"GREEN YET FREE OF SEASONS": GWENDOLYN MACEWEN AND THE MYSTICAL TRADITION OF CANADIAN POETRY

Thomas M.F. Gerry

The Shadow-Maker
I have come to possess your darkness, only this.
My legs surround your black, wrestle it
As the flames of day wrestle night
And everywhere you paint the necessary shadows
On my flesh and darken the fibres of my nerve;
Without these shadows I would be
In air one wave of ruinous light
And night with many mouths would close
Around my infinite and sterile curve.
Shadow-maker create me everywhere
Dark spaces (your face is my chosen abyss),
For I said I have come to possess your darkness,
Only this.¹

The Shadow-Maker is Gwendolyn MacEwen's name for the light that together with its darkness generates the poet's being. At once also, the poet writes, she is like "the flames of day which wrestle night." Unfolding with the poem's visual imagery is the tactile, the sexual, explicit: "My legs surround your black" . . . "I have come to possess your darkness,/Only this." In Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray meditates on Plato's rationalization of the mirror, and in so doing she insinuates the meaning of MacEwen's revelation of mystical vision-through-touch:

Wisdom, at its very beginnings, warns against looking directly at the sun, for fear of burning up the membrane at the back of the eye.... Finding an economy of light in all its dazzling brilliance, without risk of combustion and death, marks humanity's first steps into philosophy And just as the sun, even in eclipse, must be observed only indirectly, in a mirror on pain of blindness, even so the spirit will serve as an additional reflector that helps us to look upon the Good. In the strictest sense, mortals cannot look upon the Good.²

Audible here in her characterizing the heritage of Western philosophy as grounded in "fear" and "an economy. . . without risk," and unable to "look upon the Good," Irigaray's irony becomes even more scathing when she depicts this philosophy's further progress, in which "the consuming contact of light will also be avoided by paying attention to forms alone":

Direct vision means looking directly ahead, of course, but it also means doing so through an optical apparatus that stands between man and light and prevents light from touching him at all. Reason--which will also be called natural light--is the result of systems of mirrors that ensure a steady illumination, admittedly, but one without heat or brilliance. The everlasting correctness of things seen clearly, perceived rightly, has banished not only the darkness of night but also the fires of noon.³

MacEwen's metaphor in addressing the Shadow-Maker, 11 everywhere you paint the necessary shadows/On my flesh" indissolubly joins the tactile paint on flesh with the visual light dark. Sight severed from touch is the gist of the imagined consequences of the Shadow-Maker's absence:

Without these shadows I would be
In air one wave of ruinous light
And nightwith many mouths would close
Around my infinite and sterile curve.

Two hundred years earlier, in Nova Scotia, Henry Alline (1748-84), as Gwendolyn MacEwen would, ended formal education comparatively young, and also died in the prime of life. From March of 1775, when he was mystically transformed, until his death, Alline "dedicated himself to raising the spiritual consciousness of Nova Scotia (which then included present-day New Brunswick) by preaching the gospel of Christ' s salvation and the transcendence of God's grace.... Alline almost single-handedly precipitated a revival of faith that ultimately laid the foundation of the Baptist movement in the Maritimes."⁴ His followers were named 'New Lights."

In his autobiography, Alline's narrative of his redemption discloses a combination of sensory experiences similar to MacEwen's in "The Shadow-Maker":

O the infinite condescension of God to a worm of the dust! for though my whole soul was filled with love, and ravished with a divine ecstasy beyond any doubts or fears, or thoughts of being then deceived, . . . yet he still stooped to the weakness of my desires and requests.... Looking up, I thought I saw that same light, though it appeared different, and as soon as I saw it, the design was opened to me, . . . [T]he work of conversion, the change and the manifestation of it are no more disputable, than that light which I see, or any thing that ever I saw. I will not say I saw either of those lights with my bodily eyes, though I thought then I did, but that is no odds to me, for it was as evident to me, as any thing that I ever saw with my bodily eyes; and answered the end it was sent for. O how the condescension melted me. . ⁵

Alline's intimate experience of divine light fused in his writing with bodily ravishment and animated his exertions to convert others. He wrote prolifically, including 488 hymns published in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1: Halifax, 1782; 2:Boston, 1786), he debated, and he travelled the region to preach.

In addition to the contribution his teachings made to the religious revival, which I've mentioned, one particular doctrine, Alline's anti-war position, deeply affected the political life of Nova Scotia both at the time, while the American Revolution was taking place, and subsequently. According to Gordon Stewart and George Rawlyk, historians of The Nova Scotia Yankees and the American Revolution, one of Alline's important premises was that "even those Yankees who did not participate in the revival were still part of a highly favoured people simply because, during the war between Britain and America, they were living in Nova Scotia where a work of God was being made manifest."⁶ They continue:

The Yankee mind of revolutionary Nova Scotia was profoundly affected by the religious ideology propagated by Henry Alline. This ideology, highly figurative in nature, attempted to provide a meaning and coherence to a people confronting a confusing and disturbing situation.... Alline had helped to transform, in Nova Scotia, traditional New England religious values into an ideological commitment that cut off the Yankees from the new republic. (191)

MacEwen often braved in her writing an identity crisis closely related to the one which Alline addressed: "Kanada," her character Noman sighs, for instance. "Paper-maker. Like a great blank sheet in the world's diary. Who'll make the first entry ?"⁷ Similarly, in "Black Ice," a prose poem from her 1987 book Afterworlds, she writes:

In this country you carve your life out of the knowledge of your death. And out of the sure knowledge of our own deaths, angel, we create this love. I am lying on the white sheets of a Kanadian winter, waiting for the marvellous weight of your body, waiting for the ferocious Spring. I am turning to snow, I am turning to water. Not far away is the rink, and the skater about to begin. And the skater has a clean slate; he has never made a false move yet. ⁸

Through her awareness of sacredness in what one might consider to be mundane surroundings, MacEwen's writing continuously opens the reader to a renewed sense of life's possibilities. In this wonderful capacity she corresponds both to Alline, and also to the early Upper Canadian mystical writer, David Willson.

David Willson was born on June 7,1778 in Dutchess County, New York. An orphan at fourteen, for one year Willson attended the Society of Friends' or Quakers' School at Nine Partners, New York, then worked as a sailor, a farmer, and a carpenter. In the early 1790s he met Phebe Titus, a young Quaker woman he later married. The Willsons moved from Dutchess County to the Quaker settlement at Newmarket, north of Toronto, in 1801. In 1805 they joined the Quaker meeting in Newmarket. By 1812, however, theological differences between the Quakers and Willson caused an upheaval resulting in the disownment of about twenty members of the Newmarket Quaker group. These people, under Willson's guidance, formed the Children of Peace. In spite of Willson's lifelong attempts to reconcile with the Quakers, the split never healed. The Children of Peace became a thriving independent community by the 1830s. The beautiful wooden buildings of the Children of Peace, their band, choirs, and music school, their seasonal festivals, and their egalitarian social arrangements, which included schools for teenaged women and for girls and boys, an orphanage, and cooperative banking and marketing, all inspired by David Willson's visions and nurtured by his hymns, sermons and books, were sources of fascination to people of the period, as one may appreciate by reading contemporary travellers' accounts. After Willson's death in 1866, the Children of Peace gradually declined, both because of the loss of Willson's guiding energies, and because of shifting economic circurnstances--accelerating growth and industrialism during the late nineteenth century--which stymied agriculturally-based places like Sharon, the village where the Children of Peace met, while fostering the expansion of larger centres such as Toronto. Since 1917, the York Pioneer and Historical Society--a group which lists among its members many descendants of the Children of Peace--has maintained the surviving buildings of the Children of Peace as a museum and archives, and more recently, as the site of an annual music festival.

Willson was a prolific writer of religious poetry, hymns for adults and children, theological essays, and sermons. Reading his work creates a significant new dimension in one's understanding of life in early nineteenth-century Canada. Upper Canada is for Willson a wilderness where holy influences are strong, a place he often metaphorically identifies with the wilderness where the Children of Israel, sustained by heaven-sent manna, wandered, and also encountered God.

Centring on the theme of peace, both Willson and Henry Alline put into practice their mysticism: the latter in his debates and sermons preached throughout Nova Scotia, the former in founding the Children of Peace and participating in their activities. Further, Alline and Willson share many characteristics which entitle them to their positions as the original Canadian mystical writers. Both, for example, drew their imagery from the tradition of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), the great German mystic of the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century. According to J. J. Stoudt, Boehme's preen-tinent English biographer, "with Jacob Boehme the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) reasserted its ancient, compelling claims against Western culture's don-tinant rationalism. He stressed once again those feelings for life's primitive vigor which the Renaissance had cherished."⁹ Regarding Boehme's writings, Stoudt observes that "Boehme's doctrine, never fully systematized, emerges from matter which may, perhaps, defy rational order... His expressed words emerged from what may be called mystical vision,. . . for he sought to expose the mystical analogue."¹⁰ For Boehme, as for Alline and Willson, God is alive, not a concept merely, as God was for the Platonic and Aristotelian Church Fathers who overlaid with analytic abstractions the Bible's living God who suffered crucifixion as a loving sacrifice.¹¹ In contemplating the living God, Boehme took into account his own knowledge of evil in the forms of war and a corrupt Church. "He saw," in the words of the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, "a dark principle in all the primary sources of existence, more deeply than he saw existence itself. He was compelled to admit such a principle in Deity itself, and even a positive sense in the very existence of the evil that troubled him so much."¹² The dark principle, which Boehme named the "Un ground" (Ungrund), is the eternal beginning of creative processes. MacEwen's term "Shadow-Maker" might be said to encompass Boehme's Unground as well as the light or fire of love which Boehme saw as struggling dialectically with the Unground's dark, issuing in creation. To Alline one can trace Boehme's influence through William Law,¹³ while Boehme's concepts and images came to Willson through the writings of George Fox, the first Quaker.¹⁴

MacEwen, as I earlier suggested, modifies the legacy of Canadian mystical writers represented by this tradition's originators, Alline and Willson. Many of MacEwen's critics, including Jan Bartley in the only book-length study of the writer, read MacEwen with the premise that she attempts but often fails to adhere to the esoteric, exotic systems which appear in her work.¹⁵ George Bowering even says that she

gives eloquent testimony to the fact that artificial imagery can still be expressed with beautifully chosen sound patterns, and that is what makes her poetry worthwhile. Her very deliberate sound values, the choosing of syllables, result from an impulse to make up for discarded end rhyme ... the images are young and feminine and surrealistic.... Unfortunately, it is often difficult to make out what she is singing about.¹⁶

Bowering's difficulty is that instead of respecting MacEwen's distinctive mystical vision and her unique strategies for expressing it, he and other such critics conclude that her writing fails to measure up to their principles.

More accurately and positively, three other critics see beyond their own preoccupations, while, however, remaining tied to a traditional context. In her study of MacEwen's "The Nine Arcana of the Kings," Gillian Harding-Russell notes the poet's "reluctance to maintain a borrowed or fixed mythological apparatus,"¹⁷ yet, relying on Boehmist thought, Harding-Russell seems not to appreciate MacEwen's originality. This critic concludes that in "The Nine Arcana" "MacEwen's paradigm ... follows the process of a self-cancelling synthesis in which distinctions are eliminated as a result of the fanatic desire to discover universals. Contingent on this theory," Harding-Russell goes on, further linking MacEwen to Boehme, "is the need for a dialectic which underlies the diversity of reality and human experience as seen from a post-modem perspective. . ." (215-16). Margaret Atwood similarly uses Boehmist concepts to argue that "There is a strong pull in MacEwen's poetry towards completion, synthesis."¹⁸ Atwood does qualify her statement, though, observing that MacEwen, through various iterations of the cyclical quality of her contacts with the muse, actually defers completion or synthesis, "since another turn of the wheel may invalidate all answers. The poet wrestles with the angel, but to win finally, to learn the true name of the angel, would be to stop the wheel, an event which she fears" (31). Ellen Warwick's article "To Seek a Single Symmetry" makes similar claims, also in the Boehmist language of dialectic and synthesis.¹⁹

In revising Boehme's dialectical pattern of thought, one of MacEwen's efforts is to de-emphasize the disputing of opposites. The Shadow-Maker, for instance, is printed not in black on white, but in green on white. In "The Name of the Place," from that volume, she writes:

We each have a message to give to the other,
The size of the place, the colour of the place,
How to get in and out of it,
How long it is safe to remain,
But first of all its name.
I know the name of the place so well
That it's just now slipped my tongue,
But it doesn't matter as long as you
Tell me I have not been there alone.
All things are plotting to make us whole,
All things conspire to make us one. ²⁰

MacEwen's distinctive mystical stance derives in part from being emphatically feminist: writing within the dominant discourse of male mysticism, represented by Boehme, MacEwen simultaneously subverts this discourse--not as an intellectual or literary exercise, but in order to voice her self as woman and mystic. Shirley Neuman's summary of the strategies of the contemporary Canadian feminist writer in her article "Importing difference" is relevant to MacEwen:

. . . she posits herself as that which the dominant discourse says she is not: a subject with an origin. The consequence is a fundamentally altered relation to language. While accepting the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, these writers go against customary' discourse by inserting into that discourse the female subject and by theorizing that sexuality as a determinant of which of the infinity of possible (because arbitrary) relations between signifier and signified will dominate a given discourse.²¹

MacEwen, then, writes the language of mysticism with a feminist difference. To illustrate this difference, a brief contrast of David Willson's use of the birth image with MacEwens will be useful.

By the Upper Canadian establishment and by aristocratic tourists, the Children of Peace were viewed with derisive hostility similar to the revulsion some people feel for religious cults today. Because of their communal marketing and banking systems, their unstinting generosity with the poor and with runaway slaves, and being a group of over four hundred when Toronto was a city of ten thousand, the Children of Peace were at least an ideological threat to the ruling oligarchy of Upper Canada. (It's always intriguing the way pacifists so intimidate the people in power.) Willson puzzled over this rejection, concluding in his autobiography that

It hath appearedunto us that it is the will of God that we should live independent, and borrow not of the clergy or christian churches, but of him alone. And we have accordingly been recompensed beyond our expectations, and abundantly satisfied with the measures we have received, and we know that God hath given.²²

Willson's mystical visions emerge from the suffering of solitude, often in his works compared to death, that actually helped him to communicate with his God and to renew his society.

The vision which Willson experienced in 1812, just after his separation from the Quakers, and which he recorded in his autobiography, reveals to Willson his role in relation to the mystical Church, and partly explains the name "Children of Peace." After envisioning the Church as a great mother, Willson sees her child in a stream of water, being born, essentially, "descending from the east":

And as I was beholding the course of the water I saw an infant travelling therein against the current and towards the east; it was the size of a new-born babe--it was without food or raiment, and was altogether naked before me.... And the word of God said unto me 'dress the child and keep it clean.' And I followed the child three days and three nights; for I had received nothing wherewith to clothe the child, or yet keep it clean; therefore I did watch the course thereof until I saw it ascend a sea both still and calm, and the infant became a virgin, clothed with a white robe, girt about with a band of gold, which she put on in memory of the faith of her infancy. ... And she told me that her song was a song of everlasting praise, and that I must return to the earth and declare the ways of the Lord unto the people; and as I had guarded her in her infancy, so she would guard me in my old age, and when I had done with all things below I should return to her and partake of all her glory, and she would teach me to sing the song of immortality and eternal life, thanksgiving and praise unto Him that liveth for ever and ever. (21-22)

Common to the dynamic images of the "mother to child to virgin," the "river to sea," "west to east," and the "old man returning to the younger singer," is the traditional mystical motif of the circle coming to completion in an eternal order.

In her first published collection of poems, The Rising Fire, MacEwen uses the language of the mystical tradition convention ally. Also detectible are echoes of Willson's mystical language in the contemporary diction of MacEwen's "The Absolute Dance":

something sustains us
between the crib and crypt
beyond the bones' arithmetic,
a vertigo, a circular inertia, or
a sun rising west for emphasis
--between the crib and total crypt--
the dance which is the synthesis....

by other dancers, then, our stance is broken,
this: or a small sun raising vaguely phallic fires
or the skull absurd as apple
spilling cider down a virgin's spine
to drown the balance and decree
the dance, . . .

more by will than circumstance
we drink a cider more than sustenance
and move towards the total power of the dance
to seek a single symmetry, an hour of totality
for within the dance lies its extremity. ²³

However, in "The Ferris Wheel," from the same early volume, MacEwen questions the tradition:

I ask you to revise your codes of holiness,
in horn and halo, I
ask you to join me on the ferris wheel.

and to be circular and have no level
nor total logic nor anchoring of orders
but be in movement, nor static circle,
worlds from the still middle, the

point of absolute inquiry
and stop nowhere on the mind's circumference....
not one minute of your move will define you
at any time, I
ask you to join me on
the ferris wheel. (49)

In these lines we can still hear MacEwen's struggling with conventional mystical expression, reworking it in the way Atwood suggests. In "Morning Laughter," later in The Rising Fire, MacEwen recounts her own birth, beginning to speak, in Neuman's terms, "as that which the dominant discourse says she is not: a subject with an origin":

umbilical I lumbered
trailing long seed, unwombed
to the giant vagina, unarmed,
no sprung Athene
--cry, cry in the sudden salt
of the big room, world
-- I uncurled plastic limbs of senses,
freed the crashing course of menses,
                --hurled
I hurled the young tongue's spit
for a common coming, a genesis
sans trumpets and myrrh, rejected
whatever seed in love's inside
fought and formed me from
an exodus of semen come
for the dream of Gwen,
the small one,
whose first salt scream
heralded more and borrowed excellence. (59)

From Afterworlds, "Vacuum Genesis" deals with the themes of birth and symmetry in words at once allusive and elusive:

Being means breaking the symmetry of the void
So life is not a fearful but a broken symmetry
And symmetry in time and space means Nothing
And time is the space your mind moves through

Love, would you just stand unmoving for two seconds
So I can see you?

No, I accept this disturbed symmetry
This chaos which allows you to be

I only own to disown you

I dream of tiny ancient horses
The bird insane in the jaws of the cat

The world, delirious with dawn ²⁴

The locality which MacEwen has created for her self-voice, rejecting the fathers' dominant sensory mode, seeing, she relates to genesis, birth. She is at the node of being where form encounters chaos and chaos encounters form--not Blake's "fearful" symmetry, "but a broken symmetry." MacEwen's presence, then, is both and neither in the womb and/or in the world: precisely the position of the "Forgotten Path" Luce Irigaray recalls in Speculum of the Other Woman when she juxtaposes the way out of Plato's famous cave with the way out of the womb. This path is

Between the'world outside' and the'world inside,' between the 'world above' and the 'world below! Between the light of the sky and the fire of the earth. Between the gaze of the man who has left the cave and that of the prisoner. Between truth and shadow, between truth and fantasy, between 'truth' and whatever 'veils' the truth. Between reality and dream. Between.... Between.... Between anything you like. All oppositions that assume the leap from a worse to a better... But what has been forgotten in all these oppositions, and with good reason, is how to pass through the passage, how to negotiate it--the forgotten transition. The corridor, the narrow pass, the neck.

Forgotten vagina. The passage that is missing, left on the shelf, between the outside and the inside, between the plus and the minus. With the result that all divergencies will finally be proportions, functions, relations that can be referred back to sameness. ²⁵

As though intuiting the importance of this forgotten tubular passage, in The Rising Fire MacEwen writes that her "voice involves trumpets--/ an elephant's trunk/ or a trunk of a thunder tree--" (15). From the forgotten passage, of which she is later surely conscious, she accepts "this disturbed symmetry/ This chaos which allows you to be."

As a final example, revealing the transitional passage between polarities, the locus of MacEwen's feminist mystical voice, I will quote the poem from A Breakfast for Barbarians which I have cited in this paper's title. To demonstrate the simultaneous awareness of and rejection of dualities, the poem plays on the words "violent" and "violate" in portraying the poet's self.

The Self Assumes

not love, lean and frequent,
but the accurate earth,
a naked landscape, green
yet free of seasons
is a name the violate self assumes
after its violent beginnings
not this complex dance of fire and blood
which burns the night to morning,
these hypnotic feet which turn us
know no end and no returning
but a fish within a brilliant river
whose body separates the dreaming waters
and never touches land
is a name the violate self assumes
as silver winds instruct the swimmer
who swims with neither feet nor hands
O not this double dance which burns the night to morning
and cracks the latitudes of time and sleep
whose lean and frequent fires in their burning
break apart the landscape of a dream,
but the accurate self which burns, and burning, assumes
green. ²⁶

NOTES

¹ Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Shadow-Maker (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969) 80.

² Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 147.

³ Irigaray 148.

⁴ Thomas B. Vincent, "Alline, Henry," The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, ed. William Toye (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1983) 9.

⁵ Henry Alline, The Rev. Mr. Henry Alline's Life &c. (1741-1784) (1806), Documents Relating to the Great Awakening in Nova Scotia 1760-1791, ed. Gordon T. Stewart (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1982) 226-27.

⁶ Gordon Stewart and George Rawlyk, A People Highly Favoured of God: The Nova Scotia Yankees and the American Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972) 186.

⁷ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Noman (N.p.: Oberon, 1972) 87.

⁸ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Afterworlds (Toronto: McClelland, 1987) 95.

⁹ J.J. Stoudt, Jacob Boehme: His Life and Thought (1957; rpt. New York: Seabury, 1968)18.

¹⁰ Stoudt 22-23.

¹¹ Andrew Louth details these developments in Christian theology in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).

¹² Nicolas Berdyaev, "Unground and Freedom," Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, by Jacob Boehme, trans. J. R. Earle (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1958) xiiL

¹³ Stewart and Rawlyk 82-85.

¹⁴ Thomas M. F. Gerry, "From the Quakers to the Children of Peace: The Development of David Willson's Mystical Religion," University of Toronto Quarterly 54.2 (1984-85): 203-13.

¹⁵ Jan Bartley, Invocations: The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1983) 3; Frank Davey, "Gwendolyn MacEwen: The Secret of Alchemy," Open Letter, 2nd ser. 4 (1973) 17-19.

¹⁶ George Bowering, "The Canadian Poetry Underground," Canadian Literature 13 (1962): 66.

¹⁷ R.F. Gillian Harding-Russell, "Gwendolyn MacEwen's 'The Nine Arcana of the Kings' as Creative Myth and Paradigm," English Studies in Canada 14 (1988): 204.

¹⁸ Margaret Atwood, "MacEwen's Muse," Canadian Literature 45 (1970): 29.

¹⁹ Ellen D. Warwick, "To Seek a Single Symmetry," Canadian Literature, 71 (1976):21-34.

²⁰ Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Shadow-Maker (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969) 16.

²¹ Shirley Neuman, "Importing difference," A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, eds. Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986) 402.

²² David Willson, The Practical Life of the Author (Newmarket: Erastus Jackson, 1860)17.

²³ Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Rising Fire (Toronto: Contact, 1963) 43-44.

²⁴ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Afterworlds (Toronto: McClelland, 1987) 25.

²⁵ Irigaray 246-47. For drawing my attention to Irigaray's writings, and for making their originality accessible to me, thank you to Professor Maggie Berg, Queen's University, Kingston, who delivered a paper on Irigaray, "The Female Psyche in a Nuclear Age: Luce Irigaray's La Mystérique," at the 1988 ACUTE Conference, Windsor, Ontario, and published "Escaping the Cave: Luce Irigaray and Her Feminist Critics" in Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch, eds. Gary WihI and David Williams (Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 1988) 62-76.

²⁶ Gwendolyn MacEwen, A Breakfast for Barbarians (Toronto: Ryerson, 1966) 20.