To Scavenge and Invent: the Shamanic Journey in Don McKay's Lependu

by 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:

Cornelius Burley was found guilty of the murder of Constable Timothy C. Pomeroy, whom he allegedly shot on September 16, 1829 . . . . Yet what happened remains a mystery. Burley, a pathetic, illiterate, unintelligent individual, was associated with a notorious family called the Ribbles; there was some question whether he had committed the murder or one of the Ribbles was responsible. Nevertheless, the Rev. James Jackson, a Wesleyan Methodist clergyman who appears to have been the Ribbles' minister, persuaded Burley to confess after he had been sentenced to death. It is not known whether Jackson deliberately contorted the case or just enjoyed publicity .... Dropping from the scaffold erected in the courthouse square [on August 19, 1830], Burley entered criminal history as the first and second man to be hanged in London the rope broke on the first try. Before his death, Burley twice confessed his crime to Rev. James Jackson. The Gore Balance printed the confession in handbill form .... A mob of about 3000 assembled at the courthouse to enjoy the proceedings (hang­ing), partly spurred on by the antics of the Rev. Mr. Jackson, who from the scaffold read a confession obtained after the conviction. He later had 1000 copies printed as a handbill and sold them . . . . As a final indignity, visiting Yale medical student Orson Squires Fowler who went on to become a millionaire phrenologist and designer of octagonal houses to catch health­ful winds obtained Burley's skull after the ensuing public dissection. For many years he demonstrated it around the continent, pointing out the bumps on a murderer's head; what is left today rests in "Eldon House".3

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:

Hallways lined with trophies, the skulls and antlers of

exotic animals:

Hartebeest, Waterbuck, Sable Antelope...

and (slight pause) Cornelius

Burley.

(p. 7)

 

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":

 

Then up

the ladder to your rope and the Reverend reads me out to you

all just like I was

the Bible...

I go up the second time and whooee

all the words in all the hymnbooks flying off their pages out

the doors and

windows of the church I'm

everywhere

(p. 17)

 

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,

 

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects .... The sacred is saturated with being.10

 

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:

 

Decentered, allegorical, schizophrenic . . . however we choose to diag­nose its symptoms, postmodernism is usually treated, by its protagonists and antagonists alike, as a crisis of cultural authority, specifically of the authority vested in Western European culture and its institutions... since the mid-1950s, at least, we have recognized the necessity of encountering different cultures by means other than the shock of domination and conquest."17

 

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:

 

Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. This basic vision prevents us from taking any unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense, or the madness of the so-called madman.19

 

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,

 

to have it slide
through us, disappearance
of the skin, this is what we are looking for,
the way in.22

 

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 remains here, sucking on your eyebeam like an immense appetite" (p. 7). One source of "the relic"'s fascination for the speaker is its ambiguous physical state confined to a box, yet missing its top and its paradoxical meaning for the viewer as a result. Burley the criminal was excised like a cancer from his society, yet his skull is still "in the open", forcing us to recall his story, epitomizing as it does the biases of Western culture itself. Half trophy and half memento mori, the skull's power to disturb is doubled by the fact that it is kept in a box, according to Gaston Bachelard, who writes of boxes as "witnesses of the need for secrecy", the box being an emblem for "the pent-up soul".24 In Bachelard's words, the skull, and later Lependu himself, is "both visible and hidden", encouraging those receptive to him to allow the experience of spiritual or psychic openness into lives that had previously been closed, or, as McKay suggests in the first line of "The Relic": "Two dimensional, to begin" (p. 6). With these four words, McKay holds out the possibility that the persona (and vicariously, the reader) will advance, through the poems, to the larger (or three-dimensional) experience of time and space, history and place, offered by Lependu as shaman.

 

"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 ever to / be hanged in London (1830)" ("The Relic", p. 7). Considered by his society a deviant worthy of medical scrutiny, Burley cannot be written out of London's history, just as his skull finds a place today in this carefully maintained historic building, once "centre of London's cultural and social life" ("The Relic", p. 6). In this poem Lependu directly addresses McKay's persona, saying "You've been a naughty boy, neglecting me / keeping me caged in dreams when we've so much to discuss" (p. 9). Lependu as shaman

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:

 

Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos and homogeneity, to "found the world" and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it spears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day.25

 

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

 

feed some

popcorn to the squirrels and dream of two
husked lovers fondling opening
the birthday presents of each other Christopher
Columbus walking through his newfoundforests
whispers mama mia to himself (p. 11)

 

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:

 

Burley, your silence is the wound in our
speech.
We have to climb inside,
into the box we built you, armed with ears
to scavenge and invent

(p. 16)

 

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:

 

Ye sons and daughters of mirth and of glee,
Remember the end of CORNELIUS BURLEY,
He began in a ballroom to merrily prance,
But the gallows concluded his infamous dance.

(p. 15)

 

Both laughter and dancing are echoed throughout the sequence (for exam­ple, "Lependu nearly materialized by his blackbirds", "Ballade du Pendu") as McKay uses them to explore our culture's dangerous valorizing impulse, proposing as alternative the union of opposites found in shamanism, with its tolerance for what we would deem the mad or irrational.

 

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":  

 

(are you sure
we're doing the right thing how
depthed it draws us to the pool the pool ....  

(p. 18)

 

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:  

 

Talking, they build nests in air, the soft
translucence of their knuckles
hurts him.
Feeling his fingers growing into one
dumb fist. (p. 22, ll)  

 

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:  

 

Each day the same
geometry, working out the roads concession by concession, right angled
except where the river forces the road to slither from the square.
[Notice how the river alone is able to resist our Western colonization of
everything, from countryside (roads), to the brain (phrenology).] (p. 23, V)

 

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:  

 

I will tell you what it was like. It was like a wild
strawberry crushed against the roof of your mouth, a blood-bit.

(p. 24, VII)  

 

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:  

 

A body.
O the birds and bees
had never mentioned this how gravity
is potter's hands,
how with a body you are never ennuyé there's always
something going on ....
("Liaisons Dangereuses", p. 29)  

 

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:

 

He was tripe and ooze he needed
to dry out before he ripened into something animal  
or worse.
Home he dispensed himself in bits
through the shadows of the branches, black corpuscles
shot through the city like a drug.
Several squirrels went berserk
and had to be destroyed. (p. 31)

 

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:

 

o the devil take the blood
take the blood
take the blood
o the devil take the blood
running in us like a flood .... (p. 32)

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:

the zinging growing every time I made that trip

and threw up everything that tied me down, a goddam religious

posture too I

thought (this would be about the 6th and halfway puke)

kneeling and clasping the

white bowl, shaking like to shed my skin.
I hung above myself, the zinging moving through like a breeze

without a

message, asking and making nothing of itself, a time not long

but round, still

round in my mind when I think back. (pp. 34-35)

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

to open up the weave
to let the streets unravel... 
the line the page yes
pulp itself to unrolled scrolls the crabbed words finding

long

forgotten words inside the kernels of themselves
phrenology
mythology

down the rope

to scavenge & invent:

(pp. 36-37)

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".37

Major 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:

history. . .
will summon us no antlered man, we have
to wander further off
talking to ourselves
we have to lie
down cradled in the ribbed canoe, and float ....
look up into opening depths and let
your eye swim in [recalling "The Eye meets Tom Thomson's "A
Rapid""] inquisitive, surprised
as a new word in a language .... (p. 38)

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:

fish in the flux
muscles in muddy water are already
rhythm, animal rhythm, riverrhythm, rhythm of blood. (p. 40)

Meanwhile, the river's flux is repeated in the flux of the speaker's thoughts:

the river...
tugging at the names of things...
while the river under
river over river in you minds
its business of undoing, dragging at the land heh heh
unnaming London, Ont. (p. 40)

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:

The French called them Les Neutres, the Hurons
Attiwandaron, "those who speak a slightly different
language,"
or "with a tongue that is awry," a tribe...
of smokers who went up
(apparently
in smoke
cut loose from history. (pp. 40-41)

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:

Talbot  Burwell
Ingersoll Carling
. . .
(Burley p. 41)

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:

Dear Wife I am at this moment confined in the cell from
which I am to go to the
scaffold. I received my sentence today, and am to be
executed on the sixth
of February .... 
(p. 42)  

This pathetic document from London's "civilized" past contrasts with McKay's presentation of the Attiwandaron, pre-London inhabitants of this place, and their indulgence of those whom our society would label "madmen".

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 .39  

As 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  

vision-seekers, gamblers, losers, big
givers of gifts, obeying
dreams and running naked through the village,
known for their madmen...
honouring the dead. (p. 45)  

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,  

Lependu's feet
touch ground  
Fiddler!
he slams his dance in gear
feeling for the first
wound on mother earth, le trou

dancing (p. 47)

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:  

the only thinking is the river slowly  
knowing its valley (p. 47)  

and London, Ont. is consecrated as a whole community at last:  

. . .the city, seen
in a stutter of light between the branches
 

nests in the river's crotch

our own tongues
speaking in a slightly different language and our heads
antlered with images (p. 47)

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:  

The native peoples are the other half of Western history. They are not a numerical half, but a psychological and metaphysical one. Without their participation the Western identify is incomplete.40

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.

1.

See, for example, these recent reviews of Sanding: John Oughten, "Lord of the Wings", Books in Canada, 16, no. 5 (June/July 1987), 12-13; Martin Singleton, Cross-Canada Writers' Magazine, 10 no. 1 (1988), 22; and Mark Frutkin, Arc (Spring 1988), pp. 40-44.[back]

 

2.

Don McKay, Lependu (Coldstream/Ilderton, Ontario: Brick Books, 1978), "The Confession: notes toward a phrenology of absence", p. 16. All further references to the sequence will be cited parenthetically in the text.[back]

 

3.

Frederick H. Armstrong, The Forest City: An Illustrated History of London, Canada (London: Windsor Publications, History Book Division, 1986), pp. 42-3.[back]

 

4.

Nevill Drury, The Shaman and The Magician: Journeys Between the Worlds (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. xi.[back]

 

5.

John A. Grim, The Shaman: Patterns of Siberian and Ojibway Healing (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press), p. 3.[back]

 

6.

Drury, p. 25. Mircea Eliade has painstakingly recorded the recurring features of shama­nism in his major study, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1964). For my purposes, however, it is simply necessary to note that the process of becoming a shaman is a long and arduous one, its risks and hardships a reflection of the power a shaman may achieve, that power operating always for the benefit of their people.[back]

 

7.

This trance state "can be brought about . . . by sensory deprivation in which a lack of external stimuli results in an inner compensatory release of imagery; a condition of sleeplessness and fatigue, fasting and suspended-breathing techniques and through hallucinatory drugs" (Drury, pp. 15-16).[back]

 

8.

Within the trance state which provides this metaphorical death and rebirth, Eliade notes, "one or more of the following themes" can be observed: "dismemberment of the body, followed by a renewal of the internal organs and viscera; ascent to the sky and dialogue with the gods or spirits; descent to the underworld and conversations with the spirits and the souls of dead shamans; various revelations, both religious and shamanic. . ." (Shamanism, p. 34).[back] 

 

9.

Andreas Lommel, in Shamanism: The Beginnings of Art, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: McGraw, 1967) also warns against an inappropriate elevation of the shaman's status, though for a different reason. Shamanism, writes Lommel, "springs from an intensification of the ego-potency at a time when man was by no means master of his environment but at the mercy of the overwhelming forces of nature" (p. 70). His use of the word "master" here, in relation to the natural world, is a telling one; it reveals an imperialist bias antithetical to McKay's project in Lependu, and one which Eliade and Drury do not share. Nevertheless, Lommel agrees that the shaman "is not merely a    medicine man, a doctor or a man with priestly functions, he is above all an artistically productive man" (p. 8: but observe his insistence on the male pronoun).[back] 

 

10.

MiMircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 12. Hereafter cited as TSATP.[back] 

11.

quoted in Grim, p. 14.[back]

 

12.

Ward Rutherford Shamanism: The Foundations of Magic (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Aquarian Press, 1986), p. 16.[back]

 

13.

See TSATP, p. 205; also Drury, p. 87.[back]

 

14.

Charles Olson, Selected Writings of Charles Olsen, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 61.[back]

 

15.

Margaret Atwood, "Instructions For The Third Eye", Selected Poems 11: Poems Selected and New: 1976-1986 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 104-105.[back]

 

16.

Shamanism, p. 511.[back]

 

17.

Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism", in The Anti­ Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. 57.[back]

 

18.

See Drury, p. 98; TSATP, p. 208.[back]

 

19.

R.D. Laing, The Politics ofExperience and The Bird ofParadise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 11-12.[back]  

 

20.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 108-206.[back]  

 

21.

Jaynes, p. 427.[back]  

 

22.

Margaret Atwood, "Marsh, Hawk", Two-Headed Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 89.[back]

 

23.

See Eliade on sacred space: TSATP, p. 37.[back]

 

24.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964), p. 79.[back]  

 

25.

TSATP, p. 23.[back]  

 

26.

TSATP, p. 70.[back]

 

27.

Rutherford, p. 39.[back]  

 

28.

Grim, p. 5.[back]  

 

29.

It is fascinating to compare "The Report" with Laing's account of "A Ten-Day Voyage", Chapter Seven of The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. There he outlines a "psychotic episode" as the individual described it and concludes: "We can no longer assume that such a voyage is an illness that has to be treated .... Can we not see that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of, but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality? In other times people intentionally embarked upon this voyage" (p. 136). Laing obviously has in mind the shaman's ecstatic trance, mythologized as the "underground journey."[back]

 

30.

See Eli Mandel, "The Death of the Long Poem," Open Letter, 6th Series, nos. 2-3 (Fall 1985), p. 17; Michael Ondaatje, ed., Introd., The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1979).[back]  

 

31.

Eli Mandel, Pref, Surviving the Paraphrase, by Frank Davey (Winnipeg: Turnatone Press, 1983), p. iii.[back]

 

32.

See Robert Kroetach, "For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem," Open Letter, 5th Series, no. 4 (Spring 1983), pp. 91-110; Davey, "The Language of the Contemporary Canadian Long Poem," in Surviving The Paraphrase, pp. 184-192.[back]  

 

33.

Kroetsch, p. 93.[back]  

 

34.

Davey, p. 185.[back]  

 

35.

It is possible, of course, to regard Lependu as one long poem in its entirety, simply divided, as many long poems are, into individual sections: like McKay's own Long Sault (1975), included in Ondaatje's Anthology. For me it is still best described as a sequence, being a unified whole made up of discrete poems adhering within it to a specific theme, the shamanic initiation or journey. My view is somewhat reinforced by the fact that two of the sequence's poems in which Lependu is not a dominating presence, "The Eye Meets Tom Thomson's "A Rapid"" and "August", are reprinted separately in Birding, or Desire (1983).[back]  

 

36.

See Grim, p. 173; Drury, p. 6; Shamanism, p. 270.[back]  

 

37.

See Shamanism, p. 156; Lommel, pp. 108-9.[back]  

 

38.

Dennis Lee, Elegy #9, Civil Elegies (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p. 55.[back]  

 

39.

See Jaynes, p. 176.[back]  

 

40.

George Melnyk, Radical Regionalism (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981), p. 56.[back]