all so silent—” Against which, the elaborate structure must hold. The art draws upon the anguish, brings illuminations that lift the heart up, breaks thru to the light; the art draws the writer up out of the anguish into the writing, setting into motion what had been the matter as if frozen underground.

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The cards when we read them, anyway, open fearful ways into the light of day: the goat of Mendes, the card of abject grief, the inversions of goods, the cards that show my own soul swollen with vanity or darkened in deceit—these were parts of the ideogram drawn out of the Tarot reading for this book.

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In every story of the soul there is this anguish of giving birth to one’s self. For Virginia Woolf and for James Joyce those cards were dark at the end of life, darkened by the beginning. As in
Between the Acts:
“Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too . . . It was the night before roads were made or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks.” Or in
Finnegans Wake:
“it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father . . . One in a thousand of years of the nights?”

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The content of the dream, that Freud tells us must be read as a pictographic script. Or, as Schrödinger tells us in his essay upon the nature of life: “this tiny speck of material, the nucleus of the fertilized egg . . . contains an elaborate code-script involving all the future development of the organism.” The cast of the play or the members of the major arcana of the Tarot, the themes and persons of the poet, the periods and recurrences of dark and light of the artist—likewise in a configuration of events we have our own unique patterns or soul stories. But in the works of man, in the testimony of painting, music, and writing I find an other self as if I belonged to a larger language where minds and spirits awaken sympathies in me, a commune of members in which
myself seems everywhere translated. If there are, as Freud argues, no memories from childhood but only memories referring to childhood, it is not surprising that all writing that contributes to one’s consciousness in the present belongs to one’s own past, or is lost.

•

What I am trying to get across is that just as there are threads weaving H.D.’s trilogy
The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels,
and
The Flowering of the Rod
to form a moving coherence, out of and into the lore of the human past—in art what Schrödinger called in physics “an aperiodic solid”—a ministry of sympathies, so, the three works are in turn one articulated cell of a larger fabric. These almost extraneous sorts I have drawn out of Virginia Woolf and Joyce, out of Baudelaire, out of my dreams—the
Sally Rand
theme then, and the “aroused” being a key, to remember “aroused” as well as “excited” and “inspired”—refer to some larger form or soul-self of which all of H.D. comes to be a part. To which I belong, in which I have my present/presence or womb of myself.

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Thru time this fabric extends. It is my own creation as I mistake it. I have never found another human being who does not exclude from his fabric some star of first magnitude in mine; who does not include in first magnitude some “blindspot” or “aversion” of mine.

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Yet just this tissue is the cosmic extension of the aperiodic solid of me. These are the works whereby I have come to know the Work. Thus have I bound Tiamat; in this series, out of these stuffs come into my code-script.

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There is no such unique net of being, no code-script, that does not dance in the outpouring rays of the stars, no knot of my work that does not tremble between truth and falsity as it touches the human fabric that extends thru time.

This net is not now my creation but my creator. Where the caves or the cold feary mad father of the “earliest” memories of the Fathers reappear in other caves that “come to daylight at the present moment.”

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Freud in “Screen Memories” gives us a vision of men weaving the past as the tissue of the present. That is all a tissue of lies, yes—of the imagination. But then there was “when they are tested (by the recollections of adults).” There are tests or trials in which the communal fabric becomes the over-truth.

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Heraklitus said of our great imaginary web or fabrication or reality of realities: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger. But he undergoes transformations, just as fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named after the savor of each.”

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The net is not the world; it is the imagination of the world.

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Of our great net, of our humanity or ministry of sympathies, Heraklitus said: “Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.”

III
.

So, Mary of Magdala may have brought her
marah
into the
myrrh,
brought her genius or her daemon or her seven into the Presence, into the Child—as we, too, bring our selves into what we call our Childhood.

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If there is some exchange, some rumor of Virginia Woolf in the caves of the ice age, some cold draft of that inner dark in James Joyce; if I too now find these rumors or drafts or odors everywhere that I find what I
am as a man; if I too, because I have come into touch with the work of some neurotic woman—it is only the inbinding or sentence a Virginia Woolf makes of words we use all the time, “the great hooded chairs had become enormous,” so that a spell is cast—if I too become the ground in which the words of others grow and change my soul; so I understand then the translation of the myrrh in H.D.’s narrative and how

the house was filled with the odour of the ointment;

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Gospel is rumor or news, a good spell. We have only rumor or news of what is. The real world, Thomas Vaughan tells us, is invisible. And in our contemporary physics too thought must work beyond the visible with ideas of the unseen or not yet seen seeking the nature of the real world.

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Thomas Vaughan refers then to the mustard seed, the smallest of generative particles in which the esoteric meaning of things hides itself awaiting its season and new ground in those whose hearts are receptive and whose minds are willing. In the Christian mystery given in Matthew, Mark and Luke, “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field
.
” Christ telling this parable says that he means to speak of “things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.” But this seed is, He tells us, the word: “Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.”

It is this passage that H.D. draws upon when, in
The Flowering of the Rod,
Kaspar stoops for the lady’s scarf and sees “in that half-second” a fleck of light in a jewel that opens like a flower to disclose the real world—the kingdom of heaven, “the lands of the blest, / the promised lands” H.D. names the kingdom in terms of the Hesperides and Atlantis. In
The Walls Do Not Fall,
the heart portrayed first as a shell-fish in the systole and diastole of the tide-flow, then as a psyche or butterfly, “dragging the forlorn / husk of self after us,” in xxv is revealed in
terms of such a seed, the heart-shell now breaking open like the husk of a grain:

the Kingdom is a Tree
whose roots bind the heart-husk

to earth,
after the ultimate grain,

lodged in the heart-core,
has taken its nourishment.

The mustard seed of time and the mustard seed of light, invisibilities, in which Kaspar sees, are immediacies of knowledge contrasting with “the old tradition, the old, old legend,” expanses of time and space that characterize learning. In
Tribute to the Angels,
H.D. uses the language of spiritual alchemy so rhyming the terms of the word and of “
mer, mere, mere, mater, Maia, Mary
” with the elements in the alembic where the stone is being made, that meaning and odor and the jewel are identified with the
marah,
the sorrow of woman, and with the
myrrh.
The jewel in which the fleck of light comes to Kaspar’s vision then is the
Philosopher’s Stone.
It seems almost not to happen for its moment of time is a grain in which his spirit dwells but invisible to his mind.

Some ten years before H.D. wrote this passage, Whitehead in
Adventures of Ideas
wrote in a passage we have considered earlier:

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.

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H.D. will see the mustard seed as Thomas Vaughan, the Rosicrucian, does. “So in me,” she tells us in
Tribute to Freud,
“2 distinct racial or biological or psychological entities tend to grow nearer or to blend, even, as time heals old breaks in consciousness”—as in the alembic of the alchemists diverse elements are brought into one work. She relates herself here to the esoteric tradition as “a descendant of one of the
original groups of the early 18th-century, mystical Protestant order, called the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian or Moravian Brotherhood” and she goes on then to associate Count Zinzendorf and Freud: “Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the renewed Bohemian brotherhood, was an Austrian, whose father was exiled or self-exiled to Upper Saxony, because of his Protestant affiliations. The Professor himself was an Austrian, a Moravian actually by birth.” It seems part of H.D.’s design to leave no more than this hint that we must search out for ourselves. In The War Trilogy again we can see these two as entities that tend to grow nearer or to blend: the New Master over Love who commands “name it,” when, in
Tribute to the Angels,
the poetess cannot name the color of the jewel in which “
venerate
” and “
venereal
”—a break in consciousness—are united, is surely Freud; but when in the dream sequence of
The Walls Do Not Fall
He appears in “a spacious, bare meeting house”—“the Dream / deftly stage-managed the bare, clean / early colonial interior”—the figure of Zinzendorf has replaced Freud. We are no longer in the psychoanalyst’s rooms but in the environs of Herrnhut, the Lord’s House, where “The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed,” as Zinzendorf named the revived Moravian church, meets. Or in the environs of the first log house at Bethlehem in Pennsylvania which Zinzendorf dedicated himself on Christmas Eve in 1741, for Bethlehem was not only H.D.’s ancestral city but the city of her birth and her first eight years, of her “childhood” then.

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Was there—I do not know if I read it or dreamed it—a teaching among these believers who kept their Christ as a hidden mustard seed in their hearts that they would recognize Brethren among the professing-Christians about them by the illumination of eyes, by a fleck of light from the jewel that a luminous eye is? In the Moravian scene of the dream it is the look of Christ’s eyes that speaks—“as if without pupil / or all pupil, dark / yet very clear with amber / shining . . . ” In the centuries of persecution after the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century, driven to live in the forests in hiding like the Albigensians before them and the Waldenses who took part in the new movement, and then
taking the way of being a church hidden within other churches, the Brethren had to recognize each other silently, with no more sign than the inner sympathy could read like the exchange of a glance in which a would-be lover reads forbidden response.

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Count von Zinzendorf not only was patron of the renewed Church but he created rituals and wrote hymns in which a new religious language emerged that brought out the associations of sexual and spiritual images. The spear, the wound, and the flow of blood from Christ’s side were deliberately related to the penis, the vagina, and the menstrual flow. Sessler in his study of the Moravian movement tells us: “It is said that a niche covered with red cloth was built into the wall of the church, into which children were placed to symbolize their lying in Christ’s Side-Wound, and that Christian Renatus, Zinzendorf ’s son, built a
Side-Wound
through which the congregation marched”—called “the true Matrix.” Zinzendorf, like Freud, worked towards a sense of words in which the “
venerate
” and “
venereal
” were again restored.