The H.D. Book (87 page)

Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

DREAMS

Is it of dream itself that Helen speaks then in the opening where “the old enchantment holds,” where

The potion is not poison,
it is not Lethe and forgetfulness
but everlasting memory—?

It may be. Where

the breathing and breath-taking
climb and fall, mountain and valley

betray the oceanic being of the Sleeper, the ground itself of the dream. The dream itself that Achilles sees as also the veil of Cytheraea may be the Amen-temple, where

Sept. 4th: / Helen tells us she is alone

yet in this Amen-temple,

I hear their voices
there is no veil between us . . .

and the Dreamer, in the opening measures of the poem (it is the “Do not despair”), is presaged in Helen’s sense that

Amen (or Zeus we call him)
brought me here;

fear nothing of the future or the past,
He, God, will guide you,
bring you to this place,

In God, in the dream, there is no veil between us. As in
The Walls Do Not Fall
there was

and beyond thought and idea,
their begetter,

Dream,
Vision.

and the Dreamer could appear there as

Ra, Osiris,
Amen
appeared
in a spacious, bare meeting-house;

he is the world-father,
father of past aeons,

present and future equally;
beardless, not at all like Jehovah,

there was in life a Presence, as in Love a Master. We recall in the first so-called “Imagist” phase of H.D.’s work, in the poem “Pygmalion,” published in 1917, the questions asked by the mask of the sculptor as artist engaged with the divine:

Now am I the power
that has made this fire
as of old I made the gods
start from the rocks?
am I the god
or does this fire carve me
for its use?

•

In poem after poem H.D. (as during the same brief period Lawrence and Pound also were speaking in personae) spoke in the persons of Chorus, nymph, prisoner, priest of Adonis, Pygmalion, Eurydice, and then Demeter, Thetis, Circe, Leda. From these poems we begin to see that the “Image”, the “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” was not simply an invention of the poet to convey vividly his
impressions or sensibility in things but a form in poetry of trafficking with the daemonic and beyond the daemonic with the divine, the “swirl upon swirl of light?” of the poem “Pygmalion.”

•

I

We learn in the novel
Bid Me to Live
that there had been an exchange in poetry between D. H. Lawrence and H.D. in the period of “Adonis” and “Eurydice” to which “Pygmalion” belongs, and an exchange in the dream. “You said, next morning, you heard me singing in a dream and found your face wet with tears,” Julia writes Rico: “Is that true? How could you say that casually, while Elsa washed the breakfast things behind the screen?”

•

We are inhabitants of our dreams, and to wake is not to escape from the Dreamer for he remains to haunt us. These are the orders of the imagination: The poet in his imagination comes into a dimension beyond his invention or calling up where the imagination is received. In
Bid Me to Live,
“She felt curiously this room had been invented for her. It might have been said of her, from the moment of her entrance to this house, that she had felt the same of every room in this house. Every door, every shallow or steep step, every irregularity of passage-way, of door-sill held its peculiar and intimate reality. There was a charm over the house, of that she was certain.” This is a realm in which the dream is most real and what we daily view as objects are subject to magic invasion. “The words themselves held inner words, she thought. If you look at a word long enough, this peculiar twist, its magic angle, would lead somewhere, like that Phoenician track, trod by the old traders.” H.D. continues in Julia’s delirium or reverie: “She was a trader in the gold, the old gold, the myrrh of the dead spirit. She was bargaining with each word.”

•

As we in the course of this book, [illegible] have followed the lead of words or trying them to find a lead, “bargaining with each word—” “She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it” H.D. tells us of Julia-H.D.

But what we follow here is the lead of another time, twisting the “room” to tell us of this room as dream. “But I thought if you wanted me, you would ask me to come up to your room,” Julia writes Rico: “How could I climb those stairs, not knowing what you wanted?”

. . . “You said, next morning, you heard me singing in a dream and found your face wet with tears.”

•

“But I am aware of your spider-feelers, I am not walking into your net. I am not answering your questions. ‘What room have you? What room has Vanio?’ ”

We are in the realm of magic now, what the psychiatrist or psychoanalyst calls the psychotic: “This house caused you no anxiety. It was easy to block in, the whole thing was familiar. I, a familiar would be drawn literally into your picture. How could I walk up those stairs?” It is trafficking in dreams. She furnishes one more key as to how it is done: “Once a Dakota poet I knew said systematic starvation was a sort of dope. I don’t mean we starved actually. But doing without non-essentials leaves room, a room. I walked into it here.”

•

The great effort in the therapeusis of Freud was to avoid the psychotic possibility, to exorcise the room, to protect the integrity of the psyche against thoughts of invasion. The case histories of psychotic disorders carefully documented by orthodox Freudians are directly related to the particulars gathered by the Inquisitions in case histories of witchcraft: there was evidence in some of daemonic possession, but there was a wider practice in which human psyche invaded human psyche. Lawrence and H.D., Mary Butts or Yeats document in their work illnesses of a dangerously experimental course of the psyche. And Ezra Pound’s late
idée fixe
upon the perversion of the monetary exchange
in the practices of usury and profit-commodities may have a hidden ground in his brief exposure to the increases and depletions of the “image” game.

•

Just as in magic men manipulated the harmonics of the divine to produce disturbances of harmonics in what we call fascination; or disturbances of the divine correspondences to weave a net of circumstantial evidence, to “pull strings” as we sense it, playing with influences; so men cast spells. Poets cast images. And in this Lawrence’s magic of casting the room or dream in
Bid Me to Live,
is located as a drawing: “You made it all up, Elsa’s work-bag on the floor, the cups and saucers, the branch out of the window, when I thought you were writing. You were writing or you were painting rather, a branch out of the window, with the window-frame one side and the folds of the blue curtain the other. You drew the fanlight over the door, downstairs.”

•

This is evil; “Old English yfel,” the O.E.D. tells us: “usually referred to the root of
up, over.
” Where in the orders of the universe the services of craft or art become masterful in craft, crafty as artful; and the ease is dis-eased or mal-eased, we may pose as the Dreamer of our own dream or another’s; man, beast, angel, god may pose as the creator of Creation and appear to have power over things.

•

Helen struggles with the true state of what is, as often we do in dreams, in terms of her own art in letters: In her magic exchange (involvement with) Achilles, she traffics also in a magic claim (power) over Achilles:

I said, “there is mystery in this place,
I am instructed, I know the script,
the shape of this bird is a letter,

they call it the hieroglyph;

•

(Writing on the Wall)

Freud, as H.D. tells us in
Tribute to Freud,
had viewed just this writing on the wall as “dangerous.” “We can read my writing,” she tells us (she is speaking of the writing that appeared on a wall to her in a vision, but it is also her own writing):

“We can read my writing, the fact that there was writing, in two ways or in more than two ways. We can read or translate it as a suppressed desire for forbidden ‘signs and wonders,’ breaking bounds, a suppressed desire to be a Prophetess, to be important anyway, megalomania they call it—a hidden desire to ‘found a new religion’ which the Professor ferreted out in the later Moses picture. Or this writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the artistic mind, a
picture
or an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or day-dream content and projected from within (though apparently from outside), really a high-powered
idea,
simply over-stressed,
over-thought,
you might say, an echo of an idea, a reflection of a reflection, a ‘freak’ thought that had got out of hand, gone too far, a ‘dangerous symptom.’ ”

•

So Helen tries to confess the truth about letters.

I said, I was instructed in the writ,
but I had only heard of it,
when our priests decried

papyrus fragments,
travelers brought back,
as crude, primeval lettering—

what saves her, what saves H.D. is the “Do not despair” that whatever the art, it is “as if God made the picture”; by magic, by violation calling forth violence we try to read:

no, I was not instructed, but I “read” the script,
I read the writing when he seized my throat,

•

And in Helen we learn that not only she, but other inhabitants of the Dream, have a magic and seem to dream each others’ dreams. To communicate at all, creature to creature, creation must be used as meaning; interpretation itself is a power over things. “I can not ‘read’ the hare, the chick, the bee,” H.D.-Helena must confess for her own salvation. Here “the Sun,

hidden behind the sun of our visible day.”

is the Dreamer, Creator-Uncreated. “The invisible attunement is superior to the visible,” Heraklitus tells us.

•

The dream may be the veil of Cytheraea, and the veil the fabric of Maya, and the Dreamer-Creator Brahma. For wherever in Western thought this dream in which we are dreamed appears as the world, we feel the Hindu influence.

In the years following The War Trilogy the theosophical and esoteric elements which had begun to operate in her poetics there increase. We are not on the wrong track to follow from Greece and Egypt to India.

you may ask forever, you may penetrate
every shrine, an initiate,
and remain unenlightened at last.

she tells us:

How does the Message reach me?
do thoughts fly like the word
of the goddess? a whisper—

she asks.

(my own thought or the thought of another?)

•

So in “Palinode”—Proteus, “the legendary King of Egypt, reveals the future, the mystery or the legend.” His is the enactment; “Nameless-of-many-Names he decrees”. He is “Sun behind the sun of day”, we learn in “Eidolon” 1:3, Formalhaut. Is it formal-haut, highest-Form? Is it the star Formalhaut, the month of Pisces—Christos? Helen hears “a voice to lure, a voice to proclaim,

the script was a snare.”

II

Helen In Egypt
is a dream-fiction; it belongs not to the orthodox Freudian interpretation of the dream where the content speaks for the subconscious or the collective conscious; but the Dream of Helen-in-Egypt is the Dream of Alice-in-Wonderland, of consciousness that admits other consciousness. It is the situation, as James pictured it in 1901: “as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist’s mind and a cosmic environment of
other consciousness
of some sort which is able to work upon them.” Formalhaut or Farmalhaut is the Red King.

•

Lewis Carroll is playing games of the psyche, we sense in
Alice
. Yes,

The dream-child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new,

In friendly chat with bird or beast—

And half believe it true.

—we’re only, of Helen too, half to believe it true. “From a Fairy to a Child” Dodgson wrote sending his work:

Lady dear, if Fairies may

For a moment lay aside

Cunning tricks and elfish play,

’Tis at happy Christmas tide.

•

It is not only for the Star, the Dreamer of the Dream, that Helen seeks to read the script—but she searches too for the Child: the Euphorion of the poem.

O Child, must it be forever,
that your father destroys you,
that you may find your father?

•

It is along another line tho that I want to trace the relation between the work of Lewis Carroll and the work of H.D. [quote H.D. from “Writing on the Wall” page 80] For they have, we find, a common element in the fairyland-dreamland lore of the nineteenth century, that makes it seem so childish or childlike to grown up minds,

1. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant),
The History of Magic
. quote: pg 141 from “The Romans . . . were great observers of dreams”—1888

2.
Esoteric Buddhism

3. Blavatsky,
The Secret Doctrine
I. pg 279, I 309–10, I pg 691

4. Lewis Carroll 1893. Preface to
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
. pg 463–464

5. George MacDonald 1895.
Lilith

•

Sept. 11 The dream or trance is the summons of God where

God’s plan is other than the priests disclose;
I did not know why
(in dream or in trance)

God had summoned me hither
until I saw the dim outline
grown clearer,

We are concerned in
Helen in Egypt
with the operations of the dream

“Zeus be my witness,” I said,
“it was he, Amen dreamed of all this
phantasmagoria of Troy,

it was dream and a phantasy”;

Dante’s vision and the dreams of the
Vita Nuova
give background to the tradition of phantasy we follow here: the revelation at nine years old, childhood being the locus and the child the secret person then