Finding Nemo

 

Walter de la Mare; Georgie Yeats; 

William Butler Yeats; unknown woman. 1930

If you want to see the invisible, carefully observe the visible.

—The Talmud

Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.

—Aleister Crowley [as Oliver Haddo] in The Magician, by Somerset Maugham (1908)

We were musing recently on G.K. Chesterton, and how much we enjoyed that nifty little book of his on William Blake (1904) that we downloaded from Internet Archive last fall. Back then, we had just become fired up with the notion of this here BLOG dedicated to our dazzling gal pal Stanza, and we took inspiration from discovering that Chesterton's wife's maiden name was Frances BLOGG. So, in a punny way, he was married to a BLOG(g)! And so Cosmo thought the idea of settling down and getting married to a BLOG(G) was terrific, especially if that blog were to become the visible manifestation of the invisible and heretofore nonexistent Stanza.

Then we found on the free book cart the utterly hilarious apocalyptic novel Good Omens (1990), co-authored by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and dedicated by them and their demon character Crowley (ahem) thusly:

"To G.K. Chesterton, a man who knew what was going on."

Aside from the oddness of having one of the main characters of the novel participate in the dedication, there is the dark resonance of his name, Crowley, in our story – as in Aleister, author of 777 and other esoteric compendia, also con-man, drug addict, mountebank, would-be poet, and above all, MAGICIAN.

The name Crowley evens sounds creepy. Indeed, the demon character in the novel (no factual relation to AC) tells us he was originally a serpent named Crawley. Yechh. Some names are like that; they have an aural aura, if you will. On the other side of the river, "Chesterton" speaks of probity, balance, reason, grace, realism. And indeed he was an effective and energetic apologist for precisely those aspects of Western civilization. Personally, Cosmo had strong and, as it turned out, pretty accurate intuitions about Kerouac and the Yardbirds before he ever encountered them directly. Some elusive, yet unavoidable charisma had coalesced around their names, emanating partly from the sound of their names, within the culture, and Cosmo had absorbed it unawares.

Well, Frances Blogg is decidedly not that sort of name, although things probably did improve a bit when she married and became a Chesterton. Nonetheless, her surname being one letter's difference from Cosmo's current writing medium, it merited at least a cursory Googling. What we found was that (a) she was a bit of a poet herself, and that she and GK were part of a circle of London intellectuals that included the Yeats family and Walter de la Mare. In fact, her poem "Children's Song of the Nativity" appeared in de la Mare's anthology for children, Tom Tiddler's Ground.

Now, that rang a bell for Cosmo. It's the title of one of his favourite love songs, by English folkie Roy HARPER. And Cosmo knows from personal experience that there is indeed "a love nest in Tom Tiddler's Ground/long before Eden was lost and found."

So Cosmo just HAD to skip up to the 10th floor of the university library to find de la Mare's anthology, that antique volume of forgotten lore, and when he got there, he misread the call number, and plucked from the shelf by mistake another antique – a charming 1910 illustrated edition of Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin. Went looking for HARPER (well, a book with the same title as one of his best songs, anyway) and found PIPER instead! Both are magical words for Cosmo, so much so that by merely uttering them he "shines a little, and has some glimpse of his birth."

Oddly, the pied piper book contained a handwritten inscription: "To Dear Little Ulysses. Aunt Florence, July 28, 1906." I say oddly, because the book wasn't published until 1910. Unless time went backwards for little Ulysses, 1906 must refer to his birthdate, so maybe this was his 4th or 5th birthday present from Aunt Flo, who, it must be said, had very good taste in children's books.

As for Harper, his depiction of finally falling in love in that song of his is deliciously apt, especially when we listen to this explanation of the title of de la Mare's book of the same name, from Leonard Clark's Foreword of the 1961 edition:

For 'Tom Tiddler's Ground' is that no-man's land where gold and silver can be picked up just for the asking. 'Tiddler', at one time spelled 'tidler', is said to be the shortened form of 'the idler' or 't'dler'. And 'Tom Tiddler's  Ground' is the name of a very old children's game, played, especially in the north of England, as soon as the New year has begun.... A line was drawn on the ground and a boy was chosen...to be the Tom Tiddler. He took his stand behind the line.... The other players...would then proceed to...invade his ground, shouting as they did so:

Here I am on Tom Tiddler's ground

Picking up gold and silver.

[Clark then quotes A.C. Benson, From a College Window (1907)]:

'I would rather regard literature as a kind of Tom Tiddler's Ground where there is gold and silver to be picked up.'

Walter de la Mare would certainly have regarded the world of poetry as the richest kind of Tom Tiddler's Ground because all the treasures of poetry are free and there for the asking. they are compounded, too, of the finest gold and silver, since they are the treasures of man's mind and spirit.

Well, there we have it all, pretty as you please. Falling in love with girls who don't exist, discovering marvelous poetry (that, thankfully, does exist), even stumbling on all these marvelous free books this past year – all evoked so fitly by this singular title, this unexpected antique image.

HARPER and PIPER being such a potent combination of magical names, we couldn't resist the temptation to trot them out on a Google search with that other enchanted couple, COSMO and STANZA. What we got was, even for Cosmo, utterly amazing: an article by one Margaret Mills Harper dealing with Georgie Yeats (GY), who was the wife of WBY and his collaborative medium for the automatic writing that eventually became The Vision. The amazing thing is that Harper decides to view GY through the lens of her magical name, Nemo, which she chose for her initiation into the mystical Order of the Golden Dawn in 1914. As Harper writes:

Rather than telling a story, then, I will meditate on a symbol. To put it less mystically, I will watch for Mrs. Yeats by teasing out the implications of her magical name, following a few peregrinations of etymology rather than a trail of narrative as a method to suit the matter of her creativity and the intricacies of the collaborations that underlie the sea-change in her husband's work.

Let's just pause to catch our breath here, and see just what we've caught along with it, and then we'll call it a day post.

• Two pairs of magical names paired together brought us another magical name, this one meaning "no man" or "no one," a statement not unlike Stanza's coy "ABOUT ME: I don't exist."


• This magical name initiated GY, under the sponsorship of  WBY, into the Order of the Golden Dawn, to which, during the previous decade, our arch-demon Aleister CROWLEY had also belonged – much to WBY's disgust, we might add. (But in this context  it's perhaps worth noting WBY's magical name, DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS.)


• Crowley and Yeats despised each other in large part because the former was a magician who fancied himself a poet, and the latter a poet who fancied himself a magician. In fact, Yeats was rather adamant and consistent throughout his career that in order to succeed the poet must be an enchanter. The passage of time has revealed that Yeats has a much stronger claim to his fancies than Crowley.


• This makes Georgie Yeats (who was invisibly with us from the start of this little expedition as a friend of the Chestertons) not only a vital invisible presence in Yeats's later work, but also... (drum roll please, or maybe languorous sitar solo) . . . THE MAGICIAN'S WIFE.

♥♥