{"id":11058,"date":"2025-07-03T17:09:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T21:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/h-d-on-the-two-kinds-of-seeing-and-the-key-to-over-mind-consciousness-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T17:09:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T21:09:08","slug":"h-d-on-the-two-kinds-of-seeing-and-the-key-to-over-mind-consciousness-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/h-d-on-the-two-kinds-of-seeing-and-the-key-to-over-mind-consciousness-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind Consciousness \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Vision<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOne must be a seer, make oneself a seer,\u201d Arthur Rimbaud wrote<\/a>, \u201cby a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.\u201d As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience \u2014 moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean\u2019s edge, a lover\u2019s kiss \u2014 to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible. <\/p>\n

It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness<\/a>, that how we look at the world \u2014 what we choose to bring into consciousness \u2014 shapes what we see, which in turn shapes the world we make in the image of our vision. This is why we call visionaries the people who see sides and paths others do not, who catch in the prism of their consciousness the light of the world invisible to the rest and cast it back magnified, more luminous, iridescent with possibility.<\/p>\n

The pioneering modernist poet H.D.<\/strong> (September 10, 1886\u2013September 27, 1961) was such a person, and one who saw deeply into the nature of the prism itself, who located the seer\u2019s vision not in the mind but in what she called the \u201cover-mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

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H.D.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Born in Pennsylvania as Hilda Doolittle, the daughter of an astronomer who liked to say that \u201chis one girl was worth all his five boys put together,\u201d she grew up watching her father magnify stars through his telescope and her grandfather \u2014 a marine biologist \u2014 magnify cells under his microscope. Here were layers of reality, bright and dazzling, beyond what was visible to the eye, lavishing with wonder those who have the right instruments. Such an experience at so formative an age can\u2019t but reveal the mind itself as an instrument for gaging reality, its lens polished by our experience, its focus the making and unmaking of our lives, and all of it, all of it, not above the body but of it. H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason. <\/p>\n

In 1919, catatonic with grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and a world war that had slain both her father and her brother, having barely survived the Spanish Flu herself, H.D. took refuge on the Scilly Islands on her way to Greece with her newborn baby and the woman who would become her partner for the remainder of her life \u2014 the novelist, poet, and magazine editor Bryher. There amid the lapping blue waves and lush subtropical gardens of a natural world so breathtaking it seems almost supernatural, enveloped in her lover\u2019s intellectual kinship and passionate devotion, she started coming back to life. And, as such resuscitations of \u00e9lan vital tend to do, some inner veil lifted one day to leave her feeling a profound participancy in the streaming life of the universe. At the center of it was a revelation about the nature of vision, which H.D. recorded in a series of shamanic diary fragments published long after her death as Notes on Thought and Vision<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

She identifies three \u201cstates or manifestations of life\u201d \u2014 the body, the mind, and the \u201cover-mind,\u201d bearing echoes of Emerson\u2019s notion of the \u201cOversoul,\u201d that faculty for contacting what the transcendentalists\u2019 hero Goethe called \u201cthe All.\u201d<\/a> The highest achievement of human development, she observes, is \u201cequilibrium, balance, growth of the three at once\u201d \u2014 a brain without embodiment is \u201ca disease comparable to cancerous growth or tumor\u201d (what a prophetic indictment of AI), a body without a mind is \u201can empty fibrous bundle of glands,\u201d and an over-mind without the other two is madness. A healthy body, therefore, is not a conglomeration of certain parts, abilities, and attributes, but a harmonious integration with the mind, just as a healthy mind is not a checklist of cognitive capacities but a harmonious integration with the body, and out of these twin harmonies arises the vision of the over-mind.<\/p>\n

Swimming in the cerulean womb of the world, she finds a metaphor \u2014 or a metaphor finds her \u2014 for the essence of the over-mind: <\/p>\n

\n

That over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jellyfish, or anemone.<\/p>\n

Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The over-mind is the superorganism of the psyche, pulsating with \u201csuper-feelings\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jellyfish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jellyfish feelers are the jellyfish itself, elongated in fine threads.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
One of Ernst Haeckel\u2019s stunning drawings of jellyfish<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This over-mind is capable of two kinds of vision, which must also be in equilibrium for us to reach our existential potential. A decade before Virginia Woolf insisted that the highest form of mind is \u201cthe androgynous mind\u2026 resonant and porous\u2026 naturally creative, incandescent and undivided,\u201d<\/a> H.D. writes:<\/p>\n

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Vision is of two kinds \u2014 vision of the womb and vision of the brain. In vision of the brain, the region of consciousness is above and about the head; when the centre of consciousness shifts and the jellyfish is in the body\u2026 we have vision of the womb or love-vision.<\/p>\n

The majority of dream and of ordinary vision is of the womb. <\/p>\n

The brain and the womb are both centers of consciousness, equally important.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lamenting that the creative culture of her time was already suffering from the debilitating brain bias<\/a> that only metastasized in our own era, she shines an optimistic gleam into the future:<\/p>\n

\n

I believe there are artists coming in the next generation, some of whom will have the secret of using their over-minds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But nothing feeds the over-mind more, nothing reveals it and anneals it more, than love. The world deepens and broadens and begins to shimmer when we are in love precisely because the experience embodies us and enminds us at the same time, touching the total person with its light. Surely drawing on her experience of falling in love with Bryher, which had come unbidden like a rainbow after a summer storm, H.D. considers how this happens: <\/p>\n

\n

We begin with sympathy of thought. <\/p>\n

The minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of thought.<\/p>\n

The brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of ideas, takes on its character of over-mind, becomes\u2026 a jellyfish, placed over and about the brain. <\/p>\n

The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain\u2026 a jellyfish in<\/em> the body. <\/p>\n

The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision\u2026 The over-mind is like a lens of an opera-glass. When we are able to use this over-mind lens, the whole world of vision is open to us\u2026 The love-mind and the over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are properly adjusted, focused, they bring the world of vision into consciousness. The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There are many portals into \u201cthe world of over-mind consciousness\u201d and we must each find our own. Echoing Whitman\u2019s insistence that \u201cno one can acquire for another\u2026 grow for another\u201d<\/a> and Nietzsche\u2019s admonition that \u201cno one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,\u201d<\/a> H.D. writes:<\/p>\n

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My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.<\/p>\n

But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:<\/p>\n

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Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.<\/p>\n

Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Couple H.D.\u2019s Notes on Thought and Vision<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Georgia O\u2019Keeffe on the art of seeing<\/a> and Iris Murdoch \u2014 whose over-mind was deeply kindred to H.D.\u2019s \u2014 on how to see more clearly and love more purely<\/a>, then revisit Lewis Thomas\u2019s magnificent living metaphor for unselfing drawn from the enchanted symbiosis of a jellyfish and a sea slug<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cOne must be a seer, make oneself a seer,\u201d Arthur Rimbaud wrote, \u201cby a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.\u201d As more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}