A couple of quick thoughs about daemons and authorship

When we ask what is nature let us think of animals in terms of how they were portrayed in My Book and Heart Shall Never Part. We learned from the movie that kids and animals resemble each other, while animals disguise human weakness and dramatize pitiless morals. We also gleaned that, according to Aesop, "Love can tame the wildest". Also, a child is "an aged philosopher focused on dreamlike creatures performing what it means to be human." Finally, we were told that reading about animals is reading about the uneasiness of the human condition. We know that daemons resemble their humans, and vice versa. You can even take a test to see what your daemon would be (click here to take the test!) When they are cut off from one another they cease to exist and each feels the pain of the other. Lyra disguises Pantalaimon's weakness and he her's. These animals, like Pan, do perform what it means to be human, while I think the child performs what it mean to be an animal (as in adapted to civilization as the adults, or magesterium, see fit). And the powers of love are evident in His Dark Materials, when we are witness to the strong bonds between daemon and human (as well as the respected boundaries that you may not touch another daemon). Philip Pullman had said of the Chronicles of Narnia that, if it is supposed to be a religious book, it is void of the single most important Christian value: love.

As far as authorship goes, I never really like to see what the author of the book looks likes. It somehow ruins it for me. Imagining the author is a big part of imagining the book and with all of Pullman's imput, he has grown a little didactic himself, it would seem. J.K. Rowling has always maintained a distance from her readers but Philip is, at least from my experience, interruping his own work by telling me what it is about. Well, that's the equivalent of Lewis Carroll providing us with the actual answer to the raven and writing desk riddle. Something is taken away, its one less thing for me to have the pleasure of imagining. So thank you, Phil Pullman, for doing the thing to me which you have vowed so strongly never to do: leave little or nothing to the imagination. Why did you let them make a movie, especially if it isn't even as good as the book? How can we imagine what you've written if we can watch it, only further depreciating the value of an education which you so highly esteem? It seems like Phil is not doing this purely for alturistic reasons, and even he said so himself "I write a book for myself." If this is the case, why does he feel the need to explain himself to everyone?

Fairy Dust?

I don't know too much about dust yet. I'm about half way through and from what I have gathered about dust from the book is that it could have something to do with experience, knowledge, and rememberance. It is described as a shadow. Lyra and the other kids had speculated that dust was bad and forced a child to be removed from his daemon, but by the end of the Golden Compass Lyra and Pantelaimon had decided that they never actually asked if it was bad. The dust makes me think of Meno's paradox which Dr. Sexson mentioned to us in our Classical Literature class. Essentially, you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. Before being born we are little angels flying around heaven with all the knowledge in the world, but the immediate shock of our birth, purged from our amniotic sack, forces us to lose our angel wings and fall. Now here on earth, we know everything, but we have forgotten it, and each time we have a new experience our backs itch. Our angel wings grow a little each time we learn something. We drink from the river Mnemosyne, and stay away from the river Lethe, but we have an "alethe", or an unforgetting of what we have known. Hypothetically speaking, then, the dust could be knowledge. Knowledge of what the shadow on the cave wall really is, an understanding of what is being displayed in a computer. Then I think back to Paradise Lost. Sam, in arguing with me because she loves to do that, told me of an episode at a latter part of the book in which, through the amber spyglass, trees are dying because the dust is not "pollenating" them. "So," said Sam, "How do you like dem apples?" I figured if the dust represents knowlege in humans, and it is polenating a tree, couldn't that represent the tree of knowledge? Another idea in Paradise Lost is that we cannot have all the knowledge in the world, or else that would signify too much ambitiousness (for god-head). We also see how Eve's curiosity, her desire for more knowledge, leads to the eventual fall, however happy, of man.

So, we can ascertain that under the auspices of organized religion (which Pullman openly detests), curiosity and the want of knowledge are to be cut-off at a certain point or once you've reached a certain capacity. Adam says in book 12, "Greatly in peace of thought and have my fill of knowledge, what this vessel can contain, beyond which was my folly to aspire. Here is what Philip Pullman says about learning and teaching: In the Subtle Knife, "Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." He also said at the end of a lecture he gave on education: "But if we get education right, it would show that we were being serious about living and thinking and understanding ourselves; it would show that we were paying our children the compliment of assuming that they were serious too; and it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time …”

In class we also talked briefly about Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The three magical places are Zembla, Zenda, and Xanadu. In the dedication poem of the book, Rushdie says:

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:

All our dream-worlds may come true
Fairy lands are fearsome too

As I wander far from view

Read, and bring me home to you.

The poem forms an acrostic of Salman Rushdie's son, ZAFAR! In the aforementioned lecture by Philip Pullman, he says, as his concluding point, that FEAR has seeped into our educational system. That we are afraid to try new things, afraid of awkward classes, asking questions. Fear of Failure. It is a scary notion to be curious, to learn and enter a fairy land; but a good education, reading, curiosity, and imagination can inspire confidence in our educational systems. Pullman says, "When I started teaching thirty years ago, there was a culture of confidence in schools. It's not there any more; it's been replaced by a culture of fear. Shame on us, to be so timid. Shame on us, to be so mistrustful. Shame on us, to have so little faith in literature, in poetry and drama and story."

More to come, and, if you care, I have more blogs about education which correlate.

My short insight

One "device" that I have found throughout Alice in Wonderland and Sunderland is the use of frames. I think I mean but I'm not sure I mean what I say when I say that my understanding of frames is, essentially a story within a story. When you step back from a story you realize there are many different stories inside of the one you are reading, revealing many layers of meaning. Its usually done in the context of narration, like in Lolita. Other examples I can think of off the top of my head would be The Notebook (how the story is being read years later) and The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

Brian Talbott's book is made up entirely of frames, one story inside of another story, one story framed by the historicity surrounding it, and, in comic fashion, most of it is illustrated in frames. If it is the case that framing a story is a way of buttressing a story with another story, providing for it a frame work from which to base itself, then it lends itself very well to intertextuality, or the allusions we commonly see and the connections we have been stressing. Talbott shows these connections, supporting them with history and stories within stories. Because there is six degrees of separation between literature, us, and everything else, there are stories in stories everywhere. I also like how Talbott really plays with narration, often engaging himself personally with the reader, making you a part of the story, which adds to the numbers of frames in and layers of meaning surrounding the story

And I cannot think of a painting or a mirror that isn't surrounded by a frame. Have you ever been in an elevator that is surrounded by mirrors? You are basically in a mirror box, except for the doors, and if you look left you see hundreds of yourself, one image being reflected off the mirror behind you and then reflected off that. What did Dr. Sexson call this sort of perpetual reflexivity, like a mirror in a mirror in a mirror, or tv within a tv within a tv?

My favorite chapter

My favorite chapter is from Through the Looking Glass, and it is Humpty Dumpty. It is a very interesting chapter where Humpty discusses the meanings of words with Alice. He uses language to convery his own meanings, demonstrating both the arbitrariness and the importance of word. He employs words, like Shakespeare does, telling Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less. When I make a word do a lot of work like that I always pay it extra." Humpty also explores identity in this chapter, asking Alice what is in a name? Alice wondered, "Must a name mean something?" Humpty argues that words have an intrinsic relationship to the things they name, and that an abstract face would do more in defining a person than any anatomically correct face. He also describes words (verbs, adjectives) as having human characteristics, such a pride, glory, or impenetrability. Here he exemplifies that some words have fixed meanings and are universally understood. But elsewhere he argues that names are entirely arbitrary, adding an aura of nonsensicality where one thing cannot mean something and nothing at all. His explanation of Jabberwocky, though conceptually correct, he imagines the scene to be more fantasmagorical and Seussesque. According to a note in my book, the literal translation of the first stanza of Jabberwocky 'Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves/Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:All mimsy were ye borogoves; And ye mome raths outgrabe means "it was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots, and the grave turtles squeaked out." But is there ever a literal translation? Humpty describes to Alice slimy badgers with corkscrew probosci, parrots with mpos on their heads, and, like the dream we heard on Wednesday, mom raths a homesick green pigs.

Also featured in this chapter is math. 365 - 1=364 is clearly drawn out. I wondered what the relationship is between the meanings of names and mathmatical figures and why Carroll would have wanted to write out its process. Then I came upon a Northrop Frye quote from The Educated Imagination and it reads: "From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination...It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary expreience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can...one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have." Northrop Frye distinguishes the imagination from consciousness as seeing something as it is as opposed to seeing something as you want it to be. Do you recall from Alice in Sunderland on page 303 when he says "The city is reinventing itself. Old industries are replaced by new. The biggest Nissan car factory in Europe is here. New buildings are springing up on post-industrial land. Rival developers, each with their own vision of the Sunderland of tomorrow..." But my question was, why is math one of the languages and is that why we find mathematical instances laced through Wonderland? Humpty Dumpty confirmed Alice's calculations as being correct when he was reviewing it upside down. Can numbers be arbitrary as words may be? Do we use numbers do see and reinvent the world as we do with language?

Giants in Time

I did some interesting reading this weekend in additin to the two assigned books. Sam and I had to get out of the house on Saturday night (we noticed how many lights were on in the dorms and figured everyone was recuperating from Friday) so we went to Barnes & Noble where there was a caucophony of bratty high school girls scaring the living crap out of me like bees do. I was looking for anything that might be germane to my project, and since I have yet to see the word Bohemia used in a children's literature I figured anything could work. In the criticism section of the store I found a Northrop Frye book, The Educated Imagination, and Sam and I both read it this weekend. What I would like to do is succinctly raise several points about what I read this weekend:

1) In Alice in Sunderland on page 270 it says "Carroll describes his metods of developing stories; he jots down ideas, scenes, fragments of dialogue as they occur to him over time--a laborious process that takes years." This weekend I also read an excerpt from "A History of the Past" by Anders Henriksson. Henriksson, a professor of history at Shepherd College, compiled the essay from sentences extracted from students' papers over a fifteen-year period. Here is how some of it goes:
"Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships with her face. The Trojan War raged between the Greeks and the Tories. We know about this thanks to Homer's story about Ulysses Grant and Iliad, the painful wife he left behind. King Xerox of Persia invadad Greace, bet fell off short at the battle of Thermosalami...Historians today feel that the renaissance was the result of medevil people being fertalized by events. Italy was pregnent with huge ideas and great men. Machiavelli, wo was often unemployed, wrote The Prince to get a job with Richard Nixon. Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his later personality. This was a time when Europeans felt the need to reach out and smack someone..."
This history professory has retold history by using a hodgepodge of erroneous (and silly) historical statement written by his students over a 15 year span. Not only is the essay very interesting and funny, but the concept is brilliant. He creates something entirely new, but recognizable, by using symbols we know and may often get confused. What is it about the use of symbols and iconography in this way that leds itself to the nonsensicality of it all? See number 3

2) One particular scene in Alice in Wonderland that I liked was wen the cards were lying face down for the procession of the Queen, but because they were all the same on the back and had to lie as such, there was no way of telling what they really were. In case anyone didn't know, the reason there is the intricate pattern on the back of playing cards is because it is possible to read through cards. What might this say about concealing the truth of things behind confusing patterns and images. We have seen this over and over again in literature, from Plato's Cave to today's literature, that the truth is concealed, or what we are seeing may only be a version of the truth, and it could be likely that no truth exists at all, there are only images.

3)In my Mythologies class with Dr. Sexons I did my final presentation of six degrees of separation. I drew out a series of six different connections, however random they may at first seem, are actually very realted. For instance, I connected Mnemosyne, or Memory, with Sir Mix Alot, essentially by saying that Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory and the mother of all muses is what Wordsworth was talking about in his poem "I wandered lonely as as cloud" which is about remembering things past, which was the basis of a role played by Ashton Kutcher in The Butterfly Effect. This movie was about Ashton's soul and his past, and the soul is often represented by a butterfly. Psyche, or the soul, is the mother of Voluptua (Cupid is the father) and Voluptua means pleasure (or the root of voluptuous) which is what Sir Mixalot sang about in "Baby Got Back." I made several of these connections and I found that this is exactly what Alice in Sunderland is all about. It is what it is all about! On page 194 of the graphic novel we get this explanation, "Comics are demanding of the reader. The illustrations have to be "read", taking on the function of descriptive passages in text workds. The reader has to interpret the images and make the mental jump between one panel and the next." I found this to be a very redeeming quality about comics. This is also the reason there is so much history in Alice in Sunderland. You need the history to make the connections. You need the history to make the literature! Its all right there, you just need to know how to look, you begin to see things as a whole, as an entirety, rather than fragmented and disassociated events and instances.

3) Do you remember when Dr. Sexson said "simile becomes metaphor"? Here is a little explanation and it may, or may not, relate to number 1. This is a quote directly taken from a Wallace Stevens poem and is used by Northrop Frye. The poem is The Motive For Metaphor and it goes like this:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--T

he obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

Northorp Frye says of this poem, "What Stevens calls the weight of primary noon, the A B C of being, and the dominant X is the objective world, the world set over against us. Outside literature, the main motive for writing is to describe this world. But literature itself uses language in a way which associates our minds with it. As soon as you use associative language, you begin using figures of speech. If you say this talk is dry and dull, you're using figures associating it with bread and breadknives. There are two main kinds of association, analogy and identity, two things that are like each other and two things that are each other. You can say with Burns, "My love's like a red, red rose," or you can say with Shakespeare:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring.
One produces the figure of speech called the simile; the other produces the figure called metaphor...As for metaphor, where you're really saying "this is that," you're turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same ting and still remain two things."

Is this the basis of nonsense in Alice in Wonderland? When a card is not only a playing card but a member of the court, the caterpillar is not only a caterpillar, but a hookah smoking existentialist?

Click here to watch a YouTube of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach Cello Suites. We learned that all of the arts aspire to music in class. I'll talk more about this later