The H.D. Book (5 page)

Duncan’s early notebook entries when he was beginning to identify H.D.’s personal and publication history.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

A page spread from Duncan’s notebook containing his preliminary notes for Book 3.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

But beyond that is the question of whether annotating the references is even a reasonable undertaking. Duncan struggled with the idea that he might be seen as making H.D. salable in the literary marketplace. Did engaging her occultation and defending her against the misunderstandings of the professors mean he was trying to facilitate her into some literary celebrity? Some commodification? That was the last thing he wanted to do. His “rescue” mission was first of all a quest for a poetics. As a corollary to that, it was an attempt to reclaim from obscurity the world he shared with H.D. This quest was grounded in a conversation, not in assertions and truths about the “real.” If it began as a conversation between H.D. and Robert Duncan, that
between
opened into a vast exchange of other voices, other minds.

A conversation is a particular kind of event. The central responsiveness—the back and forth—is also always, in a true conversation, a
further,
an opening beyond. Duncan’s and H.D.’s conversation opens into further conversations with Dante, Avicenna, Freud, Arnaut, Browning, Iamblichus—the company keeps expanding, opening the conversation to further and further marvels of mind. Duncan’s so-called references in
The H.D. Book
mark the expansive contours of this marvelous conversation. The presence of the names is itself an opening and an invitation to each reader to join in. Finally, though, the entrance into the
conversation cannot be given. The Given is, in this sense, the problem. It must, as Arakawa and Madeleine Gins have so eloquently argued, be Taken.
¹²
The H.D. Book
opens the door and points toward the world of companions that waits. All the reader has to do is take up the invitation and join in.

Michael Boughn
Victor Coleman

NOTES

1
. H.D. / Robert Duncan,
A Great Admiration: Correspondence 1950–1961,
ed. Robert J. Bertholf (Venice, Calif.: The Lapis Press, 1992).

2
. This is akin to Henry Corbin’s description of the Active Imagination in the work of Ibn ‘Arabi as an “organ of prophetic inspiration which perceives, and at the same time confers existence upon a reality of its own, whereas for us it secretes only ‘imaginings.’ ”
Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Bin ‘Arabia,
trans. Ralph Manheim,
Bollingen
Series XCI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 88.

3
. “This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes . . . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance,” in
Essays and Lectures
(New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 271.

4
. “Moral perfectionism challenges ideas of moral motivation, showing (against Kant’s law that counters inclination, and against utilitarianism’s calculation of benefits) the possibility of my access to experience which gives to my desire for the attaining of a self that is mine to become, the power to act on behalf of an attainable world I can actually desire.” Stanley Cavell,
Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 33. See especially chapters 1 and 2 on Emerson and George Cukor’s
The Philadelphia Story
for more on perfectionism.

5
. “I want to compose a poetry with the meaning entirely occult, that is—with the meaning contained not as a jewel is contained in a box but as the inside of a box is contained in a box.” From Notebook 5 at Berkeley. This is a transcription from a letter to James Broughton.

6
. “The agreement of reasonable men was to quarantine the fever of thought.” Robert Duncan, “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” in
Fictive Certainties
(New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 99.

7
. “Normal” in this sense is a demand for what Emerson calls conformity,
the abrogation of Self. “Ordinary” refers, as Stanley Cavell has it, to “the missable, the unobserved, what we would call the uncounted, taken not as given but for granted.”
Cities of Words,
p. 332. This “ordinary” is identical with Duncan’s sense of the occult.

8
. During the Occultation the loss of energy to universal negentropy as the Imagination died under the image to Pan (Sirius), then Venus, Moon & finally Sun . . .

—John Clarke, “
HAWK OR HARP
?”
The End of This Side
(Bowling Green, Ohio: Black Book, 1979), p. 20.

See also, for instance, Charles Taylor: “Let me start with the enchanted world, the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feeling, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of human beings . . . ; and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, etc. are situated ‘within’ them.”
The Secular Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 29–30.

9
. Duncan’s epigraph from A. E. Waite,
The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross
(New York: University Books, 1961), p. 430. Both Waite and Duncan are playing the idea of Morning against the notion of Enlightenment here: “The crisis of the Enlightenment was the crisis Keats saw recapitulated in Coleridge’s collapse from the inspiration of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Cristobel’ to the psychic despair, the rationalist obsession, of later years.” Duncan, “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” p. 100.

10
. Emerson, “An Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 1, 1838,” in
Essays and Lectures,
p. 75.

11
. “We do not make things meaningful, but in our making we work towards an awareness of meaning; poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in the work.” Duncan, “Towards an Open Universe,” in
Fictive Certainties,
p. 82.

12
. Arakawa and Madeleine Gins,
The Mechanism of Meaning
(New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979).

As regards the Lost Word, it is explained that the sun at autumn has lost its power and Nature is rendered mute, but the star of day at the spring tide resumes its vital force, and this is the recovery of the Word, when Nature with all her voices, speaks and sings, even as the Sons of God shouted for joy in the perfect morning of the cosmos. —A. E. Waite,
The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross

I
.

It is some afternoon in May, twenty-five years ago as I write here—1935 or 1936—in a high school classroom. A young teacher is reading:

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air . . .

The patience of her voice, where hope for a communion in teaching still struggled with a resignation to institutional expediencies, the reaching out of her voice to engage our care where she cared, had a sad sweet lure for me. But now, as she read the poem, something changed, became more, transformed by her sense of the poet’s voice, impersonating the poet H.D.

. . . fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

To recall the poem, blunted and rounded in the heat, is to recall the first reading, and leads me back to that early summer of my sixteenth or seventeenth year. Just beyond the voice of the poem, the hum and buzz of student voices and the whirr of water sprinklers merging comes distantly from the world outside an open window.

Inside, in a room that was hers and an hour that was hers—for each period in the schedule of my school day still in those years would become a realm of expectancy for me—the poem came as an offering. It may have been a diversion or a reward after duties in our course of instruction. She had presented it as something more, a personal communication. “I have brought a poem today, not as part of your required reading,” did she say? or “not belonging to English Literature, but to my own world, a confidence, a gift, or share?” It was clear, anyway, that for her as for us, much of what we had to read was the matter of a prescribed course and not of our own explorations. We were a group set apart from the mass of those attending high school, a few by their special aptitudes, but most of us by our being the sons and daughters of college graduates, and all of our courses of study were designed to prepare us for entrance examinations for college. We were in the proving ground of the professional middle class, where we were to learn by heart the signs and passwords of that class. Not only cases and tenses, histories and zoologies, but news reports and musical appreciations and the reading of novels and poems were to become critical tests in the would-be initiate’s meeting the requirements of a cultural set.

Books had opened in childhood imaginations of other lives, dwelling in which the idea of my own life to be had taken on depths and heights, colors and figures, a ground beyond self or personality in the idea of Man. In fairy tales and in romances, old orders overthrown by the middle class lived on in the beginnings of an inner life, kings and knights long deposed by merchants and landlords, peasants and craftsmen swept aside by the Industrial Revolution, once powers and workers in the realities of the actual world passed now into the subversive realm of the irreal. In each of our histories, we were to repeat the historical victory of the Rise of Capitalism. Were there “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,” we were schooled not to be taken in by them but to take them
in, to appreciate the poet’s fancy, even as our forefathers no longer worshipped grove and fountain but exploited wood and water power as public utilities. English Lit with its reading lists, its established texts and tests, was to map in our minds the wilderness yet to be converted to our proper uses from the already developed areas of our real estate. Work by work, author by author, the right roads were paved and marked, the important sights were emphasized, the civic improvements were pointed out where the human spirit had been successfully converted to illustrate the self-respectability of civil men, and the doubtful, impulsively created areas or the adventuring tracks into back-country were deplored. If we, in turn, could be taught to appreciate, to evaluate, as we read, to improve our sensibilities in the ground of other men’s passions, to taste and to regulate, to establish our estimations of worth in the marketplace, we were to win some standing in the ranks of an educated middle class as college graduates, urbane and professional, as our parents had done before us.