Meetings, Poetry, & Publications

Re: Turning to the Landscape

This fall I’ll be initiating a “Poets and Landscapes” theme for our Section. This will be a video exploration that explores what D.H. Lawrence called “the spirit of place” — also known as “soul” of a landscape or “genius loci.” Lawrence used this phrase as the title of Chapter One in his excellent and amusing introduction to American Literature, Studies in Classic American Literature.

How does a particular landscape and the elemental spirits that reside within that landscape influence literature? How do we work creatively with those inspirations? How has this been done by poets continually as a spiritual practice throughout the history of literature?

When I taught at the university, too often students came with the idea that literature and poetry were disembodied experiences of mind. In fact, many of them were resistant to courses in literature or the humanities because they thought such courses were: impractical, irrelevant, snarky mind games played by mandarin intellectuals, of no relevance to life as it is lived and the problems that beset us as embodied beings in a capitalist world. Even worse: some of the students thought it was just fine if literature remained disembodied! And they preferred to have schematics and “correct interpretations” that solved all the problems in a text and got them an “A”. They were eager for “A”uthority.

But poets are restless and Anarchic — and novelists too! Gosh, Sam Coleridge thought nothing of slapping on a pair of worn-out brogues and hiking miles in the night over Lake Country hills to rattle the door at Dove Cottage and roust Bill and Dottie. And few of us could keep pace with Dickens on his late night London walkabouts, I’d imagine.

“I always feel sorry for women who don’t like to walk; they miss so much — so many rare little glimpses of life.”
— Kate Chopin

For the moment, given the circumstances at hand in 2021, I conceive of this “Poets and Landscapes” initiative to begin as a video project. Sounds like an oxymoron, eh? Well, keep a weather eye on the tail of that ox and watch this space for continuing updates and materials as we walk into Michaelmas and saunter on toward our Advent spirals.

Dove Cottage, circa 1920

“What Does the Karma and History of the Anthroposophical Society Mean for the 21st Century?”

In autumn 2001, from Michaelmas to Advent, I led a twelve-week seminar in Fair Oaks with this title. It was sponsored by James Ulness. The seminar had eighteen participants. We met every week for twelve weeks for two to three hours. The course was conducted in the manner of a graduate seminar. The purpose of this seminar was to shed light and understanding on the events surrounding the expulsion of Ita Wegman and Elisabeth Vreede and many others (including Owen Barfield, by the way . . . collateral damage) and the sundering of the Society that followed upon this expulsion. The seminar in 2001 was timed for the turn of the century. I used very many texts that were only available in German at that time. Some of these texts are now available in English, but at that time they were not. The seminar occurred as an event of the Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities and was reported in the Section newsletter. I had just joined the collegium of the Section.

In the waning decades of the 20th century, when my wife and I began to research the events of the 1930s in the Society, it was next to impossible to get clear information about those events. Persons were very reluctant to talk with any specificity, or they were just unaware that anything had occurred, or they feigned unawareness, or they were indifferent or even opposed to conversation about the “unpleasant” era. To build up the seminar, I did extensive work with hard-to-obtain German texts and interviewed persons who had knowledge of those events of the 1930s.

I mention this in this meeting summary because I have the sense from recent events — for example the Zoom presentation by Circles for a Renewal of Culture — that it might be time to re-enliven this line of literary inquiry. If so, it will involve another step in the evolution and maturation of our Section meetings. The seminar materials from 2001 are still in existence and could be supplemented far more easily at the present time in 2021 — twenty years after the original Michaelmas seminar in Fair Oaks.

Personally, for what it’s worth, I have always felt that this topic resides in the province of our Section. Of course, Albert Steffen was intimately involved in the events that transpired after Rudolf Steiner’s death. But more importantly, the methodologies of literary-spiritual research and text-based critical inquiry that we bring to the table as students of literature and humanities are methodologies required for such research, some might argue.

________

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”
— Wm. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2

“Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”
— Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

“As soon as beauty is known by the world as beautiful, it becomes ugly.
As soon as virtue is being known as something good, it becomes evil.
Therefore being and non-being give birth to each other.
Difficult and easy accomplish each other . . .
Realizing this, the sage performs effortlessly according to the natural Way . . .”
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching