The H.D. Book (89 page)

This is Formalhaut’s temple,
not far from Athens,
not far from Eleusis,

yet Egypt; not far
from Theseus, your god-father,
not far from Amen, your father

but dedicated to Isis,
or if you will, Thetis;
not far from the blessèd isles,

the Hesperides, or from Amenti;
not far from life-in-death,
another portal, another symbol.

•

From the second century we hear news of another Helen. One Simon, who claimed to be an incarnation of “the Great Power,” according to our legend, had learned a magic in Egypt and had found in that magic a Helen or
the
Helen. The Church Fathers said that Simon’s Helen was a prostitute he had picked up at Tyre. But in the Gnostic circles, where thought moved not towards orthodoxy and dogma but towards a multiplicity of meanings and imagination, this Helen was not only a prostitute, she was the Moon, not only the Moon but also the World-soul; A. E. Waite in his edition of Lévi’s
History of Magic
tells us that “it is said otherwise that she was Helen of Troy in a previous incarnation.” This Sun-Logos-Simon and this Selene-Anima-Mundi-Helen were persons in magic of a charlatan and a prostitute. This magic, so the rumor went, was practiced in sexual intercourse, was something “known” in each other.

•

G. R. S. Mead in his discussion of Simon Magus tells us further there was something about a Fire and a Concealment; the spark and the veil of H.D.’s poem may have their origin in the Graeco-Egyptian Hellenistic world where after the conquests of Alexander a border upon India had been opened. It is the expansion of empire beyond the confines of “western” civilization—in the time of Alexander when the Greek world was exposed to the Indian world and in the time of Victoria, again, when the English world was exposed to the Indian world—that borderlines, not only of race and national character mix, but religions too, wherever thought is not rigidly defensive, fuse. The Alexandrian Helen of Tyre and the Helen of our text come to life and multiplicity of being not only out of the Egg of Leda but also from the sphere of Kama.

•

[from Eliade,
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom:
“And in a magical papyrus of the second century we find certain Hindu beliefs mentioned; Isis is compared to M
y
, name and personification of the Buddha’s mother and also of the Great Illusion.”]

•

The Simon Magus of Hellenistic Gnostic legend may have known something of the Kama-Loca and sought along the lines of an erotic magic in a proto-Kamasutra to find his apotheosis, his ascension, to become a star. In the
Acts of Peter
Simon gets high, or flies higher than the Saint.

•

And is brought down, deflated in Christian legend, to Hell, to be Simon the Magician. Where Helen is finally only a shadow. For in the rule of orthodoxy, the restrictions of truth between the fourth century and the breaking up of the Holy Roman Empire, all other thought and feeling existed in the extensions of falsehood. Gods became daemons, heroes became ghosts, priestesses became witches, magi became magicians. False faces and false names appear everywhere. If the magic is white you look into a crystal; if the magic is black you look into a mirror. We think of them now as doors to the future, “fortune telling,”
we call it. But the mirror-world is the world of
Through the Looking Glass
and of MacDonald’s
Lilith.
What we see there is an illumination of things. “Of a familiar type,” Edith Butler notes in
Ritual Magic,
“is the one in which a pure lad of about ten who has been born in wedlock looks into the stone whilst the Cabalist prays to St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, who was said to have rediscovered the cross of Christ.”

•

For in the mirror one might have seen, not St. Helena, but Helena of Troy.

The Faust, we know, called up a wraith of Helen, “Spirits in the shape of Alexander the Great, of his paramour, and of Helen of Troy,” the dramatis personae reads in Marlowe’s play. “Be silent, then,” Faustus says: “for danger is in words.”

“[Music sounds, and Helen passeth over the stage]”

•

Is there some hint of the Helen of the shadows, the familiar of the Kama-Loka, in Marlowe’s phantom? “To glut the longing of my heart’s desire—” Faustus says he would have Helen for his paramour.

•

It is from this first Helen of our English tradition that H.D. draws certain themes. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships” is immortal as “And burnt the topless towers of Ilium” somehow is not. And later in the same speech Faustus-Simon cries:

“Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars”

•

So “the legions lost” in H.D.’s
Helen in Egypt,
“the host,” “the holocaust,” are numbered. In “Palinode” II.2 “the thousand-petalled lily; / they are not many, but one;” in “Palinode” II.4 “all the thousand petals of the rose,” but “the thousand sails,” “the thousand feathered darts / that sped them home.” In “Palinode” III.2: “can one weigh the thousand ships /
against one kiss in the night?” We recognize in passing the Thousand and One Nights of Shahárazád, “City-freer” Burton notes, told to rescue her sister Dunyázád, “World-freer” or Dinázád “Religion-freer.”

•

“Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,” Faustus demands or requests. [
Kisses her.
]

Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!—
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips.

•

This kiss, and the dwelling in a kiss, is a wisdom of the Kamasutra. Or the eroticists or “kamatists” were wise to it. The tongue searches in all adult kisses for an electricity that a child’s kiss has, or “thrill” that floods the body. Sexuality may feed upon this thrill, but—this is our concern here—Heaven feeds there too. We remember the passage in H.D.’s romance
Bid Me to Live
where the Hesperides, the
paradiso
is the locus or the presence of the husband where: “she faced the author of this her momentary psychic being, her lover, her husband. It was like that, in these moments. She touched paradise. He too. But he did not think of that.” Had he thought of it, paradise would have touched her. The kiss, the touch, the coming together sought some ultimate exchange or reciprocity.

•

“He’s looking for another book—the
Hesperides?
he’s wandering. He’s not here. No, he wasn’t there. It was almost better when she was alone.

“All of the
Hesperides
was there, nearer than the table, than the mantel piece . . . ”

•

“This star in the night” Helen calls it. Achilles springing forward in the spark of his anger, or is it pain of death?

mine, the one dart in the Achilles-heel,
the thousand-and-one, mine.

Is there some rumor that in a thousand spermatozoa one may be magic, or as we call it, fecundating, one may be hers? He “covers her” we say of birds; Achilles was no longer Achilles but from the realm of fathers, the
pitaloka
the Hindus called it, the Father. Zeus then. “This is the spread of wings,” and the eternal angry or blood-reddened Fatherhead giving up into the mothering womb its semen.

I read the writing when he seized my throat,

this was his anger,
they were mine, not his,
the unnumbered host;

mine, all the ships,
mine, all the thousand . . . .

That one strike, that one come home to Leuké, the white island, the egg-sphere or prayer, the quickened circuits of the child.

•

It is the burning ember
that I remember
heart of the fire,

Helen tells us.

•

Is the “hieroglyph, repeated endlessly,” that Helen tries to read the code-script of the chromosomes?
My legions lost,
the father cries;

“the flower of all-time,
of all-history,
my children, my legions”;

•

The “arrows” of Eris and then of Eros, the thousand, and the one that strikes home, brought me back then to Kama-Loca of the theosophists, to the Kama-Loka of the Hindus, as Zimmer in
Philosophies of India
told of him, Puspa-b
na “whose arrows are flowers,” lord of the flower-shafts.

•

In “Palinode” III.4—the thousand is “a cloud in the night,”

must I tell him again their name,
the one name for the thousand lost,
Eros, the Hawk Horus?

We begin to realize that the veil is the thousand and the spark that strikes is the one. “A touch in the dark,” it is called in “Palinode” III.5. The veil, itself, may here be what we call “coming” in crude vulgar speech, more true to poetry than the scientific “orgasm” or “ejaculation.” But “orgasm” had something to do with our spark of anger, and ejaculation with our throwing of the thousand and one arrows.

•

In VII of “Palinode” the Image of Eidolon of Thetis [“It is Thetis,” H.D. tells us “(Isis Aphrodite)”] says:

A woman’s wiles are a net;
they would take the stars
or a grasshopper in its mesh;

The stars, the Galaxy, we learned earlier, are the thousand. And, like an echo here or a resonance from an untouched octave, we realize there was one star too.

what unexpected treasure,
what talisman or magic ring
may the net find?

fishing for a clue or a child or particular star. Proteus reveals to Helen, the shape-shifter to the immortal face:

when they reach a certain degree

they are one, alike utterly,
though Achilles woke from the dark
and her Lord was cast

into the lowest depth

•

Is Achilles, the mate, Simon the Magus, Faustus the Magician?

“Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,” Marlowe’s Faustus asks, and then for the thousand-and-one: “and—at last—be saved!”

•

yet even Cimmerian embers,

H.D.’s Helen seems to reply

burnt out, extinguished and lost,
will flame anew if God
wills to re-kindle the spark;

•

God may be the Thousand-and-one. In “Palinode” VII.6:

I have talked with Proteus—or—

another (whoever he be,
he manifests variously);
Nameless-of-many-Names he decrees

that
Helena
shall remain
one name . . . .

•

H.D. was familiar with all this; as an initiate of Freud’s in psyche-analysis, she knew that the “lover” could be read everywhere in the “higher.” There was an encoding in the dreamscript that revealed something going on in a realm of sexual phantasy.

•

The old teaching was that “as above so below” might mean also the orders of the stars could be read in the spermatozoa, the anima mundi might be a common whore in the port-town of Tyre, the logos could be found in any word anywhere. Christ was not selective when he said the Kingdom is within you, or that we were gods. “Ye are gods,” He said to the crowd. Now we begin to see galaxy upon galaxy, there may be as many suns as there ever have been men.

•

(Paris said,
why must you recall
the white fire of unnumbered stars,
rather than that single taper