The H.D. Book (26 page)

“One of the main sources of male creative power,” Roheim tells us, “is the incantation itself.”

When I asked old Wapiti and the other chiefs what makes the animals grow? the spirits? the ancestors? O, no, they said:
jelindja wars,
the words only. The form of the incantation is an endless, monotonous flow of words, and actually the men urinate very frequently while performing the ceremonies. This parallelism between the words and the fluid is brought out in a description by Lloyd Warner: ‘The blood runs slowly and the rhythm of the song is conducted with equal slowness. In a second or two the blood spurts and runs in a rapid stream. The beat of the song sung by the old men increases to follow the rhythm of the blood.’

We may begin to see, given Stein’s concept of insistence that informs composition, and then thinking of the pulse of the living egg-cell itself, that beat, rhythm, underlies every pattern of our experience. Life itself is an endless, monotonous flow, wherever the individual cannot enter into it as revealed in dance and melody to give rhythmic pattern; the world about goes inert and dead. The power of the painter in landscape is his revelation of such movement and rhythm in seeing, in-formation, in what otherwise would have been taken for granted.

Gertrude Stein, reflecting upon permanence and change in the artist’s vision, sees that “the only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” Close to the Cubist movement in Paris, she had experienced how painting or writing in a new way had revealed coordinations of what was seen and heard toward an otherwise hidden unborn experience of the world, so that one saw and heard with a profound difference. “A new cadence means a new idea,” H.D. and Richard Aldington tell us; here too, cadence is how it is done. To make clear the meaning of cadence they refer to the choral line of Greek poetry that was also the movement of the choral dance, strophe and
antistrophe. So too, Roheim, initiate of Freudianism, as Stein was initiate of Cubism, or H.D. of Imagism, sees in the narratives of his Australian informants how “in all of them environment is made out of man’s activity,” for he had himself experienced a conversion in which a new environment for man had been made out of analytic activity. The “man-made world” in which “environment is regarded as if it were derived from human beings” is the narrative itself—the unity of things in how the story is told.

Parts and operations of the human body, but also parts and operations of the cosmos, are related in a new ground, a story or picture or play, in which feeling and idea of a larger whole may emerge. The flow of sound from the throat and the flow of urine from the bladder, the flow of energy from the dancing feet, the flow of forms in the landscape, the flow of water and of air felt, translated in a rhythmic identity disclose to the would-be initiate what man is but also what the world is—both other and more than he is himself, than the world itself is.

Cézanne working at his vision of Mont Sainte-Victoire and Dalí at his paranoiac vision of the Catalonian landscape not only draw but are drawn by what they draw. From body and from world toward an other body and other world, man derives meaning in a third element, the
created—
the rite, the dance, the narrative; the painting, the poem, the book. And in this new medium, in a new light, “man” and “environment” both are made up.

The power of the poet is to translate experience from daily time where the world and ourselves pass away as we go on into the future, from the journalistic record, into a melodic coherence in which words—sounds, meanings, images, voices—do not pass away or exist by themselves but are kept by rhyme to exist everywhere in the consciousness of the poem. The art of the poem, like the mechanism of the dream or the intent of the tribal myth and
dromena,
is a cathexis: to keep present and immediate a variety of times and places, persons and events. In the melody we make, the possibility of eternal life is hidden, and experience we thought lost returns to us.

“The eternal ones of the dream,” Roheim observes, “are those who have had no mothers; they originated of themselves. Their immortality is a denial of the separation anxiety. Separation from the mother is
painful; the child is represented in myth as fully formed, even before it enters the mother . . . The
tjurunga
from which it is born is both a phallic and a maternal symbol.”

The
tjurunga,
like the cartouche that encircles the Pharaoh’s name as the course of the sun encircles the created world, is a drawing of the spirit being, an enclosure in which we see the primal identity of the person. But all primal identities are Adamic containing male and female, man and animal, in one. We are each separated from what we feel ourselves to be, from what we essentially
are
but also from the other we
must be.
Wherever we are we are creatures of other places; whenever we are, creatures of other times; whatever our experience, we are creatures of other imagined experiences. Not only the experience of unity but the experience of separation is the mother of man. The very feeling of melody at all depends upon our articulation of the separate parts involved. The movement is experienced as it arises from a constant disequilibrium and ceases when it is integrated.

“Composition is not there, it is going to be there, and we are here,” Stein writes. Between “there” and “here” or “then” and “now,” the flame of life, our spirit, leaps. A troubled flame—“The time in composition is a thing that is very troublesome,” Stein tells us:

If the time in the composition is very troublesome it is because there must be even if there is no time at all in the composition there must be time in the composition which is in its quality of distribution and equilibration. (Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,”
Selected Writings
[1946], p. 461)

An anxious flame—“In totemic magic the destroyed mother is reanimated and in the totemic sacrament, eternal union of the mother and child is effected,” Roheim tells us. But the eternal separation of the mother and child is also celebrated therein: “As a religion it represents the genitalization of the separation period and the restitution that follows destructive trends.”
War,
Heraclitus called the flame, or
Strife.

“All men are bringing to birth in their bodies and in their souls,” Diotima, who here speaks as an Eternal One of the Mother, says to Socrates in Plato’s dialogue:

There is a poetry, which, as you know, is complex and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all arts are creative; and the masters of all arts are poets or makers . . . What are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? . . . The object which they have in view is birth in beauty.

Beyond beauty—birth in the eternal and universal.

“According to the natives of the Andjamatana tribe,” Roheim tells us, “children originate in two mythical women known as
maudlangami
”:

They live in a place in the sky. Their long hair almost covers them and on their pendulum breasts are swarms of spirit children who gather their sustenance therefrom. These women are the source of all life, each within her tribe producing spirit children of her own moiety.

The two
maudlangami
from whom all spiritual identities come are creatures of the story itself in which the germinal function of the storytelling is embodied. In the communion of the Story, the narrator and the listeners have their spiritual source, and all life has its source and draws eternal nourishment.

Each Aranda or Juritja native has an immortal part or spirit double, whose immortality consists in eternally rejoining the Mother in the sacred totemic cave. From time to time they reidentify themselves with the eternal in them.

It seems to Roheim that in the story “they deny their great dependence upon Mother Nature and play the role of Mothers themselves.” But Mother Nature in the eternal bond with Man is Herself, as He is, the member of the cast in a drama. In the rites that Roheim sees as denials of dependence, we see the dancers reviving the human reality in all that is disturbing to union, involving themselves in, insisting upon, and taking their identity in, the loss of their identity, keeping the rhyme of their separation alive in the sound of their unity, rehearsing their exile in the place where they are. The flame springs up in a confusion of elements, times, places.

For the Freudian, it all rests in a “psychical survival of the biologic unity with environment.” “This ‘oceanic feeling’ (Freud) or ‘dual unity situation,’ ” Roheim argues, “is something we all experience in our own lives; it is the bond that unites mother and child.” “By taking the
tjurunga
along on his wanderings the native never gives up the original bond of dual unity which ties the infant to his mother.”

From the unity once known between mother and child, the boy is initiated in a rite in which things once unified in feeling are shown as separated. This is the anatomization of the Australian scene, where parts of the body are exhibited as independent entities; but it is also the anatomization practices in which the poet is born, where words once unified in the flow of speech—the mother tongue which in turn had been articulated from the flow of sounds in the child’s earlier initiation—are shown as articulated—separated into particular sounds, syllables, meanings—in order to be reorganized in an other unity in which the reality of separation is kept as a conscious factor. The “Mother” is now the World, and the “Child” is the Self. The World is revealed as a “Creation” or “Poetry” or “Stage,” and the Self, as “Creator” or “Poet.” The man or the hero begins his life that demands something of him, a wandering in quest of something known in the unknown. Taking with him the quest itself as his Mother—as the Australian takes the
tjurunga
or the devout Kabbalist the Shekina—he is to be most at home in his exile.

•

Roheim telling about his Australian natives does not mean to initiate us into the Aranda but through his creation of the Aranda in our minds to initiate us into the psychoanalytic fiction. The old men prancing, bleeding themselves, and showing their private parts; the emu ancestors, the eternal ones who come in the dream, the primordial Mother and Child, are people not of the Australian bush but of a creative book, haunted by “the wanderings of human beings from the cradle to the grave in a web of daydream,” as the author of this mankind himself wanders in a web of psychoanalytic reverie.

“In the eternal ones of the dream it is we who deny decay and aggression
and object-loss, and who guard eternal youth and reunion with the mother,” Roheim writes in his coda:

The old and decrepit men of the tribe become young and glorious once more. Covered with birds’ down, the life symbol, they are identified with the eternally youthful ancestors. Mankind, the eternal child,
splendide mendax,
rise above reality . . . The path is Eros, the force that delays disintegration; and hence the promise held forth in the daydream and in its dramatization is no illusion after all. The
tjurunga
which symbolizes both male and female genital organ, the primal scene and combined parent concept, the father and the mother, separation and reunion . . . represents both the path and the goal.

This
tjurunga
we begin to see not as the secret identity of the Aranda initiate but as our own Freudian identity, the conglomerate consciousness of the mind we share with Roheim. “Above and below, left and right,” the Kabbalist would have added in drawing his figure of the primordial man. The whole story is “daydream,” a “web,” and we are not sure of that because the path is Eros, the child, but he is also
splendide mendax,
a glorious maker of fictions, in which all the conglomerate of what Man is might be contained.

The
tjurunga
is not only the simple bull-roarer, a wooden slab with a hole in it, but, as
tjurung,
it is also the symbol of a complex relationship, the agency of a magic in which Man and Universe are identified. The
tjurunga
is not only then the instrument of Australian rites, but, as we begin to recognize the underlying intent, the instrument of our own initiations of meaning becomes likewise the
tjurunga.
The hammock and Calder’s mobile, seen by Siegfried Giedion in
Mechanization Takes Command
as “deeply at one with the broad stream of modern evolution,” are of such an order.

If, as in Malraux’s
Psychology of Art,
we see painting and sculpture not only as discrete works but also as participants in a drama of forms playing throughout the time of man, so that what were once thought of as masterpieces of their time and place are now seen anew as moving expressions of—but more than expressions, creations and creators of—spiritual life, as acts of a drama of what Man is that has not come to its completion, but which we imagine as a changing totality called
Art; then poems too begin to appear as members of a hovering system “ever ready to change its poise,” called Poetry. The draft of air or the touch of a hand reappears now as the inspiration or impulse of mind that will change states and interrelations. “Time in the composition comes now,” Gertrude Stein puts it, “and this what is troubling everyone the time in the composition is now a part of distribution and equilibration”—“past the danger point”—throughout the history of Man. History itself, no longer kept within the boundaries of periods or nations, appears as a mobile structure in which events may move in time in ever-changing constellations. The effort of Toynbee’s
Study of History,
beyond Spengler’s comparison of civilizations, is toward an interpenetration of what before seemed discrete even alien areas of the life of man. Present, past, future may then appear anywhere in changing constellations, giving life and depth to time. The Eternal Return, no longer conceived of as bound to revolutions of a wheel—the mandala of a Ptolemaic universe or of a Jungian Self—beyond the “organic” concept Toynbee derives from Vico’s life cycles, we begin to see order now as an insistence of figure in an expanding ground of many relations. The Composition is there, we are here. But now the Composition and we too are never finished, centered, perfected. We are in motion and our meaning lies not in some last or lasting judgment, in some evolution or dialectic toward a higher force or consciousness, but, in an Adamic content of the whole, the totality of mankind’s experience in which our moment, this vision of a universal possibility, plays its part, and beyond, the totality of life experience in which Man plays His part, not central, but in every living moment creating a new crisis in the equilibration of the whole. The whole seen as a mobile is a passionate impermanence in which Time and Eternity are revealed as One.