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.)
