I'm always fond of titles that give an or after, ever since I read The Hobbit as a kid, or There and Back Again. At first this one seems simply tautological, which seems to be the joke. As you read along, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus, edited by S Kierkegaard, ventriloquizes through quotation marks to give your protestations, or the protestations of some critical reader like you. The speaker protests that his fragment or fragments are all thinly veiled or outright quotations from elsewhere, that the philosophy or philosophical poem he is laying out is the Biblical story in erudite dress.
The theme of repetition, of echoing, of saying the same old things, comes forward at the end of each section, just to highlight how little claim to originality the ideas may have, despite their elegant arrangement. Climacus seems eager to concede that he is recapitulating the Christian narrative in another guise. He continually recurs to his difference from Socrates and the theory of recollection, wherein we are supposed to have the truth already within ourselves, invoking instead the moment of the paradoxical entry of truth into history, a moment with a historical point of departure provided by the god. Whereas Socratic teaching is maieutic, one human being helping another though doubt and wonder to recognize the eternal truth within and bring it forth in articulate speech, he asserts, Christian teaching is generative, giving the occasion, the capacity for understanding one is in untruth, as well as the eternal truth, the new wine skin and the new wine, which we may encounter in the happy paradox of faith, or else stumble over and take offense.
I think that about gathers his key words to sum up. Of course, the bare summary gives only the slightest sense of what it is like to experience this text, to take its invitation to think through such a sweeping dialectical poetic thought experiment, which turns out to be nothing less than the call to wonder at the incarnation of logos.
But more than Socratic method, Climacus' polemical target here seems to be Hegelian method. It is interesting that the latter has morphed through Marxian and Freudian and critical-theoretical approaches to continue to dominate the universities, whereas the former has enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity at the grammar school level, albeit a poorly understood and mostly-buzzwordy rather than a substantial one, just as the professors seem largely unaware of their history, much less their world-historical lateness to the scene. Part of why I am not a professor, after all, nor even a full-time teacher anymore, is that I don't pretend to understand either Socrates or Hegel, teaching or history, much as I am enjoying working my way through the reading. Still, whether we attempt to go beyond Socrates in the Hegelian manner or just try to get back to Socrates through classroom discussion, Climacus' main point seems to be that we need to keep our sense for paradox about us, not to try to cover it over with words when it strikes us in the midst of our methods, but to be open to its calling us beyond ourselves.
Something of this is what I would like to say in the Tedx talks this year, now that their agreement page is loading. I don't know if anyone has applied yet, or how they could have honestly checked the box saying they'd read it when it wasn't working before.
And I still like the line of thinking about these topics I undertook back in the desert, but I have the feeling I will still be thinking over the same things in these and other ways for a long time yet.
Saturday, April 28, 2018
Saturday, April 21, 2018
On promises in Faerie
See the post at: https://forums.signumuniversity.org/index.php?threads/on-promises.2698/
So this came up in the discussion on Pullman's approach to faerian themes, in the reference back to Tolkien's great essay On Fairy Stories. (I didn't feel I ought to revive that thread, but the irony of just not posting something more about it after I said I would, would have been too much.)
First, generally, what is behind the fascination with promises in faerie?
I wonder if it has something to do with the yearning for promises to be kept. Looking at the context in Tolkien's essay, that seems really important. His mention of promise-keeping comes at what might be the key moment in the whole long, dense and yet rambling address: between the consolation of escape, into the Great Escape from Death, and to the thesis "Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending" and the revelation: Eucatastophe. Much could be said about this, but the chief thing Pullman seems to argue is that promises like these are not promises we can keep, but can only tell stories about, and yet that we should act as if those stories make a difference.
Then, to get back to Ben's original proposal, a few more specifics on faerie and promises in La Belle Sauvage--
SPOILERS
So it seems like the book has two main divisions, and then within the second, a further bifurcation or incursion of Faery, which has always been there in the background but suddenly comes out into the open. You have everything up to the flood, and then as the flood progresses you have a series of episodes which progressively move towards graver danger for Lyra, with the pursuit by Bonneville being swapped for Lyra actually being captured by the guards of the Holy Obedience. In a sort of highly compressed version of the Bolvangar episode in The Golden Compass, Malcolm sneaks in and rescues her, and they float along. Then comes the next bifurcation: with the chapters The Enchanted Island and Resin, we move into fairyland. In Ancientry we return, but perhaps were still partly there in The Mausoleum and subsequently, and have been all along. And it is a kind of self-conscious fairyland, where the rules Malcolm knows about fairy stories have real effects. He rescues Lyra from Diania, the Fairy Queen, by approaching the problem as if fairy tales were real: "Malcolm tried to remember the fairy tales he knew. Could you bargain with fairies? Did they keep their promises? There was something about names..." (371). He's successful with his plan because Alice had the sense to use their fake names from the start. Whatever drinking fairy milk may mean, it certainly conjures some heavily freighted imagery: of infants and mothers--that mother Lyra has been deprived of, and that which the atheist or agnostic deprives himself of; of Malcolm's actual mom and dad, whom he finally lets himself think of, when he lets himself cry in front of Alice (383); and perhaps of the closing lines of Coleridge's Kublai Khan:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
In the next chapter, Resin, they quickly realize something strange is going on with the underground landscape: "All that walking, and we hardly got anywhere. Maybe it's magic. It doesn't make any bloody sense anyway" (391). They speak about it as though it has intentions and personality: "It doesn't seem to mind us making a fire." The self-consciousness about fairy stories here seems closely connected to Malcolm's dawning awareness of his attraction to Alice, and of the difference between grown-ups and children, manifested also in their daemons, those themes of innocence and experience which gave Pullman's Dark Materials their energy, and I daresay give their readers something like "eternal delight" (Marriage of Heaven and Hell).
In Ancientry, rounding out the fairyland section of the story, Alice commands the giant to open the gate by appealing to their task of saving the "Princess Lyra," and Malcolm remembers the old name "Albion" of Blakean resonance:
We've also just glimpsed, on either side of the underground river, something like the "green and pleasant land" and "dark satanic mills."
Supposedly the next book will be called The Secret Commonwealth, and presumably we'll learn more about how this fairyland-reality business works.
I'm hope to make all this into some essays/podcasts soon. Comments and critiques would be much appreciated!
Spenser and Pullman, cont.
Notes on some more water poetry in Faerie Queene book I, with some reference to Pullman's essays.
The author's letter from Spenser suggests a reading in the light of the Odyssey, whose hero in the medieval framework apparently stood for the virtuous private individual, as Agamemnon in the Iliad stood for the virtuous ruler. Which is a fascinating cherry-picking summary of the Homeric epics.
And Pullman is always attentive to the role of the writer in speaking about how to read their work. He famously says his daemon is a crow or magpie, stealing shiny bits of story, but less well known is the "dusty, broken-down, out-of-date old owl who used to be a teacher" counterpart (faerie-like, does he have more than one daemon? Daemon Voices 142).
In Book 1
i.21 Nilus
ii.10 Proteus
iii.21 Odysseus
iii.31 Much like as when the beaten mariner...
xi.10, 18 dragon like a ship
xi.29 Well of Life, for the healing of the Nations
xii.1, 42 poem like a ship
Book 2 opens with reference to the discovery of the new world, and to "other worlds":
What if within the moon's fair shining sphere--
What if in every other star unseen
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.
Which surely Pullman could not have missed, if he read that far. But he reads like a butterfly, writes like a bee... Of course Professor Olsen's caveats about making too much of source material are very much in order here. All the so-called source tells us by itself is that ideas have been had before, and even before getting there they likely appeared somewhere else before that. Where do ideas come from? is a favorite question to return to, but the beautiful things is that they do come.
In his Daemon Voices, Pullman invokes Spenser's Faerie Queene as one of those books one admires without being particularly energized about reading, as contrasted with Blake's works (341). Still, the direct quote and attribution at the end of La Belle Sauvage suggests he did read it at least enough to draw that passage from it to leave the reader pondering.
But there are many non-Spenserian references to water and watercraft which are surely at least as apposite as well. Chiefly in Milton (ie. PL II 636, cited in DV 54). But also the likening of the flight of Dust from every world to a flood (435), and the particle of story which guides the whole essay Poco a Poco, the image of pouring water (205), rooted in an old iconography of Grammar, that stories for children are as water for plants...
The author's letter from Spenser suggests a reading in the light of the Odyssey, whose hero in the medieval framework apparently stood for the virtuous private individual, as Agamemnon in the Iliad stood for the virtuous ruler. Which is a fascinating cherry-picking summary of the Homeric epics.
And Pullman is always attentive to the role of the writer in speaking about how to read their work. He famously says his daemon is a crow or magpie, stealing shiny bits of story, but less well known is the "dusty, broken-down, out-of-date old owl who used to be a teacher" counterpart (faerie-like, does he have more than one daemon? Daemon Voices 142).
In Book 1
i.21 Nilus
ii.10 Proteus
iii.21 Odysseus
iii.31 Much like as when the beaten mariner...
xi.10, 18 dragon like a ship
xi.29 Well of Life, for the healing of the Nations
xii.1, 42 poem like a ship
Book 2 opens with reference to the discovery of the new world, and to "other worlds":
What if within the moon's fair shining sphere--
What if in every other star unseen
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.
Which surely Pullman could not have missed, if he read that far. But he reads like a butterfly, writes like a bee... Of course Professor Olsen's caveats about making too much of source material are very much in order here. All the so-called source tells us by itself is that ideas have been had before, and even before getting there they likely appeared somewhere else before that. Where do ideas come from? is a favorite question to return to, but the beautiful things is that they do come.
In his Daemon Voices, Pullman invokes Spenser's Faerie Queene as one of those books one admires without being particularly energized about reading, as contrasted with Blake's works (341). Still, the direct quote and attribution at the end of La Belle Sauvage suggests he did read it at least enough to draw that passage from it to leave the reader pondering.
But there are many non-Spenserian references to water and watercraft which are surely at least as apposite as well. Chiefly in Milton (ie. PL II 636, cited in DV 54). But also the likening of the flight of Dust from every world to a flood (435), and the particle of story which guides the whole essay Poco a Poco, the image of pouring water (205), rooted in an old iconography of Grammar, that stories for children are as water for plants...
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Bookends: Snow and Faerie Queene in Pullman's Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage
The lines from MacNeice's "Snow" placed at the book's opening are few but fraught:
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.
Pullman or his editor puts ellipses there, but it's a full stop. Maybe that's to let you know it comes from the middle of a longer poem, maybe to lead you into the story.
The text from Spenser's nigh-unread epic which comes after the last page is drawn from the final stanza of the first book (I XII 42):
Now strike your sails yee jolly Mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode,
Where we must land some of our passengers,
And light this weary vessel of her lode.
Here she a while may make her safe abode,
Till she repaired have her tackles spent,
And wants supplied. And then againe abroad
On the long voyage whereto she is bent:
Well may she speede and fairely finish her intent.
Spelling is normalized to an extent, with some of the quaintness left in. The spelling of fairely, for one thing, recalls faerie. Again, the words To be continued... follow, with ellipses. This time it's presumably for the twofold purpose to lead you back out into the world and to lade you with yearning for more books.
Suffused within that combination of motives and between these two poems we get the story itself. La Belle Sauvage may be divided more or less into two parts: everything leading up to ch 15, The Potting Shed, and everything which follows with the flood, which provides the book its frontispiece--
--And the Biblical story of the Flood is certainly the most important of the allusions Pullman plays upon, just as the Fall had been in his earlier work.
Perhaps the two parts resemble the two poems, the former gradually revealing the "incorrigibly plural" nature of what had appeared to Malcolm a single, sensible world; divided though his world of the priory and the inn may be by the river ceaselessly flowing between, they are just as much linked, since he in his canoe can move freely over it. He also literally reads about and discusses the mysteriously multiple nature of the physical world with Dr Hannah Relf, and so comes into contact with his own destiny as a scholar, as readers will know who have met him in Lyra's Oxford, set after the events of the original His Dark Materials. Dr Relf herself appears as early as The Golden Compass, if I remember right; so that Pullman in these books is continually unfolding the multiple worlds of his characters' stories, weaving together those which most nearly account for the view of the world he seems to care about: one in which people read books and poems and cook Brussels sprouts with crosses cut into the base and care for children, neighbors and strangers alike, and stand up to tyrannical authority.
Anyhow, I've finally sat down and read "Snow," and I'm slowly working through at least Book I of Faerie Queene. I looked but haven't yet been able to find any analyses of Pullman's references to these sources. More to the point, I'm reading La Belle Sauvage through again with Steph, so that will help when I come to say more about all this.
As I work on essays I'll post more ideas here, and then when I'm through my series of podcasts on EarthBound, Philip Pullman's books will be next!
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.
Pullman or his editor puts ellipses there, but it's a full stop. Maybe that's to let you know it comes from the middle of a longer poem, maybe to lead you into the story.
The text from Spenser's nigh-unread epic which comes after the last page is drawn from the final stanza of the first book (I XII 42):
Now strike your sails yee jolly Mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode,
Where we must land some of our passengers,
And light this weary vessel of her lode.
Here she a while may make her safe abode,
Till she repaired have her tackles spent,
And wants supplied. And then againe abroad
On the long voyage whereto she is bent:
Well may she speede and fairely finish her intent.
Spelling is normalized to an extent, with some of the quaintness left in. The spelling of fairely, for one thing, recalls faerie. Again, the words To be continued... follow, with ellipses. This time it's presumably for the twofold purpose to lead you back out into the world and to lade you with yearning for more books.
Suffused within that combination of motives and between these two poems we get the story itself. La Belle Sauvage may be divided more or less into two parts: everything leading up to ch 15, The Potting Shed, and everything which follows with the flood, which provides the book its frontispiece--
--And the Biblical story of the Flood is certainly the most important of the allusions Pullman plays upon, just as the Fall had been in his earlier work.
Perhaps the two parts resemble the two poems, the former gradually revealing the "incorrigibly plural" nature of what had appeared to Malcolm a single, sensible world; divided though his world of the priory and the inn may be by the river ceaselessly flowing between, they are just as much linked, since he in his canoe can move freely over it. He also literally reads about and discusses the mysteriously multiple nature of the physical world with Dr Hannah Relf, and so comes into contact with his own destiny as a scholar, as readers will know who have met him in Lyra's Oxford, set after the events of the original His Dark Materials. Dr Relf herself appears as early as The Golden Compass, if I remember right; so that Pullman in these books is continually unfolding the multiple worlds of his characters' stories, weaving together those which most nearly account for the view of the world he seems to care about: one in which people read books and poems and cook Brussels sprouts with crosses cut into the base and care for children, neighbors and strangers alike, and stand up to tyrannical authority.
Anyhow, I've finally sat down and read "Snow," and I'm slowly working through at least Book I of Faerie Queene. I looked but haven't yet been able to find any analyses of Pullman's references to these sources. More to the point, I'm reading La Belle Sauvage through again with Steph, so that will help when I come to say more about all this.
As I work on essays I'll post more ideas here, and then when I'm through my series of podcasts on EarthBound, Philip Pullman's books will be next!
Feb for Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and some Upbuilding Discourses
Such incalculably great readers, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms: of Abraham and Job, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, respectively, and then of the New Testament in his Upbuilding Discourses. Also of the story of the fall in the background, and of Shakespeare brooding over all--conversant with them all with such awe, such gratitude:
"Thanks, once again thanks, to a man who, to a person overwhelmed by life's sorrows and left behind naked, reaches out the words, the leafage of language by which he can conceal his misery. Thanks to you, great Shakespeare, you who can say everything, everything, everything just as it is--and yet, why did you never articulate this torment? Did you perhaps reserve it for yourself, like the beloved's name that one cannot bear to have the world utter, for with his little secret that he cannot divulge the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil" (61).
And such discernment, ever reflecting, yet not quite getting lost in the hall of mirrors, the labyrinths of literature: Abraham here and Agamemnon there, Luke over here and Shakespeare over there...
And such astonishing writers they are! One thing I remembered but could never place, this description of the knight of faith, made me so happy to find at last:
"In the afternoon, he takes a walk to the woods. He enjoys everything he sees, the swarms of people, the new omnibuses, the Sound. Encountering him on Strandveien, one would take him for a mercantile soul enjoying himself. He finds pleasure in this way, for he is not a poet, and I have tried in vain to lure the poetic incommensurability out of him. Toward evening, he goes home, and his gait is as steady as a postman's. On the way, he thinks that his wife surely will have a special hot meal for him when he comes home--for example, roast lamb's head with vegetables. If he meets a kindred soul, he would go on talking all the way...." (39)
And many things I knew nothing about, like the description of the farcical theater like the belly of Jonah's whale which proceeds this passage, have been revelatory to read:
"My unforgettable nursemaid, you fleeting nymph who lived in the brook that ran past my father's farm and always helpfully shared our childish games, even if you just took care of yourself...Then I lay at your side and vanished from myself in the immensity of the sky above and forgot myself in your soothing murmur! You, my happier self, you fleeting life that lives in the brook running past my father's farm, where I lie stretched out as if my body were an abandoned hiking stick, but I am rescued and released in the plaintive purling!--Thus did I lie in my theater box, discarded like a swimmer's clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly foamed by me" (166)
Gosh. Or this preface, repeated with variations before each set of Upbuilding Discourses, following the repeated dedication to his father:
"Small as it is, it probably will slip through, since it shifts for itself and goes its way and tends to its errand and discerns its own enigmatic path--until it finds that single individual [hiin Enkelte] whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader--until it finds what it is seeking, that favorably disposed person who reads aloud to himself what I write in stillness, who with his voice breaks the spell on the letters, with his voice summons forth what the mute letters have on their lips, as it were, but are unable to express without great effort, stammering and stuttering, who in his mood rescues the captive thoughts that long for release..." (53)
"What is not found in the second and third hours may be found in the fourth, or what was found there may again be found in the fourth: that which it seeks, that single individual [hiin Enkelte] whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that favorably disposed person who receives the book and gives it a good home, that favorably disposed person who in receiving it does for it by himself and by his acceptance what the temple box by itself did for the widow's mite: sanctifies the gift, gives it meaning, and transforms it into much.
S. K." (107)
This all resonates. My word, yes.
And then the helpful remarks of the translators and editors, who point out who that single individual was in particular, how these ideas were developed through drafts and diaries, if one wants to dig into that sort of thing, to get at the truth that is true for someone, or for something, to give some context and some bearing on the categories of language and thought behind the various projects. But the main thing is that they make this writing and reading available, accessible, and what a labor of love that must have been, which I can only hope in some small way to assist with sharing some of it here throughout the year.
"Thanks, once again thanks, to a man who, to a person overwhelmed by life's sorrows and left behind naked, reaches out the words, the leafage of language by which he can conceal his misery. Thanks to you, great Shakespeare, you who can say everything, everything, everything just as it is--and yet, why did you never articulate this torment? Did you perhaps reserve it for yourself, like the beloved's name that one cannot bear to have the world utter, for with his little secret that he cannot divulge the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil" (61).
And such discernment, ever reflecting, yet not quite getting lost in the hall of mirrors, the labyrinths of literature: Abraham here and Agamemnon there, Luke over here and Shakespeare over there...
And such astonishing writers they are! One thing I remembered but could never place, this description of the knight of faith, made me so happy to find at last:
"In the afternoon, he takes a walk to the woods. He enjoys everything he sees, the swarms of people, the new omnibuses, the Sound. Encountering him on Strandveien, one would take him for a mercantile soul enjoying himself. He finds pleasure in this way, for he is not a poet, and I have tried in vain to lure the poetic incommensurability out of him. Toward evening, he goes home, and his gait is as steady as a postman's. On the way, he thinks that his wife surely will have a special hot meal for him when he comes home--for example, roast lamb's head with vegetables. If he meets a kindred soul, he would go on talking all the way...." (39)
And many things I knew nothing about, like the description of the farcical theater like the belly of Jonah's whale which proceeds this passage, have been revelatory to read:
"My unforgettable nursemaid, you fleeting nymph who lived in the brook that ran past my father's farm and always helpfully shared our childish games, even if you just took care of yourself...Then I lay at your side and vanished from myself in the immensity of the sky above and forgot myself in your soothing murmur! You, my happier self, you fleeting life that lives in the brook running past my father's farm, where I lie stretched out as if my body were an abandoned hiking stick, but I am rescued and released in the plaintive purling!--Thus did I lie in my theater box, discarded like a swimmer's clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly foamed by me" (166)
Gosh. Or this preface, repeated with variations before each set of Upbuilding Discourses, following the repeated dedication to his father:
"Small as it is, it probably will slip through, since it shifts for itself and goes its way and tends to its errand and discerns its own enigmatic path--until it finds that single individual [hiin Enkelte] whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader--until it finds what it is seeking, that favorably disposed person who reads aloud to himself what I write in stillness, who with his voice breaks the spell on the letters, with his voice summons forth what the mute letters have on their lips, as it were, but are unable to express without great effort, stammering and stuttering, who in his mood rescues the captive thoughts that long for release..." (53)
"What is not found in the second and third hours may be found in the fourth, or what was found there may again be found in the fourth: that which it seeks, that single individual [hiin Enkelte] whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that favorably disposed person who receives the book and gives it a good home, that favorably disposed person who in receiving it does for it by himself and by his acceptance what the temple box by itself did for the widow's mite: sanctifies the gift, gives it meaning, and transforms it into much.
S. K." (107)
This all resonates. My word, yes.
And then the helpful remarks of the translators and editors, who point out who that single individual was in particular, how these ideas were developed through drafts and diaries, if one wants to dig into that sort of thing, to get at the truth that is true for someone, or for something, to give some context and some bearing on the categories of language and thought behind the various projects. But the main thing is that they make this writing and reading available, accessible, and what a labor of love that must have been, which I can only hope in some small way to assist with sharing some of it here throughout the year.