Word and Action in Margaret Avison's Not Yet But Still

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 WILLIAM BUTT Word and Action in Margaret Avison=s Not Yet But Still >Funny,= said Lancelot, >how the people who can=t pray say that prayers are not answered, however much the people who can pray say they are.= T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight I POETRY AND BELIEF The works of Northrop Frye make a fruitful context for those of Margaret Avison. These two Canadians of the same birth-decade (Avison b 1918; Frye b 1912) both passed most of their working lives in Toronto; and both were explicitly Christian in their vocations as in their writing B Frye an ordained United Church of Canada minister, Avison for many years a worker for the Presbyterian Church of Canada. Frye was the most influential literary critic Canada has produced; and Avison >the best poet we [Canadians] have had= (Bowering in Kent, Lighting, 80). It is a truism that poetry does not urge or require belief: that is the task of rhetoric. We can read Yeats=s A Vision, for example, in awe at the breadth of vision of a very great poet, without buying into it as revelation from the spirit world. On the other hand, a reader who does accept the faith assumed in a given poem will experience it differently from a reader who does not. Coleridge speaks of that willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith, but what about actual belief, that doesn=t need suspending at all? Homer=s contemporaries listening to The Odyssey, believing in the existence of Neptune, Athena, and the rest of the Olympian deities, must have found the poem a transcendent marvel in a way it cannot be to us. So a Christian might read Avison=s poetry or Frye=s books on the Bible as those Greeks once heard their Homer. For such a reader, words can articulate what Frye calls >a myth to live by= (Words with Power, hereafter WP, 117). The late works of each B Frye=s The Great Code and Words with Power and Avison=s recent poems in Not Yet But Still B echo one another constantly, as if in mutually assenting conversation. In this essay, I want to suggest several roughly parallel approaches to a theme manifest in Frye=s and Avison=s work. We could approach this theme as a series of propositions: 840 william butt $ Under certain imaginative conditions of the poet writing and the reader reading poetry, there is evoked (called out) an intensified participation in the same creative process B strenuous, painful, delightful B that ultimately creates Life itself. $ This intensified participation means abjuring the restrictive boundaries of the human self, which, by hiving off what is not the self, must diminish one=s participation in it, making us weak or wicked. $ The imagination, perceiving and half-creating something new, takes us beyond self. $ Love is another name for that impulse to live beyond self. $ For the Christian (though not only for the Christian), all life is one life, which is believed to be the result of a Creator, since we did not make it ourselves. $ Because humans at their best can both love and create, we picture the Creative Being as something like what we are at our best B not possessed of physical body or of personality with its perils, quirks, and crannies, but at least (maybe only) like us in lovingly delighting in creating. $ The Creator is vastly greater than we are, and impossible for humans to entirely understand. $ Making and reading poetry is one good way of approaching the Creator. II LIVING ROCK Let me begin by offering several works from the African arts as a context for Avison and Frye, not just because I live in Africa but because African art and spirituality provide a useful starting point for discussion of the work of these two writers. In the African Window exhibit hall in Pretoria are faithful reproductions of paintings by the San people, who have lived in southern Africa since 3000 BCE but whose culture by the early twentieth century had been in large part demolished by Bantus and whites. Many of their...