Poetry Plot (Partial Archive – items included in bold)

Home | The Overshadowed Man: On Owen Barfield | Four Rivers in Eden | On Kathleen Raine | Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction: An Appreciation | Pictures from the Speaking Stillness | Grandmother Funda | "Asa" and "The Ringbinder" | Versalvere Archive - 1 | Versalvere Archive - 2 | Versalvere Archive - 3

The Overshadowed Man: On Owen Barfield

Discussing the friendship between a cat and a bear, Dr. Ransom, in C.S.Lewis’s novel, That Hideous Strength, says that "You’ve got to become human before the physical cravings are distinguishable from affections—just as you have to become spiritual before affections are distinguishable from charity. What is going on in the cat and the bear isn’t one or other of these two things: it is a single undifferentiated thing… It is one of Barfield’s ‘ancient unities.’" These ‘ancient unities,’ Dr. Ransom explains elsewhere in the novel, hearken back "to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet [are] other than those we [now] know."

This is as good an introduction to the thought of Owen Barfield as one is likely to find. This friend of C.S. Lewis (Lewis called him ‘the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers’) is hardly remembered except as the friend of Lewis. Yet Owen Barfield’s own great contributions to the Christian revitalization of thinking are hardly remembered. Barfield was a sometime member of the ‘Inklings,’ a group of Lewis’s inspiration which gave a real flowering of Christian literary art in the 20th century. J.R.R. Tolkien needs no introduction -- his Lord of the Rings continues to provide deep sustenance of the imagination for children and adults, as have Lewis’s fictions for children. Charles Williams, another member of the Inklings group, also wrote Christian expositions, but his novels are more difficult to characterize.. For – as Barfield once put it – "Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good." For Charles Williams, only those who possess imagination can really grip the action in the drama of life. With this view of imagination as a form of ‘Power,’ or ‘Realization,’ Williams’ esoteric-occult novels veer into a moral ambiguity which is contained in the exalted tension of his amorous and subtle Christianity. But the idea of the ‘justification by imagination,’ if one can put it that way, has forcibly entered our cultural nexus without this Christian tension, where, as a purely secularized theory of art – or even nowadays, of government – it has wreaked considerable destruction.

To summarize: Tolkien’s work is for children and adults, and Lewis’s also, and Williams’ work is for adult seekers seeking new dimensions in fiction. But Barfield is purely for adults, and the truths he quested for in language, philosophy, philology, history, and science were framed in short, dense argumentative books of philosophical meditation. His first, Poetic Diction, published in 1928, was dedicated to Lewis with the motto ‘Opposition is true friendship.’ The two friends argued at length over the role of the Imagination, which Barfield believed could be an opening to truth, but Lewis said should be viewed as a way of meaning. These discussions were later published in 1978 in a monograph by Lionel Adey called C.S.Lewis’s ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield.

Barfield’s preoccupations with the imagination arose out of his experience with poetry which, he says, can lead to ‘a felt change of consciousness’ and to ‘the making of meaning which makes true knowledge possible.’ The most detailed part of Poetic Diction comprises the historical study of the uses of particular words by particular poets. "Today," he remarks, "a man cannot utter a dozen words without wielding the creations of a hundred named and nameless poets." The emphasis on historical study was to prove useful in light of his chosen profession of solicitor. Some years later he wrote an essay, "Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction," comparing the accretion of meaning through metaphor to the historical process of English common law, in which, quoting Maitland, "substantive law has at first the look of being gradually secreted in the interstices of procedure." Barfield’s increasing interest in history attracted the attention of the notable historian John Lukacs, who called Barfield "the most important philosopher of the 20th century" and whose own understanding of historical consciousness may owe a great deal to Barfield.

I believe Barfield’s most important book is Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, which appeared in the US in 1965 (published in 1957 in England.) Whereas Barfield had before devoted his attention to the historical study of language and of poetry, in Saving the Appearances he argues on the basis of the historical study of science. But once again he was met the fate of being overshadowed, this time because of Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which had taken the intellectual world by storm in 1962. This book, despite its adoption by people who wanted to dethrone the idea of objective truth for ideological reasons, made an important contribution to the historical study of science by addressing the role of the larger community in fostering or providing hospitality to certain ideas. Unfortunately the adherents of cultural studies and social constructivism used this first shoot of the participatory idea as a battering ram against objectivity in science. According to James Franklin, writing in the New Criterion in 2000, "… the worst effect of Kuhn … has been the frivolous discarding of the way things are as a constraint on the theory about the way things are."

I doubt there are many thinkers in the history of this world whose followers have all been beyond reproach. There are an infinite number of ways in which ideas may be misused, and conservatives have their own brand of it when they exalt objectivity for the sake of deriding participation. In such a situation one is apt to echo the Bible – the very stones cry out. What can reconcile objectivity and participation? Has anyone tried? If so, who?

2.

The term ‘saving the appearances’ has its historical genesis in astronomy. Ancient astronomers studied the celestial appearances to account for planetary movements rather than to address the question of whether their theory or conjecture was literally true. This question had to wait for the Scientific Revolution – indeed it was that revolution, and much of Barfield’s exposition is devoted to the explication of the mental background both before and after this salient "transposition of the mind." The phrase is Herbert Butterfield’s, whose book The Origins of Modern Science is cited by Barfield, as well as the works of the magisterial historian of science, Pierre Duhem, particularly his To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, published in 1908.

Saving the Appearances belongs to a small number of genuinely important books appearing in the second half of the 20th century. It does not fit any liberal or conservative agenda and is not easy to classify. There is much discussion of science, particularly the history of science, but more like looking at science itself from an evolutionary perspective. Which is to say, Barfield is an evolutionist but not a Darwinian, and his view of evolution is closer to what some might call "religion," although it is very far in certain respects from what most people think about when they think about religion. (For what it’s worth, Barfield was an Anglican.) His evolutionary dynamic is a – or rather, the – Logos, which has an "objective" side (the phenomena) and an interior or subjective one ("consciousness") with both sides perpetually correlative one to the other. Barfield’s essay "Philology and the Incarnation," (reprinted in The Rediscovery of Meaning, 1977) explores what this correlative dynamic signifies of "the discovery by man of his own existence as a self-conscious being." It was an event marked in historical time, signified by a Person of whom we say the cosmic Logos incarnated and became flesh.

But to return to Saving the Appearances: whatever may be said of science, religion and history, all of it has given rise to modern consciousness, and it is ultimately the fact – and value – of this modern consciousness with which this book is concerned.

3.

Science emphasizes the fact that the world it investigates – the atomic physical structure of matter – is not the same as the familiar world we are accustomed to. In fact this investigated world is radically ‘other.’ "It depends upon what ‘is’ is," said our former President Clinton, in one epigrammatic mouthful summarizing the gulf that has widened between the received world and the investigated world. This gulf has not only swallowed ethics and empiricism. It has called into question the whole realm of predication – of saying that something ‘is.’ For if the real world is only "matter in motion," all that appears in the received world is merely disconnected spectacle. Nothing participates in anything else; nothing participates in Being. Even to make a statement, "A horse is an animal," is suspect. For how can a horse participate in animal-hood, indeed what is animal-hood but a mental construction or imposition?

On the other hand, modern philosophy since Kant has attempted to come to the rescue of the realness of the world by stressing the participation of human beings in the creation, or rather evocation, of the phenomena. It is a way of saying that what we think is there is not really there, but we can do no other than suppose it to be there. Upon so thin a wedge, not even Occam himself was impaled. Yet on this narrow wedge modern society has placed its entire weight of cultural sustenance: the validity of language, law, the teaching of ethics, the works of art and religion, even the revelations of religion. Is it any wonder that our culture stumbles?

Barfield states that his purpose in writing the book was to highlight the fact that certain consequences flowing from "the hastily expanded sciences" of the 19th and 20th centuries have been insufficiently considered when building up a general picture of the universe, earth, and man – and especially early or prehistoric man. The more we go back into the past, the more human utterance and testimony about the world has a ‘mythological’ character. We believe that the received world is not real; our distant forebears, by contrast, believed in the super-reality of the received. Either we have to acknowledge that the relation between man and nature has undergone changes, or that our ancient forebears were crazy. (This point of view was argued by the brilliant but confused Julian Jaynes, in his book The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , when he wrote that "the gods were amalgams of admonitory experiences, made of meldings of whatever commands had been given to the individual.") Or maybe it is we ourselves – post-Scientific Revolution, post-Cartesian men – who are crazy. (And which of us has never had this thought?) If human beings do participate in transforming sensations into ‘things,’ why should we automatically assume that ancient man was mistaken rather than to the fact that he testified to different things – or at least saw the things differently?

Modern physics tells us that the normal, familiar world that we take for granted is not, in some sense, "really there," but rather must be understood as comprised of atoms, particles, waves, or just ‘energy.’ To be sure, even these words are cumbersome; they are just ways we have of trying to picture something that cannot be pictured. They comprise the ‘unrepresented’ background of our perceptions. But, if this ‘unrepresented’ background is all that is believed to exist independently of our perceptions, what is the foreground, what is the ‘represented’ or the ‘appearances’ of the world? Trees, houses, cars, faces of people, the singing of birds, this paper, – in other words, the received or familiar world. If the phenomena of the world are irreducibly ‘energetic’ in essence, but this essence is nonpicturable and nonrepresentational, then the world we picture, live in, talk about is, in fact, what he calls "a system of collective representations." These ‘collective representations’ are the result of our activity, however far back in the past the process may have gotten started and however long the time involved in the transmission of learning about these things is that we call society or culture.

Barfield uses the term ‘figuration’ to mean the activity which converts sensations into things, that is, as the work of the percipient mind in constructing the world of recognizable and nameable objects, the ‘familiar world.’ It should be said at the outset that Barfield is not going with this where the post-modernists have been going with it – e.g. that "The world is a huge collection of communally-evolved customs of interpretation" (Don Cupitt) or like President Clinton’s statement about the ‘is,’ quoted earlier. Such views are symptomatic of the fact that, for many contemporary people, the first glimmerings of participation are apt to be accompanied by confused thinking. Indeed, Barfield comments, "It is characteristic of our phenomena… that our participation in them, and therefore their representational nature, is excluded from our immediate awareness." But when that "immediate awareness" does begin to have a sense for the representational nature of things, the tendency is to forget how we learned of ‘things’ in the first place. Our own awareness of them is the testament to their real existence, as their existence is the testament of ours. It is the mutuality of the relation that is neglected. It is a good example of what Etienne Gilson meant by an idealism run amuck – that under the pretence of liberating the mind from things, it has enslaved the mind to itself.

Indeed, misunderstanding the nature of participation is key to many confusions of the present time. Some years ago I stumbled across a quote which perfectly expresses the ‘alienated’ character of our appearances. From Memory’s Ghost by Philip J. Hilts, the passage is a quote from the psychologist Robert Ornstein:

To preface this remarkable passage with the words "There is…" for the purpose of declaring a magisterial "There is not…" to everything we experience in the world is certainly an act of philosophic contortionism. It does not follow that because I am aware that the human contribution to that trilling sound I hear tells me bird -- which by the way is only a way of saying this is its name -- that this ‘bird’ is merely a "dimension of human experience." It is a indeed a picture of joyless and unbridgeable subjectivism. It is further remarkable for a psychologist to have written it. Apparently he accepts the existence of a self without argument while omitting to mention that learning the names of things and experiencing them is how we acquire a self in the first place.

It is probably true that we do not pay attention, really hear a bird sing every time we hear a bird sing. Much of the ‘figuration’ background of our perceptions has become mere habit – far more to the point than this Darwinist apology for "survival." And for that matter even a ‘molecule’ is the result of an historical development, and is therefore ‘participated’ to some extent, so that calling a bird a molecule just postpones the reckoning with participation and only adds a whole new layer of obfuscation. But this is a very silly example of the tricks that are resorted to in the name of a "science" that has not decided whether its mission is to eliminate participation or to understand the natural world. That we have reached such a point of absurdity is in large part the purpose of Saving the Appearances to explicate and, if possible, begin to disentangle.

Barfield emphasizes that the major difference between our phenomena and those of our forebears was that primitive or ancient man was aware of participation, whereas we are not aware of it – or at least, if we are aware of it we tend to disown it – just as in the example above. It is characteristic of our ‘phenomena’ that they are seen as being wholly independent of us, wholly extrinsic –"clothed with the independence and extrinsicality of the unrepresented itself. But a representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented."

"Phenomena" mean to us only things that happen or appear, ‘objects’ or ‘events.’ But like any word in the lexicon, the word, "phainomena" has a history. It is, says Barfield, the middle voice of a Greek verb, suggesting "neither wholly ‘what is perceived from within themselves, by men’ nor wholly ‘what, from without, forces itself on man’s senses,’ but something between the two." In our post-Cartesian world it is difficult to make the intellectual and imaginative leap into a state of mind which is an in-between – a state more akin to a coming-to-be, a nascency. And yet it is just such imaginative leaps as these that are necessary if we are even to begin to understand something of human thinking prior to the Scientific Revolution. In order to sustain, if not reclaim our cultural heritage, we must ‘participate’ the history of changes in meaning of words as a window into changing human consciousness.

How does ignoring the participated element of consciousness influence our views of origins and history of the world and mankind? Barfield uses the example of the picture of the prehistoric evolution of the earth according to H.G. Wells’ Outline of History. He remarks, "It can do no harm to recall occasionally that [this] prehistoric evolution of the earth… was not merely never seen. It never occurred. Something no doubt occurred, and what is really being propounded by such popular writers… is this: that at that time the unrepresented was behaving in such a way that, if human beings with the collective representations characteristic of the last few centuries of western civilization had been there, the things described would also have been there. [And] this is not quite the same thing." Darwinistic evolutionary science arose in the 19th century, when the older medieval participatory consciousness had faded. It took for granted the purely extrinsic nature of the appearances and then attempted to treat these appearances much as astronomy treated the celestial objects. Thus it gave birth to a wholly mechanistic picture of evolution. Had such a science developed earlier or even perhaps later, after 20th century physics did much to undermine materialism, we might have had a science of evolution worthy of the name –"man might have read there the story of his coming into being… of his world and his own consciousness."

Participation is whatever in perception that is more than just sensation -- ‘the extra-sensory link between man and the phenomena.’ It certainly does illuminate many issues in the Church. One thinks of the Transubstantiation, one of the issues dividing the participatory Catholic consciousness from that of the non-participatory Protestant. The Eucharist is literal Body and Blood in Catholic tradition because all substance is participated. Denis Farkafalvy, O.Cist., in his recent Communio article, "The Eucharistic Presence: A Study in Biblical Theology," (Winter, 2005) explains that the Aristotelian distinction between "substance" and "accident" became a useful way for the Church to explain the mystery of the Real Presence. "Only the substance "is" (exists) as the subject of the proper act of being. The accident determines the modalities or modes in which the substance participates in existence." He reminds us, also, that "… what our scientific models propose as ‘ultimate reality’ or ‘the way things really are’ belongs, philosophically speaking, to the realm of accidents." The background of the Catholic conception of the Real Presence in the Eucharist presupposes that there is an activity of philosophical participation in the foreground, that is, present in men’s minds. For above all it is concept of ‘Being’ which is itself the chief ‘extrasensory link between man and the phenomena.’ The diminished philosophical activity in the later Protestant ages amounted to a removal of living ontological experience. It is not surprising, then, that in the Protestant tradition that Real Presence was interpreted merely as ‘symbolic.’ But what goes around comes around. Many of the current muddles of modern thinking speak to our refusal to deal honestly with the ‘being’ in being human – which, aside from its purely biological aspect, encompasses the biographical and historical one as well – that is to say, realms that deal with symbolism and language.

Studying the development of the participation idea would also help in understanding Galileo, whose story is so often told simplistically in terms of Heroic Individual Freedom Fighting the Battle Against the Forces of Reaction and Dogma. What was in dispute, Barfield points out, was less the heliocentric hypothesis per se but the nature of theory itself. "Our collective representations were born when men began to take the models, whether geometrical or mechanical, literally." One might say that nothing less was at stake than the relation obtaining between the literal and the symbolical. How we view this relation has fundamental consequences for man and society, as the Church well knew. For a non-participating consciousness, something is either literal or symbolical; it cannot be both. But what is to be the fate of thinking -- an act involving language and symbolical realities -- in a non-participated world in which only the literal is considered truthful? How can we understand anything of even an elementary moral nature, unless we somehow possess some rudiments of the idea of a ‘participated’ humanity – that is, that ‘human being’ is not just a physical but also a metaphysical enterprise? (In this regard, the recent tendency of many modern writers to omit the ‘being’ in ‘human being’ and just call people ‘humans’ is a very telling sign of anti-ontological bias.)

Barfield terms the relation between consciousness and phenomena ‘correlative.’ In a similar manner, the philosopher Ortega y Gasset frequently brought up the ‘coexistence’ of thoughts and things, of man and his circumstances, as the necessary totality by which things can be viewed. My own insight, and really it is a small one, is that the correlation or coexistence of thinker and thing is the inescapably moral element in man’s consciousness. ‘Moral’ as in mores, social, meaning character and custom – thus the ‘collective representations.’ In this way we should not be put off by this phrase, ‘collective representations,’ but understand that it refers to the fact of our human coexistence with thought and thing, – which are not only facts of our life but of our thought as well.

What advantages to the one’s inner life, conduct or thought may be derived from understanding Barfield’s argument that ‘the evolution of consciousness is correlative with the evolution of phenomena’? For I have barely touched the surface of this book, and there is much more to learn from Barfield’s diagnosis of our present condition. We have outgrown the ancient form of ‘original participation,’ but we have not yet found the way to ‘final participation.’ Barfield’s use of the term idolatry to describe our condition – a word he uses from the biblical tradition (involving an interesting discussion of the role of ancient Israel in eliminating participation by quite other means than those yet to be deployed with the rise of science) was deliberately chosen. "The plain fact is, that all the unity and coherence of nature depends on participation of one kind or another. If therefore man succeeds in eliminating all original participation, without substituting any other, he will have done nothing less than to eliminate all meaning and coherence from the cosmos."

There are two messages here in particular. For conservatives: "In the long run, we shall not be able to save souls without saving the appearances, and it is an error fraught with the most terrible consequences to imagine that we shall." That is to say, conservatism cannot be seen in isolation from a view of the world, and the accent here is a call for creative renewal and deepening of imaginative vision. But there is also something for liberals. For how do we move from the zero point of idolatry to conscious final participation? It involves consciously recapitulating the creative act -- something poets and small children do. "To be able to experience the representations as idols, and then to be able also to perform the act of figuration consciously, so as to experience them as participated: that is imagination." This transforming act presupposes an initial grasp for what is – something that those who agitate for social change seem rarely able to do.

Barfield’s most important message is that how we think will bring about, in large measure, what we experience. Thoughts and things coexist. In fact we already know this to be true, on a common sense level, but Barfield applies the insight to our social and collective life in the context of its historical development. It is an amazing and revealing vision urgently needed today – of a kind of "correlative course-correction" of humanity with the very sources of its physical life. For us there is a new task of ‘saving the appearances’ – not of the heavens this time, but of the earth.

           On Kathleen Raine

"Little of what you were, less of myself I knew,

Loved with my blind heart I knew not who

Nor from what root love's recognition grew,

Who in my ignorance worshipped and wounded you."

Do not give so much, not all

You're asked to lay down at his feet.

When that arrow went into your heart

I bet it didn't make his skip a beat--

He didn't know. The sender never does.

How let him know? This is the part

You miss the beat or make mistakes,

Thinking he will make his story yours

Because you know the very place

He passed, when knowledge sprang to love

And you had all those riches yet to prove---

Whether to spring after, or just wait

With mild offers of encouragement,

And show no blood, and smile for his sake.

The third volume of Kathleen Raine's autobiography, The Lion's Mouth, was published in 1977. Raine, best known as a scholar of William Blake and Platonism, was also a poet of considerable talent. Philip Larkin, reviewing her Collected Poems in 1956, commented "how far the height and intensity of [her] purpose set her apart from her contemporaries," and "I can think of few recent poems as free from jargon, vulgarity, and smartness as those in this book."

The Lion's Mouth is a rare work of the 20th century: a testament of the soul written by one abundantly learned, spiritually developed, and fundamentally conservative. It is a 20th century as seen less in the clamor of its events than interiorly, from the inside. Historical consciousness, though certainly present to her mind, is not the main concern. Or rather, it is the thoughts, aspirations, and ideas from which historical events issue, that forms the substance of her story. Mental things are real and operate as causes. This strong sensibility for "mental causes" is Kathleen Raine's great gift, and perhaps also her sorrow: "If I cannot defend my failure I can at least defend my values because I believe these inevitably follow from the real nature of things… if man is not only an animal, but also a soul and a spirit, then the issues I so terribly encountered cannot be evaded."

Her failure, as she tells it, was a failure to realize love -- to incarnate it, to make it historical. But indeed "the issues . . . so terribly encountered" by Kathleen Raine ought to be of absorbing interest to conservatives. For the issues deal with transcendent vision-- not only in symbol and myth, but in its modes of art, politics, loyalties -- and how that vision is to be incarnated. The Lion's Mouth is thus, in this larger sense, about civilization, which perhaps more than anything else, deserves to be called man's Great Love. Like any Great Love, it is difficult to find, difficult to establish, difficult to maintain, and too easily lost. In The Lion's Mouth the dissolution of a relationship becomes the signature for a larger dissolution of civilization.

"I care only for the judgment of men who are wise, and of women who have loved," wrote Raine in the early pages of the book. It is composed in four chapters, of which the longest by far is the first -- "The Tree and its Fruit." Born in 1908 (nearly the same year as that other noted female wrestler with the transcendent, Simone Weil) in rural Northumberland, Kathleen met Gavin Maxwell "sometime after the War" upon a return from her childhood home, which is described in the first volume of her autobiography, Farewell, Happy Fields.

Gavin who, it turned out, was the grandson of the Duke of Northumberland, knew her secret places. Her paradise and his coincided: "… the hill, the heather, the wild thyme, the lichen on the stone, all were his. Gavin was a native of my paradise… And because he came from those places where Eden had been, it seemed as if he came from Eden itself."

Gavin became, for Kathleen, a "man of light," and in this book there are many generous descriptions of him. So that it is not quite true that, long after the relationship had ended and Kathleen had made the mistake (so she says) of showing to Gavin something of this narrative, he exclaimed: "Write something kind about me, Kathleen!" But there is also the awe --- known to those who perceives reality in the light of the Soul --- at being in the presence of someone a bit 'fey.' Gavin tried to make a go of shark-fishing, which failed; he traveled to the river of Paradise, the Euphrates, where he found the otter, Mij, who became the subject of his book, Ring of Bright Water.{1} Gavin was an aristocrat, a traveler, an adventurer, a naturalist; and he knew almost all of Palgrave's Treasury of English Verse by heart. All of us are seeking, I suppose, for the "truly human" -- the meeting of nature and culture. These Gavin had, apparently in abundance. It is not hard to see why Kathleen felt as she did about him.

Raine became a student at Girton College, Cambridge, in the 1920's. It was the heydey of Russell and Wittgenstein, of logical positivism and of materialist rationalism -- "crass English philosophy," she once put it. Only quantity, only matter: only this is real. Positive philosophy conforms to the natural bent of the human mind, which is projected upon geometric solids, quantities, numbers, experiences. Those who follow the natural bent may well sniff: "What do you mean by beauty?" as a positivistic fellow-student once asked Kathleen. At any rate, the doctrines infected her spirit like poison. (Today's political correctness, bad as it is, is not the first time youth has been corrupted by education.) She tells of it in the second volume of her autobiography, The Land Unknown, only revisiting the terrain briefly, and parenthetically, in The Lion's Mouth: " 'We do not cry because we are sorry,' I remember parroting in those days, 'we are sorry because we cry.' How convenient that behaviorist maxim for an unkind daughter who could look on her mother's tears with indifference!"

Raine escaped from it, but could never forgive herself for having fallen into the materialist ideology. She is too hard on herself. It is a long journey from the natural to the transcendent mind. It is a terrible thing, the "loveless and beautyless." Yet is it not also terrible, from the other side, "to fall into the hands of the living God?" It is really this "fall," or purging, that is the story of The Lion's Mouth.

The relationship with Gavin was never anything other than platonic -- carnal desire being "a small thing to forgo for the sake of deeper love." Gavin's life was "in ruins" -- she thought she could help him. He was homosexual, so he said -- something of which she could only silently disapprove. Both proud of caste -- "he as an aristocrat, I as a poet" -- they shared the love of nature through participation, common memories of childhood in the moors of Northumberland and, not the least, the English tradition in poetry. Kathleen believed that the One Life -- or, as she more often put it, the One Consciousness, had brought them together. This inner certitude of spiritual kinship with another soul was given and reinforced through many events and means, small and large. And yet this same inner certitude is baffled, certainly in the extreme, when the One Consciousness that seems to bring two souls together forces them apart. It is no easy thing to wrestle with the transcendent dimension, as our forebears Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew. "Contradiction is the instrument of transcendence," said Simone Weil. Or it may be that the Transcendence creates contradictions which we must be our instructors as, indeed, we become their instruments when we act. But it is not easy, and pondering on contradiction and what, against all reason and all love, should not be, (that is, the end of love) -- it can nearly break the soul. Kathleen Raine quotes St. Theresa -- that it is no wonder the Almighty has so few friends, He treats them so badly!

Kathleen and Gavin once both dreamed of the Tree of Life: "…the only truth of my life had been the truth of my poetry to the living imagination; and Gavin, as it seemed, had come to me by a miraculous act of the daimons themselves, unsought, not even wished for." For two apparently unmarriageable souls, the relationship seemed made in heaven, and Kathleen became, or rather thought she became, the woman in his life.

Perhaps because of the nature of the relationship from the beginning, there does not seem to have been a time when Kathleen made a clear declaration of her feelings to Gavin. (Gavin's declarations, if they were such, as described by Kathleen, might be interpreted as proofs of devotion or as the inspirations of the moment. Perhaps they were both, or neither.) I do not know if people today make any sort of declaration when they fall in love. I sometimes wonder if people today even fall in love at all. But with such a "traditionalist" like Kathleen Raine, the omission of the declaration is surprising. To make a declaration is to seek permission to love, and the worst assumption is to believe that love creates its own permission.

Thus, in The Lion's Mouth the dramatic action, so to speak, consists in the effort to harmonize the truths of the imagination with the truths that help to incarnate the real. The tragic flaw of the heroine is that truth does not succeed in becoming incarnational, which is why, when it is experienced by Kathleen, -- when Gavin finally speaks his piece to her, at the end -- it comes as a Judgment. And this judgment is not that of "Behold, I have set before thee an open door," but rather, "What I have shut let no man open."

No doubt to have spoken such a declaration would have been difficult. Such words need to be brief, explicit, generous -- and then buried at once. There was a moment, early in the narrative, when Kathleen recalls that incumbent upon anyone who has beheld the heavenly vision is the obligation --- "to walk away from it." Renunciation in the physical world is possession -- no, enjoyment, in the spiritual -- the laws of the spiritual being opposite to those of the mundane world. Kathleen knew the teaching but she could not heed it. She had, after all, already renounced any hope of carnal union. Yet she hoped for the emotional or spiritual union, and she was not aware until later -- after it was all over -- of how far she had fallen into a "demanding emotionality." She never could stop reproaching herself for "betraying the Immortal." [2}

There are other people who come into the story -- Sonia and George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Willa and Edwin Muir, Canetti. It was Canetti who warned her of the abyss (the abyss from which Kathleen believed she had the power to rescue Gavin) -- "Kathleen, Gavin for you is the abyss."

But even amidst her sorrows of a love that could not be, Kathleen remained "…too proud… to join the universal whine of the plebeian sense," and blame the government or the state of society for her troubles. As she put it in Defending Ancient Springs, a book of essays, "Visionaries are not iconoclasts." Those who have traveled in the "realms of gold," as Keats put it, have no yearning to tear down the social order. For they know how long the journey to the vision, and how much education, experience, attention, the work of generations goes into the making of a human being capable of it.

As for rights: "… have we any, within this mysterious universe?" Her values remained those of the initiate and the visionary, aristocrats among men. She re-reads Dostoevsky's The Possessed and acknowledges, with sorrow, that it describes England in the 1960's. The issue will come down to this: either atheistic humanism or the Sophia Perennis: "The terrible thing is that spiritual realities should have ceased to be premises." In the leaf-fall of civilization, she says, "It is my generation which has seen the end."

What is the significance of the "lion's mouth"? The phrase came from the poet St.-John Perse, who tells Kathleen -- "Il faut que vous mettez la tête dans la gueule du lion." It is the place where, she learns, freedom is to be found. On a visit to Rome she ponders the dungeon where St. Paul was kept in chains. The letters of St. Paul caused a civilization to come into being -- "solely through the triumph of imagination over power." This is very good. But elsewhere she wonders: "Is not civilization . . . the empire of the human imagination?" I think not. Owen Barfield -- who makes a brief appearances in these pages, along with his friends C.S. Lewis and A.C. Harwood -- reminds us in his important book Saving the Appearances, that "the imagination is not synonymous with the good." And for the same reason it cannot be synonymous with civilization. Imagination may be the spark, but it is not the fuel, of civilization. For civilization, almost by definition, is a state of society that has learned to harness the energy of the imagination. Civilization is the attempt, always more or less successful, to fit restraint to the twin forces of what is available and what is freely chosen, i.e., imagined. Restraints can be irksome unless they are felt to proceed from something creatively necessary; but without restraint there can be none of the delight of exploring other minds. Civilization is above all exchange of mental energy. Barbarians do not converse.

Yet what in human life is freely chosen? Very little, which may be why civilization is so difficult to get started and why, like the cultures of yogurt or sourdough, a little bit of past civilization is needed to start a new one. And yet it is true that civilization is like a work of art. When the work is genuine and reaches into the spiritual dimensions, the result can seem effortless, organic, natural. This effortlessness was not given to Kathleen in her relation with Gavin Maxwell:

"If I choose remorse

Of a heart inured to pain

It is because forgiveness would revive

Joy and love

To suffer all again."

But in her willingness "to suffer all again" in the writing of this narrative, Kathleen Raine, makes tellingly personal the mystery, the anguish, and the wonder of transcendence.

Notes. [1] "Ring of bright water" -- from one of Kathleen's poems, "The Marriage of Psyche":

"He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water

Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,

He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter

Broadcast on the swift river...

From her Collected Poems, 1935-1980 p. 67. I love the repetitions and reduplications of 'ring,' and also the "glitter...broadcast on the swift river."

[2] Betrayal of the Immortal: cf. Blake, from Milton: "O Immortal, how were we led to war the wars of Death?"

[March 6, 2000]

My relationship to the works of Owen Barfield began thirty years ago with Poetic Diction. This book changed my life, but more in the sense that it strengthened and affirmed the direction my life had already begun to take, rather than initiating a new direction. The deepest and most interior dimension of my life consisted in writing, or trying to write, poetry. Poetic Diction, coming into my life when I was about 21, marked the end of my adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. With Poetic Diction I began to reflect, not just about poetry in itself, but about what it was to try writing it. It was a way of reflecting on my past without reflecting on myself.

I began to apprentice myself to the art of poetry in my early teens. There was an old cedar tree in the woods near our house that I used to spend much time in, and if the lines

"While a child I remember a tree

Whose dying branches spoke to me,"

are not great verse, at least they indicate an approach to the subject. The idea of mortality and the passing of things in time may be among the oldest ever to have dawned in a human mind. Maybe they are the source of poetry itself.

The cedar tree represents the natural world, but what about the human world? In the late 1950’s fairs, carnivals, and freak shows still circulated occasionally, and a poem I wrote called "The Fair" tries to capture this experience. This poem, which I must have written and re-written hundreds of times, epitomizes the poetic labors of my adolescence as well as the darker, sadder, more grotesque aspects of human existence. The images of the Fat Lady, the Siamese Twins, the Fire Swallower, and the Midgets became an emblem for the heartlessness at the core of human affliction. They were things to gaze at, a part of the passing show – things about which we feel no participation or involvement, and which demand no involvement or participation from us. These creatures of the Fair embodied the world of externality most opposed to poetry.

If the natural world of the cedar tree epitomized pure feeling – the sense of being alive amidst the passing of time – "The Fair" symbolized the social world as pure artificiality.

With this kind of basic training in poetry under my belt by the end of my second decade, I was in a susceptible state for the green-cover 1964 McGraw-Hill edition of Poetic Diction which grabbed my eye during a bookstore browse in 1968. I still recall the feeling: the book, plucking it from the shelf, away from its fellows, into my life.

Poetic Diction is an epistemological book. It is concerned with the nature of knowledge, of how we come to know. More precisely, it addresses the issue, not so much of what we know, but how our knowledge is "added to" – how it is increased or enhanced. Thus, Poetic Diction is an inquiry into the nature of poetry qua nature of meaning qua theory of knowledge. Barfield makes the argument that poetry or poetic "method" (the diction and special techniques of poetry, the use of metaphor and imagination, etc.) is an essential means to the enhancement of knowledge. Hence poetry ultimately stands under the aegis or discipline of Truth.

Here is a serious business! Poetic Diction became for me a true Commencement Address, to go into the world and "Become Active! Develop Your Thinking!"

Of course, little of this entered into my actual awareness at the time. Age 21 is not much of anywhere on life’s journey, although, as an age, it is quite certain it has arrived at least somewhere. This shell of certainty gives one a protection against the shocks of life to come. For most of us, it seems, the formation of this shell is the parting gift of childhood, and nothing much more is added afterwards. This is what is called life – this is what life is imagined to be.

The book I purchased that day at the Noonday Bookshop in Charlottesville was a ticking time bomb against such a view of life. Little did I know I carried home with me a revolutionary manifesto! And it was all the more revolutionary for being so scholarly, so circumspect, and so conservative. Conservatism has to do with the maintenance of standards and traditions, and Owen Barfield exemplified the best of these British humanistic traditions in the carefulness and circumspection of his writing. (Indeed, genuine thinkers may be recognized as much by what they refrain from saying as by what they say.) But Poetic Diction is not primarily concerned with tradition as such.

I can only frame my understanding in the language of a later time. In time I learned what a rare, novel, and radical (in the sense of "root-bearing") message was Barfield’s.

If there is any dogma of poetic practice in the second half of the 20th century, it is the idea that Poetry is a form of Self-Expression. But there is a universe of difference between Poetry as Self-Expression and Poetry as a discipline in the practice of knowledge – Poetry as a Means to Truth. For to say that poetry-writing is a form of self-expression is to make the self the only ruling standard. Such a concept of art assumes that complacency is the highest value. Self is it, and self is sufficient. For many modern poets this self-sufficiency became a prison. One thinks of the gifted but pitiable Sylvia Plath and the other poets, like Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, who followed her into what grimly became identified as the "suicide school." These poets followed the idea of self-hood to its ultimate and, as it were, logical conclusion: if Self is all there is, there can be no Self.

There is a poetic analogy for this: if a word is alone, it barely exists. For it is in the nature of words to combine in contexts, and these contexts in turn bring out differing shades of meaning. Remarking aphoristically that "a man cannot utter a dozen words without wielding the creations of a hundred named and unnamed poets," Barfield laid at the door of the poetic task a supremely important function -- that of the making of meaning. [1]

2.

The poets of the confessional or self-expression school were hampered by other notions as well. The theory of confessionalism or self-expression comes wrapped up in a number of trimmings which have all become a part of our fabric of life. Perhaps there is no such thing as a "pure theory." We are all in the process of living out the ideas floating in the environment. Theories, habits, tendencies, are all connected. Or as Barfield once put it, speaking of a sailboat: "Every rope is either accidentally or purposefully connected with every other rope." [2]

One of the theories connected with self-expression might be called "Emersonianism." The second can be called Emotivism. And the third might be called Linguistic Incapacity. I will discuss each of these, very briefly.

Emersonianism. Briefly, Emersonianism is the deformation that happened to English Romanticism when it came to America. The Wordsworthian contemplation of Nature by means of the twin allies of Memory and Imagination became inflated, with Emerson, into a mere rounded hollow – the "transparent eyeball." The Self is inflated while at the same time it is believed to have direct access to Reality – or, what amounts to the same thing, the Self is the only reality there is. Society is Out; Nature is In. But this Nature, in Romantic thought, is not just a Garden of Eden which mankind, having lost, may find again. English Romanticism made the journey to Germany, and brought back wheelbarrows full of German thinking. In the laboratory of German Romanticism, Nature grew to philosophic proportions. But of this philosophy, little made it across the Atlantic. Emerson and Whitman turned it all into Enthusiasm: inflated, gorgeous, and at times even lucid, but containing no principle of check, limitation, constraint, self-discipline, counterweight. The words even sound harsh to us, so accustomed as we are to the Emersonianism of our own day. Enthusiastic self-assertion in place of thought has blended very well into television as a medium. So deeply has sentimentalism insinuated itself into American life, that someone who tries to think clearly and unsentimentally almost sounds un-American. For this, we have Emerson to thank.

(ii) Emotivism. Emotivism or emotionalism is the doctrine that raw emotion is more genuine and authentic than thought, or that somehow emotion is confined or hampered in the presence of thinking. Confessionalism is thus allied to Emersonianism. It would not do to examine too closely the idea that the Self is the All of the Real, and perhaps it is this distaste for thinking that animates Confessionalism. Because Barfield’s poetic theory discourages confessionalism is not to say that it discourages feeling. Barfield wrote on feeling in poetry: "…the kind of inspired thinking which I have attempted to depict, assumes the utmost intensity of feeling, as a necessary pre-requisite. There could be no other way of reaching it. It can only begin when feeling has become too powerful to remain only personal, so that the individual is compelled . . . to THINK in reality…" (Poetic Diction, p. 13)

(iii) Linguistic Incapacity. Today hardly any one believes that language can tell the truth, or if it should aspire to tell the truth – or even, if there is any truth to tell. Advertising, ideology, deconstruction, linguistic analysis, patriarchalism, positivism, power relations, speciesism, science: one could go down the list of all the things that have contributed to the devaluation of the role of verbal language. The magi of the media world -- those who can manipulate words for the sake of the concealment of true realities -- will find themselves well reimbursed. The poet, whose task is to build a structure of words in which realities may be revealed, not concealed, finds himself very much alone and out of company. The loneliness may cause him to shirk his task, to join the ranks of the concealers by scorning the idea of truth in poetry.

Distrust of language is no friend of the poet, however. "There is a tendency today to regard the physical picture of the world as the real one, and any other picture as a comparatively illusory or merely relative one." [3] The critic George Panichas calls this view "empirical fascism." The critic William Walsh says that at the root of these anti-language notions is the idea that language is an "invalid surrogate for experience:" "But the discreteness of experience and expression is a philosophic fiction of a most unconvincing sort. Experience completely free of expression, lacking even latent reference to language, is an experience utterly uninformed by meaning and it is not only unknown but completely inconceivable as human experience." [4] It is the poet’s job to make the best use of his tool, which is language. If he lives in an age which devalues language, his work becomes harder. And yet, if he succeeds in breaking through the ideological molds of his time, his accomplishment is all the more significant.

Emersonianism, Emotivism, and Linguistic Incapacity have made the work of modern poets more difficult. William Logan summarizes many of the tendencies of the self-expression school in a recent review. [5] Such poetry is, he says, a "public relations exercise," "smug," "condescending," using "reckless phrasing" and "clumsy typographical inventions," often "stiff with cant" with an "oppressive weight," "naked interiors," "airless self-importance," and "frigid emptiness" . . .

By now the reader gets the point. Many of these descriptive phrases, it is true, could be applied to the second-rate poetry of any age. But in our age, it seems, never has mediocrity fooled so many; the very tools of discernment are lacking. And there is a particular and fundamental reason for this. The idea which is expressed in the dictum by the Irish poet George William Russell ("AE") that, "a poem is the most intricately organized form of thought," has simply found little following in modernity. And it shows. [6]

3.

How can modernity find the poetic principle?

Barfield postulates two principles: the rational, which is conscious but cannot create; and the poetic, which creates but cannot make conscious. In his discussion of the historical development of poetry, Barfield acknowledges the predominance of the poetic in ancient languages, and the rational in modern languages. Speaking of these ‘ancient unities’ of language and poetry, he says

"The primary meanings were given, as it were, by Nature, but the very condition of their being given was that they could not at the same time be apprehended in full consciousness; they could not be known, but only experienced, or lived." (p. 102)

The modern poet, in contrast to the ancient, is thrown back on his own resources: "Where does the modern poet find again the poetic principle that is dying out of language? Where? Nowhere but in himself. The same creativity . . . is now to be found within his own consciousness." (p.107)

Here we are again, back to the Self! Barfield hastens to add: "I have said ‘within his own consciousness,’ but this expression, too, is misleading unless it is understood historically."

What is going on here? Having just spent much of this paper in demolishing the notion of Self as the source of poetry, how can I turn around and say essentially that? Here is seemingly a complete contradiction.

Let us consider our two starting points: the fact of Nature and the physical world, with its constraints; or the fact of the human, social world, with its – often arbitrary-seeming—conventions.

In the beginning of this essay I pointed to these two worlds in my early poetic efforts: the old cedar tree which represented the natural world, and "The Fair" which represented Society.

But is there a third rail? The world we actually live in is the Historical World, which partakes of the natural, physical world as of the human, social world, but is distinctive and different from both. Where the natural world impresses us by its constraints, and human society by its glorious aspirations and endless follies, the Historical World lays upon our minds certain recurrent notions respecting Continuity and Change. The concept "Continuity" cannot be developed unless one possesses a corresponding notion of "Change" or "Originality." (Continuity without originality would be stagnation. Originality without continuity would be a self-cancellation, lacking any means to become integrated: "idiocy" or "insanity.")

Thus Barfield’s doctrine of the poetic imagination is historical precisely because it is concerned with the original – the origination of meanings. To study "originality in history" – that is, to study history – is to involve one, sooner or later, with a "theory of poetry" – or something much like it.

And part of that "historical" consideration about the poetic principle and the Self is that the Self, too, must be understood historically. The Self, as a matter of fact, is a rather recent invention. Perhaps it is even something of a "poetic" invention. For, before there was the Self there was the clan, the tribe, the city-state, the geographic-metaphysical cosmos itself. Selfhood only very gradually emerged – or rather, "contracted" – from this cosmic womb of being. To study poetry can be a way of studying the stages of this contraction or condensation. Gaining "historical consciousness" in this way becomes for the poet an act of breathing, an act of re-animating the soul in his Self. Such is the new theory of Inspiration for the Modern Age, the poetic principle of modernity.

But the modern poet, having no concept of this historical "contraction," identifies the hard core of his selfhood as all-that-is. If he has not read Barfield, no wonder he feels desperation.

5.

In Poetic Diction Barfield does not address the "sonic shadows" – the tonality, or music, of verse. This is perhaps a surprising omission. He is after bigger fish to fry: the metaphysical underpinnings of the poeticizing consciousness.

The thesis is startling enough: poetry can lead to a "felt change of consciousness" and thus to an enhancement of knowledge. "Knowledge" he defines as "the ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies." More expansively, he says: "… the perception of resemblance, the demand for unity, is at all levels the proper activity of the imagination, or – concrete thinking." (Poetic Diction, p. 25; italics mine.) Note in particular that the activity of imagination presupposes the demand for unity and that it results in "concrete thinking." This concrete thinking and demand for unity may be summarized as "participant knowledge," that is, a knowledge which is of vital importance to the thinker, a knowledge in which the thinker had a vital part in creating. It is the role of true metaphor to help communicate this participant knowledge, as opposed to the mere placement together of "disjoined impressions." Metaphor makes us aware of our citizenship in the cosmos.

This role of poetry in mediating truth and knowledge is perhaps Barfield’s most radical premise. His lifelong friendship with C.S. Lewis partook of numerous discussions on this very point. The monograph published by Dr. Lionel Adey, "C.S. Lewis’s ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield" [7] recapitulates many of these intellectual contentions. As Adey remarks, although Lewis dedicated his 1936 book, The Allegory of Love, to Barfield – calling him "the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers" – this did not prevent Lewis from arguing, at times strenuously, against Barfield’s conviction that the imagination can lead to truth. Lewis, says Adey, insisted that the imagination conveys meaning, not truth – although his marvellous Narnia books and science fiction novels essentially place Lewis, as author, in the Barfieldian camp.

Barfield’s Poetic Diction (first published in 1928) was dedicated to Lewis – with the motto, "Opposition is true friendship." Is the imagination a way to truth or meaning? This question is important to Poetic Diction, because it is only if imagination, and by extension, poetry and the other arts, have a role in the perception and maintenance of truth, that any standard other than that of mere personal taste may be applied to them. The truth-value in imagination has repercussions in the human community. To preserve the idea of truth in imagination is to attempt to prevent the wholesale retreat, on the part of the literate and imaginative sectors of society, into purely private worlds. It is the attempt to preserve a res publica, a Republic of Soul – to suggest that yes, the imagination is an important element in our common life.

But the key here is "preserve." If something has to be preserved, by definition it cannot live on its own. Hence it becomes ever more difficult even to "preserve" a culture of any kind. The loss of the idea of truth, reason and metaphysical purpose in the life of the imagination creates a situation in which people are less and less able even to "express themselves." Poetic Diction shows that the way goes beyond even the heroic labors of preservation. The real task is re-inspiration, and this can only be done by people of highly developed thinking power joined with the imaginative faculty. I believe this book is the first harbinger in the 20th century of what, in the 21st, will become a widespread need: that is, to seek, once again, for the principles of inspired reason, and lay out the conditions of its appearance and influence in human affairs. Barfield’s Poetic Diction is the first sortie in what will someday become the strategy for a "bardic" culture: the reanimation of life from within.

NOTES

[1]cf function: "…anyone who will trouble to get out a Shakespeare Concordance and dwell imaginatively on the number and variety of Shakespeare’s use of the word function (which is not found in our language at all until about fifty years before he began to write) cannot, I believe, fail to feel, with a new amazement, the creative working of his genius, and to feel it, not merely by inference from its results, but as taking a kind of part in the very process." Poetic Diction, p. 130.

[2] Courtesy: Jeanne Bergen

[3]From the "Introduction" to Modern Poetry, 2nd ed., edited by Maynard Mack, Leonard Dean, and William Frost (New Jersey, 1950).

[4]William Walsh, The Use of Imagination, New York, 1959, p. 236.

[5] "Vanity Fair," in The New Criterion, June, 1999.

[6]Honorable exception should be made to the views of poet-critic Yvor Winters, who insisted on the role of logic and reason in poetry. Abhorring free association and emotional excess, Winters believed that a "work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth." See David Yezzi’s "The Seriousness of Yvor Winters," The New Criterion, June, 1997.)

[7] Monograph Series #14, University of Victoria English Literary Studies, 1978) Adey terms Barfield’s contribution to the debate an "attractive blend of philology and metaphysics."