The H.D. Book (90 page)

burning in an onyx jar
),

“
ART TO INCHANT
”

It would seem that the human community itself has tides where even the most “independent” minds are swept along, even as the cells that have each “a unit-life centred on itself ”
belong
to a body. Here we are creatures of a society, taking on life as units of a larger economy. We may migrate from one association to another depending upon our reality in the new economy—this is a transfer of functions: an automobile mechanic may be directly transferable to another society in which there are automobiles. But those of us who live as units in relation to the language of a society in its functions of suggestion, even as we become most aware of belonging to mankind at large, have come into this realization along the lines of a particular language. Nearing the center or centers of our own language—most aware of the Germanic
geist,
the Roman
spiritus,
the Greek
psyche
that meet in English along the pathways of invading peoples—we are more and more aware, more near, to circumferences of language. Drawn into the fascination of the language, beyond the little civilized or semantically defended area of defined
words,
we come into another area where meanings appear as design. There are no words in themselves, just as in the thought of the human body itself, transformed by passion and desire, there are no cells
in themselves—but all local meanings, the threads of German, Latin, and Greek, and the knottings of individual words, save as bonds in a total illusion, an image of images in which the personae may appear: not only our own psyche-identities, our own experience that seems the most real, that is built up of the invisible actual in which the real life of the cells goes on; but the greater images in kind to which our own lives contribute, the roles in the drama of history as we come to play them—that may be ghosts or luminous spirits. The Helen and Achilles, Paris and Theseus of H.D.’s poem are in turn members not only of history (for the siege of Troy belongs still to historical memory) but of the love of mankind. They are Eternal Ones of the dream.

•

The design now is of such an order that all loci seem to contribute to their own loss of identity in the larger figure: the poet takes over as a higher person from the immediate social personality of the man who sits down to write.

•

So that Blake in his “personal” relations to his patron Hayley or his contemporaries Flaxman and Fuseli, may have all the petty annoyances, we call them, of daily life, all the individual originality of the actual closed cell, and write in irritation
TO
F[
LAXMAN
]

I mock thee not, tho’ I by thee am Mockèd.
Thou call’st me Madman, but I call thee Blockhead.

•

“Blockd” would have been the cruder rime. Men in their contention dramatize the stupidity of cells in their place, some ever present quality of the locus to insist upon its own life independence to be a reality in itself, a closed form. But Blake in his contention is irritably aware of his belonging, to a design in the history of the visual imagination, one member of a figure in which the two other members are Fuseli and Flaxman. What we call movements in art are melodic figures in history, passages in which there is a tendency so that individual instances
lose their immediate importance in the sense that something beyond is happening. The cells in all the complexity of their specialization and variation are alive because they are chemically unstable, factors not products of creation, creator-creatures. They come into, each into a form that is all and only his, what they are authorized in a melodic coherence that belongs to a coherence within and yet without what we can imagine. This imagination of what we are lies along our senses of belonging: kinship, meaning, and then the rarer sureness the artist knows of correspondences and harmonies belonging to scales we cannot define. “The authors,” Blake wrote, “are in eternity,” and in
All Religions Are One
he draws the following among principles:

Principle 1st. That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon.

•

This Poetic Genius is our melody or movement to which notes in music or events in history come to belong. We may rationalize our existence, insist upon a rational, sensible personality, only as we increasingly dwell as if we were in ourselves sufficient and meaningful: electing the guarded manner of “science” to defend what we can know as fact against what we can only know as feeling, and beyond such knowledge against rank feeling and doubtful intuition.

•

Against which Blake wrote: “I. Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho ever so acute) can discover.

“II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.”

•

May it not be that the reality that James called fictive has its illusion of the highest truth—the vividness of Lear or the sylph Ariel having a
lasting quality of having happened that exceeds that of most inhabitants of the actual—includes finally the “scientific,” because in the Poetic Genius man is inspired by or derives his vision from, not such eyes as sensible own cornea, retina, lens, and optical nerve are, but from the melody of seeing thruout the universe along which human eyes have evolved. The Poetic Genius having just that center and circumference, that “nowhere and everywhere” of Christian mystic definitions at which to communicate impulses of the whole in which we see more than we see.

•

Physics, our imagination of the universe in which we live, confronts, even as the poetic does, the ultimate mystery in which the melos imagines the melody; the cell imagines and lives to make vivid its body; the person imagines and lives to make vivid his manhood; the man imagines and lives to make vivid his poet; the poet like the scientist imagines and lives to make vivid his universe. The “our,” “his” impersonates the belonging, the feeling of being along the line of some form or the longing for some other among others where we will become member among members of a divine feeling. In physics as in poetics reality unfolds in thematic developments, leadings, and harmonies in the light of which all previous “truths” take on new meaning.

•

We seem to have come to a point distant from the initial proposition of my chapter: “Art to Inchant.” To sing upon or to sing into things so that lines of melodic coherence appear.

•

When we follow, for instance, the changes of astronomical physics and the corresponding shifts in metaphysics we may have the illusion of a science advancing towards a surer and surer picture of What Is, in more and more fitting corrections. Yet the facts remain, the reasons change—the factors remain, the ratios change—from Copernicus to Newton, from Newton to our modern physics the imagination of the universe
proves delusive or illusive. In what scale can we find the ratios? It is the fascination, the communion a man’s mind has in longing for the form of What Is thru the stars, that comes to belong to What Is—it is the being drawn toward, the quest or tendency that remains.

I

If the psychic life may be the Kama-Loca or Astral Light of theosophy, in turn the Leuké of
Helen in Egypt,
it is not What Is. It is not the source but the medium of the dream. So in our poem the veil appears as a secret of the whole: Helen may manipulate her veil as an agent of the veil in which she appears as a figure in a pattern. Thus, Helen draws Achilles, enchants him within the enchantment.

•

The haunting Helen has of being possessed by or speaking for Thetis and of seeing the signs of her father Zeus attendant upon Achilles her lover is the nexus in one note of a “higher” and “lower” melody. Helen
is
Thetis, just as a single actual tone may belong to more than one line of movement in musical pattern.

•

On the human level some pattern appears in which Helen, Clytaemnestra, Iphigenia, belong to one “theme.” As in Wagner, the leitmotif recalls all. And the interplay of leit motifs may bring gods, men, and the ghosts of the dead into one melodic mingling. The leading that H.D. builds on—from association to association—is only incidentally reasonable in relation to what we already have established in the poem. For the poet, the poem is unfolding, not conforming to but tending towards “Formalhaut,” its creator beyond, and the line of the gathering form itself.

•

In “Palinode” the line of Helen as Enchantress began in the opening lines: “the old enchantment holds.” And in the foreword to “Palinode” III, the question “Is it possible that it all happened, the ruin—it could
seem not only of Troy, but of the ‘holocaust of the Greeks,’ . . . in order that two souls or two soul-mates should meet?” may be translated into our language of musical reference where all the happenings of the whole establish the nexus each note might be of other tones. Significance springs along the line of preparedness, and in the enchantment of gathering melodic figuration everything before and after contributes to certain “moments.” Thinking of the host lost in the war, “the holocaust,” Helen in “Palinode” II.2 tells us: “I feel the lure of the invisible,” where we may see too that she feels the lure of a lyric strain that moves to find its way in the passage from the thousand and one to the one Helen to the “another and another and another” that Helen and Theseus exchange.

•

In “Eidolon” I.8 Helen tells us:

it was dream, a catafalque, a bier,

a temple again, infinite corridors,
a voice to lure, a voice to proclaim,

“Are you still subjugated? enchanted?,” Paris had asked. “The script was a snare,” Helen says. The difficulty of who and where that haunts Helen, the knowing-the-script and yet not being able to read where, as in
Palinode
II.2:

I can not “read” the hare, the chick, the bee,

or in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
some fifteen years earlier:

still the Luxor bee, chick and hare
pursue unalterable purpose,

is the knowing as feeling yet not knowing to read that a factor has within a series of patterns where it may simultaneously function.

•

Who and where becomes confused in the increased possibilities of belonging that are awakened thru the act. Words in a poem must be exactly where and what they are—have a “Maximus” of life—not because they have independent reality, integrally themselves—but because they depend and tend everywhere in the poem, from a variety of patterns on which they function. The eloquent tendency and dependency
is
fascination, lure, the enchantment.

•

So, in “Eidolon” II.4, we find:

What was the charm?
a touch—so a hand
brushes the lyre-strings;

a whisper—a breath
to invite the rose;

and:

was Troy lost for a subtle chord,

a rhythm as yet un-heard,
was it Apollo’s snare?
was Apollo passing there?

And in II.6, the poet tells us:
Indeed it was ‘Apollo’s snare.’ None other.
The war at Troy, Helen herself, the leap forward of Achilles to “fall in love” at last, the ships and souls of the holocaust, the stars of the galaxy were in order that Troy be sung, for the Song’s sake. The passage of Helen from Egypt to Leuké, and then to her echo on the walls of Troy, from the command of Oenone, that “if you forget—Helen” of the Shepherd’s hut on Mount Ida where “who will forget Helen attends,” that passes in turn into the sessions in which Theseus and Helen recall what was—all these are passages of a music, in which the “Helen” recurs in the changes of changing environments of the music, as the same note may be recognized in new measures of the one song.

•

The song itself is felt thruout the song. “I tremble,” Helen says in “Eidolon” VI.6:

       I feel the same

anger and sudden terror,
that I sensed Achilles felt,

II

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The felt world, the world as it “moves” us, we say, where sympathies and antipathies make things most intensely real, is one with the imagined world—symphonic in its movement, where things are real in each other. Or have “body,” “substance,” in each other. The human cell, having its own autonomous life, must define its own most concrete real, beyond which its role or function in the tissue to which it belongs is more vaguely known. But in the higher orders, just as there are poets who come to imagine—vaguely, obscurely, or abstractly to be sure—their place in a larger order, might there be an imagination of the Man, a formal apprehension in the cell?

•

In our manhood, we find the idea of the reality of the cell as troublesome to hold as the corresponding idea of our belonging in turn to some larger order or happening. In
Helen in Egypt
Achilles had his autonomy as a hero. Like Helen, he too is a collective or immortal person. Not only has the image, the Imago of the Achilles or the Helen, been fed by the imaginations of thousands who are participants—writers, readers, and before them singers, listeners—in the poetry or
making,
but in turn these fairies of the human dream, these likenesses in which the heroic, the demonic or the divine may appear or move, have been fed by actual men and women—models, actors, and impersonators. So, here, too, there is a holocaust of war-dead who have contributed to the reality of Achilles, a constellation of women who have gone up into the Helen.

•

What Nietzsche and then Cocteau from Nietzsche has called
The Eternal Return,
reincarnation of certain fates or myths or plots in the lives of
those who do not know consciously their own story, so that unknowingly a ground is prepared once more for Helen and Achilles or, as in Cocteau’s great movie, for Mark, Tristan, and Isolde to undergo again, to make new, their signatures, has a biological counterpart in the reincarnation of Man in each man. In the code-script of the genes, the cell is predestined or fated, under the human order or command, bears the imperative and lives towards the fulfillment of a person; as in the tradition or mythos or gospel persons in turn bear the imperative and lives towards the fulfillment of ideas, ideals or eìdola.