The H.D. Book (64 page)

•

When, as following the method of H.D.’s later work, of a day by day account, I began this section, I have imagined another intent in which the matter of H.D. is taken as a
mantra,
my thought ever returning thereto and taking its way anew. And the book becomes, not some challenge to the literary lists—as if I might win a place for her honor in establishing (by my authority, by being an author in that sense) a place in men’s minds of active concern—but another original, in my thought (for Norman Pearson had suggested a gift for her herself), the gift of itself love seeks to make.

•

A rose. He arose or rose early in the morning. Aroused to the book.

•

To be aroused,
angry,
I said. It is certainly too to be sexually aroused, where we follow the Freudian persuasion. To rise to the occasion. An aroused content is a disturbed content, as now, bringing the Freudian reading in at all, a shadowy suspicion begins. In following Freud, I am concerned not with what might be my own psyche but with whatever news of Man’s psyche, in which I have my share—Psyche, then, of the story that Apuleius tells. She was a searcher in the story, as a consequence of her looking where looking was forbidden. And now, in the conjunction of the hour, 4:20
A.M
., the dream of the rug that may be a rug in a hall, or a cover of a bed, or an original design, and the ghost of the word “aroused,” another searcher, a figure of myself as a child comes to form a link. There was, before I could read, another event in which what I was to be took root. The little figure aroused, in the
cunning of sleep, walking, goes to see what he heard. Was it at the same hour? 4:20
A.M
. To rise early and following a scent . . .

What I remember is searching for and finding the hiding places of the Easter eggs before Easter morning. In the dream there was a reminder of those rag-rugs in the hall between the nursery and the parents’ bedroom.

•

Aroused then is, as the Freudian thought would have it, the penis aroused; the ghost of the word “aroused” the ghost of the Freudian idea. With the sense that the pen is ready to write.

•

In this book where my purpose is to give my soul into the work, the cause appears in a new light. For I have taken psychic being, taken fire, from these works. Over years, I have confused my self with them—the open secret in the Freudian primal scene is only a ground floor—used The War Trilogy in creating the poet I am. We are concerned with the architecture of a man, but building with words, with the breath or spirit forms, morphemes in inventions of time, we build structures of air, rising one within another without displacement. “Forged” myself, remembering Joyce’s word. And may have evoked that primal scene to create the scene where we are, as the magician enacts the spying upon the naked body of Noah, repeated in the spying upon Jacob in intercourse, to incite in the mind a mystery of curiosity that would see the secrets of Creation Itself, of discovery and hubris.

•

Where is the original? I took thought from her thought; I took heart in her heart.

•

In working on “The Venice Poem” in 1948 I first realized that I was not original but derived my spirit in poetry. Taking my cues from adopted parents, I found my speech and play ready, as from the sounding of the bells “a tribute to the Angels;”

yet though the campanili spoke,
Gabriel, Azrael,

though the campanili answered,
Raphael, Uriel,

with other bells of the campus campanili actually sounding in my ear, studying the architecture of St. Mark’s, I began the poem, evoking attendant spirits as I had seen H.D. in
Tribute to the Angels
evoke lords of the poem. Archangels, for archangels, Ficino tells us, “direct the divine cult and look after sacred things.” I meant to derive a poet and to take my origin in him, having no genius of my own to take the genius of the language, as H.D. had dared to take the great genii of the hours to direct the poem. [But I was “adopted”; I would never really look like my adopted parents or my representatives of the parents.]

The Cantos
had shown a way to take ancestors in time, as Homer, and then the Renaissance translator Andreas Divus “In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer,” are ancestors of Pound as he translates the eleventh book of the
Odyssey
and brings it into his own
Cantos
—adopted fathers or authors of the original (Pound’s actual father’s name being Homer, as we remember H.D.’s mother’s name was Helen); and in the “
Et omniformis omnis intellectus est
” of Psellos that opens Canto XXIII I had found a lead towards that magic in which the mind becomes whatever and all that it will. Jane Harrison in
Themis
had supplied another lead with her observation that the dithyramb was Δι-θορ-αμβοζ, “Zeus-leap-song, the song that makes Zeus leap or beget,” a mimesis in which the Zeus-Child, Zagreus, was brought to birth. But it was in The War Trilogy that begins with its declaration of a new Master over Love and closes with the presentation of the Child, with its early proposition—

so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self

—that prepared my thought for “The Venice Poem,” the first poem where I not only knew what must be done—in
Medieval Scenes
I knew what the poem wanted—but also how to do it. In
Medieval Scenes
I had thought of myself as artisan and medium of the poem in one, receiving
certain scenes and working them in language. In “The Venice Poem,” the world of the poem was not a scene received and rendered but a matrix, within which and thru which I lived, into which I brought my actual life, the unfortunate course of love and betrayal which I suffered during the time of writing, not in order to express what I experienced but in order to take what I experienced as a passion, to in-form myself with the content of the poem, to form a womb or to adopt a womb in the matter of the poem, in order to beget in a Zeus-leap-song a Child out of myself that was to be my poet.

MARCH
21, Tuesday, 1961.

I
.

I woke again this morning before dawn. But there is only what I rejected of the dream to work with, and back of that—not even an image but a name that seems out of order, disorderly,—“
SALLY RAND
.” Once I bring the name up, back of the name I glimpse the fragment of a dream image I must recover now. I had, I gather, in a scene that must form part of our pictograph, been caressing H.D.’s naked back. One member of the dream-work or of the “Chinese written character as a medium for poetry” I have to do with, was my hand moving over the bare shoulders and back of a woman who in the dream was H.D. But she was also the fore-woman, the last element in sequence was—well, I have no more than the name, the popularity, the vulgarity, the
De Vulgari Eloquentia,
of “
SALLY RAND
” to work with. Must I bring this matter up? In the transgression of boundaries, even here where I have meant to keep boundaries fluid and self-creative so that no content would be out-of-bounds, I feel uneasy. [One of my readers writes in the margin: “I find these pages a little querulous and oddly defensive in an almost petulant manner.”]

•

“We can see,” Fenollosa writes in his essay
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,
which coming into Pound’s hands in 1916 opens the way in modern poetry for ideogram and projective verse, “not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, budding forth one from another”—as the scene of the naked back and the name of Sally Rand are for us parts of speech. “All that poetic form requires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. . . . Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident but because the operations of nature are successive. The transferences of forces from agent to object constitute natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order.”

•

But some “accident or weakness” in or of my subjective operation did break away from the pictograph. The hand caressing the bare back of the woman who represented H.D. was changed or the scene was disturbed, the surface of the pool stirred and the scene dissolved into . . . into—what? There was the name foremost in my mind as I woke up: Sally Rand.

•

My father and mother went to the Chicago World’s Fair that year. Was it 1933? It would then have been the year when H.D. began her analysis with Freud. Yesterday as I was writing down the previous dream, and then as I came to picture the various books to which this study refers as if the work of art were itself a cover-image of some original, that title of Baudelaire’s
Mon Coeur Mis à Nu
kept coming to mind.
My Heart Stript Bare.
Was that one of the requirements or realizations the book demanded? The title kept insisting to be admitted.

But Baudelaire’s
Mon Coeur Mis à Nu
is only a title for me. Of a book that has been on my shelves since 1946 with pages uncut. Henry Miller had had in his
Tropics
and in
Black Spring
this
coeur mis à nu
directive. I had picked up the Baudelaire to have near at hand one of the key books of the nineteenth century, but I never read it. I didn’t really like this idea of trying to expose the heart. It stood in critical reproof of my
wanting a fiction within which the heart hidden might reveal itself as it would in the working.

•

For those of us who are weavers of the veil, spinning the thread that changes life into its story, Mon coeur mis à nu, if it must be there, appears as a clothing of the heart, a figure in the cloth—but the cloth is itself the tissue of the heart. As the heart in H.D.’s
The Flowering of the Rod
we saw brought forward by the mage Kaspar as a gift for the Child—a sealed jar. But unbroken, it has also been broken. It is an open secret. Everyone has heard the story.

•

Seven seals upon the book. Seven veils of Ishtar. In reading, in penetrating the secrets of the author—so in arts and in sciences—Freud tells us, an anxiety can grow as “budding forth one from another” a sexual curiosity works behind a scientific quest. And, doctor and scientist of the soul, Freud advanced another idea—that behind analysis itself was another anxiety,
anal,
he called it. Prying into, cutting up, laying bare the heart was, is, a surgical operation and also something more distressing, a destructive intent. There were transformations or “transferences of force from agent to object” in critical curiosity of cruel and bloody impulses.

•

Mon coeur mis à nu,
this work of Baudelaire’s that is in my mind entirely an imaginary work, an emanation from some hidden book, is then an operation, takes on the hubris, the transgression, of my own “scientific curiosity.” There is a work that I have read many times that comes to mind now, standing as it has for years (since I first read it at fifteen or sixteen) for this
mis à nu
violation of life, the story of an act that cuts the threads of the story. It is Hawthorne’s
The Birthmark.

•

“No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether
to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection.”

He operates. He is “successful.” He removes all trace of the mark of birth; of what Christians called the original sin; of the vulnerable spot where the hero’s death will strike. “You know better than to try to improve in poetry,” Jack Spicer said, when I was distressed by the failure I felt in working on this book—“Why do you try to correct your prose?” Rewriting, reworking—just over what we are most unsure of, most do not know how to work, “whether to term a defect or a beauty.”

•

The story Hawthorne tells in “The Birthmark” has to do with the artist’s urge to render the essential free from its contaminations. It is an alchemical tale then. It has something to do with laying the heart bare, to know its secrets of life.

With criticism too, then, with the concept of cleaning up a written sentence, erasing the blemishes of this prose as I write it, removing what seems to mar some possible clear thing.

•

Georgiana then is our book, our inner nature, our own body. And the alchemist or doctor or gnostic or perfectionist, the critic and artist Aylmer at last gazes down upon the perfected image of his wife.

Waking, she perishes. Was it that the life was in the flaw? “That crimson hand which had once blazed forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their happiness?”

“Do not repent,” she instructs her stricken husband, “that with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer.”

•

Waking from the dream, I rejected the best it had to offer.
SALLY RAND
. “Ecdysiast.” A joke. She had been brought up. Hey-ding-ding. Something had risen to the occasion. She was there, and I awoke. An instruction. “I cannot use
SALLY RAND
in the H.D. Book,” I said. “I cannot bring
that
up.”

•

But it had been brought up—the dancer with her ostrich-feather fans.

•

As, pursuing the pun, I am a fan of H.D.’s. This cult of the movie-star, of the dance-star, of the sports-star, and then among us in our common selves, of the poet-star, is as much of our daily reality as Sally Rand and her fan dance.

•

And there may have been another transference of force, a pun, that gave Sally her power over the popular imagination. For everyone knew, though they would only subconsciously remember (I do not recall that any of the jokes picked up on that word “ostrich”) that the ostrich hides its head in the sand, is afraid to see the facts of life.

•

Sally Rand was surrounded by the vulgar laughter, the knowing smirk. She was the victim of a joke? She had her popularity in a joke, in the “Sally Rand” jokes, and when they died out, what she was died out, leaving only the ghost of her name to haunt the jumping rhymes of children who have no other memory of her—“Sally Rand has a fan,” Iona and Peter Opie report in
The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren,
1959: “If she drops it—oh man!”