Greetings Shadow Chasers and Dust Makers.
"I was a Romantic extremist," Philip Pullman once admitted when reflecting on his teenage years, only to wryly add, "There's no point in being a Romantic moderate, is there?"
True enough. Whether swooning over ruined abbeys or wandering lonely as a cloud or musing over a Grecian urn, you kind of have to go all in. Though for me it wasn't when I was a teenager as it was for Pullman. It wasn't until I was in college that it all kind of landed. Poetically speaking.
The encyclopedia pictured here is the handiwork of one of my principal English professors back in the day. I inadvertently tracked it down while idly following threads left by or about my more beloved teachers. At least one of whom is now a scholar of some national renown.
All this led me to ponder how the liberal arts education I received in the humanities that so shaped and molded me .... well, apparently doesn't really even exist anymore. I began at a two-year community college and graduated to a four-year university, and in retrospect I am still stunned at the quality of both my professors as well as the classes themselves. How I managed to cross paths with so many great and generous minds within a few years I will never know.
Though I will say I did appreciate it at the time, which is good because - again - that is not the way of things anymore. This was back in the late nineties, when not only a liberal arts education but liberalism itself was still ... you know, liberal. But probably best just to skip ahead.
What is clear is that the book I'm currently working on about His Dark Materials would have been virtually impossible without the academic grounding I received. As is one of the main themes of said book, my education was very much about learning to read all over again. And not just literature, but life in general.
My book will take awhile to write and put together, but I wouldn't be able to manage it at all if not for all the essays and papers I polished off under the guidance of the lead editor of this encyclopedia, so thanks Dr. Dabundo. I even did my directed study on William Wordsworth and The Prelude with her.
As for the subject matter of Romanticism itself, well, all this reading and researching did inspire me to name my next dog Lord Byron, so there were some very clear and lasting impacts. I've thought a considerable amount about poetry lately, and I still maintain Romanticism scaled the heights of the English language with its verse, more so than anything else before or since.
It saturates His Dark Materials in a way that surprises even me, but also Pullman's thinking in general. And he of course led me to Iain McGilchrist, whose latest gargantuan tome Pullman christened his Book-of-the-Year. Together they have expressed in truly beautiful language what I once intuited largely in silence.
In the essay on William Blake that I keep referencing, Pullman eloquently and unforgettably recounted how immediate, visceral, and electric his response to such poetry was. In one of my favorite bits of his prose on the subject, he waxes poetic himself - "Something awakes that was asleep, doors open that were closed, lights come on in all the windows of a palace inside us, the existence of which we never suspected."
This is actually strikingly similar to his haunting description of what happens to the character of Lyra when she first falls in love at the end of The Amber Spyglass. And while clearly all of his work - as well as the poetry that informed it - is ripe for endless literary criticism and analysis, that is far from the type of spontaneous intoxication found here.
As he wrote about some of Blake's poems in the same essay, "I knew they were true in the way that I knew I was alive." That line has lingered with me ever since I first read it, and it dynamically resonates with everything I'm saying here. It is this very living quality that is so evocative of Romanticism for me.
For all its contraries and contradictions, ecstasies and excesses, Romanticism nonetheless absolutely abounds in energy, and an energy that is so poignantly necessary to the business of being fully alive. Whether the poetry is soaring to unimagined heights or plunging to unimagined depths, there is no doubt its authors - whatever their faults - were profoundly and vividly alive and aware and seeing and experiencing. That's what so harmonizes with Pullman's psyche, just as it does with mine.
(Tellingly, the His Dark Materials quote that I'm framing as my book's epigraph is simply a drugged and delirious Lyra thinking, "I'm so afraid of sleeping all my life and then dying - I want to wake up first! I wouldn't care if it was just for an hour, as long as I was properly alive and awake.")
It is fitting to close on an inspired burst of poetry I happened upon this week. I'm currently putting together after school programs, and the subject of astronomy came up. As important as it is to explore scientific realities about the universe, it's equally important to be open to poetic ones as well. Both are achingly needed and necessary to the human experience.
These lines from the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow really sank into my imagination -
Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of angels.
That's from his Evangeline here. Longfellow was following the path blazed by Romantic sentiment and vision, and I absolutely ordered a Dover Thrift edition of his works as soon as I could.
His words lyrically capture what Pullman meant in his essay. They perfectly evoke the scene when Lyra stares into the titular Northern Lights for the first time, which I wrote about here. They are very much the "material" of His Dark Materials. They're virtually the building blocks of the Republic of Heaven.
All this is to say - don't wander out into an open field on a cold, clear night only to look up into the dark sky and see nothing but dead matter and disconnection. If you're going to bother to look up at all, gaze awestruck at that same sky until your imagination fills it, until the heavens become living, breathing fields of fertility, and the stars ripen into glowing flowers saturated by Dust and the pollen of angels ....
#HisDarkMaterials #TheBookOfDust #PhilipPullman
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