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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.”
