Vision in Canada?

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 JAMES REANEY Vision in Canada? I have two little stories I=d like to tell about >Vision auf Kanada.= Has she had an easy time of it here? I don=t know. I might warn you that I want to define it first B in terms not just of Canada. I know if I were going to talk about vision in any country, I would mention Finland, where everybody knows the national visionary poem that was created by an old schoolmaster out of shamans= lays in order to give the country something to bind it together. It=s called the Kálevála, is about the conflict between North Farm and South Farm with a central hero B a bard, a poet, older than his bride. This bride, resentful of a forced marriage, commits suicide and, reader, take it from there! The battle between the two forces of death (North Farm) and life (South Farm) takes up the rest of the story with, notably, a younger hero torn asunder by witchcraft (North Farm also specializes in cannibalism!) who is literally sewn together by his mother and born again. With its chokecherry bushes and rocks, forests and lakes, this epic poem could easily provide us with an explanation of Northern Ontario, and, as a matter of fact, I bought my copy of the poem in the Finn Hall at Fort William. Now, this poem has given all Finns, at home and abroad, something for them to wind their hearts and souls around; it is the equivalent of a Finnish Bible. Everybody in Finland from childhood up can recite the poem from memory. Every national literature tries to do this B to be its nation=s Bible, to do for its nation what the Bible did for the Jews, who are said to be a people of the book. If you want to know what it=s like, have a read at Longfellow=s Hiawatha, which is an imitation of the Kálevála, rhythm and all, but with Ojibwa Indian myths as its content and which, when I read it aged ten, seemed to me to make even more sense about Southwestern Ontario than Genesis did; to begin with, in Hiawatha, the general notion is that the earth is a great big tortoise on which we are resting; continual conflict is occurring between a Frost Spirit and a Warmth Spirit, twin brothers (North Farm and South Farm), born to a moon goddess, Minnehaha, daughter of old Nokomis. I think what most appealed to me about Longfellow=s great poem, sadly neglected today, is that the tortoise myth felt right for my surroundings on the farm B where, by the way, tortoises regularly roamed 938 james reaney either to their nesting place in our pond or away from that pond to their nesting place by the Avon River. The other >scientific= myths about our origins B promulgated by the World Books and the comic strip of >Buck Rogers in the 25th Century= B had no appeal to me whatsoever. A giant tortoise is, after all, alive! A nebula sounds a great deal like something in a gas range, and contemporary astronomy has not improved things with its theories of >black holes,= although I find it interesting that astronomic myths are getting wilder and may very well (Big Bang!) be headed for telling us we live on a giant tortoise! Some nations= visionary myths impose limitations on them; for example, William Blake opined that the Iliad justified the medieval glorification of murderous knights hacking away at Saracens and Albigensians. What, in the end, is really glorious about forty thousand British soldiers killed at Waterloo, a battle in which, as Blake points out, the soldiers were more afraid of their officers than the enemy! Come to think of it though, if you really take a hard look at the Iliad, it is the defeated Hector who is the hero B >Thus died Hector, mighty tamer of horses= says the last of twenty-four thousand lines! The terrifying Achilles is not exactly a hero to warm up to, is he? Turning to North America, Northrop...