To the Muses, by William Blake

 

                                        Whether on Ida's shady brow,
                                        Or in the chambers of the East,
                                        The chambers of the sun, that now
                                        From ancient melody have ceas'd;

                                        Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
                                        Or the green corners of the earth,
                                        Or the blue regions of the air,
                                        Where the melodious winds have birth;

                                        Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
                                        Beneath the bosom of the sea
                                        Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
                                        Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

                                        How have you left the ancient love
                                        That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
                                        The languid strings do scarcely move!
                                        The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

William Blake, Poetical Sketches (London, 1783)

The Garden Myth

Bee balm in our garden, summer 2021

If there is a myth that speaks most directly to my experiences in life it is the Garden Myth, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. I first learned of this from William Blake by way of Northrop Frye; we have all fallen from the innocence of childhood into a dark forest of experience, a state of self-consciousness. What can be done about this? Is there redemption? Is there a religious experience that will free one from suffering? What is the answer? How do we do it? Christianity? Buddhism? Carl Jung? Krishnamurti? 

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There is a mythological basis to all of my work; the work, the poetry, returns to a central story, a myth. A myth is also a way of looking at one's place in the cosmos, of finding one's spiritual place, of understanding one's life. Finding one's myth is not so much discovering something new as it is rediscovering something that is essential to one's inner life; a myth gives order to one's life, it explains events, it is the foundation of one's experienced life. A myth is the soul's story and the soul loves a narrative, specificity, and order. The Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience, is the basis of my writing.

 

The Great Reconfiguration

Taken while driving over the old Champlain Bridge

For some of us, there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life was reconfigured. Life was one thing and then, a moment later, it was something else. For some of us, this is how change occurs, not a slow progression but a sudden reconfiguration of everything that constituted our “life.” It may take years, even a lifetime, to understand this sudden, radical change; it may take years for the full consequences of this change--what I have termed the "Great Reconfiguration"-- to make itself known to us, but eventually it does become known.

I was a six year old child with two parents and a brother. We lived a middle-class life in a middle-class neighbourhood. Life was not perfect because of my father’s bad health, but it was, by 1950s standards, a “normal” life. Then, my father died on November 16, 1956, and my life as I knew it was over. All of the family dynamics changed. I was now a child whose father had died, a child in a one-parent home. I cannot impress on you too much the radical changes in my life that occurred because my father’s death. The whole family was affected by his death. It has affected my entire life and it has been the Great Reconfiguration of my life. It probably made me into the poet I am today, someone who is obsessive, filled with grief, regret, and failure, preoccupied with death, and always concerned with the spiritual side of life.

Silence fell on our house after my father died. His death was met with silence; he became a topic I always felt uncomfortable about and unable to discuss. I was ashamed that he had died. I was now different from all of my friends. I was never consoled in my child`s grief but met with silence; I was expected to deal with my grief by myself. This was not a home where we shared fond and loving memories of my father, it was a home in which the man who is my father was not mentioned. There were no trips to the cemetery to visit his grave, there was just silence, and it was decades before I visited where he is buried.

I will always remember lying in bed as a six year old child, praying to God that my father come home. I will always remember the little toy train engine, powered by batteries, my mother brought home for me from Boston when my father was in hospital there. Someone, perhaps a cousin, stepped on it almost as soon as I received it and broke the wheels; and then the engine, because it had a light on it, became a light I took to bed with me. It was, as I remember, when the toy train was given to me that my mother told me, only a day or a few days after my father had died, “It is better this way, it is better that he not suffer.” And that was the end of that.

No wonder, at university only thirteen years later, when I read William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” and Isak Dinesen’s wonderful short story “Sorrow Acre,” I found the single myth that was to preoccupy and define my life for many years. It was the biblical story of the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience. It was a myth, a psychological truth, that described my own great reconfiguration. It was the event that saw the beginning of the end of my childhood puer existence and the birth of my senex concerns; it was the event in which I was conceived as a poet and the person I am today, many years older. It was the birth of my soul as a poet.

The Great Reconfiguration affects every aspect of one’s life and unless you have undergone such a radical re-organization of your life, it is difficult to understand how life changing a single experience can be. This new organization of life variables created for me a life I probably would not have had if my father had not died. Almost every aspect—I believe every aspect—of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before his death. My life was made harder, I was given a challenge that most children do not receive at age six years. It was the challenge to understand the impermanence of life. To do this, I turned to writing poetry. Poetry was my calling in life, a calling that was presented to me by necessity, by the grief and experience of my father`s death. What my life would been like otherwise is impossible to say, that life that was denied is gone, never to have been. It is only with the perspective of age that I see these events as clearly as I now do; this life journey I am on became something different from what it could have been, it has made this journey difficult but certainly interesting.