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)

Sailboats at Kitsilano

Years ago, I bought a painting from Nellie McClung, who was not only a wonderful poet but also a talented visual artist. My spirits are always lifted when I see her painting, "Sailboats at Kitsilano," in a room in our home. One afternoon in the mid- or late- 1990s we visited Nellie at her home. In one room, it was the first room on the right as you entered her east end Vancouver home, she had some large paintings leaning against a wall and we looked through these. I decided to buy "Sailboats at Kitsilano"; since she had lost some money to an unscrupulous acquaintance we agreed that I would pay her on the installment plan and I enjoyed our correspondence over the next six months. The painting was unsigned so Nellie signed it with her forefinger using paint from a can of house paint. A few weeks ago, all these years later, sitting at the beach looking out at the sailboats, there was Nellie's painting. 

"Sailboats at Kitsilano" by Nellie McClung

You can read Nellie's chapbook, Charles Tupper and Me (2004) that we published for her at http://coraclepress.com/chapbooks/mcclung/charles_tupper_and_me.html.

Kitsilano Showboat at Kitsilano Beach

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.

Clouds on a Vancouver beach

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.

"Waves" and "Waves (2)"

At Jericho Beach, Vancouver, on July 9th, 2010.

Trees on UBC Campus (1)

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"

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.

Honey bees on UBC campus

Walking by the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus last week I noticed honey bees gathering nectar and pollen in the flowers (pictured above). Notice the large pollen sacs on the honey bees' legs. There were also a few bumble bees, and other bees, but the honey bee is always of interest and anyone who has kept bees has a fondness for them. Back in the mid-1970s my friend R.R. Skinner opened his hives for me to observe his bees. That was interesting and I knew right away that one day I would keep my own bees. On my visits to R.R. I would write down pretty much everything he said--I seem to have the ability of sitting and listening to people talk about themselves for many hours in a non-judgemental and fairly passive way--but R.R.'s stories about beekeeping were always interesting, including moving hives on his bicycle and overwintering a hive in his bedroom. Beekeepers can be quite obsessive about bees, and this obsession seems eccentric to people who have never kept bees. But one man's eccentricity is another man's normal life.



Above, the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus.

It was in the early 1980s that my friend, the poet George Johnston, sat down with me and went over what I would need to establish my own apiary. I ordered some beekeeping equipment through the mail but also drove to Bedford, Quebec to pick up boxes of bees. That's how you buy honey bees, several thousand come in a wooden box with a wire mesh front and a queen bee contained in a small box inside the larger box. You literally dump the bees into a hive like bits of Styrofoam; however, the queen bee is released into the hive only gradually so that she will be accepted by the other bees. How do you release the queen gradually? There is a sugar plug that the worker bees and the queen eat opening a space for the queen to emerge into the hive. If, for whatever reason, the worker bees don't like the queen, they will quite literally kill the queen, which means more work for the beekeeper as she will have to be replaced. There is also a smell to bees, it is feral and reminds us that bees are never domesticated, only contained. I went with George, and possibly with George Elliot, about whom George has written some memorable poems, to beekeeping seminars across the border in New York State. These events were always memorable and enjoyable to attend. I also remember, one time, driving home from Bedford with boxes of bees and beekeeping equipment and the brakes failing on the car... somehow I still made it back home, maybe fifty miles distance. That was interesting...

I used to have about ten hives that I kept in the field, near some apple trees, about a hundred feet behind The Cedars, our house on the Trout River in Huntingdon, (more correctly, Godmanchester) Quebec. I had a big hand-turned honey extractor that I bought second hand, but like many beekeepers I preferred making comb honey. Comb honey is cut directly from the frame, it's honey the way bees make it in a hive, but it also means you've destroyed the comb the bees have made, while with liquid honey you can recycle the frame with the comb on it because all you've done is cut off a surface layer of wax before extracting the honey. You extract the honey by the centrifugal force of spinning the frames. There's money in bees wax that can be made into candles and pollen that some people believe has health benefits, but this should be qualified, if you want pollen for allergies or whatever, you need local pollen since your allergies are to local plants, not pollen from China that has dubious if any value. Beekeepers have always known that bee stings can help relieve arthritis, and this seems to be getting some press in recent years; however, I remember R.R. suggesting that the bee sting acted as a kind of accupuncture treatment, and maybe this is a correct explanation for this .

Unless you've kept bees you may not understand the happiness one can experience opening hives on a hot summer day. The bees are probably fairly passive on such days, but a whiff of smoke passed over the top of the frames seems to keep them busy and diverted from the beekeeper's activities. Never wear perfume or any other scent to an apiary, I've had a nasty experience being stung by doing that. I kept bees for about ten years and was put out of business by mites from across the US border infesting my bees. Don't worry about killer bees, thirty years after I began beekeeping I still don't see them as a problem here in Canada. I remember, as well, lying in the grass near the entrance to the hives and watching bees coming and going, what a wonderful sight that is! They're bringing in nectar, their pollen sacs are full, and some bees are removing dead bees; in the fall the drones, male bees that inseminate the queen on her single maiden flight, are being expelled. Don't forget, all worker honey bees are female. Lying there, in the grass on a summer day, that's when you realize the genuine affection one feels for the honey bee.

Ten Notes on Thomas D’Arcy McGee

Thomas D’Arcy McGee

1. Thomas D’Arcy McGee wasn’t a poet, like W.B Yeats, who was also involved in politics. Yeats was a distinguished poet and later, after Irish independence, he became a Senator in Ireland. McGee is a political thinker and activist who also wrote and published poems. Yeats: poet first; McGee: politician first. 

 2. Most of McGee’s poems have little interest for us today; if they do interest us, it is because they were written by Thomas D’Arcy McGee. 

Here I am visiting McGee's mausoleum at Cote des Neiges
Cemetery in Montreal. 

3. McGee makes several very contradictory changes in his life: he was a liberal in Ireland, then a very conservative and reactionary Roman Catholic in the United States, and then a liberal again in Canada. These are all opposing and difficult to reconcile positions. 

4. McGee pointed out that most Irish immigrants in the mid-19th Century did better in Canada than had they gone to the United States. My own family, like many others from Ireland, flourished in Canada. Canada has been a country of opportunities for us. 

5. Psychology, per se, had not yet been invented during McGee’s life. McGee’s psychology seems to have been dominated by the early death of his mother and the subsequent rejection of him by his stepmother. McGee had an unfortunate personal trait of attempting to ingratiate himself with those he felt were his superiors. Perhaps this was caused by his early home life. 

6. McGee was obviously a highly intelligent man—perhaps he was gifted—a man whose career before coming to Canada was distinguished by his writing, his work as an editor, and his political activism for Irish independence. He rose quickly in his career as a writer and orator for his political causes, he was more famous before coming to Canada than most of us realize. 

7. McGee’s assassination, by Patrick Whelan of the Fenian Brotherhood, helped to mythologize McGee’s life. 

 8. I doubt that most of McGee’s poetry has anything other than historical interest. Just compare him to other poets of approximately that time, compare him to Emile Nelligan, the Montreal-born poet. Nelligan’s poetry has depth and sophistication; for the most part, McGee’s poetry doesn’t. 

 

9. What is McGee's achievement? As a politician, he achieved what he worked towards, which is Canadian Confederation, but having achieved that he was also personally less and less popular with his constituency. 

10. Few things help to mythologize a life better than an untimely death; in this case McGee's assassination differentiates him from just about all of the other politicians at that time. The details of his death are that in April 1868, after speaking late into the night in the House of Commons, he returned to the humble rooming house where he lived in Ottawa, here he was murdered by Patrick Whelan. A few days later, over forty thousand people crowded Montreal streets as his funeral cortege passed. This was the beginning of his transformation from historical personage to mythological character. In this, he does what few poets, or politicians, achieve: he is remembered.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, April 21, 2010

In this row of four mausoleums, located at Montreal's Cote des Neiges Cemetery, Thomas D'Arcy McGee's mausoleum is the second from the right. Several years ago McGee's mausoleum was renovated, perhaps by the Canadian government. This visit was on an overcast day--on April 21, 2010--not far away, I found wild flowers (mostly triliums) beginning to flower.

I've written here before about McGee, he was a great orator, one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, and a poet.

A store window on Cote St. Luc Road

Apple Tree on Belmore

My interest in trees as an archetype goes back at least to my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978), and probably before. The obvious allusion in the title of my book is to The Cloud of Unknowing that I first read in the early-1970s. While in Mexico in 1984 I found a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing and read it again with great interest. Just a few months ago I returned to this book, and read it with even greater interest than the other two times. It is a part of the via negativa , with (curiously) some suggestions of Krishnamurti's philosophy.

Trees. Roots; earth. Branches; sky. Union. The mundane unites with the divine, and mundane, coming from mundo, world, earth, is the appropriate word. And then the discussion of the divine. What seems lacking in contemporary poetry is a discussion of the divine, of God, and our relationship with the Divine. It seems to be totally absent from the discussion of poetry by poets. No wonder the soul of the poet is never discussed, but without a poet's soul how can we have poetry?

These photographs (and many others that I have taken) of this apple tree in our backyard remind me of the many hours of pleasure I have had sitting looking out at this tree. In the evenings I can see neighbours' lights through the trees. Seeing these things is a pleasurable activity, it is a feeling of being in the country in the city, a feeling of calm and, oddly enough, of transcending time.

Gates at the Bridal Path, Toronto

                                     This is not the presidential palace of a banana republic but someone's home 

                                                                             in the Bridal Path area of Toronto.

                                                 So, this is what is behind those heavy gates...

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.

The Making of Collages

A collage juxtaposes images or parts of images that seem to have little association with each other; the collage presents these images in an unexpected and seemingly random way. Profound images, for instance images of human suffering and hurt, become images describing our age. Archetypal images juxtaposed beside each other give a new association, a new idea of the age. The random aspect of the collage is also interesting, this is interesting because any image placed beside any other image gives a third and new image, a new idea or insight coming from the collage. These collages are a kind of Tarot card reading, or divination, of our age, there is the sudden appearance of some insight in the collage.

Collages are similar to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique which works with words and sounds instead of images. I think you could take any issue of TIME magazine, which has excellent photo-journalism, take the images and cut or tear them up at random, and then glue them to a surface in any order that they occur, and you will have a collage that reveals something of the age in which we live. This is what I did with the collages I am putting up here. There is no "thought" in the making of any of these collages. Gradually gluing down the images becomes a system, a process, for instance beginning every collage at the bottom right hand corner, or trying to impose some kind of order or intelligence on the collage as it is being made. When this happens you have to stop and eliminate this thought interference in the making of the collage.

Then, you can also take the collage and ask what does it suggest? What ideas are there in the collage? Archetypal images contain their own energy, their own impetus in driving the unconscious mind. They are an entrance into the collective unconscious and as such they can be very powerful. My suggestion is always to begin with the archetype and then proceed from there; you can try but you can never really defeat the authority of archetypes that are innate in the human psyche.

Toronto City Hall, 10:30 p.m. on June 11, 2010

I took the usual tourist photographs earlier in the day, then we had meetings all afternoon, and on my way back to where I was staying I found Toronto's City Hall ominous and purple, and strangely alien, towering over me.

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.