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One of Barfield's designations
for contemporary man, who in his present psyche in a "camera civilization"1
(and as a stage in the evolution
of consciousness) looks--as does a camera--"always at and never into
what [he] sees" (RM 73). The camera, he contends-- though itself
a "caricature of imagination"--has, through metaphoric
internalization, come to seem a model for our own soul, our own inner
world, so that each of us now feels himself to be a kind of camera
obscura, a subjective being, inhabiting a room
of one's own: a mere recorder of an external world, not a participant
in its creative life. For Camera Man, thinking
seems only a "kind of searchlight-beam proceeding from a magic-lantern
in the human skull . . ." (RCA 228). Camera Man is the product of
the consciousness soul.
A representative
Camera Man believes "that the mind is something which is shut up in a sort
of box called the brain. . . ." He accepts "that the mind of man is a passive
onlooker at the processes and phenomena of nature, in the creation of which
it neither takes nor has taken any part." He accepts "the fallacy that
there are many separate minds but no such thing as Mind" (RCA 148).
Understood in light
of the evolution of consciousness, Barfield insists, the camera must be
seen as
a caricature
of imagination, although it is a true emblem
of perspective. Imagination is living, perspective only "lifelike." It
used to be said that the camera cannot lie. But in fact it always does
lie. Just because it looks only in that immediate way, the camera looks
always at and never into what it sees. I suspect that Medusa did very much
the same. (RM 73)
See in particular
"The Harp and the Camera" (RM 65-78). |
1"We
live in a camera civilization," Barfield observes in "The Harp and the
Camera." "Our entertainment is camera entertainment. Our holidays are camera
holidays. We make them so by paying more attention to the camera we brought
with us than to the waterfall we are pointing it at. Our science is almost
entirely a camera science. . . . and it is already becoming self-evident
to camera man that only camera words have any meaning" (RM 76). |
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