Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

15.

Returning home, the car’s gear shift
comes off in my hand and trying to repair it,
I crawl into the car’s body and discover the car is a wooden vessel,
a web of slats covered with plywood, almost paper thin
for lightness. I arrive at Oxford Avenue where I grew up;
at the front door a man’s corpse sits in an upright position,
as though he had died in the midst of pausing
to think or remember something. When I return that evening
he is gone and I am relieved: But who was this corpse?
Could he have been Father, or someone I have forgotten
or never knew, the white sheet a shroud, like a body
found in the frozen north, preserved by the cold,
lips pulled back in the permanent grin of the dead,
like a wolf’s grinning yellow teeth.



16. Five Black Horses

It was a demonstration of something, the severed
horse’s head on a chair and the four black horses
standing facing the audience. Behind the middle horse
a man took a hammer and drove a bolt
into the horse’s neck; at first, the horse stood as before,
we were all calm, including the horses,
and then the animal fell to the floor.
The other horses were to follow.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Miami, Florida, 1930s

13.

I am told my father has just died.
He was alive all the years
I thought he was dead.
For fifty years I grieved
and regretted his death.
Now, again, I have missed him.


14.

A cat has been a nuisance,
pissing on  the walls, shitting where the children play,
noise all night; the Italian landlord next door is dealing with it.
He has a big knife and has cut off the cat’s paws,
and then cut further up the leg. 
Someone holds the cat for him.
He may even have skinned the cat,
and planned to leave it alive to suffer.
We are in his car and I am pleading with him
to kill the cat, pleading kill the cat, end his suffering.
His daughter is also pleading with him to kill the cat,
“Daddy, please kill the cat. Please, please kill the cat.”

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Church in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, QC, July 2009

11.

"Down Under," as they call it,
a woman has been dragged to the floor,
her clothes torn and dirty;
a man, dressed in a blue satin suit,
like a French cavalier, watches me.
I phone the police and wait and wait.
Then I leave, go to some building
where I am with my father-in-law;
I ask him what he would do
if this man arrives here, he says
he would not let him in the house.
I am on a busy street, I am waiting
for the man in blue. Finally, he arrives
at the head of an entourage,
half-naked women on horses,
clowns, acrobats, dwarves, fire eaters,
it’s a parade that only I can see.
I hold up my hands, fingers outstretched at them:
I yell “Die! Die! Die!” as though deadly energy
will come from my fingers.
They are a lot more powerful than I am.
I feel insignificant, alone against this man
and what he represents.


12.

My son tells me he wants me as a “friend”.
I reply, “I am your father, not a friend;
a father is better; I love you as a father,
a friend is less than a father.”

Wolves at Alexis Nihon Plaza

The numinous world is all around us, waiting to break through the unconscious into our awareness. It is like these plastic wolves, found in the window of a dollar store in Alexis Nihon Plaza in Montreal. There the wolves wait, actually quite attractive figurines or statuettes, but still nothing all that special, and yet they are a reminder of the numinous order to things. The numinous--archetypes, metaphor, symbolism, mythology--are always present, always waiting to enter consciousness, always just under the surface of consciousness.

Jungians have always been fascinated by popular culture, which can be an expression of the human psyche and what it contains, represented to us in the everyday--in the quotidian--where it is an expression of our social and cultural concerns, our psychological and spiritual concerns, our collective concerns, unadorned by the aspect of high art that is deliberate and sometimes exclusive.

These wolves remind us, even if it remains unconscious, of the part of the psyche that cannot be tamed, that is always only once removed from primeval and atavistic aspects of consciousness.

I remember, years ago, reading Albert Schweitzer's On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1922), it was on the reading list for the high schools of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, and then a few years later I read A Heart of Darkness, published twenty years earlier, by Joseph Conrad, both books set in Africa. The first, a benevolent expression of Christianity (the work done at Schweitzer's Lambarene mission) in Africa; the other, how western consciousness is affected by shadow content. Both books are fascinating explorations of European consciousness relocated to a foreign environment. Conrad's vision is more relevant for us as it shows western consciousness when removed from the supports offered by western society, by western mythology. Today, and for the last hundred years years, these supports have been removed for many people in western society. We consider this the decline of western civilization, and the old civilization is indeed in decline and has been for many years, but we also live in a dynamic and vital post-modern world which adapts to change and is capable of re-visioning itself. What most people don't realize is that a new mythology has been created, new psychological supports have been created, that the numinous can never be far removed from consciousness. That we aren't fully aware of these new supports--a new mythology for living--isn't evidence that they don't exist; it is evidence that they are active, vibrant, and relevant. For many people this is a difficult time in which to live, it demands something most people aren't prepared to do, and that is to become people who are conscious and aware.

Note: When I wrote this I could still be a detached observer of things; no longer. The supports of western civilization are being destroyed by people in the west, it is called being woke, but they are not really "woke" or awake, or even aware but they are full of self-hatred. In their rush to destroy the society and culture that educated them and gave them the affluent life that they enjoy, they forget the many achievements of western society. If this is the new mythology of western society, then I didn't see it coming. These woke people want to destroy western society, tear it down, even to the basic unit of society that is the family.  (19 February 2023)

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

9.

Former Prime Minister Chretien tells me
he’ll do what he can for us
to hang onto the building,
but there are other people who want it.
Also he wants me to lose weight, improve my health.

10.

In a basement, flooded with two or three feet of water,
big shits like loaves of bread
float in the water and I try to break them into slices
with a paddle so that when my wife arrives,
walking in the water, she won’t step on the shit.
I try to stuff the shit down a drain

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

7.

I am walking along a street of ice and snow.
I stop and pay for a newspaper with tokens from the casino.
Then I am in a dentist’s office full of Americans,
all smiling and young, in cubicles.
The dentists in their white jackets
are all eager to work, even when
a small black dog tries to get into the building.
I open a door and a stag is there
also trying to get in.
I try to hold him back, but he’s large
and incredibly strong as he breaks through the door.
Now he’s in the building, in the hallway, in a room.


8.

There are three of us sky diving,
holding hands forming a circle.
We are not falling, instead
we are ascending the sky.
As we rise higher, the physical body
feels not only healed, but ecstatic
in freedom from earth and an aging body:
I did not want to return to this life
I am living, I did not want to return
to the old life. I weep as I feel complete joy.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

5.

I am a student again. I sit in the back of the classroom
with some women around me.
When I leave I put on my coat and think
I could offer to drive one of the women home, but I don’t.
Then I am at a banquet and someone is telling the poet George Johnston
that the university will name a building after him.
Jeanne, his wife, is there and she says she could cry hearing this.
George is wearing a very white shirt, he’s shaved off his beard,
and I embrace him, congratulate him on the building with his name.
Later, I ask the woman “Was George a student at the U of T?”
and she says he was and that’s why a building will be named after him.



6.

I return to 4614 Oxford Avenue to visit our old home.
I am in the flat when the present tenants arrive,
I point to out to them the leaves I’ve just raked,
how I’ve improved the lawns.
In the living room there are four fireplaces:
three are new, gas or electric. We visit other rooms.
I’ve forgotten my camera. I tell them who used to live in this building.
They seem to remember the people who lived upstairs,
they may have committed suicide in the 1980s.
I go for a walk, and it’s all traffic rushing by.
An old woman holds up her hand and crosses the street.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Church in Ste-Anne de Bellevue, QC, 2009

3.

At the bottom of a garbage can in the kitchen,
the honeybees I left there fly out as a great black cloud.
I run to the living room and then close myself in a sun porch.
A dog, with a black face, joins me.
“They stung my face,” he complains.
Others join us and somehow we get rid of the bees.
Meanwhile, someone is sitting on the stairs outside by a pool in the garden.

4.

The key is broken to the old Volkswagen,
but it still starts the car.
I am with people I don’t know
and we arrive at someone’s house
after driving along a street in the city;
I tell a woman, “You can be selective
and find a country to live in,
like finding a place in the city.”
We sit in her house, she is a retired academic.
I look around and when she returns to the room
I ask, “How did you continue getting so many perks
even though you are retired from the university?”
When I am in the car, leaving, a young girl
comes over to say goodbye and we kiss on the mouth,
her tongue is, momentarily, in my mouth.
I am in a car, or on a couch with my wife,
and want to make love, but a man enters
and we must discuss business.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Psyche’s Night Journey

1.

Grandmother’s home has wood paneled walls
and a claw foot bathtub beside the stove in the kitchen.
I weep regretting I hadn’t returned sooner or more often to visit her.
On the second floor daylight enters at the wainscoting;
on hands and knees I pull a piece of wood
from the wall behind an antique table,
there is a crack along the wall
where a wooden beam lets in cold air.
Later, walking along a narrow path
someone has dug through the snow
in the street, I see a man
walking in the same direction
watching me.


2.

At the bottom of the front stairs
at Grandmother’s flat,
there is a blue clock
which no longer works;
a key to wind the clock
is in a little black drawer beside the clock.
Upstairs everything is very plain and in proper order.
Mother is staying there and I ask her,
“Did Grandma leave any messages for me?”
Mother is annoyed by the question,
she says because of all of my questions
she regrets I came here.

Dream Journeys: Visits from Psyche

Visits from Psyche
1.

I dreamed of a girl driving
her old blue Volkswagen
through a deep pool,
water spraying up
on both sides of the Beetle.
When I complained
the car might stall
she threw the keys at my face.
I could feel them hit my glasses.
This was Psyche visiting me,
water the depth of dream and memory:
the old car this body,
a vehicle carrying me
through the streets of life;
the keys to open a lock,
a mystery to which I was blind,
even wearing glasses.

2.

Then came a second dream:
a ten foot tall brown bear
standing on its hind legs
trying to escape a backyard
confinement, one leg almost
over the top of the chain link fence.
I walk faster, afraid of the bear
attacking me. Then from behind
a frightened kangaroo appears,
emaciated and mangy-looking.
It is hopping in long strides,
fleeing from abuse.
Suddenly the owner arrives
to return the animal to captivity.
I tell him the kangaroo needs a vet
to heal his wounds.
The owner speaks only Russian,
his behaviour is intimidating.
I enter another yard
where a horse is tied down,
held on the ground by ropes.
As I stand looking
at the horse’s still body
I notice a single, large eye
move warily and look at me,
the horse unable to struggle,
legs bound by ropes and fear.

3.

The third night I dreamed
of a wooden tower,
half of it sealed off
for fifty years.
The nuns who use the tower
never enter the sealed-off side
but know it exists.
I go inside it,
find a few old desks
and chairs, the panelled walls,
windows that allow you
an obscured view
of the nun’s quarters.
Later, I stand outside
looking at the wooden tower.
It is in a Scandinavian country,
where the landscape is austere.
The tower stands alone.
In the distance is where I live,
in a grey, wooden house
that has not been painted
for many years,
it seems to be typical
of the places where people live
in these parts.

How Poets Think and an Introduction to Dream Journeys (1)

Here is William Blake's home when he lived in Felpham, near Bognor Regis, on the coast south of
London. I often walked passed here while visiting with my friend R.R. Skinner.
This is one of the first selfies, that is my finger ruining the photo...

(1)

How do poets think? Not all poets, but how do some poets think? How do poets experience the world? According to Peter Ackroyd`s biography of William Blake, the first morning Blake was in Felpham, his home for two years on the coast south of London, “Blake came out of his cottage and found a ploughman in an neighbouring field. At this moment the ploughboy working with him called out ‘Father, the gate is open.’ For Blake, this was an emblem of his new life, and the work he was about to begin.” (234-235) Blake perceived this experience as an auspicious sign from the universe, one indicating a future of openness, creativity, and the presence of the divine intervening in his life. At that moment Blake knew that he had made the right choice in moving to Felpham; the universe told him as much. This is one example indicating how poet’s think.


(2)

How poets think, as it is sometimes shown in their work (and in their lives), can be acausal, sometimes synchronistic, sometimes symbolical and metaphorical, sometimes analytical, sometimes archetypal, and often poet’s thinking works simultaneously on at least two levels of meaning. The usual linear thinking that we all do, thinking that is grounded in cause and effect, is of secondary importance in writing a poem, or thinking poetically.


(3)

I have written elsewhere of how two dreams, when I was young, changed my life. One dream told me to remember my life, and that this could be done by writing a diary; a second dream revealed to me the insecurity of life. Both were profound and life changing dreams. I always assumed that everyone had “big dreams,” but this was a mistake. Everyone dreams but most people don’t listen to their dreams, they forget them as soon as they wake, or if the dream is remembered it is either ignored or sloughed off. They don’t want to be disturbed by dreams, or by re-visioning their life, or by becoming more conscious, or by the discomfort of psychological insight. This is how poets think: they allow for the presence of dreams as a form of communication from the unconscious, and the dream is then listened to.


(4)

God communicates to people in two ways: through angels and through our dreams. If you want to communicate with God, or receive a message from God, then be open to your dreams. Dreams coming from God are the “big dreams,” and we may have only a few of these during our whole life. Dreams have some interest for poets and artists, dreams are psychic collages juxtaposing images that one would probably never put together. They are of interest in an aesthetic sense, as a curiosity, and importantly for therapists as a door into the psyche of their client. Discussing a dream is a way into the psyche, it is a catalyst for discussion. Surrealism as a movement grew out of Freud’s positioning of dream interpretation as an important part of therapeutic work. The Surrealists were more fascinated by the dream as an aesthetic event than by its therapeutic value. Dreams, then, as life changing events, can be an important aspect of how poets think; as well, dream imagery can be transformed into a poem.


(5)

Two other minor examples of poetic thinking: when I returned to live in the neighbourhood where I grew up, I would regularly see people who I used to see in the streets when I was young. They were not older versions of themselves, they were the same people that I used to see, as though, over the intervening years, they had never changed. I no longer see these people, they seem to have departed, where they have gone to I don’t know, but I would often see them, just as they were so many years ago. A second example: I have always believed that when we think of someone we used to know, but have lost contact with them, and they suddenly come to mind, for no reason at all, at that same moment they are thinking of us. For example, sometimes we think of an old friend with whom we have lost contact and then, only a few seconds later, the phone rings and it is the person we have been thinking of.

(6)

It is the essence of the shamanic journey that what is perceived is not a product of the imagination but is “real.” The important thing is the experience in which our awareness and consciousness is not always subject to cause and effect. Dreams juxtapose images that are usually not associated with each other. In essence the dream is a collage or a "cut-up" (as invented by Brion Gysin). Dreams fascinate us when they open the door of archetypal association. A door, for instance, allows us to enter a room, but a "door" for William Blake is an image opening our awareness and our perception of the symbolical world of the psyche. Almost two hundred years later Jim Morrison resonated to Blake's perception and the music of The Doors followed.

(7)

Dreams, Tarot cards, Sabian Symvbols, the Aquarian Symbols, archetypal images, paintings by Odilon Redon (and others), photographs by Man Ray, all help open an entrance into the deeper levels of the psyche; at this deeper level we become conscious of people, events, and a narrative not always available to the conscious mind. I would include fairy tales and mythology in this list of ways to access the unconscious mnd.


(8)

Poetry, in essence, deals with the soul and soul making. Just about any subject can be transformed into poetry, but a poet’s soul is needed for this transformation of the everyday into poetry. Poetry is transformation. Dreams, in essence, transform everyday reality into an expression of the psyche or the soul, and these dreams can sometimes give us access into our own souls. This is also a beginning of a definition of how poets think.
________________________________

In the coming weeks I will include here various poems inspired by dream imagery, under the heading of Dream Journeys.

"Each day and each night"

2010

Each night in each dream,
each day God speaks to me,
Each day I open a door
through which comes
sunlight & greet the presence
of the Holy Spirit—
Each night in darkness
I enter a world
parallel to this,
Each day and each night
my heart opens,
a door or window,
through which comes
starlight, moonlight, sunlight—
Each night I am visited by spirits,
by the ancients,
by ancestors;
Each day I walk
these streets, visiting
the homes of spirits,
the streets they know;
Each day and each night
we are a presence
in the dream world.

4 March 2000

Chronology and notes

August 1999: Aquarian Symbols described on shamanic journeys in Vancouver; I had read the Sabian Symbols several months before. September – October 2000: Astral journeys to visit CZ in Vancouver. Fall 2001: A Jungian event, a shamanic walk in the Plateau in Montreal; what a nightmare! I was exposed to a dark and negative atmosphere; everything went wrong; later, we ate in a restaurant and the food was cold, served on a cold plate; we returned to the car and it had a flat tire... dark, cold, hungry, flat tire... the others had a great time! Notes for a shamanic walk: begin with a question for which you want an answer. It might be something regarding a life decision or something spiritual, for instance. A shamanic walk is a kind of I Ching, a random response relying on a synchronistic or chance suggestion of insight. The walk gives meaning to what might otherwise seem random and meaningless--a walk in a city neighbourhood not regularly visited--or taken for granted. Let things that you see and experience on the walk speak to you. Be open, be conscious, to interactions with other people, or whatever else presents itself to you. Take, perhaps, forty-five minutes for the walk. Think about what happened during the walk, does it reflect back to you something about yourself and your present situation? The shamanic walk is a mirror of yourself, but it can also be a way to find answers to questions that are important to you. 16 November 2001: Don Evans lecture on Shamanism at the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal. I also read Josephine’s shamanic journeys: these did not precede the Aquarian Symbols, they followed them; it opened the door to shamanic journeying, they showed what could be seen on a journey and what can be seen indicates how it is done. The key to a journey is to have a question that gives the journey a focus, otherwise it can be quite pointless. Spring 2002: Tim Greene speaks to the Spiritual Science Fellowship conference in Montreal; a reading with Harley Monte who encourages forming a shaman centre, as he does in our yearly meetings, but without success. Spring 2003: Read Michael Harner on Shamanism; heard Wessleman lecture on his experiences and read his books; attended Harley Monte’s shaman workshop at the SSF conference. Note: Shamanism, is mankind's first expression of spirituality; there are common things in all shamanism: all link spirit and the world; they describe the seven directions of space: east, west, north and south, up, down, and within. 23.04.2003: Poem written while dreaming: Where does it end? In circles. When does it end? In your last breath. When does it end? In circles. Where does it end? In your last breath. 24.04.2003: Family history is a quest, requiring detective work, but it isn't my life journey: the quest was to find the ancestors, the spirits, and to list them in genealogical order, in a Tree of Family Life, to acquire information on them, their dates of birth, marriage, and death, to find anecdotes about their lives that bring them to life. When the veil between this world and the other world is at its thinnest, the ancestors will find some way in which to contact you, but it won't necessarily be the way you expect it to happen. The wounded become healers. Mundane experiences become a conduit to the spiritual dimension. At the bottom of all of this is the experience of the Divine.

Ottilie Douglas-Fodor at La Galerie Espace, 28 January – 2 February

On the back of our invitation to Ottilie Douglas-Fodor’s exhibition at La Galerie Espace, located at 4844 boul. St-Laurent in Montreal, Ottitlie had written “Stephen’s ‘coat’ poems were the inspiration for this series of collages!” It was a fairly cold winter afternoon a few weeks later when I visited Ottilie’s exhibition and saw this series of collages for the first time.

It was around November 2007 that I began writing a series of poems about coats. I was on a medical leave from work having broken my leg in an accident the month before. Then, when I had little more to do than sit and stare out the window into the back yard, I began writing poems about coats. The poems are usually well received at readings and I plan to include the series in my next book of poems, A Private Mythology.






Ottilie’s collages, inspired by the coat poems, show a human figure, on all-fours, and glued to the figure are different coloured or patterned, but still transparent, pieces of paper. The coats in the collages bring life to this fairly anonymous character who appears in each collage in the same prone position, bent over on hands and feet. The effect of this series is quite amazing as each collage evokes a different feeling depending on the coloured or patterned paper glued over the figure; some are light and lively, others are ominous and foreboding. There is always the juxtaposition of different coloured paper over an identical figure. These collages are simple but impressive; the figure is like a line drawing, unadorned by facial or other identifying features. One feels sympathetic to the figure wearing these different “coats,” they are like blankets draped over his body, shifting coloured shapes superimposed on his back. The figure reminds me of a James Thurber drawing, but in a much different context than Thurber's work. The image on the poster is entitled “Chrysalis, var. 2,” and there is a feeling of metamorphosis to these collages, for the coat transforms the figure from anonymity to individuality, just as the different coats in the coat poems are the vehicle for expressing something about a specific human condition.





What also interested me when seeing these collages is that Ottilie’s figure is in a similar pose as William Blake’s 1805 print of the biblical character Nebuchadnezzar. Curiously, just days before visiting Ottilie’s exhibition I had read The Book of Daniel in which Nebuchadnezzar appears and I made a note in the margin referring to Blake’s representation of him. I had remembered Blake’s drawing of Nebuchadnezzar (maybe from the William Blake exhibit at the Tate Gallery back in the 1980s) as facing in the opposite direction from the one in Ottilie’s series, but when I returned home and looked up Blake’s image I was surprised to see he was posed in the same direction as Ottilie’s character. Blake’s nude character is disturbing, with his long hair and beard, his muscular body, and the confused expression on his face. To me, there is something both shamanistic and primitive in Ottilie’s collages. They seem to come from the unconscious mind, from the collective unconscious, from a place beyond any single culture or tradition.

In some poetry, and in some visual art, there is an underlying element that is shamanistic. I think of William Blake as a kind of shaman. On one hand, shamanisim is the original expression of mankind’s spirituality, it is both global and "experientially atemporal" (that's an awkward phrase by which I mean that time, whether five years or five thousand years, does not alter what shaman's experience); what the shaman experiences is archetypal. On the other hand, organized religion is an expression of mankind’s spirituality that is culturally based and usually associated with, or identified with, a specific geographical location. This is not to say one is better than the other, it is only to differentiate between the two. I believe the poem that inspired Ottilie Douglas-Fodor's collages in this exhibition was “The Shaman’s Coat”:

The Shaman’s Coat

The pockets of the shaman’s coat,
are like holes in the ground,
worms wrap around my fingers
when I dig my hands into the black earth
of these pockets.

My shaman’s coat
when opened wide reveals a dozen
wrist watches in the coat lining
set to distant time zones.

My shaman’s coat is long and grey
and smells feral, like honey bees
in a hive. Left in a theatre cloak room
the coat is returned smelling of perfume
picked up when pressed against
a woman’s stylish coat.

My shaman’s coat has a life of its own,
sometimes it disappears, visits a stranger’s home
where it is an honoured guest,
fêted, wined, and dined until the coat
emits a protracted burp then sighs
and falls limp and rag-like
asleep on the living room couch.

This coat can walk the streets
on its shamanic journey.
It is not a coat that likes a crowd.
It is an introverted coat—
at parties it finds a secluded coat rack
where it won’t be bothered
by the noise and talk
of normal people.

The shaman’s coat
flies over the city,
enters tunnels, caves,
and office buildings;
stands on a beach,
the sea and sky gunmetal grey,
while the wind blows into a storm.
Wearing my shaman’s coat,
pulled like a blanket over my shoulders,
I am on a journey I began at birth
and will end on the day
of my death.

An Exhibit at the Metropolitan, NYC

This is a curious small sculpture that shows a woman holding onto the tail of a bird, apparently in flight. The caption beneath says that the purpose for this sculpture is unknown. I suggest it shows a shamanistic journey, that this is a depiction of a shamanistic journey. In future posts I will describe other texts and artifacts in this way.

(From the exhibit Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.November 18, 2008–March 15, 2009, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor.)

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.