Greetings and Salutations. Now for something a little different.
I recently received a couple of Pullmanverse packages in the mail for my ever-expanding Jordan Library, and I had the bright idea of sharing them via video. Or as they might say in Lyra's world, via projecting lantern. This is one of my maiden voyages on seas that don't include text, so please forgive the occasional verbal typo.
For the record, I do actually know how to pronounce words like "tokay," and that it's "table of content" rather than "contents." But the more I edited and fiddled about with it the shakier the whole process became. Still, I think it came off relatively well, especially considering it was pretty spontaneous one Saturday. Enjoy!
My complete tenth anniversary deluxe editions, as promised.
The above video is two and a half hours of the Aurora Borealis, and I don't think William Wordsworth would mind me appropriating his famous phrase for my own blog title, because said video is frankly about as Wordsworthian as one can get. As he himself did say and might again - "how dull of soul" would one have to be to remain unmoved before natural glories such as these?
During my current scholarly reread of Northern Lights, I chanced upon some prose almost as luscious as the actual Aurora. Well, I say "chanced" when in actuality it is hard to single out a patch of prose that isn't beautiful, because the novel is simply overgrown with it. I had forgotten what a lyrical dance reading these novels is, a borderline musical experience. It is rare that a literary experience is so vivid and rich it can almost drift into the practically sensual, but with Pullman, all the senses are teased and called into play.
As for example the following paragraph I couldn't resist typing out here, as it depicts our young protagonist Lyra's first real encounter with the titular northern lights -
"The Aurora!"
Her wonder was so strong that she had to clutch the rail to keep from falling.
The night filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery-crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish. In the evanescent delicacy she felt something so profound as she'd felt close to the bear. She was moved by it: it was so beautiful it felt almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes, and the tears splintered the light even further into prismatic rainbows. It wasn't long before she found herself entering the same kind of trance as when she consulted the alethiometer. Perhaps, she thought calmly, whatever moves the alethiometer's needle is making the Aurora glow too. It might even be Dust itself. She thought that without noticing that she'd thought it, and soon forgot it, and only remembered it much later.
And as she gazed, the image of a city seemed to form itself behind the veils and streams of translucent colour: towers and domes, honey-coloured temples and colonnades, broad boulevards, and sunlit parkland. Looking at it gave her a sense of vertigo, as if she were looking not up but down, and across a gulf so wide that nothing could ever pass over it. It was a whole universe away.
If there were ever words or prose capable of catching the material majesty of the sights on the above video, these would have to be it. The picture painted in those paragraphs is indicative of the quality of the writing throughout the trilogy. This is an example of prose as poetry in the sense that - much like a vanishing point in a painting - it imbues what is essentially a flat, one-dimensional experience on a page with the feeling of a much fuller, truer, multi-dimensional one. I will probably never see the Aurora in person, but if I do I will no doubt feel as if it were a homecoming, as though I'd already visited it once before.
And while it's even less likely I'll ever see the outline of a city in another world, once atop a mountain I did look up into the sky and experience much the same vertigo Lyra spoke of, the expanse before me so breathtakingly wide and open I felt as though I was falling up into it rather than down. I have also been far out into the country at night and seen such a sky pregnant with stars that I too felt that it was "almost holy." It too drew tears as I simply stood transfixed out in an open field and couldn't quite bring myself to look away.
And that was only an "ordinary" night sky.
The long paragraph transcribed here is pure Romanticism, and in all the best possible ways. There is not only the stunning and wonderful descriptive prose conjuring up a half-ethereal nightscape. There is not only the deep, profound delight in Nature, as well as a Nature that is experienced as somehow inexplicably alive and animate. There is also the sweet, almost meditative mood the passage strikes up - a passage that does the most important thing of all, and provides a communion, a working dialogue of sorts, between the whole of the universe and the mind of humanity.
The intuition that Lyra experiences here draws a swift and steady line of connection between the sweeping majesties of the Aurora and the mystical workings of the alethiometer, and it is one of the key ideas powerfully rippling through the fabric of the entire trilogy. While so often missing from modern life, some kind of congress or interaction between the human world and the infinitely larger cosmic one has always been essential to the collective psychology of our species, and Pullman conjures up his own example perfectly and poetically here.
One might even say his numinous, ineffable Dust plays or conducts the northern lights and the alethiometer and Lyra herself - all individual notes, but all coming together to crescendo into the final symphony that is the story or narrative itself.
Your blogging Jordan Scholar will have more to say on the relationship with the alethiometer and the Eolian Harp - that favorite music-haunted wind-toy of the Romantics that so reminded them of inspiration - in his eventual His Dark Materials book. But as for now, let's leave off with some very relevant lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem of the same name which evokes much the same feeling.
Think of Pullman, let yourself sink into the trance of the words, and then go back and enjoy the above video for awhile -
