The garden on 16 September 2017

 

The overweening desire for fame

 

What has gone wrong with Western society? Are we in decline or are we just changing? Have we become a society with few moral values or are different moral values evolving?  Are we happier, more fulfilled, better people who think of the other person and not just ourselves?  Are we happy, or are we just full of ourselves; or do we have no introspection, no self-doubt, and no self-awareness?       

Let’s look at Americans. During the last thirty years Americans have become ultra extroverts, every child is told they can become anything they want, they can do anything they want; everything they do is praised; subsequently, there are very few shy and introspective children left. You see people on television, on the game show The Price is Right; when audience members are called to come forward and be contestants they dance, pull faces, do cart wheels, high five a dozen strangers, scream, yell, and even the old have become cards and cut ups despite arthritic limbs and palsy, even the old behave in a way no one would have behaved just a few years ago. Fame and extroversion seem to go together. Look at celebrities, fame and self-promotion are what they crave but these are no replacement for whatever once sustained us as a society; we have abandoned what is traditional at great cost to society and to our very souls. And since traditional values have been abandoned the young have nothing real to believe in but the desire to be famous, nothing sustains them, they have been psychologically impoverished by cancelling both their traditions and culture, no wonder social media are so important to them, we're all famous on social media. 

Today, even small children want to be famous but, like everybody else, not for any real accomplishment but for fame itself; it is fame for just existing, without introspection or thought or education or talent or hard work or love of what you are doing or for caring for other people. The modest person will come in last around here! And since we are all special without doing something that makes us special, then why bother accomplishing anything? Just being ourselves makes us special, we are "special for nothing", like body builders who have big muscles not for doing work but solely for appearance. 

No one is special in themselves and fame is for doing something that is a real accomplishment, for commitment and passion, for something that will possibly make you famous --your self-worth is not contingent on becoming famous-- fame is not just for who you already are, it is for doing something that other people have not done before or few have achieved. Fame diverts you from your calling in life, it diminishes your calling, it prevents you from discovering your calling. And no, you cannot be whatever you want to be even though your grade school teachers told you so. What someone accomplishes is done for its own sake, it is your calling in life, it is never to be famous; fame is a by-product of excelling at what you love to do and, even then, fame has limited if any importance. A hundred years ago DH Lawrence wrote of the “bitch goddess success”, we now have our own god, it is fame. 

Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course, 31 August 2024

 

A host of sparrows

Sparrows have always been my favourite bird, perhaps because they are so common, so numerous, so plentiful, so shall we say insignificant, and of course so small in size. In general, I am on the side of the average man or woman and this is what sparrows seem to represent. Sparrows are not showy like the brilliant red cardinals, not as raucous or aggressive or psychologically complicated as the black crows, not as joyful as the robins, not as seldom seen as the blue jay. They are just sparrows— the mighty sparrow! — mentioned at least twice in the bible, if God looks after sparrows He is surely looking after all of us. Dear friend, it will all work out, it always has, try to  be patient, wait and see. That’s all you can do.

Photographs taken on 15 August 2024, mid-afternoon, from our dining room window.

"Clenched Soul" by Pablo Neruda

 

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

Review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

 

This review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: On Poetry, Poets, and Psyche by Michael Greenstein, was published in The Dalhousie Review, fall 2023.

--------------------------------------------

Stephen Morrissey, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: On Poetry, Poets, and Psyche.

Victoria:  Ekstasis, 2022, 141 pages, $24.95, ISBN 9781771714723

 

The cover of Stephen Morrissey’s The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry displays half of an old-fashioned typewriter, as if to suggest that this book represents half of a book that should be read in conjunction with the author’s earlier volume, A Poet’s Journey (also published by Ekstasis). Nevertheless, this volume is not only interesting and informative, but also quietly impassioned in its autobiographical insights.

                The book begins with two epigraphs addressed to the Muses—one from Bob Dylan, the other from William Blake. Dylan’s “Mother of Muses” (2020) contains the line “Forge my identity from the inside out,” while Blake’s “To the Muses” (1783) ends with “The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!” Morrissey’s Muses navigate between forging identity and forcing sound; his green archetypal field forges ahead and gains force with each entry on poetry and psyche. Two additional epigraphs show other influences. Keats’ statement in a letter of 1818 to John Taylor demonstrates a Romantic strain in Morrissey’s poetry and poetics: “That if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Allen Ginsberg’s advice, reported in the Montreal Star in 1967, also makes its way into Morrissey’s modernist thinking: “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting.” Through Dylan, Blake, Keats, and Ginsberg, Morrissey bares his soul, as Keats’ leaves enter Montreal’s fields.

                Indeed, most of these brief entries and essays were first published between 2008 and 2021 in Morrissey’s blog, Made in Montreal. The first entry, “Poetry Is a Calling,” shows the importance of vocation, avocation, and invocation. Part of the poetic calling may involve collage or the cut-up technique, which is in evidence in the structure of this book. The nine sections of “Beginning with Allen Ginsberg” reveal one form of the cut-up technique that ends with Ginsberg’s words, “scribble down your nakedness.” This soul baring and bearing runs throughout Morrissey’s memories, as he moves to Keats’ symbolism of trees and Hades: “For poets to mature it is necessary to visit the Underworld, as Persephone did; this is a journey into darkness and, if the poet has the courage, it is also a place of great creativity, of revealing what has been hidden or disguised.” Morrissey journeys through the darkness of his own soul, and he also journeys across Montreal to illuminate some of the city’s hidden poetry; both the ground and the sky inform his archetypal imagination.

                When he compares archetypes to the patterns iron filings make in a piece of glass when a magnet is place under the glass, we can see the connection between archetypes and the cut-up technique that is also part of the poet’s craft. William Burroughs is his source for this technique, which he applies to A. M. Klein’s poem, “The Mountain.” Cut-up involves coincidence, flashes of insight that produce metaphor, visual collages, randomness, jesting, and avoiding the imposition of the ego. (When Morrissey compares his own poem, “Heirloom,” to Klein’s “Heirloom,” he reveals his own self-effacement: “It was almost an embarrassment after reading Klein’s.”) In an “Addendum” at the end of the book he presents his version of “The Mountain,” which is significant not only for its cut-up but also for introducing Montreal and its poetry, which fills most of the book.

                Included in his list of Montreal poets are Irving Layton, John Glassco, Frank Scott, A. J. M. Smith, Louis Dudek, and Leo Kennedy. Morrissey gives us a sense of place and poetry with these Montreal poets, and a certain nostalgia lingers for those old days when he was mentored by Dudek at McGill. A younger generation of poets starts out from the Véhicule Art Gallery; these poets include Artie Gold, Ken Norris, and Endre Farkas, and their portraits around Sir George Williams University are as interesting as those of the earlier generation.

                Morrissey’s collage journeys between autobiographical details and universal truths. He describes his grandmother’s home at 2226 Girouard Avenue, which is his psychic centre, and contrasts it with soulless cities in a globalized world. He then shifts to poets, like Dante, who were sent into exile: “Travel, exile, pilgrimage, the desire to return home, all can be found in Homer, Chaucer, and Dante.” His discussions of the archetypal home show the influence of Jungian psychology on his personal and poetic development in a quest-collage.

                In the final section of the book, “Psyche,” we learn about shamanism. Having mentioned his two wives earlier in the book, he now recounts a woodcut given to him by his brother—“a shaman on the back of a grizzly.” The shaman is almost as big as the bear, “head turned so he stares directly at the viewer with an expression of surprise on his face, the shaman and the bear appearing from some unknown place, and always in the continuum of Inner Space.” He interprets the woodcut as an archetype for rebirth after the bear’s hibernation in a cave, a sign of the ursine cycle.

                This hypnagogic, shamanic experience gives rise to one of Morrissey’s poems: “a shaman on the back of a grizzly / the black fur a black streak / moving between the trees / then across an open grassy field.” The entire poem avoids punctuation in order to give a sense of the fluid motion between the grizzly/shaman and the observer, as well as the merging identities of all spectators. The black streak in the landscape contrasts with the white teeth later in the poem, just as the open field yields to the open mouth: “we see the white of his teeth / we see the shaman mouth open / we see him see us / we see them disappear back into the forest / they see us disappear back into the forest / we see him see us.” The final six parallelisms reinforce the streaking disappearance, the back of the grizzly doubles back to “back into the forest,” and the pronouns fuse the hypnagogic effect of our experience of shaman/grizzly. Like the archetypal cave, the mouth’s cavity and the mystery of the hidden forest engulf all of our psyches. From green archetypal field to the mysterious forest, the poet conveys the liminality and fugue states of nature and mankind.

                From this woodcut, the cut in the woods, and the cut-up technique, he returns to Girouard Avenue with its old claw foot bathtub and its subliminal connection to the grizzly’s claws that tug at memory and experience. This ancestral home arrives at an understanding of the quiet zone of old age, as Morrissey’s voice turns wistful and elegiac, especially when he recalls his father’s death, which signalled the “Great Reconfiguration” in his life. He sees faces in clouds (“pareidolia”) and invokes Rimbaud’s voyant, Rilke’s angel, and Lorca’s duende. He is in good company, as The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry establishes its own duende out of mountain, heirloom, and modernism.

                                                                                                —Michael Greenstein

At 6 p.m. on 26 August 2024

 

"September 1913" by W.B. Yeats

 

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’:

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

Visiting Montreal`s Old Port on 17 August 2011

Where Molson's Brewery was once located