Margaret Avison: The All-Swallowing Moment

Abstract

M A R G A R E T A V IS O N : THE A L L -SW A L L O W IN G M O M EN T OFELIA COHN-SFETCU McMaster University T h e publication in Canadian Literature of Daniel Doerksen's article on Margaret Avison's poetry was a welcome event, for, surprisingly enough, in spite of its unanimously recognized brilliance, her work has been only mini­ mally the object of critical scrutiny so far. Although primarily concerned with the dialectics of the process through which the poet achieves her inclusive view of the world, Doerksen's study also calls brief attention to "the commonly unsuspected implications in Christ's teaching about the child and the kingdom of heaven"1 which Margaret Avison brings out in a poem of "Marginalia." It is the purpose of this essay to make fully explicit what these implications are, and to reveal the system of beliefs which permits the poet to organize human experience meaningfully around a spiritual centre. To redress through love each instant of temporal existence in stability and consistency, to become through the acquisition of a newness in spirit illumi­ nated children of the kingdom of earth is, in Miss Avison's opinion, the only true solution to the human condition. She comes to this understanding through a religious experience, but, having undergone it, she goes beyond it and proposes a way of life whose terms are equally addressed to the believer and the non-believer. The advocation of an emotional response to the present, pheno­ menal world is precisely the message in which she achieves a consummate synthesis of the religious and the secular. The articulate premise fundamental to Avison's discussion of the human condition is a painful awareness of the inadequacy of man's existence predicated on time. With a temporal index attached to it, human life is not only transient, but also tragically short. Within the overall framework of the universe, man is only an insect living in a bathroom from 6 am to 4 p m ,2 a form of life whose flow is limited to "a sparrow time."3 Irremediably subjected to the destruction of objective duration, existence appears to the stupefied eyes of man as a pattern of opposites in tension: within, two selves conversing and arguing for ever (d , p 10), without, an avenue lined with poles "divorced from origin," their end "obscure" (w, p 63). However, it is the contemplation of this very node of contradictions governed by the regular continuation of clock time which threads a needle through the "rips and tears and thin places" (d , p 97) of her understanding and, as early as English Studies in Ca n a d a , ii , 3, Fall 1976 her first volume, helps her comprehend that, though the transitoriness and unique direction of man's life are irreducible, on this "Heraclitus-river with no riverbank" man "can play poise on now" (w, p 47). The way to do this is to consider each "now" a moment at once central and privileged, and to give to it that particular quality which, by distinguishing living from merely existing, gives life new dimensions. Thus, her voice joins those of Whitman, Eliot, Gide, and Sartre, to mention only a few of the writers of this and the last century whom Poulet hails as portents of a new departure in literature: that of finding "a new and authentic contact with existence and with time."4 The literary notation for this newly emerging sense of time is in Avison's poetry the "orphan urban tree" which, squeezed "among the knees of clanking panoplied buildings, forks" skywards for air (d , p 98). Analogously, man should no longer try to enjoy time horizontally, as a massive and continuous development of duration, but should direct his attention to what is happening when it is happening and, availing himself of the opportunity offered by each instant, absorb life as it actualizes itself in the present. The validity of the "fabricated cause-and-effect" principle governing human life is open to ques­ tion as early as "To Professor x, Year y ," whereas the contention that individual moments constitute the...