The H.D. Book (24 page)

The dissolving of boundaries of time, as in H.D.’s
Palimpsest,
so that Egyptian or Hellenistic ways invade the contemporary scene—the reorganization of identity to extend the burden of consciousness—this change of mind has been at work in many fields. The thought of primitives, dreamers, children, or the mad—once excluded by the provincial claims of common sense from the domain of the meaningful or significant—has been reclaimed by the comparative and universalizing psychologies of William James, Freud, Levy-Bruhl, Piaget, or by the comparative linguistics of Sapir and Whorf, brought into the community of a new epistemology.

“Past the danger point, past the point of any logic and of any meaning, and everything has meaning,” H.D. writes in
Bid Me to Live:
“Start superimposing, you get odd composites, nation on nation.” Malraux in his
Psychology of Art
hears “a furtive colloquy in progress between the statuary of the Royal Portals of Chartres and the great fetishes” beginning in museums of the mind where all the arts of man have been brought into the complex of a new idea of Art and Man in their assemblage. “Our art world is one in which a Romanesque crucifix and an Egyptian statue of a dead man can both be living presences,” he writes in
The Metamorphosis of the Gods:
“In our imaginary museum the great art of Europe is but one great art among others, just as the history of Europe has come to mean one history among others.”

“Each civilization had its ‘high places’,” he concludes in the introduction to
The Metamorphosis of the Gods:

All mankind is now discovering its own. And these are not (as the nineteenth century took for granted) regarded as successive landmarks of art’s long pilgrimage through time. Just as Cézanne did not see Poussin as Tintoretto’s
successor,
Chartres does not mark an ‘advance’ on Angkor, or Borobudur, or the Aztec temples, any more than its
KINGS
are an ‘advance’ on the
KWANNON
at Nara, on the
PLUMED? SERPENTS
, or on Pheidias’
HORSEMEN
.

If, as Pound began to see in
The Spirit of Romance,
“all ages are contemporaneous,”
our
time has always been, and the statement that the great drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate is the statement of a crisis we may see as ever-present in Man wherever and
whenever a man has awakened to the desire for wholeness in being. “The continuous present,” Gertrude Stein called this sense of time and history, and she saw the great drama as man’s engagement in a composition of the contemporary. Man is always in the process of this composition. “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing,” she writes in “Composition as Explanation”:

. . . they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing.

“Nothing changes from generation to generation,” she writes later in her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” “except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear . . . Once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence
.
. . Each civilization insisted in its own way before it went away.” To enter into “our time,” she saw as “a thing that is very troublesome,” for life itself was a disturbance of all composition—“a fear a doubt and a judgment and a conviction,” troubling the waters toward some needed “quality of distribution and equilibration.”

The first person plural—the “we,” “our,” “us”—is a communal consciousness in which the “I” has entered into the company of imagined like minds, a dramatic voice in which the readers and the man writing are gathered into one composition, in which we may find kindred thought and feeling, an insistence, in Plutarch or Dante, Plato or D. H. Lawrence, closer to our inner insistence than the thought and feeling of parents or neighbors. The discovery of self, time, and world, is an entering into or tuning to possibilities of self, time, and world, that are given.

“The single experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable,” Sapir writes in
Language:

To be communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly accepted by the community as an identity. Thus, the single impression which I have of a particular house must be identified with all my other impressions of it. Further, my generalized memory or my ‘notion’ of this
house must be merged with the notions that all other individuals who have seen the house have formed of it. The particular experience that we started with has now been widened so as to embrace all possible impressions or images that sentient beings have formed or may form of the house in question. In other words, the speech element ‘house’ is the symbol, first and foremost, not of a single perception, nor even of the notion of a particular object but of a ‘concept’, in other words, of a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distant experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more. If the single significant elements of speech are the symbols of concepts, the actual flow of speech may be interpreted as a record of the setting of these concepts into mutual relations.

There is no isolate experience of anything then, for to come into “house” or “dog,” “bread” or “wine,” is to come into a company. Eros and Logos are inextricably mixed, daemons of an initiation in each of our lives into a new being. Every baby is surrounded by elders of a mystery. The first words, the “da-da” and “ma-ma,” are keys given in a repeated ritual by parental priest and priestess to a locus for the child in his chaotic babbling, whereby from the oceanic and elemental psychic medium—warmth and cold, calm and storm, the moodiness previous to being—persons, Daddy and Mama, appear. But these very persons are not individual personalities but communal fictions of the family cultus, vicars of Father and Mother, as the Pope is a vicar of Christ. The Child, in the word
child,
is himself such a persona, inaccessible to the personality of the individual, as the language of adult personal affairs is inaccessible to the child. To have a child is always a threat to the would-be autonomous personality, for the parent must take leave of himself in order to enter an other impersonation, evoking the powers of Fatherhood or Motherhood, so that the infant may be brought up from the dark of his individuality into a new light, into his Childhood. For the transition to be made at all, to come into the life of the spirit, in which this Kindergarten is a recreated stage set of the mythic Garden, means a poetry then, the making up of an imaginary realm in which the individual parents and infant participate in a community that exists in a time larger than any individual lifetime, in a language. For “Father,” “Mother,” “Child,” are living words, deriving their meaning
from thousands of distinct experiences, and the actual flow of family life, like the actual flow of speech, “may be interpreted as the setting of these concepts into mutual relations.” The toys of the nursery are not trivia but first given instruments of an extension in consciousness, our creative life. There is a travesty made of sacred objects when the building blocks that are also alphabet blocks, the animal and human dolls, the picture books, are rendered cute or babyish.

“The maturity of man
—
” Nietzsche writes in
Beyond Good and Evil:
“that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.”

In
The Zohar
of Moses of Leon, God Himself appears as Child-Creator-of-the-World:

When the Holy One, blessed be He, was about to make the world, all the letters of the Alphabet were still embryonic, and for two thousand years the Holy One blessed be He, had contemplated them and toyed with them. When He came to create the world, all the letters presented themselves before Him in, reversed order. The letter
Tau
advanced in front and pleaded: May it please Thee, O Lord of the world, to place me first in the creation of the world, seeing that I am the concluding letter of
EMeTh
(Truth) which is engraved upon Thy seal.

One by one the letters present themselves. At the last,

. . . the Beth then entered and said: O Lord of the world, may it please Thee to put me first in the creation of the world, since I represent the benedictions (
Berakhoth
) offered to Thee on high and below. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to her: Assuredly, with thee I will create the world, and thou shalt form the beginning in the creation of the world. The letter
Aleph
remained in her place without presenting herself. Said the Holy one, blessed be His name:
Aleph, Aleph,
wherefore comest thou not before Me like the rest of the letters? She answered: Because I saw all the other letters leaving Thy presence without any success. What, then, could I achieve there? And further, since Thou hast already bestowed on the letter
Beth
this great gift, it is not meet for the Supreme King to take away the gift which He has made to His servant and give it to another. The Lord said to her:
Aleph, Aleph,
although I will begin the creation of the world with the
beth,
thou wilt remain the first of letters. My unity
shall not be expressed except through thee, on thee shall be based all calculations and operations of the world, and unity shall not be expressed save by the letter
Aleph.
Then the Holy One, blessed be His name, made higher-world letters of a large pattern and lower-world letters of a small pattern. It is therefore that we have here two words beginning with
beth
(
Bereshith bara
) ‘
in-the-beginning He-created
’ and then two words beginning with
aleph
(
Elohim eth
) ‘
God the
’.”

In this primal scene, before the beginning of the world that is also here before the beginning of a writing, the Self contemplates and toys in a rite of play until the letters present themselves and speak; as in another primal scene, in a drama or play of the family, the child contemplates and plays with the sounds of a language in order to enter a world in which Father and Mother present themselves and speak. So too in the fullness of the imagination, blocks and even made-up playmates present themselves. The teddy bear was once in the shaman world of the great northern forests Grandfather or Folk-Father. The figures we play with, the members of our play world, given as they are, like the Katchina dolls of the Zuni child, are spirit figures. “My unity shall not be expressed except through thee,” the Child-Creator promises. It is the first promise of love, “on thee shall be based all calculations and operations of the world.”

These powers, the ambience in which all things of our world speak to us and in which we in turn answer, the secret allegiances of the world of play, the psychic depth of time transformed into eternity in which the conceptual persons of Father and Mother, Child and Play Thing, exist—these are pre-rational. Brother and Sister have such an existence in the unreal that, where actual brother and sister do not exist or are unwilling to play the part, imaginary brother and sister may appear.

For men who declare themselves partisans of the rational mind at war with all other possibilities of being, the prerational or the irrational appears as an enemy within. It was not only the Poet, but Mother and Father also, that Plato would exclude from his Republic. In the extreme of the rationalist presumption, the nursery is not the nursery of an eternal child but of a grownup, a rational man. Common sense and good sense exist in an armed citadel surrounded by the threatening
countryside of phantasy, childishness, madness, irrationality, irresponsibility—an exile and despised humanity. In that city where Reason has preserved itself by retreating from the totality of the self, infants must play not with the things of the imagination nor entertain the lies of the poets but play house, government, business, philosophy, or war. Before the guardians of this state the voices and persons of the Child-Creator stand condemned as auditory and visual hallucinations a dangerous non-sense.

In the world of
The Zohar,
dolls were not permitted. The Child plays with the letters of an alphabet and Logos is the creator of the world. Man is to take his reality from, to express his unity in, the letter. But this letter is, like the doll, alive to the mind.
Tau
presents herself and speaks, just as the bear in our nursery does. To the extent that once for us too alphabet blocks were animate, all future architectures and worlds are populated, and we are prepared to understand the world-experience of the Kabbalist.

In this world-experience, rationality does not exist apart from the whole, but the understanding searches ever to picture the self in the ununderstandable. The human spirit draws its life from a tree larger and more various than knowing, and reason stands in need of a gift, “the gift of the queen to them that wander with her in exile.”

There is a return in the imagination to the real, an ascent of the soul to its “root,” that Hayyim Vital describes in his life work,
The Tree of Life:

The imaginative faculty will turn a man’s thoughts to imagine, and picture
as if
it ascended in the higher worlds up to the roots of his soul . . . until the imagined image reaches its highest source and there the images of the supernal lights are imprinted on his mind
as if
he imagined and saw them in the same way in which his imaginative faculty normally pictures in his mind mental contents deriving from the world.

We seem to be in the description of the process of a poem, for here too the mind imagines, but then enters a real it had not imagined, where the image becomes informed, from above or below, and takes over as an entity in itself, a messenger from a higher real. In his ascent the
mystic is irradiated by the light of the tree and in his descent the light finds a medium through which to flow back into the daily world: