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The following is excerpted from Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa.
Throughout the seventies P.K. continued to read Sufi material and to meet with like-minded friends. Her group, which by the end of the decade seems to have moved to a building on the corner of Cook and Fort Streets, discussed Sufi readings and raised funds for the Institute of Cultural Research. P.K. also continued to absorb Sufi thinking from Doris Lessing. At the heart of the ideal city in The Four-Gated City is a square connected to an octagon. In the square, under the library, is a small white octagonal room, where it is believed the governing elite, the saving remnant of the ideal city, resided. (At this point, in her copy of the novel, P.K. had penciled in “Sufis.”) In Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), which P.K. was reading in 1970–71, the representative from the gods, entrusted with the task of warning mankind, falls into a sleep when he enters the poisonous atmosphere of Earth and forgets the information that has to be passed on for mankind to survive. Lessing’s successive novels in the Canopus in Argos: Archives, which P.K. read in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, are very much concerned with the loss of Earth and the attempt to find new worlds in space. In essence, P.K. was living by and through ideas, but hers was a private quest for illumination. As Jung explains in his autobiography (an explanation carefully copied by P.K.), to follow only “external happenings” is to give no understanding of one’s real self.90 To be sure, some of P.K.’s friends and acquaintances to whom she distributed copies of The Sufis (among them Pat Martin Bates, Florence Bird, Elizabeth Brewster, David Jeffrey, Jim Polk, Arlene Lampert, Rosemary Sullivan, and Constance Rooke) glimpsed her deep immersion in the Sufi way. But none of this was apparent to the casual observer. There were few external markings of the ferocious internal journey that she was undertaking.
MQUP cordially invites you to join
Sandra Djwa at the Toronto launch of her book,
Journey with No Maps
Monday, November 5, 2012, 6-8 pm
At Ben McNally Bookstore, 366 Bay Street, Toronto
Recent review: P.K. Page biography sheds light on one of Canada’s great poets in The Gazette, October 17, 2012.
To learn more about Journey with No Maps, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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