The H.D. Book (78 page)

•

Dante is about to witness in the Office of the Poet the splendor of God, the Rose Itself, and there may be a warning in this reminder of
il loco mio
that the poet too is to most remember his place. But the author and master of the
Divine Comedy,
the poet, has also his locus—it is the
work itself. And Dante, to know his own place, but writes the work in service of, as agent of, that author.

III
.

March 28, 1961. Tuesday.

There is, then, not only the order of
Paterson
and
The Cantos
in which we may consider The War Trilogy as a vision of our own times; but there is another order of dream or vision-poem disclosing the soul’s journey from this world thru “Apocryphal fire,” leaving “the-place-of-a-skull / to those who have fashioned it”—How Virgil has to warn Dante to let Hell be—and coming at last into the presence of God in which works as various as
The Divine Comedy
or Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
may be of a kind with H.D.’s Trilogy.

•

Dante, the heir of a cult in Christendom of Amor; Bunyan, a preaching seventeenth century Protestant convert, certainly no heir of a high poetic tradition; and H.D., late Imagist, versed in a Hermetic-Christian lore of the twentieth century. But to each the order or worth of this world is revealed in the light of another world. Man’s spirit is seen more ardent, more in need. Angelic and daemonic spirits attend, and the narrative is in the terms of a religious convention the story of the individual soul’s trials or stations in consciousness towards an authority or author who is God.

•

Each is a Dream-Vision. “I cannot rightly tell how I entered it,” Dante tells us, “so full of sleep was I about the moment that I left the true way.” The
selva oscura
is a dark passage of the Life-Dream, and the poet is moved by what Dante in the close of the Comedy calls his high fantasy.

•

In Bunyan’s case he had, he tells us, set about to write an allegory. Well, no . . . he says:

And thus it was: I writing of the Way
And Race of Saints, in this our Gospel Day
Fell suddenly into an Allegory
About their Journey and the way to Glory.

•

To “fall into” an Allegory is, in this case, like falling in love or falling into a revery, to be compelled in the Work by a creative force—“in Eternity,” Blake said that force was. Where what the imagination sees is acknowledged to be, not an unreal thing, nor an invention of the poet, but a higher reality revealed. The book itself becomes the Way. The journal, the daily return to the imagination of the book, becomes the journey.

•

“
In the similitude of a
dream
,
” Bunyan subtitles the Progress.

•

Then there is, as in a fairy tale, the primary condition that the soul has lost the straight way and finds itself bewildered, having no way out except its angel or daimon direct. “Through the wilderness of this world,” Bunyan has it. “So,” H.D. tells us, “through our desolation / thoughts stir
.
” “And they again began to multiply,” Bunyan testifies, “Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly
.
”

•

It is like a dream but not a dream, this going out into the world of the poem, inspired by the directions of an other self. It has a kinship too with the séance of the shaman, and in this light we recognize the country of the poem as being like the shaman’s land of the dead or the theosophical medium’s astral plane. In the story of Orpheus there is a hint of how close the shaman and the poet may be, the singer and the seer.

•

Hermes in the old lore guides the poet in the underworld, as Virgil guides Dante in the Inferno. Briefly, in
The Cantos,
Plotinus appears to rescue Pound from the hell-mire of politicians and dead issues, but Pound is eager to interrupt the inspiration of his poem and to direct its course.

It is the originality of Pound that mars his intelligence. The goods of the intellect are communal; there is a
virtu
or power that flows from the language itself, a fountain of man’s meanings, and the poet seeking the help of this source awakens first to the guidance of those who have gone before in the art, then the guidance of the meanings and dreams that all who have ever stored the honey of the invisible in the hive have prepared.

IV
.

March 29, 1961. Wednesday.

From Bunyan’s
Apology to Pilgrim’s Progress:

Would’st read thy self, and read thou know’st not what
And yet know whether thou art blest or not
By reading the same lines? O then come hither,
And lay my Book, thy Head, and Heart together.

—from this verse of Bunyan’s we may go on to the close of H.D.’s poem “Good Frend,” where H.D. calls upon Shakespeare as her author, with “Avon’s Trinity”:

When one is Three and Three are One,
The Dream, the Dreamer and the Song.

MAY
25, 1961. Thursday.

Glimpses of the Last Day:
In the West some intense fire burned, red in the evening. Fires were scattered over the landscape, descending suddenly as if cages or caps of flames had been clamped down from another realm above over men where they were, working in the fields or on their way home, or as if footsteps of angelic orders, fateful and yet oblivious of the individual, had burst into flame. At random the incendiary blows fell and yet with a purpose everywhere to charge the world with the realization of its last day. Just here, and then just here, blows shook the earth, fires broke out, and men swarmed to recover the ground.

The landscape was out of Bosch’s
Temptation of Saint Anthony
or Brueghel’s
Dulle Griet,
a countryside with fields and hamlets laid waste by war or by industry and mining. For I have never seen a city under fire, but hitch-hiking thru West Virginia and Pennsylvania, I have seen such desolate and wrathful landscapes at night where man’s devastating work has raised great mountains of slag and left great pits in the earth, burning wastes and befouled rivers that appear an earthly Hell. In the dream, the visitation is, like these actual landscapes, a just rendering of some desire of man’s fulfilled. One of the afterthoughts of the dream was that this Last Day had to do with all men coming into one reality out of the—
unreal,
I called it in the dream, when I was conferring with
the Doctor at the spring. It would be many things for many men but for all at last, not just for men in Europe and Asia but for America too, there would be the fires, the laying waste. It was “the lightning shattered earth and splintered sky” of the poem I have kept as my text, the “zrr-hiss” of
Tribute to the Angels.

•

The scene of the Flemish apocalyptic paintings was a pervasive reference. It had transformed or taken over the locus of San Francisco where the Flemish valley lay between Twin Peaks and the Bay, and the far-away incandescence glared out of the darkness of Playland-at-the-Beach, where the Pacific now meant the Abyss itself. The distant circle of burnings was the horizon. The spring, where the Doctor (Charles Olson) and I met to work the drawing of the waters in the primal direction, was in the East—it would have been the Berkeley hills. But here, the reference to my own city was gone (as too, there was no likeness to Olson’s Gloucester). The Place of the Spring was in the high mountains. Yet even as I write this the sense of high mountains seems wrong. I saw the mist-cloud realm of Ibsen’s Professor Rubek and Irene in
When We Dead Awaken,
as I saw those heights long ago reading the play, and then another high place from Ibsen’s
Little Eyolf
—for a second, Allmer’s “Upwards—towards the peaks. Towards the stars. And towards the great silence.” Then, replacing the idea of high mountains, I see as I write that the Place of the Spring was a cleft of the Mother Earth between low-lying hills.

The Doctor was certainly Olson, but that certainty did not belong to my first recognition in the dream. The important thing at first was that he was Jewish, not the Messiah, but that other beneficent power, the hidden rabbi, the Zaddik. So I told myself in the dream he is Einstein, he knows the numbers of the cosmos. He may have been Freud—Freud, the new Master over Love in H.D.’s life, but also Freud the Master of dreams. But Freud did not occur to me in the dream itself. No, I thought, it is not Einstein, it’s Charles. As I saw it was Charles, it was in his glance, how those familiar eyes beamed with the thought of our task together at the spring.

As, early in the dream, there had been another poet I knew. The youthful master of the incandescence was Robin Blaser. He existed on two levels or in two orders. In one, as a fellow in that earlier stage where all of us men sometimes courageously battled the fires that sprang up, sometimes cowered in panic, he told me of his dream concerning that incandescence. It was as he told me of it that I first saw that disk of fire. And then, thru his telling, thru his dream within my dream, I saw another Robin—Redbreast, I thought when I woke from the dream, and tried to figure:
Who killed Cock Robin?
Suggestions of an old rite seemed hidden in the dream figures. Along this line of half-waking digression I was led by that other haunting nursery rime,
The Hunting of the Wren.
“We will go to the wood, says Robin to Bobbin.” There may have been some distant periphery where the Wren Boys made their rounds. The Robin of the dream may have been Robin Hood, a person of the life drama, like the Child in childhood or the Man in manhood. There was too, ever ready in my post-Freudian associations, “red Breast” and “cock robbing.” But the fact of the dream or vision remains: for the disk was not of fire or flame or destruction but was a pool of heat and light that drew all of us men out of our selves into its incandescence. The Robin of my dream was the fire man I saw long ago in the séance at Woodstock before the War.

So there was the other pun: Blazer. The white that was also red-hot, that burned, that was-to-burn something of me into a black charcoal, and to fire something of me into a radiance, was a blaze, a blazon or sign or seal of God as a pure intensity. Robin Blaser was a shepherd of this place of seal. The incandescence may have been the Fleece then. He was the tender. Now it comes to me that within this radius, this blazon was the spot that flares up, the tender spot as well as the threatening spot.

I was afraid, I told him. As if there were some great pain or agony in the blaze, and yet knowing there was no pain, no agony—only radiance. Robin’s dream made a bridge between the Last Day (my dream time) and the Blazon (his dream place) where it seemed I went to try the fear I had, for I did in the dream anticipate my burning up in the heat to a black clinker, my entering the light.

Yet, with this vision of what was at last, of lasting things, there remained the works of the last days. As Robin tended the region of the incandescence, but also related his dreaming of that place, so I had my work to do. I was among men fighting the fires that sprang up bewilderingly where the steps fell. I was terrified as they were, cowering and praying in the dream that these strokes pass over my head.

Then came the break-thru of astral forms, a streaming down into this landscape, where Bosch’s vision and my own San Francisco were already mingled, of another world, a coming together of universes. Giants and monsters, phantasms of Norse and Greek gods from story-books of childhood, images of past eras, Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, fell as if poured out of their imaginary being into this one time and one world. It was the sign in the dream whereby I knew what must be done. I had known from the beginning and told those about me that we were in the Last Days, in the Glory then. Now the change came.

“The astral worlds have fallen down,” I told those about me. “We must redirect the spring” or “we must
draw
the springs in the first direction” or “the right direction.”

The Doctor came into the picture then. We went together or we met at the spring to draw forth the waters once more. I told him about the fall of the giant orders into the world. “How can the unreal have as much effect as the real?” I asked.

He was Einstein, Doctor of the Cosmos, and then Olson. Where I see now the cover of Olson’s
O’Ryan
with the giant Orion drawn in his stars by Jess. The falling of the astral worlds may be, then, the falling of the sky, where giant stars and dwarves, monstrous constellations and regents of the planets stream down in the collapse of time. Here, the Doctor and I must restore the Milky Way, the spring of stars that is our universe.

The Doctor had a key to the old science of the spring. I had to find the lock, but now it seems that I draw the waters forth by the physical magnetism of a shaman, witching, pulling invisible reins of the stream with my hands.

“You who are nearest to me,” I said to the Doctor, “are unreal.” I could see thru his form, yet just then he seemed most dear. A sentence of Heraklitus comes to mind now which had been a theme in Olson’s
San Francisco evenings in 1957: “Man is most estranged from that which is most familiar
.
”

The Doctor belonged to a supernatural order. At this moment of estrangement, there was a more powerful return. It was here that his eyes, most Charles’s, beamed upon me, that I saw Charles in the Doctor or thru the Doctor, at once my superior and my companion in the work at the springs.

I
.

To have a companion is a happiness. But these were not the springs of happiness but of meaning.

•

“The pursuit of happiness,” of good fortune then, of
la bonne heure,
good time, that inalienable right that those merchants, bankers and farmers set high who made their Declaration of Independence for these United States, is a vanity, even a vice, when it blinds men to life as a work.
Le bonheur
comes as a gift. It is easy to think of good times as a gift, but bad times too are a gift. It is the hour itself that comes as a gift, the time of the Work; and the artist learns early that it is not happiness, but what is meaningful, an appointment, what verges upon the mystery of his being, that may be hard to bear, that opens once more, more than happiness or unhappiness, the joy or flower of life. It is not a chance on the wheel of fortune but a chance to work he must seek, where from the many roots of what he is and of what he has known streams of humanity, of animal life, of divine wish, flow towards the beauty that can be terrible, the flower, that precedes the good fruit.