The H.D. Book (13 page)

In the old rites, Eros appeared as an unwrought stone. And from our childhood, for some of us dim, for some of us vivid, memories remain of the way a stone could seem to be alive. The presence or protective genius of a stone could become a secret ally of oneself. For the sculptor the stone “speaks” and his work emerges along the lines of a colloquy between his listening and—out of a dumbness or meaninglessness of matter, were it not for this listening—a language of space which the stone has evoked for him. For what we call our common sense, for the consensus that is even contemptuous of being influenced by mere things, the stone is properly inert. But for the imagination, for the mind seeking communication, to create in its life a serious play, even inert matter is alive with person. So, for the Orphic poets, the seed or egg of the universe is created by
Hyle,
the primal chaos of matter.

Again and again in our lives we find our vital sense of the universe must return to this muddle, to begin again in the unspeaking obstruction of the stone. It is the artist’s block that heightens his awe of the other power in which his material speaks to him. The block itself is the blockage of a breath. The inspiring stone “breathes” as the artist awakens to his work.

From the unwrought Eros, once the work begins, the form of a vital spirit flies up. Chaos itself, the abyss—but it is a block—is alive with that personal possibility. In its obscurity, Chaos corresponds to the psychoanalytic unconscious, for the idea of the unconscious is also that of a vitality that, unless a man enter a colloquy with what cannot sensibly speak and take instructions from what he cannot know, may show itself as a deadly and deadening matter. But once he take faith in what he cannot see, from a World-Egg, where once there was demonic Chaos, the universe of Creation comes forth, and, as Jane Harrison observes in her
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,
“it is almost inevitable that there should emerge from the egg a bird-god, a winged thing.”

Hidden, Eros is the very vitality felt by the sculptor in the stone.
Revealed, he is shown to be an idea, a youth flying up from the head of a Titanic Mother or Matter awakening or come alive in the ground, the Earth-goddess, Γη or Gaia. This Earth is also the artist’s content, the subject of the conversation with an otherwise speechless matter, the ground of potential identity in which he works. In the figure shown by Jane Harrison on page 639 of the
Prolegomena,
attendant upon the work, are two satyrs with pickaxes, breakers of the ground; the giant female head uprises. And from the aroused head two
erotes
spring—the primal Eros and Himeros.

In Hesiod’s
Theogony,
the second Eros and Himeros appear as transformations of the Father’s testes, and back of this erotic replacement, there is the scene of a chaotic or psychotic episode—the castration of the Father. In the mysteries of the Mother, the awakening of Chaos giving rise to Love and Desire seems also to follow upon such an attack, but here it is upon the Mother. One satyr holds his pick swung high for a blow; the other has completed his stroke. Describing an earlier figure shown on page 279 of the
Prolegomena,
Jane Harrison sees this as the
anodos
or calling-up of the Maiden: “The colossal head and lifted hands of a woman are rising out of the earth. Two men are present. Both are armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them strikes the head of the rising woman.” It may be the same rite as that of the breaking of the world-egg. We see them attacking the stone, breaking the ground or egg—it is the mothering head—to release from its container the ideas of a new order: Eros and his other.

•

In Athens, Jane Harrison tells us, the cult of Aphrodite gave way to the cult of the male Eros. “There is no Aphrodite,” the poet Alcman sang:

Hungry Love

Plays boy-like with light feet upon the flowers.

The power of Love that had been a woman in an other phase is impersonated by youths.

“O Menexenus and Lysis, how ridiculous that you two boys,” Socrates says at the close of Plato’s dialog
Lysis,
“and I, an old boy, who
would fain be one of you, should imagine ourselves to be friends—this is what the by-standers will go away and say—and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend.”

In the aristocratic cult of the homo-Eros, the winged images we saw drawn upon the vases become winged ideas in full. The daemonic force of Eros remains, but within the created world of Plato’s book the cosmos itself has been idealized. Empedocles had called Eros
Philia;
and now in
Lysis,
Plato’s Socrates speaks of a first principle, a higher Eros, the πρ
τον
λον. In his
Hexameters,
Xenophanes had remarked:

If oxen and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

In the idealizing philosophy of Plato the true form of God is the ideal of the Good. Whatever of the old divine world cannot be incorporated in the ideal of the Good must be put down as the falsification of Art or Poetry. Just as men may imagine themselves to be friends but cannot come to discover what is a friend, so men may imagine immortal gods with immortal bodies, but

no such union can reasonably be believed to be; although fancy, not having seen or surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time.

The young men flying in a sexual rapture now are called to school their bodies, serving a new rapture of the rational mind. For them, there is to be a rational Eros, the Love because of Whom men try to love, the First Beloved, the most dear, because of whom men hold life dear and would imagine themselves friends. Caring in itself becomes an adventure of the imagination that is wed here to the great adventure of Eros and desire.

But the old power of the old Eros haunts the new love of friends. We do not quite know what makes us find things most dear. Just here, in the unknowing, Plato must call upon the primal force to make real
the idea. The Good has power in men’s minds, but it comes not in their knowledge but in their desire that there be good. Eros and even Dionysos, desire and intoxication, Plato argues are daemons of the Good.

But then the story turns, as life itself turns. The light spills. Eros is burned or betrayed. Some five hundred years after Plato, a Christian contemporary of Apuleius, Ignatius of Antioch, said, “crucified”—“My Eros is crucified.” It is the beginning of our era.

Eros, in Apuleius’s story, when he comes to Psyche in the dark, is something she knows not what. He is what the oracle at Miletus said he was—a monster that belongs to the old order, an unwrought stone. But he is also an other, for he carries arrows. She is curious about those arrows; her investigating hand trembles and she wounds herself. She bleeds. Psyche becomes soul; the figure of the human Eros comes to light—the Divine Bridegroom to be. Who might have been a dilettante becomes an exile from delight. What might have been pleasure is to be joy, that is the new faith. It is in exile from Eros that this love and this faith appear depending upon a promise that is unbelievable. In the new myths, Orpheus turns to look, and Eurydice is lost. “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” the Christ says to his mother or bride or woman. In the Gnostic interpretation, the spirit loses or puts away the soul. Psyche disobeys the law and raises the light to know Eros, and the separation of soul and spirit follows. Something like this happened in our history in the Western World, so that, for men of the second century after Christ, that there was a Life within life, a Love within love, became a promise only faith could believe. Eros had been seen in the flesh, a figure the light drew out of the old dark to husband the soul. The great dark reality in which body, soul, and spirit had been one in unknowing was reft. “Knowledge, the contaminant”—and then—“Uranium, the complex atom, breaking / down
.
” Men revile the body they had seen. Psyche is set to those tasks by an offended Aphrodite. Life and history appear to travail in punishment that is necessary before the restoration of paradise. The spirit retreats from its incarnation and is removed to states of ecstasy and despair, heaven and hell.

The god had said: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” As H.D. tells of Him in
The Flowering of the Rod:

He was the first to say,
not to the chosen few,

his faithful friends,
the wise and good,

but to an outcast and a vagabond,

The passers-by jeered at Him, so Matthew tells us. We remember, that for Plato too, there had been the sense of what “by-standers” would say, mocking the Eros of those who imagined themselves to be friends. “Even the robbers who were crucified with Him,” so Matthew testifies, “abused Him in the same way.” There may then have been mockery when one said, as Luke testifies he did, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom!” Eros, being taunted, would have replied likewise—“I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” For Paradise is the inexorable power of Eros.

In Greece, in Plato’s lifetime, the virtue of boy-love in men’s eyes had come to be suspect, and the faithful friends lost the ground in Eros they had imagined to claim as philosophers. He who had immortalized the Symposium was to condemn symposia in his
Laws,
where, in his old age, Plato sees the State as the stronghold of Reason:

Now the gymnasia and common meals do a great deal of good, and yet they are a source of evil in civil troubles; as is shown in the case of the Milesian, and Boeotian, and Thurian youth, among whom these institutions seem always to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts. . . . Whether such matters are to be regarded jestingly or seriously, I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust.

The Platonic and Sapphic lovers are driven not only outside the law or the rational State but outside of the natural order into the criminal chaos from which Eros had first come.

In Jerusalem, the Temple was to fall and the Jews go scattered among
the gentiles into the Diaspora. Gnostic cults taught that the Light Itself had been in the beginning scattered so into a Darkness, sparks or seeds of light imprisoned in matter. All men were to become outcasts and vagabonds. There was in Christ’s
“
today,
”
because of the promise, no end of time in the actual world.

He had also said: “The time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor at Jerusalem.” Man had retracted his worship from place and time. The old cosmic gods, and the Elohim among them, withdrew from mountain and temple to men’s minds. We saw in Plato’s teaching the old cosmology replaced by a new ideology. Now, everywhere, cosmology and ideology give way to psychology.

Hesiod, like the Old Testament, speaks of a beginning that was Earth and Sky. And Heraclitus says of Hesiod: “They think that he knew many things, though he did not understand day and night. For they are one
.
” And then: “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.” This was the ancient world, where, if God was man, He was also day and night, beast and sun, wind and tree; where before there was man, there was Beauty, Eros, and Himeros.

But with the Gospel of John—is it six hundred years after Heraclitus?—a Book begins to take the place of the Old Testament that had been a spoken word, what-they-said or myth, passed from man to man. The new written testament knows nothing of Earth or Sky, of day or night, of summer or winter. “In the beginning was the Word,” the new Book tells us: “Everything came into existence through Him, and apart from Him nothing came to be.” The universe had once, almost, spoken to man. Now, a language that originated in the Word, the speech of man, was to be the true universe. The
vis imaginativa
in which the things of men’s souls and the things of the actual universe dance together, having concourse and melody, the magic world of resonances and freely associating rhymes—is disowned. And what appears is a world of two opposing possibilities—dogma and heresy.