Is life or the pandemic wearing on you? Is winter lingering a bit too long? Is the Magisterium gaining a foothold in your world? Suspect the Consistorial Court of Discipline has you under surveillance? If so, what better way to counteract the situation than by going to a bookstore on a Saturday evening, claiming Scholastic Sanctuary, and loading up on some literature?
In my case, it was a Books-A-Million and the bargain book section. Maybe I was "getting and spending" too much as William Wordsworth earnestly warned against, but I was also purchasing the very building blocks of our Republic of Heaven, so hopefully it will all come out even in the end.
The big one at the back is Night Sky: Stargazing with the Naked Eye, and it contains some utterly sublime photographs of not only the stars and moons and Milky Way, but also the stunning aurora borealis itself, which should hold a special place in the hearts of Pullmanites everywhere. I took two semesters of astronomy in college, and would love to formally explore stargazing. The main problem is I live not far from a major metropolitan area, and light pollution is a significant issue.
- It is food for thought that we are one of the few generations to ever exist on the planet who are not treated to a nightly celestial feast in the heavens, but as with many things now lost, this book seems at least a partial substitute for the real thing.
Next up is The Romantic Poets and their Circle by Richard Holmes, which I had never seen before or even heard of. Naturally I was pleased to obtain it, as it contains many exquisite portraits and paintings of the famous poets, writers, and other important figures of the Romantic era. It begins with a great portrait of Lord Byron, as striking and powerful as Lord Asriel himself, complete with all the requisite Byronic and Miltonic trappings of both men.
- As I also like to point out at every given opportunity, Philip Pullman himself freely admitted he was a "Romantic extremist" as a young man, then wryly adding, "Well, you can't be a Romantic moderate." On that point, as on so many others, we agree.
Following that is an edition of Walden, by of course Henry David Thoreau. He went to the woods to "live deliberately," and so accomplished his mission. Living deliberately is a major Republican virtue, so we can probably mark Thoreau as a Citizen of the Republic in good standing.
Next is a quaint little introduction to that ancient Chinese divination book, the I Ching. Admittedly, I have not had too much exposure to this one, despite a fondness for ancient Chinese philosophy. But I figured this just might come in handy when writing my own book on His Dark Materials, as Mary Malone so famously references/uses it in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.
Hilary Barrett writes in the opening chapters of this version, "The I Ching is an oracle: something that speaks. Although it comes disguised as a book, it is really a voice in a conversation, and you can talk with it (or with what speaks through it) as you would with a wise friend or mentor."
As Pullman has said, most cultures have an oracle of sorts, some way of "interrogating the universe." And of course, he himself invented arguably the most famous fictional device of this kind, the alethiometer. Above quote more than closely resembles it, no?
- Fun story: One of my humanities professors in college told my class about the first time he used the I Ching. He was faced with a big decision back when he was a young student himself, namely whether to travel to Hawaii and study philosophy there. Once the yarrow sticks had been cast and the hexagrams divined, the message came back very clearly, something to the effect of "It would be good for you to cross great water." He did so and travelled to Hawaii, which he claims was one of the best decisions he'd ever made.
Beneath this came the Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson, who I haven't given enough attention in past years. Sitting on the front porch softly reading her poems aloud, I was struck by the enormous living quality of her words. Of course, she famously sent a letter (to the world that never wrote to her) asking the man who would become her patron "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?", which I find extremely lyrical and revealing.
Exactly like with the Pullmanverse, everything in the Dickinsonverse is alive, aware, and animate in some way - bees, trees, gardens, woods, etc. This I see as one of the basic missions of poetry - to imbue the universe with an urgent and very tangible sense of life. Dickinson seemed to have lived in constant dialogue with the world around her, which adds a sensational quality to her quatrains, and is precisely the quality that so sings in Pullman's prose.
I would particularly highlight this Dickinson quote at the beginning of the book - "I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough." Juxtapose this with a line about the Latvian witch-queen in The Subtle Knife - "[Lyra] felt a quickening of her heart, for Ruta Skadi lived so brilliantly in her nerves that she set up a responding thrill in the nerves of anyone close by."
This kind of imagery with the witches is brought up again and again in HDM, and it is not hard to see Emily as making a fine witch had she been born a few parallel universes over (a "queen of queens!" even, as Skadi might say?). I also feel compelled to mention the witch chanting and spell work is also one of the few examples we get of some literal rhythmic poetry buried in Pullman's prose.
- In mentioning her "living" quality, I would submit that even when she's writing about death it's equally and ironically alive. Here I will also draw another Pullman parallel in that they both personified Death, Dickinson in some of her most famous poems, and Pullman of course in The Amber Spyglass. I should also note he quoted her several times in the epigraphs in the very same book.
And along those lines, I ended with a nice hardback edition of some William Butler Yeats. Pullman highly values his poetry, and the introduction mentions how Yeats saw poetry in general as naturally linked to the spells and incantations of the original mystics of his native Ireland. So perhaps one of the male-witches Ruta Skadi mentioned in her talks about Lord Asriel? Certainly Yeats is another poet I haven't perhaps paid enough attention to, but will hopefully make amends for that.
So thanks for coming along with me on my literary shopping experience,
And as Always
Stay Dusty My Friends
#HisDarkMaterials #TheBookOfDust #PhilipPullman
#BuildingTheRepublic #PullmanStudies #JordanScholarship
#InDustWeTrust #DownAndDusty #TheGreatProject
No comments:
Post a Comment