Accidental Philosopher: How Owen Barfield De-Railed My Life

Photocopy of a letter from Barfield, and a handwritten copy of my letter to him, with recent correspondence from the Marion Wade Center

For the last 18-20 months – almost two years! – I’ve been slowly preparing a set of letters I exchanged with Owen Barfield - English philosopher, literary theorist, novelist, essayist - between 1988 and 1992, to donate them to the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, which holds one of several Owen Barfield archives around the world. In those almost two years I’ve revisited, in some detail, a profound period of my life, and am re-impacted, in a new way, by the original experience.

Totally Accidental

I started writing my first novel when I was ten years old or so. It told of an Air Force test pilot who was called up to pilot a spaceship to Jupiter, on some secret, very important mission. I published my first poem at 17 in the school literary journal. I don’t have a copy of that poem, but I remember the opening lines:

When will it end/This state of utter confusion

My first SLR camera

Heavy stuff.

When I started college just a few months after I wrote that poem, I was enrolled in the journalism school, because I wanted to be a photojournalist – the 1970s National Geographic/Life style. I wanted to take pictures, travel the world, and to write, so photojournalism seemed reasonable.

My plans, I think now, were pretty insightful. 

Only two years before, I had learned to use an SLR 35mm camera. My parents then bought for me a Fujica St605n camera, and from then on, for most of life, I’ve had a camera at hand.

One of my first selfies, 1980 or so, Greece

During that same time, I had discovered and fell in love with language. Two high school English teachers intiated me into the glories and charms of literature and language, and that enchantment lasts to this day.

But I quit the journalism school after the first semester – I didn’t want to write ‘that kind of stuff’. I wanted to study literature head on, and write about it, and write it. But instead of a full on BA in English, I took advice to instead major in Secondary Education, and get certified in two separate fields: English, and Physical Science.

I read, studied, and wrote about a helluva lot of literature, nonetheless, in those four years of college, some of the best years of my early life, for sure.

After college, though, my heart was not into teaching high school, at all, and I was totally absorbed in writing poetry and getting it published, while I worked to pay rent with my new wife and baby! A job opportunity came, though, to teach – a small private religious school needed someone to teach all of the science courses – Earth Science, Physical Science (pre-Physics), Biology, and Physics – and I said ‘yes!’

In my first year of teaching, I fell in love with science, the history of science, and with teaching. But someething else happened: the high school science textbooks all had some introductory chapter or section on human history that recounted how we’d gotten from myth and superstitition to modern science and rationality, and as a result of reading the same basic story in a biology text, a physics text, an earth science text, I came to suspect that maybe this story was incomplete, and misleading.

My original copy of Barfield's
Saving the Appearances

One day, hunting in the used bookstore in Austin, Texas, I bumped into a fellow teacher from a different school. I was still most deeply a writer and poet, despite my job as a science teacher, and I mentioned that I was looking for a book of literary theory by Owen Barfield, titled Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. My friend, knowing of that book, and of Barfield, told me that I should be looking for, reading, and studying a different book by Barfield, titled Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. He knew I taught science, and he was convinced this book was essential to my understanding the textbook-narrative of human intellectual history.

Barfield called that history the 'history of ideas', and offered his alternative, the history of the evolution of human consciousness.

It included intellectual history – Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, et al (of which I knew nothing, or next to nothing, at the time I was reading Barfield for the first time) – but it ‘explained’ that history from a different, an independent viewpoint: the history of language as the expression, the demonstration of consciousness, as it is where you find it.

What hit me immediately, though, and hardly diminished in clarity for years, was the shift from ‘inside’ language – and oblivious to it like a fish in water or me in the air of the atmosphere - to outside of it, and watching it change through time.

Some of my first notes on my first reading
of Saving the Appearances

That was the One of a One-Two punch. The Two: that when I perceive, there is a region of profound, if not extensive, overlap between my consciousness or self-awareness, and the world presented as external and independent of me, of my body and definitely of my mind.

In two quick jabs, I was knocked into a space where it seemed a previously 2D picture blinked out, to reappear in 3D and 4K. It was the same picture, sort of, but not at all. And the 3D/4K displayed so much more detail, so much more color and vibrance.

Human history leapt to life. Especially, the part we call 'the history of science'. And this was maybe a third, the knockout, punch: science has a history, that tells us where it came from, and why. I was again made aware of the invisible air I breathe, that IS me.

About twelve months later, my wife and daughter and I were on the road, headed up to Missoula, Montana, with all our possessions, where I would start graduate school in Philosophy, with the intent to study the history and philosophy of science, and apply Barfield’s ‘evolution of consciousness’ to my studies.

This view of his, and now mine, brought so much intelligibility to so many different subjects, questions, disciplines. That helped me through reading the classic texts of Philosophy at the time, but also dis-endeared me to my professors, who felt I wasn’t critical enough – I presumed too much.

New and exciting reading for me

Nevertheless, it was now my journey that mattered most. I continued, and have continued, to read Barfield’s work, everything I could, and even still finding and being led to new essays, prefaces, introductions, translations, poems, novels, and stories.

I self-published what started as my master’s thesis, expanded. I found fellow Barfieldians and connected with them at conferences. 

Save the Phenomena

I joined the Owen Barfield Society. In 2006 I created a blog, Save the Phenomena, and post to this day. Much of it about Barfield (47 posts), but also Steiner (40), Husserl (14), and phenomenology (38).

My original book (2001) and revision (2020)

I revised my book recently, more cutting than expanding. I presented some ideas recently at a conference regarding Tolkien and Barfield as time travelers. And finally, after a two-year gestation period of prepping, I delivered my collection of Barfield’s letters from our 1980’s correspondence to the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College.

So now what?

Funny thing: In 2017 I decided to go back to school, and get a master’s in…….journalism. I finished in 2018, and instead of network news, I veered off into freelance photography and videography. Like the kid of 18 back in Austin at UT, I have a camera in my hand again, and it feels good.

And in the other hand, a book. Probably philosophy. Or metaphysical fiction. Or maybe it's a writing pad, with the first eight chapters of a new short story.

Or Barfield.