1“The War is the first and only thing in the world today.” In his landmark introduction to The Wedge in 1944,1 William Carlos Williams obliquely sheds light on H.D.’s wartime triptych initially published as “The Walls Do Not Fall” (1944), “Tribute to the Angels” (1945) and “The Flowering of the Rod” (1946). Although it might seem relevant as a time-specific statement reflecting the historical unfolding of World War II ( “today”), this statement truly makes sense when understood as an untimely observation fundamentally defining poiesis in terms of warmongering. “Such war, as the arts live and breathe by,” adds Williams, “is continuous.”2 Although they were poised to follow wildly diverging aesthetic paths, leading nonetheless in both cases to epic undertakings such as Williams’ five-part Paterson (1946-1958) and H.D.’s “tripartite biblioblitz”3 followed by her subversive rewriting of the Trojan War in Helen in Egypt, both authors choose to ground their art in archaic eris and polemos. Both relate poetic writing to Homeric epos4 and pre-Socratic thought, exemplified by Heraclitean aphorisms such as “War is both King of all and Father of all” (fr. 53, 245) or “One must know that war is common and that right is strife and that all things are happening by strife and necessity” (fr. 80, 238). H.D.’s “War Trilogy,” therefore, might baffle historically-minded readers insofar as it is, except for its masterful inaugural fragment, hardly about WWII. Rather, it provides an inquiry into poetic writing as waging war, an activity inseparable, for poets of modernity, from “the Permanent War Economy” of daily life.5 Trilogy explores the “warring elements” at the core of poetic practice6 and examines their aesthetic and ethical underpinnings. Driven by insistent questioning such as “what is War//to Birth, to Change, to Death?” ( “Tribute to Angels,” 8, 71), H.D. reevaluates the birth of writing and its (meta) physics, construed as perpetual process and double-edged (s) word, instrument of thought/Thoth, or life and death.7

2As is made abundantly clear in the palimpsestic troping and the opening fragment of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” H.D.’s historical sense is based on a logic of continuity and contiguity between different eras, namely brought together by enduring forms of meaning-making such as “picture-writing,” the Egyptian pictograms or sacred imprints (hiero-glyphs) legible on parchments, tablets and monuments: “still the Luxor bee, chick and hare/pursue unalterable purpose,” “they continue to prophesy/from the stone papyrus” (3).8 Besides revealing H.D.’s fascination for Egyptology, mythologies, and ancient forms of pictogrammic and phonetic writing—namely the shift from hieroglyphics to Greek alphabet—, these lines obliquely raise the question of interpretation: what do “the Luxor bee, chick and hare” convey in the experience of reading? Is their presence as mesmerizing “picture-writing” purely referential, or does it point to larger epistemological and metaphysical matters? What does H.D.’s use of atavistic, sometimes solipsistic referentiality tell us about her conception of language, of interpretation, and of truth? This paper seeks to show that, far from being a long devotional poem merely celebrating deities and venerating hermetic symbols (“o venerate/venerator,” 75),9 Trilogy is the work of a creative grammatologist analysing the claims and the force of writing as a tool for thinking. As Adalaide Morris has shown, H.D. evolves a poetics where “poems are material forms of thinking: they enact ideas, extend them, project them, throw them forward.”10 This very analytical process in turn produces the poem. Such self-reflexive poetics could be depicted as “transcribing” (Trilogy, 165), for the poet-scribe ceaselessly returns to and re-enacts the birth of writing, revives runic scribblings and ancient practices of meaning-making so as to rethink modernity.

3“[T]houghts stir, inspiration stalks us/through gloom”: the primary principle or archè causing thoughts to stir is less the glum sight of the urban waste land than the potential for heretical thinking occasioned by the orgy of destruction. The latter unavoidably startles the spirit out of its lethargy: “unaware, Spirit announces the Presence” (3). Fueling the ec-static process of writing, devastation raises a capitalized Spirit from the dead. In other words, annihilation nurtures ontological awareness, arouses mystical intuition, spurs thought and ushers in Thoth. Yet H.D. runs a risk in reawakening the repressed “dimension of Spirit, with that troublesome, rebarbative capital letter,” as Michael Palmer puts it in reference to Duncan’s own use of the occult.11 In Trilogy, H.D.’s yearning “after strange gods” (Eliot) has a strong subversive power as it enables her to fight against moral dogma and religious orthodoxy: “boasting, intrusion of strained/inappropriate allusion, //illusion of lost-gods, daemons; /gambler with eternity” (43). Thus in the opening fragment, “ruin opens” onto a repressed, forgotten polytheistic world; “rune” is released by the near homophone “ruin” as a paronomastic presence or sonic double haunting the wor (l) d, as its soul is hatched and embarks on a metempsychosis. New meaning is produced by the play of signifiers, when words are broken down into literal fragments, causing phonemes and graphemes to collide. Monuments only become runes when in ruins, once they are fissured and thus turned into barely legible or understandable yet visible, potentially meaningful “jottings” (42). Like words’ poetic space, they start making sense.

4Amidst the ru(i)n(e) s of war, H.D. cerebrates the shattering of surface and unity, of monumental, monolithic meaning and monist thought: “illusion, reversion of old values, /oneness lost, madness” (41). What fascinates the poet is not the language of war, the rhetoric of rupture of the Vorticists and the praise of speed, technology and violence of the Italian Futurists. Instead, she values the war in language, the tension derived from multiplicity in unity (“mind dispersed”), the infinite pressure in/of language to think and rethink the world:

the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone
is yours if you surrender
sterile logic, trivial reason;
so mind dispersed, dared occult lore, (40)

5Therefore H.D. wages battle on two fronts; against closed, rationalist thought ( “sterile logic, trivial reason”), deemed incapable of spiritual risk-taking or gambling ( “dare, seek, seek further, dare more,” 40), unable to throw the dice in Mallarmean fashion, or, to reverse the famous Keatsian definition of negative capability, “when a man is “incapable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Selected Letters, 41-42); and against monotheistic orthodoxy, Christian dogma, sectarian faith, which she regards as symptomatic of a similar spiritual failure, a lack of appetite or “wistfulness” (Trilogy, 42), yet this time underwritten by canonical texts and doctrinal beliefs, in short by unwittingly dogmatic truth. Monuments, in that regard, seem hardly apt responses to divine intuitions. Throughout “Tribute to the Angels,” H.D. denounces the incongruity of monumental materialism used to corroborate faith:

To Uriel, no shrine, no temple
where the red-death fell,
no image by the city-gate,
no torch to shine across the water,
no new fane in the market-place (70)

6 Instead, H.D. wants to “correlate faith with faith.” (54) Far from deploring the absence of cult places devoted to ethereal beings ( “there is no shrine, no temple//in the city for that other, Uriel,” 79; “For Uriel, no temple,” 81), the recurring negative theology of spirits—defined as what is not represented or materialized in official theological culture ( “no temple,” “no image,” etc.)—is a reminder of the indestructibility of intangible, spiritual life. Beyond that, it is an affirmation of life.

7These lines echo the harsh critical debate between T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the latter also confronting Williams, Joyce, etc.) regarding the divisive question of faith, and what Pound ironically calls the various “district “ss of the aether”.12 In “Religio or, the Child’s Guide to Knowledge” (1918), Pound outlines his pagan, Neo-Platonic vision of the gods: “A god is an eternal state of mind.”13 He opposes the sepulchral nature of the Eliotian religious and literary canon to the “live paideuma” of his critical writings14 and to the “live tradition” of The Cantos: “To have gathered from the air a live tradition/or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame/This is not vanity.”15 Like H.D., Pound values the Eleusinian mysteries and a polytheistic Weltanschauung, regarding forms of “Christianity or monotheism” as nothing more than “an hypothesis agreeable to certain types of very lazy mind too weak to bear an uncertainty or to remain in ‘uncertainty. ’”16 In his “Credo” (1930), a sardonic reply to Eliot who had asked him to elucidate what he believed, Pound wryly quips: “Given the material means I would replace the statue of Venus on the cliffs of Terracina. I would erect a temple to Artemis in Park Lane. I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.”17 In the end, for Pound, “ttradition inheres in the images of the gods and gets lost in dogmatic definitions. History is recorded in monuments, and that is why they get destroyed.”18 Echoing the inaugural fragment’s “Apocryphal fire,” (4) in The Flowering of the Rod, H.D.’s own Book of Revelations ( “doom, doom to city-gates”), prophetic utterances announcing apocalyptic destruction abound:

It is no madness to say
you will fall, you great cities,
(now the cities lie broken);
it is not tragedy, prophecy (126)

8Image, in Pound’s statement, should be understood in its Imagist sense, where the poet posits that the poetic—here the numinous—can only be glimpsed in a “radiant node,” in a “complex” of thoughts or the “cluster” of a poetic equation.19 Yet as H.D. insists, the poetic image of the Deity or deities has nothing to do with pseudo-mimetic, cultic paraphernalia: “The Christos-image/is most difficult to disentangle//from its art-craft junk-shop/ paint-and-plaster medieval jumble//of pain-worship and death-symbol.” (27) H.D.’s own combination of iconoclasm and syncretism leads her to a critique of Christian idols and memorials as they testify to what she perceives as the death of creative— “heretical”—spiritual life: “We have had too much consecration, /too little affirmation, //too much: but this, this, this/has been proved heretical.” (53) Heresy, in that regard, enables a paradoxical desacralisation of theology and Holy Writ through a poetics of the divine, of infinity, avoiding the “search for finite/definition of the infinite” (42).20

Thoth’s Ghost

Wistfulness, exaltation,
a pure core of burning cerebration, (42)

9In keeping with H.D.’s paronomastic strategies, the poem conjures up the acoustic image of celebration, called for by “exaltation” (elevation) foregrounded on line end immediately above it. Yet the unsounded celebration (of poetry, of things through naming) gives way to “cerebration,” which undoubtedly affirms the poem as an instrument of thought/Thoth. This single-letter difference means a world of difference, as it points to two radically opposed poetic visions. The invisible, silent shift partakes of what we could call a grammhauntology at work in the poem, i. e. a combination of ontological, hauntological/spectral, and grammatological principles.21 Trilogy is riddled with actual meaningful shifts, highlighting minimal graphemic and/or phonemic differences, such as “frame” / “flame” in the inaugural fragment, “ruin” / “rune” straddling the first and second, “shell” / “spell” in the fourth, with further echoes and incremental metamorphoses across the entire triptych and beyond. Some of these aural procedures have been amply analyzed, namely by Morris in her detailed study of what H.D. calls the “whirr” of words, which she analyzes in terms of “phonotexts,” “echonomics” and “a/orality” after Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext and Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word.22 Further examples of grammhauntology are to be found in crypto-, ana- and paragrammatic deployments of words within words, of the embedded here-in-there (there), hearing there, her-in-here, here and there or process of “coinherence”.23

10H.D. develops a poetic language “that is a field folded,” “whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words”.24 Thus in Trilogy “host” unmistakably emerges as a host of “ghost,” although “host” (whose etymological meaning is enemy, stranger) is used but once in the line “But Simon the host thought” (122), whereas (holy) ghosts proliferate. It is echoed in Helen’s opening fragment:

Do not despair, the hosts
surging beneath the Walls,
(no more than I) are ghosts; (Helen in Egypt, 1)

11Equally, and just as meaningfully, the word “Word” haunts the proverbial “Sword” (Trilogy, 17), thereby further underscoring the primacy of “the script or Scripture, the Holy Writ or Word” over the sword (Tribute to Freud, 36). Yet in the case at hand (celebration/cerebration), the shift is purely virtual; it hovers over the word as a phonemic ghost engendered by the semantic and sonic conflation of “exaltation” / “cerebration,” also possibly instigated by our cultural expectations (the word cerebration being scarcely used). The spectral celebration—a cliché about poetry’s essence and assumed reactivation of adamic language (Benjamin)—only occurs mentally, as pure cerebration, aural m (ir) age. In an unseen “blizzard of marks” (Carson xi), through a subatomic poetic blitz, “Mage,” “mirage,” and “myrrh” merge into a spectral “myrrh-age” (the poem’s ultimate eidolon?), “seen in a dream/by a parched, dying man, lost in the desert.../or a mirage...” (Trilogy, 137), when thought “follows the Mage/in the desert” (29), “He is Mage, /bringing myrrh.” (10)

Thinking through Writing

12H.D.’s archeology of writing thus pervades the poem, which is filled with references to material inscriptions. This inquiry into archaic writings involves a radical exploration of writing itself, i. e. a thorough paragrammatic dissemination of its various roots, namely—scrib ( “scribe,” “scribblings,” “scribbled,” “circumscribed,” “prescribed,” “describe,” “transcribing”), and—script ( “script,” “manuscript”), to which one may add variations on “sign” ( “signs,” “significant,” “insignia”), as well as the lexical field of traces ( “track,” “scratch and mark”). The old writing tools are displayed in fragment nine of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” among the ruins “where poor utensils show/like rare objects in a museum” (4): “Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure” (16). Several passages in Trilogy read like fragments of a poetic treaty on grammatology, the science of writing, concerned with its object from its inception over three thousand years ago in Sumerian Mesopotamia. In English, writing fittingly connotes a process, thus referring to what goes on living long after the death of the scribes. H.D. conceives of writing as the immemorial, ritual art of inscription ( “scrape a palette, /point pen or brush, //prepare papyrus or parchment, /offer incense to Thoth, //the original Ancient-of-days, /Hermes-thrice-great,” 48). Its material meaning is inseparable from its occult force ( “talismans, records or parchments,” 49), from magic and sacred signs ( “as if each scratch and mark/were hieroglyph, a parchment of incredible worth or a mariner’s map,” 164), from the Scriptures ( “in the beginning/was the Word,” 17) and beyond from the scribblings of the scribe’s pictographic art.

13H.D.’s “radical” investigation of writing is far from limited to the physical sense of graphic notation but is loaded with metaphysical implications as well. In H.D.’s palimpsestic poetics, writing is cosubstantial with the erasure of traces (“your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate, /how can you scratch out//indelible ink of the palimpsest/of past misadventure?” 2), where trace should not be understood as Ur-grund or “originary ground” but as mark of radical anteriority.25 “When in the company of the gods,” writes H.D. in the fifth fragment of “Walls,” “never was my mind stirred/to such rapture” (10). Capitalizing “His” as the signal for numinous presence of “a new Master” transcending the multiplicity of deities, H.D. subtly addresses the ontological charge of traces:

His, the track in the sand
from a plum-tree in flower
to a half-open hut-door,
(or track would have been
but wind blows sand-prints from the sand,
whether seen or unseen): (10)

14This phenomenon or apparition partakes of the grammhauntological mode, and not only because it is haunted by the specter of imagism (Pound’s paradigmatic “The footsteps of the cat upon the snow: / (are like) plum-blossoms”; and his oft-quoted “Metro emotion”).26 It does not perform a deciphering of truth, the disclosure or unconcealment of a buried, forgotten entity (a-letheia or truth showing forth out of oblivion). Rather, the poem records a paradoxical mode of presence, where the track is simultaneously there and not there (t/ here); produced in its own vanishing; manifest in its very latency; projected “from within (though apparently from outside)” (Tribute to Freud, 51). The use of the parenthetical places (Presence) “under erasure,” as it points to a disjointed mode of being foregrounding a manifestation of radical otherness, and which “will never present itself in the form of full presence.”27 Mostly concerned with a deconstruction of the concepts of presence and of truth, H.D.’s Trilogy stresses writing as a structure always already inhabited by trace, carrying within itself the track of fundamental otherness. As Morris argues, “H.D.’s originality [...] lies in a radicality in language use that both instigates and carries her thinking”.28 Trilogy is the work of a deeply skeptical poet interrogating dualities, including the voice v. writing dichotomy and the relation between truth and the written word. “Grammhauntology,” then, H.D.’s own brand of poetic enquiry into visual and sonic traces, questions orthodoxies by fashioning a poetics of writing, that is a critique of the written sign, born from and borne by writing. Hence the dizzying spiraling described in fragments 5 and 6 of “Flowering”: “mythical birds—who seek but find no rest//till they drop from the highest point of the spiral/or fall from the innermost centre of the ever-narrowing circle?” (119).

15Through her incantation to Isis, H.D. wonders what the stylus performs, when in the gesture of erasure, crossing out or over-writing by a stroke of the pen, it simultaneously deletes and leaves legible the inscriptions in the psyche. Along with its metaphorical avatars “the Sceptre/the rod of power” or “Caduceus,” the stylus points to the will to truth, a drive for knowledge linked with the phallocentric urge to appropriate and conquer. In “The Flowering of the Rod” H.D. writes off this “eternal urge” to pinpoint the truth, derides “the desire to equilibrate/the eternal variant;” she favors “the will to enjoy, the will to live, //not merely the will to endure, /the will to flight, the will to achievement” (119). With increasing pressure throughout her long poem, H.D. voices her suspicion of the value of truth and her mistrust of narrowly defined Christian metaphysics. She does so namely by liberating the signifiers from their ties to a fantasized primary signified. Thus Mary’s fabled origin becomes “a word most bitter, marah,” a fake etymology, in section 8 of “Tribute to the Angels.” Verbal alchemy does not entail purification or fusion, but the deployment of a multilingual chain of signifiers in lieu of diachronic derivation: “mer, mere, mère, mater, Maia, Mary” (71) provides a sound-propelled exploration of language which critiques the search for truth when it does not recognize its constitutive incompletability.

16As Trilogy unfolds, truth gradually forsakes its implicit definition as a message to be unraveled or deciphered in signs. In Flowering, Kaspar is portrayed as a helpless hermeneus or interpreter of signs. He is the one “who saw as in a mirror,” and who “knew the old tradition, the old, old legend,” yet the poem leads to the final irony: “no one would know exactly//how it happened, /least of all Kaspar” (fragments 28 to 40). Indeed H.D.’s investigation of hermeneutics leads to the disclosure of truth as perpetually elusive and only conjured up by a will to believe ( “a sort of spiritual optical-illusion,” 165). The quest for truth, as criticized by H.D. in her rewriting of biblical myth namely through the figures of Kaspar and Mary Magdalene, is predicated upon a process of incessant, “bewildering” and “bedeviling” deciphering. Kaspar’s constant reinterpreting through sign-chains and identifications ultimately leads to the need for new means of knowing. In conclusion, Trilogy evolves from rather narrowly-defined faith in grammatology, the study of script ( “so let us search the old highways//for the true-rune, the right-spell, /recover old values,” 2), to “grammhauntology,” a writing practice which liberates anagrams, cryptograms, paragrams, not through a veneration of the scripted sign but through the sonic patterns relaying and relating the written words.