Hilda Doolittle - Asphodel

“She’s like a great yellow rose though I don’t believe I am in love with her—” “Wh-aat?” “I mean the Correggio there is like a — like a — I mean I don’t think if I were the faun I would be in love with — in love with—” “What’s all this talk of being in love with, silly?” “I was talking to Clara. She has the Baedeker. Go look it out for yourself. It’s written anyhow on the bottom. Of the picture. Zeus and Antiope. I said I didn’t think I would be in love with the sleeping lady. She’s too fat yet there is something adorable (one feels there might be) in the soles of her feet and the underside of her elbow that doesn’t show. But she doesn’t look like—” “Don’t talk about pictures this way. Showing off. What’s the matter with you? Do you want lunch? Are you drunk simply? Why can’t you take things peaceably? This is only the Louvre.” “Fayne. . go away. Leave me alone to find it—” “Find what, impressionable?” “Its — whatever it — is—”

O let me alone. God. God. This is worse than Cathedrals. Let me alone. Let me find for myself. Get away. Get lost. People going away and the Louvre getting empty. Cool. Long cold galleries and downstairs the marbles like ice, cut like ice, holding something in their shapes that people didn’t see, couldn’t see or they would go mad with it. Not always the most beautiful things, slid thus through the breasts of the Venus de Milo from the bench in the corner (the red plush bench, shabby against the wall) showed like two thin knife edges, edges of the crescent moon. The Venus de Milo was a little heavy but if you prowled and prowled and waited for different days, little effects of shadow and light and half light caught you; depending on how empty or how full the room was, you got caught by something. That was the answer to prayer. Prayer was asking, asking. Prayer was asking for something that was so terrible and so necessary that you had no words to ask for it. When you found the words, the prayer was already a faded thing. A prayer with words was like a plucked flower. Prayer without words was growing deep, deep in the ground, in the heart of everything. If you found words for your prayer, you had already separated your prayer from the thing you prayed to. Prayer, sitting on the shabby little bench in the corner listening to the guide explaining to the party from Kansas, wasn’t in words. The guide was saying “and here ladies and gentlemen in the glass case at the left” (he never varied his formula) “you have the authentic fragment of the foot, the bit of the hand and the arm and the lost apple.” How do you know it is an apple, how can you tell it is her hand or her foot? You can’t but nobody ever asked such simple questions. They accepted the dogma as good presbyterians, good methodists, good nonconformists or even good catholics have a way of doing without question, without grace or without bickering. How did they come to do it? Religion of love-of-beauty wasn’t this thing. But still they wanted something, looked for something. O God don’t let me pity them, looking all lost towards a Cook’s Guide for beauty. Let me not despise or pity nor patronize them for your ways are inscrutable and when you led the fingers of Phidias along those two crescents, you already had my hands in yours. I can’t put it into words. You know what I’m saying. Before Phidias was, I am. Long ago when you struck white lightning from marble you had some of us already with you. No. I didn’t ever forget. Don’t let me go mad with this my first discovery. But I will — I will — I will go mad unless I go upstairs and look at Leonardo, look at Correggio, look at Fra Angelico. They are the most blatant shams. They are a curtain hiding reality.

Is Christianity then that? Is Christ the soft mist, the blue smoke of altar incense hiding the beauty of the thing itself? Is Christianity then that, at its best, a curtain, woven of most delicate stuffs to hide reality, the white flame that is Delphi, that is Athens?

O God, they don’t even know about it. Not even the Rabbs. Fayne doesn’t really know. Fayne reads Dante and thinks it’s real when it is a circle upon circle to numb the senses, like light reflected from bright mirrors that deflects, that blinds one’s eyes with its dazzle but that really hides the image. The image of truth, of beauty is in this marble bowl forever. . a Grecian urn. Where is he, Keats of that somewhat washed out ode? Let me get to him. Hands in yours, Phidias’ and mine. . You held our fingers in yours. We are your fingers. Athene’s hands wove, wove and she was the goddess of the artisan. Sculpture. Let me creep along your corridors. O God. If only I could come here at night when it’s empty and speak with you. . “Clara, yes, certainly. I was sitting downstairs to keep cool. All these pictures excite one somehow. How funny that just this year the Mona Lisa should be stolen. But there’s that other one, you know, Madonna of the Rocks, Pater wrote about it, didn’t he? No, I don’t mean ‘her eye-lids are a little weary’ but about the background being like light reflected from under sea. A phrase like that reveals things. . Napoleon’s watches? can’t we do them to-morrow?” Lady of the sea. Lady of the ship’s prow rising from the sea. Rose drips from wings spread rose wise, catching the sun in wings that spread out above a glacial thunder cloud riven with white hail. You stand with spread wings dropping honey-coloured petals down to us, far, far below you and Samothrace itself is here at the top of the steps—“ this ladies and gentlemen, is the famous winged Victory”—dropping petals alike on the just and the unjust. The sun shines alike, the rain falls alike, the wings of Samothracian Nike spread alike over the just and the unjust, the seeing and the not-seeing and the almost seeing and the just not seeing. Samothrace is a small island set like a honey-coloured lump of amber in a lapis sea. Honey coloured rock that was riven to mould wings, feathers—“you will see ladies and gentlemen that the later effect of the drapery arrangement—” and the wind blowing, blowing straight from Asia, straight from Europe, you standing between, a sort of breakwater for the East and West. Let me stand between, Greeks of the islands. Mystery made formula. Samothrace a formula of God. God making islands and giving the islands to Greeks before Phidias was Greeks are and they are and will be. You can’t change a static formula. “The crown jewels are in the last room, madame to the right but let me assure you—” Going on and on. Jewels. King’s jewels and Louis the something or other with gems weighing down an empty head and no chin. Bourbon type with no chin, cold like fishes, lecherous. With little boudoirs painted with numberless pink ladies, with love from the air dropping blue streamers with pin-cushion pink rosettes of roses. That’s art. French art. “French art is best represented by this Angelus of Millet.” “French art in its essence this Fragonard, this Watteau—” Air come to light. Light come to garments fluttering in fragrance from Cythera. The breeze from Cythera (see Walter Pater) and Fragonard and Watteau and the other one, Lancret. Small world of mirrors and pinks in glasses with the stems showing. France was pinks in tumblers with the stems showing, hardy fragrance, France. Oeillets trois sous la botte and there were carts of cherries outside along the narrow crooked roofed-over little streets of the left bank. Old brocades and chairs in windows and china that would break if you so much as breathed on the window pane. Rabbits in cages under a counter chewing lupin, grass, thick tufts of green green grass, the greenest of grass under a counter piled high with purple cabbages and with blue-purple artichokes and with asparagus and with eggs in baskets neatly fitted like precious lumps of alabaster. Eggs taking on a new significance. Raspberries different, seen differently as things may seem different seen through clear glass. Things in Paris looked clear and different and a little magical with qualities defined (was that art simply, something in the air?) as if seen through a clear slightly magnifying bit of crystal. Everything a little different, was it something in the air? Climates made people. They did understand. Something in the air in spite of the noise, the raucous screams, the neglect and unsavouriness of certain streets, certain milieux. Yet different. A woman in a poor shop with a cap flung sideways brought back all the Revolution. . “not that. No, don’t let’s go to the Bastille. Clara do have some more raspberries. What makes them taste like the way pot-pourri ought to smell and doesn’t.”. . “Where are we going this afternoon?” “There’s that little Cluny Museum everyone talked about.” “Everyone. Who’s everyone?” Yes who was everyone? Hermione propped an elbow on the table edge. Who was everyone? “Can’t we have some of that black, black coffee. I feel — sleepy.” “Bored?” “No. God no. Shut up. Dead beat.” Voices all about. Then voices all going. Then almost gone and all the tables that had been crowded on the pavement empty. “Let’s have the coffee outside. Everyone’s gone now. Café spécial. Yes. We must have it hot, strong.” “You drink too much black coffee. Abuse yourself—” “O God. Really Clara—” “Wh-aaat?” “O, I don’t know what you said. No. It wasn’t funny. I didn’t mean to be rude. But I do. I am. I don’t know what I mean. No. I don’t. Fayne does.” “Does what? What does Paul do?” “ Abuses one’s confi— den— ces.” “Does she?” “Terribly. I told her par exemple that I hated statues but that she was to be sure not to tell you.” “O. She didn’t.” “O she did. Don’t stand up for her Clara. She did tell you. I could see by the way you shoved that Victory down my throat. Everybody’s Victory in cheap bronze, in tobacco shops, in people’s libraries, everywhere. A winged Victory on the mantel piece, height of bathos.” “You mustn’t talk that way—” “There you go. All for the proprietors. Like telling me not to be irreligious at Rouen. Religion. Bah—” God. God. God. God. God. Don’t let any demon wipe away Paris. Paris is written in clear colours, as if someone (you?) painted in light from coloured glass. Don’t let it go. Paris is a state of mind like what happens to one’s mind seeing unexpectedly a clear tumbler with flower stems on your dressing table. Lighting the candles and finding the flowers, one magnolia, a flat water lily in a flat dish. Who put it there? Did Eugenia put it there? O good little old Eugenia coming to Paris on her honey -moon. Such a good little Eugenia with a bustle and her hair caught with a diamond arrow (I have the picture somewhere) and seeing all these things, the Bastille even. Good little Eugenia getting presents, little souvenirs for everyone. I’m not good. .