Hilda Doolittle - Tribute to Freud

So again I can say the Professor was not always right. That is, yes, he was always right in his judgments, but my form of rightness, my intuition, sometimes functioned by the split-second (that makes all the difference in spiritual time-computations) the quicker. I was swifter in some intuitive instances, and sometimes a small tendril of a root from that great common Tree of Knowledge went deeper into the sub-soil. His were the great giant roots of that tree, but mine, with hair-like almost invisible feelers, sometimes quivered a warning or resolved a problem, as for instance at the impact of that word stranger. “We’ll show him,” retorts the invisible intuitive rootlet; and, without forming the thought, the words “love me, love my dog” are there to prompt me. “He will see whether or not I am indifferent,” my emotion snaps back, though not in words. “If he is so wise, so clever,” the smallest possible sub-soil rootlet gives its message, “you show him that you too are wise, are clever. Show him that you have ways of finding out things about people, other than looking at their mere outward ordinary appearance.” My intuition challenges the Professor, though not in words. That intuition cannot really be translated into words, but if it could be it would go, roughly, something like this: “Why should I look at you? You are contained in the things you love, and if you accuse me of looking at the things in the room before looking at you, well, I will go on looking at the things in the room. One of them is this little golden dog. She snaps, does she? You call me a stranger, do you? Well, I will show you two things: one, I am not a stranger; two, even if I were, two seconds ago, I am now no longer one. And moreover I never was a stranger to this little golden Yofi.”

The wordless challenge goes on, “You are a very great man. I am overwhelmed with embarrassment, I am shy and frightened and gauche as an over-grown school-girl. But listen. You are a man. Yofi is a dog. I am a woman. If this dog and this woman “take” to one another, it will prove that beyond your caustic implied criticism — if criticism it is — there is another region of cause and effect, another region of question and answer.” Undoubtedly, the Professor took an important clue from the first reaction of a new analysand or patient. I was, as it happened, not prepared for this. It would have been worse for me if I had been.

“By chance or intention,” I started these notes on September 19th. Consulting my “Mysteries of the Ancients” calendar, I find Dr. W. B. Crow has assigned this date to “Thoth, Egyptian form of Mercury. Bearer of the Scales of Justice. St. Januarius.” And we know of Janus, the old Roman guardian of gates and doors, patron of the month of January which was sacred to him, with all “beginnings.”

Janus faced two ways, as doors and gates opened and shut. Here in this room, we had our exits and our entrances. I have noted too, the four sides of the room, and touched on the problem of the fourth dimensional: the “additional dimension attributed to space by a hypothetical speculation” is the somewhat comic dictionary definition. Old Janus was guardian of the seasons too, that time-sequence of the four quarters of the year. Thoth was the original measurer, the Egyptian prototype of the later Greek Hermes. I made the connecting link with the still later Roman Mercury, our Flying Dutchman.

For myself, there was a story I loved; I had completely “forgotten” it; now it is suddenly recalled. The story was about an old light-house keeper called Captain January and a shipwrecked child.

We have only just begun our researches, our “studies,” the old Professor and I.

This is only a beginning but I learned recently (again from Dr. Crow) that “the seal of the Hippocratic University bears the Tau-cross, entwined with the serpent — exactly the figure used by early Christian artists to represent the serpent which Moses lifted up in the wilderness.” My serpent-and-thistle motive obviously bears some hidden relation to this.

It was Asklepios of the Greeks who was called the blameless physician. He was the son of the sun, Phoebos Apollo, and music and medicine were alike sacred to this source of light. This half-man, half-god (Fate decreed) went a little too far when he began actually to raise the dead. He was blasted by the thunder-bolt of an avenging deity, but Apollo, over-riding his father’s anger, placed Asklepios among the stars. Our Professor stood this side of the portal. He did not pretend to bring back the dead who had already crossed the threshold. But he raised from dead hearts and stricken minds and maladjusted bodies a host of living children.

One of these children was called Mignon. Not my name certainly. It is true I was small for my age, mignonne; but I was not, they said, pretty and I was not, it was very easy to see, quaint and quick and clever like my brother. My brother? Am I my brother’s keeper? It appears so. A great many of these brothers fell on the fields of France, in that first war. A great many have fallen since. Numberless poised, disciplined, and valiant young winged Mercuries have fallen from the air, to join the great host of the dead. Leader of the Dead? That was Hermes of the Greeks who took the attribute from Thoth of the Egyptians. The T or Tau-cross became caduceus with twined serpents, again corresponding to the T or Tau-cross that Moses lifted in the desert.

Am I my brother’s keeper? So far as my undisciplined thoughts permit me. . and further than my disciplined ones can take me. For the Professor was not always right. He did not know — or did he? — that I looked at the things in his room before I looked at him; for I knew the things in his room were symbols of Eternity and contained him then, as Eternity contains him now.

This old Janus, this beloved light-house keeper, old Captain January, shut the door on transcendental speculations or at least transferred this occult or hidden symbolism to the occult or hidden regions of the personal reactions, dreams, thought associations or thought “transferences” of the individual human mind. It was the human individual that concerned him, its individual reactions to the problems of every-day, the relation of the child to itsenvironment, its friends, its teachers, above all its parents. As to what happened, after this life was over. . we as individuals, we as members of one race, one brotherhood of body that contained many different, individual branches, had profited so little by the illuminating teaching of the Master who gave his name to our present era, that it was well for a Prophet, in the old tradition of Israel, to arise, to slam the door on visions of the future, of the after-life, to stand himself like the Roman Centurion before the gate at Pompeii who did not move from his station before the gateway since he received no orders to do so, and who stood for later generations to wonder at, embalmed in hardened lava, preserved in the very fire and ashes that had destroyed him.

“At least, they have not burnt me at the stake.” Did the Professor say that of himself or did someone else say it of him? I think he himself said it. But it was a near-miss. . even literally. . and last night, here in London, there were the familiar siren-shrieks, the alerts, each followed by its even more ear-piercing and soul-shattering “all-clear,” which coming as a sort of aftermath or after-birth of the actual terror is the more devastating. Released from the threat of actual danger, we have time to think about it. And the “alerts” and the “all-clears” are punctuated by sound of near or far explosions, at three in the morning, after seven and at lesser intervals. . the war is not yet over. Eros and Death, those two were the chief subjects — in fact, the only subjects — of the Professor’s eternal preoccupation. They are still gripped, struggling in the deadlock. Hercules struggled with Death and is still struggling. But the Professor himself proclaimed the Herculean power of Eros and we know that it was written from the beginning that Love is stronger than Death.