[Curtis Gale Weeks]

From
TRIBUTE TO THE ANGELS, Pt. 2 of Trilogy

Invisible, indivisible Spirit,
how is it you come so near,
how is it that we dare
approach the high-alter?
we crossed the charred portico,
passed through a frame--doorless--
entered a shrine; like a ghost,
we entered a house through a wall;
then still not knowing
whether (like the wall)
we were there or not there,
we saw the tree flowering;
it was an ordinary tree
in an old garden-square.

H.D. [Hilda Doolittle, London, 1944]

An excerpt from Science and the Mythopoeic Mind: The Case of H.D., Adalaide Morris, published in <u>Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science</u>; editor, N. Katherine Hayles, 1991:

Scientists have developed several ways of representing the rich coherence of chaotic phenomena. The most haunting of these is the "strange attractor," an odd variety of a familiar scientific abstraction. An "attractor" is any point in an orbit that seems to pull the system toward it. Classical science recognized two kinds of attractors--fixed points and limit cycles--both of which can be illustrated by the orderly behavior of pendulums. Fixed-point attractors are characteristic of systems whose behavior reaches a steady state, like free-swinging pendulums that eventually stop at the midpoint of their arc; limit cycle attractors are characteristic of systems that repeat themselves continuously, like motor-driven pendulums that oscillate from one side of an arc to the other. Both fixed-point and limit-cycle attractors are simple and predictable; neither is "strange."

Strange attractors occur in the orderly disorder of chaos and are more complicated and difficult to understand. A pendulum's swing depends on only two variables, velocity and momentum, and can thus be represented on a two-dimensional graph, but chaotic data like stock-market prices or weather shifts depend on a vast number of variables and are therefore best charted in what physicists call "phase space." Phase space can have as many dimensions as a system has variables: in it the state of a system at any given moment is represented as a point that moves as the system shifts, tracing a continuous trajectory across a computer screen. What phase space diagrams show is that chaos too has an "attractor," a pattern that is neither a fixed point nor a limit cycle but an orbit that always stays within certain bounds without ever crossing over or repeating itself.

"Strange attractors" are the forest that surrounds...fixed points and limit cycles: they are everywhere and everything else. Whether the data charted in phase space come from measles epidemics or lynx trapping, whether it spans a week or a month or a millennium, whether it is local or global, the same trajectory appears again and again: a line that never doubles over itself loops round and round the computer screen in an infinitely deep and complex demonstration of the fine structure that constrains what we have thought of as disorder. The most famous strange attractor is a pattern first discerned in a phase space picture the meteorologist Edward Lorenz made from a set of nonlinear equations for the chaotic rotation of heated fluid. Like all strange attractors, its trajectory is a continuous path of infinite complexity that never runs off the page and yet never exactly replicates itself. The shape it traces is a shape H.D. returned to again and again in her writings...

The coincidence between H.D.'s mythopoeic mind and the science of chaos offers rich and resonant access to aspects of her work that have been difficult to capture through conventional literary analysis. One particularly powerful demonstration of the overlap is the cascade of images that structures H.D.'s long poem Trilogy [cites from Trilogy, New York: New Directions, 1973]. Written in London amidst the turbulence of World War II, this is a poem about forms in motion: in it air thickens, wind tears, rain falls, bombs descend, and roofs tumble into ruins. Like the chaos theorists to come, the poet searches the borderland between order and disorder for the pattern that pulls all else toward it, a pattern that prevails across scales, through time and over space, a pattern whose every recurrence mixes characteristics that are "the same--different--the same attributes,/ different yet the same as before" (105). The poem, though lyrical, is presented as the result of "research" and constructed hypotactically using connectives like "so," "moreover," "but," "however," and "for example": (51, 19, 54). Like Lorenz who sought the patterns that structure atmospheric turbulence, H.D. aimed to discover the "true-rune[s]" which she believed to be "indelibly stamped / on the atmosphere somewhere,// forever" (5, 17).

Like Lorenz's attractor, the shape H.D. traces in her poem is a looping spiral which is bounded and therefore finite but also unending and therefore, mysteriously, infinite. The pattern appears again and again in a pulsing of hollow spaces within which degeneration turns into regeneration. The mollusc flutters its fans shut and open, the worm spins a shroud, the heart contracts and expands: from the first comes a pearl; from the second a butterfly; from the third, mysteriously, a "tree / whose roots bind the heart-husk // to earth" (8, 53, 35). A tree in a bombed courtyard, "burnt and stricken to the heart" (82), bursts suddenly into bloom; the city, fallen to ruins, becomes a rune of regeneration (3-4). The germ of new life comes from outside the system and throws it into turbulence. Sand cast into the mollusc shell, a grain cast into the heart, a bomb cast into the city, the philosopher's stone cast into a crucible, a seed cast into the womb: each occurrence propels the system from steadiness through turbulence into richly reorganized life. As in a strange attractor, so in the poem there is no end to the loop: the mummified pharoah [sic] in the ruined tomb of the poem's opening becomes the swaddled infant from the womb at its close, and the beginning, which had seemed to be an end, turns into an end which is also a beginning.

Like many chaotic patterns, H.D.'s rune is self-embedded: it repeats itself on finer and finer scales not only in the world but also within the poem. From its largest narrative, argumentative, and imagistic structures through the smallest details of its rhythm and phrasing, every level of Trilogy repeats the cycle of disturbance, disintegration, and reintegration. Even individual words are shattered and reconstituted so that "here" emerges from "there" (3), "mother" from "smother" (30), "word" from "sword" (18), and "ember" from "dismembered" (4). Like all chaotic patterns, the patterns in H.D.'s poem do not replicate each other exactly, but neither are they a jumble. They have a disorderly order that emerges slowly but surely, so slowly and so surely that the reader experiences something like the eerie inevitability one observer remembers feeling when he first watched a strange attractor form on the computer screen: the pattern "appears," he tells us, "like a ghost out of the mist. New points scatter so randomly across the screen that it seems incredible that any structure is there, let alone a structure so intricate and fine" (James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987). What is crucial to remember, what differentiates this pattern from ornament [is that] these intricate structures are not decorations but discoveries, laws discerned by the mythopoeic imagination.

[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 05, 2002).]