The H.D. Book (91 page)

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As “Associations” or memories they appear in the psychologies of our times. The stream of consciousness and the track of the analysand are modes of creating the past, following the cues or tendencies of the psychic worlds imagined by Bergson or Freud, and in the stream or along the track certain psychic entities arise. What any psychology is is a choreographic scheme in which its psyche may appear. This scheme is a map of time, a plot of event—as with the code-script of the genes, its form lies in its sequence. It is when our familiarity with time expands, so that we know not one history but many histories, that our human nature expands. The Imago of Helen comes into new powers as she comes into new understanding. As we come to find the Helena Dentritis, the Maiden or Helen’s Tree of Rhodes, celebrated by Theocritus, our idea of Helen becomes more complex. We have only to form an allegiance to the worship of Rhodes, a complicity with Rhodes in our love of Athens.

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As long as we are convinced of our unique claim to human respect and of the superstition, primitiveness, sillyness, ignorance, irrationality of all other (heterodox) human thought and feeling, our truth or worths will be measured most real against the fabrication of divine life. It is part of the sad story of monotheism that where it first forbade worship of other gods it divorced its people from the communion of the human spirit (“for the Lord thy God is a consuming fire,
even
a jealous God”) and set over them a racial law. For the Jews, and after them, for
the Christians and Moslems, all that was not lawful and in the book was error and falsehood. Just as the mixing of races was forbidden the Jews (so that ironically the anti-semite Hitler, because he was a racist, performed to the letter the will of Jehovah (Yahweh) as a consuming fire to cleanse the chosen race of its nephelium—those who had broken the laws) so all other traffic with images, dreams, sacred foods, arts was forbidden. “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse”: so the commandments were laid down. Never again would the divine intrude, but the people under the law would know the divine only in the law: so, Moses is the last to see the Burning Bush.

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Dec. 27 / 61 The narrative art is in weaving at once a story and a fabric, bringing into play whatever threads towards the full ground in which the figures become meaningful and tendencies become designful. But these “threads” are voices; the telling directive in verse or in prose shows in the way the immediate area is working. For the master of this art—for the art-full story teller, there is just this transformation of telling into spinning—there are those rare folk geniuses who can still spin a good yarn—for whom words pass into phrases like wool into thread, and threads fly into sentences. We gathered to hear the story, are following the thread. All of this is a voice—and if it isn’t a voice, and then a voice into which other voices enter—there is no story.
Mythos
the Greeks called it, what the mouth uttered, and Aristotle said that
mythos
was plot.

Helen in Egypt
belongs to the high art of the narrative. H.D. draws not only upon what Stesichorus in his
Palinode
told to be the truth of Homer but also upon how he told it. [Just as Plato or Herodotus praises Stesichorus for having seen the light and rendering Helen true to life, tell us too.] We learn from Plato or Herodotus that Stesichorus saw the light and told at last the true story of Helen; but we learn too from Greek historians of poetics the Stesichorus found a new way of the high art, alternating prose and choric verse in his narrative. He took up the story from the Homeric tradition and told it anew in the light of an alternate weave. “Truth” here is in the fitting figure, the turn of the plot that has the highest economy in complexity. The Helen on the ramparts of Troy being a wraith, the Helen in Egypt being the truth,
fitted the truth of war and its causes. So in Euripides’
Helen,
we hear
Helen in Egypt
in a speech that has the warp of what happened in the Trojan war and a woof of what is happening in Athens’ own phantasmagorical war with Sparta. And—this is the full magic of the art—we see anew our own war obsessions. It was all, Helen tells us:

     thus to drain our mother earth

of the burden and the multitude of human kind—

and then:

     fought for me (except it was not I

but my name only).

It is most fitting then that H.D. [illegible] the alternate tradition, where we fight for freedom and the Soviets for communism (these two: freedom and communism being the two vital expectancies of the human spirit in our time), but both in that delusion of the name only. Communism no more truthfully the cause of the Soviets than freedom the cause of the American forces.

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But it is not for such a political persuasion that H.D. writes in
Helen in Egypt.
Plato’s Socrates in referring to the
Palinode
of Stesichorus had been struck by the implication that the truth of Helen in Egypt gave the lie to the cause of the Greeks at Troy, but his concern here was not that of a pacifist seeking to discredit war, but that of a seer and teacher seeking to illuminate the nature of human life itself. Our greatest delusion is the lure of the ground in which we appear: our own liveliness is our wraith, we are not deluded by the false causes of the enemy but by our own.

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It is not misfitting that in our common speech “to tell a story” has already the underthread and overthread of two meanings. We must always be in the full enchantment of the voicing, the telling phrases, the rhythmic successions that lead us on—aware that all the intensely alive thing is the one thing that is alive—the human voice or mythos. What
they said. The rest of history is dust. And we are misled if we think the facts have this significance in them. War has terrible repercussions—all of a sudden in the fabric of the human community the threads of a thousand tendencies are realized. There is not only the
mythos
but there is the
dromenon
: men not only tell their story but they enact it. If men imitate in their arts, they imitate in their lives. And the intensely alive actor like the intensely alive narrator intends towards crisis. To have community with other men at all is to become a member of a communal peril beyond our individual fate. At the heart and from the heart of this awful communal mind the
mythos,
just like the
dromenon,
springs. The story teller begins and the dynamics of his art takes force from the compelling voice that transforms us from individually responsible men into listeners and leads us on—that’s one charge of the tension that makes for attention—and from the alert mind that attends that voice and works to articulate and relate. There are only two living poets in our language of the stature of H.D.—William Carlos Williams and Pound. Both Edith Sitwell and Eliot at a crucial phase ceased to develop as poets and never entered the major phase of the man for whom all thought and feeling has become “poetic,” transmuted into the medium of his art.

But it is not with Williams or Pound that I would compare
Helen in Egypt.
“We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt” the prose of
Palinode
begins.

Do not despair, the hosts
surging beneath the Walls,
(no more than I) are ghosts;

do not bewail the Fall,
the scene is empty and I am alone,

The antiphon of the verse takes up the theme. This art is of an unfolding, informing narrative, most aware from the first of its voice as a story. “I hear voices,” Helen tells us in this opening passage

there is no veil between us,
only space and leisure

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H.D.’s counterparts in contemporary writing are the Thomas Mann of
Joseph
and
Doctor Faustus
and the Malraux of
The Psychology of Art.
Here the writer is aware of his art as the central drama—rhyme, meter, number; stanza, chapter, book are articulations that provide possibilities of an intricate fabric of parts, kept moving, without conclusion. The depths of the art, tho it has crisis, are sounded in reverberations and correspondences—a whole structure. While each poem participates in the life of other poems.

The multiple phases of Helen—in Troy, in Egypt, phantom and actual; the other beings of Helen, the girl that Theseus knew, the young matron who “had lost her childhood or her child” in Sparta, the obsessional paramour of Paris who died thrown from the walls of Troy, the wise Helen who never was at Troy but lived under the protection of Proteus—all the imaginations of what she was are gathered up into the great Persona of Helen for whom only Achilles—the other great Persona of the War—can be mate.

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Yes, as we begin to see how these many articulations are moving, move as they do in-forming each other and in that unfolding a melody, we recognize that H.D. here and there is aware (as Shakespeare in
The Tempest
or Mann in
Doctor Faustus
is aware) that in this work the author seeks to reveal his/her identity. There is the personal signature, Hilda Doolittle’s “H.D.” in the Helena Dentritis, Helen of the trees. So, Helen, this dryad Helen, is the counterpart of another dryad, the H.D. of the very first poems. Everywhere in the world of this poem impersonation passes into our dwelling in and then living in one another. Phantom is complicit in the real: Helen “is both phantom and reality.”

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Plato had read the truth of the Helen in Egypt to mean that men fought at Troy for an illusion, for a lie. “That story is not true,” Stesichorus had written:

You never went away in the launched ships.
You never reached the citadel of Troy.

Only these 3 lines remain of his
Palinode.
There is a hint in the Greek Anthology that Pythagoras believed Homer lived anew in Stesichorus and at last, finding the truth of Helen, “saw,” was no longer blind. The truth of Helen for Herodotus the historian and for Euripides the dramatist was the truth about the war. “Fought for me (except it was not I),” Helen says in Euripides’ play: “but my name only.”

Yet when we find Helen again in Goethe’s play (where the Helen of Tyre that Simon Magus knew has been gathered into the Persona of Helen, as Achilles–Simon Magus has been gathered into the Faustus role) the abducted wife of Homer’s epic, the phantom of Stesichorus’s
Palinode
and Euripides’
Helen of Egypt,
the face that sank a thousand ships of Marlowe’s show—all the illusion, the lure, the cause of war has become Beauty: At least, Goethe remarked, there was once a war that was fought for Beauty.

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What in-forms the Helen of H.D.’s masterwork anew is the analysis of the psyche (H.D. being an initiate of Freud himself).

BOOK 1: BEGINNINGS

Chapter 1: Written in 1960. Published in
Coyote’s Journal
5/6 (1966): 8–31.

Chapter 2: Written in 1960. Published in
Coyote’s Journal
8 (1967): 27–35.

Chapter 3, Eros: Written in 1961. Published in
Tri-Quarterly
12 (Spring 1968): 67–82.

Chapter 4, Palimpsest: Written in 1961. Published in
Tri-Quarterly
12 (Spring 1968): 82–98.

Chapter 5, Occult Matters: Written in 1961. Published in
Aion: A Journal of Traditional Science
(December 1964): 5–29; reprinted in
Stony Brook Poetics Journal
1/2 (Fall 1968): 4–19.

Chapter 6, Rites of Participation: Written in 1961. Published in
Caterpillar
1 (October 1967): 6–29, and
Caterpillar
2 (January 1968): 124–54.

BOOK 2: NIGHTS AND DAYS

Chapter 1: Written March 10, 1961. Revised 1963. Published in
Sumac
1, 1 (Fall 1968): 101–46.

Chapter 2: Written March 11, 1961. Revised 1963. Published in
Caterpillar
6 (January 1969): 16–38.

Chapter 3: Written March 12, 1961. Revised 1963. Published in
Io
6 (Summer 1969): 117–40.

Chapter 4: Written March 13, 1961. Revised 1964. Published in
Caterpillar
7 (April 1969): 27–60.

Chapter 5: Written March 14, 1961. Revised 1963. Published in
Stony Brook Poetics Journal
3/4 (Fall 1969): 336–47 [section I];
Credences
1, 2 (July 1975):
50–52 [extract from section II];
Sagetrieb
4, 2–3 (Fall/Winter 1985): 39–86 [complete].

Chapter 6: Written March 15, 1961; September 2, September 3, September 4 and 10, October 1, 1964. Published in
Southern Review
21 (Winter 1985): 27–48.

Chapter 7: Written March 20, 1961; October 8, 1964. Published in
Credences
1, 2 (July 1975): 53–67.

Chapter 8: Written March 21, 1961. Published in
Credences
1, 2 (July 1975): 68–94.

Chapter 9: Written March 22, March 24, 1961. Published in
Chicago Review
30 (Winter 1979): 37–88.

Chapter 10: Written March 25, March 28, March 29, 1961. Published in
Ironwood
11, 2 [#22] (Fall 1983): 48–64.

Chapter 11: Written May 25, 1961. Published in
Montemora
8 (1981): 79–113. A selection of passages from Book 2, revised and supplemented with new material, appeared in
Origin
(second series) 10 (July 1963): 1–47, as “The Little Day Book.”

BOOK 3
[
APPENDIX 1
]

Part 1 (“Exchanges”): Written 1961. Published in
West Coast Line
60 (42, 4) (2009): 100–117.

Part 2 (“Dreams” and “ ‘Art to Inchant’ ”): Written 1961. Published in
The Capilano Review
3, 9 (Fall 2009): 80–101.

In the course of writing
The H.D. Book,
Robert Duncan refers to hundreds and hundreds of texts. This is part of his summoning of a world and all its proliferating implications, as well as the incarnation of his conversation with the great minds of the world. This is a world of mind at work in the work of minds. Sometimes his references are substantial. Sometimes they are simply passing mentions of titles that illustrate a point. In compiling this list, we decided to include only those works which Duncan goes on to quote substantially or discuss. Where possible we have tried to cite the editions that he worked with, or at least the editions that were in his personal library or otherwise available to him at the time. We have not included works cited in Book 3 (Appendix 1).