Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

The Sensing Word
by
Philip Thatcher
To one who understands the sense of language
The world unveils itself
In image
Rudolf Steiner
The corrected proofs of my novel, Mirror of the Moon, are now
back at prepress, one more stage toward the launching of this second volume
of The Raven Trilogy.
As I went through the proofs, I was struck by an experience of “I,
yet not I.” I was an active agent in putting these words together over a
period of two years, yet the finished work is more than my I-activity. It has
become in itself a “mystery of the will” that language, working through my
I-activity, has brought into being.
In the writing of both Raven’s Eye and Mirror of the Moon, I have
had the experience of knowing a moment in the story through and through
before putting pen to paper. In the fall of 1993, for instance, I stood beside
a double dolmen in Brittany, known locally as “The Fairies Mound,” and
saw in a flash a sequence of events in Part IV of Raven’s Eye. When it came
to the writing of that sequence of events, it was a matter of finding words
and images that could embody what I already knew.
There is, however, another experience. I sit, pen in hand, knowing
where the story needs to go. But how will it go there? More specifically,
how will the characters go there? What in the mystery of their wills will
move them toward that moment, event, destination that I know truly belongs
to the story?
Let me explore this question through an image.
During these past days of Christmas, I went to an exhibit at the
Vancouver Art Gallery featuring the work of Tom Thomson. Thomson’s
work as a painter, mainly in Algonquin Park in Ontario, spanned an intensive
six years before his death in 1917. Some of his works are clear vistas
across a lake to its far side, toward the hills of the Canadian Shield beyond,
overarched by skies filled with cloud and light. What interested me, however,
were those paintings where clear distances were obscured in part or
almost totally by foregrounds of bush and trees—the barely penetrable bush
of much of Canada’s wilderness. Stands of white birch, black pine or a
shock of red maple leaves fill the foreground. Behind them, there are hints
of skies massive with cloud or immense with light; a glimpse of hills reddened
by sunset; a clear horizon on the far side of a river or lake—the larger
picture partly or barely visible through the tangle of trunks, branches, leaves.
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