Lindy Hough

Psyche

North Atlantic Books, 1974
ISBN 0-913028-24-X $7.95
Cover and title art by Peter Ruddick
Logo page designed for North Atlantic Books by Nicholas Dean
Published in Plainfield, Vermont 1977

Psyche is a long narrative poem based on interaction with two sources: the structure and content of H.D.’s Helen In Egypt, and Eric Neumann’s Jungian retelling of the myth of Psyche in Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Psyche (1956).

H.D. (born in 1886) was one of architects of Imagism, friend of Ezra Pound and life-long companion of Bryher. The Imagists held that the poet should observe three major principles: direct treatment of the subject, allowing no word that was not essential to the presentation, and following the musical phrase rather than strict regularity in rhythms.

“Her work is sensuous and tough, and much of its strength arises from her struggle to refuse roles, both of life and feeling, commonly assigned to women.”

—Robert Kelly, 1974

In Psyche, Lindy Hough weaves in six “Books” a view of the individual caught against time in among the players of an embattled college in a tiny Vermont town. The narrator Psyche moves in dream-time through life in the small Vermont village at the foot of the college, not understanding how the men she loves could be so ceaselessly involved in the politics of the tiny experimental college (based on Goddard College); regarding objects and skeletal systems. She is cocky and outspoken, wrestling with love, desire, action, examining contemporary life in the early1970’s. Psyche’s gaze catches the portrayals of women in Mario Puzo’s fiction, David Bowie and the character of Ziggy Stardust, attitudes towards love held by men, a mysterious lover who dances closer and away; and all the projections, shadows, and dark sides of Jungian psychology. What is fidelity? What is monogamy? Amid children, traveling, moving around, watching the battlements of the college and the village in the same way Helen observed Achilles at war, walking on the walls of Troy, appraising the war machine.

The psychic and artistic work, whether in Jungian psychology or the poetics of H.D., freed consciousness by reassembling memories and cultural representations filtering reason and driving imagination. Different narrative modes are employed in Hough’s Psyche: a collaborative poem occupies parts 9 and 10 of Book V; the last Book VI opens with a dialogue between the lover, Eros, and Psyche. As in Helen In Egypt, with its 160 sequences of three-line stanzas , with each poem varying from four to thirteen stanzas, the poem breathes as a full single thought down the page, spilling from the italicized narrative initial voice of Psyche, who introduces the action and movement, asking questions, positing action, laying out the scene:

Or introducing “Those Webs That Attach to the Sky,” a poem about David Bowie, the participant observor Psyche in italics maps action:

Psyche sat right down and wrote this poem which was a song
in her head without any music for it to go to.

The modernist tone of Psyche is also somewhat influenced by Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, since it was written during and after a stay at Kent State University in the spring of 1974 when Hough and Richard Grossinger spent time with Ed and Jenny Dorn, and their host at Kent State, Robert Bertholf. Psyche is contemporary, ribald, feminist in it’s sauciness and intention, but infused with a dedication to artistic process (the tasks of Apuleius’ myth in The Golden Ass).

Excerpts:

Book IV, [10] Psyche thinks, I will not say the word woman because that changes it. A whole set of sociological responses starts cluttering away in your mind. But, "La Religiuse". Is it true that 1770 was this stringent, this many constraints. She realizes that that is not the point: that by watching this over- stringent set of limitations in Diderot's France, we can see by analogy the binds we are in, that our mothers were also in, all the way back. You will be hated & stoned. Butchered and beaten. Tossed out of town. Your shoes will always be wet. You will careen from wall to wall. Although the law will accord your environs will not & though all the courts grant your freedom you will live continually among sticks & weeds, not daring to summon higher powers which seem to have abandon you for fear of reprisal below if God should intercede... It will become clear that justice is not enough, other humans' inability to use you and others for anything but pawns will untie you make of you a scattered object rolling down steep hills with the rain No birthright except in existence, No acceptance except by hatred. You understand that no where do you fit in except with death, imagine lying down with him as lying with a priest, or Satan. And yet he is a cool, sweet, relief, or blindly, the only flashing alternative. So you will cast yourself down out the window, & we will see you a white flat object, spread far below -- perhaps the camera could zoom back, soar up over Paris & show the whole city, the whole country to be so small the whole planet to be endlessly whirling — but we leave remembering your history, not panning back. will not be able to follow through in the way men do who believe wholly in what they are doing & have forgotten any other power. From so many years of convent life you will bumble & be awkward you will both make mistakes & yet have a faith that others will mock; you will cross yourself each time the churchbells sound & that will madden them all. Worst, you will not be able to direct your life as you see others directing theirs because inside of you there will be a hollow well, an empty vessel awaiting the annointment of God which you will wish to be filled with human will, but not being able to find it anywhere or to fill it up with God, you will be light & too empty to hold down a space in the world
Book V, [2] Psyche who has sorted commodities and goods reg- ularly; Psyche who has learned how deadly the sun may be head-on and so waits for nightfall; Psyche who is able to catch the essence from the uroboric stream, with the healp of a gay eagle; Psyche who has gone to the underworld and dared to take godly beauty, out of interest and desire in that beauty; this Psyche hears unrest in the town and runs into it, head-on. The hills are there, but the people cup themselves into them, curling at their base, depending on Providence to guide them every subject had racism & reverberations of prejudice attached to it, flowing out like strings to her words, dragging through the mud Psyche talks to a neighbor, lived here 36 years, ought to know. The preacher dismissed for too-liberal politics. A party line different from his congregation. Them niggers. They just don't know how to be when they're up. Psyche goes to bed, sleeps not at all, a mean man (her son-in-law) was sitting there as they talked in the summer night. Somehow Psyche was regressing younger & younger in this conversation, talking too freely in an effort to be liked, to be understood, to be mothered. & the mean looking man hearing it all looking evil as any Klanner fly out bird, fly out of my head fly into the hills fly above Vermont lead in your essence of sea & the kindliness of men who live by the sea
Book VI, [1]
Eros:	We wondered, though, whether your story wasn't simply emotional leavings. Women are very emotional you know. You have to watch that.
Psyche:	What do you mean, as though there were guards at the gates because someone might slip out in the night, an unguarded emotion might pass between the bars and be glimpsed shadowing away into the night...No. The alchemist in changing common matter to philosophical gold is not interested in selling at the corner stall. He wants to work with the problems of psychic transfor- mation. He wants to keep a record of a particular process that he effected. It was not able to be told in novel, not in American sociology. Sometimes the beloved was so clearly a link that to hear her speak, or him, particular words, only a sentence, could show one how it all fits together. This life I am this man I am, selling my wares quite nicely and successfully, but always something is wrong. Always the pieces do not quite go together, it is necessary to get to Lhasa, only when the beloved speaks is it clear who we both are, who we were before, and why our life feels so directed yet obscure at the same time. The properties of the world stay the same, generation after generation. The statue of the Jowo is there for us to make our vows to as those before us did you are the wife, trailing me life after life, preventing by your sorrow either of our transformations I am the willful egoistic male always needing economic gain before I win you, doubting inside me that my early childhood saintliness could lead me to such an easy future. Future present: how we learn we have always been part of the cycles. How the leaves, each time, coloring such bright oraange & yellow & red amaze us, searing us in color & age too. I looked at you and that is what your presence seemed to say, although your body and mind in this life were no more right than mine.