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The Golden Blade TWENTY-FIFTH (1973^ ISSUE Editorial Notes The Recos'ery of the Living Source of Speech .... R u d o l f S t e i n e r 8 The Forming of Destiny in Sleeping AND Waking R u d o l f S t e i n e r 2 0 Language and Discovery Owen Barfiehl 38 Some Uses of Language in Modern P o e t r y . P a u l M a t t h e w s 5 0 Eurythmy and the Word Cecil Harwood 61 T h e E u r y t h m y F i g u r e s 77 Inner Language and Outer Language J o h n D a v y 7 9 Aus "Wahrspruchworte" Rudolf Steiner 94 Sayings from Various Times Rudolf Steiner 95 E q u a l i t y a n d J u s t i c e C h a r l e s D a v y 9 8 Speech in the Family A d a m B i t t l e s t o n 1 1 4 Reviews Spiritual Development — Coleridge Shakespeare and the Rose Cross The Unknown in the Gospels—Maturity Edited by Adam Bittleston and John Davy Price 75p. Published by the Rudolf Steiner Press, 35 Park Road, London NWl 6XT, for the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain. THE flNTHROPOSOPHIC PRESS 258 HUNGRY HOLLOW ROAD SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. 10977 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The two lectures by Rudolf Steiner printed in this issue are published by EDITORIAL NOTES generous permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, as are also the repro ductions of drawings by Rudolf Steiner Thesummer United Nationswas a focus environment for the growing conference concern in about Stockholm the health last for the Eurythmy figures. (See page 77). of the earth planet. It also underlined the strength of the forces The cover design by Mr. Ted Roberts opposing a proper care for the global environment, notably the is based freely upon two other drawings powerful interests of national States. of this series (not reproduced here) of the A few months later, the Olympic Games opened in Munich and movements expressing the moods: " Im inevitably recalled memories of how the last Games to be held in parting of Tidings " and " Inwardness." Germany were exploited as a platform for one of the most dark and virulent forms of nationalism Europe has ever known. Hitler achieved, in the end, the opposite of what he believed himself to be striving for. Instead of forming one great Reich, central Europe was divided, at the end of the war, by the Iron Curtain. And far from destroying the Jews, Hitler's actions generated enormous support for the movement to establish the State of Israel. In the Middle East, there is now one of the most dangerous confrontations of national feeling in the world—and this exploded into the Olympic arena at Munich in a grim and tragic form, as if to remind us that the' Olympic Ideal' is hollow as long as such desper ate conflicts remain unresolved. The earlier events were centred in the heart of Europe; the Israeli- Arab crisis centres on Jerusalem, the place which in medieval times was felt to be the heart of the world. And both belong with a more intimate drama being played out in the human soul, a drama in which the true being of language, the Word in man, is deeply involved. The use of language in the Middle East conflict is revealing. The very nature of the Arabic language, as several commentators have pointed out, makes it almost impossible to deliver a temperate political speech. The language flowers into passionate rhetoric so that unmanageable emotions rise up and cloud the judgement. But it is not only the Arab peoples who face this problem, or use language in this way. Israel, by contrast, is deeply imbued, also Printed in Great Britain by in her political language, with the style of a Western technological Charles Clarke {Haywards Heath) Ltd culture, clear, logical, efficient, but also easily soulless. In a scien- EDITORIAL NOTES 5 4 EDITORIAL NOTES tific age, all language is threatened with a kind of dessication and speak a truly human language to each other. Such language then resounds not only in man, but in the spiritual worlds. Men begin depersonalisation, so that many young people, especially in the West, have come to despair of language as a means of human communica to speak to the Gods, and the earth ceases to be a lonely spaceship tion at all. They are searching, with increasing urgency, for a in a dark void, the' Silent Planet' of C. S. Lewis's novel, and begins language of true humanity, a ' heart language' which will make to find its way into the community of the heavens. possible a community of man on earth. * * * Most of the essays in this issue are concerned with the nature The new linguistics of language and its redemption from the tragedies which threaten it. This is a concern of both art and science: modern poetry is The last few years have seen a great revival of interest in the study of language, and most university bookshops which supply searching in a wilderness. Yet as Paul Matthews shows, there may universities and their students now have a substantial section for be more meaning in the search than is often realised. Scientists * linguistics'. Curiously enough, one field of study which has turn to the abstract language of mathematics, which may, as Owen Barfield describes, embody the beginnings of a new relationship prompted a renewed interest in language is computer programming. with nature, although neither the layman nor the scientist himself Attempts to use computers for translating one language into another have largely failed (except where the original and the translation may yet have clearly realised it. Here, too, there is a kind of social have been so stereotyped and codified as to have lost almost all question, how to overcome the ' detachment' of science, the on looker whose impersonal manipulations of the environment have led resemblance to real living speech). But failure has prompted a new to the crises which prompted the Stockholm conference. sense of wonder at the extraordinary phenomenon of human lan At this conference, the ideal of a united human community, guage. This has been reinforced by another line of research, some caring for one Earth', was often mentioned, and was frequently attempts to teach animals to ' speak'. A recent experiment in reMorced with the image of" Spaceship Earth ", an island in space America has succeeded in teaching a female chimpanzee a large which must live indefinitely from its own resources. But this image repertoire of ' deaf and dumb' signs. But it seems that she uses awaits a crucial transformation. The earth is indeed a kind of these only in relation to the immediate present, prompted by events island in the universe at the present time: Rudolf Steiner often or objects in her surroundings, or her bodily need? One of the spoke of the fact that the forms of thinking and feeling in the souls pioneers of the new linguistics, Noam Chomsky (whose work is of many human beings are so ' earthbound ' as to be incomprehen discussed in John Davy's article) has written in his book Language sible to the beings of the spiritual Hierarchies. If we have begun to and Mind: "The examples of animal communication that have been picture the heavens as a dark void, it is because the earth has become examined so far do share many of the properties of human gestural dark for the heavens. systems, and it might be reasonable to explore the possibility of In the first of the two lectures by Steiner printed below, he points to direct connection in this case. But human lan^age, it appears, is the future ' heart language' which must be born in man as the reali based on entirely different principles. This, I think, is an important sation of the deed of the Christ Being in uniting His destiny with that point, often overlooked by those who approach human language of mankind at the Mystery of Golgotha. And in the second lecture, as a natural, biological phenomenon; in particular, it seems rather Steiner describes how the way in which language lives in us during pointless, for these reasons, to speculate about the evolution of the day deeply influences our relationships with the Hierarchies, human language from simpler systems—perhaps as absurd as it both during sleep and in the forming of our destiny between death would be to speculate about the ' evolution' of atoms from clouds and a new birth. The * Right Speech' which the Buddha preached of elementary particles ". at a time when men still had some recollection of the creative lan « * * guage which the gods once spoke to men, has to be found today in Speech is in its reality no less complex than the being of man, the human soul, renewed and rejuvenated, so that we can begin to it is indeed the same complexity. The senses, the inner organs, 6 EDITORIAL NOTES EDITORIAL NOTES 7 the muscular system, the structure of the bones—everything is in which real human meeting over questions of work, production and formed out of the creative Word, and for the Word. price would not be so hindered as it still is today by the conflicts of The foundation for our sense of human equality is this conscious power. He wanted it to be seen that price is appropriate for com ness—that we bear the same human form, endowed with individual modities, and not in the same way for human work, or land, or ity, though our personal qualities are so different.