An Aeolian Harp
Shelley
Coleridge
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An Aeolian harp was
a small box, a popular toy of the Romantic
Era, across which are stretched gut strings of different thickness, tuned
to resonate in unison with each other. Rising and falling harmonies are
then produced when air blows over them. (Aelous
was, of course, a Greek god of the wind.)
Barfield's chief
interest in the Aeolian harp is that, as an instrument played on by nature
itself rather than by human intervention, it stands as a ready-made symbol
for inspiration, as is apparent in the following
passages (quoted from Shelley
and Coleridge respectively) cited by him:
Man is an instrument
over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like
the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an aeolian lyre, which move
it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within
the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise
than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal
adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which
excite them.
(from "A Defence
of Poetry," quoted in
RM 67)
And what if all
of animated nature
be but organic Harps
diversely framed,
That tremble into
thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast,
one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul
of each, and God of all?
(from "The Aeolian
Harp," quoted in RM 66)
To these Romantic testaments
he adds his own "Romanticism come of age"
version of the aeolian harp metaphor--one of his most concise and brilliant
representations of the evolution
of consciousness:
It [the evolution
of human consciousness] is rather as if a musical instrument, which was
being played on . . . an
Aeolian harp perhaps, played on by nature herself
. . . fell silent for a while. And then, after an interval, when it began
to sound again, it was no longer merely an instrument, but had become aware
of itself as such . . . and could itself take part in the playing of itself.
(RCA 234)
In an essay entitled
"The Harp and the Camera" (in RM), Barfield contrasts the Aeolian
harp as a root metaphor with the camera:
Unlike the camera
the harp has no inside, it does not first of all receive into itself stimuli
from without and then respond to them. The wind-harp becomes what it is
by itself becoming an "inside" for the environing air, by becoming a modulated
voice for it to speak with. (RM 72)
And he wonders if the
Romantic infatuation with the harp did not represent a prescient moment
in the evolution of consciousness:
Did that enthusiasm
of the Romantics for the wind-harp signify that they had come to see the
history of the Western mind as a kind of war between the harp and the camera--that
they foresaw the camera civilization that was coming upon us? (RM
75-76)
The harp/camera antinomy
lies at the heart of the modern misunderstanding of the "primitive" mind,
the "chronological snobbery" that
lead to the development of the theory of projection. "If we must think
in metaphor," Barfield writes (and he acknowledges
that we must), "why not try beginning again on the assumption that primitive
man was not a camera obscura
but an aeolian harp?" Conscious adoption of the harp metaphor, he suggests,
may in fact be the only means by which "we can hope to understand the origin
of myths and of thinking at all" (RM 75).
Rather than a war
between the harp and the camera, Barfield suggests, however, more than
just a metaphoric reconciliation: he imagines a marriage, one that, as
a decisive step in the development of true systematic
imagination, might lead us out of the modern wasteland.
If the story of
the harp and the camera is to continue instead of ending with a whimper,
it will have to be by way of a true marriage between the one and the other.
Is it fanciful, I wonder, to think of a sort of mini-harp stretched across
the window of the eye--an Apollo's harp if you will--as perhaps not a bad
image for the joy of looking with imagination? (RM 77)
See in particular
"The Harp and the Camera" (RM 65-78). |
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