The H.D. Book (83 page)

A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Just for the moment he was in that very
selva oscura,
the desolation, where thoughts stir, in which the great adventure of the spirit in the
Divine Comedy
or
Pilgrim’s Progress
or The War Trilogy begins.

But the great adventure of the spirit is in its evolution, in its surrender of itself and coming into the intention of God in the peril of the soul. Towards Paradise, heaven, the light—
that
has been the eternal promise. The promise that falling in love makes to the lover.

•

“
Quando m’apparve Amor subitamente,
” Dante says: “When suddenly Amor appeared to me, the memory of whose being maketh me shudder.” And he tells us in his journal of the same event:

I thought I saw in my chamber a cloud of the hue of flame, within which I discerned the figure of a lord, of fearful aspect to one who should look on him. And he seemed to me of such gladness as to himself that a wondrous thing it was; and in his words he said many things which I understood not save a few, among which I understood these:
Ego dominus tuus.
I am your Master. In his arms I thought I saw one sleeping, naked, save
that she seemed to me wrapped lightly in a crimson drapery; whom, gazing at very intently, I knew to be the lady of the salutation, who the day before had deigned to salute me. And in one of his hands I thought he held a thing that was all aflame; and I thought he said to me these words:
Vide cor tuum.
Behold thy heart. And when he had tarried a while, I thought he awoke her who slept and so wrought he by his art that he made her eat of that thing that was aflame in his hand, whereof she ate afeared. Thereafter, short time he abode ere his gladness was changed to bitterest weeping: and thus weeping, he gathered this lady up in his arms and with her I thought he went away heavenward: whereat I sustained so great anguish that my feeble little sleep could not endure, but broke and I was awake. And straightway I began to ponder and found that the hour in which this vision had appeared to me had been the fourth hour of the night: so that it manifestly appeareth that it was the first of the last nine hours of the night.

•

Wherever he names the time (
la bonne heure
) in
La Vita Nuova,
Dante finds it in terms of the number nine: “Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light returned,” “so that almost from the beginning of her ninth year she appeared to me and I beheld her almost at the end of my ninth”; again, Beatrice appears to Dante nine years later in the ninth hour of the day. The theme of the beginning in the end, of the first and the last is repeated in the design of nines, where in the first vision of Amor Dante finds the hour of the dream to have been “the first of the last nine hours of the night.” The second vision of Amor is in the ninth hour of the day. A third comes on the ninth day of a painful illness. Hours, days, years—months along, the nine months of gestation, seem missing. Then, in accounting for the time of Beatrice’s death Dante tells us, “because many times the number nine hath found place among the preceding words, whereby it appeareth that it is not without reason,” he will discuss the meaning of the number. First, he must show how the number nine appears in her death: “I say that according to the Arabian style her most noble soul departed in the first hour of the ninth day of the month; and according to the Syrian style, it departed on the ninth month of the year—and according to our
style, she departed in that year of our era, namely of the years of our Lord, wherein the perfect number was completed nine times in that century wherein she was placed.”

In a series of revelations Dante has dangerously hinted that Beatrice is analogous first to Love, then in the Giovanna Primavera–Giovanni
prima verra
passage that she is analogous to “
la verace luce,
” the True Light or Christ. Now he tells us that nine has reason; first, because it denotes the astrological harmony of the nine spheres appropriate to her birth; then, “more subtly and according to infallible truth, this number was her very self,” “This lady was accompanied by the number nine to give to understand that she was a nine, that is, a miracle whose root is the wondrous Trinity alone
.
”

But Dante has prepared for the daring of this suggestion in his digression on the license of poets in their fictions from which I took my epigraph at the beginning of this day book. He seems to be explaining his license to a serious reader with a philosophic bias: “Here a person worthy of having all his difficulties made plain might be perplexed, for he might have a difficulty as to what I say concerning Love, as if he were a thing in himself and not only an intelligent being but a corporeal being. Which thing according to truth, is false; for Love exists not as a being in itself but as a quality of a being.”

Things are not what they seem. But poets are allowed, Dante argues, a “greater license in speech” than composers in prose. “The poets have spoken to inanimate things as they had sense and reason and have made them speak together, and not only real things but unreal things.” Is Amor then the creature of such a poetic license? Nor was the poet sincere in that high ardor of vision in which he saw Beatrice so exalted? “Deep shame were it to him,” Dante writes: “who should rhyme under cover of a figure or of a rhetorical colour and, afterwards, being asked, knew not how to strip such vesture from his words, in such wise that they should have a real meaning.” Is it philosophical error or theological heresy that the poet would cover for in his license? Is the real meaning beneath the vesture of the figures of Amor and Beatrice less than or more than the poet would tell us in the poem? In the first case he means to warn us that he praises Beatrice inordinately; in the second case, that
she is in truth—“the glorious lady of my mind who was called Beatrice by many who knew not how she was called”—an other higher entity. In sections v and vi of the
Vita Nuova,
Dante tells us how midway between him and Beatrice there sat a lady “marvelling at my look which seemed to end in her,” so that many mistook the object of his gaze. “Then I comforted me greatly being assured that my secret had not been made common that day to others by my look.” “And straightway,” he continues: “I thought to make this lady a screen of the truth.”

•

From Apuleius’s
The Golden Ass
or those “
fictions littéraires du logos de revelation,
” as Festugière would call them, to which the orthodox
Gospel of John
as well as the heretical
Acts of John
surely belongs, from the creative romanticism of the late Hellenistic age to Dante’s
La Vita Nuova
in the transition to the Renaissance, even to H.D.’s War Trilogy written in our period which has relegated the terms of Christian vision as well as of pagan mystery or of daemonic or angelic hierarchies to the domain of illusion and delusion, the response to experience in the spirit of romance has been to seek out the deeper meaning or impact of the seizure that we know as falling in love. In each romance there is a transformation, a deprivation in which beyond the physical, a psychic and then a spiritual reality is revealed. Festugière is right, I think, in his pointing out that these revelations are
fictions littéraires,
for they come about in an art of fictions, a witchcraft of the Word. And their higher truth or reality remains poetic, a revelation of the power of the reality of man’s language itself. “The end of my Love,” Dante writes, “was once this lady’s salutation [where
salute
may also mean salvation]; and therein dwelt my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But since it hath pleased her to deny it to me, Love, my lord, by his grace, hath placed all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me . . . in those words that praise my lady.”

•

To find the hour and the place, bringing into the fictive creation the particulars of the actual life, is part of the magic of self-transformation, so that the creative fiction enters the sense of actual reality. H.D., like
Dante, like John of Patmos, has no experience that is not meaning, that is not, by emblem or rubric, part of feeling beyond her feeling. The events of her life are not only personal, they are also hints of a great universe to which all man’s fictions belong. Dante’s astrological and numerological practices, reading the nine of his fictions into the times of his actual life, take creative thought in actuality as they take action in a creative fiction, akin to H.D.’s practice of astrology and angelology:

I had been thinking of Gabriel,
of the moon-cycle, of the moon-shell,

of the moon-crescent
and the moon at full:

It is taking thought where the poet begins to have a heightened sense of time and this life as informed by his Work. But our Work, which may have been the alchemical Work, or the Work in the Art, is now in a larger sense a Life-Work or evolution of Life in which we play our human phase. The poet begins to have a heightened sense of his involvement in a great work beyond his work.

•

Ananke,
in Freud’s
The Future of an Illusion,
the law of “in so far as external reality allows it,” reflects all Freud’s sense of how the soul in the throes of creative change was most likely to come thru “touched” or “silly,” maimed or lost, in its new self. He had on his mind too how maimed, lost, silly, souls often were, who had gone thru the alembic of religious conversions.

But
Ananke
had a twin in
Logos. Ananke/Logos,
that Freud proposes to take the place of the old gods of the cathedral, is just, in one guise, the Hell-Heaven that his nurse had sown in his infant mind.
Ananke/Logos
might also be the Christ-Crucified/Christ-Child. He is Falling-in-Love/Loving. He is the inspiration, the feeling of a divine order that we sense in a directive that is not from our personal bias but from the self we have in a universal community. He is Amor. He is the evolutionary imperative.

“You would have the state of bliss to begin immediately after death”;
Freud writes: “you ask of it the impossible, and you will not surrender the claim of the individual. Of these wishes our god
Logos
will realize those which external nature permits, but he will do this very gradually, only in the incalculable future and for other children of men. Compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life, he does not promise.” The reality—this is Freud’s sense here that seems most true—the deep reality of actual life is without consolation for the claim of the individual. Dante tells us that in deprivation of the actual Beatrice he wept and then fell asleep “like a beaten sobbing child.” H.D. in the opening passages of
The Walls Do Not Fall
speaks of her “desolation” and inspiration “stalks” like a threatening hunter so that the poet trembles. Amor, in
La Vita Nuova,
appears as “a cloud of the hue of flame, within which I discerned the figure of a lord, of fearful aspect to one who should look upon him.”

Yet the promise, wherever the pain has been known and received as a condition of the Work, is bliss. We had been talking of Kaspar, in H.D.’s poem, for he came to a moment when he knew in a way he was lost. “The seal of the jar was un-broken”—Kaspar was what he was; but “no secret was safe with a woman.” Did he fall in love? He had a high sense of his cause, his proper heat and center:

he drew aside his robe in a noble manner
but the un-maidenly woman did not take the hint;

yet the epiphany of
The Flowering of the Rod
is his falling in love somehow, falling in with the stars, being inspired. “Kaspar did not recognize her,” H.D. tells us:

until her scarf slipped to the floor,

and then, not only did he recognize Mary
as the stars had told (Venus in the ascendant . . .

We begin to trace the line of an inspired seizure, from “as the stars had told”—Yes, he felt what Dante called the salutation of the Lady, he felt he had an appointment there, as eyes too may meet in a new light—thru the travail of desire, the courses of the stars:

and what he saw made his heart so glad
that it was as if he suffered,

his heart laboured so
with his ecstasy

in his seeing “the fleck of light”:

like a flaw in the third jewel

to his right, in the second circlet,
a grain, a flaw or speck of light.

•

Dante tells us that in the vision of Amor, his heart or rather, “the vital spirit which dwelleth in the most secret chamber of the heart” trembled so that “it was horribly apparent in the least of my pulses”; even as “the animal spirit which dwelleth in the high chamber to which the spirits of sense carry their perceptions” began to marvel.

•

So that when he comes into the presence of the Christ-Child, Kaspar is inspired to see or to present (for the fragrance that is the Divine Presence is both the myrrh which he brings escaped from the unbroken seal of the jar and also the Child born from the virgin woman) what we have called the promise of falling in love or the revelation of the end of desire. Which the Mother sees or knows is there:

she said, Sir, it is a most beautiful fragrance,
as of all flowering things together;

•

“It is really about the soul, or the primal intelligence, or the
Nous,
or whatever we choose to call that link that binds us to the unseen and un-created,” John Gould Fletcher wrote in 1917, reviewing H.D.’s
Sea Garden.
“A new cadence means a new idea,” the Preface of
Some Imagist Poets
in 1915 argued. Something Platonic and then neo-Platonic haunts these passages, as it haunts Pound’s definitions of
logopoeia, melopoeia
and
phanopoeia,
with hints not only of a theosophy, a lore and wisdom of divine orders, but also a theurgy, an operation of divine orders.

Fletcher sees H.D.’s work in such terms and tells us we must read her as we read “Plotinus or Dionysius the Areopagite, or Paracelsus, or Behmen, or Swedenborg, or Blake, or any other of the mystics.”