Compare and Contrast

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.

Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World.

Redemption of the Senses: Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness.

The first is by David Abrams, published thirteen years ago. I have a vague sense that I knew of the book when it came out, but am only now reading it. I'm noticing the review snippets in the front, from Bill McKibben, Thomas Berry, James Hillman, Max Oelschlager, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roszak, Lynn Margulis - names I'm familiar with, some of whom I've read. What he is writing about is so difficult to capture, to characterize, to articulate. Nevertheless, I am disappointed that he still assumes a separateness for the human body - a separately existing human body, a shell, a box that contains some stuff, and keeps out all the rest of the stuff.

The second is by Verlyn Flieger, first published in 1983. This is an excellent, if sometimes overly literary, study of Tolkien's Middle Earth mythology as an expression of Owen Barfield's conception of the evolution of human consciousness. In that conception, language and human consciousness and the world all evolve together, out of a single primal origin. If you look far enough back, said Barfield, you find less and less distinction between the three. Yet Flieger is just a little too simplistic - a little too facile with literary categories - in her analysis, which in fact does an injustice to Barfield's - and Tolkien's - achievement of finding that nexus of language, consciousness, and world.

The third is the original title of my master's thesis (if I remember it rightly). Even then (I say to myself) I knew that what Barfield's work was all about was perception. Don't read "sight" where I use the word "perception." I mean - and he meant - something much broader, though no less focused, than that. This is where phenomenology is so helpful, at least so far as giving a semi-stable framework for the study at hand. It really is about learning a very subtle but very real craft of perception, of awareness, that begins with letting go of the basic distinction 'real:unreal'. Let go of that distinction for a moment, and be aware, and find out what happens...