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. 

Reading Around: Recommended by Pullman

I wrote this a long time ago, so long ago I think I tried to have it printed in the college magazine. As I start to work again on study materials for more exhaustive work on my favorite author, I remembered it, and how I'd already begun, a long time ago, my quixotic apprenticeship.

Reading Around

The Golden Compass is my favorite book by anyone alive. It is fairly popular, there is a movie coming out, and for these and other superficial reasons you will sometimes see it mentioned beside Harry Potter. I read it for the first time when I was little, and then the next two books that complete the story, and then all three over again after a few years. Nowadays I listen to a passage here or there of The Golden Compass, which, as I say, is my favorite, read by the author and a full cast, on my ipod. I like to go to readings at the Lit House and play it on speakers.

Well, you can find out about the book best by reading it, you know how I feel about it. What I want to do here, rather than review it, is to go about trying to place the story within a map of ideas, to catch it in a web of them, to wrap it in a blanket of them. That is what I mean by reading around. If you like this kind of article, we could make it into a regular column. I would like it if people shared books and families of books that they know well and like—books and ideas make a community, just as we make a community of readers and writers.

In the case of The Golden Compass, some of these relations are fairly obvious—mentioned already are its siblings, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and Harry Potter as a kind of rival. (His avowed rival, however, is C.S. Lewis, whom he reads, somewhat bitingly, as a religious fundamentalist.) It has been remade into other media, film and audio, and there was also a theatre version some years back.

We can tie the discussion into the “Storytelling in the Digital Age” theme by taking a look at the author’s website. (There are any number of fan sites, which make up a topic to themselves.) Philip-pullman.com has pictures Pullman drew for the chapter headings, a very occasionally-updated blog, and his thoughts on writer’s block and woodcarving. You may discover, if you read around, that he is a fan of the Sonata Reminiscenza of Medtner, and has sworn off air travel out of concern about the environment. There are also a couple of excellent essays which I want to recommend. They are pretty long, but very worthwhile.

“Miss Goddard’s Grave” is the text of a lecture Pullman was invited to give somewhere over there in Britain. It would be amazing if we could bring him to speak here; I would personally row him up the river… The speech is a meditation on literature, morality and education—more than a meditation, because it makes a definite argument. Some of the key ideas have to do with the value of experience over theory, interpretation over absolutes, enjoyment over drudgery. Thoughtfully worked out, these assertions link literature to the rest of life in a way too often overlooked, when it is treated as a school subject and a chore. But there is a certain blindness in the argument. It might not necessarily be stories that are fascinating to everyone, and the basis of growing as human beings. Couldn’t it be almost anything else—play, conversation, walking around—so long as its value were recognized? I think Pullman is aware of his prejudices in this regard and others, but still I would like to ask him about it.

The other essential piece is the autobiographical sketch “I have a feeling this all belongs to me”. Again, it is a window onto the way art and life are connected, this time going the other way around, experience into writing. The “ghostly hum” of electricity from the shed in Africa, learning from a sailor how to sweep the floor, “waterfall climbing” in Wales—all this is familiar to a careful reader of the big trilogy, and all the rest must have had its bearing less directly. Interesting to contemplate is to what extent writing this sketch brought some of these ideas to the forefront of his mind as he was setting to work.

Some of the major literary influences are mentioned in it, too. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are the material Pullman is proud to have stolen from—he calls himself in several interviews a “crow stealing shiny bits of story”. Also present is Keats’ “negative capability,” characterized this time as “butterfly soup”. Quotations, themes, style—all fall under the debt. Then there are more obscure references. I have tried without too much success to look up the traveling poet Nick Messenger. The comic books and fairy tales have their bearing, too, as besides His Dark Materials Pullman has written lots of smaller stories that resemble both genres. I forget just now where I found this out, but an essay by Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” is another acknowledged source. It gave me chills to read it—the fencing with the bear comes whole-cloth, and the alternative theology of grace is shared in large part.

Emil and the Detectives, The Moomin stories, The Magic Pudding—these are some children’s books that Pullman cites here and there as favorites. I’m sorry I can’t describe them as I should, I’ve kept you long enough, and I’ve spent enough time writing this little appreciation-bibliography. I just keep getting distracted, reading all these things over again… Well, in the introduction to a new edition of The Magic Pudding, Pullman tells us about its author, Norman Lindsay, and the wowsers: “ ‘Wowser’ is the Australian word for a prim, narrow-minded, pompous, Puritanical, humorless, spoilsport sort of character…Lindsay loved to annoy the wowsers, and did it with great success all his long life. He fought them on principle, as the Puddin’-Owners fought the Puddin’-Thieves.” Pullman, of course, is a Puddin’-Owner himself. He’s clearly in the company of a Lindsay, a Dahl, and probably—why not?—can hope to go down one day with Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, those great eaters and generous feeders of the human heart.

--

What I meant by Reading Around is how it goes sometimes on wikipedia, clicking link after link, down the rabbit hole. But I don't know, this is more like going for a walk in the field, watching the rabbits and birds come and go. In no particular order, then, here is where I'll list books Pullman has cited approvingly one way or another, and some he cites disapprovingly, too, if they seem relevant. 

The Magic Pudding
The Moomins
BB
Milton
Blake
The King James Bible
The Book of Common Prayer
Emil and the Detectives

Emil and the Three Twins
The Lost Words
A Voyage to Arcturus
Medtner, Sonata Reminiscenza
Nicholas Messenger
Kleist
Derrida
Marx
Kierkegaard
Nietzsche
The Secret Commonwealth, by Robert Kirk
Russell

Kipling

The Outsider, by Colin Wilson

Frances Yates

Ginsberg

George Eliot

Alexandria Quartet

McGilchrist

Chips Channon’s diaries; Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series; Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus; Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh; Don Paterson’s new collection, The Arctic; Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song; Mary Midgley’s The Owl of Minerva, etc, etc. - These listed in The Guardian 

https://radicalreads.com/philip-pullman-favorite-books/ 

Light and Dark: Splintered Light by Verlyn Flieger and Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

We all know the ways of ideas. How sometimes a good idea will come to mind just after we needed it, ex post facto and extraneous. Sometimes even in the middle of things the opportunity for it passes us by, but the idea seems worth repackaging somewhere else, perhaps, so it sticks with us. Maybe it's as we're going down the stairs after the party that good ideas come too late. Or maybe that's just in French. Maybe it's while we're still up on the landing, that moment in The Dead, hesitating between alternatives, in suspension between past and present, speech and silence. 

O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.

For me, it's years and years later that a possibly good idea will percolate up, good as black coffee, from some long-lost opening in time, or fall like a flake of snow. And then I still won't get around to making something of it for more years and years. 

In the case of individuals, the delays are striking enough; afterthoughts on the scale of peoples and of humanity as a whole, all the more so. Generations come, generations go, and the way history repeats is proverbial. Epimetheus (Afterthought) and his place in the myth is not so well known as Prometheus (Forethought), but he isn't the one having his innards pecked out, either. Sisyphus gets his retelling from the existentialist Camus. France hosts Baldwin and loses its colonies in Africa, where Dubois goes into exile, while the African American movement for rights and liberation in the US enacts its mid-to-late century successes and suffers its tragedies. A few summers ago, another movement for Black lives started bubbling up in mainstream consciousness. Some with hope, some with dismay heralded the racial reckoning upon us once more. Now the contest has moved to the arena of prestige fantasy and school board meetings, but the reckoning, in the root sense of counting up and recompense, is in no way accomplished. 

Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, opens with the distant music of jazz in a French memoir; Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light: Language and Logos in Tolkien's World, with the distant music of the medieval worldview taken on for the creation of new worlds. Published decades apart and a generation or two ago, nevertheless both supply readers and students with excellent models for reading and scholarship to recur to. The idea of putting the two in conversation with one another has been hovering on the staircase of my mind for some time. Let's see how it goes here. In the scheme of things, if I am to take on board all they have to say to one another, however long it takes the lading will always be timely enough, because the ideas here are perennial. 

How to compare the light and dark of Flieger and Morrison? First, we should note that each is a practitioner and a theorist, writer and teacher. There was an anecdote shared by Morrison's student, Mohsin Hamid, on the Ezra Klein show recently: "she used to say that you should keep your reader a half heartbeat ahead of the action of your novels, and that they shouldn’t know what’s coming next, but when it happens it should feel inevitable." Flieger's continued commitment to teaching and writing is likewise in evidence in her work with Signum University, just half a heartbeat away from anyone, anywhere, online. She kindly took the time to speak with me about my project investigating Philip Pullman's place in the wake of the Inklings, whose importance in literature she has done so much to explicate. 

This combination of openness and demandingness is what draws me to them most as role models. For all the difference of their focus, both Morrison and Flieger are engaged with a project of expanding the circle of legitimacy and modeling the depth of thought with which readers and writers are rewarded by taking seriously, respectively, the presence of Blackness and whiteness in literature, and of eternal themes in fantasy and myth. 

As I notice the themes of conversation, of teaching, of connection and valorization with an audience of fellow writers emerging here, I'm aware that many more writers--starting with Marilynne Robinson--would be appropriately included in this imaginary dialogue as well. For her part, Robinson instantiates in her fiction and criticism much of the overlapping of race and wonder that Flieger and Morrison study. She makes no secret of her aim to revendicate the soul in modern reality, and does so beautifully in Gilead, for instance, with a shared language of light and play. We have all the time in the world to widen the scholarly scope of the dialogue indefinitely, later. For now, let's hew to our two. 

Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, sets out collecting notes 'like a game,' notes on the portrayal of Blackness in literature which prove to illuminate the whiteness latent in the writing and the world (viii). She invites the reader to 'play along,' (ix) even as she proceeds, in a blues-inflected mode of wry humor and earnestness, assembling at once a foundational work of theory, and just one among many items in her literary 'toolkit' (x). The language of play blends with that of music in her lone short story, 'Recitatif' (its themes echoed in her student Hamid's splashy novel) (xi). Appropriating 'the words to say it' of other writers through this preface, well worth a read on its own if no time in the syllabus allows for more, she moves into the essays proper. 

First they were lectures; published with their full standalone force, complete with epigraphs, the three essays repay reading on their own and as a trio. Her 'map' immediately alludes to that other Other, the Native people of this 'New World,' to which we might append Donald Klein and Hisham Amin's review of the book, noting that Hemingway's 'Fathers and Sons' can be read as hinting at homosexuality as another dark other as well. But Morrison has to start somewhere, and so she sets out on the path to understanding Blackness, beginning in 'delight, not disappointment,' blazing the trail for us as she goes (4). The 'dark, abiding, signing presence' stands forth at every turn (5, cf 46). 'To read as a writer,' she acknowledges, means not only interpreting this presence signs, but seeing how this can mean telling a story out of the encounter (15). Seeing the 'fishbowl' that traps us all in societal pretension--but, we have to add, which also holds the water we swim in--Morrison limns a metaphor more playful than that of the Bell Jar of Sylvia Plath, and testifies to the experience of seeing through it with no less resolution and poetry (17 cf also DFW's graduation address). 

'Black Matters' then turns to the case study of Willa Cather's last novel (18). Without having read the book, I can only marvel at the susceptibility of the author of My Antonia to fall into the weak plotting and sentimentality Morrison unfolds in her reading of Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Nancy, unnamed in the title, serves and finally escapes from the elderly Sapphira, who nevertheless retains Nancy's mother, Till, apparently unmoved. This culminates in the reunion between mother and daughter stage-managed, for a young Cather's benefit, by the mature writer, but which only confirms her failure to realize the humanity of her characters (27). 

The second essay, 'Romancing the Shadow,' concerns the genre of Romance as practiced in American literature and its characteristic 'closed white images' over against 'the shadow' that haunts the dream (33). 'Romantic... prophylaxis' against reality: such is Morrison's assessment of the function of this mode of writing in Poe, among others (36). She wonders at such a 'playground for imagination' (38) turning, in a less naive register, to 'Rhetorical acid' effacing so effectively a complex dialectic of master and slave (46 cf 'serving and served' 90). Once more, her 'shadow' proves ineradicable, for it is cast by its unwitting observer (48). Lest we forget or give in to fatalism, though, she reminds us how 'knowledge... plays' even in our fumbling towards a free nation (49). 

The case study here, from Poe, turns briefly to engage with Mark Twain. Morrison, like many readers, notes the jarring, then, like few if any, points out the ironic fitness of Huckleberry Finn's ending (55). Once more she recurs to the language of 'play... with life'; yet this 'play and deferment' ultimately proves Jim's maturity and well-earned freedom (57). 'Snow' becomes the referent of contemporary and near-contemporary white canonical authors for their meaninglessness in the absence of a deeper understanding of their black roots (58 cf The Dead and indeed The Lord of the Rings). 

At last, in 'Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks,' Morrison turns definitively to come to grips with Hemingway.  Across a minefield of metaphor (63) and escape (66) littering the iconic author's work, which she deftly traverses on the strength of her reading it whole, not least across the previous two essays, in the light of the Blackness underlying our literature, Morrison comes to regard in a single circumlocution, where the white character usurps his black companion's agency in the phrase 'saw he had seen,' the whole willful blindness and ugliness of narrative racism (72). In the 'accusation of inhumanity' from Wesley, she perceives the 'lapse' of the author and his stand-in, admitting its truth (76). Morrison eventually even draws together those links we started out by noticing in her initial map of the territory: in Hemingway's unfinished late work, 'sexual play' (85) and racial othering, recurring to imagery of the 'Indian' (86), are bound up with the last gasp of yearning for a lost paradise. A 'mythologized' and 'racist literature' ours may be, but Morrison shows how it endures and how much it illuminates the culture we live in for all that (90). 

On that note of myth, we pick up with Flieger's Splintered Light. Of the two authors, she is of course the less celebrated; of the two books, hers is the less influential. Yet, as the preface and introduction show, she is just as dedicated to the project of uncovering truth in unexpected readings of literature. She brings a spirit of seriousness and play to her approach to the question, 'Why read Tolkien?' (viii) and her account of his 'myth for England' (xiv). As she argues, the key to understanding his accomplishment lies in the overlooked Silmarillion.

The predominating image of the book, and Flieger's metaphor for reading it, is light, that 'glittering white' which is the unity and origin of colors (1, 46). Together with this, she naturally associates an energetic, life-giving heat or warmth, which connects with the struggles of Tolkien's family in South Africa, particularly his mother (2). These unities contain the essential dualities of Tolkien's nature, his hope and despair, visualized in the play of light and dark (4). The fascinating early work of Tolkien on the word for black people and their land in Old English comes in for brief discussion (8, recalled in the story of the lamps and trees later 63). Like her subject, Flieger is careful, exact and exacting (8). She takes Tolkien's student Simonne d'Ardenne at her word when she suggests that through his study and fiction alike, he 'broke the veil' and saw realms lost to others' sight (9). 

From this introduction to the 'Man of Antitheses,' Flieger embarks on arranging foundational material from Tolkien's two great essays, on Beowulf and fairytales. The former is 'dark '(11), in her reading redolent of the 'shadow of despair' underlying all Tolkien's efforts (17). And yet, through this dark shines the 'cosmic' (17), much like the opening sequence of Final Fantasy VII in a later medium. The centrality of monsters, such as Grendel, because of the clarity of their reflections on humanity--this becomes Tolkien's great insight into the story of Beowulf and into story writ large, so far overlooked by the critics (18, but certainly well recognized by Morrison). 

From the equally seminal 'On Fairy-stories,' Flieger singles out the importance of such 'recovery' in Tolkien's scholarship as well as his fiction (25). 'Technology' and 'the speech of beasts' come to reinforce our dependence on story, the one a push, the other a pull (26), and to the end of stories of this sort, 'eucatastrophe' or the good turn (27). For instance, when Snow White opens her eyes (28, though perhaps we can only fully recover the wonder of this moment in the light of reading whiteness back into it, with the aid of Morrison and scholar-practitioners since). Out of this 'reversal,' Tolkien and Flieger bear witness, we experience not only the promise but the actuality of future, eternal 'joy' (29)

For the central chapters which follow, Flieger endeavors to show how the eternal light, the human dark, and their myriad gradations collaborate in the unfurling of Tolkien's vision. We might single out the imagery of the color green (41) from among the movement from white to 'many hues' (43, 158), given the pressing importance now for an environmental-stewardship reading of fiction and the world through it. We can infer this through Tolkien's reimagining of the diminutive fairies as 'elves,' and their fascinating migrations and descent along the lines of 'race,' echoing a colonial empire crumbling in the course of Tolkien's life (51). Once more, we encounter that 'Green sun' unifying the language and literature, the scholarly and imaginative, for Tolkien as for Flieger (60) in the midst of many shades of linguistic change and visual shades of grey and black (70). Theories of 'Indo-European peoples' come in for comparison with the family trees of languages and peoples in Tolkien's legendarium (77). As the 'dark' grows and prevails, (82) still it is in service of the essential contraries of human nature (86, 83, or as on 87 correlates).

In the beauty of the silmarils, 'jewels' recalling the etymology of Tolkien's early work on Africans as seen or imagined by Europeans, there lies the inevitable 'fall' of the overweening sub-creators (108-9). Flieger highlights the motif of 'appropriation' in the most literal sense, the 'desire to possess,' as a theme Tolkien took to be the heart of his plotting and narrative causation (110). In the horrible figure of Ungoliant, consuming and perverting light itself, she indicates a monstrous fear at the back of all the hopeful happy endings and theoretical tendencies of her subject (112). Yet another overlooked instance of the same process is the spoiling of the original 'white ships' whose role in the main story of the Lord of the Rings is one of saving and healing (115). 

The movement from east to west proves fundamental in Tolkien's work, setting up the contrary movement towards the east in Frodo's quest (121, 124). The figure of the 'white lady,' likewise, has many iterations in his stories (122). Flieger's accumulation of evidence, with her patient application of the core prevalence of light and language across the examples, recovers from cliche such formulations as the movement from 'dark to light' (125) and the 'fall' (128). Her work, too, becomes a 'tapestry' (129) woven 'in the dark' (130). From an 'aristocracy of light' (131), drawn as they are by love and enchantment (133, 140), the elves proceed athwart the universal imperative toward darkness (145). 

Only towards the end of the book does Flieger assign a place within this framework to the humble hobbits whom Tolkien found the 'accidental' heroes of his better-known stories. In their humility we have transmitted the 'unsullied light' of a reworked early poem on the morning star, Earendil (148), and clinging to their earthiness we have the 'dust' or 'mote' that Tolkien likened himself to back in the opening chapter's epigraph (150, 156, 7). With reference to the psychology of Jung, Flieger restates once more the urgency of confronting and accounting for our 'shadow' (151), and recognizing the meaning behind what we take to be 'invisible' (157). Finally, she identifies a counterpart to the ring in the 'phial' lighting the hobbits' way, drawing our attention to that fascinating way in which Galadriel abjures her love as perilous if it is not freely given and received (159). Over against the early poems of Earendil and 'Mythopoeia,' we have Frodo's Dreme and the dream of the veil rolling back (165). 

Flieger concludes her work there, having bridged the then-inaccessible backdrop of The Silmarillion, Tolkien's poetry and scholarship on myth and language, with his perennially popular fantasies. She remarks, with Tennyson's Arthur, that 'The old order changeth' (171)--and this is well. 

With such admirable scholarship to draw upon, where do we go from here? The work of Marilynne Robinson, her fiction and essays and her dialogues with President Obama; contemporary speculative fiction from NK Jemison or Colson Whitehead; or perhaps a talk by Marlon James, the seventh annual Tolkien lecture at Pembroke College, on why he turned from Booker-prize winning literature to fantasy, and is now engaged in creating a collective African mythology in response to Tolkien. Or, knowing me, most likely, inexorably, incorrigibly, back to Philip Pullman. 

The Teacher Trap

 That is, if we take the Parent in Nate Hilger's title to be a noun rather than a verb; otherwise, it's the teach (v) trap we're talking about about, the same one that Ranciere points out to such effect in his tricky little book.

I still have to read Hilger's. Yet in the course of marketing it through podcasts and articles--see our last couple of Thoughtful Dad episodes--he's proven so competent a thought partner and such a handy nemesis to have around I'll keep acting on the assumption that it's worth the attention. 

What I mean, then, I want to say in the sense of the trap he talks about: both the difficulty of teaching and the turgidity of the discourse around teaching, and thus the immobility of attempts at reform. And still in line with the argument as I understand it, this implies that just as parents cannot be left to do an impossible job alone, so teachers will need help. Not the nosebleed of funding we saw with pandemic response, or not only that, Stanch it, pump it towards daycare, public service tutors and aides, therapists and coaches. Train teachers in the schools, paying the mentor teachers rather than professors. Or rather, bring the professors of ed back into the classroom to show us how it's done. Subbing, at the very least, since many of them are retirement age anyway, and that pool of retired teachers seemed like it used to be a reliable source of substitutes. 

Along with the image of the trap, I can't help but think of the experiments with food on one side of a little door, and the subjects trying to grab it and pull it through. When they grab a big handful, they can no longer bring their hands back out the doorway. That's the sort of experiment we've been engaged in for the past generation or two of state-mandated curricula and testing regimes: grabbing huge handfuls of a bunch of resources that no one can use, paying their providers for the privilege and serving the students poorly. To get out of the trap, it might suffice to give more student-centered funding a try. 

Free up teachers to make their own decisions and quit paying for tests and curricula; turn that money and micromanagement toward the availability and retention of experienced early childcare workers and afterschool programs for kids in need. And again, knit together the work of childcare and teaching more closely at all levels, from pre-K to post-grad, focusing on the evident desire on the part of all parties to do better, and alleviating the strain on the system as a whole by giving everyone involved a better idea of what their colleagues are up to. Such that programs of early identification and support of prospective future teachers in high school, or even middle and elementary peer tutoring and mentorship programs, should be the norm rather than an exception or charitable intervention worthy of applauding. Students learn best and most willingly teaching one another. Let's foster those interactions, provide the necessary guidance to students, and otherwise get out of their way--and out of the trap. 

Thoughtful Dad Podcast

 Quick note: Joe and I started working on a new series on being a dad :)

The Japanese present and future tense: How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, is a lovely book, to be read alongside Platero y yo and Le Petit Prince as soon as possible. Only, since I don't know Japanese anywhere near as well as I know Spanish and French, I had to wait until the book, long classic in Japan, was translated into English, thanks to its popularization of the likes of Hayao Miyazaki, said to be basing his final film on its story, and Neil Gaiman, who contributes the foreword.

The title, as translated by Bruno Navasky, is How Do You Live?

The last line, however, is given as "How will you live?"

These are both possible renderings of the same phrase in Japanese: 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimi-tachi wa Dō Ikiru ka)

How can this be? In the original language, what we would call the "future" and "present" forms of the verb are the same. The meaning, present or future, will depend on the context. Like so much does in Japanese, and in every language. Verbs in Old English, for example, have a similar ambiguity as to present/future. 

In terms of Owen Barfield's view of language, though his examples tend to be nouns--and if we're interested in Barfield, we're in good company, because Verlyn Flieger makes the strong case for JRR Tolkien's essential agreement with his fellow Inkling on this point, though his examples tend to be adverbs--Japanese verbs might well give us insight into some truth of the world's unfolding. Not, as Gatsby would have it, that we are "borne back ceaselessly into the past," exactly, but that the present is somehow continually becoming one with the future. 

Consider the way friendship happens. The growth of a person into who they want to be, or of a plant putting itself out from a seed into the light. Or the sense of anticipation we feel whenever we open a book we've heard a lot about and hope that it won't disappoint. Really hoping, perhaps, that we are ready to understand what it has to say. All of that is what this book is about. 

Other resonances might be with the Kurosawa film Ikiru (To Live) and the video game EarthBound, where the uncle's notebooks' second-person voice carries over into the dialogues with the developer over tea and coffee. But standing alongside Juan Ramon Jimenez and Antoine de St-Exupery on the shelves is already pretty good company.  

In Place of Lesson Planning: Letters By a Modern Mystic, by Frank Laubach, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster, by Jacques Ranciere

Finding convergences between two books as different as Letters By a Modern Mystic, by Frank Laubach, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, by Jacques Ranciere, may come as some surprise. The one was written towards the middle of the 20th century, and feels even closer, somehow, to the 19th--the world of sailing ships and steamers and the early days of flight. It comes from a missionary preacher on an island in the south Pacific, like something out of Joseph Conrad, writing letters home to his father in which he expresses his loneliness and his spiritual strivings. The other emerges from the atmosphere of the late 60's and 70's, with the memory of the student revolt in Paris still fresh. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, as the Game Studies Study Buddies explain in their episode on the book (and translator Kristin Ross explains in her introduction to the text), follows Ranciere's break with the Marxism of his teacher, Louis Althusser, and his turn toward alternative philosophical pathways. Not quite as mystifying as the likes of Derrida and Foucault, he contributes to the explosion of French theory here by his resurrection from obscurity of the ideas of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher of Belgian youth who devised a revolutionary method of instruction just after the French Revolution. 

Dallas Willard, who helped bring Laubach and his prayerful teaching to new generations, offers throughout his works a nuanced critique of contemporary attempts, like Ranciere's, to philosophize in the absence of moral knowledge. So what do these books by such different authors have in common? 

Despite the efforts of Willard and the GSSB, neither book is known as widely as it probably should be, but each is a classic within its niche. Both deal, in their different ways, with the same challenge: how teaching is possible when teachers and students lack a shared language. Quite literally, neither Laubach, as he presents himself in his letters, nor Jacotot, as conjured by Ranciere, speaks the language of the people they find themselves among. Yet each one develops a powerful, inspirational approach to the difficulty, which they share in more (Ranciere) or less (Laubach) detail through their writing. 

Communication and human connection become universal for them. Jacotot accomplishes this through a philosophy and practice of equality and emancipation; Laubach, through faith renewed in a game he plays minute by minute and a focus on literacy. They come to communicate universally, both in the sense of allowing them to understand and be understood by their students--their methods rely heavily on student agency and collaboration, what Ranciere calls will and Laubach each one teach one--and in a still more capacious mode. For in the process of teaching and reflecting on their teaching, both author-personae point beyond themselves and their immediate contexts to problems of truly ultimate concern. They meditate on God, on the soul, on human relationships and the prospects for building a community in our time. They speak to the questions of transcendent significance which their teaching opens up and as it were prefigures, much as Kierkegaard in his pseudonym Climacus does in Philosophical Fragments. Like Laubach, Kierkegaard/Climacus is infused with biblical yearnings and a wish to embrace the people and perhaps be one of them, for all his sophistication and privilege. Like Ranciere/Jacotot, he is a playful stylist and lover of paradox, with something of a bone to pick with the Plato and Socrates of Meno. 

We might formulate their questions about method something like this: How do we as teachers motivate people to learn? How do we learn how to teach, and teach how to learn? How, under any given circumstance, is teaching and learning possible at all? 

And as far as content goes: What is it possible to know? What is it necessary to believe in? 

As far as school administration: What is education for? How does our practice of schooling serve our ends, if those do include freedom and democracy?

These themes of epistemology, of avowed intellectual but still more moral and metaphysical valence--questions of the meaning of life, not to put too fine a point on it--might make us uncomfortable. We, as public school teachers and staff, whether in our daily work or professional training, are not generally asked to think about things like that. Laubach and Ranciere invite us to think on them deeply, though, and imagine with them a world where schools look very different, because they are concerned with nothing less. They might not truly expect that we will refashion our whole system around their insights and premises. Then what room would there be for spirit, and what old order to push against? But they do challenge us to examine ourselves and renew at every moment our collective and individual search for truth, our honesty in living out our beliefs. 

Further reading: 

Research on Ranciere and games in education by Caroline Pelletier 

ProLiteracy, the organization carrying on Laubach's work

Equity and Excellence, Historicized: Cultivating Genius, by Gholdy Muhammad

Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, by Gholdy Muhammad, arrives with the force of momentum. It carries a freight of enormous expectations, gracefully secured in just under a couple hundred pages, and largely delivers on its promise. The foreword from Bettina L. Love, professor at UGA, does not overstate matters in placing Gholdy Muhammad "in the tradition of Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, and Cherrie Moraga" (6). The regard is mutual: Muhammad cites Love's work on Abolitionist Teaching in the context of teacher preparation programs' and curricular mandates' tendency to isolate, rather than ground themselves on, "Black and Brown excellence" (40). In the following notes, let's lay out the author's own language and passages from history and fellow researchers she cites in order to see how a more robust and rooted educational regime might take hold. If we are attentive, though, to the argument, we'll see that our critical response is called for, and so from time to time we'll make bold to offer some interpretations and remarks of our own. But mainly we are here to listen and to learn; adequately contextualizing all the highlights of the book would be at least a course in itself. 

Each chapter opens with a quote from one of the Literacy Societies Muhammad researches, making her doctoral-level work accessible to a wider, less specialized audience. For chapter 1, the author is James Forten, stating in his address to the American Moral Reform Society, Aug 17, 1837: "I conceive our Literary Institutions to have the power of doing. It seems to me, then, that the main object is to accomplish an intellectual and moral reformation. And I know of but few better ways to effect this than by reading..." (8). Later in the chapter Muhammad brings in Alexander Crummel's 1897 The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect: "For the first time in the history of this nation the colored people of America have undertaken the difficult task, of stimulating and fostering the genius of their race as a distinct and definite purpose..." (14). Mary Church Terrell and "an anonymous sister author" exhort women of color along the same lines, and Prince Sunders connects the movement for literacy and moral upbuilding with the "many [who], in different periods, by cultivating the arts and sciences, have contributed to human happiness and improvement, by that invincible zeal of moral virtue and intellectual excellence..." (14-15). For Muhammad, we as teachers and students are indeed part of this process and should carry it forward: "The culturally and historically responsive literacy framework I offer serves to reorient literacy to our students' lives and asks educators to implement an equity framework that aligns with and accounts for our rich history and exalted literacy legacy" (15). 

Besides historical archives, Muhammad "relied on the writings of prominent scholars Dorothy B. Porter (1936) and Elizabeth McHenry (2002)" for context on the literary societies inspiring her emulation (20). She bemoans the fact that "rarely do teacher candidates study the educational theories of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Prince Saunders, Ella Baker, or Carter G. Woodson (to name a few)" (22). One more contemporary scholar, "Alfred Tatum (2009) describes enabling texts as texts that move beyond a solely cognitive focus such as skill and strategy development, but also have sociopolitical and sociocultural influences" (29). To help round out her theoretical toolkit, Muhammad refers us to Gloria Ladson-Billings, who "defined culturally relevant education as a 'theoretical model that not only addresses student achievement, but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate' (1995, p. 469)" (39). Muhammad reminds us, lest we get too caught up in all these authors, "even those who struggle to read print become very skilled at reading people" (41).  

Continuing her groundwork, she cites Geneva Gay, who "defines culturally responsive teaching as 'using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively' (Gay, 2002). Her premise rests on the philosophy that teachers can't teach until they deeply know and understand cultural and ethnic ways of knowing and being, and this includes the tools, protocols, values, traditions, and ways of living of the students they teach" (45). Questions for getting at this knowledge are offered on p. 51, including "What are the histories of my students' schooling/school experiences?" and "How were literacy and language cultivated historically with their families and ancestors?"

To illustrate the need for students to "see themselves in their learning," Muhammad points out, "when I work with teachers, I often take multiple pictures of them in small groups and project them on a large screen. Their eyes invariably go directly to their own faces. They look to find themselves. I believe students do the same in classrooms" (69). She asks herself, "How would I teach a young Ella Baker in my class given her identities? How would my instruction honor her psyche?" To better know students, she suggests another list of questions, including "Who are you? Do you know who you are?" and "If you could take me somewhere to help me understand your culture/ethnicity, where would you take me?" (72). Similarly, she has her student-teachers pair up and "take one-minute turns asking each other the question 'Who are you?' They ask this repeatedly, and each time, the other person must answer differently" (73). To frame the centrality of identity another way, the cites Martin Luther King Jr.'s talk to students in which he asks them, "What is your life's blueprint?" (78). She goes on to suggest ways to teach this across subject areas, from personal narratives in English to DNA in science, measurement and scale in science, and "the history of America's blueprint and who built this country" (79)--a fascinating and complex project. 

With emphatic italics, Muhammad puts her finger on the problem that "there is not enough historicizing of knowledge across the content areas. To historicize means to connect a topic to history or to represent it as historical. I often suggest to teachers that they teach the history and meaning of their discipline during the first days of school...'What does mathematics mean?' I asked this question once to a large group of high school math teachers, and no one knew, but they all saw the importance..." (101; and restated in the questions at the end of the chapter: "Whose intellectual histories do you teach?...What is the meaning and history of the disciple you teach...Why is arts coupled with the word language? Why is social coupled with studies?" 115).  For "creating an intellectual culture," she poses questions such as "Who is represented (and not represented) on the school and classroom walls?" and "How are students welcomed each day? Do we speak to students as if they are our respected co-intellectuals?" (108-9). 

Chapter 6 introduces the "concept of 'criticality'--reading print texts and contexts with an understanding of how power, anti-oppression, and equity operates throughout society. Criticality enables us to question both the world and texts within it to better understand the truth in history, power, and equity" (117). With respect to her own identity, she goes on, "I also explain criticality through a poem, written in the year 1258, in which humanness was expressed in a few simple lines. Written by the Persian poet Sa'di, the prose poem called The Gulistan of Sa'di is especially dear to me...The 'Ghul' sound...is reflected in my name and means 'the rose garden'" (117). In her discussion of the passage, she concludes, "Sa'di pushes us to ask ourselves, 'What does it mean to be human? What is personal responsibility in the face of human violence and oppression? What do humanizing practices look like in and outside of the classroom?'" (118). 

In his "West India Emancipation" speech (1857), Frederick Douglass famously declares, "Power concedes nothing without a demand," and Muhammad borrows from his themes of "resistance and agitation" in her demand for a richer literacy curriculum (125). The language of "agitation" comes up again in Ida B. Wells-Barnett's letter of Jan 1, 1902 to the Anti-Lynching Bureau, cited as another example of how Black writers have "enacted literacies to define their identities, resist oppression, and to promote social change" (126). She recurs to a list of "demands of Black students from 1969," cited earlier in her sketch of the genealogy of culturally relevant education in "scholarship from authors such as Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Carter G. Woodson, and W.E.B. Du Bois (43), to ask, "Have we listened? Have we moved toward their suggested changes? And whose best interest has education served from 1969 to today?" (130). Muhammad engages in such scholarship and encourages the practice of writing such critical open letters. To this she juxtaposes a letter from 1833, by Samuel E. Cornish, in which he "argues for the urgent establishment of schools, literary societies, and libraries to counter the neglect of Black people" (131). Whether from the 1830's or 1960's, brought to the fore as here by Muhammad or marginalized in the academy, the call of these open letters has all too contemporary a ring. 

Hearkening back to the work of William Whipper and the founders of The Library Company of Colored Persons, the Reading Room Society, and the Banneker Literary Institute, Muhammad calls for similar spaces stocked with "useful books" and Black newspapers, which ran "informational pieces...articles, sermons, and reprinted public addresses" along with "poems and broadsides by poets such as William Cullen Bryant and Phillis Wheatley" (143). She cites "Forget Me Not," by F. G. Halleck (cf. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison), and quotes entire "On the Poetic Muse," by George Moses Horton, as examples of how "the texts nurtured various identities while at the same time assisting readers to engage in literary pursuits" (145). 

By Muhammad's persuasive account, in striving for equity along the lines traced by Black genius past and present, we're doing far more than just trying to "get it right" or our due diligence in the educational front of the culture wars. We transcend politics and inquire into the depths of difference that abide in ourselves and others. 

And as the passages cited indicate, Muhammad provides practical suggestions for how to do this, if teaching this inspired can still fairly be called practical. Towards the end of the book, two of the simplest methods come in quick succession. She calls for "layered texts": "multiple short, powerful, multimodal texts," and she comes back to her mentor Alfred Tatum's 2009 "gift... his research regarding textual lineages...texts that are meaningful and significant in our lives" (147). 

Without going into the details of the transition (the subject of Anna Holmes' "Inheritance" piece in The Atlantic), Muhammad concludes her book with the "dissolution of the literary societies [and] the emergence of the Brownie Stories in the early 1900s" (153). None of Du Bois' goals for the publication include "passing a state assessment or reaching a particular 'reading level' in guided reading," Muhammad notes. "So why are those central goals in schools today? Returning to Black literary and literacy history means restoring excellence that is not just excellent for children of color, but for all children. This requires us to consider the purpose of the texts and literature we chose to support our instruction, as well as the very purpose of schools. I argue that schools and texts should help students to know themselves, their beauty, brilliance, and genius. They should also know the truth and histories of other groups of people who don't look like them" (153). The italics are hers; the sentiment we can certainly share. 

In the final chapter, Muhammad cites "the inaugural issue of Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper," arguing in line with Martin (2002) that its words "sparked the movement for literary societies... David Walker's Appeal, the development of African-centered schools, and the organization of literary societies" (156-7). The last word, though, is love, with Muhammad finding therein the point of convergence for bell hooks' and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s studies: "'This is the most precious gift true love offers--the experience of knowing we always belong' (hooks, 2001)... 'Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love'" [King, 1967] (167). 

In an afterword, Maisha T. Winn, professor at UC Davis, ties in Muhammad's work with her own in History Matters and Futures Matter, towards "demonstrating how history, historiography, and historicizing our young people and their families will create and sustain futures" (171). That is no doubt true, and varieties of scholarship and prophetic poetry will still extend the work of historicism in education and in the shaping of history. We might prefer to rejoin, though, that the through-line of Cultivating Genius as we've been able to discern it and attempted at distilling it here runs in the paradoxical moment which is neither past nor future, but the ever-unconcluded time of hooks' gift of always-belonging love and King's regal trinity of power, justice, and love--it is of the present.