W.B. Yeats's Grave, Sligo, Ireland, July 1978

Back in July 1978, I visited my friend R.R. Skinner at Boisville, his home in Camberley, England. We had first met a few years before, in August 1974, after I attended Krishnamurti's Gathering in Saanen, Switzland. After visiting with RR I planned to spend some time in Ireland and flew into Dublin, then after a day or two I took the train across Ireland to Galway and then on to Sligo. It not only rained, it poured rain the whole time I was there. I was miserable. One day I took a bus tour to the grave of W.B. Yeat's, that was probably the same day I also visited Lissidale House, where Yeats stayed in his youth. I did my research for this trip the way poets do their research, which is after the fact... this perhaps accounts for the dismal nature of my trip to Ireland. Years later I decided I would never visit a place where I didn't know somebody, or where I didn't have a reason for visiting (for instance, a conference). The life of the tourist is not for me, it is given to loneliness and self-consciousnss, constant travel, exhaustion, trying to maintain an interest in siteseeing when I'd prefer to be at home reading a book, and associating with some questionable people. It's all perfectly dreadful! So, this is the highlight of my trip to Ireland: Yeats's grave, including the church near his grave, and a Celtic Cross gravestone, all within close proximity to each other. Yeats is (perhaps) the greatest English language poet of the 20th Century.

Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978 - 1998

Preface to Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978-1998 (Muses’s Company, Winnipeg, 1998)

When I was growing up, I had two dreams that profoundly affected the shape of my life. I was six years old when my father died; the first of these dreams occurred three years after his death. I dreamed two men from an orphanage came to take me away. They were waiting for me at the back door; they were going to put me in a wooden cage. This dream made a deep and lasting impression on me, not only as a reminder of the insecurity and transience of life, but also as an encounter with the powerful depths of the unconscious. In retrospect, this dream began my awareness of the imagination, vision, and what psychologist C.G. Jung calls “the shadow.” It also informed me of my own separateness from the world in which I lived.

The second dream came when I was around thirteen years old, and it is responsible for my embarking on a lifetime of being a poet and diarist. In this dream I was imprisoned in a room where the windows were covered with mud. Once I could see outside, but now I was enclosed and cut off from the world. However one may interpret this dream, my own interpretation as an adolescent was that I had to write down the truth as I knew it--what people had done and what I had done. Only by writing could I see things clearly. I knew intuitively that writing could clarify, order, and give perspective to experience. My concern was with saving my inner being, which I was afraid would be lost if I were unable to remember events. My conviction, even then, was that there is a heroism and bravery to the average person’s life and I was responsible for recording as much of what I perceived of this as possible. I awoke from this dream knowing I had to write and ever since this dream I have written poems as well as kept a diary.

In addition to these two dreams there was a third influence to the kind of poet I became. In 1967, when I was still in high school, I read an article in a newspaper; in it the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, gave advice for poets. He said, “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked...” This statement made a lasting impression on me. It validated what I was already trying to do in my own poetry. For the first time I realized that the kind of subject matter I was grappling with as a teenager--content that was personal and confessional--belonged to a literary tradition and had meaning to other people. Even if I hadn’t read Ginsberg’s statement I would not have been deterred from continuing the writing I was doing--writing that attempted to understand deeply felt experiences. However, to discover that there was a public context for this kind of writing was enormously empowering, and allowed me to identify myself as a poet. My first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), published when I was in second year university, contains poems that have a thematic continuity extending from those early poems up to the work I am writing now. This present collection, Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978 - 1998, presents a selection of twenty years from my body of writing. This selection is chronological, beginning with my first published book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978) up to the present selection from new, unpublished poems.

For years I struggled in my writing to express early experiences of grief and failure. I wrote many poems on these subjects, but none articulated exactly how I felt, or dealt adequately with what I needed to say, until I wrote the long poem “Divisions.” This poem is central to my early work--in it I was finally able to deal aesthetically and personally with the experience it discusses. Everything came together in the writing of “Divisions”: content, form, and the insight necessary for its writing. This was a breakthrough poem for me, written over a three day period in April 1977. I was finally able to express in poetry what I was attempting to do since I was fifteen years old. I photocopied “Divisions” and mailed it out to other poets and critics, including Northrop Frye and Louis Dudek, both of whom responded generously: Frye with a letter, and Dudek with an offer to publish the poem. In 1983 bp Nichol published the poem in my book Divisions, with Coach House Press.

There are two more factors that I believe have contributed to my writing. The first is the fact of being born in Montreal of a large, but dwindling, family of Irish descent. This Irish background is rich in experience and family history; names such as Callaghan, Flanagan, and Sweeney are all a part of the family which has been in Montreal since before 1840. They were not wealthy people, although a few made names for themselves, but they were hardworking and improved conditions for the lives of their descendants. Their values, religious faith, and large families made them what they were. I am grateful for being a part of this ancestry.

A final factor that has helped shaped my poetry is the tradition of writing poetry in English-speaking Montreal. Growing up in Montreal in the 1950s, I always took for granted that poets lived and worked in the community in which I lived. Poets were never “someplace else”—they were right here. So the idea of becoming a poet was never unusual. Just as I appreciate my Irish heritage, I also benefited from the poetry community into which I was born. In the 1970s I was associated with Vehicule Art Gallery where I attended and organized readings while a graduate student at McGill University. I associated with other poets, and my first full-length collection of poems was published.
I have always aimed at a directness of statement and emotion in my poems, to communicate an image and a strong emotion; to merge the personal self with the archetypal self. Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet. These poems, selected from twenty years of published work, map the convolutions, terrain, and geography of the soul.

My poetic journey, from the early dreams and writing to the publication of this Selected Poems, has been a reaching out to other people. From the initial isolation as an adolescent poet until now, I have been blessed with meeting certain individuals who have encouraged and inspired me. My association with poet and editor Carolyn Zonailo began in 1989 with the publication, by Caitlin Press, of my book Family Album. CZ has edited my poetry and helped to prepare manuscripts for publication. We have shared a collaboration in writing and in life, living most of the year in Montreal, but spending as much time as possible each year in her native Vancouver, British Columbia. I would like to thank CZ for selecting the poems in this collection, urging me to write this preface, and for editing.

I would like to thank Louis Dudek for being my teacher and friend from McGill University days to the present. George and Jeanne Johnston extended to me friendship and the joy of discussing poetry and literature. Ken Norris, a colleague since the early 1970’s, has offered on-going encouragement. Jake Morrissey has often listened with appreciation to my work. Sonja Skarstedt and Geof Isherwood began Empyreal Press in Montreal in the early 1990s; with bravado and a belief in the importance of poetry they published each volume of The Shadow Trilogy. I would like to thank Endre Farkas and Gordon Shillingford for offering their support through the Muses’ Company. Finally, I would also like to thank the Canada Council for writing time during two grants, and for project grants in support of individual books.

Stephen Morrissey
Vancouver, British Columbia
August 7, 1998

regard as sacred

"Regard as sacred the disorder of my mind."
-- Arthur Rimbaud

Notation: The various line breaks in this concrete or visual poem, the reordering of the words, and the permutations and fragmentations of the words suggest both the disorder of the mind and a new “sacred” order of the text from the deconstruction of the original text. Reading the poem, not necessarily from the upper left hand side of the page scanning right and down, but beginning in the middle, or at the bottom and scanning left and up, or through the middle, in other words randomly, with the white spaces signifying a unit of silence, equivalent to the missing word, and beginning with a single voice but then also adding, and reading simultaneously, with a second (or third or fourth) voice, turned the concrete poem into a sound poem, again suggesting disorder but also creating a new aesthetic order or experience.

(This is how we read this poem in performance; pretty standard instructions. But it also emphasized that the way a poem is presented on the page is the notation of how the poem is to be performed; again, pretty standard instructions).

The Archetypal Field of Poetry

Published in 2022

Published in 2022, Ekstasis Edition, Victoria, BC, Canada

C.G. Jung made archetypes one of the central concepts to his approach to psychology, and this has been elaborated upon and expanded on by some of his followers, for instance James Hillman. An archetype is a psychological concept, it is a blue print, a prototype, an image, or a pattern of behavioural experience. It is also a term, used popularly today, suggesting that the experience of mythological characters is a pattern that can be seen in the behaviour of average people (as explored in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s books). Another contemporary Jungian thinker who has been influenced by the concept of archetypes is Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst and author of Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche (Spring Publications, Woodstock, 1999).

In poetry an archetype, as an image, or as a narrative, gives depth and sophistication to a poem letting it work on several levels of meaning simultaneously. Maud Bodkin, in Archetypal Patterns In Poetry, Psychological Studies Of Imagination (Vintage Books, New York, 1958) examines C.G. Jung’s “hypothesis in regard to the psychological significance of poetry.” She writes,

The special emotional significance possessed by certain poems—a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed—he attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images,” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same types,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience.

An archetype can include psychological complexes—it is a way to analyze and find patterns in any behaviour. Conforti extends the concept of archetypes to posit, if I understand him correctly, an external existence to the archetypes independent of the psyche, or of psychology. Archetypes, for Conforti, are not only psychological constructs, they also have an empirical existence, such as the pattern iron filings on a piece of glass will make when a magnet is placed under the glass. The division between the inner, psychological and spiritual domain, and the outer domain of consensual and empirical reality, is blurred, even eliminated. Conforti’s concept of archetypes seems to be both outside of time and space, and also firmly located in their expression inside the temporal and spatial. It is a fascinating and, some might say, a mystical idea, one that will be rejected by some (or many) clinical psychologists.

While hearing Conforti speak, to the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal last fall (2008), I realized that his concept of archetypes is one of the clues I had been looking for regarding how poetry is composed. It occurred to me that there is an archetypal field of poetry, which does not mean that poems have already been written and poets merely record what they “hear,” although this is what some poets describe as their experience when writing or composing poems. I suggest (and it’s just a thought) that there is an archetypal field of poetry, a psychological state accessed by poets when writing poems. Writing poems is a [“kind-of”] shamanic journey or process in which images (which can also be archetypal) are retrieved and expressed in composition. This should not conflict with the popular division of poets into romantic (or spontaneous) and classical (or formal).

It is very difficult for us to conceive such a thing, but the reality—not just the idea—of the static ego, formed and unchanging, might one day be replaced with a different concept: of a perceiving entity in the active present moment, a constellation of selves with an identifiable Persona, moving in and out of time and space, and possibly existing in the “undifferentiated unity of existence” (W.T. Stace, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World, A Mentor Book, New York, 1960). We may, one day, conceive of a poem as an existing entity that both exists and doesn’t exist before it is written, and that it comes to us uninvited to be transcribed by the poet. Just as J. Krishnamurti described, during his lectures—including lectures that I attended in Saanen, New York City, and Ojai—that an apparently living entity came to him—not as an invention of his psyche—but as, for instance, a living presence that had a quality of goodness or love that exists outside of his individual consciousness, an entity perceivable at times by him, as existing in the world by itself. There is no “how” as in “how does one access this experience?” There is only the work of creating a foundation for the work to come if it does come or if it is to come.

So, if asked where my poems come from, I would answer that they are from the archetypal field of poetry.

Instant Shaman (four)

Brion Gysin wanted to “disorder the mind,” and he succeeded in two well-known discoveries. One is the reordering of a text by the Cut-up method of composition and the second is the Dream Machine he co-invented with Ian Sommerville in the early 1960s. Sommerville was a colleague of William S. Burroughs, and Burroughs used Gysin’s Cut-up method in part of the writing of his novel Naked Lunch. Both of Gysin’s inventions move the conscious mind away from consensual reality, and assert what poets have known all along, that the visionary experience is fundamental to the art of poetry. Brian Sheehan’s documentary, FlicKer, is an excellent and engrossing introduction to Gysin’s Dream Machine. The Dream Machine is basically a cylinder containing a light bulb and various shaped forms cut from the walls of the cylinder; the cylinder revolves at a predetermined speed. The observer sits beside the Dream Machine with closed eyes, allowing the flickering images caused by the Dream Machine to induce mental images of colour, shapes, and symbols. The flickering produces a hypnogogic state—perhaps it is alpha wave activity—and what is visualized during this state can then be used in a work of art, or left as an experience in itself. Gysin had an early, prototypical experience of this when traveling by bus, and while sitting with closed eyes, there was a flickering caused when trees and buildings were juxtaposed between the sunlight and the bus, similar to the experience of observing the Dream Machine. After seeing Sheehan’s documentary, FlicKer, I remembered my own experiments using the Eeman Circuit in the late 1980s. In The Cameron Aurameter (ed. Meade Layne and Riley H. Crabb, Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, Vista, 1970), there is a description and short discussion of the Eeman Circuit, the subject of experiments I tried in the mid-1980s. The Eeman Circuit is simple to assemble and use:

The circuit is made by fastening six feet of insulated copper wire to a copper or brass handle on one end and to copper wire or meshed strands… Two of these outfits are used. One is placed under the base of the spine of a person lying on his back… The wire with the handle to be gripped in the right hand, is brought out from the screen and held in the right hand. The second screen is placed under the head and the wire brought out so its handle can be placed in the left hand… The idea is that the body electricity (our mana) will be picked up by the screens and caused to flow along the wires to the hands so that changes in normal flow are brought about.

My own experience of using the Eeman Circuit is that I was overwhelmed with dream imagery while using it. I don’t remember using the Circuit many times, it was uncomfortable to lie on, and when I moved back to the city twelve years ago I didn’t bring it with me. But it is worth trying out, as one might try out the Dream Machine. All of these strategies—the Dream Machine or the Eeman Circuit; mirror gazing or the psychomateum—are ways to try to access the visionary experience; they are small doors into the unconscious, small doors to shamanic and visionary experiences. Not everyone will be interested in a shamanic approach to poetry, but it is offered for those who might resonate to some of these ideas.

Instant Shaman (three)

There was a time when I would have agreed with William Everson, certainly one of the major proponents of shamanism in poetry—his famous proclamation for poets is “Shamanize! Shamanize!”—when he writes regarding spirits “… these spirits are collective images, actually we call them today archetypes, but in primitive times they were thought to be separate consciousness.” This makes perfect rational sense. But I also think of work of Dr. Raymond Moody, who is a scholar of the classics, and a doctor of medicine and psychiatry, and whose seminal book Life after Life has had a profound affect on our society’s way of looking at death. A more recent book by Dr. Moody, written with Paul Perry, is Reunions, Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones (Ivy Books, New York, 1993) which describes various techniques of encountering the dead, one of which is mirror gazing. I have heard Dr. Moody speak several times at the annual conferences held in Montreal by the Spiritual Science Fellowship and he is an excellent and fascinating speaker.

On several occasions I have visited mediums and astrologers, and I remember one medium in particular, who told me important information that could not have been known to her, that was specific in detail and importance only to myself, and that gave me immediate relief from what I was concerned about. I have also walked along a street and seemed to feel the presence of spirits walking with me, not of just one or two, but of dozens, so many in fact that it seemed they were pressed up against me. I have also sat with one of the most famous astrologers in the world, Nöel Tyl, and listened while he summarized my life experiences giving not only the year in which experiences occurred but also the exact month, from my birth to the present. Astrology is very different than Spiritualism but both indicate that there is a dimension to existence other than our consensual reality, and we suffer a loss in vision when people rationalize, justify, and excuse away what lies outside the bounds of rational and intellectual thinking.

Another important editor and author on poetry and shamanism is Jerome Rothenberg. I remember the excitement when I first read his anthology of “primitive” poetry Technicians of the Sacred (Anchor Books, New York, 1969). Rothenberg, in his Introduction, writes that the assembled poems show “some of the ways in which primitive poetry and thought are close to an impulse toward unity in our own time, of which the poets are the forerunners.” Then he describes the areas where these intersections of “primitive & modern” occur, one being “the poet as shaman, or primitive shaman as poet & seer thru control of the means… an open ‘visionary’ situation prior to all system-making (‘priesthood’) in which the man creates thru dream (image) & word (song), ‘that Reason may have ideas build on’ (W. Blake).” And in a sidebar he lists the following as examples of this, they are: “Rimbaud’s voyant, Rilke’s angel, Lorca’s duende, beat poetry, psychedelic see-in’s, be-in’s, etc, individual neo-shamanism, works directly influenced by the ‘other’ poetry or by analogies to ‘primitive art’: ideas of negritude, tribalism, wilderness, etc.

In Reunions, Dr. Raymond Moody writes that for the ancient Greeks “visions took place in a state between sleeping and waking.” This psychic state can be accessed by various means, for instance, by mirror gazing, or for the ancient Celts, by gazing into a cauldron of water. Moody has constructed a “psychomateum,” which he describes as “a modernized version of the ones found in ancient Greece, with the same goal in mind, that of seeing apparitions of the dead.” Moody writes,

The word psychomateum, taken literally, implies that the spirits of the dead are summoned as a means of divination so that they can be asked questions about the future or other hidden knowledge…the facility I created for this study is not a psychomateum since our purpose was not to arouse the dead for divination. Rather people came (and still come) in hopes of satisfying a longing for the company of those whom they have lost to death…

Regarding shamanism, Moody writes,

In Siberia…Tungus shamans used copper mirrors to “place the spirits.” In their language the word for “mirror” was actually derived from the word for “soul” or “spirit,” and hence the mirror was regarded as a receptacle for the spirit. These shamans claimed to be able to see the spirits of dead people by gazing into mirrors. He also writes, … most people who hear for the first time about shamanism assume that the shamans were either charlatans, mentally ill, or that they possessed some extraordinary faculty that most of us lack. We have already seen that shamans claimed to be able to take voyages into the spirit world through their magic mirrors, where they then saw spirits of the dead… the inner world of those ancient tribal practitioners is accessible to us all.

Instant Shaman (two)

I remember, as well, in my late teens experimenting writing poetry. I would play loud music and write, thinking the music could help me access the poetic experience, as though it could somehow block the ego that is usually situated, like a filter, between the poet and what he is writing. All of my experimental writing was done with this in mind, whether concrete or sound poetry, or the cut-ups and visual collages that I also did. I know that some people have tried writing while on various “recreational” drugs, or while intoxicated after drinking alcohol. Alcohol never much interested me, it is only in the last ten years or so that I have the occasional social drink, and I did try hallucinogenic drugs a few times but found the results dismal. Mainly I felt that I didn’t like having my consciousness played around with by alcohol or hallucinogens. I also spent years sitting at my desk for several hours every evening writing hundreds of poems, being alone, telling no one what I was doing, and filing these poems in the small cubbies on either side of the desk, with no thought whatsoever of this writing having any purpose other than that I enjoyed writing poems.

The shamanic experience, the shaman’s journey, is usually described as one in which the shaman listens to repetitive drumming in order to enter a hypnogogic state. This type of religious experience seems to be caused by the release of endorphins in the brain. This does not refute the content of the experience, it only explains the physiological response to an experience and the experience of the Divine is possible without drumming, or any outside stimulant. There is something greater than the individual ego, it is what W.T. Stace described as “the undifferentiated unity of the universe.” I remember this phrase very well because Stace’s book on mysticism, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World (A Mentor Book, New York, 1960) had a profound affect on me when I was still in high school. I remember going to a used book store in downtown Montreal, where a cousin worked, and buying two books, one was by W.T. Stace and the other was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet which I never read. I still have both of these books. When I was in high school I read Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics (Wilshire Book Company, Hollywood, 1968), a book that teaches self-hypnosis. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who discusses, in this book, how a visualized experience of something is the equivalent, for the mind, to actually having had the experience. I read Maltz’s book and learned his technique for self-hypnosis and visualization. Self-hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation in which the conscious mind is situated between wakeful consciousness and sleeping unconsciousness. Meanwhile, I also remember my brother was interested in hypnosis and that he once hypnotized me, around 1962-63 when we still lived on Oxford Avenue, and he gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion, that I would get up and get a drink of water, and I remember walking to the bathroom and drinking from the tap (as we did for some reason) immediately after coming out of the hypnotic state. To this day I practise Maltz’s self-hypnosis when I can’t sleep, and over the last ten years or so I have used it for entering shamanic journeys.

Instant Shaman (one)

Back in the early 1970s, when I was a student at Sir George Williams University, I took a line from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and made it into a visual poem. The poem became a visual representation of the content of Rimbaud’s statement: “regard as sacred the disorder of my mind.” Rimbaud’s approach to poetry is an ancient one, it is also shamanic. When he writes, in Lettres du voyant, “Je est autre,” he becomes the “other,” and we re-vision the poet not only as an individual entity but as a medium for the Divine. God communicates with people through dreams and angels, but communication from the Divine can also occur in a trance state, or in a state of deep relaxation, in a synchronistic experience, in the creative act, or possibly under other heightened conditions of consciousness. This experience is not unfamiliar to many of us who write poetry, for creative people there is often an experience of transcending the ego in the act of creating, and there is usually a sense of wonder that something was created that had not existed before.

My assumption—my intuition—has always been that there is something inherently important in the act of writing poetry. It was Rimbaud’s aim to access the unconscious by entering a trance state, to go beyond or transcend the known by disordering the senses. This could be done, he writes, by «un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.» In other words, he would disorder the senses, disorder rational thinking, in order to find the spirit world, the world of archetypes, wherein lies poetry. An important author on this topic is William Everson, author of Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations (ed. Lee Bartlett. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1982). He writes, “The shaman enters a trance-like condition in order to engage the archetypes (spirits) of the collective unconscious and stabilize their awesome power, appease the demons, as it were. This is precisely the function of the poet today.” He also writes, “…the poet, too, can only work through trance…no creativity is possible that does not involve a trance-like state of possession.” Order exists in the universe, even if it is projected by the human mind, for the mind abhors disorder, craves order, and will create order. I remember as a child lying in bed and seeing faces and shapes in the chintz pattern drapes in my room, or walking along Oxford Avenue to Terrebonne and watching the clouds move across the sky as though they were following me in an intimidating way, or lying on our front lawn and watching the clouds assume the appearance of shapes and faces (this experience, of seeing faces in clouds, is called pareidolia), and I also remember the sound of water dripping from a bathroom tap had the effect of sounding like a voice that was repeating some phrase, over and over again, suggesting some coherent statement.

Notes on The Mystic Beast (1997)

The Mystic Beast, 1997

I first discovered the sculpture that I call “The Mystic Beast” (The Mystic Beast, Empyreal Press, Montreal 1997) around 1994 at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology, a museum that is largely dedicated to the art of First Nations people in British Columbia. He (the sculpture) was in a room just after the main hall as one enters the museum, placed off to one side near a window, so he is easily missed. In fact, the sculpture is a Northwest coast Nimpkish wood sculpture of a human figure, made around 1893. When I first saw him, I felt as though I had met my doppleganger; however, instead of a human double, it was an inanimate object.

I think CZ and I both immediately recognized the facial similarity that I shared with the Mystic Beast, but it was more than the expression on the face, it was also spiritual. I knew the meaning of his expression—so indicative of how I felt in life—for it showed my inner being: it was the face of an introvert trapped in a room full of extroverts; it was the face of one who is more at home being alone than with other people. It is a curious and rare experience to find a visual expression of one’s inner being, of one’s identity as a human being; he did not represent my persona, but the private face of the condition of my soul, he was the face of my Shadow.

The “Shadow” contains the aspects of our psychology that we reject, deny having, are afraid to face, and so on. They may be parts of our psychology too hurtful for us to deal with, that we would prefer to forget, or it might consist of taboo behaviour, or other aspects of ourselves that we consider too dark and disturbing to acknowledge. What we forget is that the Shadow is full of energy, think of the energy we’ve all used to deny or hide our Shadow; we sometimes project what we don’t like about ourselves onto other people and demonize them; we may go to great lengths and spend many years avoiding the Shadow; we may adopt a new persona (for instance, one that is light and lively) to hide behind, rather than investigate our own inner darkness. I am reminded of the phrase, “the bigger the sun, the bigger the darkness” and how this so often gives an accurate insight into some of the people we meet. However, there is gold in the Underworld; there is light in the darkness; there is redemption from our past; there is a voice of witness reminding us what we need to remember; there is poetry in life’s journey. So, it was epiphanous to find a sculpture, in a museum in Vancouver, representing my inner being, and I associated my Shadow with the sculpture.

                                

At the time when I visited the Museum of Anthropology, I was working on a manuscript of poems entitled The Mystic Beast, the final book in my Shadow Trilogy, and I thought of the sculpture as my twin Mystic Beast. I thought of him as having a similar psychology as myself and there he was, staring at me, or staring off into space. He is physically larger than life size, in fact much larger than he appears in most photographs, and the artist who made him caught perfectly an expression of psychological depth that, I feel, is rare in art found anywhere. When The Mystic Beast was published in 1997, the cover art was by Ed Varney who made an incredible drawing of the face of this sculpture, as can be seen above. A French translation by Élizabeth Robert, entitled La bete mystique (Editions Triptyque, Montreal, 2004) has an equally remarkable cover image, but it is not of the Mystic Beast in Vancouver. (You can see a photograph of The Mystic Beast on the home page of my poetry website, as well as elsewhere in this blog.)

In the prologue to The Mystic Beast, I refer to Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream,” which is a work of art of depth and profound anguish, and iconic, but different than the Mystic Beast. On one hand, Munch’s painting is a scream of life denial emanating from the human soul in the darkness of a world that seems to lack redemption and grace. On the other hand, the Mystic Beast is more of a subversive presence, one that is apparently resigned to the way things are but is also aware that there is epiphany and grace, and life affirmation, in the very midst of a society and life gone wrong:

Here is darkness,

here the place

where waves are black

and the wind howling

through trees is a cry:

one thinks of Edward Munch,

the soul become a sheet

in the wind; have I left

a pile of skulls,

a dying heart

where it lies in my chest

as in a desert, tormented

by the sun and wind?

Here is title poem of the collection:

The Mystic Beast

1. The Invention of the Mirror


How could this be me

what I see as myself,

meeting what is

not me

but someone else:

a doppleganger passing

in the street, a twin

I was separated from

at birth, a part

of me divided

and gone,

as though

I lost my shadow

and must stay indoors

to avoid the sun.

The mirrored image

of my right hand

as I raise it

seems to be

my right hand,

but in the mirror

if my right hand is holding a book

the words are reversed—

who we are,

we never see

what we’ve become—

unless a mirror

in which nothing

could be invented

is reversed, words

read as words,

then we could see

for the first time

in human history

our true selves;

meeting ourselves

as others see us

not reversed or backwards.




2. The Mystic Beast

Arriving on the west coast,

I find the perfect image

of myself, a wooden

statue staring

at nothingness

in a museum:

he is the mystic

beast—not reversed

in a mirror,

not divided by life—

but the single

essence of who

I am. This image

is not reversed

by fortune or glass,

silver or animation,

but the inner being

so long separated:

my own face

and body frozen

in time and regret.

It is the unreconstructed

self found at last,

like finding a cousin

or brother, the true

brother of light

and camaraderie

who holds

my arm and announces

the birth of poetry,

the beginning of light,

the conclusion of silence.

It is my self

I find, my lost twin,

the inner being

I was and am,

who escaped

long ago and

disappeared,

a face encountered

in a mirror without

distortion by depression

or a concave in which

I slip into silence;

not the face seen

reflected in store

windows, the one

caught in peripheral

vision looking afraid

and alone, but an image

of one born in Heaven,

who fell to earth

from the clouds

and landed among

strangers. I searched

almost half a century

until now

when I meet myself,

I finally step out

of the mirror

as out of my body

my skin like clothes,

my face a mask,

my shadow

disappearing in light,

my true self

before and after

my birth and death.


(Stephen Morrissey, The Mystic Beast, Empyreal Press, Montreal 1997;


ISBN 0-921852-16-9; The Shadow Trilogy, including The Compass (1993) and The Yoni Rocks (1995), was published by Empyreal Press in Montreal.)

Notes on The Yoni Rocks (1995)

The Yoni Rocks, 1995

Ed Varney’s cover art for The Yoni Rocks (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1995) is an image of the Venus of Willendorf, a small sculpture of a round shaped woman with big breasts and braided hair that is approximately 25,000 years old; this artifact from our prehistoric past has become famous since it was discovered in Austria early in the 20^th Century. The quotation at the beginning of The Yoni Rocks, taken from H.I. Austen’s fascinating book, The Heart of the Goddess, will better help to define the meaning of Yoni: “In Sanskrit, Yoni means ‘womb, vulva, place of birth source, origin, abode, home, nest; family, race, caste.’ It derives from a root word which means ‘to join together.’... For how can we love life if we do not love the yoni, the doorway through which all life passes?”

The Yoni Rocks has two sections, “The Yoni Rocks” and “The Heart of the Goddess.” These poems are concerned with the anima, the feminine part of the male psyche. The whole book is a hymn to the feminine, to the Yoni, to the unifying aspect of life. The title comes from a photograph in which some rock formations became a natural visual representation of the Yoni, so there was also the juxtaposition of something hard and ancient, rock, with something living, giving birth to life, and sexuality, the Yoni.

The Yoni Rocks begins with the funeral of one of my aunts, and then moves to memories of my paternal grandmother and her home, and the many things “home” represents: the feminine, nurturing, comfort, and so on. This is the divine feminine, but the feminine can also be dark, constrictive, and destructive; just read some poets’ work on their mothers. There is also the river, and the metaphorical qualities of rivers, that the same river cannot be stepped into twice, and so on. The second section of the book deals almost exclusively with romantic and sexual love, the meeting and relationship of the two sexes. Romantic love is, indeed, one of the most profound experiences that humans can have, whether it is ultimately positive or negative, for we abnegate our ego when it happens.

Another poem in The Yoni Rocks is about my paternal grandmother who will always have a special place in my heart and psyche. I often visit my grandmother’s home—on Girouard Avenue in Montreal, where she lived for forty years—in dreams or drive passed on my way to work. When I was a child my family lived for two years at Grandmother’s Girouard Avenue flat because my father was not well. Later, I had many happy days when I would visit my grandmother and her two old sisters, my great aunts Essie and Edna. Her home is the psychic center of my imagination and she, herself, is someone I loved dearly. For me, Girouard Avenue is the home of the Grand Mother, a place of ancestors, love and kindness, and the beginning of my journey in life.

As well, and of enormous importance in my life, has been my relationship with CZ who returned me to life, who animated me, after years of not being fully alive. The Yoni Rocks is dedicated to “the three important women in my life: my grandmother, my mother, and my wife.” Whether for good or otherwise, knowing these three women has made my life the journey that it has been and still is. Knowing CZ, my wife, is something that doesn’t need to be discussed here but is celebrated in the following poem, also in The Yoni Rocks:

Reincarnation

1.

We meet again, again flesh

and blood, again bone, tendon

and memory. Events of old lives,

clothes divested as I divested

the past in meeting you,

in meeting you again

and again and again

into infinity.

Forty years of waiting for you,

a dark delirium of the soul;

we met apparently for the first time

but home is where we are together

in this room, this house,

the two square feet we occupy

in a single embrace. The embrace

of memory, bred in muscle, eating

or favouring one side in sleep,

falling asleep in your arms.

The arms of many births,

deaths, incarnations of

gods and goddesses,

Bardic voices, Druid's potion.

Listen, we share the sounds and sights

of a summer's evening, fireflies

across a field seeming

distant but as close as

a hand before your eyes,

breath on the back of your neck,

or is it the darkened field

and firefly lights

repeating their journey

between this life and that?

With you I have

returned home, not a place

walls enclosing silence,

but soul meeting soul

in the ancient movement of time.

I lie asleep on the floor

ear pressed to the darkness

and hear the hum of earth,

the generations of families, priests,

and existence of all living things

like listening, ear to a pregnant

woman's belly, baby's rapid

heart beat; shadows fall hundreds

of feet, listen into the soul

of man preparing for its journey

of final sleep, we came

from here and return, forgetful

of our origins, or of the

father and mother who created us.

Here is the title poem of The Yoni Rocks:

The Yoni Rocks

Who would deny us the Yoni rocks,

who would keep us from

hearing Mother's voice?

Who would deny us death,

the rocks that are tombstones:

father's grave lies bare,

a rectangle of grass where

soil separates us; it is more

than soil, but time,

sorrow, and grief.

The men I never knew, Father,

stepfather, my father's father,

the others distant.

So now I return to mother,

returning home, the hidden dream

of home. It is from the mother

that we come, to the earth

that we return. Cleft-divided,

rocks in the hot sunlight

by the ocean, where the iguana

are motionless.

I am drawn to her presence, to

a hymn to woman,

birth, death, the goddess

coming from the earth

and moon, held captive

in moonlight, a perfect

roundness of completion.

She is my seed and bone, my

entrance into life; age four

I lay between my parents,

Father asleep, and Mother,

smiling, said "kiss your

father." Later I slept

with Grandmother and Aunt Mable

at their country home,

lay between them, my head

at their feet making room

for three in one bed. We are three,

a trinity of man, woman,

and child.

Vulva shaped rocks,

the Yoni Rocks, shells,

clams moving on the river's

sandy floor leaving

a trail twisting, straight,

or circular in the sand;

the sun entering the sky

from beneath trees

on the horizon. Mother

is the most beautiful

woman I remember thinking,

long brunette hair, as I lay

in a pram on Girouard Avenue

just a hundred feet

from Grandmothers's flat,

living there when Father

was ill. Mother

was the most beautiful woman

to the child who lay

staring at her as though

only we existed, no other existed

in that enclosure of mother, father

and child. So now I seek to lie

beside you, fear losing you,

as I have been left before.

Now the Yoni Rocks

are a doorway

to the inner life,

as before conception

and birth, before emerging into life

in blood and salt and air;

always fearing the return,

dissolution into nothingness

and fear.

2.

Our ship did not break like waves

on these rocks, rocks that gave us

life; these rocks were stars,

meteors fallen in the night

waiting to cool from their

entry to our world, we saw

them lie almost invisible

half buried in sand and water

cooling in the summer night.

White caps are an old

woman's white hair, twisted

and tied into a bun, faces

seen in clouds when a child,

a horse pulling a milk wagon

on Oxford Avenue in 1957,

Archibald Lampman's:

Tonight the very horses springing by

Toss gold from whitened nostrils,

moved by these lines age sixteen.

Who would deny us the Yoni rocks,

who would deny us poetry, the intimate

square feet we inhabit,

a rectangle of grass, a triangle

of birth, the brown mouse

and codfish, separation

and reunion, sky and earth,

northern lights in July when sailing

at 2 a.m., fireflies on a June evening

when out for a walk with you?

We return to ourselves, to the

woman a man is always beside, or

the man the woman is beside.

Who would deny us hearing Mother's

voice, your touch, or the silent

presence of Grandmother

always with me, always close

with her white hair, cotton

print dress and black shoes,

not a farewell

but this presence ending grief.

(Stephen Morrissey, The Yoni Rocks, Empyreal Press, Montreal 1995; ISBN 0-921852-07-X; The Shadow Trilogy, including The Compass (1993) and The Mystic Beast (1997), was published by Empyreal Press in Montreal.)

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.)