The H.D. Book (65 page)

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She was, incarnate, a creature of the hey-ding-ding touch or mark that H.D. had wanted removed from William Carlos Williams’s poetry to reveal the real beauty. The H and D, above and below.

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There was as I recall no more than the gentle joking about did Father go to see Sally Rand and her dancers? In—wasn’t it called “Elysium”? In their side-show burlesque or nudist
Elysium.
Did he want to see? It would all turn out to be a joke. They would rag him. The ladies would
laugh gently to cover something that I did not understand. Sally Rand was “common,” was somehow both alluring and distasteful.

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In
Bid Me to Live
(“my Madrigal, my
roman à clef,
” H.D. called it in her
Newsweek
interview upon the publication of the book), H.D. gives her account of a charade, an evening’s game in which Lawrence and Frieda (Fredericks and Elsa, in the novel), Rafe and Julia Ashton, Bella Carter and Vane impersonate God and serpent, Adam and apple-tree, Eve and the angel at the gate. It is not part of their play, or, it is not openly part of their play; but in the original of that charade, in the story of our Ur-Parents in the Garden, they are of the Tree of Knowing and they saw the hey-ding-ding touch. In the lore the Above and the Below separated into two. They saw they were naked.

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In a collection of memoirs, letters, and biographical sketches presenting a portrait of D. H. Lawrence, I found another account of just that evening: where another charade is presented in which Fredericks, Elsa, Rafe and Julia Ashton, Bella Carter and Vane appear as Lawrence, Frieda, Richard and H. D. Aldington, Bella (who is to be the second Mrs. Aldington), and the British composer Cecil Gray.

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Was it before or after Lawrence wrote his poem “Elysium” that appears in
Look! We Have Come Through!
?

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Once the charade is set going in the novel, elements take on new levels of meaning, new circles of meaning ringing out from each pebble. “Somewhere, somehow, a pattern repeated itself, life advances in a spiral.” That is it, part of my sense here. For the pattern, the spiraling advance, is in the swirling veil of Ishtar or Isis or of our Nature, not the heart but the charade of the heart. “Every breath she drew was charged
with meaning,” H.D. writes of Julia. This sense of the meaningful is the charge we have as weavers in the weaving, to bring forward meanings into the work, as creatures ourselves of the tissue of life. Or the
screen
?

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Sally Rand was, to my Freudian persuasion, a screen-image.

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“They have to bring forth,” Mary Butts writes in 1932 in
Traps for Unbelievers,
“from the eating-houses of Brooklyn, from farmsteads in Kansas, from shepherds’ huts in the Puszta in Hungary, flesh that can bear the weight of the world’s imaginings about Aphrodite. . . . All the young gods, of sex and war, of art and sport and maidenhood; of drink and the mysteries of excitement and moving about . . . the gods of ourselves, in the order we most want them.

“Only it is men and women now who have to bear the burden of that desire: the movie star and the athlete, the flying man and woman, the speedboat racer and the boxer.”

And the artist? the cult of Picasso? and the poet?

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Certainly T. S. Eliot belonged to this order, standing as an idol of the higher sophistication called culture, as Noel Coward stood for the lower sophistication called show business.

As in our day, Ginsberg and Kerouac are stars, beside whom any flyer or racer dims.

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There is a priestess, a personality of this cult of ourselves I would make H.D. to be—this too? A bare-back rider of Pegasus of the Circus?

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It was my hand caressing her bare back, as if it were in touch with fame, with this woman, from which sprang, once the dream was disturbed, the other famous,
popular
name.

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“Not, it may be observed, the older and soberer incantation,” Mary Butts writes: “not the Father or the Grandfather or the Intellect; not Zeus Chronides or Athene; not ‘Zeus of the Underworld and dread Persephone’.”

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But, waking this morning, disturbed, I thought . . . the thought kept coming back . . . “Did I ever . . . ?” It was the hand kneading, needing then, the bare back. “ . . . stroke my mother’s back so?” Or
the
mother’s back?

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Jehovah, I remember now from my reading in the Works of Thomas Vaughan last night, showed Moses His bare backside. How had they ever been able to keep that Rabelaisian detail as part of the story? of the real beauty?

II
.

I had gleaned from some reference to a dictionary that the word
verse,
our verse in poetry, like our
prose
in poetry, was
backwards
and
forwards,
as a man ploughing goes along one line and returns.
Prose,
forward in the row or line; then “turning to begin another line” (as now I find in the O.E.D.)
versus.

As men plough forward and back, did they once write, turning

?enil eht fo dne eht ta

But in verse now, we
return
to begin another line. We do not reach the end or margin.

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It is a fanciful etymology. To demonstrate that, once words cease to be conventional, customary or taken-for-granted in their meaning, all things begin to move, are set into motion. In the figure of ploughing, we see that prose and verse are two necessary movements in the one
operation of writing. That here what we call the ploughing of the field we also call poetry or our own operation in language. Writing that knows in every phase what it is doing.

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Forward and back, prose and verse, the shuttle flies in the loom.

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“It means
against
too,” Spicer noted in the margin of an article I had written on Ideas of Form, and he asked me to look the word up in the O.E.D. There was
pro
and
versus.
My polemics. Lines of a poem “employed in
Law
to denote an action by one party against another.”

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There is from
vertere
to turn,
version:
“a rendering of some text or work, or of a single word, passage, etc., from one language into another”; and too, “the particular form of a statement, account, report given by one person.”

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aversion

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There is the
verso
or “the side presented to the eye when the leaf has been turned over.” The other side of the fabric, where the colors are more vivid for not having been brought to light. The underside of the weaving.

There is the verso, the world beneath the stone, the underworld. Where not only mystery but misery hides. Where not only occult wonder but obscene infection swarms. Life revealed when the stone is turned over, reversed.

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For wasn’t there, as Freud found, dug out, exposed: anal and oral phantasy—shit and devouring demons everywhere. The witch in the wisewoman?

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There is in the operation Freud describes as the screen image a standing of one thing in the place of another. “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all
from
our childhood: memories
relating to
our childhood may be all that we possess,” he writes in “Screen Memories” (1899). The fabric of history, of memory, then, must be continually woven in order to exist
because it is not the fabric of the past but the fabric of the present that we weave.

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We find meanings and significances to make up the Presence in which we, I, are, am.

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“Out of a number of childhood memories,” Freud had pointed out, “there will be some scenes which, when they are tested (for instance by the recollections of adults), turn out to have been falsified.” Fabricated or forged, made-up, worked, to be a scene at all means that facts have been taken over by the restless human creativity. In the terms William James gives of a plurality of reals, we read: “there will be some scenes which turn out to have only a personal, not a conventional, reality.”

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Then, describing this operation—it is the operation of our weaving, the classical operation or pretension of the magician, Freud observes: “They are false in the scene [sense?] that they have shifted an event to a place where it did not occur . . . or that they have merged two people into one or substituted one for another, or the scenes as a whole give signs of being combinations of two separate experiences.”

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As in the charade which the poets and lovers play in War-Time London, the loss of Paradise is brought into the loss of the pre-War world, and in their impersonations the personalities of Lawrence and H.D. become linked to the archaic personae of Jehovah and the Forbidden Tree.

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“She had the same feeling,” H.D. writes in
Bid Me to Live,
“that she had had in Capri, her word would call any Spirit to her, but she must be careful how she spoke. How she thought, even. It would be tempting something, luring something too poignantly near.”

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Screen-images or screen memories Freud calls them, these things too poignantly near. Figures of the veil, we have called them. The heart figured to clothe the heart. He speaks in that essay of “the high degree of sensory intensity shown by the pictures and the efficacy of the function of memory in the young.” I have suggested that we are not only creators, but, if and where we are creators, we are creatures of the veil we weave, children out of the whole cloth, charged with the intensity of the transforming work itself.

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Then Freud warns: “these falsifications of memory are tendentious, that is, they serve the purpose of the repression and replacement of objectionable or disagreeable impressions.” But he goes further to question whether we have any memories at all from childhood. He almost raises this picture of everywhere objectionable or disagreeable realities giving rise to the what we are in what is, creatures of our own transformation of what we could not satisfy in life, satisfying realities disappearing into their satisfactions.

“In these periods of revival,” Freud continues, “the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say,
emerge;
they were
formed
at that time.”

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What we are involved in now, after the brooding thought, the penetrating analysis, the pervasive suggestion of Freud, is that our recognitions must go two ways. Though, after Freud, enthusiasts have tended to see the underside as the true and the overt statement as a cover, we would see both as present terms of the weave of truth.

•

As what sent me off along this line of
prose, verse; versus; version, aversion, verso,
was that bit out of Vaughan’s
Anthroposophia Theomagica:

This fire is the vestment of the Divine Majesty, His back-parts which He shewed to Moses; but His naked, royal essence none can see and live. The glory of His presence would swallow up that natural man and make him altogether spiritual. Thus Moses his face—after conference with Him—shines, and from this small tincture we may guess at our future estate in the regeneration.

“But I have touched the veil,” Vaughan continues, “and must return to the outer court of the Sanctuary
.
”

“The trembling of the veil of the Temple,” Yeats had called the generation of Mallarmé. Between the high-mindedness and the low thought-forms a Void—but it was also a Maelstrom—trembled, shimmered, began to cast forth its old fascination. What is on my mind is that Yeats too, like Freud, poetics as well as psychology, was drawn to find out hidden content, working to bring us into a new consciousness in magic, away from the abstract and absolute, towards the coordination of above and below.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street . . .

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There was a time of the trembling; then a time of the forcing of overt images. We now have our sanctuary only within the open secret in which the tissue of life reverses and restores the face, as Waite in a footnote to Vaughan quotes the Vulgate:
ignis involens.

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We no sooner saw the backside that God showed Moses, because the Glory, the face, was forbidden, was
too much,
than we saw the sexual figure with which this image was charged, the other back-side that Freud forced us to admit existed in our thought.

As Satan, the Goat of Mendes, presented in parody, in a charade of the verso, his ass-hole to be kissed by the devout. Where, too, the face of the devotee “shines and from this small tincture. . . . ” When Madame Blavatsky tells us that Isis has revealed to her “the secret meaning of her long-lost
secrets,
” in the context of a garment that becomes more transparent, the sexual reference of the word contends to take over the tenor of the statement.

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H.D.’s allegiance, like Freud’s, belongs to the high mind. Pound, we remember, called her, long long ago, “that refined charming, and utterly narrow minded she-bard ‘H.D.’ ” and yet, had wanted her to keep the “few but perfect” position in poetry. But in
Ion,
in her apostrophe to Athene, H.D. addresses “this emanation of pure-spirit” with a new sense of what high-mindedness might mean. Reading the passage again, in the context of the Hermetic “above and below” (the “As above, so below” of the Smaragdine tablet) and also of the Freudian idea of displacement above and below, we see that the above must work in the below and the below in the above, there must be a circuit for thought to be creative, for desire to be intelligent: “This most beautiful abstraction [the Athene] pleads for the great force of the undermind . . . that so often, on the point of blazing upwards into the glory of inspirational creative thought, flares, by a sudden law of compensation, down, making for tragedy, disharmony, disruption, disintegration.” In our task, we must have “the desire actually to follow all those hidden subterranean forces,” if we would come to the reward of thought. “ ‘You flee no enemy in me, but one friendly to you,’ says the intellect, standing full armed. . . . ”