Chapter Seven: Orient and Immortal Wheat
The tea-rooms Barfield had mentioned were in a wooden bungalow with a veranda, one of a number of small wooden buildings beside an unsightly petrol station on the north side of the road, just past Silbury hill. Despite their inauspicious appearance the bungalow, at least, was welcoming, and it wasn’t too long before the three friends found themselves ensconced in a sunny spot looking over the road and the green fields of newly sprouted wheat opposite, and enjoying a pot of tea.
A couple of farm labourers and another small group of walkers were the only other clientele on the veranda, though there were other workmen seated in the shaded part of the building, laughing and playing cards.
Barfield sipped his tea and looked longingly out over the forecourt.
‘I used to stop here for tea on my trips down to Cornwall when still a student.’ He said. ‘Those were lovely times; if only I’d appreciated how lovely at the time; I’m sure I did, but I think it takes a period of hard work and drudgery to give these things perspective.’ His face had dropped at the mention of drudgery.
‘What took you to Cornwall?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Folk dancing…’ Barfield smiled again, seeming to drift off in to some lovely memory, ‘and unrequited love…’
‘Ah,’ Lewis said, with a wink; ‘the one love I didn’t dare mention in ‘The Four Loves’’
‘Blissful torture, at the time, I can assure you. But I learned a great lesson from it, probably one of the greatest of my life!’ Barfield said, stirring his tea.
‘Being?’ asked Tolkien.
‘Well. When you have been in love, and given so much of yourself, and that love hasn’t been returned you have two choices: you can pine after the girl forever, or you do something rather more pragmatic, like sublimate those feelings into something else… you see, looking back on it I can see that my love for the girl was, I suppose, a love of life, really – or at least the possibilities life had still to offer me. I was stricken for a good while – very low – not really able to move on – it was a great blow at the time - until I had this moment of realisation that I could fall in love again; and I did; with nature, with life – with the world!’
‘With Maud?’
‘Yes…’ Owen said, haltingly, at the mention of his wife’s name. He seemed to shift uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before he resumed:
‘I do wonder whether anyone who’s never been in love can really fully appreciate the ecstasy that comes from it. I’m talking of that sense of sheer awe one feels in the presence of the beloved. Love, I suppose, romantic love, is a force of nature that just sweeps all else away. It is a primordial, magical, experience!’
‘But ultimately illusory.’ Lewis said, dunking a biscuit into his cup.
‘Why so?’ Barfield countered.
‘Because it is transient; I believe it almost a trick of nature to capture a man and fool him into marriage.’
‘So says an unmarried man’ observed Tolkien, wryly.
Barfield arched an eyebrow. ‘Does Nature perform tricks, Jack? Your attitude is typical of modern man’s distrust of Dame Natura which sees himself not only as separate from Her, but above Her, believing that She is some evil temptress!’
He took a hasty sip of tea and continued.
‘To reduce Romantic love to a biological ‘trick’ is to demean one of the most liberating of emotions. Look at the art that love has produced: would we have ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had never seen Beatrice? Are you dismissing The Inferno because it was founded on love?’
Lewis was frowning. ‘Founded on love it may have been,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful of biscuit, ‘but not Romantic love. Romantic love, my dear Owen, cannot be separated from sex, and sexual desire is transitory...Beatrice Portinari was 9 years old when Dante first saw her, if you think this was based on romantic, which is sexual, love then we are on dangerous ground… ’
A couple on a nearby table seemed to shift uncomfortably at Lewis’s words.
‘…Dante’s work was not based on lust;’ Lewis continued ‘Beatrice for him was a spiritual ideal rather than a flesh and blood woman.’
‘Absolute poppycock, Jack!’ Barfield snorted, ‘For one, Dante himself was the same age as her when they met – so let’s not sully his love with any hints of paedophilia - and for another, Beatrice was precisely who she was and no other, not a symbol, nor an allegory for some ‘higher’ or ‘purer’ state of caritas: she was simply a beautiful green-eyed Florentine girl who turned the head of an intelligent and sensitive young man, and thereby opened his eyes to the beauty of the world!’
‘Are you talking about Beatrice or your green-eyed Cornish girl?’ Jack said, playfully, seemingly amused by Barfield’s fervour that had brought a flush to the taller man’s smooth cheeks.
‘Both! What is this delight of being in love but an experience of joy, of connection with the world? And what is poetry but the communication of such rapture?! One cannot read Dante, or any other great poet, without feeling it!’ Barfield’s eyes flashed with passion, seeming to drink in the landscape which no doubt was fuelling his ideas with nostalgic memories.
He paused to take another sip of tea, expecting a rebuff from Lewis that never came. The latter merely shook his head slowly, at a loss to even attempt to argue against what he thought as erroneous, and took another biscuit from the plate.
Just then a rumbling outside the veranda announced the arrival of a vehicle; the workmen in the shadows of the café looked and murmured to each-other as a strange machine, seeming half car and half tank, with caterpillar tracks for back wheels pulled up at the garage forecourt a little past the tea-house.
One of the workmen on the nearby table muttered to his colleague; and his companion guffawed at what must have been a private joke. A small, handsome man in a long and well-tailored pale overcoat and cap could be seen chatting animatedly to the petrol attendant.
Tolkien pushed his empty cup away from him and leaned across the table,
‘I like your view, Owen, that the poet is one who sees the rapture of existence and seeks to tell of it to his blinkered fellow man.’
Barfield smiled appreciatively at Tolkien’s attempts to steer the conversation back on line.
Tolkien carried on: ‘…that poetry is like some magical potion that allows you to see things differently, to see things shining with qualities otherwise hidden from us…’
‘It’s as I’ve said before,’ Barfield replied, ‘the poet sees the world as others do not, and he seeks to communicate his experience in the only way now available to him: poetic metaphor.’
‘Why won’t prose suffice?’ Lewis asked, his eyes flitting from the strange vehicle momentarily back to Barfield.
‘You’re being deliberately obstinate now, Jack – we’ve talked about this many times before! Prose is the language of the modern everyday world; a world at odds with the poetic vision. The use of poetic metaphor restores man to his original state of participation in nature. Think of Traherne’s beautiful phrase ‘orient and immortal wheat’…’
He waved his hand in the direction of the sun-drenched sloping hills on the opposite side of the road, green with freshly sprung blades of new-born wheat still not yet much more than a foot in height.
‘When I think of those lines I see things differently; it’s as if I’m no longer looking at a field of corn, a few weeks old; what was pleasant greenery newly sprung from the soil becomes something terrible and sublime: for those shoots grow from a buried seed, and those seeds in turn were the ears upon last year’s shoots… where does one begin and the other end? The answer is that surely they are somehow one. And if last year’s corn sprouted from the ears of the previous years, and so on, ad infinitum, we are left with the startling truth that yon green field thither is not covered in fresh new life, but a life thousands upon thousands of years old, which each year takes on a new skin, as it were, and at the end of each year casts it off so that what the farmers fill their barns with at harvest is but the sloughed skin, really, of an organism far, far older than mankind himself. Those plants, there, are in reality the same plants that were brought here from the Near East by the first farmers thousands of years ago, whose form has remained constant, though the substance through which that form is expressed has changed: Orient and immortal indeed.’
Tolkien stared at the verdant hillside, baulking at Barfield’s musings – and for a moment he saw, literally saw, a difference – what was a rolling peaceful green valley was suddenly transformed so that its sides were no longer inert, seeming dead compared to the skylarks that flew over them, but alive in a way he had never before perceived – the leaves of the wheat became upward-thrusting scales of a giant plumed serpent which covered the entire valley, scales that would be sloughed off at harvest, only to grow anew… a serpent that had wended its way to this valley some 6,000 years ago having travelled thousands of miles from its birthplace in the river valleys of the Near East… ancient, orient, immortal… dying each winter, buried in the black earth then rising again in the spring…
Barfield lit his pipe and continued. ‘That is what Traherne’s poetic phrase suggests to me, and carries far more meaning than the single word ‘corn’ or ‘wheat’ could ever do – for in it we start to get a glimpse of what early man must have seen when he was still close to Nature, not alienated from Her as he is today.’
‘A sense of the true nature of things?’ Tolkien suggested.
‘A sense of the divinity of things!’ Barfield replied, ‘for ancient man the corn was the body of a god – not in a quaint symbolic way such as our folk image of ‘John Barleycorn’ but as something real and experienced; to the Egyptians the crops were the green-skinned Osiris, torn apart, buried and resurrected each year – later echoed in Jesus as the Bread of Life, dying and rising again…’
Lewis coughed. ‘No, Owen; those earlier vegetation gods were a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ’s life was the metaphor made fact, the earlier vegetation gods were the echo…’
Owen waved his hand dismissing his friend’s interruption. ‘We’re getting away from my point – what I’m saying is that to ancient man corn was an expression of a divinity immanent in all things, man included; if you think about it, the very idea of a vegetation god presents a view of reality worlds apart from our own: this wasn’t a world where the Creator was separate from his creation, and mankind created as a lord above all other animals – no – this was a world in which nature itself was the body of the god, and man, kin to all other creatures, was part of this divinity too. If we saw all as Holy we would be less prone to trivialise, exploit and destroy our world…’
He stopped for a moment while a waitress came and leaned over and refilled their tea-pot with boiling water, avoiding all eye contact with these strange university types, friends, perhaps, of the ‘Marmalade Man’, she thought, her eyes flitting to the dapper gentlemen at the petrol pump. She coloured, feeling suddenly awkward. Maybe these were some of those friends? The ones the Red Indian gardener had told her about, with their strange rituals and the women they shipped in for the night and packed off to London by taxi the next day…
‘Imagine a world where each and every word you uttered expressed the divinity inherent in all things…’ Barfield continued, adding a mouthed a thank you to the waitress, who smiled back awkwardly and left the table; ‘how different would we look at that field if we called wheat ‘Osiris’ or ‘Persephone’ and saw, really saw, it as divine? Well this is exactly what the ancients saw; we dwell in a world where one says ‘the wheat is like Osiris’, but they would have said the equivalent of ‘the wheat is Osiris’: their language would seem to us as pure poetry; their experience of the world poetic, mystic. But it was not meant as a deceit. It expressed a truth.’
Tolkien nodded in agreement and poured each of the men more tea. How wonderful it was to hear this man talk. He was eloquent and intelligent – such a waste that he should have become a lawyer and not an academic! He has the best mind of all of us, Tolkien thought. Lewis’s attention, however, seemed to be on the man at the petrol pumps.
Barfield continued: ‘We no longer see that way because we have fallen from that original Edenic state – Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becoming aware of their nakedness is a metaphor for mankind losing that state of participation with nature and realising his difference from the animals; his expulsion from Eden is brought about by the development of his sense of self-consciousness - which alienates us from nature – to use the image of the dismembered corn-god, our modern mind is like the evil brother Seth who divides and separates the divine world into disconnected objects, tearing it limb from limb: a world once experienced as divine is divided up, categorised, its former connectivity broken, the divinity killed; but the poet is one who can, like the goddess Isis, re-assemble the pieces of this dismembered god and bring him back to life: to literally re-member the god, the original state of pre-fall unity, where every object sang out with its participation in the divine; so that man is once more at one with the birds, beasts, fish and trees…’ Barfield’s voice had risen to a crescendo of excitement, his hands emphasising every word. ‘…for mankind still abides in Eden – indeed he never left it – for Eden is around us, but we do not see it!’ he brought his palm down hard on the table-top to emphasise each of the last six syllables, rattling the tea-set and causing the people on the nearby table to look round again, nervously.
Tolkien stared into Barfield’s ecstatic face – I’m sure you see it, Owen, he thought – as the latter gazed open eyed with rapture at the dance of the windblown corn. He had never seen Owen so animated, so energised; stirred up, no doubt by memories of youth and love. Tolkien cleared his throat, a little wary of breaking the spell his friend had fallen under.
‘You know, Owen, that one of my poetic creations, Tom Bombadil, whose adventures I recall reading to you all at an Inklings a few years back now, I’d imagine – well, I didn’t say it at the time but Bombadil, who is really the spirit of our fast disappearing Oxford and Berkshire countryside, a kind of genius loci, was in no small measure influenced by your theories. He speaks in verse, for he exists before the fall of language, before speech became prose; he is the Eldest; he speaks to the badgers and the trees and the barrow-wights; I imagine Bombadil to possess what today man can only glimpse in myth and poetry; he can talk to the birds, like Siegfried who gains that ability by drinking the blood of the dragon Fafnir...’
Barfield nodded. ‘When I try to picture that original state of unity I always imagine Orpheus with his magical lyre that could tame the wild beasts, and make the trees and even the stones dance about him in a circle.’ Barfield suggested. ‘Orpheus, like Osiris, is torn to pieces, yet his head goes on singing – you see, despite being rent apart the voice of the god can still be heard, singing of the unity of all things, remembering Eden before the Fall, if men but listen…. Poets hear it….lovers hear it…’
‘This mystic state of unity, you know - it all sounds rather like being drunk.’ Lewis commented with a wink; suddenly back in the conversation now the vehicle and its dapper driver had pulled away.
Tolkien smiled.
‘You have a point, Jack: think of all those Norse legends that tell of drinking the mead or ale of poetry; for in intoxication man achieves something akin to that sense of belonging, does he not, and forgets his alienation? Behind every alcoholic, I suspect, lays a poet!’
‘Well, the reverse is certainly the case!’ said Lewis.
‘Yourself included?’ asked Barfield.
Lewis didn’t seem amused by Barfield’s quip, instead his eyes seemed to pale a little.
‘Sadly I think I gave up the urge to become a poet long ago. I now seek solace in my cups.’ He smiled weakly. ‘The blood of John Barleycorn gives me courage bold, not inspiration.’
Tolkien understood, now, why Lewis had seemed so uninterested in what Barfield had been saying; it was like rubbing salt into a wound – here was Lewis who in his youth had wished to be a poet above all things, but who had not received the recognition he had really deserved, and who was now reduced to writing prose – while Barfield was extolling the virtues of the poetic vision; Lewis must have felt somehow unworthy.
‘In which case,’ Lewis was continuing, ‘let us hope the beer at the Red Lion isn’t varnish!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Barfield laughed, ‘Though if it’s too good the long road to Calne will begin to lose its appeal…’
‘Well,’ Lewis said, ‘if the stones of Avebury circle begin to dance about us like they’ve been enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre we’ll know it’s time to down our cups and move on…’
Tolkien was nodding. ‘It’s funny; I had this image in my head then, when Owen was speaking: I had initially thought it was the dismembered body of Orpheus on the banks of the river Hebrus and his severed head floating down the river - but instead of some Mediterranean stream all I could see was the Kennet and instead of Orpheus’s head bobbing amongst the sticklebacks it was the image of a woman – her hair spread out like Ophelia. It was so persistent that I’m sure my mind was trying to tell me something: I’m sure it has something to do with this landscape, though quite what I don’t yet know…’
‘Well let us pray the mead of poetry inspires an answer, Tollers!’ Lewis beamed, used to Tolkien’s ‘flights of fancy’. ‘For myself that tea has restored my vigour; I’m a little too full for climbing the hill, now, if I’m honest – but a constitutional to Orpheus’s dancing stones itself seems a fair prospect.’
The tea-rooms Barfield had mentioned were in a wooden bungalow with a veranda, one of a number of small wooden buildings beside an unsightly petrol station on the north side of the road, just past Silbury hill. Despite their inauspicious appearance the bungalow, at least, was welcoming, and it wasn’t too long before the three friends found themselves ensconced in a sunny spot looking over the road and the green fields of newly sprouted wheat opposite, and enjoying a pot of tea.
A couple of farm labourers and another small group of walkers were the only other clientele on the veranda, though there were other workmen seated in the shaded part of the building, laughing and playing cards.
Barfield sipped his tea and looked longingly out over the forecourt.
‘I used to stop here for tea on my trips down to Cornwall when still a student.’ He said. ‘Those were lovely times; if only I’d appreciated how lovely at the time; I’m sure I did, but I think it takes a period of hard work and drudgery to give these things perspective.’ His face had dropped at the mention of drudgery.
‘What took you to Cornwall?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Folk dancing…’ Barfield smiled again, seeming to drift off in to some lovely memory, ‘and unrequited love…’
‘Ah,’ Lewis said, with a wink; ‘the one love I didn’t dare mention in ‘The Four Loves’’
‘Blissful torture, at the time, I can assure you. But I learned a great lesson from it, probably one of the greatest of my life!’ Barfield said, stirring his tea.
‘Being?’ asked Tolkien.
‘Well. When you have been in love, and given so much of yourself, and that love hasn’t been returned you have two choices: you can pine after the girl forever, or you do something rather more pragmatic, like sublimate those feelings into something else… you see, looking back on it I can see that my love for the girl was, I suppose, a love of life, really – or at least the possibilities life had still to offer me. I was stricken for a good while – very low – not really able to move on – it was a great blow at the time - until I had this moment of realisation that I could fall in love again; and I did; with nature, with life – with the world!’
‘With Maud?’
‘Yes…’ Owen said, haltingly, at the mention of his wife’s name. He seemed to shift uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before he resumed:
‘I do wonder whether anyone who’s never been in love can really fully appreciate the ecstasy that comes from it. I’m talking of that sense of sheer awe one feels in the presence of the beloved. Love, I suppose, romantic love, is a force of nature that just sweeps all else away. It is a primordial, magical, experience!’
‘But ultimately illusory.’ Lewis said, dunking a biscuit into his cup.
‘Why so?’ Barfield countered.
‘Because it is transient; I believe it almost a trick of nature to capture a man and fool him into marriage.’
‘So says an unmarried man’ observed Tolkien, wryly.
Barfield arched an eyebrow. ‘Does Nature perform tricks, Jack? Your attitude is typical of modern man’s distrust of Dame Natura which sees himself not only as separate from Her, but above Her, believing that She is some evil temptress!’
He took a hasty sip of tea and continued.
‘To reduce Romantic love to a biological ‘trick’ is to demean one of the most liberating of emotions. Look at the art that love has produced: would we have ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had never seen Beatrice? Are you dismissing The Inferno because it was founded on love?’
Lewis was frowning. ‘Founded on love it may have been,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful of biscuit, ‘but not Romantic love. Romantic love, my dear Owen, cannot be separated from sex, and sexual desire is transitory...Beatrice Portinari was 9 years old when Dante first saw her, if you think this was based on romantic, which is sexual, love then we are on dangerous ground… ’
A couple on a nearby table seemed to shift uncomfortably at Lewis’s words.
‘…Dante’s work was not based on lust;’ Lewis continued ‘Beatrice for him was a spiritual ideal rather than a flesh and blood woman.’
‘Absolute poppycock, Jack!’ Barfield snorted, ‘For one, Dante himself was the same age as her when they met – so let’s not sully his love with any hints of paedophilia - and for another, Beatrice was precisely who she was and no other, not a symbol, nor an allegory for some ‘higher’ or ‘purer’ state of caritas: she was simply a beautiful green-eyed Florentine girl who turned the head of an intelligent and sensitive young man, and thereby opened his eyes to the beauty of the world!’
‘Are you talking about Beatrice or your green-eyed Cornish girl?’ Jack said, playfully, seemingly amused by Barfield’s fervour that had brought a flush to the taller man’s smooth cheeks.
‘Both! What is this delight of being in love but an experience of joy, of connection with the world? And what is poetry but the communication of such rapture?! One cannot read Dante, or any other great poet, without feeling it!’ Barfield’s eyes flashed with passion, seeming to drink in the landscape which no doubt was fuelling his ideas with nostalgic memories.
He paused to take another sip of tea, expecting a rebuff from Lewis that never came. The latter merely shook his head slowly, at a loss to even attempt to argue against what he thought as erroneous, and took another biscuit from the plate.
Just then a rumbling outside the veranda announced the arrival of a vehicle; the workmen in the shadows of the café looked and murmured to each-other as a strange machine, seeming half car and half tank, with caterpillar tracks for back wheels pulled up at the garage forecourt a little past the tea-house.
One of the workmen on the nearby table muttered to his colleague; and his companion guffawed at what must have been a private joke. A small, handsome man in a long and well-tailored pale overcoat and cap could be seen chatting animatedly to the petrol attendant.
Tolkien pushed his empty cup away from him and leaned across the table,
‘I like your view, Owen, that the poet is one who sees the rapture of existence and seeks to tell of it to his blinkered fellow man.’
Barfield smiled appreciatively at Tolkien’s attempts to steer the conversation back on line.
Tolkien carried on: ‘…that poetry is like some magical potion that allows you to see things differently, to see things shining with qualities otherwise hidden from us…’
‘It’s as I’ve said before,’ Barfield replied, ‘the poet sees the world as others do not, and he seeks to communicate his experience in the only way now available to him: poetic metaphor.’
‘Why won’t prose suffice?’ Lewis asked, his eyes flitting from the strange vehicle momentarily back to Barfield.
‘You’re being deliberately obstinate now, Jack – we’ve talked about this many times before! Prose is the language of the modern everyday world; a world at odds with the poetic vision. The use of poetic metaphor restores man to his original state of participation in nature. Think of Traherne’s beautiful phrase ‘orient and immortal wheat’…’
He waved his hand in the direction of the sun-drenched sloping hills on the opposite side of the road, green with freshly sprung blades of new-born wheat still not yet much more than a foot in height.
‘When I think of those lines I see things differently; it’s as if I’m no longer looking at a field of corn, a few weeks old; what was pleasant greenery newly sprung from the soil becomes something terrible and sublime: for those shoots grow from a buried seed, and those seeds in turn were the ears upon last year’s shoots… where does one begin and the other end? The answer is that surely they are somehow one. And if last year’s corn sprouted from the ears of the previous years, and so on, ad infinitum, we are left with the startling truth that yon green field thither is not covered in fresh new life, but a life thousands upon thousands of years old, which each year takes on a new skin, as it were, and at the end of each year casts it off so that what the farmers fill their barns with at harvest is but the sloughed skin, really, of an organism far, far older than mankind himself. Those plants, there, are in reality the same plants that were brought here from the Near East by the first farmers thousands of years ago, whose form has remained constant, though the substance through which that form is expressed has changed: Orient and immortal indeed.’
Tolkien stared at the verdant hillside, baulking at Barfield’s musings – and for a moment he saw, literally saw, a difference – what was a rolling peaceful green valley was suddenly transformed so that its sides were no longer inert, seeming dead compared to the skylarks that flew over them, but alive in a way he had never before perceived – the leaves of the wheat became upward-thrusting scales of a giant plumed serpent which covered the entire valley, scales that would be sloughed off at harvest, only to grow anew… a serpent that had wended its way to this valley some 6,000 years ago having travelled thousands of miles from its birthplace in the river valleys of the Near East… ancient, orient, immortal… dying each winter, buried in the black earth then rising again in the spring…
Barfield lit his pipe and continued. ‘That is what Traherne’s poetic phrase suggests to me, and carries far more meaning than the single word ‘corn’ or ‘wheat’ could ever do – for in it we start to get a glimpse of what early man must have seen when he was still close to Nature, not alienated from Her as he is today.’
‘A sense of the true nature of things?’ Tolkien suggested.
‘A sense of the divinity of things!’ Barfield replied, ‘for ancient man the corn was the body of a god – not in a quaint symbolic way such as our folk image of ‘John Barleycorn’ but as something real and experienced; to the Egyptians the crops were the green-skinned Osiris, torn apart, buried and resurrected each year – later echoed in Jesus as the Bread of Life, dying and rising again…’
Lewis coughed. ‘No, Owen; those earlier vegetation gods were a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ’s life was the metaphor made fact, the earlier vegetation gods were the echo…’
Owen waved his hand dismissing his friend’s interruption. ‘We’re getting away from my point – what I’m saying is that to ancient man corn was an expression of a divinity immanent in all things, man included; if you think about it, the very idea of a vegetation god presents a view of reality worlds apart from our own: this wasn’t a world where the Creator was separate from his creation, and mankind created as a lord above all other animals – no – this was a world in which nature itself was the body of the god, and man, kin to all other creatures, was part of this divinity too. If we saw all as Holy we would be less prone to trivialise, exploit and destroy our world…’
He stopped for a moment while a waitress came and leaned over and refilled their tea-pot with boiling water, avoiding all eye contact with these strange university types, friends, perhaps, of the ‘Marmalade Man’, she thought, her eyes flitting to the dapper gentlemen at the petrol pump. She coloured, feeling suddenly awkward. Maybe these were some of those friends? The ones the Red Indian gardener had told her about, with their strange rituals and the women they shipped in for the night and packed off to London by taxi the next day…
‘Imagine a world where each and every word you uttered expressed the divinity inherent in all things…’ Barfield continued, adding a mouthed a thank you to the waitress, who smiled back awkwardly and left the table; ‘how different would we look at that field if we called wheat ‘Osiris’ or ‘Persephone’ and saw, really saw, it as divine? Well this is exactly what the ancients saw; we dwell in a world where one says ‘the wheat is like Osiris’, but they would have said the equivalent of ‘the wheat is Osiris’: their language would seem to us as pure poetry; their experience of the world poetic, mystic. But it was not meant as a deceit. It expressed a truth.’
Tolkien nodded in agreement and poured each of the men more tea. How wonderful it was to hear this man talk. He was eloquent and intelligent – such a waste that he should have become a lawyer and not an academic! He has the best mind of all of us, Tolkien thought. Lewis’s attention, however, seemed to be on the man at the petrol pumps.
Barfield continued: ‘We no longer see that way because we have fallen from that original Edenic state – Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becoming aware of their nakedness is a metaphor for mankind losing that state of participation with nature and realising his difference from the animals; his expulsion from Eden is brought about by the development of his sense of self-consciousness - which alienates us from nature – to use the image of the dismembered corn-god, our modern mind is like the evil brother Seth who divides and separates the divine world into disconnected objects, tearing it limb from limb: a world once experienced as divine is divided up, categorised, its former connectivity broken, the divinity killed; but the poet is one who can, like the goddess Isis, re-assemble the pieces of this dismembered god and bring him back to life: to literally re-member the god, the original state of pre-fall unity, where every object sang out with its participation in the divine; so that man is once more at one with the birds, beasts, fish and trees…’ Barfield’s voice had risen to a crescendo of excitement, his hands emphasising every word. ‘…for mankind still abides in Eden – indeed he never left it – for Eden is around us, but we do not see it!’ he brought his palm down hard on the table-top to emphasise each of the last six syllables, rattling the tea-set and causing the people on the nearby table to look round again, nervously.
Tolkien stared into Barfield’s ecstatic face – I’m sure you see it, Owen, he thought – as the latter gazed open eyed with rapture at the dance of the windblown corn. He had never seen Owen so animated, so energised; stirred up, no doubt by memories of youth and love. Tolkien cleared his throat, a little wary of breaking the spell his friend had fallen under.
‘You know, Owen, that one of my poetic creations, Tom Bombadil, whose adventures I recall reading to you all at an Inklings a few years back now, I’d imagine – well, I didn’t say it at the time but Bombadil, who is really the spirit of our fast disappearing Oxford and Berkshire countryside, a kind of genius loci, was in no small measure influenced by your theories. He speaks in verse, for he exists before the fall of language, before speech became prose; he is the Eldest; he speaks to the badgers and the trees and the barrow-wights; I imagine Bombadil to possess what today man can only glimpse in myth and poetry; he can talk to the birds, like Siegfried who gains that ability by drinking the blood of the dragon Fafnir...’
Barfield nodded. ‘When I try to picture that original state of unity I always imagine Orpheus with his magical lyre that could tame the wild beasts, and make the trees and even the stones dance about him in a circle.’ Barfield suggested. ‘Orpheus, like Osiris, is torn to pieces, yet his head goes on singing – you see, despite being rent apart the voice of the god can still be heard, singing of the unity of all things, remembering Eden before the Fall, if men but listen…. Poets hear it….lovers hear it…’
‘This mystic state of unity, you know - it all sounds rather like being drunk.’ Lewis commented with a wink; suddenly back in the conversation now the vehicle and its dapper driver had pulled away.
Tolkien smiled.
‘You have a point, Jack: think of all those Norse legends that tell of drinking the mead or ale of poetry; for in intoxication man achieves something akin to that sense of belonging, does he not, and forgets his alienation? Behind every alcoholic, I suspect, lays a poet!’
‘Well, the reverse is certainly the case!’ said Lewis.
‘Yourself included?’ asked Barfield.
Lewis didn’t seem amused by Barfield’s quip, instead his eyes seemed to pale a little.
‘Sadly I think I gave up the urge to become a poet long ago. I now seek solace in my cups.’ He smiled weakly. ‘The blood of John Barleycorn gives me courage bold, not inspiration.’
Tolkien understood, now, why Lewis had seemed so uninterested in what Barfield had been saying; it was like rubbing salt into a wound – here was Lewis who in his youth had wished to be a poet above all things, but who had not received the recognition he had really deserved, and who was now reduced to writing prose – while Barfield was extolling the virtues of the poetic vision; Lewis must have felt somehow unworthy.
‘In which case,’ Lewis was continuing, ‘let us hope the beer at the Red Lion isn’t varnish!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Barfield laughed, ‘Though if it’s too good the long road to Calne will begin to lose its appeal…’
‘Well,’ Lewis said, ‘if the stones of Avebury circle begin to dance about us like they’ve been enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre we’ll know it’s time to down our cups and move on…’
Tolkien was nodding. ‘It’s funny; I had this image in my head then, when Owen was speaking: I had initially thought it was the dismembered body of Orpheus on the banks of the river Hebrus and his severed head floating down the river - but instead of some Mediterranean stream all I could see was the Kennet and instead of Orpheus’s head bobbing amongst the sticklebacks it was the image of a woman – her hair spread out like Ophelia. It was so persistent that I’m sure my mind was trying to tell me something: I’m sure it has something to do with this landscape, though quite what I don’t yet know…’
‘Well let us pray the mead of poetry inspires an answer, Tollers!’ Lewis beamed, used to Tolkien’s ‘flights of fancy’. ‘For myself that tea has restored my vigour; I’m a little too full for climbing the hill, now, if I’m honest – but a constitutional to Orpheus’s dancing stones itself seems a fair prospect.’