‘Imagining Out Things’: The Act of Vision in James Reaney's Alphabet

THOMAS M.F. GERRY >Imagining Out Things=: The Act of Vision in James Reaney=s Alphabet Soon after Northrop Frye published Fearful Symmetry in 1947, James Reaney=s friend Colleen Thibaudeau gave him their professor=s book as a present. The twenty-one-year-old Reaney gave the volume his close attention . Whether Frye=s meditation on and mediation of William Blake confirmed what Reaney already understood, or educated his youthful imagination, I don=t know. It is certain, though, that many of Frye=s expressions of his insights into Blake=s ideas accurately describe James Reaney=s career as a visionary poet-dramatist.1 A good starting point for understanding this relationship is the following paragraph from the chapter in Fearful Symmetry entitled >A Literalist of the Imagination=: Blake cannot understand why we should require artists to specialize either in lofty beginnings or in high finish. We do not reflect first and write or paint afterwards : art is the activity of writing or painting. We do not experience an internal tornado and then see what we can salvage from the wreck: the conception takes on its own form and shape only in the execution. We cannot conceive more than we can produce: we may dream of great masterpieces and then find that what we do afterwards is inferior to the dream, but a dream of doing something great is not seeing a picture in the mind=s eye and realizing it in paint. What the painter really visualizes is what he can succeed in making appear on the canvas. (93) That Frye writes here in terms of visual art is immensely convenient for beginning to come to terms with the visionary quality of James Reaney=s work. >Art is the activity of writing or painting.= Realizing that vision is an action; it is in the doing. Reaney himself once defined the metaphoric term >vision= as >expressing the wheel of life.= He made this remark twenty-one years ago, during the 28 January 1980 class of English 585, Ontario Literature and Culture, at the University of Western Ontario. In Reaney=s tower office that evening, 1 See Richard Stingle=s book on Reaney for a fuller exploration of Reaney=s relationship to Frye and Blake. 858 thomas m.f. gerry students explored aspects of Ontario=s visionary tradition, as it was formed by such people as Richard Maurice Bucke, Margaret Avison, Frye, Jean de Brébeuf, and David Willson and the Children of Peace. James Reaney. Untitled drawing of a bicycle: from Reaney=s Poems. Ed Germaine Warkentin. Toronto: new press 1972, 230. Used with Reaney=s permission. From Blake and Frye we recognize the required emphasis on the activity involved in >expressing.= According to both Frye and Reaney, >the wheel of life= for people in Ontario is the Bible=s circular pattern, the movement from the creation in Eden to a fall into the wilderness, then, around Ezekiel=s wheels a-rolling, to redemption and back again by way of St John=s Apocalypse. In what ways does Reaney=s writing express the wheel of life? To suggest answers to this question, I will focus on his intensely active project called Alphabet. Starting in 1960, Reaney edited and printed Alphabet as a biannual magazine devoted to the >Iconography of the Imagination=: Alphabet ran for nineteen issues, winding down in 1971. Each issue offered an editorial written by Reaney, key sources for appreciating his visionary qualities. The editorial for issue 1:1 contains the following well-worth-repeating sentences: The most exciting thing about this century is the number of poems that cannot be understood unless the reader quite reorganizes his way of looking at things or >rouses his faculties= as Blake would say. Finnegans Wake and Dylan Thomas=s >Altarwise by Owl-Light= sonnet sequence are good examples here. These words cannot be enjoyed to anywhere near their fullest unless one rouses one=s heart, belly and mind to grasp their secret alphabet or iconography or language of symbols and myths. A grasping such as is involved here leads to a more powerful inner life, or Blake=s >Jerusalem=s Wall.= Besides which it=s a hell of a...