Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman.

Me talking about a new book it's called lost knowledge of the imagination and what I'm gonna try to do is see if I can quickly walk through sort of the central ideas that are in the book and the central figures that I look at the title of the book comes from the poet Blake scholar and essayist Kathleen rein who you may be aware of she for many years was involved with something it was known as the Temenos Academy which was a sort of I'm even though it was called the Academy was kind of a non-academic kind of learning institution but the learning was devoted to wasn't the sort of learning that you might find in universities regular run at Millett universities it was learning of the imagination it was learning of this lost knowledge of the imagination what Kathy Maine also referred to as the excluded knowledge or the rejected knowledge and the reason she called it this lost knowledge of the imagination was because literally when she was a coming of age in well when she was at university in Cambridge in the 20s and 30s she always loved poetry she read poetry she was writing it as we all do teens but this she was actually writing real poetry then but she also had a great love of nature and the Tuda herd didn't seem you know antithetical sort of detailed observation that she devoted herself to is just the child you know growing up and looking at the wonders as she grew up on sort of the borders the borderlands of Scottish and English up there and in science and you know the same sort of thing this kind of exact observation and attention to detail so when she finally went to Cambridge she thought rather than study literature which she thought was kind of silly to do but she was reading all this stuff anyway that she would study something that she didn't have first-hand knowledge of already and this was science and but she didn't give up on poetry and she didn't give up on literature but she quickly discovered that the sort of poetry and the sort of literature that was being read by her new friends in Cambridge wasn't the sort that she had grown up with I mean her favorites were the Romantic poets or a little…