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PN Review 275
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This article is taken from PN Review 65, Volume 15 Number 3, January - February 1989.

Homonymous: A Meditation on HD's Trilogy Beverly Dahlen


'But her ideas were seeds in the sections
she had already written.'
                   - Norman Holmes Pearson
Foreword to Trilogy by HD (Carcanet, 1973)


Why not begin with those coincidences, or correspondences, those seeds of thought upon which all her life HD meditated, mediated in that transformational code which seems to us now to have been one of the groundworks of modernist writing. If 'every one always is repeating the whole of them,' as Gertrude Stein was insisting, HD's repeating was of an order which found the seeds of thought in these correspondences, these appearances, by which or through which she seems to have grown her work.

Her work grows out of these appearances, or apparitions, as if from a ground, as if the seeds of her thought had been always latent or potential within that which she had already written, as if The Flowering of the Rod could bear itself within itself, its seed as well as its bloom.

HD's vision narrows to a point, to that point which is repeating the whole, as if that repetition bore within itself the compacted or concentrated essence of the whole, the beginning and the end, 'the same... different yet the same as before.'

This repetition is a contravention of the literal laws of cosmology which decree that each event is unique and non-repeating, that nothing is the same as before. Nothing is the same as before, ...


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