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