Owen Barfield’s Prose and Poetry: Wholeness Blossoms from “Imagination’s Earth”

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The crisis for Burgeon is a moral one.  He finds that “words confuse things and make the truth difficult to discover” (40).  In the materialist atmosphere imposed by Burden, Burgeon can’t really talk to the clients about their moral problems; he is prevented from addressing the heart of the issue.  He feels that decisions on legal matters often devolve to a choice “between two dirty tricks” (107). Also bothersome is the inescapable mechanical nature of the legal process and profession. Burgeon bemoans those “two leprous blights on the urban life of the twentieth century, the typewriter and the telephone,” and the frequent interruptions by clients (89). We find this irritation with the modern invasion of the machine in his poetry, too. An example is his poem “Bad Day”:

They build in Station Road.  A Kango hammer
Pounds in the scantlings, like a straining heart.
Drowning the drills’ pneumatic stammer,
Great buses stop and start.

And all day long against this island shore,
Plash after plash, accosting, laps the main
Incessantly.  Again my door
Opens and shuts again.

Till back again, by catacomb, I go;
Homeward on wheels on rails through tunnels drum.
Who shouts? A dog snaps.  Fret not so
For silence.  It will come.

(Hunter 25)

As he approaches a nervous breakdown, he says his insides quiver “practically the whole day now. I think it is the expectation of little blows and bruises” (103). In analyzing his situation he identifies two types of assault on his peace of mind: the “longus levis” or “petty jerk,” and the “gravis brevis” or “grand jerk,” which is two or more petty jerks combined, in other words multiple interruptions and or irritations (51). In addition, he suffers from “rhema-tophobia,” or the “fear and hatred of the spoken word,” which continues even at home, causing distress and distancing him from his loved ones (52-53). In final desperation, he cries: “God, what a way for a man that stands upright between the earth and sky to use the spirit that is in him!” (108).

According to Barfield,

For Coleridge, the basic polarity between two forces or energies, one of which strives to apprehend or find itself, while the other tends to expand infinitely is also the source of man’s individual consciousness. It reappears as a psychological polarity. (“Either: Or” 39)

Barfield, in “Bad Day,” admonishes us to “Fret not so for silence. It will come.” It very nearly does come for Burgeon when Burden threatens to kill him. The conflict between the two comes to a crisis when Burden reaches the end of his rope over their constant arguments about the morality of their legal practices, the “conventional lies” (104), the lack of integrity in legal language, and the devaluation of their clients. Burgeon, however, is able to avert disaster by reminding Burden of death:

I convinced him that if he should survive me, then when in his turn he came to die, that most certainly would be the end.  Whereas if I survived him, there at least might, even after my death, be something more. (113-114)