‘The Seriousness of Things beyond Your Understanding’

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 RUSSELL MORTON BROWN >The Seriousness of Things beyond Your Understanding= I The essays in this special issue suggest that a strong element of the visionary runs through Canadian writing. Though it has been some time since this idea has been considered in any extended way, it is not entirely a new one. It can be seen in 1926, shaping Lionel Stevenson=s comments on Canadian poetry in Appraisals of Canadian Literature: In Canada the configurations of nature have scarcely been modified as yet by the presence of humanity ... the primordial forces are still dominant. So Canadian art is almost entirely devoted to landscape, Canadian poetry to the presentation of nature ... Canadian poetry is equally concerned with the apocalyptic. The poetic mind, placed in the midst of natural grandeur, can scarcely avoid mysticism. (11B12) A 1999 conference in Guelph called >A Visionary Tradition: Canadian Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Millennium,= which provided a fresh occasion to consider this question of the visionary in Canadian poetry and in the Canadian arts more generally, served as impetus for this special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, in which a number of literary critics come together to continue that conversation. Collectively, the essays in this issue suggest that an interest in the visionary has remained important in Canadian writing; these essays ask us to notice the importance of visionary moments and the presence of the numinous in the work of some of Canada=s most important fiction writers, poets, and critical thinkers. Prominent among those discussed in the following pages are Northrop Frye, Sheila Watson, Margaret Avison, P.K. Page, James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Anne Carson. Thinking about this list I find myself wanting to add the names of still other Canadian writers. For example, some years ago I argued that Margaret Atwood should be understood as a visionary writer; and more recently Thomas Gerry has written about Gwendolyn MacEwen as a mystical >the seriousness of things beyond your understanding= 803 poet. But let me suggest here someone who might seem a less likely candidate than those so far named: Al Purdy. Purdy=s sense of the inherently comic nature of his own humanity coupled with his dislike of all pretentiousness might make him seem to be one who would treat as risible the idea of visionary breakthroughs. And in >Wilderness Gothic,= one of his best-known poems, he does seem to be dismissing vision. When his typically jokey and ironic speaker stands in the backyard of his Eastern Ontario home, looking out over Roblin Lake at a man climbing a steeple, he refuses to let this figure become a symbol of transcendence, and insists on seeing him instead in his role as a mundane workman, a man who, while he may seem to contend >heroically with difficult problems of / gravity, sky navigation and mythopoeia,= does so >minus sick benefits of course on a non-union job.= And the way that poem then ends with the warning that >Perhaps he will fall= seems to foreclose other possibilities. However, while such moments of irony and deflation are common in Purdy=s work,1 there are poems in which a visionary experience is depicted without irony. A more recent poem, >On the Flood Plain,= which has the same setting as >Wilderness Gothic,= provides an informative contrast to that earlier poem. The speaker, now an older man, looks out across Roblin Lake into darkness: Midnight: it=s freezing on the lake and wind whips ice eastward but most of the water remains open B and stars visit earth. Though illuminating and inspiring, the beauty of those reflected stars on the surface of the lake is momentary and vulnerable, as beauty is everywhere in Purdy=s poetry. The wind stirs, disrupting the quiet surface of the water, and it >extinguishes the silver fire.= But in this late poem vision returns B and multiplies: more flash down and even those reflections reflect on the sides of waves even the stars= reflections reflect stars. 1 See Brown, >Perhaps He=ll Fall.= Experiencing this moment...