Work on St. Joseph's Oratory; early 1900s |
The first chapel at St. Joseph's Oratory |
1950s |
Climbing the stairs at St. Joseph's Oratory |
Photo taken 1938 |
From the street |
From the street |
From the street |
When my son, who is a Medievalist, saw the fences around my garden he mentioned "hortus conclusus", the concept of the enclosed garden from the Middle Ages; this garden design has its origin and attribution to the Virgin Mary but gardens are also a part of our spiritual history, beginning with the Garden of Eden and the fall of Man. The hortus conclusus is an archetypal garden, it has that special quality of spiritual authenticity that gives the garden a greater significance, as a place that resonates in both our Christian spirituality and the spirituality of other religions. So, this is no happenstance that I have these walls enclosing the garden; this is a way of finding spirituality, or God, in the physical and material world, and it is the reason I find such happiness in having the garden enclosed with these walls.
And so, the hortus conclusus is a place of peace, and one wants to be there because it is a place of quiet, an entrance to the spiritual, and a place of temenos. All of this is foreign to our contemporary life, but people in the past, especially the Middle Ages, understood the meaning of the enclosed garden.
Poems, no matter how dark their subject matter, are always an affirmation of life.1. What can be seen in the dark no matter how dark it is? What light will we follow when it is most dark? It took me many years to know what is obvious to many people; the light that is always present, even in the darkness, is the goodness of life, it is love. That light is love.
1. Because the act of creating something is, in itself, an affirmation of life.
This is the house at 5265 Westmore Avenue that Uncle Bill rented in 1950, back then it would have been typical of other Cape Cod cottages, not renovated like it is now. |
This is the grave of Lillian and Bill Morrissey at Mount Royal Cemetery; their son, William Chipman Morrissey, is also buried here. He died on 27 February 1990. |
William Morrissey in 1973 |
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Creativity has the capacity to heal; some have fallen into the darkness of existence, and writing poetry or making art is one way to find light in the darkness; what is the light? It is the discovery of love in one's life. It is greater than any darkness.
Only a month ago we had +20 C weather (that's 68 degrees Fahrenheit), the colours of nature were brilliant and gave variety and life to things, but now late fall and the approach of winter has been pulled over our heads like a large wool sweater and it is a grey world we're living in, reduced, monochromatic, cold (-5 C or 23 F), dull, and uninviting.
Out walking, when I approached Meadowbrook Golf Course I saw this long line of cars and people standing around, my first thought was that there must be an extraordinarily rare bird in the swampy area to the right of the road and all of these people had gathered to see this bird, or maybe a deer was there, or a bear, the Bear Clan are just a few miles away . . . of course, I was wrong, stupidly wrong, projecting my own interests on a lot of parked cars and men standing around waiting for the golf course to open, possibly for the last time this season. But I would have preferred my scenario and seen some extraordinary bird before it took to the air and flew south for the winter.
Here is a quotation from Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843):
All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in Law, in Custom once solemnly-established, and now long recognized as just and final.--True, O Radical Reformers, there is no custom that can, properly speaking, be final; none. And yet thou seest Customs which, in all civilised countries, are accounted final; nay, under the Old-Roman name of Mores, are accounted Morality, Virtue, Laws of God Himself.
This essay is in the December issue of The Artisanal Writer; you have to log in, free of charge, to visit the site, or just read it here.
On Poetics: what the soulhas to say
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Photo taken on 30 November after a second pruning of these trees this month. |
A neighbour had this row of trees pruned, branches and some boughs have been removed; my hope is that this will give me more sunlight next year. |
Some rose bushes have been wrapped in burlap while this area has a layer of leaves and burlap covering it. |
Any gardener will tell you of the advantages of mulching; don't discard last fall's leaves, rake them onto your flower beds; in the early spring you'll see new growth where you raked your leaves. |
The end of November and these flowers, in a hanging pot, are all that is left in the garden despite the cold and snow we've already had and that subsequently melted . . . |
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3. You don’t become a poet expecting to be liked
for everything you write, or even for some of what you write. Why do people
become poets? It is simple: people become poets because they are called to this
work; writing poetry is an act of transcription, writing down what is given to
you and, most importantly, writing poetry is to feel that truth is so important
that it must be adhered to. This is why freedom of speech is so important; it
is essential if literature is to have any meaning or relevance for either the
poet or the reader.
4. Poetry isn't antiseptic, it's passion for life. Poetry is love and death and tears of joy and tears of sorrow. It's messy, it's stuff we don't want to talk about, it's betrayal and jealousy, it's love and sex and tenderness and grief and regret and awe and divine inspiration; it's the shadow falling across one's life. Poetry is nothing if not passionate; passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing, defines poetry.
5. In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), I described how one's life can be reconfigured to something totally different from what one expected in life; I described this as the Great Reconfiguration. When I was six years old and my father died my old life became redundant, everything changed; I was one person and then I became someone else. His death has preoccupied much of my life, his passing reconfigured my life; this began the relentless journey of grief and understanding, love and loss, that I've been on, and trying to understand this existence and expressing it in poems.
6. To write not parts of a life but a whole life, that is what I have tried to do; it is an impossible task and can be attempted only if one refers to archetypes and a mythological approach to experience as a way to communicate this information. The poet's body of work is all of a piece, a single entity; it's a life that is transformed by poetry, it's the soul speaking through the poet. For John Keats life was a vale of soul-making, not a vale of tears; this was always the direction of my writing, my concern has always been with soul-making and I expressed this in my poems.
Whatever we change, we change at the loss of something else, and not every change is for the better. Some things we change, what we may have originally considered reforms, end up making life worse, or more complicated, or destroy institutions that have supported society for centuries. Not much thought is given to how change will affect us, what we are giving up, what we are replacing, or what we have lost. We are a society that believes in change for its own sake, that everything new is better than what is old, and people cheer for change as though all change is wonderful. What people are cheering for now may be what people will regret in the future.
The reason we adopted the metric system is that it was presumed it would make us more economically competitive with other nations, for instance the European Union. Of course, the young accept the metric system, it's all they have ever known for measuring and weighing things, and it is taught in schools. Others among us have never wholeheartedly accepted metrification; fruit and vegetables in grocery stores are weighed in both metric and the imperial system, in ounces and pounds, and measurement for building construction material is still in the imperial system, we buy a sheet of plywood that is eight feet by four feet, a two by four is measured in inches, and so on. Measure twice, cut once, is the carpenter's rule; and it is done in inches and feet.
Metrification
meant giving up an aspect of our both collective inheritance and the use of
words that pertain to measurement. But we didn't care, we accepted something that displaced centuries of
our history, our way of life, and our language. Metrification moved us further
from what is specific and historical, the Avoirdupois system, and into
what was conceived in conferences and has very little connection to the everyday
life of everyday people. My concern here is not which is the better system of weights and measurement, it the loss of language, history, and our way of life; of course, we can't go back, that will never happen.
The
Imperial system is derived from the Avoirdupois system which originated eight hundred years ago, certain words are from Old English, the Romans,
and earlier civilizations. An "inch" is 1/36th of a yard, from the
Old English "ince" or "ynce"', and it is 1/12th of a foot.
A "foot" is from the Old English, it is a linear measurement of a
man's foot measured as twelve inches. A "yard" is the length of a
man's belt but also calculated by King Henry I as the distance from his nose to
the thumb of his outstretched hand, it is 36 inches in length. While a
"furlong", a word still used in horse racing, is the length of the
average plowed furor, it is 660 feet long. A "mile" is from the
Romans and calculated as 5,280 feet; a "country mile" refers to travelling
over difficult terrain over a long distance since it is not a straight line.
Meanwhile,
the metric system dates back to around the time of the French
Revolution, to 1795 and 1799, replacing other systems of
measurement. The metre was determined by dimensions of the Earth; the kilogram
or unit of mass was based on the volume of the litre. It was not long before
France and then the rest of Europe had adopted the metric system. This system
of measurement is a child of conferences, both the Treaty of the Metre (1875) and the Conférence générale des poids et
mesures continued to invent and increase divisions of the
material world according to the metric system.
If our previous system of measurement is ancestral and originated in a pre-industrial rural society,
then the metric system is fairly recent, originating in cities, by
intellectuals and academics, and based in measurement for science, business, and urban
dwellers; it is not a system of measurement with a relationship with the
natural world, with the earth, or with anything to do with forests, rivers,
wild life, oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on.
Perhaps most urban dwellers don't care about forests, rivers, wild life,
oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. The metric
system does not spring from the earth that we walk on or from our ancestors or
a belief in the importance of place or where we live; its origin is an abstract invented system of measurement.
How do we define what it means to be a human being and does this definition include a soul? The soul does not resonate to the metric system, the soul demands specificity, place, tradition, and history; the soul includes forests, rivers, wild life, oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. The metric system was imposed on us as so much else has been imposed on us; what is being imposed on us moves us away from tradition, our ancestors, and the ground on which we walk. The metric system does not spring from place, or from our ancestral and historical place.
Of course, after the fact this refers to what one becomes familiar with, and you can become used to anything. Metric displaced pounds, ounces, and Fahrenheit, it displaced what our ancestors knew and lived with, and it displaced words that were used every day by average people going about their lives. We can't go back to the old system but we should remember that change is not always for the best, that what changes displaces what we already have, and in retrospect what we already have may not be all that bad. Today's society is beginning to look very different from what we had, and were happy with, even just five years ago. I am not saying that change is not needed in society, but change and the direction in which our society is now headed is not a place some of us want to go, it looks to be dominated by the State, by globalism, by the end of the family unit, and the end of our way of life. So, this is about a symptom, metrification, and no doubt it seem ridiculous, but it is a symptom of a future that is already happening.
I really enjoyed, more than enjoyed! last night's "5 Poets Breaking into Song" (this is the link to a video of the reading), an event held in Toronto. George Elliott Clarke included one of my poems, commissioned by George and set to music and performed by James Rolfe, and this can be found at 1:37:00. Many thanks to George and James and everyone else involved in this event!