In which reading Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth prompts me to talk about creative writing and value
Beginning this blog today really feeling the “blah” in blog. On Tuesday, I finished We Both Laughed in Pleasure and started writing, but because this book has so much of Lou Sullivan’s sex life in it, some of my writing ended up being about my sexuality. I’m still planning to shape at least some of that writing into something public, but I didn’t feel comfortable publishing it without mulling it over—and I like to be pretty immediate with these blog posts. They’re not essays, but records of thought in process, and as such it doesn’t feel right to agonize over them. For me, the best blog posts are begun and published in the span of a day.
I’ve also jumped back into The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (spoilers ahead). It’s the second book in a new trilogy set in the world of His Dark Materials. After a slow start, I’ve been pulled back in. As with my favorite fantasy novels, I feel like this book contains a secret doctrine, a philosophy, in which the problem of the imagination is central, which appeals to me because core to my personal philosophy is the assertion Diane di Prima makes in her poem “RANT,” that:
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
If you haven’t read The Golden Compass or the other books in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, they are set in a world like our own. I see it as a kind of alternate 19th century, based on context clues, dominated by an organization called the Magisterium—akin to the Catholic church at the height of its political power, if the Protestant Reformation had been absorbed (in this alternate history there is a Pope John Calvin). In this world, people’s souls, called dæmons, are visible, external beings that take the shape of animals. Dæmons can change shape until puberty, at which point they fix into a particular species. And their humans and their demons cannot separate too far for too long without drastic consequences.
In the first book of The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, Lyra was an infant. In The Secret Commonwealth, she is a young adult (in her early twenties, I believe). She and her dæmon, Pan (short for Pantalaimon) are at odds with each other, which is horribly sad, especially if you read the books that make up His Dark Materials, when Lyra was a kid and she and Pan’s relationship was harmonious.
The Secret Commonwealth, from which I quote at length below, shows Lyra as a depressed young skeptic who has fallen under the intellectual spell of:
The Hyperchorasmians, by a German philosopher called Gottfried Brande, [which] was a novel that was having an extraordinary vogue among clever young people all over Europe and beyond. It was a publishing phenomenon: nine hundred pages long, with an unpronounceable title (at least until Lyra had learnt to pronounce the ch as k), an uncompromising sternness of style, and nothing that could remotely pass for a love interest, it had sold in the millions and influenced the thinking of an entire generation. It told the story of a young man who set out to kill God, and succeeded. But the unusual thing about it, the quality that had set it apart from anything else Lyra had ever read, was that in the world Brande described, human beings had no dæmons. They were totally alone.
Like many others, Lyra had been spellbound, hypnotized by the force of the story, and found her head ringing with the hammer blows of the protagonist’s denunciation of anything and everything that stood in the way of pure reason. Even his quest to find God and kill him was expressed in terms of the fiercest rationality: it was irrational that such a being should exist, and rational to do away with him. Of figurative language, of metaphor or simile, there was not a trace. At the end of the novel, as the hero looked out from the mountains at sunrise, which in the hands of another writer might have represented the dawn of a new age of enlightenment, free of superstition and darkness, the narrator turned away from commonplace symbolism of that kind with scorn. The final sentence read, “It was nothing more than what it was”
Part of the schism between Lyra and Pan has to do with Pan’s feeling that Lyra, under the spell of Brande, has lost her imagination. As the book proceeds, and the two (or, I suppose, the two-in-one) reach an impasse, Pan leaves on a quest to recover Lyra’s imagination.
Another noteworthy aspect of this world that Philip Pullman has built is a device called the alethiometer (truth + meter). The quickest way to describe is if the tarot were an old-fashioned pocket watch. The tarot is a book of images to which I’ve been returning my whole adult life, especially when I don’t know the way, so I feel very close to the magical system of these books.
Lyra starts this most recent book an undergraduate, but has to leave for that most contemporary of reasons: no funding! It’s been cut by an evil administrator. Well, that and she is caught up in an ongoing international intrigue. This ejection feels rougher because her university isn’t just her university, it has also been her home for most of her life. Oxford: Pullman, like many others, adds another coat to its already gleaming aura, while also making Lyra an ambivalent figure in the town/gown divide—at home in both worlds.
It has me thinking about school. DISCLAIMER: I should say here that I’m not really trying to make this fit neatly with The Secret Commonwealth—it’s just kind of a jumping off point for talking about this stuff. When I left school (the most recent time), I felt so certain. My body was telling me, no, screaming at me to go. So I went. But now the way is uncertain. I left school but I should have known that I am still carrying around the school in me. When I was in school, I had an Adversary. Now I have removed myself from its reach and proven my insignificance. When I was in school, I could downplay the importance of the academic and pedagogical boxes I was being forced into because I had the outlet of imagining that my real life was my writing, and conducting the sort of para-academic workshops I’ve taken with folks like Hoa Nguyen in Austin and Laura Moriarty and Brent Cunningham in the Bay. And that is my life, and I’m trying to take steps to keep going in that direction. But I’m trying to live by my decision to try to make money from creative writing (and ancillary activities), which introduces a different hierarchy of values, or, I should say, replaces one set of concerns with another.
And one of the ways of making money as an artist is to have a big audience, which means that anxieties about money easily shift to concern about audience, fame. This is particularly easy to do in a writing community like Western Massachusetts with such a disparity between its most and least successful (in capitalist metrics).
The thing that has mostly driven my own limited successes as a writer is community engagement. Hosting readings, editing journals, etc. That stuff isn’t really about my ego. And I’ve never pursued those activities for some sort of return, except for maybe the thrill I get being a ham on stage or getting to publish writers I admire. There is a return, albeit slow and indirect, which is the trust and goodwill of your community. And it’s easy enough to sink that right back into the same projects (like organizing, editing, teaching) that generated it but much harder to believe that one’s own creative writing, for example, is the gift.
Whether the income-from-creative-writing-and-ancillary-activities gambit works or not, this is an inner shift I’m trying to make, which demands imagination to conceive of, but a scission of the self into multiple parts to effect. The parts of I’m thinking of right now are the administrator and the poet.
I’ve been leaning hard into the boss, so let’s give the poet an audience. What is she reading? This morning it was “carta desde el infierno” from Chely Lima’s lo que les dijo el licántropo / what the werewolf told them, with a facing page translation by Margaret Randall, published by the operating system
¿Nadie le da albergue al peregrino, mi dulce dios de las encrucijadas?
Este viaje largo y la luz que no asoma.
El peregrino busca la luna detrás del eleggua
que lleva entre los ojos, y que una vez tuvo otro nombre
cuando fue el escribe mayor de los dioses del Nilo, su Mensajero.
El peregrino busca la luna de leche, la luna de plata viva.
Porque detrás de la luna, siempre, habita el sol.
¿Nadie le presta un techo al peregrino?
No hay templos a su paso, ni tabernas,
es el abandonado de sí mismo, el que no se mira en un espejo,
el que sueña. El que remienda lo que queda de su cuerop.
Quizá lo que quiere el peregrino es volverse loco.
Quizá mira hacia arriba acechando las constelaciones.
El oso quo lo guíe.
La lumber cierta como una pedrada en el ojo transido del cielo.
Now here it is in English, as “letters from hell:”
No one shelters the pilgrim, my sweet god of the crossroads?
Such a long lightless journey.
The pilgrim searches for the moon behind the Eleggua
he carries between his eyes, and who once had another name
when he was the senior scribe of the gods of the Nile, his Messenger.
The pilgrim searches for the moon of milk, the moon of living silver.
Because behind the moon the sun always resides.
Does no one lend the pilgrim shelter?
There are no temples along his way, nor taverns,
he is his own abandonment, who doesn’t see himself in the mirror,
he who dreams. He who mends what is left of his body.
Perhaps what the pilgrim wants is to go crazy.
Perhaps he looks up stalking the constellations.
The bear that will guide him.
Certain fuel like a stone in the sky’s frozen eye.
Wanting to reconnect not just with the poet part of me but also the witch, the radical, the part that wants to go crazy, I also got out Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (inscribed by her to my former name) and Ursula Le Guin’s English version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.
In the Tao Te Ching, I flip the pages, randomly stopping at number 72:
The right fear
When we don’t fear what we should fear
we are in fearful danger.
We ought not to live in narrow houses,
we ought not to do stupid work.
If we don’t accept stupidity
we won’t act stupidly.
So, wise souls know but don’t show themselves,
look after but don’t prize themselves,
letting the one go, keeping the other.
Turning to the back of the book, here is Le Guin’s commentary:
I take the liberty of reading this chapter as a description of what we, we ordinary people should fear. The usual reading is in the manual-for-princes mode. In that case “what should be feared” is the ruler, the rightful authority, and the advice that follows is evidently directed to that ruler. It’s certainly what William Blake would have told the oligarchs of the Industrial Revolution, who still control our lives.
Here’s a short one from di Prima:
REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #73
DREAM POEM ABOUT REAGAN & CO
September 24, 1981
When we are dirt poor
and no longer have our mountains for shelter
when we are conquered
and cannot go to our forests for comfort
when we are hungry
and our valleys will no longer sustain us
then we will see these men
in their true light
The poet is el peregrino, the pilgrim. Her wealth is her wandering. She doesn’t live in a narrow house and she won’t do stupid work. But it’s a moot point if the oligarchs take away the mountains she takes shelter on and the forests she goes to for comfort. So how should the poet proceed? And the administrator, chasing after her, trying to keep body and soul together?