Girouard Avenue, 1910

Here's a photograph, from the Fraser-Hickson library, of the old streetcars or trams running along Girouard in 1910, before our family moved to the street. Back in the day when this area was like the country...

2226 Girouard Avenue, early 1950s (two)

Here is my brother, John Morrissey, pushing a pram with me in it. Behind us is Girouard Avenue and the photograph was taken in N.D.G. Park (more commonly called Girouard Park), I would think this is the late fall, maybe early winter, 1950 - 1951.

My brother on his sled, winter 1950 - 1951 at Girouard Park.

Here I am, fall-winter 1950, maybe January 1951, looking grumpy.

My mother and I, back porch off the kitchen, at 2226 Girouard Avenue, around 1953.

With my mother, around 1953, back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue.

P.S. The large N.D.G. Park is more familiarly called (by locals) Girouard Park, because it is on Girouard

2226 Girouard Avenue, late 1930s and late 1990s (one)

Here is my grandmother, Edith Sweeney Morrissey, holding my cousin Herb Morrissey, a few months after his birth in 1939. Photo taken on the back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue in Montreal.

Ivy Lewis Morrissey, my Auntie Ivy, holding Herb.

Above: this is Alex Morrissey, my uncle, holding his son, Herb.


I took the following photographs of 2226 Girouard around 1997:

Front door.

The upstairs living room window on the left; Auntie Mable's bedroom with the balcony off of it.

In the lane behind the flat, the kitchen window on the far left of the second floor; the dining room window upstairs on the far right.

The oldest photos

These two photographs seem to have been taken the same day. In the top photo, I believe the older boy is my Uncle Herb Morrissey. The woman, third from the right, looks like my great aunt Essie, my grandmother's sister. The woman on the far left looks like my grandmother, Edith Sweeney. I can't identify the others...

FAMILY ALBUM

Family Album

When my mother moved to Toronto, at age 91, she gave me an old shoebox of family photos. It is a fascinating experience to sort through these images--mostly black and white but also some colour photographs--images of ourselves from when we were young, and of our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, relatives, friends, those faces to which we can’t attach a name, and some photographs of the old neighbourhoods where we used to live.

Here, then--on my 59^th birthday--is the beginning of the next month or so of posting old family photographs. Everyday, to the end of May, a different set of photographs will be posted, and a brief explanation will accompany the photographs. This is also the beginning of the process of digitalizing all the old family photographs in my possession and making them available to anyone who wants to see them. Even if you don’t know any of these people, the images may still be of interest. The approximate dates of the photographs are mid-1920s to early 1960s. May I also suggest visiting the Morrissey family history website?

Stephen Morrissey
Montreal, 27 April 2009

The woods in south western Quebec, winter (two)

The woods in south western Quebec (one)

Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978 - 1998

Preface to Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978-1998 (Muses’s Company, Winnipeg, 1998)

When I was growing up, I had two dreams that profoundly affected the shape of my life. I was six years old when my father died; the first of these dreams occurred three years after his death. I dreamed two men from an orphanage came to take me away. They were waiting for me at the back door; they were going to put me in a wooden cage. This dream made a deep and lasting impression on me, not only as a reminder of the insecurity and transience of life, but also as an encounter with the powerful depths of the unconscious. In retrospect, this dream began my awareness of the imagination, vision, and what psychologist C.G. Jung calls “the shadow.” It also informed me of my own separateness from the world in which I lived.

The second dream came when I was around thirteen years old, and it is responsible for my embarking on a lifetime of being a poet and diarist. In this dream I was imprisoned in a room where the windows were covered with mud. Once I could see outside, but now I was enclosed and cut off from the world. However one may interpret this dream, my own interpretation as an adolescent was that I had to write down the truth as I knew it--what people had done and what I had done. Only by writing could I see things clearly. I knew intuitively that writing could clarify, order, and give perspective to experience. My concern was with saving my inner being, which I was afraid would be lost if I were unable to remember events. My conviction, even then, was that there is a heroism and bravery to the average person’s life and I was responsible for recording as much of what I perceived of this as possible. I awoke from this dream knowing I had to write and ever since this dream I have written poems as well as kept a diary.

In addition to these two dreams there was a third influence to the kind of poet I became. In 1967, when I was still in high school, I read an article in a newspaper; in it the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, gave advice for poets. He said, “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked...” This statement made a lasting impression on me. It validated what I was already trying to do in my own poetry. For the first time I realized that the kind of subject matter I was grappling with as a teenager--content that was personal and confessional--belonged to a literary tradition and had meaning to other people. Even if I hadn’t read Ginsberg’s statement I would not have been deterred from continuing the writing I was doing--writing that attempted to understand deeply felt experiences. However, to discover that there was a public context for this kind of writing was enormously empowering, and allowed me to identify myself as a poet. My first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), published when I was in second year university, contains poems that have a thematic continuity extending from those early poems up to the work I am writing now. This present collection, Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978 - 1998, presents a selection of twenty years from my body of writing. This selection is chronological, beginning with my first published book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978) up to the present selection from new, unpublished poems.

For years I struggled in my writing to express early experiences of grief and failure. I wrote many poems on these subjects, but none articulated exactly how I felt, or dealt adequately with what I needed to say, until I wrote the long poem “Divisions.” This poem is central to my early work--in it I was finally able to deal aesthetically and personally with the experience it discusses. Everything came together in the writing of “Divisions”: content, form, and the insight necessary for its writing. This was a breakthrough poem for me, written over a three day period in April 1977. I was finally able to express in poetry what I was attempting to do since I was fifteen years old. I photocopied “Divisions” and mailed it out to other poets and critics, including Northrop Frye and Louis Dudek, both of whom responded generously: Frye with a letter, and Dudek with an offer to publish the poem. In 1983 bp Nichol published the poem in my book Divisions, with Coach House Press.

There are two more factors that I believe have contributed to my writing. The first is the fact of being born in Montreal of a large, but dwindling, family of Irish descent. This Irish background is rich in experience and family history; names such as Callaghan, Flanagan, and Sweeney are all a part of the family which has been in Montreal since before 1840. They were not wealthy people, although a few made names for themselves, but they were hardworking and improved conditions for the lives of their descendants. Their values, religious faith, and large families made them what they were. I am grateful for being a part of this ancestry.

A final factor that has helped shaped my poetry is the tradition of writing poetry in English-speaking Montreal. Growing up in Montreal in the 1950s, I always took for granted that poets lived and worked in the community in which I lived. Poets were never “someplace else”—they were right here. So the idea of becoming a poet was never unusual. Just as I appreciate my Irish heritage, I also benefited from the poetry community into which I was born. In the 1970s I was associated with Vehicule Art Gallery where I attended and organized readings while a graduate student at McGill University. I associated with other poets, and my first full-length collection of poems was published.
I have always aimed at a directness of statement and emotion in my poems, to communicate an image and a strong emotion; to merge the personal self with the archetypal self. Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet. These poems, selected from twenty years of published work, map the convolutions, terrain, and geography of the soul.

My poetic journey, from the early dreams and writing to the publication of this Selected Poems, has been a reaching out to other people. From the initial isolation as an adolescent poet until now, I have been blessed with meeting certain individuals who have encouraged and inspired me. My association with poet and editor Carolyn Zonailo began in 1989 with the publication, by Caitlin Press, of my book Family Album. CZ has edited my poetry and helped to prepare manuscripts for publication. We have shared a collaboration in writing and in life, living most of the year in Montreal, but spending as much time as possible each year in her native Vancouver, British Columbia. I would like to thank CZ for selecting the poems in this collection, urging me to write this preface, and for editing.

I would like to thank Louis Dudek for being my teacher and friend from McGill University days to the present. George and Jeanne Johnston extended to me friendship and the joy of discussing poetry and literature. Ken Norris, a colleague since the early 1970’s, has offered on-going encouragement. Jake Morrissey has often listened with appreciation to my work. Sonja Skarstedt and Geof Isherwood began Empyreal Press in Montreal in the early 1990s; with bravado and a belief in the importance of poetry they published each volume of The Shadow Trilogy. I would like to thank Endre Farkas and Gordon Shillingford for offering their support through the Muses’ Company. Finally, I would also like to thank the Canada Council for writing time during two grants, and for project grants in support of individual books.

Stephen Morrissey
Vancouver, British Columbia
August 7, 1998

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).

At Blue Bonnets, a few years ago... (Two)

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.

At a beach...

Parc St. Henri, St. Antoine Street

This should be Parc Jacques Cartier, with the statue at the center of the park of Jacques Cartier, but there it is... I believe this is the park I wrote about in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978), mentioning large coloured lights (like Chinese lanterns) hanging from the trees.

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.

Review of James Hollis's Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
James Hollis, Ph.D.
Gotham Books, New York
276 pages, ISBN 1-592-40207-0


Review by Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's new book, Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, begins with the premise that while the first half of life is outer directed, such as to building a family life, or owning property, or being employed, the second half is more inner or spiritually directed. As we age, if we have not done the important work of examining our life, we may one day find ourselves in the "swampland" of life's second half. At that time there is an urgency to deal with our psychology, as confused, alienated, and fragmented as it may be.

Hollis asks, in a series of spiritually and psychologically probing questions that open the book, "Why is the life you are living too small for the soul's desire?" Hollis writes: "As Jung once put it humorously, we all walk in shoes too small for us. Living within a constricted view of our journey, and identifying with old defensive strategies, we unwittingly become the enemies of our own growth, our own largeness of soul, through our repetitive history-bound choices."

Why do we keep wearing shoes that are too small? One reason lies in our belief in "the false self" which encompasses "the values and strategies we have derived from internalizing the dynamics of our family and our culture." Our too small shoes keep us from stepping "into the largeness that the soul expects and demands." We know the signs of the soul being denied. There may be a depression, often treated relatively inexpensively by medication, but not treated deeply or thoroughly. There may be a problem with addiction, or an awareness of psychological complexes.

In the chapter on "The Dynamics of Intimate Relationship" Hollis discusses romantic love and marriage. It is a fairly bleak discussion of something that is supposed to bring us great happiness and fulfillment but is all too often filled with fantasy, complexes, transference, projection, and the desire to find the "magical other" or the person "who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, and ... spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our own needs."

We live in a world that idealizes romantic love; indeed, we believe it can fulfill many of our needs, especially those in life's first half when it is only natural to want to have a partner and family, to fulfill ourselves in our careers, and to work for something greater than our individual selves. However, Hollis contends that we place a greater emphasis on the importance of the romantic relationship than it can fulfill. Central to his thinking is an emphasis on living as authentically as possible to the soul's purpose; unfortunately, romantic love may not be the fulfillment of this purpose, and Hollis seems to contend that it may also be the negation of it. The important thing, for Hollis, is not romantic involvement, which sometimes ends up as simply being an expression of co-dependence and a fear of being alone. Hollis suggests that we continue on our journey of self-understanding, and then, possibly, we will find that we are more tolerant and loving of others. "It is love not only of the other, but love of this life, this journey, and love of this task of soul." It is difficult to disagree with Hollis without appearing naïve, but I am not totally convinced by Hollis's argument which seems overly pessimistic. Sometimes even a bad romantic relationship can be a vehicle for waking up to the psychological complexity of life, and when better to wake up than the first half of life?

Our experience of family changes after mid-life. Some marriages collapse after the children have left home. They may have been a diversion or buffer, allowing the parents to continue to co-habit but also a means for couples to avoid relating to each other. A pathology in the family that Jung identified, and which Hollis discusses in this book and in his previous books, exists in the relationship of some parents and their children. It is the important observation that some children are burdened with "the unlived life of the parents." This refers to the parents' failure to reflect on their own life, to "finally, really grow up." Inevitably, the children will have to do the inner work that the parents never dealt with. Subsequently, Hollis writes, because "The parent has stopped growing, is intimidated by fear, is unable to risk, that model, that constriction, that denial of soul will be internalized by the child."

In the last chapter of this book, "The Healing of the Soul," Hollis answers the series of questions he presented at the very beginning of the book. Healing the soul can be the work of psychology, as Hollis feels it must be, for the etymology of "psychology" refers to "psyche" or the soul. The soul is a subject that religion has traditionally dealt with and psychology has avoided as unscientific or in the jurisdiction of organized religion. There is, Hollis writes, "A mystery so profound that none of us really seems to grasp it until it has indisputably grasped us..." This mystery is "that some force transcendent to ordinary consciousness is at work within us to bring about our ego's overthrow... That force...is the Self, the architect of wholeness, which operates from a perspective larger than conventional consciousness." The Self is a spiritual aspect to our totality as human beings; the Self seeks wholeness and life affirmation despite the psychic fragmentation we experience. A dream, and the understanding of the dream, that leads to a greater understanding of some aspect of our life is an expression of the Self.

James Hollis's book, intended for a mass market, is an introduction to only some aspects of C.G. Jung's work; for instance, there is little or no mention of the shadow, anima and animus, or other discoveries that Jung made in his long career. Nevertheless, for many people, James Hollis's Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up is an excellent place to begin this important journey into the second half of life.

Published: The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, November 2006

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

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.

Instant Shaman (one)

Back in the early 1970s, when I was a student at Sir George Williams University, I took a line from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and made it into a visual poem. The poem became a visual representation of the content of Rimbaud’s statement: “regard as sacred the disorder of my mind.” Rimbaud’s approach to poetry is an ancient one, it is also shamanic. When he writes, in Lettres du voyant, “Je est autre,” he becomes the “other,” and we re-vision the poet not only as an individual entity but as a medium for the Divine. God communicates with people through dreams and angels, but communication from the Divine can also occur in a trance state, or in a state of deep relaxation, in a synchronistic experience, in the creative act, or possibly under other heightened conditions of consciousness. This experience is not unfamiliar to many of us who write poetry, for creative people there is often an experience of transcending the ego in the act of creating, and there is usually a sense of wonder that something was created that had not existed before.

My assumption—my intuition—has always been that there is something inherently important in the act of writing poetry. It was Rimbaud’s aim to access the unconscious by entering a trance state, to go beyond or transcend the known by disordering the senses. This could be done, he writes, by «un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.» In other words, he would disorder the senses, disorder rational thinking, in order to find the spirit world, the world of archetypes, wherein lies poetry. An important author on this topic is William Everson, author of Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations (ed. Lee Bartlett. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1982). He writes, “The shaman enters a trance-like condition in order to engage the archetypes (spirits) of the collective unconscious and stabilize their awesome power, appease the demons, as it were. This is precisely the function of the poet today.” He also writes, “…the poet, too, can only work through trance…no creativity is possible that does not involve a trance-like state of possession.” Order exists in the universe, even if it is projected by the human mind, for the mind abhors disorder, craves order, and will create order. I remember as a child lying in bed and seeing faces and shapes in the chintz pattern drapes in my room, or walking along Oxford Avenue to Terrebonne and watching the clouds move across the sky as though they were following me in an intimidating way, or lying on our front lawn and watching the clouds assume the appearance of shapes and faces (this experience, of seeing faces in clouds, is called pareidolia), and I also remember the sound of water dripping from a bathroom tap had the effect of sounding like a voice that was repeating some phrase, over and over again, suggesting some coherent statement.

Sarah Palin on the Pier

Apartment on Avonmore

Our home on Avonmore in the early 1950s, before moving to Girouard for health reasons.