In 1978 while in a bookstore looking through a table of books on sale for 99 cents each, I saw R.J. Reilly’s Romantic Religion. Being a 19 year old and madly in love, how could I not pick it up and take a look? I noticed that the book was about C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien—all of whom I had heard of—and a writer unknown to me named Owen Barfield. My friend David Werther, an admirer of and writer about C.S. Lewis, had introduced me to the work of Charles Williams whose work had captivated me, so I purchased the book in order to read about Williams; I couldn’t have cared less about those other three authors. By the time I had finished chapter two on Barfield, my life plans and reading habits had been reoriented. After almost 47 years now, I can affirm that encountering Barfield’s work was as significant as falling in love, for essentially that is exactly what happened.
Not long after that first encounter I ordered a copy of Poetic Diction, the third edition with the Afterword in which Barfield discusses some of the books published since the first edition of that book in 1928, and after dropping out of a PhD program (Linguistics) in complete disillusion, I turned to that Afterword and began a decade of independent study guided by those authors about whom Barfield had written: Nicolas Berdyaev, Thorleif Boman, Ernst Cassirer, R.G. Collingwood, F.M. Cornford, Susanne Langer, R.B. Onians, Philip Wheelwright, L.L. Whyte… and many more, including of course Rudolf Steiner. Along the way, each of those writers led me further, often in directions that Barfield himself had not pursued.
In 1983 I moved to San Francisco and took a job working in Stanford University’s Green Library. Soon after arriving at Stanford, I learned of a conference on dance that was to take place on campus, and I asked if I could be allowed to attend, even though I was way too late to register and was neither a student nor a dancer. For some very personal reasons I was completely fascinated with dancing, even though the only dance I was capable of dancing was the pogo (if you don’t know what that was, it doesn’t matter). Fortunately I was allowed to attend the conference, and at the conference Heinz von Foerster gave a marvelous lecture that turned my attention towards cybernetics and some oh so Californian New Age writers popular during the 1980s. I think it was as a result of that conference that I learned of Eurythmy classes being taught somewhere in San Francisco, and went to my first—and last—Eurythmy class. As I mentioned above, I am no dancer, and in fact the experience of being in a room with people and trying to move my body in public was absolutely terrifying. But dancing continued to fascinate me to the point of an obsession, so much so that when I read somewhere that Barfield had been a dancer in his youth, I decided that I had to write to him.
At some point during 1984 I found Barfield’s address in a directory of British authors that I found in the reference department of the library, and I wrote a short letter to him, telling him of the extraordinary impact his writings had had on me. In my letter I admitted that I had written nothing worth reading, and had nothing to offer him at all—I was (and remain) a nobody—but I wanted to express my gratitude for the inspiration and the guidance that I had received from his writings. Upon learning that he had been a dancer, I wrote, I could no longer refrain from writing. I do not remember what else I may have written in that first letter. Then to my astonishment, Barfield wrote me a letter in response, inviting me to visit him if ever I came to England. I think I must have written another letter or two during the months that followed, but cannot now remember. I saved up some money, quit my job at Stanford, and in August 1985 I bought a plane ticket to London.
After arriving in London, I had to figure out how to get to Orchard View, but first I had to find a place to stay, as it was already nighttime. I rented a bed in some kind of rooming house. The next morning I decided to go visit Kathleen Raine while I was in London, and did so. Then I took a train out to South Darenth, got off and went off in search of someone who could tell me how to get to Orchard View. I saw no one on the streets. Finally I went up and knocked on the front door of someone’s house and was greeted by a teenage girl. I asked her if she could tell me how to get to Owen Barfield’s house at Orchard View, but she had never heard of the man or the place. She went inside and asked her mother. Happily, her mother knew what road to head down and sent me on my way with her best wishes. I remember it being a long walk. When I arrived, in the middle of the afternoon, Barfield’s son, Jeffrey, met me at the door and said to me “Mr. Barfield has had visitors, became tired, and is taking a nap right now. Please call back after 6 PM to make an appointment to see him.” I walked back to South Darenth, found a public telephone somewhere, and a little after 6 PM I called and spoke to Owen. He asked if I could return on the morrow at a specified time (which I no longer remember). I agreed, not telling him that I had neither a place to stay nor a watch to tell the time.
I walked back towards Orchard View, wondering where I could spend the night, not wanting to go back to London that late and try to find another bed for the night. It began to rain. In a recently cut field of wheat I saw a pile of straw bales, and decided that was probably the best lodging I would find before it got dark. I rearranged the bales to make a place in which I could lie down out of the rain, and went to sleep.
What happened next, I cannot remember, but somehow I managed to arrive at Barfield’s door at more or less the agreed upon time. I knocked. No one answered. I knocked again. No one answered. I stood there wondering what to do next, when a bespectacled head appeared in the window of the door, and then the door opened. A small, frail, lightly teetering old gentleman cocked his head and asked me “Have you been here long?” For some reason this first meeting—his almost bouncing walk, the lilt of his voice, the way he cocked his head when looking at me, whatever exactly I cannot say—took me completely by surprise, as absolutely delightful and even amusing. It seemed that gravity had only a precarious hold on an inner levity that strained against it. I wanted to burst out laughing and dancing in absolute delight on the spot. There was more dancing, laughter and sparkle in his greeting than I could ever have imagined, least of all from an 86 year old philosopher. Perhaps an anthroposophist would say that I experienced his etheric body dancing.
He ushered me into his study and proffered me a seat. He apologized for making me wait a day, saying that Jeffrey was only trying to take care of him—and he appreciated that. Barfield had apparently reread our correspondence prior to my arrival because he began talking about some of what I had written to him. After so many years, I cannot remember what I said nor what he said, and some of what I seem to remember was probably from our written correspondence rather than our conversation. Nevertheless, I remember a few topics that we discussed, and the impression that he made on me.
In 1983 I had moved to San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic; I was madly in love with a lesbian friend (who was obstinately not interested in my romantic hopes); I was writing awful poetry and essays that only revealed how little I knew about writing: those were some of the things about which we talked. I mentioned that reading Buber’s I and Thou was a profoundly moving experience, orienting my thinking and my life in much the same way as Poetic Diction had, and he leaned back in his chair and said that he too could still remember reading it and that it had made a deep impression on him as well. He suggested that I read Vladimir Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love, an English translation of which was soon to be or had just been published with an introduction that he had written. (I later read the earlier edition, finding a copy of that immediately upon my arrival back in San Francisco, and then Barfield’s introduction when I was able to purchase the Lindisfarne edition.) We talked about asthma and how anthroposophy understands it, and of a dream of a lion about which I had written to him. “Stay away from psychiatrists” he urged me, but then said he would like to hear what a good Jungian would say about that dream. We also talked about dancing, about his time as a Morris dancer, and eurythmy. Whether it was during our conversation or in a letter, I do not remember, but he did say one way or the other that “the only dancing I do now is in my etheric body, and it sounds like that is how you dance too.”
We talked about his early writings on economics, in particular Law, Association and the Trade Union Movement and his work on C.H. Douglas such as Danger, Ugliness and Waste, these having especially attracted my attention. He was surprised that anyone was reading those essays, and said that he had eventually realized that what was wrong with Douglas’s ideas was the simple fact that in order for his economic/financial system to be viable, everyone had to go along with it. And if it won’t work in the presence of alternative practices, dissent and difference, Barfield said, then it surely suffers from the same problem that every form of tyranny poses.
Barfield asked me which poets I liked, and I mentioned Kathleen Raine, towards whose work Barfield himself had directed my attention and whom I had visited the day before. During my meeting with her she had given me copies of issues 4, 5 and 6 of Temenos, and since I was literally homeless and sleeping under straw bales in the field, I still had those volumes with me. Barfield was very eager to take a look at them. He was especially interested in the batik paintings of Thetis Blacker in one of those volumes and sat looking at them for some time. While in London I had also stepped into a bookstore and picked up a volume of the journal Agenda, a special issue devoted to David Jones, and had brought from San Francisco as a gift for Barfield a cassette tape of the Ohio-born, San Francisco-resident poet-singer-cellist Nancy Kangas performing with her then husband Greg Bonnell. I do not think Barfield was particularly impressed with either Jones or Kangas, although I was and still am (about Nancy and her Preschool Poets, do take a look). Of one of my own poems, Barfield said during our conversation that it was a good idea for a poem, but not a poem. Such critical honesty was hard to take, but it did keep me from writing more bad poems one after another for the next 40 years—I only wrote a few after that.
I have saved the best for last: what most astonished me during my encounter with Barfield was not something he said, but what he did not say. He asked me questions about some of what I had written in my letters, and I was pouring my heart out like the heart-broken 26 year old man that I was. I was suddenly overcome with shame and embarrassment at doing all the talking, and I stopped. Here I was, sitting in a room with the man whom I admired more than all other living persons, the man to whom I had come in the hope of sitting and listening to him, and I was doing all the talking! For a moment I was devastated, too ashamed to remain in his presence. Then he said “Please go on; I am fascinated.” Never in my life had anyone ever listened to me aside from a very few close friends. No one had ever taken me seriously as a scholar or a poet, as anyone or anything at all. And here was Owen Barfield himself, listening to me, urging me to keep talking. My mind was reeling, my heart in shock… and I picked up where I had left off and resumed talking. I would learn later, perusing Barfield’s publications, that just prior to our meeting he had published an article arguing exactly the opposite of what I had been saying. Why did he keep listening, even saying “Please go on” when I stopped? Why did he not set me straight, show me how wrong I was? That, too, left me astonished.
That Barfield would listen, and listen raptly and intently, to an uneducated American dropout sixty years his junior, an unkempt, long-haired stranger still damp from walking in the rain (it rained every day in London in August 1985) with straw in his hair, looking like something the cat left dead on the doorstep, is something that I still have trouble believing. Yet it was this for which I remember Barfield most of all. Having read almost everything Barfield published, I think it is indicative of who he was and how he encountered the world: he could and would listen to and learn from anything the cat might drag up. He somewhere wrote (I do not remember where) that an intelligent person could find something to read and learn from in any 10 cent sale bin outside a bookstore, and that is exactly how he responded to me. Unlike so many academics (and preachers!) whom I have met over the decades, he did not respond to my appearance on his doorstep with a lecture in which he enlightened me about all those matters of which I was ignorant, he did not open his mouth to reveal the Truth or to correct my logical or illogical errors; instead, he listened. It was the very last thing I expected from a philosopher or a scholar, and it is how I remember him: a man wise enough to pay attention to and learn from even a wet young scarecrow like me, even when he had just argued in an essay published in an academic journal the opposite point of view. He did not pull rank and shut me up with authority; he listened.
I mentioned above that his physical manner and his expressive voice when he opened the door and welcomed me in came as a complete surprise and as a delight; there were more such delights during our time in his study. One such incident I remember with great pleasure. At one point during our conversation, I noticed that he began looking around the room in bewilderment. I had no idea what was wrong, what he sought. “I’ve mislaid my pipe!” he said. He then rose from his chair, and as he did so, his pipe fell out of his lap and onto the floor. He looked down, saw the pipe on the floor, and said “There it is! What is it doing there?” He picked it up, sat back down, lit the pipe and began smoking. Once again I could have died laughing had I not been in such open-mouthed astonishment. How can I describe what happened? It wasn’t funny, I wasn’t laughing at him, but the entire incident was so filled with simplicity, lightness, laughter and delight on his part at finding his pipe that I sat there in awe and ecstasy. The pleasure he expressed at finding his pipe and sitting back down to continue the conversation while having a smoke—it was simply, inexpressibly, exquisite.
I do not know how long we talked—remember I wear no watch and never have—but at a certain point I began to feel embarrassed at staying so long. Although I had nowhere to go and nothing to do till my plane was scheduled to leave the day after the morrow, I told him I should get going. He asked if I would like to stay the night; too embarrassed to accept his offer, I declined, said goodbye, and forgetting to pick up my David Jones issue of Agenda, I stepped out the door and headed back to the wheat field. I have kicked myself ever since for not accepting that offer of overnight accommodation.
I have suffered from asthma for as long as I can remember, and the time spent in the straw did me in. By the time I got to the airport, I could barely breathe and hardly walk. I stayed the next night in the airport because I had nowhere else to go, no money, and I could neither breathe nor walk. A concerned airport official came up to me at one point and told me that there was a medical station in the airport and that free medical help was available, even for foreigners. I went, and there I was given an inhaler. I had never used one before, and to my astonishment it worked. Then the woman at the ticket counter switched some seats around so that I could sit in the nonsmoking section. I used my last few pounds to buy her flowers at a flower stall in the airport, and having delivered them, headed to the boarding gate. When I boarded the plane to make my return trip, the stewardess, with a beautiful and genuine smile, said “We have been instructed to relay to you this message: ‘Thank you for the flowers’.”
I continued to correspond with Barfield for the next year and a half. Whether it was during our meeting or in our correspondence, I no longer remember, but he once said or wrote to me that I should follow my deepest impulses and never ever let anyone explain away my experience of love. It was the wisest advice I have ever received. I still live by it.
Barfield last wrote to me in early 1987 about his impending move to Forest Row. Being in the midst of a terrible personal crisis, I never responded. I did not want to trouble him when I had nothing to write but expressions of despair, when I was in what might be described as my own ‘dark night of the soul’. I recovered slowly. In 1995, back in Chicago again, after watching a woman walking down the street, I suddenly had an idea for a story, a poem, a book, about a dancer: “Dancing in Pilsen.” By early 1998 I had finished a tiny volume of interrelated short stories and poems that I thought Barfield would actually like: Perra Loca’s Terra Animata. Was he still alive and living at the Forest Row address that he had last sent me? I looked around in the library and discovered that he had died in December 1997. What might he have thought of those stories and poems? I do not know, but I was heartbroken that now, when finally I had something to offer him, he was no longer able to receive it. In one of the poems from that volume the birds of Thetis Blacker were in my mind as I wrote it, as was a young Mexican woman whom I saw one day walking-dancing down the street in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. The attentive reader will also hear resonances of Barfield’s remarks in his introduction to Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love. I wanted to send this poem especially to Barfield:
Volo ut sitis (I)
(for Julia)Call upon the ransomed queen
to speak above the roar
sing and dance the art of dreams
mend a world that’s torn
daybreak dawnbird rise and soar
red wing light on yellow rose’s thorn
crimson dawn calls morning’s golden stream
for my beloved’s beauty all the world’s reborn
In August 2025 it will be 40 years since I met Owen Barfield, and the memory of our meeting remains with me as one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.
David Bade
11 December 2024
