The H.D. Book (23 page)

Taller than Morro Rock I would think the breakers of that catastrophe must be. I would try to picture the flood enormous enough to crash upon the mountains of the Coast Range as if they were but banks of sand, a wave to drown the San Joaquín. Or I would listen, curled up on the ledge back of the seat in the coupé, as Mother drove us home from the movies in San Luis Obispo, to the beach, for the fascinating sound above the fascination of the motor-sound, for the sea-roar. Now it will come, now it is coming, pouring in from the coast to meet and overwhelm us.

Born in 1919 at the close of the War, I belonged, I had been told, to an Atlantean generation that would see once more last things and the destruction of a world. There was a repeated dream I had as a child that came to be my “Atlantean” dream, for my mother told me it was a memory dream from that previous life. I belonged, too, to the generation
that had been destroyed in a cataclysm before the world we lived in began. I had a part in the fabulous.

Sometimes in phantasizing, calling up pictures like this to illustrate an other life, I would rescue myself and set out upon the sea again in a boat. But the boat now was no longer charmed or charming, like the Wynken-Blynken-and-Nod Boat had been. Huddled in the wrappings of my bedclothes, I was never sure how the dark exposed rowboat or lifeboat had escaped the holocaust in which it had been said all was lost, but it had been said too that certain adepts escaped and I would be an adept. I was never sure how the boat was making its way now north and east over a grey and forbidding sea toward new land. The way was alien. I was never sure that this part, going on to rescue myself like this, would work out at all. My heart sank, for, even in a dream, I could but pretend to be an adept; I would be found out. On and on the boat sped toward some colony or destiny that had no such reality as the deluge, the sea itself, had, but lay ahead unseen and unreal.

We had moved from the Bay Region to the Valley in ’28 away from the house my father as a young architect had designed in Alameda before I was born or was adopted by my parents, away from the towers of San Francisco where he had worked in a firm as a junior architect, and away too from the circle of Hermetic students. Back of what we knew as children, scenes were being shifted: from the big house with its parties, the garden and the studio, to the crowded little house in Bakersfield where my sister and I slept in the same room; from the conversation at table that was all fabulous history and fantastic science to the admonitions and explanations of the Depression years, the economic worrying and the things-to-be-discussed-later-but-not-in-front-of-the-children. What was left me from the talk of the elders in that antechamber of my childhood was now all my own. My parents, living far from the center of things, were concerned now with security and status, the politics and business opportunities of Bakersfield. Our religion became something we did not talk about to everybody. I talked to myself about it.

I would shake the mahjong table, and the palace of many gardens and courts, the majestic halls and ramparts, constructed by giant hands from another world, the corridor where the Queen walked in the evening
to meet the King, would fall. It seemed as if distant almost real shouts of anguish rose among the tottering ivory walls, and, making my play of earthquake—for I was the genius of the scene—I almost heard the confusion of delicious dismay, grief, and fear, echoed in my heart as if bonds of human sympathy united me with the inhabitants of this world I created to destroy again and again. What I would see then was . . .

Yes, I would see the actual mahjong tiles. I had had to build with utmost care and grandeur my little piled-up city or kingdom with many levels, for in the care, piece by piece, a place for something to happen was prepared, an other realm was built up, each tile the immediate occasion of a life fated to come to its last day. What I would see then was the monolithic real building I was engaged in, coming into existence block by block and yet the blocks themselves coming into existence in the building, out of what they were—the imposing gleam of the red dragon and green dragon walls, the mysterious symbols of the Chinese game with its winds and flowers converted into ancient glyphs and signs of a fated citadel. The Queen again would walk in the shadowed colonnade, the priests would sound their alarms from the tower, the scenes of human panic would flare-up in the mind’s eye, the pitiful consolation of the Queen in the King’s embrace as the walls fell, the . . . No, he would not get to her!—the crashing house between, the grief and loss. Each time I would experience what the victims of the holocaust experienced.

In the Atlantis phantasy and the Atlantis game or play, the most real emerged only in terms of what was most unreal. It was an experience true and untrue to itself. I could call up these returns of a scene, but I had no will in calling them up that could go against the emerging pattern, given in the play. The intense reality, wherever I became arbitrary, as if I could alter the fate of my play, dissolved into unreal and unsure elements. I could not name for sure any place as my destination. I could not name for sure any time as my appointed time. So, though I read eagerly anything and everything about my Atlantis, it grew only more suspect in the obsessional proofs of Ignatius Donnelly—I didn’t believe in an historical Atlantis—and yet, when geologists and reasonable historians scorned the would-be fact of Atlantis, the sinking land seemed real. Outside of history, there was an Atlantis—the shuddering
earth, the engulfing waters that must have been, came into their own again.

“In other words, they are not poeticised versions of unique historical events in the life of any individual ‘hero’,” Jane Harrison writes of myths in
Themis:
“but reflect recurrent ritual practices, or
dromena.
” The things said over the fire long ago in my grandmother’s rooms, or the talk at table in my childhood of planetary influences, elemental powers, lives before this life—the whole pictured island of lost consciousness under the sea waves that might rise once more: Atlantis—was not false history but spoke of a feeling about the course of life itself. My grandmother died in her drama, her
mise en scène
of the Hermetic cult, and those who had lived in the enchantment of her stage survived to defend, to prove, to suspect, or to put away, what, when she had been alive, had been the language in which her living was written.

It is in the dream itself that we seem entirely creatures, without imagination, as if moved by a plot or myth told by a story-teller who is not ourselves. Wandering and wondering in a foreign land or struggling in the meshes of a nightmare, we cannot escape the compelling terms of the dream unless we wake, any more than we can escape the terms of our living reality unless we die. There is a sense in which the “poet” of a poem forces us as writer or reader to obey a compelling form, the necessities of the poem, so that the poet has a likeness to the dreamer of the dream and to the creator of our living reality; dream, reality, and the poem, seem to be one.

The dream that was called my Atlantis dream was not something I thought up or that derived from the talk of my elders. The sequence remains emblematic and puzzling. Had my parents been Freudian instead of Hermeticists, they might have called it my birth-trauma dream. My first mother had died in childbirth, and in some violent memory of that initiation into life, she may be the mother-country that has been lost in legend. But, for me, the figures of the dream remain as if they were not symbolic but primal figures themselves of what was being expressed or shown. Memory of Atlantis or memory of birth-trauma, phantasy of Isis or play with words—these are not what the heart fears and needs, the showing forth of some power over the heart.

First there was the upward rise of a hill that filled the whole horizon
of what was seen. A field of grass rippled as if by the life of the grass itself, yet I was told there was no wind. When I saw that there was no wind, it was a fearful thing, where blade by blade the grass so bowed of its own accord to the West. The grass moved toward the left. The seer or dreamer then was facing north. There may have been flowers—day’s eyes—the grass was certainly in flower. The field was alive and, pointing that way, across the rise of the hill to the West, gave a sign.

Was I four or five when I first dreamt this dream? It came again and again as if to cut its shape for sure in what I would be. “For these images showed intention and choice,” Yeats said of such primary things. When I heard the story of that nymph who fell hopelessly in love with the Lord of the Sun, Helios, I was drawn to identify with the sunflower that, rooted in her passion, turns her head to follow the Sun’s way, for there was some faint reminder there of the grass I had seen in my dream bowing to the West. But in my dream there was no sun. The light was everywhere, and I can not be sure whether it was morning, evening, or high noon.

Then, in a sudden almost blurred act of the play, there was a circle of children—sometimes they were all girls or all boys, sometimes they were boys and girls—dancing in the field. They chose or had chosen someone who was “
IT
” in the center of the ring, but I saw no one there.

The Dreamer is in the center, the “I” or Eye of the Dream. And just here, I realize that this “I” is my self and second that I have been “chosen,” but also that in dreaming I am the Chosen One, I have been caught in the wrong—a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance. Ring a round of roses. Pocket full of posies. Or is it poses? for I had been proposed or I had posed as King, posed myself there. Ashes, ashes. All fall down!

In the third part—but it is the second section of the dream, for the Field and Its Dancers are two parts belonging to the one section—I am shown a cavern underground. A throne room? There is a stone chair on a dais. Seeing it is the King’s chair or, even, in some dreamings of this dream, finding myself a lonely king in that chair, there is no one rightly there. A wave of fear seizes me. All things have gone wrong and I am in the wrong. Great doors break from their bars and hinges, and, under pressure, a wall of water floods the cavern.

The open field, the dance and the presumption, the seeing the dark throne and the flooding of the underworld (the dream that my mother believed to be memory of a past life) seem now a prediction of what life will be, now a showing forth of some content of what life is, as in the Orphic mysteries the story of Persephone was shown in scenes. The restless dead, the impending past life, what had been cast away—a seed—sprouts and in the vital impulse would speak to us. The head of a giant woman rises from the ground.

“I have seen Kore,” the initiate Heracles says: “What face more terrible? I am initiate, prepared for Hades.” Wonder and terror seem to be signs of the rite. But in my life dream, I have not seen the Maiden, for I stand in her place or in her way.

The drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate, “the dream of everyone, everywhere.” The fate or dream is the fate of more than mankind. Our secret Adam is written in the script of the primal cell. We have gone beyond the reality of the incomparable nation or race, the incomparable Jehovah in the archetype of Man, the incomparable Book or Vision, the incomparable species, in which identity might find its place and defend its boundaries against an alien kind. All things have come now into their comparisons. But these comparisons are the correspondences that haunted Paracelsus, who saw also that the key to man’s nature was hidden in the design of the larger Nature. We are a variation among variations in the music of a natural intent in which evil as well as our good plays its part, becomes a term of the good of the totality in process.

In the terms of Space, this has meant the extension of our “where” into a world ecology. The O.E.D. gives 1873 as the earliest use of the word in our language, appearing in the translation of Haeckel’s
History of Creation:
“the great series of phenomena of comparative anatomy and ontogeny . . . oecology.” The very form of man has no longer the isolation of a superior paradigm but is involved in its morphology in the cooperative design of all living things, in the life of everything, everywhere. We go now to the bushman, the child, or the ape, who were once considered primitive, not to read there what we once were but to read what we are. In the psychoanalysis of the outcast and vagabond,
the neurotic and psychotic, we slowly discover the hidden features of our own emotional and mental processes. We hunt for the key to language itself in the dance of the bees or in the chemical code of the chromosomes. Likewise, it is the secret theme of a new music transforming the meaning of earlier themes in which the very thriving of Mankind has come into crisis.

The inspiration of Marx bringing economies into comparison and imagining a world commune, of Darwin bringing species into comparison and imagining a world family of the living in evolution, of Frazer bringing magic, rituals and gods, into comparison and imagining a world cult—these inspirations toward a larger community of Man belong to the nineteenth century of imperialist expansions. In Time, this has meant our “when” involves and is involved in an empire that extends into the past and future beyond times and eras, beyond the demarcations of history. Not only the boundaries of states or civilizations but also the boundaries of historical periods are inadequate to define the vital figure in which we are involved. “For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other,” so the witch Diotima tells Socrates in Plato’s
Symposium,
“does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment
.
”

The symposium of Plato’s time was restricted to a community of Athenians, gathered in the common creation of an
areté,
an aristocracy of spirit, inspired by the homoEros, taking its stand against lower or foreign orders, not only of men but of Nature at large. The intense yearning, the desire for something else, of which we too have only a dark and doubtful presentiment, remains, but our
areté,
our ideal of vital being, rises not in our identification with a paradigm in a hierarchy of higher forms but in our identification with the process of design beyond our own figure. To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man—must return to be admitted in the creation of what we are.