Grant's Tomb, NYC

Thoughts of Girouard Avenue

Back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue, my grandmother and my cousin Herb,
spring 1938

My parents worked hard and ensured their children had the opportunity to get ahead. Even so, due to my father's bad health, we lived with my grandmother and other relatives on Girouard Avenue for two years in the early 1950s. We were not the first to return there to live. I could make a list of the different family members who lived there over the years. When my grandmother was planning to move--maybe it was the move to Girouard from St. Henry back in the mid-1920s--my father told her to get a smaller place so she wouldn't be able to take in so many family members. As it turned out, the flat on Girouard was bigger than ever. The door was always open to family members who needed a home, who needed a safe harbour.

Some families are still willing to take in relatives fallen on hard times, bad health, unemployment, or family crisis, but the "open door" seemed to happen more often in the past before a social safety net took over this function. If you had family or friends, you would never find yourself on the street, you’d never be homeless. In our family, this help was given by my grandmother; other families did the same thing for their relatives when they were in need.

As I remember it, homeless people in the past were almost all men who had fallen on hard times, often due to alcohol; we called them “rubby-dubs,” and I wonder if this word exists outside of Montreal and if it is derived from a French word? If you saw any homeless people, or beggars, in Montreal just a few decades ago they were mostly men and many of them were hopeless alcoholics. Now, there are many homeless people in Montreal. Not all sleep in the streets, many sleep in shelters, others crash for a few days in the apartments of friends, and you see a few pushing grocery carts full of plastic garbage bags containing their possessions through the streets, or sleeping in the entrance ways to stores that have closed for the night. Being homeless is now a possibility in many people’s lives, just as time spent incarcerated is a possibility for some people, almost an expected event. If one served time in prison in the past it was a terrible disgrace and you had brought shame on your family; now, especially in the United States, for many poor people, it is just a part of life.

Are people really all that much worse now than they used to be? Must so many people end up in prison? Maybe these people really are terrible, lost souls, that you want to avoid, or put in prison. Maybe using illegal drugs has made them outcasts from traditional society. Maybe our society has turned into something that would be shocking and incomprehensible to people just fifty or sixty years ago. They might recoil with horror at some of the changes in our contemporary society.

Recalling my grandmother’s home as a place of welcome, I believe that this is how memories and family cohesiveness is created. When family memories are loving and happy ones, then these memories are sustaining for us when we are having difficult times in our own lives. We remember the good times when the hard times seem overwhelming. That is when an address, like 2226 Girouard Avenue, a place remembered, enters into the geography of the soul and into the important memories in a family’s collective history.

(Yes, they were called "rubbies," that is "rubby-dubs," because they drank rubbing alcohol. I had forgotten this.)

Mausoleums

Return to Girouard Avenue

Looking south on Girouard Avenue

(1) Return to Girouard Avenue 

When I returned to my grandmother’s flat at 2226 Girouard Avenue in May 2009, it felt as though no time at all had intervened since I was last there, that was also in May but forty years before. I had driven by the flat that day, as I often do, and noticed that the front door was open, there was an open house set up by a real estate agent. I rushed home and got my camera, and returned to a place that had meant so much to me my whole life. Entering the flat, it was as though only a few minutes had intervened since my last visit, so many years before. There was also a feeling of suspended animation as there had been no major renovations to the premises since it was built around 1900, and since 1966, when my grandmother died, there seemed to have been very little maintenance—the floors were now uneven, the door jambs crooked, the roof had leaked, and windows were threatening to fall out of the walls. Despite this, I felt “at home”; I was happy to have returned to this place that figures so much in my imaginal and psychic life. 

(2) It was in 1959... 

That day I took many photographs as I walked through the flat, I knew this would probably be my only visit there, and it was. The first room I entered had been my Aunt Mable’s bedroom where I can still remember sitting one afternoon on my father’s lap and learning how to spell, maybe I was three or four years old. Next was the living room where I often stood at the window and looked out at the street below—we were on the second floor — and one day in 1959 I counted eleven streetcars running along Girouard Avenue, for it was the last day there was streetcar service in Montreal. Here, too, was where my brother and I had visited our great aunts at Christmas just months after our grandmother had died; my Great Aunt Edna told us stories of the past, describing our grandparents’ wedding over seventy years before. I also entered what had been my grandmother’s bedroom; then the dining room; and as I walked down the long hallway to the rear of the flat I noticed the old claw foot bathtub in the bathroom; then my Great Aunt Essie’s bedroom; and finally I entered the kitchen and spare room off the kitchen where my great grandfather had lived his final years. All of these memories returned to me, including Bella, the cleaning lady my grandmother had come to the flat once a month in her old age; I remembered Bella on her hands and knees, with her nylons rolled down to her ankles, polishing the hardwood floors by hand and the smell of floor wax in the air. 

(3) Geography 

Girouard Avenue is on the eastern edge of NDG although it isn’t the true border where NDG begins and ends, but psychologically that border is Girouard. Driving south on Girouard, below Sherbrooke Street West, we pass my grandmother’s flat and then drive through an underpass at the bottom of the street; now we’re in Lower NDG and if you turn left from there onto St. Jacques you're headed in the direction of St. Henry, St. Cunegonde, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, or Point St. Charles. This journey is across the years but also across our collective emotions, a journey from the past that is frozen in a kind of suspended animation. 

(4) Dreams 

While I have often dreamed of the Girouard Avenue flat, it bothered me that usually my grandmother was absent in these dreams. Maybe one or both of the old great aunts would be there or the flat was empty, but only seldom was my grandmother present. I now see that it isn't only the people, it's the actual place that is important to me, and this includes and encompasses my relatives and ancestors who lived there, it encompasses all we've done as a family living at this one location for so many years. Not only was the flat itself important to me, it was my psychic centre, a place of dreams and poetry, a place of creativity, family, memory, and emotion. The Girouard flat was a place of the soul and I have manifested the soul’s vision in the poems I have written. We contribute to the world with our poetry, our creativity, our love, our enthusiasm, our spirit, and this is what I have tried to do in my writing and in my life. 

(5) Notre Dame de Grace 

Many people have their own “Girouard Avenue,” as such it is an archetype for that first home, that first idealized place where we grew up and where we had our first memories of childhood. It is a place for us that recalls the world of innocence. For many of us, it is the place where we first lived as we moved upward in social class, from St. Henry to Notre Dame de Grace, to the familiar "NDG," our new neighbourhood. Many of our parents never finished high school: my father dropped out of St. Leo’s Academy to help support his family after his father died; my mother went to the Mother House and learned shorthand, typing, and secretarial work. 

(6) The quiet zone that is old age 

I was a quiet child and did not need constant entertainment, or any entertainment, when I stayed at my grandmother’s. I never thought of her as being someone to play with, I went to her house and stayed the day and just naturally played on my own. I respected that she was old. I looked out the window; I played with little cars on a tea wagon; I sat and listened to the radio with my grandmother; one day, I asked her to play the piano for me and we sat on the piano bench, just inside the living room, and she played a few notes, and then stopped, she could no longer play. I accepted my days of relative inactivity at her home as normal, as what one did at one’s grandmother’s home. I knew she was old and that she did not do much, she drank tea and ate toast, she sat, she listened to the radio. This created in me a sense of what it is to be old, of the quiet zone that is old age. I still enter a quiet zone of my own, as I have done my whole life, and which was a gift from my grandmother to me.

On Glen Sorestad's Poetry

Glen Sorestad, League of Canadian Poets AGM in Edmonton, 2007

Ten years ago, I invited Glen Sorestad to give a reading of his poems at the college where I teach. It was a large audience, well over a hundred students, and I remember that the students loved the poems that Glen read that afternoon. Later that day, Glen and I drove into Montreal and had lunch at an Irish bar-resto on McKay or Crescent below Ste. Catherine Street. I remember introducing Glen to our waiter and saying that Glen was a well-known poet, that he was also the Poet Laureate of the Province of Saskatchewan. A few minutes later the waiter returned with a guest book for Glen to sign, I had no idea restaurants had guest books.

Once, someone wrote in a review of a reading I gave that I came across as “everyone’s favourite uncle,” not necessarily what I would like to have heard but perhaps accurate. The only other poet I’ve met who could also be described in a similar way is Glen Sorestad. I remember Margaret Laurence being described by the critic Robert Fulford as nondescript, perhaps looking like a housewife. Appearances are deceiving!

Over the years I’ve read many of Glen’s books as they’ve been published; two of his newer books are Road Apples, an autumn journey into America (Rubicon Press, 2009) and What We Miss (Thistledown Press, 2010). Unless I am mistaken, What We Miss is Glen’s first major publication since Blood & bone, ice & stone (Thistledown Press, 2005). In fact, as online-chapbook editor at Coracle Press, I published Glen’s Language of Horse in 2007 and some of the poems in this chapbook are republished in What We Miss.

Road Apples, an autumn journey into America is an impressive chapbook. It is part of a body of literature—the iconic and archetypal journey or road trip across a part of America—that moves from particular observations to general comments about American society. The archetype of the journey is present in many American writers, from Walt Whitman to John Steinbeck to Jack Kerouac. Sorestad’s American journey is across a landscape of ranches, highways, RV parks, and tourist attractions. Sorestad is the outsider, the observer, the bystander. This is America seen through Canadian eyes, that is, it is the perception of someone who is easily assumed to be a fellow American but whose perceptions are always informed by a consciousness that is uniquely Canadian. You could call us “Americanadians”! Americans, unlike Canadians, seem to know very little about the outside world. When telling a waitress in Sioux City, Iowa that he and his wife have just driven from southern Nebraska, she comments that this is lovely and where are they from? They reply they are from Saskatchewan… “And what part of southern Nebrasaka/ would that be in?” she asks. There’s no guest book to sign in this American restaurant, and I doubt the waitress would know what a Poet Laureate is…

………

        Glen Sorestad’s What We Miss is a truly inspired book of poems. These poems are deceptively simple, they return us to the basic experience of being a poet and writing poetry. This experience lies in the ability to see in the quotidian, the everyday, that which is marvelous and meaningful. In the first section, “Moving Towards the Light,” we read poems of everyday experiences, of going for daily walks and recording what is significant on these walks: it is seeing the first robin in spring; the presence of a red-winged blackbird; the warmth of the sun on one’s face; rain; geese; an old man and his dog; the sun coming through some clouds; a woman walking two dogs; a decapitated field mouse… All poets have had this experience: we place importance on observations that other people either ignore or aren’t aware of or think are too trivial to comment on. The poet gives these experiences significance and importance, he gives people a different way to perceive reality. As well, informing Sorestad’s poems is the recognition of our mortality. We know that when he writes of “walking towards the light” it is not only a kind of awakening, but it is also the light that lies beyond death. “Towards the Long Night,” the last poem in this section of What We Miss, finds us in November, the decline to winter has begun, and we note “The sharp sting of wind in our faces, /we bear reluctant light through the park.”

Sorestad’s love of language began when he was a child; he writes of this experience in “The Language of Horse”:

It was words like halter and hames,
bits and bridle, collar and reins,
words his uncle threw at him
as if they were self-evident—
this language so foreign to him.
It was a childhood epiphany:
each new landscape he encountered
from that point on would come with
its own language, its own lexicon
to be snapped or buckled into place,
for him to become a part of and in turn
for it to become a part of him.

Glen Sorestad is a poet who celebrates his early life, his family, moving between the city and the country, but it is in the country where he seems happiest, a happiness of being in a loving family and in close contact with nature. For instance, “Snow Tunnels” and “Christmas Oranges” are both poems of a happy childhood and of innocence. His poem, “Map of Canada,” returns us to an earlier time in Canadian history, he writes of a large map of the country on the classroom wall, but this map had a different quality to it, it also advertised the products of a chocolate company, and now, many years later, the names of different chocolate bars are forever associated to places in Canada, at least in Glen Sorestad’s consciousness! The final poem in the book, “Winter Walk,” has at least two layers of meaning; it is winter, but this is also a walk in the cemetery, and Sorestad is one of several pall bearers of a child’s coffin. This is a very moving poem, it reminds us of life’s transience and the fragility of human life. He writes movingly,

At last they set their box down at the site,
consigned the child to cold and dimming light.

The beauty of Glen Sorestad’s poetry lies, in part, in finely crafted epiphanous perceptions of nature, a love for family, and memories of the past; in these two books we see things through his eyes and know something of the way poets perceive reality.

I consider Glen Sorestad one of our finest Canadian poets. 

(The Language of Horse by Glen Sorestad can be found at http://www.coraclepress.com/the-chapbooks/language-of-horse-glen-sorestad/.)

Floor tiles at St. John the Divine

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (4)

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (3)

On the 142nd anniversary of Thomas D'Arcy McGee's assasination

McGee was assasinated on April 7, 1868. This is the 142nd anniversary of the death of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, a Father of Canadian Confederation, always remembered as a poet and for his contribution to founding the Dominion of Canada.

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (2)

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (1)

Review of James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World

Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World
James Hollis
Toronto, Inner City Books, 2004
158 pages
ISBN 1-894574-10-9

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World continues the author's exploration of the importance of mythology begun in his 1995 Inner City Book, Tracking the Gods. Myth, for Hollis, "is perhaps the most important psychological and cultural construct of our time." Mythologems is a term that might be familiar to some Jungians but not found in my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary or Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary. Hollis defines a mythologem as "a single, fundamental element, or motif, of any myth. The motifs of ascent or descent are mythologems. The hero's quest embodies two such mythologems: the hero and the quest, each of which has a discernible lineage and separable meaning, and yet synergistically enlarge each other." Mythologems are therefore specific motifs found in mythology.

We find in the invisible world the content of both our inner conflict and our psychopathology. Psychopathology is defined by Hollis as "the expression of the soul's suffering". Surely this description is part of the beauty and attractiveness of a Jungian approach to inner work: it turns away from a solely clinical and reductionist description of psychology and restores the numinous, the spiritual, and the epiphanous to the description of the complexity of the psyche.

This approach to psychology is not a flight from science (as it is found in what Hollis refers to as the therapeutic bible, the DSM-IV) or a rejection of the modern but rather it is a continuation of mankind's ancient journey to wholeness and completion. Hollis writes, "To map the psychological terrain of a person is to engage in mythographology, to depict the various scripts which each fragment of the whole embodies... The manifold forms of the child, of father, of mother, and also our relationships to them, play out in the schemes and fantasies of everyday life."

For Hollis, who acknowledges he is only one along with many other writers, it seems "there is a malaise in the soul of modern man" that can only be brought to consciousness by reflection on the inner life. The archetype of the child has been lived out by all of us: Hollis discusses "the child as original form", "the lost child", and "the child god". Parents have an obvious archetypal function in the psychology of their children. It should be noted that others, who are not biological parents, can assume the parental role in people's daily life, for instance anyone in authority, such as a teacher or landlord or police officer, can assume some aspect of the parental archetype.

We know that the father imago is a source of empowerment for the young and when absent can result in disempowerment. Hollis writes, "... whenever we are dealing with our own capacity or impotence, whenever we are serving the imago Dei or questioning its relevance to our actual life, we are dealing with the father archetype in all its many forms." Part of the empowering role of the father is that the child will seek to overthrow whatever symbol of authority is necessary for the child to achieve an authentic life of his or her own.

The mother archetype is, as Hollis writes, "both the source of life and of death." There are positive and negative expressions of the feminine; some mothers nurture their children while others actively discourage the child's individuation. Hollis discusses "the son's enmeshment with the mother"; he writes, "The power of the mother complex to affect the archetypal ground of the son cannot be overemphasized." Men who have been enmeshed with the mother's negative feminine can remain adolescent—what C.G. Jung called the puer aeternus—or express in their personal life destructive "Don Juan" behaviour. Meanwhile, there is also "the daughter's enmeshment with the mother" and Hollis describes the different scenarios women experience from inadequate or destructive mothering.

Another mythologem of importance for us is the "Hero's Task" which includes the work of individuation. The "Hero's Task" requires that we "align our conscious choices with our individuation agenda." There are two other mythologems that should be noted: Catabasis refers to stories of descent to the underworld while spiritual rebirth, ascent, or Anabasis, is "a going up in order to bring the gift to consciousness." It would not be an exaggeration or untruth to say that many of us have experienced both descent and ascent in our life's journey.

The concept of the Divine, as a mythologem, also interests Hollis. He writes, "Looked at archetypally, a god is an image which arises out of a depth experience, an encounter with mystery." According to Hollis, God is not a fixed entity but "always renewing itself". Further, Hollis elaborates,

Gods ignored, which is to say, primal energies repressed, split off, projected, today show up as neuroses. They are the animating wounds manifest in history, acted out in families, public forums or the sundry deformations of the private soul.

Still discussing the mythologem of the Divine, Hollis quotes Canadian archetypal psychologist Ginette Paris: "An ancient Greek whose destiny was going badly would ask which divinity he or she had offended. This questioning was part of what we would call therapy." With regard to the Divine, Hollis concludes, "The gods have hardly departed; they have simply gone underground and reappear as wounds, as inflations, as pathologies..." Finally, Hollis is critical of both science that is divorced from the human soul and fundamentalist religion with its dogmatic emphasis on what is perceived as God's "word". While science and religion are traditionally mutually exclusive, they have something in common when they reduce experience to a rigid set of rules and perceptions.

Contemporary American society appears to have forsaken the invisible world and has become, to use Hollis's word, "sterile". It is a society that can seem hostile to the multiplicity, variety, and complexity of the invisible world. Nevertheless, Hollis states that it is not too late to recover, by examining myth and its disparate mythologems that reveal the mystery and depth of the unconscious mind. Hollis writes, "The archives of our tribe are not so far gone that we do not remember a time when they were connected directly to the gods." Responsibility for our psychology rests inescapably with each one of us, but Hollis's book—written with intelligence and compassion—can help make the inner journey that much more accessible.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, November 2004

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Store windows in Manhattan, Easter 2009

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.

From a window on 6th Avenue in Manhattan

A Visitor From the Future

Poster for poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery, and
showing interior of the gallery

One fall evening, back in the mid-1970s, at the old Véhicule Art Gallery on Ste. Catherine Street West, I was scheduled to give a reading of my poems. It was dark and rainy outside as I waited for an audience so I could begin. I remember the arrival of a bearded man as he came up the stairs from the street outside. He asked if “Stephen Morrissey” was giving a poetry reading and I remember speaking with him. He had just arrived in Montreal, he said, on a train from New York City and he had seen my name advertising the reading in the newspaper, and he had a few hours between the arrival of the train and his departure from Dorval Airport that same evening on a flight to Ireland. He wanted to know if I had any poems about being Irish and when I answered that I didn’t, he turned and left. I remember being annoyed by him, and thinking, as well, that whatever was implied by writing “Irish poems” didn’t interest me. I remember that his brief appearance at the reading, before it even began, caused a stir, as others also gathered around him when he entered.

The memory of this stranger has stayed with me all of these years; indeed, I see his visit in a different light now that I have spent the last ten or more years researching my Irish family history and writing what might be called “Irish Poems,” such as “The Colours of the Irish Flag” and “The Rock, A Short History of the Irish in Montreal.” I now think of this stranger as a visitor from my future, someone who came to remind me of what I would one day be writing. In retrospect I see that what I was writing back in the mid-1960s, and on through the years to what I am writing now, is a single continuum, although I was not conscious of this back then. I think of this visitor from the future not as someone who came to change what I was writing, but as someone reminding me of my themes in poetry: poems of family, memory, the ancestors, grief, and the knowledge that underlying everything we do is this journey we are on—this journey between being born and dying—that it is in every instance holy and divine.