"Sorrow Acre" by Isak Dinesen

Sorrow Acre

By Stephen Morrissey

Many things influence a poet's development, for instance what we read can enlarge our concept of ourselves as poets as well as our idea of what we can do in poetry. One of these influences for me occurred around 1970 when I read a short story entitled “Sorrow Acre" by the Danish author Isak Dinesen. Dinesen's story was important to me for two reasons: first, it showed me the importance of mythology and archetypes as a way to critique literature; second, it introduced me to the "Garden Myth" and this was significant for me at a personal level as well as influencing  the poetry I was writing. This myth expresses a psychological truth, it is about how we lose the unself-conscious innocence of childhood. As we get older we "fall from innocence" into the world of self-consciousness. My father's death when I was six years old introduced me to the world of grief, loss, and regret. I knew at an early age that life is finite, that death takes away from us people we love. Indeed, we all suffer loss in some form and eventually leave the idyllic world of innocence.  

The Garden Myth is a major theme found in the work of many poets and writers, it is found in the work of a poet I was reading at the same time I read Isak Dinensen's short story; this is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake perceived that our life's journey includes both the fall from innocence and later the effort to find a higher innocence, a meaningful existence

Years ago, Isak Dinesen's “Sorrow Acre" was important to me. In the 1990s I wrote "The Shadow Trilogy" (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks, 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997) which was influenced by C.G. Jung's concept of the human "shadow", that dark fallen side of our inner being that we either keep hidden or we project onto other people. However, preceding my interest in Jungian psychology was Isak Dinesen's short story.

This is where Élizabeth Robert enters this essay with her wonderful translation of The Mystic Beast as La bête mystique (Editions Tryptique, Montreal, 2004). Now Élizabeth knows something more of what was "going on in my mind" that influenced the text that she translated in the early 2000s.

23 04 2014

Note: I wrote this for a panel discussion on "Dans la Tête de L'auteur/ In the Mind of the Writer", a panel discussion presented by the ATTLC-LTAC, held on April 23, 2014 here in Montreal. I was invited by Élizabeth Robert, my friend and translator: "Three authors pen short texts, and their translators “translate” the imagined text, sight unseen. Trois auteurs écrivent un court texte. Leur traducteur respectif produisent simultanément la traduction de ce qu'ils pensent être les textes en question." This (above) was my text; unfortunately, I was ill that evening and, with regrets, missed the event. 

Visiting the Mystic Beast in 2010

Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

The "Mystic Beast", from the rear of the building.

What I call the "Mystic Beast is a Northwest coast Nimpkish wood sculpture of a human figure, made around 1893.

Since last May, I've been living on the campus of the University of British Columbia. One of my "neighbours" is the Museum of Anthropology, with its world famous display of artwork by indigenous people from the coastal area of British Columbia.

It was back in the early 1990s that I discovered, at the MOA, a sculpture I called the "Mystic Beast," and in 1997 published a book of poems with this title.

Living on campus has been an extraordinary and moving experience. I have never failed to be impressed by what I have seen, the people I have met, and just walking on the campus, which I do every day, is a wonderful experience.

The other day I was out in the morning and took these photographs at the Museum of Anthropology. I had planned to visit the Museum as it has been renovated, new exhibits put on display, and so on. It had been suggested to me that perhaps the Mystic Beast would no longer be on display, but there, in the window at the rear of the building, was the Mystic Beast.

I don't identify with the Mystic Beast as much as I once did, but there is still a part of my soul, my inner being, that resonates to what I see in this sculpture. He is not a "fun guy," but someone resolute in surviving this life, someone who has had to find strategies for survival and live "undercover," someone for whom understanding the shadow aspect of the psyche has been essential. You can change, you can even be "reborn," you can meditate and do Tai Chi, you can have your satori or your highs however induced, you can put in your years of therapy, but some of the essential aspects of the personality stay the same. You can revision your past and I suggest this is not a bad thing to do for some people. You might even look back at the old self, one day, and wonder how you could have been that person. But at the end of the day there is still a part of us, the part we have struggled with for so many years, that remains the same.

First Meeting the Mystic Beast, 1994

SM and the Mystic Beast.

Museum of Anthropology,

University 0f British Columbia,

Vancouver, BC.

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.)