#daemon voices

[self-prescribed]

I feel nervous, so I'm doing it.

I haven't used Tumblr since 2019. Apparently I used this one for the last time a couple of years before that, and before that it wasn't since I was in high school.

I'm here because I want to write about Philip Pullman, and His Dark Materials, and the Book of Dust. I just finished The Rose Field. It's a beautiful treatise on the power of human imagination. I've been a student of Pullman since I was in, what, grade 4? That was over 20 years ago.

I used to be much more creative. The last time I used Tumblr, in fact, was as part of a project for a creative writing degree I was pursuing, in which I wrote heavily and often about Pullman. Daemon Voices had just recently came out, and dovetailed neatly with a lot of the writing I was trying to do, as well as my love for Joseph Campbell's work.

Since completing my degree, and realising that one has to (unfortunately) make money, I started working in marketing as a copywriter, and then ChatGPT happened, and it made my job a lot easier, and I forgot how to think or imagine or write. In short, my daemon died.

At the very least, she's not well. I imagine her as a magpie. Years and years ago I made a promise to myself that if I saw a magpie it meant I was having a good day. In Melbourne, you see a lot of magpies, so you have a lot of good days. I got one tattooed on my arm to add to the guarantee. We haven't spoken in a long time, though. I wish to revive her.

My instinct has always (or often) been to learn more - to read more, listen to more, consume more. I want to act more - practice more. I want to write for no/minimal audience. I want to do nice things in silence. However, I'm still going to read, and if I'm going to read, I'd like to do it with focus.

I had this idea last year, actually - a little curriculum for myself. I adore Pullman. I want to trace back the lineage, arriving again at the end of Book of Dust. Pullman was hugely inspired by John Milton, so we're using that as our sort of guiding direction.

We start with...

The Iliad/The Odyssey by Homer, which lead us to...

The Aeneid by Virgil, who was the guide in...

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, which inspired...

Paradise Lost, by John Milton, who inspired...

The poetry of William Blake, which was a big influence on...

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.

That's the gist. From there, I'd like to look at who Pullman has influenced. I'm kind of hoping that ends up being, y'know, myself. I went through the acknowledgements in The Rose Field and found all the authors, because I think that helps develop a constellation of influence on Pullman. I think the better I know his mind, the better I can see it's similarities/differences to my own...or something. These are his acknowledgements:

Anatomy of Melancholy

John le Carre

Donald Heiney/Macdonald Harris

Brian Mountford - Liberal Christian

Caradoc King - Problem Child

Carlo Rovelli - physicist

Chiaro Marletto - physicist

David Deustch - physicist

Dinah Birch - critic

Iain McGilchrist - psychiatrist/philosopher/neuroscientist

James Hawes - HISTORIAN

Jonathan Kingdon - zoologist

Kristen Poole - Pullman/religious academic

Neil Philip - mythographer/illustrator

Rowan Williams - archbishop

Suzie Sheehy - physicist (AUS!)

Tim Brighouse - educator

Philip Goff is in there too, but I didn't add him because I already have a copy of Galileo's Error which I'm probably going to read next.

I don't know if this is interesting. I feel like I write that a lot when I write stuff into the void. Who cares. It's interesting to me. I'm trying to get better at saying that. I'm going to do a lot of reading.

[dk-thrive]

The classroom is a torture chamber, interrogating poetry until it confesses.

— Philip Pullman, from Dæmon Voices: Essays on Storytelling (Vintage, September 18, 2018) (via Hammock Papers)

[pierrotdameron]

The theme of my story is the end of innocence. [...] In other words, we have to forget about innocence – it’s gone; it’s no use moping about our lost childhood, and becoming intoxicated by the sickly potency of our own nostalgia; we have to grow up. We have to leave the unself-conscious grace of childhood behind and go in search of another quality altogether, the quality of wisdom. And that involves engaging with every kind of human experience, making compromises, getting our hands dirty, suffering, toiling, learning. Innocence is not wise; wisdom cannot be innocent. And it’s very painful and it’s very hard, but it’s the only way forward, and in the end, if we keep on trying, we shall have acquired a deeper, fuller, richer understanding than we ever had before we tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. That is the meaning of Lyra’s losing the power to read the alethiometer. It came to her easily, like grace; it departs as if it had never been, leaving only a memory of the ease and swiftness and certainty she used to feel. But this is not a story about how wonderful it was to be a child, and its dominating principle is not nostalgia and regret. It’s a story about how necessary it is to grow up, and its dominating principle is realism and hope.

Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: “The Writing of Stories”

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

this man!! keeps making Choices(tm)!!! sir why would you insist that LotR is simple and uninteresting and trite at a fucking FANTASY CONFERENCE?!!

[wordshaveteeth]

There is no joy comparable to the thrill that accompanies a new idea, one that we know is full of promise and possibility — unless it’s the joy that comes when, after a long period of reflection and bafflement, of frustration and difficulty, we suddenly see the way through to the solution; or the delight when one of our characters suddenly says something far too witty for us to have thought of ourselves; or the slow, steady pleasure that comes from the regular accumulation of pages written; or the honest satisfaction that rewards work done well — a turn in the story deftly handled, a passage of dialogue that reveals character as well as advancing the story, a pattern of imagery that unobtrusively echoes and clarifies the theme of the whole book.

- Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

[wine-frost]

i forgot to take a picture of my treat yet again, but i’m reading philip pullman’s daemon voices, his collected essays on stories and storytelling.

@bibliophilicwitch

[aliteraryprincess]

Once you do love something, the attempt to understand it becomes a pleasure rather than a chore . . .

Philip Pullman, “Paradise Lost: An Introduction,” Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

[antigonick]

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

Philip Pullman, excerpt of “The Writing of Stories”, in Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling