More Devin Johnston

The Merrill Chapter of Precipitations

Otto Rank on the double: “The double serves to preserve the ego through a negation of loss.” (Qtd in Johnston 110). Can that elucidate my confusion on H.D. and her use of the double? I don't know that H.D. was trying to preserve the ego though. Maybe, through expansion of self, magnification of the self, the self is somehow preserved, but I don't think it was necessarily about the self. In H.D., it almost seems as though the other is the self and the self is the other, and you find the self through finding the other. She, in all her marginalizations, seems to be more other than other, and to find her self through an actual other would bring her back to some sort of center, away from the margins. The second part of Rank's sentence "a negation of loss" I'm not sure about either. In H.D., the double seems to always signify loss because the double is never retained... Maybe Otto Rank cannot help me with H.D.

But another cool poetics: “Imagination…does not move in one direction but is reciprocal” (116). Johnston is discussing the two voices (DJ &JM) in Changing Light of Sandover here but this poetics could also refer to Poetry/Muse etc. I feed and pull on it and it feeds/pulls on me.

“In Yeats’ experience, the spirits who dictated through his wife announced that they did not bring a system of philosophy to be explicated in lifelong study but ‘metaphors for your poetry’” (122). Poetry as more important than any logical system!