14

Animism

WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY MEAN to say that Canada is an animist country?

This simple word has always provoked horror in the western heart, as if it were the ultimate denial of our various abstract ideologies—whether of the religious or political variety. The very hint of animism destabilizes the rational defences attached to these ideologies, because they are invariably structured on an idea of exclusion.

Ideologies are designed for selected humans, who have been mysteriously chosen as the beneficiaries of a universal architecture aimed at the establishment of a paradise in heaven or on earth. These are not real mysteries, but rather assertions which produce large truths, invariably involving gods or market-places or races or some other central force. As for non-humans—the animals, plants, rocks, water, natural forces—they are the instruments of the chosen because they are dumb, dumber, inert and are thus destined to be controlled.

It may sound as if I am slipping into some sort of environmentalist argument. And no doubt this new movement has revived some elements of animism. But environmentalism on its own can also turn easily into determinism—in other words, into another ideology. Animism is the opposite of a goal-oriented idea of social order.1 And it is not principally about nature. Nor is it necessarily the description of a religion most commonly found among what Europeans might call Native peoples or hill tribes.

Animism is simply an inclusive idea of the planet; a nondeterminist view. It is inclusive because it sees everything as alive and interrelated. In that sense it is a beehive of causal relationships.

Anthropologists now tend to avoid the term because it became identified inside their corporation with nineteenth-century studies of what they identified as ‘primitive societies.’ Animism was therefore a primitive religion. The preferred term today is Native spiritualism. But that has all the flaws of the European rational approach. First it reduces western religions to spiritualism, which is usually one of their more superficial characteristics, rather than their core. In the Christian context, we hear ‘spiritualism’ to mean superstition. And by adding on the word ‘Native’ it is suggested that animism is somehow a Native version of Christian superstition. Images of ‘primitive’ people limiting their actions because there is a spirit in a rock spring into our imaginations.

Wittgenstein offers a good example of the standard view of animism—“Could one imagine a stone having consciousness?” To do so would be “image-mongering.” But his question misses the point. Or rather it is itself word-mongering. We all now understand the rudimentaries of atoms. We accept that a stone, cut from its place and exposed, changes. It may harden or rot, darken or bleach. The dynamics have been changed. The choice is therefore not between us and them, between an inert mass and one having signs of human consciousness. It is worth going back to the great discussions of animism in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the best-known writer on the subject, E.B. Tylor, put it that animism “embodies the very essence of spiritualistic, as opposed to materialistic philosophy”; that the essential division was that between animism and materialism.2 Note: the spiritualistic used in this way, as the opposite of materialism, is clearly not something you reduce to spirits.

Were he alive and writing today, Tylor might have added that the essence of science is a defence of animism, which is why over the last two centuries scientific progress has continually undermined the abstract, intellectual form of the western religions that set man apart. Tylor would probably also say that there is an essential division between science and materialism. The point is that the essential divisions are not between the intelligent and the dumb. Or between the animate and the inanimate. If everything is in some way alive then everything contains a form of intelligence. You might call it a form of existence.

Different societies will deal with this reality in different ways. Those who have long lived with the sense that they dominate the space they occupy will develop ideas about their relationship to that place quite different from those who do not dominate. The former will tend to deny any animist view and the latter to accept it as normal. That doesn’t mean they are expecting to have an interesting conversation with a rock.

To the extent that the materialistic or rational societies do manage to integrate animism, they will transform it into something else; something designed to confirm the special human mission. Ancestor worship—common in traditional animist societies—will be condemned, but it will be replaced by Hero worship, which in the century following the death of God has become to all intents and purposes a religion. Heroes, we have come to believe, lead us and form our societies. Without them—without leaders—we are lost. In fact western dependence on Hero worship far outstrips in importance that on ancestor worship elsewhere.

And since nature continues to exist in even the most dominating of societies, it is redefined as a place of romantic escape. The pastoral poetry of the seventeenth century, filled with shepherds and shepherdesses, turns into Rousseau’s romantic view of nature as an indulgent park. And that in turn became Walden Pond in the middle of the nineteenth century:

. . . I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond . . . and earned my living by the labour of my hands only.

Note that for Thoreau to be alone in the woods is to be a mile from your neighbours.

In October I went a-graping to the river meadows and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. . . . It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods. . . . Everyone looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.

Thoreau’s return to the forest was pure pastoralism—a two-year romp in a Rousseauian garden. “This is a delicious evening when the whole body is one sense and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.”3

In Manitoba’s boreal forest there are twenty species of black flies and twenty of mosquitoes. As the great Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski puts it, “The mosquitoes dictate the form of my writing. . . . I would like to think a little. To find associations, metaphors. But the mosquitoes will not allow it.”⁴ Or more precisely, an eighty-five-year-old White Spruce will be eighteen inches across in southern Canada. As you move north, kilometre by kilometre, it will shrink until at last it is only two inches across on the edge of the Barrens. Each one of those kilometres northward from the border or the Great Lakes or the St. Lawrence represents the elimination of various species which cannot grow or survive at that latitude.

The view of place in northern countries is not that of domination or sustained romanticism. What cannot be dominated must be part of an ongoing coalition. If nature is “without bounds,” as August Strindberg put it, then we are involved as part of it. Pastoral poetry makes no sense there. Instead, George Bowering writes, “We all grow out of the ground and that is the way we grow.” Or Joy Kogawa—“We are the silences that speak from stone.” Or Kaplinski—“The wind does not blow. The wind is the process of blowing itself.” Or Anne Hébert—“Je suis la terre et l’eau, tu ne me passeras pas à gué mon ami, mon ami.—I am the water and the earth, you will not cross over me, as over the shallows of a river, my friend, my friend.” Or Al Purdy—“I think the land knows we are here.” Or Gatien Lapointe—“This land is without measure, / This figure without memory. / . . . I am nothing but a clump of root-filled earth.” Or Gwendolyn MacEwen—“This land like a mirage turns you inward, / And you become a forest in a furtive lake.”5

As you read through Canadian poetry and literature—whether in French or English—it is literally constructed of animist language. Whether the scene is wilderness, countryside or city changes nothing in this. The city exists as a live body, just as it does in Russian writing. Or in Swedish. Kjell Espmark in Hatred looks at society through the eyes of an assassinated prime minister. In the days before he is killed, the leader feels “subsidences in the ground, the sound of ice breaking up.”⁶

The place is never the background. It is a leading character and the humans unfold in images which include the whole. No matter how urban the inspiration, place remains omnipresent, even when, as in Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, the character scarcely leaves his bed.

There is an argument common in Quebec that anglophones are obsessed by the physical while francophones are more interested in language, are more European. Any reading through the texts shows that this just isn’t so. In any case, animism isn’t about the physical. It is about context and inclusion. Anne Hébert’s context, like Alice Munro’s, includes the place. It does not use the place, it is of it. Besides, the Russians and the Scandinavians—the northern Europeans—have this same relationship to place.

The Quebec argument is quite understandable, even if not accurate. It was originally a reaction among liberal intellectuals against the dominance of narrow religious nationalism which built itself on the myth of a rural paradise. Le terroir. The earth was the touchstone.

But the agrarian dream of the Ultramontane school and their inheritors, such as Abbé Groulx and the Montreal School, was Rousseauian romanticism. The earth was static and pastoral. Le terroir was the opposite of an animist substance. It was about belonging and controlling and excluding.

What is more, I am not using animism here as a simile for nature. As Rudy Wiebe puts it, the idea of north is not “simply a variation on nature and wilderness.”7 Louis-Edmond Hamelin, in Canadian Nordicity, has written at length about the role of perception:

A country is not merely the result of ecological factors, it is more or less the fruit of a way of thinking, whether this is expressed or not, exact or not, politicized or not. . . . By this process we create images, the impact of which can overwhelm even those of the clearly identified physical realities.

Hamelin talks of nordicity as a condition in which climate, bio-geography, geography and psychology are weighted in order to establish the degree of northernness of a location. It is as much about an approach to the place as the place itself.⁸ While Hamelin is talking about a farther north which few Canadians have seen, let alone lived in, his arguments can be applied to the much more general concept of the northern half of the continent.

Being in the north is a central factor in our animism. It is not simply a geographic option—one among many in which humans may choose to live. Nor is it a mere progression beyond what lies farther south. It is a condition in and of itself, one which makes it impossible to turn away for more than brief periods from an animist approach to our existence.

This is not to minimize the role that Native animism has played in the approach of our society. Europe has the clear memory of its animist roots in the Greek myths. But the memory is so distant and intellectualized that those roots are no longer perceived as having been animist. In Canada, only a little over a century ago, those same myths were alive and well in the indigenous cultures. When Duncan Campbell Scott was writing his Native-filled poetry and taking part as a civil servant in the undermining of that civilization early in the twentieth century, he was dealing with people whose “material and spiritual lives were not severed.”9 Today that culture is still very much alive.

As a result our situation has produced a peculiar and difficult meeting between an extremely sophisticated animism more or less unbroken in history and an almost unconscious animism re-adopted and readapted by those of us who have arrived from places where it had been reduced to the vague reminder of a distant past. That there has been a meeting and that some sort of marriage has resulted is what pours out of our literature and our painting. “The disturbing thrilling awareness is that there really is a world outside of language which, creatures of language ourselves, we translate with difficulty.”¹⁰ Our creativity has been a constant reworking of that difficulty.

In 1936 the anthropologist Diamond Jenness had a series of conversations with a seventy-five-year-old religious figure called Pierre, in Katzie, a Coast Salish village about forty kilometres from Vancouver on the Fraser River.¹¹ He was a well-known medicine man, widely respected and considered effective. Jenness convinced him to recount all that he knew about Salish beliefs. As well, Pierre described at length the process by which he had become a healer.

At one level the beliefs could be seen as just another complex, highly sophisticated set of myths running parallel to Christian mythology. What differentiates them, however, is the remarkable integration between the elements. All of the animals and fish were originally humans, as were the principal sites which marked their movements up and down the coast. In a sense this centres everything on humans. In another sense, since everything is human, humans are part of everything. They are not separate or above.

The Sockeye salmon are humans who live down the coast and change into fish during certain months. As a result the Salish let some of the schools swim by and throw the bones of the first fish eaten back into the water to reconstitute as fish. An environmentalist would call this selective fishing a very sensible management program. But it isn’t management. It’s a relationship. For this reason there is a great deal of talk in Salish mythology about the vitality of a human or a species or an object and how it might be transmitted from one to another. Perhaps Wittgenstein would have had less trouble with the concept of the vitality of a stone rather than troubling himself over its possible consciousness. As for Pierre’s training as a healer, it was a lengthy cleansing process during which he survived in nature alone under the most extreme conditions. Thoreau would not have approved. And what with the lack of “graping” and of affectionate wood piles, he would probably not have survived. There is also a complex idea about guardian spirits which—unlike the Christian idea of imposing saints—turns on individuals preparing themselves, again through a cleansing period in solitude which actually resembles the western Christian traditions of fasting and meditation. The meditation takes the form of “wandering in lonely places” and praying in solitude.12

The overwhelming message contained in what Pierre recounted was that there are uncounted centres of power in things.¹³ This is an idea which science now insists is accurate. From an animist point of view, westerners, by seeing everything in their own terms, have betrayed a lack of imagination.

It was George Grant’s view that we, the immigrants, could have no real relationship with this animism—“When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours.”¹⁴ But what sort of manifestation would we require? A rational, structured manifestation, accompanied by theological texts and footnotes and the music of a magnificat rolling through the valleys?

It seems to me that these gods, whatever they are, have been manifesting themselves in our society for a long time. A world outside of language is precisely what we find in Robert Lepage and in Gilles Maheu of Carbone 14. And why has the Jungian movement been so strong in Canada, with Robertson Davies as its great writer?

. . . no self-deceiving folly and no meddlesome compassion, but a humble awareness of the Great Justice and the Great Mercy whenever they choose to make themselves known.

There are hints of Christian language here. But no, it is essentially animist. In Fifth Business, Mary Dempster brings the hero’s brother back to life in a way which would have made more sense to Pierre the healer than to your modern churchman, let alone to most medical specialists. She resembles the healer in Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night. Pierre Morency’s meditation on the Great Heron could have been written by Pierre, the Salish religious figure—“To possess the Great Heron would be to become the Great Heron, even better: a clump of reeds, a still branch, a reflection of minerals.” As could Don McKay’s meditation on the same theme, which begins—

What I remember

about the Great Blue Heron that rose Like its name over the marsh. . . .

As could the scenes in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary, when the monks teach hockey to their reform-school boys by instructing them to become a specific animal. As could the description of the famous affair in Marian Engel’s Bear.

Engel’s creation of an emotional, erotic relationship between a human and a bear only touched the logical edge of animism. In a sense, if humans are part of the whole, then they are engaged in a continuous emotional, erotic relationship with their place. Writing of Montreal, Claude Gauvreau put it gently:

The river spread out her body of a rich woman dressed in the

Orient, and the stocky city reflected his love on her.

The city lay his new jewel on the river’s throat, a jewel of flesh.

The lover shuddered, and the flesh mutely took his place

in an iridescent furrow of her multiple breasts.

This sort of integration between human and place can be found throughout northern literature. The Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman filled her novel Blackwater with the earth and the forest in constant human mutation—“[T]he ground had dried to dead flesh in the body of the landscape.” “The greenery was obscene.” The heroine saw it as “bushy pubic hair.”

There is nothing new about this. Isabella Valancy Crawford, young and proper in the nineteenth-century urban world of southern Ontario, wrote what A.J.M. Smith called “geographical animism.” But it was much more than geographical. It was physical in the full sense that animism can imagine. For example, there is her wonderfully dirty poem, “The Lily Bed”:

His cedar paddle, scented, red,

He thrust down through the lily bed;

Cloaked in a golden pause he lay,

Locked in the arms of the placid bay.

Trembled alone his bark canoe

As shocks of bursting lilies flew

Thro’ the still crystal of the tide,

And smote the frail boat’s birchen side . . .

All lily-locked, all lily-locked,

His light bark in the blossoms rocked.

Their cool lips round the sharp prow sang,

Their soft clasp to the frail sides sprang . . .

With golden hand she grasped the mane

Of a red cloud on her azure plain. . . .

They swayed the high, dark trees, and low

Swept the locked lilies to and fro.

With cedar paddle, scented, red,

He pushed out from the lily bed.15

But all I have done in these last few pages, some might say, is offer literary examples, as if they told us something about reality. They do. Western civilizations express themselves accurately through their literatures, particularly when they do so with such insistence, in such quantities, in both languages, across the regions and across the distance of time. It is part of the Canadian paradox that in order to do this we have had to work to make our language communicate what lies beyond language; and above all, what lies beyond style.

When Big Bear is offered land to settle his people in one static place, Rudy Wiebe has him reply—“Who can receive land? From whom would he receive it?”¹⁶ The sense that land is not simply owned has had an effect, ever since the European arrival, on our concept of the public good. Of course, we haven’t embraced the Native ideas of non-ownership; that, for example, intimacy and attachment gave a man rights over land, but not exclusive rights. Or there is the more aggressive idea in the north that humans are owned by the land and not vice versa.¹⁷ But there has been an almost unconscious attempt in Canada to marry these animist ideas to the European. An “intermingling of place and person,” in Sharon Butala’s words. And this has come about more as a natural reaction to the place and what it demands of those who live in it, than by any compromise over social models. “Nature has reinvented us,” David Young writes.18

That reinvention has been central to our ability to advance a small, poor society by conceptual leaps. I have talked about a society of ideas. That these have not been of the calculated sort, but have bred in an atmosphere of movement and communication, is tied to animism. Yet over the last decade we have slipped increasingly into a predictable, mechanistic, measuring view of our society. In other words we have increasingly conformed to the standard western abstraction of civilization as something which aggressively eliminates all hints of the animistic. The more we have done this, the more it has seemed impossible to engage in original initiatives here; strategic initiatives which have some relationship to the place. With this ‘normalization,’ the very idea of Canada has become increasingly impossible.