I
Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting.3 Rapallo’s thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water’s edge. The little town described in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”4 In what better place could I, forbidden Dublin winters and all excited crowded places, spend what winters yet remain? On the broad pavement by the sea pass Italian peasants or working people, people out of the little shops, a famous German dramatist, the barber’s brother looking like an Oxford don, a British retired skipper, an Italian prince descended from Charlemagne and no richer than the rest of us, a few tourists seeking tranquillity.5 As there is no great harbour full of yachts, no great yellow strand, no great ballroom, no great casino, the rich carry elsewhere their strenuous lives.
II
I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years lived in rooms opening on to a flat roof by the sea.6 For the last hour we have sat upon the roof which is also a garden, discussing that immense poem of which but seven and twenty cantos are already published.I,7 I have often found there brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order.8 Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue.9 There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or modern historical characters.10 He has tried to produce that picture Porteous commended to Nicholas Poussin in Le chef d’œuvre inconnu where everything rounds or thrusts itself without edges, without contours—conventions of the intellect—from a splash of tints and shades; to achieve a work as characteristic of the artII of our time as the paintings of Cézanne, avowedly suggested by Porteous, as Ulysses and its dream association of words and images, a poem in which there is nothing that can be taken out and reasoned over, nothing that is not a part of the poem itself.12 He has scribbled on the back of an envelope certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events—I cannot find any adequate definition—A B C D and then J K L M, and then each set of letters repeated, and then A B C D inverted and this repeated, and then a new element X Y Z, then certain letters that never recur, and then all sorts of combinations of X Y Z and J K L M and A B C D and D C B A, and all set whirling together. He has shown me upon the wall a photograph of a Cosimo Tura decoration in three compartments, in the upper the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, in the middle Zodiacal signs, and in the lower certain events in Cosimo Tura’s day.13 The Descent and the Metamorphosis—A B C D and J K L M—his fixed elements, took the place of the Zodiac, the archetypal persons—X Y Z—that of the Triumphs, and certain modern events—his letters that do not recur—that of those events in Cosimo Tura’s day.
I may, now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme, that here is no botch of tone and colour, all Hodos Chameliontos, except for some odd corner where one discovers beautiful detail like that finely modelled foot in Porteous’ disastrous picture.14
III
Sometimes about ten o’clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm-trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats.15 He knows all their histories—the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed it; that fat grey cat is an hotel proprietor’s favourite, it never begs from the guests’ tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell off, a whirling ball of claws and fur, and now avoid each other. Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for cats—“some of them so ungrateful”, a friend says—he never nurses the café cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own.16 Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organise the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power. I examine his criticism in this new light, his praise of writers pursued by ill-luck, left maimed or bedridden by the War; and thereupon recall a person as unlike him as possible, the only friend who remains to me from late boyhood, grown gaunt in the injustice of what seems her blind nobility of pity: “I will fight until I die”, she wrote to me once, “against the cruelty of small ambitions”.17 Was this pity a characteristic of his generation that has survived the Romantic Movement, and of mine and hers that saw it die—I too a revolutionist—some drop of hysteria still at the bottom of the cup?
IV
I have been wondering if I shall go to church and seek the company of the English in the villas. At Oxford I went constantly to All Souls Chapel, though never at service time, and parts of A Vision were thought out there. In Dublin I went to Saint Patrick’s and sat there, but it was far off; and once I remember saying to a friend as we came out of Sant’Ambrogio at Milan, “That is my tradition and I will let no priest rob me”.18 I have sometimes wondered if it was but a timidity come from long disuse that keeps me from the service, and yesterday as I was wondering for the hundredth time, seated in a café by the sea, I heard an English voice say: “Our new Devil-dodger is not so bad. I have been practising with his choir all afternoon. We sang hymns and then ‘God Save the King,’ more hymns and ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’ We were at the hotel at the end of the esplanade where they have the best beer.” I am too anaemic for so British a faith; I shall haunt empty churches and be satisfied with Ezra Pound’s society and that of his travelling Americans.
V
All that is laborious or mechanical in my book is finished; what remains can be added as a momentary rest from writing verse. It must be this thought of a burden dropped that made me think of attending church, if it is not that these mountains under their brilliant light fill me with an emotion that is like gratitude. Descartes went on pilgrimage to some shrine of the Virgin when he made his first philosophical discovery, and the mountain road from Rapallo to Zoagli seems like something in my own mind, something that I have discovered.19
March and October 1928
“This way of publishing introductions to books, that are God knows when to come out, is either wholly new, or so long in practice that my small reading cannot trace it.”
—SWIFT20
I
The other day Lady Gregory said to me: “You are a much better educated man than you were ten years ago and much more powerful in argument”. And I put The Tower and The Winding Stair into evidence to show that my poetry has gained in self-possession and power.21 I owe this change to an incredible experience.
II
On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing.22 What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. “No,” was the answer, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”23 The unknown writer took his theme at first from my just published Per Amica Silentia Lunae. I had made a distinction between the perfection that is from a man’s combat with himself and that which is from a combat with circumstance, and upon this simple distinction he built up an elaborate classification of men according to their more or less complete expression of one type or the other. He supported his classification by a series of geometrical symbols and put these symbols in an order that answered the question in my essay as to whether some prophet could not prick upon the calendar the birth of a Napoleon or a Christ.24 A system of symbolism, strange to my wife and to myself, certainly awaited expression, and when I asked how long that would take I was told years. Sometimes when my mind strays back to those first days I remember that Browning’s Paracelsus did not obtain the secret until he had written his spiritual history at the bidding of his Byzantine teacher, that before initiation Wilhelm Meister read his own history written by another, and I compare my Per Amica to those histories.25
III
When the automatic writing began we were in a hotel on the edge of Ashdown Forest, but soon returned to Ireland and spent much of 1918 at Glendalough, at Rosses Point, at Coole Park, at a house near it, at Thoor Ballylee, always more or less solitary, my wife bored and fatigued by her almost daily task and I thinking and talking of little else.26 Early in 1919 the communicator of the moment—they were constantly changed—said they would soon change the method from the written to the spoken word as that would fatigue her less, but the change did not come for some months. I was on a lecturing tour in America to earn a roof for Thoor Ballylee when it came.27 We had one of those little sleeping compartments in a train, with two berths, and were somewhere in Southern California. My wife, who had been asleep for some minutes, began to talk in her sleep, and from that on almost all communications came in that way. My teachers did not seem to speak out of her sleep but as if from above it, as though it were a tide upon which they floated. A chance word spoken before she fell asleep would sometimes start a dream that broke in upon the communications, as if from below, to trouble or overwhelm, as when she dreamed she was a cat lapping milk or a cat curled up asleep and therefore dumb. The cat returned night after night, and once when I tried to drive it away by making the sound one makes when playing at being a dog to amuse a child, she awoke trembling, and the shock was so violent that I never dared repeat it.28 It was plain therefore that, though the communicators’ critical powers were awake, hers slept, or that she was aware of the idea the sound suggested but not of the sound.
IV
Whenever I received a certain signal (I will explain what it was later), I would get pencil and paper ready. After they had entranced my wife suddenly when sitting in a chair, I suggested that she must always be lying down before they put her to sleep. They seemed ignorant of our surroundings and might have done so at some inconvenient time or place; once when they had given their signal in a restaurant they explained that because we had spoken of a garden they had thought we were in it. Except at the start of a new topic, when they would speak or write a dozen sentences unquestioned, I had always to question, and every question to rise out of a previous answer and to deal with their chosen topic. My questions must be accurately worded, and, because they said their thought was swifter than ours, asked without delay or hesitation. I was constantly reproved for vague or confused questions, yet I could do no better, because, though it was plain from the first that their exposition was based upon a single geometrical conception, they kept me from mastering that conception. They shifted ground whenever my interest was at its height, whenever it seemed that the next day must reveal what, as I soon discovered, they were determined to withhold until all was upon paper. November 1917 had been given to an exposition of the twenty-eight typical incarnations or phases and to the movements of their Four Faculties, and then on December 6th a cone or gyre had been drawn and related to the soul’s judgment after death; and then just as I was about to discover that incarnations and judgment alike implied cones or gyres, one within the other, turning in opposite directions, two such cones were drawn and related neither to judgment nor to incarnations but to European history. They drew their first symbolical map of that history, and marked upon it the principal years of crisis, early in July 1918, some days before the publication of the first German edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which, though founded upon a different philosophy, gives the same years of crisis and draws the same general conclusions, and then returned to the soul’s judgment.29 I believe that they so changed their theme because, had I grasped their central idea, I would have lacked the patience and the curiosity to follow their application of it, preferring some hasty application of my own. They once told me not to speak of any part of the system, except of the incarnations which were almost fully expounded, because if I did the people I talked to would talk to other people, and the communicators would mistake that misunderstanding for their own thought.
For the same reason they asked me not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and this increased my difficulties. Apart from two or three of the principal Platonic Dialogues I knew no philosophy. Arguments with my father, whose convictions had been formed by John Stuart Mill’s attack upon Sir William Hamilton, had destroyed my confidence and driven me from speculation to the direct experience of the Mystics. I had once known Blake as thoroughly as his unfinished confused Prophetic Books permitted, and I had read Swedenborg and Boehme, and my initiation into the “Hermetic Students” had filled my head with Cabbalistic imagery, but there was nothing in Blake, Swedenborg, Boehme or the Cabbala to help me now.30 They encouraged me, however, to read history in relation to their historical logic, and biography in relation to their twenty-eight typical incarnations, that I might give concrete expression to their abstract thought. I read with an excitement I had not known since I was a boy with all knowledge before me, and made continual discoveries, and if my mind returned too soon to their unmixed abstraction they would say, “We are starved”.
VI
Because they must, as they explained, soon finish, others whom they named Frustrators attempted to confuse us or waste time.31 Who these Frustrators were or why they acted so was never adequately explained, nor will be unless I can finish “The Soul in Judgment” (Book III of this work), but they were always ingenious and sometimes cruel. The automatic script would deteriorate, grow sentimental or confused, and when I pointed this out the communicator would say, “From such and such an hour, on such and such a day, all is frustration”. I would spread out the script and he would cross all out back to the answer that began it, but had I not divined frustration he would have said nothing. Was he constrained by a drama which was part of conditions that made communication possible, was that drama itself part of the communication, had my question to be asked before his mind cleared? Only once did he break the rule and without waiting for a question declare some three or four days’ work frustration. A predecessor of his had described the geometrical symbolism as created for my assistance and had seemed to dislike it, another had complained that I used it to make their thought mechanical, and a Frustrator doubtless played upon my weakness when he described a geometrical model of the soul’s state after death which could be turned upon a lathe. The sudden indignant interruption suggested a mind under a dream constraint which it could throw off if desire were strong enough, as we can sometimes throw off a nightmare. It was part of their purpose to affirm that all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being. Was communication itself such a conflict? One said, as though it rested with me to decide what part I should play in their dream, “Remember we will deceive you if we can”. Upon the other hand they seem like living men, are interested in all that interests living men, as when at Oxford, where we spent our winters, one asked upon hearing an owl hoot in the garden, if he might be silent for a while. “Sounds like that”, he said, “give us great pleasure.”32 But some frustrations found us helpless. Some six months before the communications came to an end, a communicator announced that he was about to explain a new branch of the philosophy and seemed to add, “But please do not write anything down, for when all is finished I will dictate a summary”. He spoke almost nightly for I think three months, and at last I said, “Let me make notes, I cannot keep it all in my head”. He was disturbed to find that I had written nothing down, and when I told him of the voice, said it was frustration and that he could not summarise.33 I had already noticed that if their thought was interrupted they had to find some appropriate moment before they could take it up again, and that though they could sometimes foretell physical events they could not foretell those moments. Later still a frustration, if the communicator did not dream what he said, took, as will be seen, a more cruel form.
VII
The automatic writing and the speech during sleep were illustrated or accompanied by strange phenomena.34 While we were staying at a village near Oxford we met two or three nights in succession what seemed a sudden warm breath coming up from the ground at the same corner of the road.35 One night when I was about to tell my wife some story of a Russian mystic, without remembering that it might make her misunderstand an event in her own life, a sudden flash of light fell between us and a chair or table was violently struck. Then too there was much whistling, generally as a warning that some communicator would come when my wife was asleep.36 At first I was inclined to think that these whistlings were made by my wife without her knowing it, and once, when I heard the whistle and she did not, she felt a breath passing through her lips as though she had whistled. I had to give up this explanation when servants at the other end of the house were disturbed by a “whistling ghost”, and so much so that I asked the communicators to choose some other sign. Sweet smells were the most constant phenomena, now that of incense, now that of violets or roses or some other flower, and as perceptible to some half-dozen of our friends as to ourselves, though upon one occasion when my wife smelt hyacinth a friend smelt eau-de-cologne. A smell of roses filled the whole house when my son was born and was perceived there by the doctor and my wife and myself, and I have no doubt, though I did not question them, by the nurse and servants. Such smells came most often to my wife and myself when we passed through a door or were in some small enclosed place, but sometimes would form themselves in my pocket or even in the palms of my hands. When I took my hands out of my pocket on our way to Glastonbury they were strongly scented, and when I held them out for my wife to smell she said, “May-flower, the Glastonbury thorn perhaps”.37 I seldom knew why such smells came, nor why one sort rather than another, but sometimes they approved something said. When I spoke of a Chinese poem in which some old official described his coming retirement to a village inhabited by old men devoted to the classics,38 the air filled suddenly with the smell of violets, and that night some communicator explained that in such a place a man could escape those “knots” of passion that prevent Unity of Being and must be expiated between lives or in another life.39 (Have I not found just such a village here in Rapallo? for, though Ezra Pound is not old, we discuss Guido Cavalcanti and only quarrel a little.)40
Sometimes if I had been ill some astringent smell like that of resinous wood filled the room, and sometimes, though rarely, a bad smell. These were often warnings: a smell of cat’s excrement announced some being that had to be expelled, the smell of an extinguished candle that the communicators were “starved”. A little after my son’s birth I came home to confront my wife with the statement “Michael is ill”.41 A smell of burnt feathers had announced what she and the doctor had hidden.42 When regular communication was near its end and my work of study and arrangement begun, I was told that henceforth the Frustrators would attack my health and that of my children, and one afternoon, knowing from the smell of burnt feathers that one of my children would be ill within three hours, I felt before I could recover self-control the mediaeval helpless horror at witchcraft. I can discover no apparent difference between a natural and a supernatural smell, except that the natural smell comes and goes gradually while the other is suddenly there and then as suddenly gone. But there were other phenomena. Sometimes they commented on my thoughts by the ringing of a little bell heard by my wife alone, and once my wife and I heard at the same hour in the afternoon, she at Ballylee and I at Coole, the sound of a little pipe, three or four notes, and once I heard a burst of music in the middle of the night; and when regular communications through script and sleep had come to an end, the communicators occasionally spoke—sometimes a word, sometimes a whole sentence. I was dictating to my wife, perhaps, and a voice would object to a sentence, and I could no more say where the voice came from than I could of the whistling, though confident that it came through my wife’s personality. Once a Japanese who had dined with my wife and myself talked of Tolstoy’s philosophy, which fascinates so many educated Japanese, and I put my objections vehemently. “It is madness for the East”, I said, “which must face the West in arms”, and much more of the same sort, and was, after he had gone, accusing myself of exaggerated and fantastic speech when I heard these words in a loud clear voice: “You have said what we wanted to have said”.43 My wife, who was writing a letter at the other end of the room, had heard nothing, but found she had written those words in the letter, where they had no meaning. Sometimes my wife saw apparitions: before the birth of our son a great black bird, persons in clothes of the late sixteenth century and of the late seventeenth.44 There were still stranger phenomena that I prefer to remain silent about for the present because they seemed so incredible that they need a long story and much discussion.
VIII
Exposition in sleep came to an end in 1920, and I began an exhaustive study of some fifty copy-books of automatic script, and of a much smaller number of books recording what had come in sleep. Probably as many words had been spoken in sleep as had been written, but I could only summarise and much had been lost through frustration. I had already a small concordance in a large manuscript book, but now made a much larger, arranged like a card index.45 And then, though I had mastered nothing but the twenty-eight phases and the historical scheme, I was told that I must write, that I must seize the moment between ripe and rotten—there was a metaphor of apples about to fall and just fallen. They showed when I began that they assisted or approved, for they sent sign after sign. Sometimes if I stopped writing and drew one hand over another my hands smelt of violets or roses, sometimes the truth I sought would come to me in a dream, or I would feel myself stopped—but this has occurred to me since boyhood—when forming some sentence, whether in my mind or upon paper. When in 1926 the English translation of Spengler’s book came out, some weeks after A Vision,III I found that not only were dates that I had been given the same as his but whole metaphors and symbols that had seemed my work alone.46 Both he and I had symbolised a difference between Greek and Roman thought by comparing the blank or painted eyes of Greek statues with the pierced eyeballs of the Roman statues, both had described as an illustration of Roman character the naturalistic portrait heads screwed on to stock bodies, both had found the same meaning in the round bird-like eyes of Byzantine sculpture, though he or his translator had preferred “staring at infinity” to my “staring at miracle”.47 I knew of no common source, no link between him and me, unless through
The elemental things that go
About my table to and fro.48
IX
The first version of this book, A Vision, except the section on the twenty-eight phases, and that called “Dove or Swan” which I repeat without change, fills me with shame.49 I had misinterpreted the geometry, and in my ignorance of philosophy failed to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole depended, and as my wife was unwilling that her share should be known, and I to seem sole author, I had invented an unnatural story of an Arabian traveller which I must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to write half a dozen poems that are unintelligible without it.IV,50
X
When the proof sheets came I felt myself relieved from my promise not to read philosophy and began with Berkeley because a young revolutionary soldier who was living a very dangerous life said, “All the philosophy a man needs is in Berkeley”, and because Lennox Robinson, hearing me quote that sentence, bought me an old copy of Berkeley’s works upon the Dublin quays.51 Then I took down from my wife a list of what she had read, two or three volumes of Wundt, part of Hegel’s Logic, all Thomas Taylor’s Plotinus, a Latin work of Pico della Mirandola, and a great deal of mediaeval mysticism.52 I had to ignore Pico, for I had forgotten my school Latin and my wife had burnt her translation when she married me, “to reduce her luggage”. I did not expect to find that the communicators echoed what she had read, for I had proof they were not dependent on her memory or mine, but did expect to find somewhere something from which their symbolic geometry had been elaborated, something used as they had used Per Amica Silentia Lunae. I read all MacKenna’s incomparable translation of Plotinus, some of it several times, and went from Plotinus to his predecessors and successors whether upon her list or not.53 And for four years now I have read nothing else except now and then some story of theft and murder to clear my head at night.54 Although the more I read the better did I understand what I had been taught, I found neither the geometrical symbolism nor anything that could have inspired it except the vortex of Empedocles.55
XI
I might have gone on reading for some two or three years more but for something that happened at Cannes. I was ill after pneumonia and general nervous breakdown, had partly recovered but fallen ill again, and spent most of the days on my back considering a slowly narrowing circle.56 Two months ago I had walked to the harbour at Algeciras, two miles; a month ago to the harbour at Cannes, a mile; and now thought two hundred yards enough. It had begun to widen again, and I had returned from my walk at a quarter to five one afternoon when I heard my wife locking her room door. Then walking in her sleep, as I could see by her fixed look, she came through the connecting door and lay down upon a sofa. The communicator had scarcely spoken before I heard somebody trying to get into her room and remembered that the nurse brought our daughter there every afternoon at five.57 My wife heard and, being but half awakened, fell in trying to get on to her feet, and though able to hide her disturbance from the nurse and from our daughter, suffered from the shock. The communicator came next day, but later, and only to say over and over in different words, “It cannot happen again, for at this hour nobody comes”, and then day after day to discuss what I had written. My wife’s interests are musical, literary, practical, she seldom comments upon what I dictate except upon the turn of a phrase; she can no more correct it than she could her automatic script at a time when a slight error brought her new fatigue. But the communicator, as independent of her ignorance as of her knowledge, had no tolerance for error. He had no more than tolerated my philosophical study and was enraged by the intrusion, not so much into what I had written as into the questions I put, of a terminology not his. This led to one of those quarrels which I have noticed almost always precede the clearest statements, and seem to arise from an independence excited to injustice because kept with difficulty. “I am always afraid”, he said in apology, “that when not at our best we may accept from you false reasoning.” I had half forgotten—there had been no communication longer than a sentence or two for four years—how completely master they could be down to its least detail of what I could but know in outline, how confident and dominating. Sometimes they had seemed but messengers; they knew nothing but the thought that brought them; or they had forgotten and must refer to those that sent them. But now in a few minutes they drew that distinction between what their terminology calls the Faculties and what it calls the Principles, between experience and revelation, between understanding and reason, between the higher and lower mind, which has engaged the thought of saints and philosophers from the time of Buddha.
XII
I have heard my wife in the broken speech of some quite ordinary dream use tricks of speech characteristic of the philosophic voices. Sometimes the philosophic voices themselves have become vague and trivial or have in some other way reminded me of dreams. Furthermore their doctrine supports the resemblance, for one said in the first month of communication, “We are often but created forms”, and another, that spirits do not tell a man what is true but create such conditions, such a crisis of fate, that the man is compelled to listen to his Daimon.58 And again and again they have insisted that the whole system is the creation of my wife’s Daimon and of mine, and that it is as startling to them as to us. Mere “spirits”, my teachers say, are the “objective”, a reflection and distortion; reality itself is found by the Daimon in what they call, in commemoration of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Ghostly Self. The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all.59
Much that has happened, much that has been said, suggests that the communicators are the personalities of a dream shared by my wife, by myself, occasionally by others—they have, as I must some day prove, spoken through others without change of knowledge or loss of power—a dream that can take objective form in sounds, in hallucinations, in scents, in flashes of light, in movements of external objects. In partly accepting and partly rejecting that explanation for reasons I cannot now discuss, in affirming a Communion of the Living and the Dead, I remember that Swedenborg has described all those between the celestial state and death as plastic, fantastic and deceitful, the dramatis personae of our dreams; that Cornelius Agrippa attributes to Orpheus these words: “The Gates of Pluto must not be unlocked, within is a people of dreams”.60 What I have to say of them is in “The Soul in Judgment”,V but because it came when my wife’s growing fatigue made communication difficult and because of defects of my own, it is the most unfinished of my five books.62
XIII
Some, perhaps all, of those readers I most value, those who have read me many years, will be repelled by what must seem an arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism. Yet such has almost always accompanied expression that unites the sleeping and waking mind. One remembers the six wings of Daniel’s angels, the Pythagorean numbers, a venerated book of the Cabbala where the beard of God winds in and out among the stars, its hairs all numbered, those complicated mathematical tables that Kelly saw in Dr. Dee’s black scrying-stone, the diagrams in Law’s Boehme, where one lifts a flap of paper to discover both the human entrails and the starry heavens.63 William Blake thought those diagrams worthy of Michelangelo, but remains himself almost unintelligible because he never drew the like. We can (those hard symbolic bones under the skin) substitute for a treatise on logic the Divine Comedy, or some little song about a rose, or be content to live our thought.64
XIV
Some will associate the story I have just told with that popular spiritualism which has not dared to define itself, to go like all great spiritual movements through a tragedy of separation and rejection, which instead of asking whether it is not something almost incredible, because altogether new or forgotten, clings to all that is vague and obvious in popular Christianity; and hate me for that association. But Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain—porcelain is best made, a Japanese critic has said, where the conditions of life are hard—or of the Ninth Symphony—virginity renews itself like the moon—except that the Muses sometimes form in those low haunts their most lasting attachments.65
XV
Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include, now all recorded time in one circuit, now what Blake called “the pulsation of an artery”, are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods of equal length?66 To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.67 They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.68
November 23rd 1928, and later
I
My dear Ezra,
Do not be elected to the Senate of your country. I think myself, after six years, well out of that of mine.69 Neither you nor I, nor any other of our excitable profession, can match those old lawyers, old bankers, old business men, who, because all habit and memory, have begun to govern the world. They lean over the chair in front and talk as if to half a dozen of their kind at some board-meeting, and, whether they carry their point or not, retain moral ascendancy. When a politician follows, his thought shaped by newspaper and public meeting, it is as though somebody recited “Eugene Aram” as it used to be recited in my youth.70 Once when I had called at a Dublin bank, rifle fire began all round the bank, and I was told that nobody could leave for an hour or two and invited to lunch with the Directors. We lunched in a room overlooking the courtyard, and from time to time I got up and looked out of the window at a young soldier who ran from the protection of a wall, fell upon one knee and fired through the gateway. The Republicans were attacking the next building, but was the bank well protected? How many such young soldiers stood or crouched about us? The bankers talked their ordinary affairs, not one went to the window or asked whether a particular shot was fired by the young soldier or at him; they had to raise their voices a little as we do when we have selected by accident a restaurant where there is an orchestra.
Should you permit yourself to enter the Senate, that irascible mind of yours will discover something of the utmost importance, and the group you belong to will invite you to one of those private meetings where the real work of legislation is done, and the ten minutes they can grant you, after discussing the next Bill upon the agenda for two hours with unperturbed lucidity, will outlast your self-confidence. No, Ezra, those generalities that make all men politicians and some few eloquent are not as true as they were. You and I, those impressive and convinced politicians, that young man reciting “Eugene Aram”, are as much out of place as would be the first composers of sea-shanties in an age of steam. Whenever I stood up to speak, no matter how long I had pondered my words, unless I spoke of something that concerned the arts, or upon something that depended not upon precise knowledge but upon public opinion—we writers are public opinion’s children though we defy our mother—I was ashamed until shame turned at last, even if I spoke but a few words—my body being somewhat battered by time—into physical pain.
II
I send you the introduction of a book which will, when finished, proclaim a new divinity. Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between four sacred objects, was there washed as the dead are washed, and thereupon passed with Theseus to the wood’s heart until amidst the sound of thunder earth opened, “riven by love”, and he sank down soul and body into the earth.71 I would have him balance Christ who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body, and I see him altogether separated from Plato’s Athens, from all that talk of the Good and the One, from all that cabinet of perfection, an image from Homer’s age. When it was already certain that he must bring himself under his own curse did he not still question, and when answered as the Sphinx had been answered, stricken with the horror that is in Gulliver and in the Fleurs du Mal, did he not tear out his own eyes?72 He raged against his sons, and this rage was noble, not from some general idea, some sense of public law upheld, but because it seemed to contain all life, and the daughter who served him as did Cordelia Lear—he too a man of Homer’s kind—seemed less attendant upon an old railing rambler than upon genius itself.73 He knew nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that mind fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his blessing and his cursing. Delphi, that rock at earth’s navel, spoke through him, and though men shuddered and drove him away they spoke of ancient poetry, praising the boughs overhead, the grass under foot, Colonus and its horses.74 I think that he lacked compassion, seeing that it must be compassion for himself, and yet stood nearer to the poor than saint or apostle, and I mutter to myself stories of Cruachan, or of Cruchmaa, or of the road-side bush withered by Raftery’s curse.VI,75 What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?77 What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of a balance, the dip of a scale, and so date the coming of that something?
You will hate these generalities, Ezra, which are themselves, it may be, of the past—the abstract sky—yet you have written “The Return”, and though you but announce in it some change of style, perhaps, in book and picture it gives me better words than my own.
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe”,
Inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!78
I. There are now forty-nine.
II. Mr. Wyndham Lewis, whose criticism sounds true to a man of my generation, attacks this art in Time and Western Man. If we reject, he argues, the forms and categories of the intellect there is nothing left but sensation, “eternal flux”. Yet all such rejections stop at the conscious mind, for as Dean Swift says in a meditation on a woman who paints a dying face,
Matter as wise logicians say
Cannot without a form subsist;
And form, say I as well as they,
Must fail, if matter brings no grist.11
III. Published by Werner Laurie in 1925.
IV. Michael Robartes and his Friends is the amended version.
V. It is now finished, but less detailed than I once hoped.61
VI. Was Oedipus familiar to Theban “wren boys”? One of those Lives “collected out of good authors” at the end of North’s Plutarch describes a meeting between Epaminondas and what I would like to consider some propitiation of his shade. “Even as they were marching away out of Thebes, divers of the souldiers thought they had had many unluckie signes. For as they were going out of the gates, Epaminondas met on his way a Herald, that following an auncient ceremonie and custome of theirs, brought an old blind man as if he had bene run away; and the Herald crying out aloud, Bring him not out of Thebes nor put him not to death, but carie him backe againe, and save his life.” The accepted explanation is that he was a runaway slave welcomed back with some traditional ceremony because he returned of his own will; but imagination boggles at a runaway, old blind slave.76