Notes on The Compass (1993)

The Compass (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1993) is the first book of the Shadow Trilogy, books I wrote between 1989 and 1997. I had several titles before I decided on The Compass, which is also the title poem of the book. It is possible that I considered "The Home Front," because of the irony that it can refer to both a war between countries being fought on the home country’s border and to “home” with its suggestion of the promise of love, comfort, and happiness; I think, as well, of the title of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, of World War One, and of the unhappily married caught in a War of the Roses scenario. However, now I wonder if this was one of my working titles, or was it for a book that was either never written or for a possible title for a previous book, Family Album? I don’t remember

    Just today, I reread the poems in The Compass and the book is not quite as I remembered it. If anything, it is much more affirmative and positive than I had thought. It is divided into three sections: “The Whip,” “Hades,” and “The Compass.” “The Whip” is a continuation of Family Album (Caitlin Press, Vancouver, 1989), my book immediately preceding The Compass. The poems in “The Whip” are poems of family life, memory, observation; they are a continuation and development of the poems in Family Album. “Hades,” the second section, is made up of post-divorce poems, the outcome of the emotional and psychological experience of the divorce-- which was an emotional journey to Hades--and it is this section that is "confessional." The final section, “The Compass,” celebrates rebirth, sexuality, marriage, and romantic love.

    I would like to explain the psychology that leads one to write three books on the human Shadow, the Jungian archetype encompassing the psychology of shame, projection, taboos, and self-loathing. I was always intrigued by Shadow content of consciousness; I always wrote with the intention of what C.G. Jung called individuation even before I had heard of Jung, that was always my concern in my writing, from when I began writing in 1965. I knew for many years that the way I was living was not right, but I was incapable of changing myself or the circumstances of my life. Fortunately, the soul will not allow stasis, we can not escape for long the demand of the soul for an authentic life. Thus it was, that after many years of avoiding life, events conspired to do for me what I could not do for myself, as will be explained below. I wrote about the avoidance of transformation in the following excerpt from a poem in The Mystic Beast (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997):

            Lines From Magritte:

        The Forbidden Universe (or Olympia)

A man refused

transformation—"not

yet" he argued "too busy

with family, job, mother,

no time"—always he held

back, remained in

a chrysalis state,

like putrefied matter, undigested

food, or a giant tumour

in his body

clogging all arteries

that lead cosmic

energy into the central

nervous system.

For forty years

a giant organic blockage

grew in the middle

of his body

until he bulged

at the waist;

it was a tumour

on his soul

or the soul

itself expanding

disproportionate

and constricted

by its cage of ribs

and internal organs.

He was sick

with undiagnosable

illnesses, his face anguished,

even walking across

a room became difficult.

In my experience big changes in the soul do not happen because of a series of insights and epiphanies; nor do they happen in a linear progression, or build to a final perfection. The soul does not care about time and space, or even about talking and discussing; change is not an evolution, not even a convoluted evolution, but something that happens to us, something that is beyond our conscious insistence, or desire, that we change into something that is unknown to us and of which we have no experience. I am not referring to the kind of insights we all have with some regularity, but to “the development of the soul,” to the kind of profound change that seems to seldom happen and can’t be made to happen.

    The ways in which we attempt change are hit and miss: years of prayer result in nothing; years of meditating in a cave result in nothing; years of therapy result in nothing. These activities have a nobility to them, perhaps they lay a foundation for change, but there is no causal guarantee that they will result in the desired change. Indeed, I am not saying that these methods for changing the soul are without value or always fail to effect change, only that in my experience the kind of change that I am talking about comes, as it did for me, through what might be called “Divine intervention,” through fate or Providence, or something that comes to us without invitation and by its own volition.

    Around 1986-1987, I was beginning a Pluto transit over my ascendant, which is when my marriage began to unravel and finally collapsed in the winter-spring of 1989. There were other terrible events around the same time, but they must wait for another discussion. A Pluto transit over the ascendant devastates and wipes out one’s life; this was my experience. It was a time when my old life was wiped away so that a new life could be created.

    I, myself, soon came to affirm what had happened to me; I soon affirmed the annihilation of my old life as I knew it; it was the only way that I could embrace life and grow into the person I was meant to be. I felt that my old life was like a giant tumour growing in my body and I was unable to do anything about it, I was unable to cut it out myself, and it was not possible for someone else to remove it, it was the tumour of a psychological complex. I know what an unrealized life is like, I know what it is like when the compass that guides our life does not read accurately the direction in which we must make our journey if we are to find spiritual and psychological wholeness.

    Change and transformation is also possible when we are loved by another, when the other focuses their love and attention on us and we reciprocate with love for the other. Love can move us closer to wholeness, change, and creativity. For many of us, what love means is to be animated, or brought to life, by another. This is a gift that must motivate us, who have been loved, to return to life the blessings of love that we have received.

Here’s the title poem from The Compass:

        The Compass

On the four corners of the bed

the body becomes a compass

describing the direction

of desire and passion. Months of desire

arrive at this destination,

rocking on a single almost silent

wave we are sheltered

by darkness. The body

is a compass needle;

you turned me from east to west,

awoke a sleeping giant

that moves between your mouth and breasts and legs;

the room illuminated by static electricity

thrown off by our bodies.

How many decades did I sleep

waiting for only you;

I lust after you in all the directions of space.

Meeting at the airport

your foot touching my leg

beneath the restaurant table,

we secretly entered an empty banquet

hall where the caterers chattered and

poured drinks behind a wall partition

then quickly leaving

finding a deserted hallway of

open office doors

where we embraced.

All the others in my life

fell away, I was ready

to abandon my old life for you,

for the touch of your hand

and mouth, the apple red and delicious

cut in half that I eat.

Tied to the four corners of love

as to a bed which becomes a compass,

I find you on your stomach,

on your back, in the morning

lying pressed against me.

It is not possible to return

to sleep now, it is not possible

to forsake your touch and love,

black lace, fingers, wetness,

your mouth, words. The compass's

needle turns finding north switched

to east and west to south, night

becomes morning; nothing remains

as it was. You pointed my life

in a new direction, towards a corner

of the world only dreamt of before.

Outside the sun is red

descending behind a row of trees,

shadows fade into the other

unexplored regions of night.

(Stephen Morrissey, The Compass, Empyreal Press, Montreal 1993; ISBN 0-921852-04-5; The Shadow Trilogy, including The Mystic Beast (1997) and The Yoni Rocks (1995), was published by Empyreal Press in Montreal.)

A few notes on Confessional Poetry

1. Over a three-day period in late April 1977 I wrote a long poem, “Divisions” (Divisions, Coach House Press, Toronto, 1983). I wrote about things that had deep emotional meaning in my life. I had married the previous summer, in August 1976, and the wedding was immediately followed by marital turmoil. Perhaps this was the catalyst for me to write a poem I had tried to write for many years. Writing “Divisions” was a catharsis, a purging of emotions; it is a poem of witness, of confession, of what I had seen and experienced. 

2. In the 1990s, I wrote “The Shadow Trilogy” (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks, 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997; all published with Empyreal Press, Montreal), books that came from an awareness of the Shadow aspect of the human soul. The Shadow is an important archetype in Jungian psychology; it is made up of what we reject in ourselves and project onto other people. “Owning one’s Shadow” refers to being aware of one’s dark side and being responsible for one’s psychology instead of projecting it onto other people. Writing these three books was an important journey for me; it was a time when I tried to make sense of the first half of my life. 

3. There has always been a “confessional” aspect to my work. Confession is the Shadow’s autobiography. My work, before writing The Compass, was concerned with family, but with The Compass the work became even more intensely confessional, more directly revelatory. It was my Shadow, my darkness that I had to purge. 

4. In Frank Bidart’s essay on confessional poetry, found in Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), Bidart writes that “Lowell winced at the term” “confessional.” Bidart writes that the common perception of what confessional poetry is suggests “helpless outpouring, secrets whispered with artlessness that is their badge of authenticity, the uncontrolled admission of guilt that attempts to wash away guilt. Or worse: confession of others’ guilt; litanies of victimization.” No poet would want to be identified with this definition of “confessional poetry.” However, Bidart continues, “there is an honorific meaning to the word confession, at least as old as Augustine’s Confessions: the earnest, serious recital of the events of one’s life crucial in the making of the soul.” The important point here is that confessional poetry, today so discredited among poets and critics, is concerned with “the making of the soul.” This is the definition of confessional poetry to which I subscribe.