The H.D. Book (86 page)

the sea, the shore, the night
as we walk, heel and sole
leave our sandal-prints in the sand,

though the wounded heel treads lightly
and more lightly follow,
the purple sandals

his limp then; the brushwood fagots, the flint, the fire, the blackened sticks then and the ember, the night-bird, her purple sandals (“I am a woman of pleasure,” she could suggest), her scarf or veil, his “shield, helmet, greaves.”

•

How to the carrion-bird vulture, Isis; hawk, Horus; and swan, Zeus come! Mother, son, and Father gathering in along one line of association. And in those wings of the night-bird greater wings of the war itself, feathered with all of the dead, a thousand arrows and one—the arrow in war that mortally wounded immortal Achilles. Thetis was to blame for that, for the fatal vulnerable spot, the thousand ships. “This is the spread of wings.”

•

In the poem to these actual things, where the man and the woman huddle over a fire in the night on the beach, a gathering begins. This is not the magic of symbols, but the magic that goes on in the practices
of psychoanalysis—the magic of associations until a host of incidents, impersonations, tendencies precipitate what is called “the content” and in the precipitation the crisis. Not those streams of consciousness that in Proust’s magic opened out from one impression vistas of the past recaptured; but as if this magic were reversed and all the glowing and modulated fabric were to be called in from its dispersion to increase the pressures of a single moment.

•

They seek to draw themselves out of the fire—ash and ember; to look from the blackened mask, to flame forth anew out of the things at hand. They seek too to resurrect their old selves, to bring forth just what was intolerable—the spread of wings, the fascination of the veil. The spark must be the spark of war and love, Eros and Eris is one. The holocaust itself, the burnt offering of Iphigenia and the wholesale burning of the war-dead is needed for Achilles to be this Achilles, Helen to be this Helen.

•

“Never, never do I forget the host,” Helen says:

the chosen, the flower

of all-time, of all-history;
it was they who struck,
as the flint, the spark

of his anger,

•

The host, the all, struck the spark; but the thousand-and-one darts were “a host, a cloud or a veil” we learn from Helen. It may be that the thousand-and-one associations—their lives—they had called up “encircled”, “sheltered”. “
Helena, which was the dream?
” Achilles asks her:

the rasp of a severed wheel,
the fury of steel upon steel,
the spark from a sword on a shield?

or the deathless spark
of Helena’s wakening . . .
a touch in the dark?

•

There is the magic of the sword, the magic of everyday distraction, even to be beside oneself with grief. The attention is disarrayed and the attention returning is caught by the glance of an eye or the touch of a hand; for a moment we do not know where we are; we ourselves have lost track of ourselves—and we fish for clues. Along the lines of
what does it mean?
we may do and undo veils of the meaningful in which we mean to catch ourselves, that elude us and lure us on.
What will it mean to me?
reaches out toward new fate.
What would it have meant to me?
may be more really present in what we are than what happened.

But there come other moments, when we must ask Who are you? Where am I at last?

•

Describing Frederick Myers’s work in an address for a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research in 1901, William James tells us: “he took a lot of scattered phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others outlawed from science, or treated as isolated curiosities; he made series of them, filled in the transitions by delicate hypotheses or analogies; and bound them together in a system by his bold inclusive conception of the subliminal self, so that no one can now touch one part of the fabric without finding the rest entangled with it. Such vague terms of apperception as psychologists have hitherto been satisfied with using for most of these phenomena, as ‘fraud,’ ‘rot,’ ‘rubbish,’ will no more be possible hereafter than ‘dirt’ is possible as a head of classification in chemistry or ‘vermin’ in zoology.”

•

What James calls “the classic romantic” type of imagination had “a fondness for clean pure lines and noble simplicity in its constructions”—the proper realm of mentality, man’s “normal” state was abstracted—“a sort of sunlit terrace was exhibited on which it took its exercise. But where that terrace stopped, the mind stopped; and there was nothing
left to tell of in this kind of philosophy but the brain and the other physical facts of nature on the one hand, and the absolute metaphysical ground of the universe on the other.”

“But of late years,” James continues, “the terrace has been overrun by romantic improvers, and to pass to their work is like going from classic to Gothic architecture, where few outlines are pure and where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows.” As in H.D.s “Palinode”

we huddled over the fire,
was there ever such a brazier?
a night-bird hooted past,

he sparked, “a curious flight,
a carrion creature—what—”

•

We have seen already the role these questions—the why? the who? the what goes there? the what does it mean?—play in the psychoanalytic séance that had its beginnings in the same era of or context of hypnotism, suggestion, and association that furnished the ground for the Society of Psychical Research and for James’s own Pluralistic philosophy, for Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy and Frazer’s bringing together of scattered phenomena in
The Golden Bough.

“A mass of mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some of these new candidates for psychological description. The menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material. The world of mind is shown as something infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may still possess it has lost at any rate the beauty of academic neatness.”

•

Seen in light of the classic-academic, the conservative-institutional new, hysteria is a disease, a disturbance of mind—but mind here is the public peace. Hysteria is ominous with riot.

But hysteria is the very prophetic voice of Cassandra; cries woe and
[illegible] of cities, and ravens for what it most fears. War-hysteria, love-hysteria.

ringed and rayed with the word “beautiful”;

•

In areas of science that most avoided such thought, even the psychoanalytic subconscious of Freud much less the subliminal self of Myers—men, as if they did not know what they were doing, insured the great hysterical possibility of our time—the increase of pressures and explosion in the atom bomb, the radioactive aftermath that would riot in the chromosomic structure of man, that most would increase to a new power the meaning of the hysteric thing, this suffering in the womb.

Oppenheimer and Fermi, Teller and Vannevar Bush enact two stages of one operation: in the first the hysteric cannot see the consequences to which he contributes—he knows not what he does. In the second, the hysteric is possessed by the sight of what he does, he knows what he does but his judgment of the consequences is perverted and his greatest enemy is the judgment at all of the consequences to which he contributes. Or they take on the lure of fate, and all that leads away from those consequences appears malicious and hysterical.

•

Wherever an “enemy appears” as now in the United States an enemy has appeared in Russia and even in the Castro regime in Cuba; or as in Russia an enemy has appeared in the United States, an hysterical crisis impends. All things about us become organized and useful to our hidden “mate” or “enemy” or “holocaust”; life takes on tendency.

•

“lust—enough—” Achilles says.
“I was afraid of evil,
in an evil place.”

•

Had there never been the War, had Achilles never stooped to fasten a broken strap of his sandal and lost all, had so many not died and the
walls of Troy fallen, had Helen not been so deeply hated—there had not been the spark. There may then have been all the incidents of the war preceding to give death this one possibility.

Every identity these two have is in the War. The wings of her father Zeus are feathered with its arms and dead hosts and the sails of its ships; the sea-enchantment of his mother is the cheat of its cause, dream of the phantom Helen.

•

As if only at last in the ruins and burning waste of the world we know could our desire be realized; so that there is an overwhelming threat and fear of those ruins and that holocaust.

but without the Galaxy,
the sails of the thousand ships,
the Glory that encompassed me

when I face his anger,
we would have burnt out in a flash.

•

In
Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher
(1909), William James notes in the medium “an odd
tendency to personate,
found in her dream life as it expresses itself in trance.” “Most of us reveal such a tendency,” he adds, “whenever we handle a ‘ouija-board’ or a ‘planchet,’ or let ourselves write automatically with a pencil. The result is a ‘control,’ who purports to be speaking.” “ . . . On such a view,” he continues, “the medium’s
will to personate
runs the whole show; and if spirits be involved in it at all, they are passive beings, stray bits of whose memory she is able to seize and use for her purposes, without the spirit being any more aware of it than the saltor is aware of it when his own mind is similarly tapped.”

•

Sept. 2 / 61

In the primary magic of every day life we personate our selves, setting things into motion or emotion about us, telling them what they are.
Free association, it was once called; but Freudian analyses have shown that associations are not free but binding. In the process of personation the events about us are transformed into knots, possibility is tied to possibility until a net is woven writhing with the psychic energies that before had been oceanic.

•

Achilles and Helen seem in the opening scene on the Egyptian beach to be playing with fire, magic against magic. Later, we begin to see that there was a Command or commands; and as the great presences of Thetis and Zeus, sea-veil of Cytheraea and wing of eagle or swan, tend to form along the lines of the play, we feel Achilles and Helen are being moved, not moving.

•

“We are thrown, for our conclusions, upon our instructive sense of the dramatic probabilities of nature,” James writes in
Psychical Researcher:
“My own dramatic sense tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist’s mind and a cosmic environment of
other consciousness
of some sort which is able to work upon them. If there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable of itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent possession of an organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get its head into the air, parasitically, so to speak, by peopling weak spots in the armor of human minds, and slipping in and stirring up there the sleeping tendency to personate.”

IV

In the third part of
Helen,
the “Eidolon
,
” we learn that Egypt may have been dream, delirium, as Leuké,
l’isle Blanche
had been trance, ecstasy, and “Eidolon” the waking-dream or day-dream. Egypt—Leuké—Hades then is dreamland and the question that comes again and again:
which is the dream? which is the veil?
is the trick or key of what is happening. Helen and Achilles are fairies, figures of fairyland or the veil itself. The White Isle of Thetis is the white egg of Leda we learn, but it is the moon too.

•

Where Thetis, the sea-goddess, and Proteus, the sea-god who presents himself as King of Egypt, are, we recall, as we are ourselves in dreams shape-shifters. In our dreams, we are always being dreamt, as Alice learns in that first of all dream books.

•

“Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.

“Isn’t he a
lovely
sight?” said Tweedledum.

. . . “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”

Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”

“Why, about
you
!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream.”

•

“Now, Kitty,” Alice says at the end, having wakened, yes; but she is still in the telling of the story: “Let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should
not
go on licking your paw like that—” [“The first automatic writing I ever saw was forty years ago,” James writes: “I unhesitatingly thought of it as deceit, although it contained vague elements of supernormal knowledge. Since then I have come to see in automatic writing one example of a department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic.”] “as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it
must
have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!
Was
it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—” [“Every sort of person is liable to it, or to something equivalent to it; and whoever encourages it in himself finds himself personating someone else, either signing what he writes by a fictitious name, or spelling out, by ouija board or table-tips, messages from the departed.”]

still she haunts me, phantomwise,

So Carroll tells us in his envoi to
Through The Looking Glass
: