To Scavenge and Invent: the Shamanic Journey in Don McKay's Lependuby Laurie Kruk With the publication of his sixth book of poems, the warmly-reviewed Sanding Down This Rocking Chair On A Windy Night (1987),1 and the nomination of his previous volume, Birding, or Desire (1983), for the Governor General's Award, Don McKay's poetic reputation clearly appears to be on the rise. The critics' growing appreciation of McKay's witty and assured voice encourages our examination of an earlier, generally overlooked work of his. The work in question is Lependu (1978), a richly inventive and intelligent poem sequence which has not yet had the critical attention that it deserves. Its genesis lies in a little-known incident in the history of London, Ontario: the execution, exploitation and pseudoscientific taxonomy of Cornelius A. Burley, hanged in 1830. McKay reinvents Burley, exploring his fate and absurd reappearance as a trophy in London's oldest private residence, Eldon House, and, doing so, makes him the medium through which to comment on London's — and by extension, Western civilization's — alienation from its spiritual ancestry. Meanwhile, as a response to the growing awareness of Western culture's dangerous limitations demonstrated by artists, like McKay, associated with postmodernism, a renewed interest in the world-view of pre-literate peoples has emerged. In Lependu McKay draws on our (still) relatively recent understanding of the markedly less hierarchical nature of pre-Western, aboriginal societies, in order first to confront, and then to rewrite, Burley's symbolic value for London past and present. Such a critique of local history is a necessary therapeutic act, McKay suggests, for as he declares in this apostrophe early in the sequence, "Burley, your silence is the wound in our/ speech."2 Some knowledge of the sacred rituals of pre-literate peoples, particularly shamanism, is essential to appreciate fully McKay's creative achievement. In my proposed reading, Burley, "the hanged man" or, in French, "Lependu" of the title, is "translated" into the shaman who brings McKay's speaker news of the spirits, while preparing him for his own "underground journey" or metaphorical death-rebirth, represented in the ride down the river in "True Confessions," the final poem in the volume. As well as pursuing this central shamanic aspect of Lependu, the following paragraphs will make mention of some of shamanism's vestiges in contemporary society and its visible importance for artists today as a universal model for both holy and creative experience. At the outset, a brief recapitulation of the historical facts surrounding Burley is necessary. The official story as told by Frederick H. Armstrong in The Forest City: An Illustrated History of London, Canada reads as follows:
It is this comic-grotesque episode that McKay unearths at the beginning of Lependu, in "The Relic", where the speaker (presumed male, for lack of evidence otherwise) visits Eldon House to see:
It is further explored in "The Confession: notes toward a phrenology of absence", where he vows to "scavenge and invent" Cornelius Burley, thereby freeing him from his ostracized position as historical oddity, the head-hunter's trophy displayed for the titillation of tourists. The speaker's unease upon seeing Burley's half-skull in "The Relic" shakes him, and has the potential, McKay suggests, to shake all of us out of our complacency and towards the possibility of envisioning our world anew. For out of this unease rises, phoenix-like from the historical ashes of Burley, "Lependu", French for "the hanged man". Having said this, however, it must be noted that McKay's creation cannot be contained within a single identity: born out of Burley, he is not Burley the man but rather Burley the perceived criminal, deviant, and ultimately "hanged man" who yet has a redemptive role to play. Paradoxically, upon Burley's execution, the subversive energy attributed to him is released into a larger world as Lependu is suddenly "everywhere" as McKay says in "The Confession":
He is not, after all, confined to the box containing Burley's skull in Eldon House, though that is where the speaker first encounters, or rather, first recognizes an energy or impulse he has been aware of all along. A daily presence, this energy remains unharnessed by twentieth-century "rational" society, and outside its perimeters. Consequently, it is these same perimeters that Lependu will consistently mock and subvert throughout the sequence.
Shamanism as we understand it offers an alternative to a negative reading of Lependu as absence or chaos. McKay's sympathetic recreation of Burley in "The Confession" foreshadows his attempt to reconstruct a nonEuropean history for London, Ont. in "True Confessions: a phrenology for the antlered man", and establishes his distrust of our Western insistence on hierarchies, classes, categories. These are mental habits which McKay reveals as ultimately meaningless, like Fowler's phrenology lesson in "The Confession." And so the sterile "phrenology of absence" conducted on Burley by Fowler there will gradually give way, in the sequence, to a more meaningful exploration of the shamanic wisdom Burley represents, culminating in the "phrenology for the antlered man" of "True Confessions" (my italics). Anthropological research indicates that the essential themes of shamanism are remarkably similar whether found in Siberia, Japan, Australia or the Americas.4 John Grim provides a useful definition: "Among tribal peoples the shaman is the person, male or female, who experiences, absorbs, and communicates a special mode of sustaining, healing power."5 S/he is most frequently described as a medium between the human world and the spirit world, "an intermediary between the physical and inner worlds . . . [who] gains from the gods or spirit-beings privileged and sacred knowledge".6 According to Grim the stages in the formation of a shaman are: (1) the call from the spirits, (2) a sickness or withdrawal from previous activities, and (3) the emergence of the mature shaman. The sickness of stage two may be a literal illness or a ritual enactment through fasting and seclusion. In it, a trance state is experienced, during which the shaman is presumed to contact the spirit world.7 This state is often mythologized as the "underground journey", a universal motif which aptly conveys the shamanic candidate's particular out-of-body experience. In effect, it draws an implied analogy between the ecstatic experience and a hazardous journey through an unknown landscape. Ultimately, the "journey" is recognized as a death-rebirth experience, and as the source of the shaman's power.8
While the shaman may have special abilities to contact the spirits, an experience of the sacred is not limited to an elect, according to Eliade in The Sacred and The Profane.9 The hoarding of power which defines a hierarchical society is not found in societies that practice shamanism. In fact, according to Eliade,
It is the shaman's ecstatic but controllable trance experience that separates him or her from any other individual in their society, individuals who may also be capable of having visions. And unlike the modern priest or doctor, the shaman maintains, as an essential part of his or her role, a marginal or "liminal" status in their society. This fact explains Lependu's "possession" of Cornelius Burley — or, in other words, McKay's revisionist understanding of him as shaman — a man considered to be living at the margins of his society. (Such a view, McKay implies, simply facilitated his execution.) Victor Turner observes: "The shaman . . . assumes a statusless status, external to the secular social structure, which gives him the right to criticize all structure-bound personae in terms of a moral order binding on all . . . ."11 Like the licensed court Fool common from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, the shaman is authorized to criticize, to mock, and when necessary for the health of his or her society, to subvert. Ward Rutherford goes so far as to declare the shaman's alter ego to be "the Great Trickster."12 Certain "liminal" characteristics may also be seen in Lependu, such as the irreverent, mocking voice he turns on contemporary London and its inhabitants, and his predilection for adopting different forms. Meanwhile, the increasingly sardonic, playful nature of the speaker's own observations as the sequence proceeds (see, for example, "When Lependu loves you," — which, though the first poem in the work, thematically belongs with these mid-sequence, mid-initiation poems — "Lependu flu", "Lependu flu at the U", "August") aptly suggests the strengthening influence of Lependu on the speaker's perceptions and attitudes as he embarks on his own shamanic journey.
The fragmentation or "hierarchization" of space in modern society that McKay exposes in Lependu is being rejected by many other artists in their search for the sacred on an increasingly de-mystified, de-mythologized and ecologically threatened earth. Eliade writes that to settle in a territory is to consecrate it. It is this sense of consecrated community that we have lost, as McKay shows in the case of London, Ont., and it is for this reason that, in addition to Burley, he feels compelled to unearth and re-invent a past civilization — the Attiwandaron — which had consecrated this part of Southwestern Ontario (a continuing psychological need, according to Eliadel3). A greater concern in locating the sacred no longer solely in the rigid orthodoxies of Western religions but also in the living cosmos itself, has led many writers to question the basic values of Western civilization while groping for a new way to express one's relationship to the world. Dating back to Charles Olson's influential essay, "Projective Verse" (1950), a new interest in exploring place has appeared, one rejecting the values and perceived biases of modernism for a more holistic vision of our place in the world. In this new project "Art does not seek to describe but to enact".14 Margaret Atwood, for example, explores this new aesthetic in "Instructions For The Third Eye."15 Here, the inspiration of the poet intersects with the ecstasy of the shaman, both of them making use of "the third eye."16 That an awareness of this "primitive", non-Western relationship with the natural world where each profane object recalls a cosmic order, an order humankind participates in peaceably, rather than attempting to "master," is intrinsic to our understanding of postmodernism as a political as well as creative movement, is eloquently summarized by critic Craig Owens:
In "True Confessions" McKay's historical critique will in fact focus on the cultural "conquest" of the Attiwandaron and "domination" over the landscape which enabled London, Ont. as we know it to come into being.
Not surprisingly, this "crisis of cultural authority" has had an impact on the domain of psychiatry, causing revaluations of "madness" and "sanity", and incorporations within it of some of the healing features of shamanism."18 R.D. Laing, a noted existentialist psychiatrist, has commented:
In his work with schizophrenics Laing made a radical departure from medical orthodoxy by treating their "illness" as an intensified experience of reality. Julian Jaynes vindicates Laing's unorthodox views on schizophrenics in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by claiming them to be the last inheritors, like the shaman, of the bicameral mind. It follows that both schizophrenic and shaman experience (1) hallucinations (auditory), (2) the erosion of the analog `I', (3) the dissolution of mind-space, (4) the failure of narratization, and (5) body image boundary disturbance.20 Like Laing — but armed, as McKay says ironically in "The Relic", with "the comforts of fact" — Jaynes revises our understanding of schizophrenics, unhappy owners of the bicameral mind. Under the heading, "The Advantages of Schizophrenia", he notes that schizophrenics "seem to have a more immediate and absolute involvement with their physical environment, a greater in-the-worldness".21 How does this claim bear on Lependu? Jaynes' book provides another way of talking about the shamanic experience central to McKay's poem sequence and, by presenting historical "proof' for his thesis, Jaynes also brings an area of experience once confined to the occult (see Drury) and otherwise only articulated by those bold enough, like Laing, to put their professional reputations on the line, into the respectable mainstream. No longer a curiosity for anthropologists, shamanism or "bicameralism" is apparently in our genes. In their different attacks on medical definitions of madness, Laing and Jaynes, like many postmodern thinkers, are both searching for a healing experience of the sacred in our profane lives — or, as Atwood expresses it in another poem,
And it is Lependu as reminder of Burley's execution by his (our) society, and as shaman who inspires the persona's own shamanic initiation, who will show us "the way in."
While it would be unwise, not to say at odds with McKay's deconstructive aim in creating Lependu, to try to explain away the power of McKay's invention by placing him in a category —just as the half-skull of Burley, nineteenth-century London's bogeyman, still "sits in a wooden box" ("The Relic", p. 7) — a few extrapolations from the aspects of shamanism reviewed here may prove a fruitful way into the poems as a whole. Within the sequence, then, Lependu's role can be described as a shamanic one: both repeating the shamanic initiation of death, dismemberment or sickness —or all three — followed by a visionary rebirth, and inciting others to follow suit.
As
was previously observed, "The Relic", second poem in the sequence,
recreates the persona's experience upon visiting Eldon House, London's own
"sacred space" —
that is, preserved by a Historical Sites Board, its familiar plaque
recreated in the illustration on page 6 —
where he discovers "the relic" of Burley.23 The poem's focus
shifts from the description of the urban journey, which begins on London's
imposed grid of streets ("Walk block by block down Ridout Street past
York . . . .", p. 6), to the more fluid movements of the mind as McKay
presents the persona's initial reactions to the house, to its artefacts and
finally, to Burley's skull. His first glimpse into it (its top half is
missing) inspires a trance-like sensation ("you may feel / a certain
limpness of the tongue, a certain-", p. 7) which the speaker halts by
reading its inscription outlining Burley's history, "the comforts of
fact" (p. 7). Yet he remains transfixed by the power which "the
relic" still has for him, a power he will rename "Lependu":
"The skull consumes its history .... / And the wound, the entrance, /
exit, still
"Nothing
There" explores in more detail the fear aroused in "The
Relic" by the opening of that Pandora's Box in Eldon House. Is it fear of
death? Of accident, treachery, suicide? McKay refuses to label it, simply
suggesting, probing the weak spot in our culture's fabric: one caused, McKay
implies, by an over-reliance on the "light" of reason. Out of this
nameless dark emerges the figure he will call "Lependu", linking him by name and
McKay's own sympathetic association to his latest (human) incarnation, "the
first man is initiating a necessary discussion of fears and thoughts suppressed by our culture; the ensuing discussion between the speaker and him may be viewed as "the call from the spirits", first step in shamanic initiation. This in turn will precipitate the speaker's own "underground journey", however much it is resisted at first.
"London Life" introduces another important London landmark, and one that will recur, like Burley, throughout the text. This is the prominent insurance company of the title, whose imposing head office is located in London, Ont. With its "manicured" lawns and monumental architecture, it provides a prime example of the type of sterile icon which Western civilization has enshrined. Simply by the fact of recognizing this, the speaker moves closer to a pre-Western appreciation of the world. For McKay, the insurance company becomes the inverse of Burley's skull, for it is a glorified and socially accepted monument to death (and the fear of death) whereas the skull is a suppressed (boxed in) monument to life deprived (as Burley's was) of its potential for the sacred as well as the profane. London Life — which McKay ironically describes as having "invented" London, Ont., in a grotesque of values — is depicted asa "massy pile / built on uncertainties so solid it defies the grass / to look unlike a rug" (p. 11). We are thus made to compare the pretentious bulk of the building — a building which, in McKay's personification of it, still has to assuage its lack of meaning by murmuring, mantra-like, "[security]" — with the insubstantial omnipresence of Lependu, who resists all such containment.
In Eliade's study of pre-literate peoples, he learned the importance of connecting one's home, through myth and ritual, with the cosmos. It is this connection that we unconsciously hunger for today, in our "profane experience", he argues:
The secretaries who are forced to make London Life their "fixed point" five days a week, escape its confines at lunch "to sit in the park on real / grass" (my italics) — the profane suddenly becoming sacred — where they
Their dream of lovers slides abruptly into a vision of Columbus in his discovery of "the new world". By justaposition McKay seems to suggest that the park still has some connection with a "sacred time", that time, according to Eliade, which is "reversible and recoverable, as sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites".26 In their appreciation for the profane public space outside the "temple" of London Life, the secretaries are able to evoke an "eternal...present" of discovery which has more meaning for them than all the wisdom cities and insurance companies have since claimed for themselves, making "London Life," as well as London, Ont., suddenly fade into nothingness: to be replaced by a memory of Columbus' "newfoundforests."
A pivotal poem in the sequence is "The Confession: notes toward a phrenology of absence", a composite of historical documents and McKay's attempts to reconstruct the past events surrounding Burley, including his thoughts prior to his execution and afterwards, when Lependu's unmistakably irreverent voice takes over. With an exhilarating energy McKay explores here the historical facts presented in "The Relic". He combines short lines with verse paragraphs, putting the voices of both "found" and original material together: Burley's confession, "ghostwritten" by Rev. Jackson; the broadsheet's pompous doggerel; Fowler's phrenology lecture; and McKay's monologue for Burley, innocent of the shooting of Constable Pomeroy, but finally indifferent to his fate. McKay discloses his poetic intention in presenting these varied documents when he says:
In
other words, McKay's goal will be not merely to recover London's early history
but to scrutinize its motives, thereby revealing the hidden agenda which
victimized an innocent man and which is still dangerously in effect today. In
the vocal collage McKay creates, Burley undergoes several transformations
reminiscent of the shape-changing shaman,27 shifting from the penitent of
Jackson's confession, to the exemplum which ends up "gift-wrapped,
hanging on the living room walls of Upper Canada" (p. 15), to the mute
subject of Fowler's phrenological study, a study which proves only that Burley
may indeed have been framed (since his skull shows a surprising lack of the
expected criminal's contours), much as he is now "framed" in the
form of a printed broadsheet. This passage is then followed by McKay's
reconstruction of Burley through his own historical "scavenging" and
"inventing" of the man, an imaginative tour de
force where he focuses on Burley's acclaimed "Mirthfulness".
Finally, we see Burley's triumphant transformation into Lependu, for the
execution does not in the end contain what Burley's society felt necessitated
it. The antisocial action that Burley stood for as (ignored) shaman is still
present as a latent energy in our culture, McKay reveals, but it remains
unacknowledged, as shown in "Nothing There." Formerly enjoying a
restricted being in Cornelius Burley — depicted by McKay as the madman
(in Western society's eyes) or wise fool / shaman who laughs at fate (in
McKay's) — the shaman's voice of social subversion is freed for the
moment into the essence of non-being located "everywhere" that
McKay names Lependu. Laughter, presented by McKay as the primary inspiration
for Burley's antisocial act (here, shooting the cow), and music, especially
the dance, remain two activities linked with Burley as social deviant within
his particular culture:
Both
laughter and dancing are echoed throughout the sequence (for example, "Lependu
nearly materialized by his blackbirds", "Ballade du Pendu")
The similarity of wording between this poem's title and that of the final and most important one in the sequence, "True Confessions: a phrenology for the antlered man", underlines our culture's fascination with confessions, "true", or trumped-up as Jackson's was, as well as introducing the possibility of re-inventing phrenology as the very "scavenging" for lost meaning in which McKay is engaged. In a way, by examining Burley as possible descendent of "the antlered man" or shaman, and so reading his much-abused skull for the vestiges of "antlers", or a pre-Western mentality, McKay is performing a little phrenology himself. For while unearthing Burley's history and analyzing his on-going meaning for Londoners is one purpose of Lependu, a recreation of the shamanic journey is the other; the first project confronts the past, the second starts there but ends with a vision for the future. Having received "the call from the spirits" from Lependu, McKay's persona is presented as first resisting, and then succumbing to the psychic sickness or withdrawal that will eventually lead to the shamanic wisdom he craves.
In
"The Eye meets Tom Thomson's "A Rapid" ", the speaker
finds himself transfixed against his will by a painting by that
semi-mythical Canadian figure, Tom Thomson, sometime member of one of
the most identifiable (now almost cliched) Canadian art movements, the Group
of Seven. Thomson himself has been re-invented as a kind of shamanic
figure by other writers in the postmodern tradition: George Bowering in A Short
Sad Book; Robert Kroetsch in "Meditation on Tom Thomson" (in The Stone Hammer Poems). Here, it is his painting which threatens to
absorb the viewer just as Burley's skull did in "The Relic":
What
this poem seems to convey is a failure of the "rational" separation
between art and viewer, art and artist (since "...Alfred Hitchcock /
appears in his own show as a waiter", p. 18), essential to the modern
concept of art. This aesthetic stance may be linked with the general Western
European tendency to pit mankind against nature in an adversarial
relationship which Lependu, as shaman, is out to undo. Experiencing this
failure first-hand, — "he turns / to eat the audience"
— the speaker fearfully clings to his Eye (`f), concluding "we'd
better / wake up and get out of here friend / if we can" (p. 19).
The
speaker's withdrawal or descent into the psyche, into the landscape,
prefigured here, begins in the next two poems, "Lependu flu" and
"Lependu flu at the U" where he admits to feeling like "a
veritable oignon pour / le chef inconnu" ("Lependu flu", p.
20). As humourous as this sounds — and McKay's playfulness is never a
detriment to his aims — "Lependu
flu" is, as the cannibalistic image makes clear, the next stage in
shamanic initiation: sickness or dismemberment or both.
Ever inventive,
McKay takes a completely different direction next, in "The Trout".
Here, the playful tone and comic-grotesque imagery of some previous
poems that Lependu's "liminal" perspective provided is replaced by
sensitive observations expressed by three different speakers on daily
experiences of modern life: memories of pain, of thwarted communications
between family members, and of life's mocking meaninglessness where "He
aches with his knowing, knowing / it has no tune, there is no way to
explain" (p. 24, VII). The numinous is here but inexpressible; the love
for one's children is here but more likely to come out in perverse impulses
toward violence, McKay reveals:
Meanwhile,
the daughter in the poem, alive with the promise of puberty, "with unseen
buds", feels oppressed by the unnatural restictions enclosing her world,
including the grid of local roads. As she remarks wearily:
Feeling trapped — in her body, in winter, in a society whose constructs are rapidly becoming foreign to her — she identifies with the trout of the title. She too requires water, using it to numb her malaise (just as her father numbed his smashed hand in the stream in section I): "When she gets / home she will take an ice-cube from the fridge to suck, letting it melt in / the earth of her" (p. 23, V). The fluid, yielding quality of the water which both she and her father desire gives it an important metaphorical role here and within the sequence (as seen in "The Eye"). That is why in "True Confessions", the ride down the river becomes the "underground journey"; unlike the land which was claimed and renamed London, the river remains in some sense unowned, as McKay suggests there.
A
third voice emerges, however, in section VII of "The Trout": a freer
voice, supplied by an older woman who tells of her pleasure in picking
strawberries or "bloodbits", "because you have to get real
close to things to see them, maybe that is why" (p. 24). To do this, she
crosses "through the gap in the fence still unmended, maybe never mended
now," that same gap the man had been mending when he hurt his hand. Her
action suggests that she is farther from the Western mentality he subscribes
to when he shores up boundaries which the natural world will not recognize.
The woman realizes
that "work is wearing paths on our bodies" (an insight which
describes the secretaries' situation in "London Life") and notes
"When I pick strawberries I can feel those paths growing over" (p.
24). Freed from these deadening "paths" she is in tune with the
natural world in a way that the man and his daughter are still not:
"Feeling the tickle of grass / blades in my wrist. Feeling the sun's
angle in my shoulders" (p. 24). In "The Trout", she is the true
shamanic candidate, and as a result, is granted an ecstatic glimpse of a hawk
which may be Lependu (described as a bird of prey earlier in "Le reve du
pendu";ornithological symbolism is prominent in shamanism, Eliade tells
us). She responds with delight and an appropriate simile:
Through
the polyphony of "The Trout", McKay subtly conveys Lependu's growing
influence on London's inhabitants. By the time we turn to "Liaisons
dangereuses", the sense of a community infected with "Lependu
flu" so that "the mind / melts" ("August", p. 25) has
been evoked by poems such as "August", "Shadow city shadow
city" (where Lependu "lays the absence of his body on the city like
a long / black negligee, wakens the buildings / softly, so the bricks remember
/ being earth", p. 26), and "A Left Wing" (and foreshadowing it
earlier, "Portents"). With "Liaisons dangereuses", McKay
returns to his sardonic use of vernacular in order to evoke Lependu's
strengthening, mocking voice, and declares his influence as "stretching
Windsor to Toronto" (p. 29). The focus of this poem is on the rebirth
Lependu needs to complete the cycle which began when he was freed into
non-being by the death of Burley. For now he craves carnality once more,
to know being and non-being, birth and death, as the shaman must. McKay
humourously expresses Lependu's need thusly:
His
mission bawdily portrayed with great comic zest, Lependu homes in on that
Ontario Babylon, the Yonge Street "strip", where he finds shelter
and his goal "in the uterus beyond / And there / (o baby) / it was
dark" (p. 29).
In the succeeding poem, "For it is the pleasure of souls to become moist", death and dismemberment follow this latest rebirth in yet another turn of an implied perpetual spiral as Lependu realizes:
An intermediary between the ecstatic or sacred and the profane, perpetually travelling between the world of the dead and of the living, Lependu cannot be confined to one place — the box in Eldon House, London, Ont., or one "animal" body — but must remain available to everything ready to receive him, even squirrels.
"Ballade du Pendu" makes an interesting use of both the shape and the substance of a dance (reminding the reader of Burley's "infamous dance") as an infectious rhythm sweeps through the song's chant-like short lines and incantatory rhythm:
The poem's deliberately giddy ending ("music is the / magic is the / devil is the", p. 33) reminds the reader of the breathless hedonism released by the dance, a consequence glossed in moral terms in the excerpt from Jackson's "Confession" which McKay inserts at the beginning of the poem. Like the shaman's ecstatic trance, the dance also invites a narrowing of consciousness and provides a sensation of transcending the physical while simultaneously celebrating it. And since dancing traditionally involves form as well as energy, it is itself a symbol of the harmonious balance of opposite forces that it is the shaman's task to achieve. The ecstatic experience reappears in a completely different context in the next poem, "The Report of an Old Man whose Life was Changed after briefly becoming Lependu back in 1946." In contrast to the rhythmical tightness of the "Ballade", this poem is written in strangely lyrical paragraphs of a stream-of-consciousness-type prose, similar to Burley's monologue in "The Confession." And instead of capturing the controlled passion of the dance, McKay presents here the vivid recollections of a particularly harrowing "morning after", the uncouth vocabulary of drunkenness included. Unlikely as it sounds, this story becomes yet another instance of the sickness, withdrawal or "underground journey" of shamanism. For as Grim reminds us, within the pre-European's world view, "even the profane is full of potential for becoming sacred."28 In the speaker's description of his recovery, alone in his hotel room, we recognize steps very similar to the shamanic candidate's sickness and trance state: hallucinations, bodily dissociation, a sense of circular time rather than of linear, a fasting and purging of the body. And while subtly incorporating these experiences into the speaker's recovery, McKay is also able to preserve both the pathos and the humour of his predicament:
Leaving behind this intensity of being, the speaker returns to "normality" and ends up attending a dance where he meets his future wife. This may not appear an act of any especial significance (although we may remember the importance of the dance for Burley and Lependu as revealed in "Ballade du Pendu"), yet a potential for shamanic wisdom remains in the undimmed memory of that astonishing experience. 29"A Death insurance policy" follows "The Report". Here McKay returns to shorter lines and free verse, but continues to show his inventiveness within this form as he takes care to stretch three brief stanzas across two pages, a visual underlining of his intention "to lie down" in the "underground journey" via canoe ride of the next and final poem of the sequence, "True Confessions." This spacing also mimics "the hanged man"'s posture and emphasizes his desire for release from this powerful yet uncomfortable position (". . .longing, Jesus longing / to lie down, lengthen—", p. 36), since, like the shaman, he is also suspended between heaven and earth. Meanwhile the speaker longs
Ending with a reiteration of McKay's poetics in Lependu ("to scavenge & invent"), this poem, with its spatial stretch across two pages, prepares the reader for the temporal leap to follow in the final poem of the sequence. There McKay will "open up the weave" of time and space to give us the three-dimensional experience he obliquely promised in "The Relic" ("Two dimensional, to begin"). This will take the shape of an "underground journey", juxtaposing past and present, memory and a vision, into the known history of London, Ont. in search of that "in-the-world-ness" (Jaynes) which, McKay has made clear by now, is missing from our lives today. "True Confessions: a phrenology for the antlered man" is the ambitious finale to an ambitious work. At ten pages, it may be seen by some critics to be another entry in the healthy "long poem" tradition in Canada, a tradition that, while not originating with postmodern writers, appears to have interested a good number of them. 30 As Eli Mandel writes: "It has become clear recently that the long poem represents a major mode of contemporary writing."31 "True Confessions" certainly has the verbal and formal playfulness, the creative borrowing of forms and signs, and the concern with place rather than with strictly sequential narrative, that Robert Kroetsch and Frank Davey have both offered as recurring features of the contemporary Canadian long poem.32 With its anti-Western shamanic theme and its unobtrusive structure, this final poem — an ostensibly casual meditation on the history and settlement of London, progressing apparently by association — (indeed, Lependu itself) reveals "the skepticism about history" that Kroetsch finds in such well-known Canadian long poems as Atwood's Journals of Susanna Moodie and Ondaatje's Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Although the fact remains that the entire sequence is shaped, as I have shown, by the process of shamanic initiation, Lependu too is a work in which "archaeology supplants history; an archaeology that challenges the authenticity of history by saying there can be no joined story, only abrupt guesswork, juxtaposition, flashes of insight."33 Yet "True Confessions" lacks that open-endedness which Davey generally ascribes to the long poem, which moves "in the joy of continuing".34 Nor does it build its content as well as its technique upon "delay", as Kroetsch suggests the long poem does. The conclusion of the journey that "True Confessions" records is vitally necessary in order to complete McKay's rewriting of history, and has been subtly prepared for by the preceding poems in the sequence, their shamanic ideas or allusions.35 Its title suggests its aim: to discover an ancestry we can believe in rather than the "absence" of the true man that we find in Jackson's "Dying Confession of Cornelius Burley" or Fowler's phrenology lesson in "The Confession." In it McKay's persona makes the "underground journey" towards shamanic wisdom via a canoe ride down the Thames River — still untamed, he noted in "The Trout", by London city planners — while temporally travelling back to its previous existence as "La Tranche" for Ontario's French settlers, and, more importantly before that, "Askunessippi / the antlered river" (p. 40) for the Attiwandaron, "`distinguished for the multitude and quality of their / madmen who were / a privileged class"' (p. 41). In other words, back to the last people who made room in their culture for the shaman.The speaker's journey begins with the memory of the "various figures . . . [once] delineated on trees at the / forks of the Thames . . . / . . . the most remarkable / were the imitation of men with deer's heads—" (p. 38). Two features of shamanism are combined here, with McKay's typically deceptive casualness: first, the habit of carving "the personal power symbol" on a tree — which can always be seen by the pre-European as an incarnation of the "world tree", joining heaven, earth and the underworld simultaneously. 36 Second, the "men with deer's heads" represent the shaman in a common animal costume which, in relation to Lependu's sub-theme of phrenology, is a particularly apt choice of McKay's "scavenging / inventing".37Major Littlehales, one of the first European explorers of this area, observed these figures, McKay tells us, and "doomed them in his diary" as he travelled "along this antlered river, / Askunessippi, which he calls, like us, [my italics] / `the Thames"' (p. 38). The possibility of colonizing an area intellectually as well as physically, is raised by his ostensibly innocuous act of recording the figures, as well as by the renaming of the river. "Doomed" in Littlehale's diary, these "power symbols" lose their meaning and become reduced to archaeology, anthropology, even as Fowler attempted to reduce Burley's individuality through phrenology. McKay's speaker is well aware of the imperialism of Western civilization, which too often "murders to dissect". As he declares:
So begins the speaker's journey back through history, a critical revaluation where he gradually assumes the shaman's role in order to mock London's alleged progress with sardonic allusions to the river's pollution, the courthouse's futuristic heating system, and the fact that the conception of London pre-dated even the existence of a village, which, in the context of "London Life", makes it still more unreal. These observations are followed by descriptions of varied perceptions, bits and pieces of fragmented London lives which come to him ("the covers of Hardy Boy Mysteries the odd / schlmazel of a squirrel's nest", p. 39) intertwined with sounds of the river, relayed onomatopoeically: "chuckling under the bow, / whispering screwzensoftly, sucking and / kissmacking down the sides of the canoe. . ." (p. 39). The rebirth symbolism starts to appear, foreshadowing the speaker's shamanic rebirth, when the river is described as a uterine canal, and rational Western order, the separation between figure and ground shifting in "The Eye", finally begins to disintegrate:
Meanwhile, the river's flux is repeated in the flux of the speaker's thoughts:
By this process of "unnaming", the speaker discovers the original name for this "antlered river", Askunessippi — which is proposed as a more authentic one than "the Thames", with its homage to the "mother country". We are also introduced here to the people who first named it, themselves named by puzzled outsiders:
Then, having summoned these ancestors, the speaker goes on to contrast their generally more meaningful past existence with that of contemporary citizens of London (p. 45), its very name borrowed from a foreign tradition, a choice which consequently swallows up the very real differences between this country and England. Naming is revealing for McKay, as he demonstrates that it is always the "winners" who leave their names, their language and history behind, although the occasional memory of history's suppressed "losers" lingers on, as the list inserted on the fourth page of the poem shows:
At this point, Lependu returns, reminding Londoners of our uncomfortable position here, surrounded by names that don't reflect us (London, Thames, Oxford and Piccadilly Street, to name a few), finally handing our deaths over to London Life in a sterile financial transaction, before he abruptly dies (at the top of page 42) — preparing for his own rebirth five pages later (p. 47), when he will be spiritually renewed once more. But as a further reminder of our culture's intolerance of any type of deviance, he leaves behind the note of another condemned man:
This
pathetic document from London's "civilized" past contrasts with
McKay's presentation of the Attiwandaron, pre-London inhabitants of this McKay's
poetic line, flexible as it is throughout Lependu,
adapting readily to the demands of his imagination, really begins to open up
now with the isolation on the fifth page of the poem of "this space"
(meaning pre-"London" London) and the insertion on the same page of a
map of the Attiwandaron's settlements in Southwestern Ontario. This drawing is
introduced as a museum display map-" (push the button / HERE" —
a detail which reminds us of Fowler's demonstration in "The
Confession": "Observe, then, how the candle shows an / amazing
translucence of the cranium, particularly here.
. ."(p. 15). Both cartography and phrenology, after all, are products
of a classifying intellect that denies the numinous. In his own attempt "to honour each one of my country's failures of nerve and its / sellouts", 38 McKay includes "found" material here, such as the paragraph from the contract between Attiwandaron and English to sell the land, and the "alphabet" of gifts (from "blankets" to "vermillion") which purchased it. He also turns to illustration, recreating a few of the pictographs used by the native people in their treaty on page 44, thereby setting up a sharp contrast between these and our sign-system, the English language, and showing the Attiwandaron's greater rapport with things-inthemselves rather than with things-as-symbols .39As well, there are his drawings on the last two pages of the poem, which illustrate the transformation of "the hanged man" — and owing something to the child's word-game "hangman" — into "the antlered man" or shaman. Through these formal innovations the poem challenges our preconceived notions of poetry to become an experiment in openness, in play, while it demonstrates the same creative thinking integral to the shamanic vision. After the
Attiwandaron leave or "give up space", a vacuum of meaning is created
which we now realize we are still trying to fill. But surveying and building
physical structures alone ("to organize / to build / a courthouse in your
[river's] crotch", p. 43) will not suffice, as McKay has shown throughout Lependu.
It is a relationship with our environment that we must build, like those
The Attiwandaron's "great day / of interment" (p. 45) is then set against the founding of London, presented as a failed attempt at consecrating the ground, just as Fowler's "phrenology of absence" failed to "trap" (or here, even to locate) the subversive, shamanic spirit of Cornelius Burley. The
poem concludes, however, with true poetic justice, or the triumph of shamanic
wisdom over the sterility of Western rationality, providing both retribution for
Burley and the imagined possibility of a return to a preEuropean, or what
Eliade calls a "religious" attitude towards being. In yet another
transformation, the poem shifts into doggerel-type verses describing
an actual incident in London, fifty-one years after Burley's hanging: "the
St. George's Day Disaster", where the boat Victoria apparently sank in the
Thames, killing nearly two hundred people. The downing of a ship named after the
then Queen of Canada as well as England, spells a momentary loss of the
authority which condemned Burley to death: "While BURLEY's sad fate
throughout Canada rings, / Let it teach you subjection to God and your
King" ("The Confession", p. 14). The Disaster causes a temporary
toppling of the established order by that unconquered river the Thames/Askunessippi.
And suddenly,
What
this antisocial occurrence does is release "the hanged man" from his
tortures in "A Death insurance policy", letting him as shaman
"touch ground" and so reclaim his being in our world. With this
apocalyptic event, reality must and does change, as McKay shows, while history
is rewritten in favour of a non-Western, shamanic vision. The journey is
complete for McKay's speaker, reader and Lependu alike: each experiences a
knowledge of place, a certainty of belonging here, that McKay suggests the
Attiwandaron must once have enjoyed. So that now:
and London, Ont. is consecrated as a whole community
at last:
By
revealing McKay's unique creation, Lependu, to be the evertransforming shaman
in touch with everything that is denied or dismissed by Western civilization, a
catalyst for the healing and creative journeys of others, this poem sequence
does what all thoughtful art must do: it strips away the pretences of the
dominant culture and returns a truthful if unflattering picture of its soul. And
in his recovery of the "sacred time" of London, Ont. in particular,
Western civilization in general, McKay participates in the postmodern quest
for a sense of place. In a slightly different context, George Melnyk argued:
In
Lependu, Don McKay strives to redress that balance, answering the
current crisis of cultural authority with an integrated vision of being. Notes I
would like to thank Professors J.M. Zezulka and D.M.R. Bentley for giving me
advice and encouragement in the course of writing this paper.
|