Thoreau Catches Two Fish on One Hook

This is the rough draft of a paper I am working on for my American Renaissance class.  It needs some editing and refining but I thought that I would throw it on here during the Thanksgiving break because I will probably forget later.  While this paper does not bring Owen Barfield, or J.R.R. Tolkien into the discussion at all, you will find some very close parallels with their understanding of human consciousness.  I find Thoreau's blend of empirical fact with transcendental ideals nothing short of inspiring.  I am sure that, as part of the Romantic movement of the 19th century, Thoreau and Emerson had some impact on Tolkien and Barfield.  Take special note of the three aspects of Thoreauvian Epistemology.  The first if very Barfieldian, the third is exactly what Tolkien thought that good Fantasy could do for a person.

Truth in the Water:  Walden Pond as Analogy to Thoreau’s Concept of the Mind

           
What is the value of nature? This simple question was put before the Phi Beta Kappa members of Harvard University in 1837 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered it as the most important issue that American scholars had to resolve in their own minds (American 45). It is the question which motivates countless debates, from Capitol Hill to local town-hall meetings. One of American Transcendentalism’s defining traits, both as a philosophy and as a social movement, was its immersion in nature. Transcendentalists looked to the natural world, still so immense and threatening to the early nineteenth century mind, as a model for, and a reflection of, the human soul (Transcendentalist 82-3, Writings 12:201). Henry David Thoreau embraced the idealistic philosophies of Emerson, but also, more than any of his friends, embraced the materialistic philosophies of the empirical scientific method as well. Throughout his life and writing, Thoreau struggled to find balance and connection between these two spheres: the Ideal and the Material. He was able to find a balance between the two and in no other place can this balance be better seen than in his work while living on the banks of Walden Pond. Thoreau used his observations and descriptions of Walden Pond itself to exemplify his own epistemological beliefs. In Thoreau’s skillful hands the water of Walden Pond becomes a symbol for his understanding of the human mind.


Thoreau’s epistemology is complex and layered, which will come as no surprise to any careful reader of Thoreau. It is far beyond the scope of this essay to attempt a full explanation of his philosophical grounding; however there are three major aspects of Thoreau’s epistemological thought that should be kept in mind while analyzing Walden. First is his Transcendental understanding of human perception itself, second is his recognition of the shifting nature of mediums of perception, and third is his attempt to break down the culturally created schemata that Thoreau understood as the mediator of human perception.

The Romanticist’s epistemology, which incorporates the Transcendentalist’s, can be seen as a reaction to the professional scientific-empiricism which dominated the intellectual circles of his day (Newman 111; Tauber 20; Walls 17). The empirical positivist, or Materialist, as Emerson calls them, attempts to separate absolutely the subject from the object it observes, so that the observation made by the subject is not in any way tainted by the subject (Emerson 82; Tauber 20). The Romanticists saw that not only did this philosophy of separation promise a meaningless existence for mankind, it was also impossible to completely separate the subject from the object. As Laura Walls points out in Seeing New Worlds, the European Romanticists and the American Transcendentalists both sought for an understanding, “which encouraged the subject to ‘know’ by seeing correspondence in the worlds objects, as if they were the mirror of the self” (147). To Emerson, Thoreau, and their circle of acquaintances, all perception was naturally subjective because all perception takes place in the human mind. Therefore the human was a partial creator of his or her own world, and one’s perception of the natural world was a reflection of one’s very soul. This Transcendental epistemology did not discount the reality of an external, objective world, nor did it dismiss the role of the physical senses in creating perceptions, but it did emphasize the role of the active human mind in creating the images, sounds, tastes, and sensations through which humans interact with their world. It was of this partnership between the physical senses and the mind in creating our perception of the natural world that Wordsworth spoke when he wrote in “Lines Composed a few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey,” that his ears and eyes “half perceive and half create” the natural world around him (Wordsworth, 197). Emerson clearly believed the creative powers of the mind to be the chief component of perception, as seen in his essay titled “The Transcendentalist.” For example, he writes that, “His thought—that is the Universe,” and, “All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought” (83). Thoreau began to read Emerson’s writings as a senior at Harvard and was deeply influenced by him (Bickman 11; Newman 111). In January of 1852, Thoreau wrote a very similar statement in his journal, “What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity, and transparency, and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind, for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within…” (12:201). In a later entry he writes, “I find that it is not [objects] themselves (with which the men of science deal) that concerns me; the point of interest is somewhere between me and them” (16:165). To Thoreau, “there is no objective observation,” as he states in his journal, “Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective” (12: 237, emphasis in the original). The combination of these two elements, the evidence of the actual object, and the image making ability of the mind, creates what humans know as “sight.” Thoreau attempts to explain the principal position the mind holds in creating reality when he wrote on April 3, 1842:

On one side of man is the actual, and on the other the ideal. The former is the province of the reason; it is even a divine light when directed upon it, but it cannot reach forward into the ideal without blindness. The moon was made to rule over the night, but the sun to rule by day. Reason will be but a pale cloud, like the moon, when one ray of divine light comes to illumine the soul. (7:360)

Thoreau sees value in the fact gathering function of the sensory organs, but he sees it as only a reflection of the true source of illumination. It is the ideal light of the mind which illuminates those facts; gathering better facts simply gives our minds a better surface to reflect upon.

Thoreau adds another important texture to this conventional Romantic epistemology. As just described, the mediums whereby a person interacts with their surroundings are the light, sound vibrations, or other sensory stimuli picked up by our senses; and the mind itself. Thoreau drew the necessary conclusion that the constant shifting of these mediums makes one’s personal perception of nature dependent upon the moment in time in which one perceives it.

The shifting hues of light and atmosphere alter dramatically the understanding and meaning of that which is perceived. Thoreau believed that the constantly changing qualities in the air and lighting create a mirage every time one is in nature: “The mirage is constant. The state of the atmosphere is continually varying, and, to a keen observer, objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance…I cannot well conceive of greater variety than it produces by its changes from hour to hour of everyday” (9:291). Robert Abrams says of this aspect of Thoreau’s epistemology, “Thoreau locates a sense of reality that is dissonantly present throughout mutually incongruous characteristics and qualities but never directly, steadily, or absolutely seen,” and then later, “Whatever is witnessed can no more be encompassed by the inert visual image than it can be definitively mapped” (260-261).

To Thoreau, the changing moods of the percipient’s mind were as quintessential to the creation of the mirage of perception as the countryside being observed (Smith 74). Thoreau records a lesson for those who venture into nature in his journal saying, “When you think your walk is profitless and a failure, and you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open” (19:111). To Thoreau, the attitude of the perceiver tints the perception of the object just as greatly as if they were two different objects. In “Autumnal Tints” he writes, “The actual objects which one man will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different” (5:286). This addition to the epistemology of his peers gave Thoreau an extremely rich and texturized relationship with nature.

There is one final feature of Thoreau’s epistemology which should be understood before turning to his descriptions of Walden Pond. This third face of Thoreau’s philosophy of knowing involves how he deals with the cultural constructs, or schemata, that people of necessity use to relate to a perceived subject. Thoreau purposefully attempts, as he sojourns in nature, to not see his subjects through this lens of his preconceived understanding of an object or phenomenon. Early on it can be seen that he is attempting, with some frustration, to see through these constructs in order to approach nature with a blank mind in order to allow it to reveal to him what it can. He writes, “I begin to see such an object when I cease to understand it, and see that I did not realize or appreciate it before, but I get no further than this. How adapted these forms and colors to my eye!” (8:107). The infrastructure of his mind is used to conjuring certain images when his eyes see certain forms and colors. These oft used images are laden with connotation and meanings from his past experience and the culture that he was raised in. Thoreau realizes that this is the case and wishes to see nature without the context of his own schemata, hence the lamentation, “How adapted these forms and colors to my eye!” Many years later in his life he writes a very similar point and there seems to be an improvement in his ability to leave behind his culturally given schemata: “It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know…To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your Botany” (18:371). Abrams makes an excellent, clarifying analogy to what Thoreau is trying to say when he writes, “Once to realize the potential strangeness…of markings like ‘q’ and ‘x’…or to accept the potential preposterousness of clothing styles that now seem normal—is to grasp the obscure other side of any culturally mediated object or material surface” (256). This mediation of the image making process of the mind by culturally constructed symbols and meanings is like a boundary on the mind which is very difficult to see past, like the banks of a river they guide the mind to see objects as the rest of the culture sees them. It is against this that Thoreau fought, and put great effort into escaping those mental boundaries to “see” the object without the taint of his cultural heritage. It was only in this mindset that he felt he could come to a new truth about, or relationship with, the object. Interestingly, it is with this same goal in mind, of leaving behind preconceived notions of nature, that enlightenment Empiricists developed the scientific method. Thoreau developed his own method of systematic observation, but one which is centered on making deeper connections between the subject and object, instead of attempting to more fully separate the subject from their object.

Now, with this brief description of Thoreau’s epistemological ideas in place, a look at Walden Pond through his eyes will reveal how the pond itself symbolizes his concept of the human mind. As with everything that Thoreau wrote, his descriptions of Walden are multilayered and complex, but much of what he says about the pond itself can be related to the above discussion. The chapter that contains the most prolonged description of Walden Pond is called “The Ponds” and falls precisely in the middle of the work. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Thoreau proclaims, “Yet the Universe is a sphere whose center is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man” (Concord 259). Here we see, as has been implied above as well, that Thoreau sees the human mind as the center point of his own universe. By placing “The Ponds” in the central location of the book Thoreau by implication is setting Walden Pond up as an allegory to the human mind.

Thoreau begins his description of Walden Pond with one of his most quoted and memorable lines:

It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this fain jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seems as if I might next cast my line upward into air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. (166)

Thoreau immediately establishes that the surface of the pond is a threshold between two tenuously connected spheres. What are these two spheres? The upper sphere is the conceptual, divine sphere, bejeweled by stars and “vast and cosmogonal themes.” It is the realm of the ideal whose light the human mind reflects. The lower sphere is the natural world. It is the sphere populated by shiny fish and the practicalities of getting a meal for tomorrow. Thoreau, in this “queer” situation, sits half in one and half in the other.

After this poetic beginning, Thoreau describes the color of the pond. He says that “it is a clear and deep green well,” and that it is green because “lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both…the color of the sky,” and at the same time, the “yellowish tint [of] the shore” (167). A couple of sentences later he makes this metaphor clearer by observing that there is no other explanation for the color other than that it is “the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.” It is very easy to see in these lines the mixture of the ideal (blue) and the natural (yellow) in the mind of man. When Thoreau adds to the metaphor the idea that it is an iris, it can be see that here is a beautiful symbol for the Romantic/Transcendental epistemology. As stated above, the eye receives information from its natural surroundings, but before that sensuous data can be “seen” it must be “mixed” in the mind with the imagination, to become an image in the mind’s eye. As “earth’s eye” the pond receives both from the natural setting around it, mixes these elements with the ethereal colors of the heavens and brings them to green, the symbolic color of life (176). To further flesh out this metaphor for the mind, Thoreau tells the reader that there is not a stream that runs either in or out of the pond and that the only ingress and egress are from the heavens above, rain and evaporation, and “a perennial spring” from deep in the bedrock (166; 171). These features of the pond again show that Thoreau’s concept of the mind had a dual nature, receiving as much from Natures deep wells, as it receives from the abstract realms of Transcendental principles.

These colors shift and change as more or less light is mixed with the waters, the mood of the air around the pond, and according to the vantage point of the viewer. Seen from far off the pond looks blue, sometimes “a darker blue than the sky itself,” but upon approach to the shore the water turns to green and even yellow near the shore (167). The shifting waters of Walden reflect light in numerous different hues and moods. Sometimes it is slate grey during cloudy weather, at others a silky cerulean, and yet other times it is “literally as smooth glass,” with only the thinnest of lines separating the two spheres (167; 168; 177). The waters of Walden, in this sense, exemplify the second feature of Thoreau’s epistemology; which is that there is not a way to absolutely see Walden Pond. One can only perceive that particular aspect which the mood of the water and the light from the sky will allow to be revealed. At times when the reflection of the water is perfect and serene, nothing can move across its surface without leaving its rippling traces. So too is Thoreau’s concept of the mind; it is at times much more susceptible to receive truths, as in the example of the “subdued” state that comes after much walking.

Another feature of Walden Pond described by Thoreau is the unique way in which the pond is naturally bordered by what look like enormous paving stones. These stones are of such regular placement, he said, that it could just have easily gone by the name “Walled-in-Pond” (173). Upon noting this, Thoreau immediately tells two legends concerning the creation of Walden (172-173). He tells one involving local Indian lore and another about God analogized as an Ancient Settler. Thoreau purposely reveals these stories at this time to link the border of the pond to myth and legend. Just as with his third layer of his epistemology, wherein the way in which the mind make images out of the sensory data passed on to it by the senses is bound by the cultural constructs of one’s heritage, Thoreau connects the actual border to legends of the locals, and his own mythologized God character. Occasionally, perhaps every thirty years or so, the pond overflows its bounds, due of course to a rising of the deep springs, and fill a meadow. The water overflows so significantly that one may fish in the flooded meadow. These occasional overflows can likewise be related to Thoreau’s attempts, usually frustrated, to see beyond the familiar schemata of his mind, to see a part of nature that he has seen a thousand times as wonderfully strange; and from that strangeness come to know new truths about it.

At the end of his description of Walden, Thoreau leaves off with a last enigmatic line, “One proposes that be called ‘God’s Drop’” (183). In the context, it would seem to refer poetically to being directly placed by God onto the earth, or maybe a tear from God’s eye, or even to a celestial eye drop to wash away the dirt of society from one’s eyes, however a second interpretation may also apply to this phrase. The term ‘God’s Drop’ is also the name of the Bindu, or “dot” worn on the forehead by Hindus. It is well known that Thoreau read and was very interested in Hindu texts (Benoit 122). The Bindu represents a physical point of meditation upon which the Hindu devotee should concentrate in order to visualize the Absolute—it is the point from which the diagram of divinity in all of its transformations expands (123). Interpreting “God’s Drop” as a reference to the Bindu adds a wonderful new depth to Walden as a symbol of Thoreau’s philosophy of the mind.

Plotinus, writing in the third century, called the human soul, “an amphibian hovering between two worlds” (Paul xlvii). The amphibious soul is bound to the lower, watery elements of the material world, and the body in which it resides; but at the same time is able and obligated to ascend to a more rarified, spiritual sphere where it inhales its life giving breath. What a wonderfully Thoreauvian image Plotinus worked with some 1700 years ago. Thoreau affirmed this dualistic understanding of the human condition, and no doubt would have been gratified by the naturalistic allegory that Plotinus uses to explain it. Thoreau labored philosophically to remain in both spheres simultaneously. He was a doer of his own words and put his philosophy to work day in and day out. He would spend many, many hours engaged in the pursuit of empirical facts by searching, measuring, observing, cataloging, calculating, and charting many aspects of the waters and surrounds of Walden Pond. After gathering the facts he would look on them and see in them transcendent implications. He took the earthy facts concerning Walden Pond, and without altering them to suit his purposes, saw in them the deeply abstract, symbolic, and human implications in them. His observational and interpretational methods were a perfect example of his own personal transcendental epistemology. This was to Thoreau the value of nature; to better know himself, and to know how to better himself. In the rhythms and material he saw his own, and in its inspirational symbolism and beauty, he saw the ideals to which he should aspire. Truly he did catch two fish on one hook.





Works Cited

Abrams, Robert E. “Image, Object, and Perception in Thoreau’s Landscapes: The Development of Anti-Geography.” Nineteenth Century Literature. 46.2 (1991): 245-262. JSTOR. PDF File.

Beniot, Raymond. “Walden as God’s Drop.” American Literature. 43.1 (1971): 122-124. JSTOR. PDF File.

Bickman, Martin. Walden: Volatile Truths. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Brooks Atkinson ed. New York; Random House, 2000. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Transcendentalist.” The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Brooks Atkinson ed. New York; Random House, 2000. Print.

Newman, Lance. “Environmentalist Thought and Action.” The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Joel Meyerson et al. eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.

Newman, Lance. “‘Patron to the World’; Henry Thoreau as Wordsworthian Poet.” Bloom’s Critical Reviews: Henry David Thoreau. Harold Bloom Ed. New York: Infobase, 2007. Print.

Paul, Henry S.J. “The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought.” Plotinus: The Enneads. Stephan MacKenna Trans. and Ed. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.

Smith, David C. The Transcendental Saunterer: Thoreau and the Search for Self. Savannah: Fredrick C. Beil, 1997. Print.

Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. Berkley: Univ. of California Press, 2001. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Odell Shepard Ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. New York: Houghton Miflin & Co., 1906. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. Brooks Atkison Ed. New York: Random House, 1992. Print.

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth Century Natural Science. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Print.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.” Poems of William Wordsworth. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1995. Print

Tolkien's "Recovery"

As discussed below at length, (See Synopsis of Barfieldian Epistemology) we engage the world around us through culturally constructed symbols.  By this I mean that when we see a tree (or anything else), our mind has been taught from its infancy about how to see that tree.  Our mind has been taught how to create the image of the tree from the raw sensory data that the eyes bring in.  So the tree, by the end of our infancy, has a familiar shape and color and feel to it.  These constructed images also have attached to them familiar associations that fit our notion of "tree-ishness"  It has green leaves so that it can use sunlight to create food sugars through photosynthesis.  Its stiff branches hold the canopy high above to catch sunlight. It is a dry spot in the rain and a shady spot in the heat of the summer.  It requires no mental activity to recreate its form and feeling in our minds; it is ours already, part of our mental make up.  It is a tree, and we know it as such.

Tolkien remarks in "On Fairy-Stories" that one of the primary benefits to reading fantasy is "Recovery."  He says, "We should see green again and be startled anew...We should meet with the Centaur and the Dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses, and wolves.  This recovery fantasy helps us to make."  In the next paragraph he continues, "Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining--regaining of a clear view.  I do not say 'seeing things as they are'...though I might venture to say 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them' --as things apart from ourselves.  We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity-- of possessiveness."

It is very hard to see past, or through, the schemata of our minds.  Occasionally, however, we will look at a dog that we have seen a thousand times and see it is a strange beast, though we know it to be the same creature we have seen before.  Or at times we hear a word that has been formed by our tongue countless times, and it suddenly sounds foreign, and we can imagine what "English" might sound like to the Chinese.  It is in these brief moments that we are seeing something old and familiar afresh, without the culturally created schemata that we used before; and the familiar object, for a moment, is something new.  It is this type of breaking down of triteness and familiarity that Tolkien sees as a great benefit of good fantasy.  Upon entering a secondary world of elvish beauty and orcish horror we can return to our familiar world and see a tree, and knowing it is the same tree, see it fresh and new, its green leaves are a startling revelation, and its branches an Aeolian Harp.  (For an interesting discussion of this idea in connection with Thoreau's writing see-  Abrams, Robert E. “Image, Object, and Perception in Thoreau’s Landscapes: The Development of Anti-Geography.”  Nineteenth Century Literature. 46.2 (1991): 245-262.)

Let's look at some of Tolkien's own writing then and see how he employed this idea.  One of Aragorn's memorable talents was his ability to heal.  When Frodo was stabbed by the Morgul blade of the Nazgul upon Weathertop, Aragorn makes a poultice of leaves which he calls Athelas.  Tolkien writes in the chapter "Flight to the Ford", "He crushed a leaf in his fingers and it gave out a sweet and pungent flavor.  'It is fortunate that I could find it for it is a healing plant that the men of the West brought to middle earth'...He threw the leaves into boiling water and...the fragrance of the steam was refreshing, and those that were unhurt felt their minds calmed and cleared.  This description of the simple Athelas leaf sounds remarkably like Tolkien's own belief in the refreshing and recovery that fantasy can bring.

In the third book, in the chapter "Houses of the Healing" Aragorn again uses the Athelas, an herb that the herbmaster thought was of little value, to heal Faramir of the "Black Breath."  "Then taking two leaves he laid them on his hands and breathed on them, and then he crushed them, and straight way a living freshness filled the room, as if the air itself awoke and tingles, sparkling with joy...The fragrance that came to each was like a memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in spring is itself a fleeting memory."  The scent of the Athelas renewed and brought to mind a sense of the world as a brand new thing.  A world that was being discovered and imagined freshly and for the first time.

Tolkien's use of the Athelas plant is, I believe, his symbolizing of the refreshing potential of fantasy itself.  The ability of fantasy to allow us to see the world anew.  It is a magic that overcomes the one who enters into Tolkien's world.  He/she does not come back the same person.  Tolkien is the master of lore, and in his hands, Athelas (fantasy) can have great healing effects upon those who will breath its fragrance.

Some Original Poetry

These are some poems and poetic thoughts that have occured to me recently. Some are simply in the form in which they came to my mind and are not refined much. Others have been worked somewhat. Feel free to rip them to shreds!

Willow and Maple

Two seeds fall, one Willow and one Maple,
Landing side by side, each blown from afar.
Upon these germs heaven pours out its blessing,
Tender roots reach out, to feel where they are.

Their first roots entangled, growing together,
Push through the soil and hold the earth fast.
Two yellow-green stems look toward heaven,
Seperate but bound, they rise from the grass.

Jointly feasting, drinking, breathing,
The saplings grow harder and tighter entwine.
Trunk and branch and leaf pressed together,
Wood yielding, hearts yearning, their bodies combine.

Sap flows mingled, branches knit together,
Maple gives strength where Willow is hollow.
Willow tempers Maple's stiff fibers,
To bend, not break, in storms to follow.

Spreading, growing, each day melded closer,
Where either tree parts can no longer be seen.
One trunk, two hearts, at once strong and flowing,
Reach joyously up to touch heavens beam.

Pushing up, and up, they quicken my breathing.
Starting - I ponder, head on my pillow.
Two limbs wrap round me, our roots entangle,
I feel her heart beating, and I whisper, "Willow."


The Fall of Man

All I was.
All I felt.
All I knew.
All was one word.
I said the word and it broke in two.

So became I,
And that which is not I,
A firmament between us;
My dome of knowing.

I breathed in the firmament
And with it I sang,
Till that which was not I broke,
All worlds to compose.

That which was not I was now four new words,
Inside me they chorused unique melodies:
Wind and Wave, Field and Flame.
My heart leaped up to sing with them.

My breath tasted like thunder,
The melting ice smelled like my sorrow,
My ears rang with the din of sunlight,
And my heart felt the dark soil push the sapling up, and up.

All this I knew, and felt, and was.
But knowing, and sensing, and feeling was not enough.
I had to tell it
To someone, to myself...To God.

I used my mouth as a cleaver, and split the four songs.
Wind became air, and breath, and flow, and spirit, and current, and blow.
Earth became strength, and moutains and mud,
And I mixed it with fire and turned it to blood.

And so with each word, my toungue did divide,
But each word sang a little less loudly,
Until I could barely hear the song over my voice.


Art as Backdrop to my mind

All perception in a metaphor, an imagination of actuality, an image projected on the screen of the self. The crushed dyes of Cimabue are spread in my mind and paint the hues of an autumnal leaf upon the canvass of my I. Each woman I see, be they study, mistake, or masterpiece, is impressed in my conscience with Renoir’s pastels.

Talking

Language is a poor messenger- in fact is not a messenger at all, but a summoner. For he can only call forth and not convey. And what is it that he hopes to call forth? Why all this talking anyway? Sounding the reaches of our own soul; hoping to hear an echo to let us know we are not alone. All speech is only a singing - a single flute playing a theme on the symphonic harmonies of our soul. We hold in our mouth a torch, still burning, warding off the dark of a life unknown, not reflected in the glass of another's mind. So we send forth our summoners, calling and calling, seeking an ally to come forth dressed in gowns that match our own.

A Few Quote Comparisons

As I've read over some of Emerson's essays and Thoreau's "Walden" I have come across a couple of very powerful sections which express some very Barfieldian ideas. Here are some comparative quotes to think about.

- Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history are only subjective phenomena. -Emerson "The Transcendentalists"

- The familiar world which we see and know around us; the blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends, the world too...is a system of collective representations. -Barfield "Saving the Appearances"

- His thought - that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts that you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him. -Emerson "The Transcendentalists"

- It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres. -Barfield "Poetic Diction"

-Thus to him, this school boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge, as to a becoming creator. -Emerson "The American Scholar"

Although long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, but he is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-Creator, refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single white
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world be filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons--'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law by which we're made.
-Tolkien "In a letter to C.S. Lewis."

-I am monarch of all I survey
My right there is none to dispute" -Thoreau "Walden"

- All you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought... -Emerson "The Transcendentalists

- For, as the organs of sense are required to convert the unrepresented "particles" into sensations for us, so something is required in us to convert sensations into "things." It is this something that I mean. And it will avoid confusion if I will purposely choose and unfamiliar and little-used word and call it, at risk of infelicity, figuration.
Let me repeat it. On the assumption that the world whose existence is independent of our sensation and perception consists solely of "particles," two operations are necessary...in order to produce the familiar world we know. First, the sense organs must be related to the particles in such a way as to give rise to sensations; and secondly, those mere sensations must be combined and constructed by the percipient mind into the recognizable and nameable objects we call "things." It is this work of construction which will here be called figuration. -Barfield "Saving the Appearances"

Thoreau is very subtle in the expounding of his Transcendental thoguhts, but it should be kept in mind in the following quote that Walden Pond itself is used by Thoreau as a symbol of the mind of man. He is fishing on a clear starlit night...

-It was very queer, especially on dark nights when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fish as it were on one hook.

Please feel free to comment on any of these quotes or to bring up any other quotes you may have read. Enjoy!

Brandon

OP: A Short Story..

For everyone's approval, I submit the incredibly rough draft of my latest short story. I felt it definitely channeled a bit of Lewis and Williams in the themes. Please everyone, feel free to critique away.

“We Always Appreciate Your Business..”

It was approximately nine fifteen in the evening when my mid-life crisis began. There I was sitting on the couch, telling myself how banal everything was. How it could be so much better if I just got up off my lazy ass, got in the car, took a drive to see all those places I’d never imagined I’d ever get to see in my life, take a few pictures for friends to enjoy and eat a meal that would surely lead to increased risk of heart failure. And as I was just about to launch out of my chair and go forth on my new happy quest through life, the doorbell rang.

I stood with newfound conviction, strode to the door, and flung it wide open. To my surprise, it was a small statured man, wearing a lopsided fedora a size or two too large and two piece grey suit. Mister Magoo as a G-Man. I glanced up and down at him, nearly chuckling to myself before I caught the sound in my throat at my own amusing joke, and with barely constrained seriousness, I asked him who he was.

“Me? Doe. Ray Doe.”

I stared at him blankly, unsure of whether or not this was some sort of joke. Or at the very least, a door-to-door reenactment of the Sound of Music.

“I see, Mister.. Ray Doe, was it? And what can I help you with, sir?”

The man fidgeted slightly as though nervous. Obviously, he’d had little experience with these door to door things. I cleared my throat to give him a gentle nudge towards the matter at hand.

“Oh. Ahem. I’m, well, I’m here to collect you sir. You’ve figured it all out. And we have a strict policy of..”

I interrupted him harshly. Those words sounded oddly suspicious. Suddenly, this G-Man wasn’t nearly as comical as he’d original been.

“Collect me? Figured what out? Listen, is this some sort of unpaid parking ticket or something?”

The man rocked in his shoes, seeming a little braver now that he’d broken the ice. His fingers clenched themselves tightly, while this thumbs twiddled mindlessly. Still anxious, obviously, but when he spoke he was firmer, clearer. A studied sales pitch.

“Well, you see, sir. You’ve figured it all out. And that’s why I’m here. You’ve got the answer, and we’ve got a strict policy of not letting anyone share that answer with anyone else.”

“Listen, mister, I’m not quite sure what you’re selling, but I am quite sure I don’t want any of it. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’ve just decided that I really need to see New Orleans before I die.”

The man grinned slowly, he’d obviously found something very funny.

“But that’s just it, sir. You’re going to die. And very soon too!”

Oh. Great. Door-to-door religion.

“Listen, I’ve already found Jesus. I.. just.. I’ve got to go. Goodbye!”

I grabbed for the brass of the knob and pushed it forward, meeting the heavy thud of Ray Doe’s boot.

“Sir, I’m not quite sure you understand. You’ve figured out the meaning of life. I can’t allow you to go on, you’ll spoil it for everyone else, soon everyone will be happy and there’ll be no point to living a mortal existence before the splendor of Heaven. You’ll bring the whole system crashing down!”

I paused a moment. Something about the little troll made me want to believe him. I backed down on the doorknob. He seized the moment and thrust it open, nearly knocking me down in the process. Strong little bugger.

“Look, Mister Doe. All I’ve decided is to make a few changes in my life. For the better. You know, relax a bit, have more fun in my life and to simply not stress out about things.”

Ray Doe looked up at me with a sincere gaze, his big saucer eyes looking right into me and speaking in his best pure, wonderful, bluebirds and cartoon bunnies Disney voice. “But that’s just it, sir, everyone wants to make those changes, but do you know anyone who’s ever actually done it? Waltzes around happy-go-lucky all the time, never doing anything at all but what they want and taking it all in stride?”

I paused a moment. The man had a point. The only kinds of people who’d ever managed to do that sort of thing were those celebrities. The glitz, the glam, the full nude expose on page four of the tabloids at the supermarket.

“Yeah”, he said, reading my mind, “Celebrities usually have to bargain their soul away for that. Which means not only do they only get a temporary bit of fun, they have all that added drama plus a bit of time in the fires of H-E-double-Ades, if you get my drift.”

I looked at him, stunned. Either he was absolutely out of his hobbity little head, or I was talking to a real live.. “Angel?”, I voiced with a great deal of uncertainty.

“Not quite, sir. There’s no such thing. Great stories, but you know how man loves mythical symbolism. You have a guy come down from a place in the heavens and everyone assumes he’s gotta have wings to take the divine elevator. Really, all you need is the penthouse key. Look, all of this is neither here nor there. I need you to come with me before you mess up the Boss’s plans.”

He held out his hand to take mine, which shook a bit as though cursed by a nervous twitch or possibly revulsion at the touch of a stranger. I hesitated, my mind still reeling over the revelation. I didn’t want to leave yet. Maybe there was something I could still do to get out of it.

“But I’m not ready yet. Can’t I.. just stay here?”, I asked. Now it was my turn to be the timid one.

“Well, usually no. However the Boss does have an installment plan worked out in case our customer base would like to purchase an extended time share on the mortal coil.”

Gone was the hestitation, the shyness from before. This was a cool, calculating businessman standing before me, having finally warmed up his pitch and throwing it low and slow. Something he knew I’d swing at.

“Yes. Yes, that. I’ll take it.” I said, repeating his words over and over in my mind. There had to be a loophole. These deals with devils always had some sort of damned, forgive the pun, loophole.

“The pun is forgiven. And I’m not a devil. They’re a lot better at this sort of thing. And they usually don’t stray out of the warmer places. Miami? Full of ‘em. Now, sir, this is a verbally binding contract, so I’d like you to once again affirm that you’re opting into an extended timeshare.”

He was speaking a mile a minute now, moving smoothly, the twitching nervous hand now withdrawn to smooth under his fedora across his oiled back hair. He gazed at me intently, his little eyes no longer blinking. Gone was the bumbling goon of only a little while ago, and now instead was nearly predatory, leaning forward to perch on my every word.

“Yes. Yes, of course. I agree to this timeshare thing. I’m not ready to die yet. A little more time, please.”

Ray Doe clapped his hands, the sound of which created a cacophony, not unlike the sound of a passing jumbo jet coming in low for its landing, contained all in one tiny instant.

“Very good then, sir. Now, I note this is your fifteenth extension. We’re always glad to have repeat customers. Please, enjoy the remainder of your life.”

The words drifted away dreamlike, misting at the very edges of my mind and suddenly I was standing alone in my doorway with little idea of how I’d gotten there. Confusion, anger, annoyance swept across my mind as I looked into the dim night, wondering who’s damned kids had been so inspired to play ding-dong-ditch at my doorway. The bulb flickered and popped into darkness, echoing my dismal mood as I closed the door and slumped back down on the couch. There I sat, pondering it all over – life was always so damned difficult. Always missing that one spark that everyone needed to make life just the smallest bit more pleasant, more exciting. I felt for a moment almost like the solution was there at the tip of my mind, ready to tip over before I grabbed the remote and switched the television off in disgust. Nothing on again. Best to just go to bed now before another day of unsatisfying work. More time wasted as I worked towards some dream I’d never have.

As I slowly trudged up the stairs, I pulled off my robe, and laid it across the foot of the bed, ready for tomorrow’s lukewarm shower before a dismally snowy drive on the way to work. It was then I noticed the indent on my pillow, glittering with a faint gold glow. Upon closer inspection, I found it to be a small, foil wrapped chocolate beneath which a small card lay. The card was alabaster, of the finest card stock with little scroll work music notes dancing across the border of the card. At its center, in elegant scroll was the signature of one Ray Doe. And there beneath it, dimly flickering in the little light of my room were the words, “Thank you for your stay. We always appreciate your business.”

The Green Glades of the Mind

As Barfield pointed out, all of our interaction with the world around us is through the medium of mental metaphor. (See Barfield's Epistemology posted in Oct. 2009) These mental metaphors take the form of words in our minds. The set of metaphors that we use at any given time to recognize, understand, and think about our environment or lives is represented by the words, or semantic set, that we know. Have you ever noticed that once you learn to distinguish something with a new word you begin to see it all over. From the time we were infants, when all sensory stimulation was one reality, to when we began to distinguish 'mother' from the mass of sensations, 'happy' from the mass of emotions, and 'dogs' from the mass of animals, our world has been created through the words that we learn. Even if, through observation, we realize that there is something which does not fit into our semantic set, we have to come up with a place holder word, like 'thing', in order to think about it.
We live in a world of words. How deeply though do we respect the creative power of our minds? Our positivist culture often dismisses the myths of the past as worthless etiological stories told to explain the natural world. But when we think of any scene of our life are we not cast as the hero, or sometimes the villain? Furthermore, the very words we use to tell the story are alive with meaning only because they are still nourished by the roots of the ancient stories from which they sprung. When we look up at a golden sun and see it beating down upon us, or fight back panic, or catch a cold, or every other episode of our life, which can only be expressed using the old metaphors of the past, are we not creating the mythic personal narrative of our life? We don't realize that we are being just as mythopoeic as the ancients as we half perceive and half create the story of our life. The words that we use are living metaphors of the past and we build from them the meaningful myths of our lives. We are constantly cobbling together the green, lush metaphors of the past to create our own reality and we don't even realize what we have created, or even less, that we are creating. We believe that we live in a concrete, urban, static mental reality when in fact we live in the green glades of ancient metaphors. It takes a story teller like Tolkien, or a poet like Wordsworth, or a philosopher like Barfield to show us that our minds are not paved over in concrete but are overgrown with grasses and flowing with little rivers.

In part this site is intended to help facilitate the effort of writers and poets who wish to reveal the fertile valleys of their reader's minds, and remind them that they are participating in that landscape. (Goodness, the very words I must use to express these sentiments seem to scream out the same message for themselves!)

Brandon Pearce

Synopsis of Barfieldian Epistemology, Evolution of Conscience, and the Modern Loss of Meaning

Owen Barfield was a philologist in England and was a great friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and influenced them profoundly in their literary works. He is not as well known for his literature or poetry, although he did write, but is best known for his theories on meaning and the evolution of consciousness. Through his exploration of poetic diction he developed a philosophy of the evolution of human consciousness, the exploration and explanation of which became his life’s work. I would like to attempt to give a synopsis of Barfield's theory of the evolution of conscience and the modern loss of meaning.

Let me begin by attempting to describe Barfield’s epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which deals with the acquisition of knowledge. It asks the question, How do we come to know something? And how do we know that we know it?

Rene Magritte, an early twentieth century surrealist painter painted this famous pipe. And

underneath it he painted these words “This is not a pipe.” He was trying to draw attention to the

idea that all art, no matter how realistically rendered, is still only representation, or metaphor for the actual subject. This, of course, is NOT a pipe, but the painting of a pipe; the representation of a pipe.

Barfield goes one step further than this and points out that it is not just art that is a metaphor of an actual subject, but all of our perceptions of the external world are a mental representation, or metaphors, of reality. Barfield accepts the assumption that there does indeed exist an exterior reality, but simply points out the fact that the only way in which we are aware of it is through our sensory organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and touch. When our sensory organs come into contact with the particles of the external world they cause sensations which are then interpreted by the mind as a representation of that sensory data. It is the representation of that data that we experience when we hear a bird, or see a rainbow, or even touch a table. Barfield says it like this, “On the assumption that the world whose existence is independent of our sensation and perception consists solely of particles, two operations are necessary…in order to produce the familiar world we know. First, the sense organs must be related to the particles in such a way as to give rise to sensations; and secondly, those mere sensations must be combined and constructed by the percipient mind into the recognizable and nameable objects we call things, it is this work of construction which will here be called figuration.” (Pg. 92 Reader) So this then is Barfield’s epistemology; that the exterior is really interior, because everything we know about the exterior is really a metaphoric representation in our minds of the sensory data that is gathered by our five senses. “The familiar world which we see and know around us- the blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor-bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends- the world too, which experts of all kinds methodically investigate- is a system of collective representations. The time comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways.” (Pg. 89 Reader)

This type of perception, it should be noted, requires a certain amount of participation by the perceiver. The world, as such, does not exist without the participation of percipient. We are not generally aware of this participation in creating the world we know, but in fact this creative act of representation, or figuration as Barfield calls it, is at least as important to what we call conscious perception as the perceived matter itself. Now Barfield was not the only or first person to recognize this fundamental idea, the English Romantic poets wrote extensively on this idea, as did the American Transcendentalists. It is what Wordsworth means when he writes in “Tinturn Abbey”

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,

And what perceive; (italics added)

The unique thing about Barfield is that he was way ahead of his time in realizing that the way in which people figurate, or represent, or participate with, the world around them has not always been the same. He realized that people in the past actually participated in the creation of their world in a very different way in which we do today. This change over time in the way in which people form such mental metaphors of the external world in their mind is what Barfield means by the “evolution of consciousness.” Allow me to repeat this: The change from the way in which Ancient man, or “primitive man” understood, or mentally created his world, to the way in which we do today, is what Barfield means by the “evolution of consciousness.” Barfield comes to recognize that this change has occurred through his study of words, poetics to be more precise.

The way in which we perceive the world, determines our semantics. Because words are the verbal and written symbols that we use to indicate the representations that we have in our minds. Each conceptual entity that is separately identified through this process of figuration is represented by a word. In fact the word indicating an idea, or thing, replaces in the mind, the image of that thing and allows us to think about it. When we think analytically it is by mentally manipulating these symbols, or words, in our mind. The words we use, and the meanings we ascribe to them, or our semantics are a direct reflection of the internal thought processes of the mind. Barfield sees the evolution of consciousness as being implied by the evolution of language. By studying how words developed over time, one can also deduce the way in which man’s consciousness has likewise evolved over time. So let’s talk about how words developed and what they mean, both in the past and today.

In Poetic Diction, Barfield states, “One of the first things that a student of etymology- even quite an amateur student- discovers for himself is that every modern language, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning and association, is apparently nothing, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors. If we trace the meanings of a great many words- or those of the elements of which they are composed- about as far back as etymology can take us, we are at once made to realize that an overwhelming proportion, if not all of them, referred in earlier days to one of these two things- a solid, sensible object, or some animal (probably human) activity.”

The common belief in Barfield’s day, and today the general notion is still around, is that the words that we use today formed initially as very simple verbal indicators for physical items or basic human activities, devoid of abstract of metaphorical meaning. We see this still today in the depictions of “cave men” pointing at something and uttering UUUUG! (Hurrah for Geico for giving sophistication to the cave man) Anyway this is the way in which we think of primitive man and thought. The problem with this notion is that when we study ancient writing, the language is actually MORE metaphoric than language today. Others before Barfield had noted this as well, and had come up with the explanation that time between the earliest man and our earliest manuscripts there existed a “metaphorical period” in which men took these simple concrete words and applied them in very abstract, metaphorical ways which created the reservoir of ancient metaphors, the dead and petrified form of which make up our language today. Barfield ridicules this notion when he says, “In other words, although, when [the linguist] moves backwards through the history of language, he finds it becoming more and more figurative with every step, yet he has no hesitation in assuming a period- still further back- when it was not figurative at all! To supply, therefore, the missing link in his chain of linguistic evolution, he proceeds to people the infancy of society with an exalted race of amateur poets.”

Barfield realized that this made no sense whatsoever. In fact what Barfield theorizes, and what modern language theory has been increasingly confirming, is that the words which seem to be denoting simple items or ideas, were extremely metaphorical to them. Allow me to site two examples of what I mean by this. If the roots of the word deity or divine is traced back far enough, we would find that it comes from the Latin root Deus, which means God, This word Deus is a cognate of the Greek word Zeus, which as we all know was the great sky god of the Ancient Greeks. Taken further back, these words come from an indo-european word, [deiwos], which meant the day time or bright sky. The old pre-Barfieldian way of explaining this was that primitive man came to at some time indicate the actual sky, or sun in the sky, with some word similar to [deiwos], and that some time after that man began to associate the word with the abstract characteristic of brightness, light, the sun’s life giving power, the residence of God, and a heavenly father. Barfield realized however that when ancient man looked at the bright blue heavens and said deiwos, he was not indicating any one of these single meanings but meant all of these concepts simultaneously. Not in a polysemous way, in other words he did not use the word for sky in some senses, and god in another sense, and brightness in yet another context; rather all of these ideas were wrapped up into one very meaningful and powerful word. That word to ancient man did not have many meanings, it had much meaning.

The Latin root for our word ‘spirit’ as well as the root of our word ‘respiration’ also can be traced back to a word, spiritus in the latin, that meant ‘wind’ ‘breath’ and ‘life force’ or ‘soul’. Again in this word we see that what have an ancient word from which many concepts, both abstract and internal, as well as concrete and external, are formed. Similarly to our example of the Indo-European word for bright sky, the ancient man who used this word ‘spiritus’ meant all of these internal and external meanings at once. Barfield recognized that the use of words in this way by ancient man indicated that his way of understanding the world around him was also much more unified and that he was connected to his exterior. The way in which internal/abstract meanings are connected to the external/concrete objects indicates that there was a very intense awareness of the participation that man had with the creation of his perception of the external world. The often ridiculed ‘myth’ or ‘mythological’ understanding of the physical world makes much more sense when we understand the way in which our ancient ancestors figurated, or represented the world in their minds.

The current model of understanding myth as primitive man’s pitiful attempts of rationally explaining the world around him, makes as little sense as the old ways of thinking about language development. This way of explaining myths is dependant, much like old theories of language development, on a time in which man saw only things and then went through a period of great imaginative reasoning where everything became a god and a spirit. Barfied writes in Poetic Diction, “the more widely accepted naturalistic theory of myths is very little more satisfactory for it is obliged to lean just as heavily on the same wonderful metaphorical period. The only difference is this, that for an extinct race of mighty poets it substitutes an extinct race of mighty philosophers.” Barfield points out the mistake that is made in thinking in this manner, “For the nineteenth-century fantasy of early man first gazing, with his mind tabula raza, at natural phenomena like ours, then seeking to explain them with thoughts like ours, and then by a process of inference ‘peopling’ them with the ‘aery phantoms’ of mythology, there is not any single shred of evidence whatever.” In other words, the problem is that we take our own empirical manner of figuration, of representation, of inductive reasoning and assume that all men over the course of time thought as we do today, and the semi-unconscious process of interpreting the sensory data that comes into our mind was done in the same way, and created the same representations in their minds as it does in ours, the only difference being that they drew inferior conclusions about the phenomenon that they were experiencing and that we, have drawn the correct ones. In actuality, ancient man participated with their reality in a different manner from us today, he did so in a way which made everything much more alive and connected to the human experience than we do today with our observational, empirical manner of seeing the natural phenomena around us. Indeed the way in which ancient man’s mind represented the data passed to his mind from his sensory organs created a world in which he was continually aware of his participation in creating it, and one in which everything around him was connected to him in a tapestry of meaningful relationship between himself and the world around him.

So what happened then? Why did this change? Why is it so hard for us to comprehend this unified, meaningful ancient mindset?

I have implied a few times in talking about the past that the difference in thought process between us and them is our unique reliance on the analytical nature of positivist philosophy. Positivist philosophy holds as it’s epistemological foundation that we can only know something through empirical evidence. This type of thought process is what Barfield calls Alpha thinking. He says, “Alpha thinking, as I have defined it, is thinking about collective representations. But when we think ‘about’ anything, we must necessarily be aware of ourselves as sharply and clearly detached from the thing thought about…In fact the very nature and aim of pure alpha-thinking is to exclude participation.” In other words, this way of thinking, which we today call empirical positivism, seeks to be able to think about the phenomena as something separate from the human, on its own, from an observational point of view, rather than a participating point of view. By doing so it must, out of necessity, break up the unified meanings into separate words which indicate the internal or abstract ideas expressed by them, and the external/concrete objects or activities to which they were attached. This manner of observational thinking and figuration did not begin all at once but had many starting points. The Lyceum, Aristotle’s famous school, ancient Alexandria the birth place of modern medicine and where the first geocentric model of the universe was conceived, the scholastic form of inquiry of the Middle Ages, were all steps toward the movement that we today call (somewhat self-aggrandizingly) the Enlightenment. It is during this relatively recent transformation of thought that we see very influential philosophers like Spinoza, who declares that man is but a facet of nature, and not exceptional in the role that he plays. The complete separation of man from his participation in creating the knowable world naturally leads to the conclusion that human life is in the end meaningless, and that existence itself is pointless. Now I don’t want you to think that I am here to condemn the science department, or that I am against thinking in this analytical way, I started back to school as a mechanical engineering major, and have always been fascinated by the physical sciences, and I am very much for the good things, including the improvements in comfort and life span, that they have brought about. The problem arises when we can only see our world through such a Positivist lens. As we just discussed, the metaphoric mental recreation of sensory data is the medium through which we understand our world. Empirical Positivism denies the act, or medium, of creative, participatory, metaphoric representation, while at the same time using the current, given set of collective representations, or semantic set, as the authoritative set by which the world is “empirically” observed. The concern that Barfield had, and I echo, is that we have become unaware that there is, or ever was, another way of mentally representing the world around us, and when we see the world only through empirical eyes, it has the negative consequence of leaving our lives bereft of meaning. We can see the effects of this lack of meaning in our modern use of language, as Barfield puts it, “We no longer call up any mental image of “standing beneath” when we use the word ‘understand’, nor do we feel an physical “pressing out” when we speak of expressing a sentiment or idea.” The only reason these words have any meaning at all is because they still cling tenuously to their old metaphorical past. They do still mean something to us, but they have lost that active living meaning that accompanied them when they were spoken by our ancient ancestors.

If I might, I would like to give one last example to clarify the difference in the two modes of thought, the analytical empirical mode of and what I like to call the participatory mode. I am writing with my pencil on this piece of paper some words, what can science teach me about what I am writing? It could tell me about the way in which lead is formed with minute sheets that are loosely bound so that the friction between it and the paper cause it to leave behind a line of lead chips. Science could tell me about the brightness and weight of the paper that I am writing on. It can explain that proprial receptors in my hand relay to my brain that I am holding the pencil correctly. It could tell me that the nervous impulse propagating from the post central gyros, passes through the cortico-rubral tract and meets with impulses from the cerebellum which then pass into the rubral-spinal tracts of the brachial plexus and then pass a neuro-electric charge due to the reception of sodium into billions of sodium channels along the length of the axion of a nerve cell in the ulnar, radial, or median nerves, which causes a positive charge at the nerve terminal which releases acetocholine into the neuromuscular junction which causes the endoplasmic reticulum of the muscle cell to release its calcium content into the muscle causing it to flex. Science can tell me a good many things about my writing. But what do the words that I wrote mean?

She walks in beauty like the night,

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

And all that’s good of dark and bright,

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies. -Byron

This poem is meaningful to me, and hopefully it was meaningful to you too. The first time I heard this poem it changed the way I saw the night sky, and my wife; it connected my 'self' to the phenomenon of perceiving the night sky such that it allows me to participate anew in the act of seeing it. This is the final point I would like to make. Barfield believed that through good poetry, and I would add good story telling, the metaphors of language can be refreshed and cause what he called a “felt change of consciousness” so that the same sensory input, for example from looking at the sky at night, will result in a new mental representation in your mind. Good poetry and literature allow us to re-participate in the perception of the green earth around us. It allows us to remake some of the meaning that has been lost.

Brandon Pearce