My last visit to Oxford was a cold, dark, immediately post-Covid February three years ago, the same day Putin invaded Ukraine I recall, so it was a pleasure to visit again on these two bright and mild days in early-April.
Iain McGilchrist was on stage 3 times during this year’s Oxford Literary Festival – the first time he has participated in the OxLitFest, based on his earlier comments, I believe – 14 years after the book that made him famous “The Master and his Emissary” and 3 years after his magnum opus “The Matter With Things”. I saw and listened to him Friday evening and Saturday afternoon.
Given this wasn’t a promotional “new book” publishing tour I had imagined the Friday session at which he was originally advertised simply as the speaker might be a call-to-action or an update lecture on “Where to next?” with his now well-established hemispheric social hypothesis agenda. That first session was in fact conducted as a conversational style interview with Charles Foster in the chair. Foster has written about and much referenced McGilchrist’s work – as he did at last year’s Annual Mike Jackson Lecture at the Hull Centre for Systems Studies. (Aside – I’m at this year’s MJ Lecture in Hull on Thursday this week.)
Disappointingly for me, the content was almost entirely a summary of his work to date, which I already know very well. The poor amplified acoustics of the Sheldonian and the obvious fact that Iain was in a hurry to get away afterwards, didn’t add to the experience.
Can only assume from his introduction to the Saturday session that the reason he was in a hurry Friday was to meet for the first time his guest for that session. This was more interesting for me, with tables-turned. Iain was introducing us to the work of Catalan philosopher Jordi Pigem with whom he had established by correspondence, had a parallel and complementary agenda about the world being led astray by our left-brain dominant use of 24/7 comms technology. Pretty much my own agenda in fact, so it was interesting to hear someone voicing the same issues and ideas. Sadly for now, Pigem is published only in Catalan and Spanish.
Apart from the obvious ancient wisdom “the problem (eg. motorcycle) you are working on is yourself” angle, tending your own garden, changing the world one person – yourself – at a time, my anticipated question for the Friday session was actually asked by someone at this session. “What is the suggested strategy for getting Iain’s message for a better future out there in widespread practice?” Any wiser answer came there none. Everyone should read and act on Iain’s thesis for themselves. Essentially the same “hopeful pessimist” message from the Friday session.
Anyway, I enjoyed the two bright, mild days in Oxford walking the streets, at least 5 miles, between landmark pubs and specialist second-hand bookshops, pausing again at the recommended “Art Café” for both breakfast and lunch. Christ Church College Green is close to both the “Head of the River” and “St. Peter’s Books”, the first place I stopped to search for Iain McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism”. It’s an out of print first book of his that I’ve mentioned before and was actually referenced multiple times in the Friday session. Not to be found anywhere, despite that. [Amazon UK] [Amazon US] [Book Finder](*)[British Library](*)
But I did learn some things new to me:
Last time we were there, “The Eagle and Child” (aka “Bird & Baby”) was boarded-up with a planning permission notice pinned to the front door. This time it was fully shrouded in 3 storeys of scaffolding and sheeting as the work was clearly now taking place. The other “Inklings-adjacent” pub, “The Lamb and Flag” across the road was open however and had an Inklings-themed beer.
Having walked north out of the centre, I continued to pay my first visit to No.2 Polstead Road, the long-term family home of T.E. Lawrence, as a child and as a student in Oxford as well as an archaeologist and a first world war army officer. What might have been, had Lawrence had lived to meet the Inklings on his way in and out of the university (although by later in his short life he was leading a solitary existence out at Clouds Hill, Dorset)? Not much to see besides the blue plaque, much more in the Ashmolean of course.
The Bodleian is not so much a library as a collection of specialist libraries. As well as the “old school” libraries and the Sheldonian already mentioned, there’s the huge modern Weston Library which was set-up together with Blackwells as the centre of activities and books for the OxLitFest itself. A kid in a sweetshop, but they’d never heard of “Against Criticism” either.
And not quite finally, the venue for Iain’s Saturday session was the Oxford Martin School, which boasted some very impressive multi-disciplinary “mission statements” towards “finding solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges”. Why else were we here?
And finally having been at the Bodleian/Blackwell LitFest and having visited a handful of used book shops, I couldn’t fail to buy some books, even though I couldn’t find the one I was looking for.
Bronowski’s book on Blake “A Man Without a Mask” I already have a copy and have mentioned before, but this copy had an original first edition dust cover(!) I mentioned earlier Bronowski having taught at Hull University when I attended the previous Mike Jackson lecture.
Barfield’s was one I hadn’t been aware of before, it’s a collection of previously published essays and talks, published in 1966 but originally delivered between 1944 and 1961. His main works are de-rigueur for Pirsig scholars – “Poetic Diction“, “History in English Words” and “Saving the Appearances” – but this collection does as it says on the cover, with Goethe as the archetype of all the Romantics, and has much explanation of the importance Barfield placed on Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophy, something interesting thought-wise if perhaps a bit scarily “cultish” as a form of teaching practice in the 21st C. Clearly Barfield was responding to sceptical criticism of his relationship with Steiner and had to explain himself.
But of course the Goethe connections are multiple here, hence the interest in A.N. Wilson’s latest biography of him. Pirsig uses Goethe’s “Erlkönig” metaphor for his motorcycle trip with his son, and the romantic is fundamental to his metaphysical split with the classical in his first book ZMM. And not only is Goethe the archetype for the British romantics via Coleridge, but is practically worshipped alongside Shakespeare as part of The Jena Set of the Humboldts et al as written about by Andrea Wulf. Wilson naturally also covers the Napoleonic history of the Jena Set too, but disappointingly there’s no Wulf reference, even though she published two years earlier. Fittingly, however, Wilson’s book is published by the Bloomsbury Group – so many connections.
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(*) Post Note:
Successfully re-registered(**) in person at the British Library (Boston Spa / Thorpe Arch facility nr Wetherby in Yorkshire). Iain’s “Against Criticism” shows-up with catalogued copies existing in both London and Yorkshire. Because any book (up to six a day) may be in either location, generally there’s 48 hours notice to get them to the local reading room. Since there were two copies, one at each, in principle if it’s in one of the manually accessible stores, the librarian can get it for you while you wait.
It was, so they did. Except, the one in Boston Spa is “Lost / Missing” from the shelf, so I’ll have to wait until my next visit for the London copy. Given the only second hand copy I could find at Book Finder or Abe Books was priced over $2000, I wonder what missing actually means?
[(**) I say successfully re-registered because , as you may be aware, the British Library suffered a massive denial-of-service cyber-hacking attack which they are still only partly recovered from 2 years later. Some of the manual services are still better / faster than the electronic ones 🙂 Anyway I was previously registered in that period when I was weekly commuting to work in London – all records lost / inaccessible. A fresh start.]
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