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.