duDek and poUnD: six mEsostic poems for dK/ (2)

 

 

Review of James Hollis's Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path

"Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path". 

Review of James Hollis' Creating a Life, 

Toronto: Inner City Books, 2001. 159 pages. 

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis' latest book, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path , gives the reader the wonderful experience of sitting with an intelligent and articulate person, and listening to their reflections on the meaning and value of life. This is Hollis' sixth publication for Inner City Books. Like the other books he has written, this one helps the reader grapple with his or her own meditation on life, as well as initiate new areas of thought.

In the first section of Creating a Life , Hollis refers the reader to the increasing number of contradictions we are faced with as we get older, and the confusion that is caused by our inability to resolve them. Hollis uses Greek drama to describe experiences that seem to be common to many people. Hollis says that our lives are circumscribed first of all by "Fate, or moira , [which] embodies the world of givens, the world of limitations, the world of cause and effect. Our genetics, our family of origin, our Zeitgeist, the interplay of intergenerational influences--each is part of our fate." He goes on to say we also complicate and make worse our lives with hubris, "Which means arrogance at times, a character flaw at others, or sometimes simply the limitation of possible knowledge." A third aspect of the human condition is hamartia or "the tragic flaw," what Hollis calls "the wounded vision." Hollis writes, "Each protagonist believed that he or she understood enough to make proper choices, yet their vision was distorted by personal, familial and cultural history, dynamically at work in what we later called the unconscious."

Psychology has added to and changed the names of the terms by which we describe the human condition, but human experience, in essence, is the same now as it was in classical Greek times and before. Today we speak of psychological complexes that "lie at the core of who we think we are." Hollis writes that the reader "will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself." Indeed, it seems to be fate that the tragic vision of the Greeks is re-enacted by each of us in our equally tragic and wounded lives.

In this, as in his other books, Hollis refers to C.G. Jung's suggestion that "the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents." This refers to the parents' unexamined life and subsequent psychological projections onto their children. The child is left responsible for doing the emotional and psychological work the parents didn't do. In turn, this becomes a part of the core complex through which our perceptions of the world around us are filtered. In some ways, this parental burden forms the basis of our shadow work, and while it is painful when left unconscious, it can lead to an exhilarating awareness for the participant in a more examined life.

This is not a book for the faint of heart, for those who desire an intellectual quick-fix for what ails them, or for the individual who believes that a guru, a romantic partner, or anyone else will come along and save them. Hollis discounts the cure-all approach of both New Age adherents and fundamentalists of all religious persuasions. It is here that Hollis makes his "modest claim", and this is the basis on which the book's thesis is developed.

The thesis of Creating a Life is that to create a life one must examine one's life, and out of this examination comes an awareness of the true nature of one's soul. Our psychological foundation is made up of many things, including core complexes that we wish we could eliminate altogether, but that cannot be easily dealt with. Indeed therapy can't eliminate them either. According to Hollis, what therapy can do is help you observe the core complex. This, in turn, will help the individual become a more conscious person with a maturer vision of life. Hollis writes, "Therapy will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting." Thus, the examined life is the more interesting life, and the corollary that follows from this is that "Consciousness is the gift and that is the best it gets."

If the result of our choices or unreflected actions are akin to Greek tragedy or drama, then we might also ask ourselves what is the myth that best represents our life journey? What is the myth that best explains our existence to us? Hollis writes that myth "as it is used here, refers to those affectively charged images (imagos) which serve to activate the psyche and to channel libido in service to some value." Are we living second hand lives, the unresolved cast-offs of our parents' experience? Are we living reflectively or are we living reactively?

By now most readers must be aware that we are not dealing with the activities of the first half of life. This text is not about ambition, career, or even traditional domesticity. It isn't Hollis' project to tell the reader what kind of life to create--his purpose is simply to define the foundation of understanding necessary to create an authentic life. An examined life best expresses the soul's purpose. Hollis' book is addressed to those people who have entered the second half of life, who have survived what Hollis calls the "gigantic, unavoidable mistake" of the first half of life. For Hollis, "The larger life is the soul's agenda, not that of our parents or our culture, or even of our conscious will."

This book is a meditation on the life journey of individuation. Jung's concept of individuation "has to do with becoming, as nearly as one can manage, the being that was set in motion by the gods." This, then, at a practical level is a process of psychological and spiritual maturity. A test for this maturity lies in one's capacity to deal with anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Hollis writes, "The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the developmental and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge."

Part two of Creating a Life is comprised of twenty short chapters dealing with "attitudes and practices for the second half of life." These include: amor fati, the necessity to accept and love one's fate; that the examined life is one of healing; that the examined life is also healing for our ancestors; and so on. Some readers may feel overwhelmed by Hollis' listing and brief explication of these necessary "attitudes and practices." However, he is reassuring and directing the reader to observe his or her own unconscious as the primary authority in one's life. Individuation lies, in part, in the process of reflecting upon the processes of the unconscious mind.

Part three of Creating a Life brings to a conclusion James Hollis' meditation on how to approach the second half of life. Certainly, above all else we need to be grateful for being alive at this most liberal and tolerant of times and places in the history of humanity. Hollis refers to the myth of Oedipus that is suggestive of our own human condition.

How did Oedipus live out the second half of his life? We may each have our own personal myth to discover, a myth with which we identify and which gives our life substance, meaning, and depth. Oedipus, however, is an archetype representing everyman in his flight from the darkness of his core complex to his discovery of soul and meaning. Hollis writes,

After Thebes, after the stunning humiliation of midlife, Oedipus spends his final years in humble wandering, wondering what it is that the gods wish him to know. He learns, he absorbs, he winds his weary exile to Colonus, where he is blessed by the gods for the sincerity of his journey. It was not so much that he created his life, as that he allowed at last that life might create him, as the gods had intended. The price of this gift, both precious and perilous, was exile and suffering; the price of not finding his calling was ignorance, pettiness and annihilation of the soul.

James Hollis reminds the reader of what a profound and exciting journey we have been invited to undertake. It is the journey of individuation, sometimes frightening, never exempt from the many experiences and emotions that are part of the human condition, and always demanding we extend ourselves beyond what we thought possible. We continue to create our lives because, simply put, it is all we can do, if we have the gift of consciousness and are sensitive to the soul's command that we look inward.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, March 2001. 

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

duDek and poUnD: six mEsostic poems for dK/

 “Like acrostics, mesostics are written in the conventional way horizontally, but at the same time they follow a vertical rule, down the middle not down the edge as in an acrostic...”

—John Cage

 

 

 

 

 

Morrissey & McGee

At Cote des Neiges Cemetery, a cold day in late March at McGee's mausoleum. Here's the heart someone left hanging on the door to McGee's mausoleum, still there months later...

Notes on Voice in Poetry

                      

The discovery of a poet’s voice brings an authenticity to the poet’s work, that the poet’s voice communicates the content of the poem as well as the poet’s inner being, his or her soul. Voice in poetry is the expression of the soul.

__________________________

It isn’t the sound of your voice or how well you read a poem out loud that is voice. It isn’t a poem for several voices. It isn’t slam poetry or performance poetry. It’s the essence of who you are as it is expressed in the way you write, your own original distinctive individual voice.

__________________________

Voice in poetry, to be authentic, must be true to the self of the poet, to the inner, subjective, self-perception of the poet. The voice has to be authentic and true to the poet’s inner perception. Voice has to be an expression of the authentic self, not the self covered over with falsehood and conceit.

__________________________

The point is to discover one’s voice, and then you continue writing and voice changes in what one writes, but the discovery of one’s authentic voice is a border one needs to cross in order to write the work that follows, work that one can stand behind, that gives one the self-assurance to expresses one’s vision. 

__________________________ 

Voice is a vehicle for the content of poetry, but it is also inseparable from poetry; content expands when an authentic voice is discovered. Voice is not style, style changes but voice is the expression of the inner, psychological dimension of the poet; voice is the expression of psyche. The expression of voice changes just as our actual voice changes with age, but once an authentic voice is discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the poet is saying.

__________________________

There is no way to find one’s voice, it must be discovered by the poet, but not all poets find their voice in poetry; however, after voice is discovered the person writing poems is a real poet, not someone who also happens to write poems. If someone who writes poems never finds his voice, he is not a poet. How can he be when writing poetry is predicated on writing from an authentic voice? This does not diminish what a poet writes before the discovery of voice, in some way voice might exist as a precursor to the discovery of the poet’s authentic voice, or at least the reader can see the potential for the birth of voice in the early work.

__________________________

First, you have to be born a poet and realize you are a poet by writing poetry, then you have to put in your 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. There’s nothing romantic or fun about it. It’s a lot of hard work to be a poet and as you get older it gets harder and harder, not because of writing poems but because of all the pother work that comes with writing and building a body of work; for instance, organizing and placing your archives, working on your selected poems, writing criticism, keeping up correspondence, managing what you have created a lifetime building, and so on.

__________________________

Voice is the expression of the poet’s integrity as a poet. Voice is the expression of the poet’s character, sensibility, and integrity as a human being. This is why it has such importance to poets.

__________________________

Discovering one’s voice does not disqualify or negate what the poet wrote before this discovery, but it is a signifier of the poet’s maturity as a poet. 

__________________________ 

Voice is when we speak from the heart, from the soul, without pretention or affectation, but honestly without censoring ourselves, with only one conviction, to be true to our inner necessity, to what we have to say (not what we want to say or should say, or think we should say) but abandoning these things of the self, to speak from the real and authentic self, not the layers of self, but from the heart, with honesty, and from the soul.

__________________________ 

The genesis of both the content of the work and the voice expressing the work are simultaneous, they can’t be separated. They are the same process. The work is written in the voice as the voice is discovered and as the work is written.

__________________________ 

Voice in poetry is not one’s “style” of writing; style may be narrative, minimal, visual poetry, or what have you. Voice is access to psyche from which poems are written. If a poet hasn’t discovered his “voice” he hasn’t become a poet.

__________________________ 

A poet can’t “search for a voice”, but all poets need to find their voice. Voice comes to the poet, it isn’t something you can “find”. Voice is the expression of the poet’s psyche, the congruence of events that allow the poem to authentically express the inner, spiritual and psychological, being of the poet.

__________________________

God bless you, Mr. McGee: Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 1813-1868 (two)

These photographs were taken last November 2012 (I'll be at McGee's mausoleum today); this is the 145th anniversary of the assasination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the fathers of Canadian confederation and someone, more than most others, who helped form our idea of modern Canada. His vision was of a tolerant and welcoming country, a place where people would leave behind the prejudices of the countries from which they came.

Above, a plaster heart someone made and left hanging on the door to McGee's mausoleum. He has become a folk hero and his life mythologized.

God bless you, Mr. McGee: Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 1813-1868 (one of two)

 

I am not the only one who visits Thomas D'Arcy McGee's mausoleum at Cote des Neiges Cemetery. I pay my respects to McGee several times a year with these visits and I often find flowers or other mementoes of other people's visits. He is one of the true folk heroes of Canadian history, assasinated in Ottawa on April 7, 1868 as he returned to his reesidence after addressing Parliament. The anniversary of the 145th year since his death is tomorrow.