The Astral H.D. by Robinson Matte

Author:Robinson, Matte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

The other presence: “Grove of Academe” and “Aegina”

Hermetic Definition reconfigures the pine cone, token from another dimension in “Aegina,” as the key to union in another dimension, a tool more powerful than wine or salt. The pine cone is held in the hand of the Celestial Mother, feminine aspect of the divinity, in the portals of Notre Dame (Ombre 191). The abrupt shift in locations is triggered by the presence of the “hachish supérieur,” ingredient of the sabbat “pommade” used to induce astral travel to the meeting in a wooded grove. The second part of the long poem, “Grove of Academe,” is a shift of dimension, back in time to Aegina, where she first picked up the pine cone. The story “Aegina” does not relate what happened when she lost consciousness, only that the pine cone is the token she brought back, to be supplemented by a piece of pumice from the island. “Grove of Academe,” after an encounter with “this other,” reconstructs the experience on the island, explains the “presence” there, and fills in what happened when she picked up the pine cone.

“Grove of Academe” returns to Aegina, finding “this other” to be the identity of the “Presence” in the Aegina temple (22), distinct from the two other figures called “presence” in the first part. The presence in the grove is Saint-John Perse (at least in one sense), a poetic semblable of H.D.’s, the man who caught her when she fell at the medal ceremony, a poet who writes of the sea and roses. This section is quite a different dimension from the room with the two presences, Asmodel and then Azrael. The Grove of Academe is its own place: a meeting-place. H.D. has found a poet, her “own age” (22), who writes mysterious verses about the sea, roses, and rose gardens, but his path is not at all like hers, with its “initiations, adepts, neophytes/masters and imperators”; he has no “angels’ names, nor right and wrong,/nor intricate sentiers [paths]” (24). The speaker’s address to this “Presence” details their difference, their otherness from one another, while at the same time asserting an identity or definition for H.D. and her writing. Her work is, unlike his, filled with paths between sephiroth, angel invocation, initiations, and adepts. Their meeting is “nothing visionary/nor ecstatic … only recognition” (25). This is an unusual meeting to be recorded in H.D.’s work—an ordinary, earth-plane meeting—and it even seems to surprise the speaker. This grove is the counterpart to the multidimensional space opened up in “Red Rose and a Beggar,” the opposite pole. At first, the poem consisted of these two poles, and then Lionel Durand died, and a third, smaller part was added, forming a trilogy.

The mature poet, the peer, the “other,” represents a path she did not take, but that does not mean that her path was wrong: “what I wrote was right then,/auguries, hermetic definition” (26), and yet now there is another paradigm, another truth. She “would have left initiates” for “a red rose and a beggar” (26), but she did not.

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