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Monday – Martin Luther King Day
One shift we have witnessed under the Trump administrations is white liberals finally awakening to a reality that people of color have long known: when the powers that be assume authoritarian powers, Constitutional rights and equal treatment under the law are illusions. That reality was slammed home through the ICE shooting of Nicole Renee Good and the Justice Department’s laughable cover-up.
Martin Luther King used non-violent resistance to win the public over to his side during the Civil Rights movement, and Minneapolis protesters are taking a page from his tactics. Meanwhile, reenacting the role of Bull Connor and others, ICE is doing all it can to goad people into giving Trump an excuse to send in the military.
In “Bullet Points,” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown uses bitter sarcasm to cast doubt on police explanations for Black deaths. Thanks to cell phone witnesses, the broader public is finally coming around to his view. For all its grim humor, the poem ends on a heartbreaking personal note: the life of the victim is ultimately about tears of the bereft.
Bullet Points By Jericho Brown
I will not shoot myself In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it to get home. Yes, I may be at risk, but I promise you, I trust the maggots Who live beneath the floorboards Of my house to do what they must To any carcass more than I trust An officer of the law of the land To shut my eyes like a man Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet So clean my mother could have used it To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will do it the same way most Americans do, I promise you: cigarette smoke Or a piece of meat on which I choke Or so broke I freeze In one of these winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter that we’ve been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can play a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.
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Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading, about the marriage in Cana, has led me to a fascinating lyric by Canadian poet Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922). “The Bridegroom of Cana” tells the story from the point of view of the groom at the wedding, although “bridegroom” points two ways in that Jesus is sometimes called the bridegroom of the church.
It’s a strange poem in that the bridegroom appears to be having, if not second thoughts, at least a sense that consummation will not live up to the anticipation. In the first stanza he wishes his spouse to veil her eyes “lest in their light my life withdrawn/ Dies…as a star in the day,/ As a dream in the dawn.” His mention of two olive leaves “sighing apart” suggests that the reality cannot live up to the dream, and in fact he goes on to say, “Sweet, I have waked from a dream of thee.” Then he proceeds to talk about “the golden lure of this love [growing] dim.” When he says that her “lips are bright as the edge of a sword,” it’s not clear that this is a good thing.
What changes is the presence of Jesus at the wedding. Suddenly (if I am interpreting correctly) something more has entered the marriage ceremony, and that something more is Love. “Love, I looked awhile in His face/ And was still,” the speaker says.
So now, after these early bridegroom jitters, the speaker has a vision of a new foundation for his marriage, described powerfully in the final three stanzas. I particularly like the image of thrushes in a field while a third bird, a lark, pours down music from above:
Down in the fields the thrushes sing And the lark is lost in the light above, Lost in the infinite, glowing whole, As I in thy soul, As I in thy soul.
I note, as an aside Percy Shelley’s description of the lark’s music in “To a Skylark”:
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
In this case, Jesus is that blithe spirit, and the union of higher and lower continues on:
Turn to me, trust to me, mirror me As the star in the pool, as the cloud in the sea.
And:
Hush my harp, for the day is begun, And the lifting, shimmering flight of the swallow Breaks in a curve on the brink of morn, Over the sycamores, over the corn, Cling to me, cleave to me, prison me As the mote in the flame, as the shell in the sea…
Here’s the poem:
The Bridegroom of Cana By Marjorie Pickthall
“There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee. . . . And both Jesus was called, and His disciples, to the marriage.”
VEIL thine eyes, O belovéd, my spouse, Turn them away, Lest in their light my life withdrawn Dies as a star, as a star in the day, As a dream in the dawn.
Slenderly hang the olive leaves Sighing apart; The rose and silver doves in the eaves With a murmur of music bind our house. Honey and wine in thy words are stored, Thy lips are bright as the edge of a sword That hath found my heart, That hath found my heart.
Sweet, I have waked from a dream of thee,– And of Him. He who came when the songs were done. From the net of thy smiles my heart went free And the golden lure of thy love grew dim. I turned to them asking, “Who is He, Royal and sad, who comes to the feast And sits Him down in the place of the least?” And they said, “He is Jesus, the carpenter’s son.”
Hear how my harp on a single string Murmurs of love. Down in the fields the thrushes sing And the lark is lost in the light above, Lost in the infinite, glowing whole, As I in thy soul, As I in thy soul.
Love, I am fain for thy glowing grace As the pool for the star, as the rain for the rill. Turn to me, trust to me, mirror me As the star in the pool, as the cloud in the sea. Love, I looked awhile in His face And was still.
The shaft of the dawn strikes clear and sharp; Hush, my harp. Hush my harp, for the day is begun, And the lifting, shimmering flight of the swallow Breaks in a curve on the brink of morn, Over the sycamores, over the corn, Cling to me, cleave to me, prison me As the mote in the flame, as the shell in the sea, For the winds of the dawn say, “Follow, follow Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter’s son.”
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Friday
Now that I’ve recovered from a severe case of the flu, I return to my Friday memoir writing. My good fortune, after receiving my PhD from Emory in 1981, was finding a position at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in St. Mary’s City. Despite its name, St. Mary’s is neither a women’s nor a Catholic school but the state’s liberal arts college, set up with the vision of offering a small liberal arts college experience to students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford one. As such, it spoke to my own deepest ideals.
My first year at St. Mary’s (1981-82) was a tremendously exciting time. The school had hired 17 new faculty, many in the arts and humanities, and many of us had small children. We had potluck gatherings and talked incessantly about literature, critical theory, child rearing, and the state of the college. (Our first year our president resigned for having an affair with—wait for it—the Dean of Academic Affairs!) Finances were tight as Julia wasn’t working and I was being paid an Instructor’s salary ($14,500, even though I was an Assistant Professor) so that, to save on gas, we had to apportion out our trips to town. But because of our community of like-minded souls and an exciting intellectual environment, it was a happy time.
One of the great joys of having children is getting to revisit one’s favorite childhood books, and I began sharing old classics, along with new arrivals, as soon as I could. Like my parents, we chose not to have a television so that we could focus on reading, and every night when they were old enough, Justin, Darien, and Toby got a chapter each, along with a poem. I read them the Pooh books, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, The Jungle Books, the Narnia books, Gulliver’s Travels, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the Alice books, many of E. Nesbit’s novels, Miss Masham’s Repose, Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden, The Princess and Curdie books, The Rescuers and all the sequels, and (among the new arrivals) Lloyd Alexander’s Taran books, Brian Jacques’s Redwall series, The Rats of N.I.M.H., and on and on. As a result, the boys have grown up to be voracious readers, and Toby, after reading Redwall to his kids, has just asked us to send him the Taran books.
Meanwhile, I was learning what every new teacher learns, which is that we were the exceptions in the courses we took, not the rule—which in my case meant that my students did not enter my classes with my own level of enthusiasm. I also came to my teaching with what I came to call a F.O.G.S. mentality, which is Fresh Outta Graduate School. I still can’t believe how much I asked of my students that first year. In a satire class I had them read Alexander’s Pope’s very challenging poem Epistle to Arbuthnot. I also assigned a novel a week in a Victorian literature class and had them grapple with George Lukacs’s daunting Theory of the Novel in a senior seminar. Imagine being assigned the following:
The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality….[T]he novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness.
Somehow the students survived while I adjusted my teaching to reach the students I had, not the students I imagined having.
Like all colleges, St. Mary’s had its ups and its downs in the 36 years I spent there, but I never lost faith in its mission, and always I was determined to provide each student with an educational experience tailored to his or her personal needs. To truly make this change, however, a more profound shift was needed on my part.
In my past memoir writing I’ve talked about how many of the essays I was assigned in college felt unreal (or “reified,” to use Lukacs’s term for forms empty of meaningful content). I knew that some of the essays I was receiving, even while they might appear perfectly competent, seemed no more than an empty exercise akin to jumping through hoops. I remember one essay, for instance, where a student analyzed the name symbolism in Death of a Salesman (Willie Loman as “low man”). The student didn’t care, nor did I. So how could I teach in a way that would elicit explorations where something seemed at stake.
When I received a Fulbright to teach at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Yugoslavia for my sabbatical year, I set as one of my goals figuring out how to get meaningful essays. While I knew that, for myself, it was important to figure out whether and how the literature I loved could make the world a better place, my students weren’t as keyed into historical developments as I had been (the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests). I realized I had to find ways to apply the literature we were reading to their personal concerns.
I’ll save the story of Yugoslavia and the friendships I developed there for a future post. I’ll just note here that the reduced teaching responsibilities and absence of committee responsibilities give me an immense amount of extra time to focus on teacher development. I also had time to read, and I plunged into the English Department’s impressive library, including novels by Margaret Drabble, Sarah Maitland, Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), John Updike (Rabbit Is Rich), Louise Erdrich (Tracks), Gloria Naylor (Women of Brewster Place), Patrick White, Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), and others.
What is noteworthy about a number of these works—especially those by Drabble, Maitland, and Barnes—is that they were non-political melodramas. As such, they expanded my own emotional range. This would prove invaluable for when I returned to the States and started thinking about other things my students could get out of the works they were reading.
Essentially, I shifted to a much more psychological approach to teaching. For instance, in my Intro to Lit classes I would ask my students to describe memorable reading experience of a poem, story, or play that they could remember—between three and five—and figure out who they at the time that explained why they had the experience that they did. This showed them that literature had played a deeper role in their lives than they perhaps realized. For the rest of the course, I encouraged them to view each work as potentially having a similar impact. Their final essay was to be on the work that moved the needle the most.
In my book I describe the assignment and also give numerous examples of students reporting on life-changing reading experiences. I can confidently say that I addressed the reification issue satisfactorily.
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Thursday
The final two books in Philip Pullman’s Lyra Silvertongue’s hexalogy (or second trilogy, if you’d rather) are about Lyra and her daemon searching for her lost imagination. To fully appreciate the import of that search, it’s useful to look back at the importance that the west has attached to the imagination since the 18th century. That’s when various philosophers, social scientists, political activists, and above all poets came to believe that the human Imagination could transform the world. As I wrote in my book,
It’s hard to overstate the importance placed on the Imagination at this time. “Seldom in Western culture,” writes James Engell in his landmark study The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism, “has one idea excited so many leading minds for such a stretch of time. It became the impelling force in artistic and intellectual life…” Applied to everything from William Wordsworth’s “meanest flower that blows” (“Intimations of Immortality”) to Percy Shelley’s “light whose smile kindles the universe” (Adonais), the Imagination came to be seen as the key that would unlock the secrets of creation. In his essay “Poetry and the Imagination,” American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that poetry “is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist…”
I noted in Tuesday’s post there are various forces in Lyra’s world that are threatening the imagination, from money-obsessed capitalism to narrow church orthodoxy to various reductive schools of philosophy (soulless science, flippant skepticism, nihilistic existentialism). Pullman counters with the creatures of his rich fantasy world, which unite to keep the portals of the imagination open.
The key portal in one in a faraway eastern desert through which a special rose oil in obtained. Incapable of being grown in Lyra’s world or of being synthesized by chemical companies, the oil has a special property: if you let a drop fall on your eye, you can see the Dust (consciousness) that is at the foundation of creation:
I saw the appearance of a nimbus or halo around the dealer, consisting of sparkling granules of light, each smaller than a grain of flour. And between him and his daemon, who was a sparrow, there was a constant stream of such grains of light, back and forth, in both directions. As I watched, I became convinced that I was seeing something profound and true, which I would never afterwards be able to deny.
So what profound truth is Pullman’s fantasy revealing to us? In his epitaph to The Secret Commonwealth (Book #5) he quotes William Blake—“Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth”—and in the course of Commonwealth and The Rose Field he makes clear that fantasy is more than just fantasy. To do this, he draws on poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria for a distinction between “fancy” and “imagination.”
“Fancy,” as Coleridge saw it, just organizes materials already before us, say the way a metaphor does. As Lyra puts it at one point, “Taking real things and changing them a bit. That’s exactly what liars do.”
Imagination, on the other hand, takes existing objects and transforms them in such a way that they correspond to a deeper truth. In Coleridge’s words, it “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.” Lyra attempts to distinguish between the two in a debate with an angel. While the angel thinks that “fancy” and “imagination” both happen only in the mind, Lyra sees imagination as having a reality beyond:
Lyra: “I know that whatever the imagination is, it isn’t just inventing things. Making things up and pretending they’re real is not enough.”
“It is enough for the great poets. For the storytellers and the artists of every kind. They take things as they are, things in the world, and play with them and change them about and make something new. Is that an activity to condemn as trivial?”
“That’s what you think poets and storytellers do?”
“Why, yes. What else?”
“But that’s what I did when I told lies,”she said. “I used to be a famous liar. I took things that were partly true and I made up other things out of them. But they were lies. I knew they weren’t true as I told them. You can’t mean that the imagination is the same thing as telling lies?”
While the angel refuses to acknowledge a difference, Lyra makes another attempt to distinguish the two in the next book, when she is closer to understanding what she is searching for. This time she is talking with her friend and mentor Malcolm, who asks her,
“What did you feel was missing?”
“A…certainty about the world. A sort of sense that fundamentally it was true and reliable and just there. A sense that we belonged there too. Belonged in the physical world. Whatever that sense was, I’d had it once, and I didn’t have it anymore.”
“Maybe ‘imagination’ was the wrong word.”
“No, it was exactly the right world. People who think imagination is just making things up, they’re just wrong. Even angels are wrong. Imagination is seeing things properly, real things, seeing them fully in all their contexts with all their connections in place, all the things they mean around them…
And a little later:
“[The angel] said that the imagination was just our minds making things up, bits of fantasy jumbled together, like a dream. But she was wrong. . . . What Pan said, the thing he said I’d lost—he was right. It’s something fundamental. And I had lost it. . . . They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play, or tell stories, or in a dream, is that things can be both true and not true…like when someone says, ‘Art is nothing more than pretty patterns.’ But the truth is that it’s pretty patterns as well as lots of other things. And what that means…Well, what it means is that we must keep the windows open. Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it—we need it.”
“Good so far. Go on.”
“Welll…” she felt unsure, and also that she was trembling the edge of a discovery. “I think the Rose Field, the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well. And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out theretoo…The Rose Field needs what we have as much as we need what it has. What matters is that it must be free to flow through all the worlds.
Lyra’s separated daemon, meanwhile, is coming to similar conclusions:
[The imagination] wasn’t just something you could bolt on like a spare part. It was something far more deeply interfused…He knew all the poetry that Lyra did, of course, and loved it just as much, and that phrase came to hi unbidden and at first unrecognized, from a time when she’d been reading in a whisper and he’d been lying with his head against hers. It was like them: deeply interfused. Something had left her, and it had left him.
Pam is thinking here of a passage from Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” It goes right to the heart of the matter:
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Thinking along the same lines, Lyra at one point speculates, “Maybe the imagination is a sort of wind that blows through all the worlds.” Imagination as wind is a metaphor that is adopted by multiple Romantic poets, most notably Coleridge and Percy Shelley, and it helps us see how Pullman plays with Lyra’s name. In the early books she is a notorious “liar,” but she develops into a “lyre.”
With the wind image, think of her as an Aeolian harp, which Coleridge and Shelley both saw as an image for the artist: while it is acted upon by nature, at the same time it transforms nature into art. In “Ode to the West Wind” Shelley asks, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” and in “The Aeolian Harp” Coleridge writes,
And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caressed, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land…
So Lyra is an artistic lyre, responsible for seeing into the life of things (to borrow again from Tintern Abbey). When she says, “the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well. And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out there too,” she is echoing Wordsworth’s description of the poet as one who half perceives, half creates. By the book’s end, her artistry will be used to reopen the portal to the imagination that the world has attempted to destroy.
Before turning to that, however, let’s look at one other way that Pullman uses to articulate this other world, along with the internal crisis that Lyra and Pan are experiencing.
At one point in the book, Pam and Malcolm are in the kingdom of the gryphons, where they have been joined by a representative of the witches. These various mythological creatures are assessing the danger that orthodox religion, mechanistic philosophy, capitalism, and modernity generally are posing to their existence. It is a version of the danger that Wordsworth articulates in his sonnet, “The World Is Too Much with Us.” Whereas once we looked out at nature and saw pagan gods, now we waste our powers with getting and spending:
Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Like Proteus and Triton, these mythical creatures of the air are fighting for their own existence. A witch describes the threat her people have been noticing:
Winds are wilder than they used to be, or else they fail altogether. The air is tainted and stale. Freshness has left the atmosphere, by small degrees at first, so small as to be hardly noticeable, but it is getting worse. Sunsets are lurid with colors never seen before; birds migrate at strange seasons, or die in their thousands from diseases unknown to our healers.
The change, she adds, is “impalpable and silent. It drifts in invisible clouds and can’t be described or fought or destroyed.” She, the gryphons, and Malcolm conclude that their task is “to protect the openings between the worlds, whose closure and destruction is causing so much damage.”
One way of thinking about them is as members of “an inner kingdom.” As Pam puts it,
I have learned that the wisdom of the gryphons distinguishes between an outer kingdom and an inner kingdom. The outer kingdom is the world we can travel through and measure and make maps of, and gryphons and witches and humans alike can share and understand it. The inner kingdom comprises everything to the distance of the furthest star, and includes the mysteries of the heart and the mind.
Another term Pullman uses for this inner kingdom is “the Secret Commonwealth,” and as one of Lyra’s mentors informs her, you can’t see the Commonwealth directly:
You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out of the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time. If you want to see them jacky lanterns [bog spirits], the absolute worst way is to go out on the marsh with a searchlight. You take a bloody great light, and all the will o’ the wykeses and the little sparkers, they’d stay right underwater. And if you want to think about them, it don’t do no good making lists and classifying and analyzing. You’ll just get a lot o’ dead rubbish what means nothing. The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.
While the witches and the gryphons make for an impressive alliance, as in Lord of the Rings the ultimate responsibility falls upon a single individual. Lyra’s challenge, however, is the great Romantic crisis, which is how to access her lost imagination. Without it, she cannot create the stories she needs to connect with the Secret Commonwealth, the inner kingdom, the Rose Field, her spirit demon. She is thus like Wordsworth in Intimations of Immortality or Coleridge in “Kubla Khan.”“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Wordsworth cries out in agony while Kubla Khan stares in horror at “a lifeless ocean” and “caves of ice.”
One wonders whether, in the course of finishing his series, Pullman went through his own crisis, losing confidence in his own creations. Is that why he missed his deadline by two or three years? Did he ever feel rudderless, as though he had lost his own spirit guide? In any event, I have a sense that he might be describing his own writing process at the of Rose Field when he has Lyra attempting to undo the destruction that the orthodox church has visited upon the portal.
The church’s military officers have used dynamite to destroy the openings so that only tiny fragments remain. Lyra’s barely adequate tool is the needle that was once housed in the golden compass. It has the same cutting capacity as Will’s “subtle knife” from the second book but is far less malleable. Meanwhile, the openings are dancing around:
And the holes, the tears and the gashes left by the explosion, were so small—maybe she wouldn’t be able to put the needle into one, even if she could see it…
And
There was one of the little torn gaps—a bit larger than most of them—and light was moving behind it, but such a small thing, no wider than the tip of a fingernail before it was filed. And no, she’d lost it again; but yes, there it was…She tried to line it up with things behind it, the edge of a group of trees, the windscreen of that red bulldozer further down, the corner of a stone wall around a distant field across the lake…
Is this what it is like for novelists as they try to capture the vision that floats on the periphery of their minds? Fortunately for Lyra, she hears the distant voice of Pan. She may be opposed by all the forces of the modern world, but she has this interior guide:
Bracing herself against the trunk of the toppled willow, she reached out, supporting her wrist with the other hand, and placed the needle point precisely into the tiny gap. It slipped away—but that was because her other hand, still hurting from the assault by the soldiers in the train, was painful to keep in that position. She let it hang before lifting it up again, and she heard herself uttering a long low moan of weariness and pain, but shut it down and gritted her teeth and lifted the needle once again, found the spot at once, and cut down as far as she could reach.
And the air opened, and there was her own world, and Pantalaimon tumbled through and into her arms.
Lyra has accomplished what Pullman has accomplished with his luminous fantasies, providing us with a portal through which we can pass from our own world into one populated by daemons, gryphons, witches, sorcerers, alchemists, angels, specters, and countless other rare beasts and unique adventures (to borrow from Auden).
I’ll let Ionides, a one-time math professor and Lyra’s desert guide, sum up what her quest has achieved. “Without imagination,” he says, “you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less.”
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone.
Wednesday
You’re getting a lot on Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy this week because, after years of waiting for the final installment, I was finally about to finish the series and am still vibrating. Tomorrow I will be posting an essay on the author’s connection with high Romanticism, a knowledge of which helps us appreciate the depth of his project.
For today, however, I want to apply an insight from The Rose Field to the white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups that are attempting to take over America and the Muslim clerics that, in Iran, have long held sway. Both are characterized by an intolerance for anyone who looks, thinks, or worships differently than they do, so much so that they are willing to brutalize, imprison, and kill anyone who fails to buckle under. It has been much, much worse in Iran than here, of course, but we can see in Iran’s history where our own rightwing would like to take us.
A similar madness has seized the world in which Lyra operates so that an autocratic church—a blend of intolerant Calvinism and Opus Dei Catholicism—wishes to shut down portals to other worlds. In doing so, it makes common cause with “the Men from the Mountains,” who are Islamic terrorists characterizing themselves as “the clean wind of God.” While nominally at odds with Christianity, they share the church’s suspicion of the portals. If these reactionary forces have their way, they will create closed systems, the ultimate goal of ideological purists.
Lyra invokes a mathematical principle to expose the flaw in their vision:
“In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system…”
“Gödel’s theorem. How does that fit in?”
“Well, if that’s true, then that means If you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong. You’re not looking properly.”
A healthy system, she goes on to say, requires gaps:
We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.
Other worlds, she continues
are necessary, and so are all the windows and doors and openings, to let the wind blow through all the world…That’s why all the authorities want to block up the openings, and that’s why we must fight to the death to stop them.
Immigration, multiculturalism, liberal engagement with the world—these are all ways of opening ourselves to that wind. It’s that or suffocate.
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Tuesday
My Christmas present this year was Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field, the last volume of his Book of Dust trilogy (which in turn followed the His Dark Materials (or Golden Compass) trilogy. Pullman fans like myself have been anxiously awaiting this book for a while, given that it was supposed to have appeared in 2022. Indeed, I would have stood in a bookstore line at midnight, like a Harry Potter fan, if that’s what it took to speed things up. Anyway, I’ve now read the Lyra Silvertongue’s story arc in its entirety, which has given me a clearer sense of Pullman’s project. Major spoilers ahead.
In the first trilogy, Pullman appears to be working through his beef with organized religion in general and with fundamentalist Calvinists and Opus Dei Catholics in particular. The Magisterium is a cross between Calvin’s Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition’s Counter Reformation. More generally, however, Pullman objects to those religions that demand that their members be mindless followers, allowing the church to dictate their thinking.
Key to his vision is “dust,” which appears, when all is said and done, to be consciousness. Since consciousness is associated with original sin (the tree of good and evil), the church regards it as evil. And because this dust is not detected on human beings until they become adults, it is associated with puberty and sexuality and declared sinful.
Integral to this drama are the animal daemons, the most captivating element in Pullman’s fantasy. These function as some combination of animal spirit guide and the anima/animus side of ourselves that (according to Carl Jung) we must open ourselves to and accept if we are to find completeness. The daemons of children can be a variety of animals but, once their human has entered puberty, they settle upon a single form, a way of signaling that the basic structure of the individual has become more or less fixed. As they are thus connected with the end of childhood experience, Mrs. Coulter in Golden Compass seeks to render children perpetually innocent by separating them from their daemons, a gruesome experiment resulting in death for some, zombi existences for others.
In his second trilogy, Pullman widens his focus. His critique of repressive orthodox religion hasn’t ended—in fact, Magisterium has joined forces with fundamentalist Islamists, who share some of the same goals—but now he is interested in threats to the imagination as well as to independent thought. Thus we are introduced to three other villains: soulless materialism, empty skepticism, and predatory capitalism. The Magisterium finds ways to co-opt or make use of the first two, even though it has radically different goals. It doesn’t appear to have fully registered the threat represented by the third, however, which threatens to dissolve everything.
Let’s step back for a second. By attacking both religious orthodoxy and various forms of godless materialism, Pullman shows that he believes spiritual forces to be at work in the universe. Orthodox religion, unfortunately, cares more for power than in connecting people with those forces. As bad as the Magisterium is, however, at least it doesn’t threaten people’s daemons, which skepticism, blinkered science, and global capitalism do.
Let’s look at each of these three in turn. Simon Talbot is the radical skeptic or Berkeleyan idealist who sees everything as a construct and nothing as real. (There are deconstructionists who think this way.) In his essay “On the Non-Existence of Daemons,” he contends,
From our earliest childhoods we are encouraged to pretend that there exists an entity outside our bodies which is nevertheless part of ourselves. These wispy playmates are the finest device our minds have yet developed to instantiate the insubstantial. Every social pressure confirms us in our belief in them: habits and customs grow like stalagmites to fix the soft fur, the big brown eyes, the merry tricks in a behavioral cavern of stone.
And all the multitudinous forms this delusion takes are nothing more than random mutations of cells in the brain.
Although Talbot himself has a daemon—a blue macaw—it seems perpetually nervous and we never see them interacting.
As an aside, I note that one of the funnier lines in the novel is when Talbot, who has been spying for the Magisterium, realizes that he is functioning as their tool or useful idiot:
He stood and shook hands, and Talbot gathered his cloak and his briefcase and left, obscurely humiliated, although he wasn’t sure how; but his philosophy soon made that feeling disappear.
If Talbot is slippery, able to bend his rhetoric in whatever way will serve him, materialist philosopher Gottfried Brande is rigid and entrenched. In his mind, daemons are irrational delusions that only the weak-minded believe in. When Pan attempts to initiate a conversation with him, he closes his eyes and ears and thinks he is being attacked by ghosts (even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts either). His own daemon, meanwhile, is a large dog tormented with misery, as is the case with any creature that is thoroughly neglected.
The daemons of the industrialists and capitalists in the book, meanwhile, are in zombie states. Essentially they are ignored by their humans, who deny their own complex humanity as they tear apart beauty, custom, and tradition on their way to maximizing profits. Their daemons, unable to converse with them or with anyone else, essentially shrivel up.
Lyra’s daemon Pan, who has settled into the form of a pine marten, sees her human falling under the spell of both skepticism and soulless materialism, schools of thought that she encounters as a student at Oxford. In the process, Lyra loses the ability to imagine, which she had as a child. Pan therefore separates from her—an agony to both of them—in order to find where her imagination has gone. Put another way, if Lyra is to be healthy and whole, she must reconnect with this side of herself that she has lost. And she must do so in a world that is increasingly hostile to the imagination.
I’ll do a deeper dive into the imagination in a post later this week. Suffice it to say that Pullman draws on the great Romantic poets to articulate its power—I pick up allusions to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats in the course of the novel—and that he sees it the way that 18th and 19th centuries saw it, a force that could change history. If Lyra is to save the world a second time (the first time her embrace of sexuality and sensuality saves both the living and the dead from orthodoxy), she will need to prevent religious fundamentalism, soulless materialism, empty intellectualism, and predatory capitalism from destroying the portals through which the imagination works.
It is through these portals that come Pullman’s own marvelous creations, so in a sense he is making a case for the urgency of his own fantasy. A genre that some dismiss as fanciful and others as ungodly (he contends) in actuality reveals a deep and urgent truth: we must have the rich products of the imagination if we are not to end up a dry, desiccated husks living meaningless lives. At the end of the novel, when the Magisterium appears to have closed the final portal, Lyra as artist finds a way to open it back up.
In the act of doing so, Lyra finally reconnects with Pan in a moment of ecstatic joy. This is what it feels to overcome inner alienation and step into the real and full self. Just as she provides us with one model of wholeness at the end of the first trilogy, so she provides us with another model of wholeness in the second.
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Monday
When I heard the news about ICE murdering Nicole Renee Good in Minneapolis, followed by Border Patrol killing two more in Portland, Oregon, the lyrics of an old Phil Ochs protest song came to mind. While the blood of martyrs, most notably Emmitt Till eight years earlier, may have been the seed of the Civil Rights Movement, in the “The Ballad of Medgar Evers” the dispirited singer just sees another meaningless death:
Too many martyrs and too many dead Too many lies, too many empty words were said Too many times for too many angry men Oh, let it never be again
Evers died in June of 1963 and, as it turned out, there would be many more martyrs before Congress would pass significant legislation. Victims would include the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing and various voting rights activists. Although I was only twelve at the time, I remember sharing Ochs’s pessimism. It seemed like segregation would be with us always.
The good news is that both he and I were wrong. All those martyrs awakened even indifferent members of the public to the horrors of Jim Crow while spurring others to action. The ultimate result was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, titanic achievements that changed the American landscape. While they didn’t eradicate white supremacism (as we know to our sorrow), they made possible many of the advances we have seen over the past 50 years.
Rather than stay with Ochs, then, here’s a lyric by Lord Byron, written after leaving comfortable surroundings in Italy to agitate for Greek independence from the Turks:
The dead have been awakened – shall I sleep? The World’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch? The harvest’s ripe – and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my Couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, Its echo in my heart…
The thorn of Nicole Renee Good’s murder will not allow sleep. As a recent Atlantic article put it, “What is now overt, in a way that it hadn’t been Wednesday morning, is that these agents are at war with the public, and have been for some time.” A trumpet is sounding and its echoes are reaching American hearts.
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Sunday
In the Episcopal Church we have entered the season of Epiphany, which apparently in the Roman Catholic Church is called “Ordinary Time.” According to W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, “the most trying time of all” is the interim between Christmas and Lent. “For the time being” (a phrase so commonplace as to be almost invisible) is a time of tepid emotions, humdrum compromises, and low expectations.
“The happy morning is over. The night of agony still to come,” the poet observes, adding “the time is noon.” Missing the intensity of Christmas, when “everything became a You and nothing was an It,” we find ourselves thrown back into unpleasant self-reflection.
As we return to household chores and workday commutes—back to the Aristotelian city, where everything is matter-of-fact measurable—the marvelous sense of having stepped out of time is fading. Rather, we now operate according to Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s mechanics. Auden asks whether great suffering would be preferable to this time when the Spirit doesn’t seem to be showing forth in force but is merely practicing his scales? What could be less inspiring than these days when there are “bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, irregular verbs to learn”? The streets appear to have shrunk and the office to have become more depressing, while the Christmas feast is but a distant memory and a clean-up job. Echoing Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeleyan idealism, the poet tells us that “the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.”
For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio III
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes — Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, And the children got ready for school. There are enough Leftovers to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week — Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot, Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully — To love all of our relatives, and in general Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed To do more than entertain it as an agreeable Possibility, once again we have sent Him away, Begging though to remain His disobedient servant, The promising child who cannot keep His word for long. The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory, And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are, Back in the moderate Aristotelian city Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it. It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all. For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious; Remembering the stable where for once in our lives Everything became a You and nothing was an It. And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause, We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son, We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father; “Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.” They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form That we do not expect, and certainly with a force More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance. The happy morning is over, The night of agony still to come; the time is noon: When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure A silence that is neither for nor against her faith That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers, God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
The greatest enemy to faith in this season, Auden seems to be saying, is indifference. God is not going to step in and prevent the world as it is from triumphing if we let it.
It is up to us, then, to redeem time from insignificance—which is to say, we must seek the divine no less now than at other times of year. God’s presence shouldn’t be dependent on the season.
To bolster our sagging spirits, Auden follows up section III of his Oratorio with a luminous section IV. He suggests a way to transform ordinary time into extraordinary time:
IV CHORUS
He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life. Love Him in the World of the Flesh; And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
Apparently, “Land of Unlikeness” is taken from a quotation of Saint Bernard and refers to the human soul’s unlikeness to God and unlikeness to its own pre-awakened state. Poet Robert Lowell, who also uses the phrase, has it symbolize how modern man, cut off from the sight of God, wanders through the land driven by greed and cruelty.
Despite the challenges, however, Auden’s wonderful images reassure us that magic and adventure can still be there for us. We have but to love Christ “in the World of the Flesh.” Even though we may dwell in “the Kingdom of Anxiety” (or “Age of Anxiety,” as Auden wrote three years earlier), by following the Truth we will come “to a great city that has expected your return for years.”
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Friday
It so happens that I have a bad bout of the flu (in spite of having had a flu shot), although at first my doctor thought it was something more serious and sent me to the emergency room. The pain has now been brought under control but, as I’m not yet up to writing a substantive post, you’re getting this instead.
The Sewanee hospital’s emergency room, where I have spent many hours with my mother, is quite small so I was occupying a bed in full view of the ER administrator. As I was lying there groaning, with stabbing pains alternating between head and chest, she was sitting behind her desk doing, well, administrative work. I felt like I was in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The scene I had in mind was when an invalid finds himself sharing the same room as the ivory company’s chief accountant. Despite the Congo’s challenging conditions, the accountant is immaculately dressed. Marlow describes him as “a miracle”:
I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.
To this man, the illness of others is an irritant:
When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalid agent from upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. ‘The groans of this sick person,’ he said, ‘distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.’
I did my best to keep my groans from becoming an annoyance but wasn’t always successful. I apologized several times.
I fully acknowledge that my flu was nothing compared to the malaria suffered in the novel. Nevertheless. I still related to what Marlow experiences towards the end of the book:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
A little later he describes this condition as “a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself.”
While I didn’t share his careless contempt when it came to my pain—instead I fervently prayed it would go away—I recognized the greyness.
It all made me see why Marlow is in awe of the station manager that he meets upon first arriving in Africa. The man is a mediocrity and maybe even a hollow man à la T.S. Eliot—”Perhaps there was nothing within him,” Marlow reflects—but he has one thing going for him:
His position had come to him—why? Perhaps because he was never ill… He had served three terms of three years out there… Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself.
Given how I have been feeling the last few days, I can see why Marlow is impressed. And with that, I’m off to crawl beneath my blankets once again.
