McLuhan: Well, no, it’s, I think we’re coming back more and more to it very much, but the idea of taking total field theory. Field theory in physics is book of nature. Interdisciplinary is book of nature. Not allowing specialism to take over. But grammar-logic-rhetoric had been for, from the ancient times, a sort of basic curriculum, concerned with eloquence and with the word, the logos . And the study of the word as resonating with wisdom, and, incidentally, resonating with therapeutic power, goes way back. There’s a book by Entraglo called The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity . He’s a medical historian. That is a basic book like Havelock’s Preface to Plato . Therapy of the Word concerns the work of the witchdoctors and the shamans who cast the spells and so on, helped people to get well. The spells were cast in various artforms: lyric, epic, dramatic, odes, and so on; were all part of the shaman’s
