Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bird that Steals Shiny Things: Philip Pullman Among the Poets

The book I reread
Not so much a single book as all the poetry I know by heart, and all the poetry I don’t know by heart and want to. Poetry is everything. - Philip Pullman in The Guardian

The last piece of writing I had picked out to look at with the memoir writing group at my church was Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens. Then the pandemic and politics put paid to that.

But the words of the poem recently winged their way back into my head, like the birds of Plato's Theaetetus or Robert Louis Stevenson via William James. Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird connected itself somehow to a favorite phrase of Philip Pullman's (everything I think about comes back to Pullman eventually, or to EarthBound, or both). To whit, whenever he's asked what his daemon would be, he tends to give some variation on the formula "a bird that steals shiny bits of story."

As I've been on something of a biographical-encyclopedic kick lately, then, with a piece about Shigesato Itoi forthcoming in NES Pro magazine, I thought it might be time to revisit Philip Pullman. Or so a little bird told me. 

 
Playing off of Stevens' poem, here are thirteen ways of looking at Pullman's life and work.

1 The Eye: Vision and Attention in Northern Lights/ The Golden Compass

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

In the first chapter, we get to expand on this "revaluation of consciousness" idea 

2 A Tree: The Worlds Revealed by The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

Continuation of the foregoing, with emphasis on the worldview Pullman espouses. God's Spies in Shakespeare and the Great Shift. Mnemonics, after all, are essentially a way of enlisting the imagination to serve and strengthen memory. Stories, then, are concatenations of such memorable images encoding and disclosing a whole range of possible meanings according to the imaginative engagement of the reader. The same question might be asked analogously of imagination--what is it, and how better to engage it, that we ask of memory and attention--of Dust. The witch counsels memory, and patience, and the angel imagination and work. Mary Malone, for all her insight into the present moment, has little to say at this juncture, only expressing a desire to learn to see her daemon. The knife will be broken, but what of the spyglass? or say, the lodestone resonator, to communicate across the worlds? If not the quarterly scholarly review and conferences, at least a symposium, perhaps, would be in order, a festschrift in honor of a significant birthday, or something of the sort. A bibliography, a timeline, and collected reminiscences, imaginings, works-in-progress, and so forth. Worth a try. 
The dust in the box from Atlantis in The Magician's Nephew, rings and wood between the worlds... Lewis' fall narratives of Charn and Venus. 

3 Winds: Pullman's Practice of Writing and his "little books": Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, The Collectors, Serpentine, and The Imagination Chamber 

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Considering the art and business of being a master storyteller. Via Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, The Collectors, Serpentine, and The Imagination Chamber


4 A Man and a Woman: His Forgotten Materials: The Haunted Storm and Galatea

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

5 The Beauty: Race, Class, and Gender in How To Be Cool, The White Mercedes/The Butterfly Tattoo, and The Broken Bridge 

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.


6 The Shadow: Traces and Mysteries in The Sally Lockhart Books

Language and story echoes of the adventure tales of his youth, penny dreadfuls, comics... 

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.


7 Imagine: Fairy Tales and Fables: Aladdin, Mossycoat, Puss in Boots, I Was a Rat! The Scarecrow and His Servant, The Firework-Maker's Daughter, Clockwork, Tales from the Brothers Grimm

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?


8 Noble Accents: Pilfering Paradise Lost, the King James Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.


9 Circles: Art, Travel, and other Influences in Essays and Public Statements

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.


10 Light: Poetry and Education

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.


11 He Mistook: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

Misprisions of Tolkien and Lewis. Dickieson's work on cruciformity in Lewis, stemming from Lewis' conversion (partly inspired by the night talk with Dyson and Tolkien). Letters in which he speaks of the MacDonald idea of death, really St Paul's, and of reading Romans. Pilgrim's Regress, Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Miracles; Perelandra; Great Divorce, Four Loves, Till We Have Faces, Grief Observed. Northrop Frye U-shaped pattern. To avoid reductive reading of Lewis as "apologist". Tolkien's mote letter (p1 of Splintered Light; 'if there is a god') 

12 The River: The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth (and the forthcoming book, Roses from the South?)

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.


13 Evening: Pullman's Legacy

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Adaptations, influences on other writers, etc.