Establishing a Context for P.K. Page's Interest in Eastern Religions: When Papier-Mache Angels Descend among the Metals and the Flowers

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2004 by Vavassis, Vivian

This essay demonstrates that the desires for selfhood and wholeness propel P.K. Page's poetic vision. In an attempt to establish a context for the studies that focus on Page's later interest in Eastern religions - especially Sufism - the article investigates the spiritual principles that drive the poet's early works, with particular attention paid to her second volume of poetry, The Metal and the Flower (1954). Although the volume depicts a spiritual drought in the postlapsarian world that hinders its individuation, glimmers of the active imagination provide a vehicle for redemption. Appropriating Jungian symbology, the study argues that, for Page, the imagination is a divine faculty whose figures hint at the completeness embodied in the archetype of the God-image. A thorough investigation of the interrelationship between the paradigms of the self and the God-image reveals the spiritual implications of self-actualization as they pertain to the individual and to the collective progression of humankind towards individuation.

Cet essai demontre que le desir d'individualite et de totalite propulse la vision poetique de P.K. Page. Dans une tentative d'etablir un contexte pour les etudes qui se penchent sur l'interet tardif de Page pour les religions orientales - particulierement le soufisme - l'auteur etudie les principes spirituels qui regissent les premiers travaux du poete, en portant une attention particuliere a son second volume de poesie intitule « The Metal and the Flower » (1954). Bien que l'ouvrage depeigne une secheresse spirituelle dans le monde post-lapsarien qui retarde l'individuation de l'auteur, les faibles lueurs d'une imagination active fournissent un vehicule de redemption. S'appropriant la symbologie jungienne, l'etude soutien que, pour Page, l'imagination est une faculte divine dont les representations font allusion a la plenitude exprimee dans l'archetype de l'image de Dieu. Une enquete approfondie des relations reciproques entre les paradigmes du moi et l'image de Dieu revele les implications spirituelles de l'actualisation du moi, relatives a l'evolution tant individuelle que collective de l'humanite a l'egard de l'individuation.

At present, RK. Page is in her eighties. Her poetic vision is close to its fullest form. In relation to its development, I would like to offer some speculations on the significance of her first two decades of writing. In the early 1960s, she encountered excerpts from !dries Shah's manuscript of The Sufis (1964) through Stella Kent (Djwa 48). The book's ideas coincided greatly with her own and led her to the twelfth-century Persian poets that would "nourish" her spiritually (qtd. in Pearce 153). Given her eventual interest in the Sufi ideas of selfhood, it is easy to argue that her early works anticipated her later writings and publications. Page herself almost seems to imply a linear development from Jungian symbology to Sufism:

When I read The Sufis by Idries Shah, with its introduction by Robert Graves, it was with a kind of recognition. I suppose one is born with an aspirational drive, with a sense of there being something higher than oneself. Since adolescence, this awareness has taken me on a search. Jung's Modern Man in Search of [A] Soul was an early step on the way which led me to The Sufis. (qtd. in Orange, "A Conversation" 75)

Yet the critical eye that has the advantage of familiarity with Page's entire oeuvre can see that her path is less linear than spherical. In "Kaleidoscope" (1991), the observer's perspective shifts constantly and widens as the perceived objects slip into one another in the circular lens to unite all things in "the perfect, all-inclusive metaphor" (73).1 As Cynthia Messenger notes, the principles of alchemy and the Jungian quaternity remain a presence in the new poems (119). With the maturation of Page's writing, these elemental ideas blossom with images inspired by Sufism and other eastern philosophies but, ultimately, they express the higher level of consciousness that has always been central to her poetics: the carrefour where the personal self, its universal and divine archetypes, the human plane, and the greater universe meet.

In seeking to provide a context for the studies that focus on Page's familiarity with eastern religions, this essay turns to the fundamentally spiritual principles in the poet's early works and offers a theological framework that precedes her interest in Sufism. Given the limitations of space here, I will focus on Page's second volume of poetry and examine the mystical implications of individuation in The Metal and the Flower, with particular attention paid to the paradigm of the self and its relation to the archetype of the God-image or imago Dei. In his discussion of Carl Gustav Jung, Northrop Frye states that poetry and religion share a common language (36). My treatment of Page also attempts to illustrate that the artist and the spiritual seeker traffic in the same symbols: the imagination is a divine faculty, for Page, and its figures hint at the completeness embodied in the archetype of the God-image. According to Jung, God communicates indirectly to humankind through the matrix of inherent symbols embedded in the psyche (Collected Works of Carl Jung [CW] 11.468). More guided than nocturnal dreaming, the process of active imagination often begins consciously, grounded in the external world, but it allows the images to develop "according to their own logic" (Jung on Active Imagination [JOAI] 145). The evaluation of the images brought forth from the collective unconscious expedites the process of individuation in its dialectical mediation of the opposite states or the "real" and the "imaginary," the external and the internal. The consequent transcendent state enables the individual to gain access to the divine part of the self. With this in mind, Jung maintains that "Godhead is obviously all-pervading creative power or, in psychological terms, self-generating creative instinct" (CW 6.254). Without claiming to be a mystic, Page herself sees the poet as a medium and, thereby, suggests that the creative self is the apparatus of a greater force (Cameron et al. 58; Orange, "A Conversation" 78).2 In this context, poetry is a religious language that elevates humankind to its highest potential. Building on the investigation of the relationship between active imagination and self-actualization, I will demonstrate the pivotal role of the imagination in the individual's union with the Godhead.