The Double Vision of ‘Natural Man’

Abstract

Walter Ong, George Ewart Evans, Walter Benjamin, and others have said words to the effect that the modern mind now only sees things literally and materially, and has lost the metaphoric vision of old. Although metaphor continues to enjoy some currency, for literal-minded thinkers it is usually relegated to occasional use. A secondary form of orality persists to some degree in everyday conversation in literate culture. However, in the prior oral culture, the metaphoric vision encompassed everything seen, heard, felt, smelt, tasted, thought, and spoken of. It was not just constantly taking measurement from experiences stored in parallel understandings in the back brain, but part of its demand for certainty and truth was by the projected use of imagination. Such metaphoric extensions into imagination produce visions of understanding, for example, of the intangible — a grasp upon those things for which we have no visible image. Despite slowly evolving physical changes, the dominance of oral modes of expressive culture in the Middle Ages continued for what we might call ‘natural man’ 1 as exemplified in language, inherited wisdom, and secret knowledge with comparatively little change in extremely remote parts of the UK until probably the 1950s, 2 and there is still a small residue. Drawing upon a lifetime’s personal study of one orally oriented culture from this period, and from an insider’s perspective, the paper will show that vernacular indigenous orally oriented people whom I encountered had an inherited second sight. I argue that such highly imaginative thought patterns from ‘natural’ man leads to esoteric belief. Northrop Frye, through studying the metaphoric nature of the Bible, recognized in the early nineteenth-century English poet William Blake a completely metaphoric mind which he called ‘The Double Vision’. Blake said, ‘I can see the past, the present and the future at the same time’. It is this idea that I primarily discuss in this paper.