Log24

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Annals of Deceptive Fiction —
Dark Materials: Milton, Eliot, Pullman

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:45 pm

For Pullman, see previous instances of "wilde abyss" in this journal.

For a less fictional approach to the abyss, see the following.

From T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
by Sarah Kennedy,
Cambridge University Press, 2018 —

Chapter 7
His Dark Materials

Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say, I play
The Man I am.

– Shakespeare, Coriolanus, III.ii. [Link added.]

. . . .

Eliot describes the creative germ as the
‘unknown, dark psychic material . . .
with which the poet struggles’.

The phrase echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost :

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds . . .

Eliot’s creative logic retains an aspect of the divine
poet-as-maker, but the effect is not hubristic.
Where Milton’s Almighty may ordain, Eliot’s poet
can only struggle against something unknown.
Yet even in the image of struggle, reminiscent of
Jacob’s struggle with the obscured figure who
appears in the darkness and departs at dawn,
there is a sense of the poet as more than human,
both blessed and maimed by the confrontation.
Like Milton, Eliot locates the struggle in a ‘wilde abyss’:
he once described human consciousness
(following The Tempest ) as extending into a
‘dark . . . backward and abysm of time’. Importantly,
this space is not an aspect of the world as constructed
by a presiding intention (as in Paradise Lost ), but exists
within the poet.
. . . .

"The phrase echoes Milton's Paradise Lost" —

In describing his  abyss, Milton invokes not "psychic material" but
rather the classical view of Nature as composed of the four elements
Water, Earth, Air and Fire.

Note that one source* of the "psychic material" phrase in Eliot's work
gives a rather different picture . . .

"And now I should like to return for a moment to Gottfried Benn
and his unknown, dark psychic material —
we might say, the octopus or angel with which the poet struggles."

* "The Three Voices of Poetry," by T. S. Eliot, The Atlantic, April 1954.

Related entertainment . . .

Thursday, December 22, 2022

For “Dark Materials” Fans: The Monkey Trial

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:35 am

Saturday, October 15, 2022

Dark Materials

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:27 pm

Friday, June 11, 2021

Dark Materials

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Items from the Dark Matter Research Unit office in
the recent HBO version of His Dark Materials —

Closeup of the I Ching  book:

Closeup of parquet-style patterns in a 4x4x2 array —

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Gemini Poem

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 3:58 pm

Or using his  research and their  tools.

Compare and contrast — 

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise
Thir embryon Atoms....
                                ... Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage....

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Annals of Journalism

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:27 pm

Update of 12:31 PM ET —

The time  of this post, 12:27 PM ET,
suggests a 12/27 flashback:

Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.

A related literary remark —

"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark  set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."

— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book review, not  of Dark Materials.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

The Forms of Being

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:25 pm

"If the window is this matrix of ambi- or multivalence,
and the bars of the windows-the grid-are what help us
to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are themselves 
the symbol of the symbolist work of art. They function as
the multilevel representation through which the work of art
can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."

— Page 59, Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," MIT Press,
October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64

Related material —

Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.

A related literary remark —

"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark  set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."

— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book review, not  of Dark Materials.

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Lily in Paris

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:43 pm

The parquet floor supporting Lily Collins in today's noon-hour post
suggests a search in this journal for parquet.

A resulting quote from Henry James —

"… the high party-walls,
on the other side of which
grave hôtels  stood off for privacy,
spoke of survival, transmission, association,
a strong indifferent persistent order."

As do the three Dark Materials images in the search.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

LA Story

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:11 pm

November 2020, billboard at La Brea Chevron —  His Dark Materials :

December 2020, same billboard — TENET :

November 2021,  Croft House to the above Chevron station :

"All we want are the facts." — Jack Webb

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Compare and Contrast

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:16 am

From the previous post —

For the connection between His Dark Materials  and The Four Elements ,
see Darkness at Noon (Log24, Jan. 31, 2011).

La Brea and Beverly

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:18 am

November 2020 — Billboard at a La Brea Chevron:  His Dark Materials

October 2021 — Nearby billboard:  Guilty Party

Log24 on Sept. 18  — The Guilty Party  acorn hat:

♫  The way you wear your hat . . .

Saturday, July 31, 2021

For St. Peter’s College (University of Oxford)*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:41 pm

In memory of a Harvard professor who reportedly died on
St. Peter's Day, 2021 (June 29).

"You may be flying through the air
Wrapped up in how high you can go
And no one will be there to bring you down
Just stop — take a look around"

— Patti LaBelle, "Space Children"
(No. 204 on Cara Delevingne's Wall of Sound)

* See also St. Peter's College in "His Dark Materials." 

Sunday, July 25, 2021

Together Again… At Twilight Time

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:58 am

In memory of Ed Wood:

"Such a brilliant director, a fucking powerhouse…."
— Recent Instagram comment

"Twilight  was theatrically released on November 21, 2008;
it grossed over US$393 million worldwide. It was released
on DVD March 21, 2009 and became the most purchased
DVD of the year." — Wikipedia

See also November 21, 2008, in posts tagged Olaf Gate.

Related material —

As inquisitions go, I prefer the Holy Office of Philip Pullman. 

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise
Thir embryon Atoms....
                                ... Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage....

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Perspective for Pullman*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:05 pm

* I.e., for Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials .
  Those who prefer fiction to reality may consult
  a Baja-related search in this  journal for "Sea of Cortez."
  That search in turn suggests a Fandom webpage related
  to yesterday's post "Perspective" —  
  https://davidmitchell.fandom.com/wiki/Luisa_Rey.
  "Luisa Rey is played by Halle Berry in the Wachowski siblings'
  2012 adaptation of Cloud Atlas . . . . Her name is based on 
  The Bridge of San Luis Rey . . . ." 

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

The 7-11 Culture War

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:44 pm

Here  on June 7-11 —

June 7: Pullman's Holy Office

June 11: Dark Materials

Monday, June 7, 2021

Pullman’s Holy Office

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:23 pm

Good question.  From Philip Pullman's recent HBO version of
"His Dark Materials," The University of Oxford’s St. Peter’s College:

Saturday, June 5, 2021

Times Square Logic

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:40 am

Dialogue from Season 1, Episode 8 of "His Dark Materials" —

Asriel:  And the serpent said, "You shall not surely die, for the Authority doth know that on that day that ye eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, your daemons shall assume their true form and ye shall be as…"

Both:  "… gods, knowing good and…"

Lyra:  "… evil."

Asriel:  "… Dust ." You see? They have been trying to convince us for centuries that we are born guilty. And that we have to spend a lifetime atoning for the crime of eating an apple. Is there any proof for this heinous stain, this shame, this guilt? No, not at all. We are to take it on faith, and on the word of the Authority.

But Dust… Dust is an elementary particle that we can record, measure, study.

Read more at:
https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/
viewtopic.php?f=270&t=37981

Related material: Times Square Logic.  Log24 posts now tagged
"Times Square Logic" include two from April 7, 2015, the date of
Geoffrey Lewis's death.

Lewis played, notably, "Hard Case Williams" in Lust in the Dust  (1984).

Friday, April 16, 2021

In Memoriam . . .

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:45 pm

The voice of Stelmaria.

See as well Dark Materials in this journal.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Logic of the Dust

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"Dust is a fictional elementary particle that is of
fundamental importance within the story." 

— Wikipedia on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials  trilogy

A review of posts tagged Kabbalah yields —

  "If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City  this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
    … Paul Durham is convinced by the 'logic of the dust' theory mentioned above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular automaton (Permutation City) started in a 'Garden of Eden' configuration — one which isn't reachable from any other, and which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation….  I didn't understand the need for this elaborate set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than 'well, all possible worlds exist, and I'm going to tell you about one of them.' "

— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City , 
     a novel by Greg Egan

See also in this journal a search for Dark Matter.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Darkness Visible

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

Andrew O'Hehir on July 22 —

— and on July 27 —

"Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds …
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage…."

— John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II

For Benedict Cumberbatch as a "warie fiend,"
see posts now tagged Both Hands.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Darkness at Noon

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

In today's Wall Street Journal , Peter Woit reviews a new book on dark matter and dark energy.

For a more literary approach, see "dark materials" in this  journal. 

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise
Thir embryon Atoms....
                                ... Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage....

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II

Related material:

1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”—

2. Angels and demons here and in the Catholic Church.

3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090312-OpsopausSquare.jpg

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Sunday August 16, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Return to Paradise

(Title of a New Yorker
essay dated June 2, 2008)

Kenneth Bacon, an advocate for refugees, died yesterday at 64 on the Feast of the Assumption.

In his honor, we may perhaps be justified in temporarily ignoring the wise saying "never assume."

From a defense of the dogma of the Assumption:

"On another level, the Assumption epitomizes the reconciliation of the material and spiritual world, as the human Mary enters 'body and soul to heavenly glory.' Carl Jung, the transpersonal psychologist, concluded that the doctrine of the Assumption reflected an acceptance of the physical world."

For other such reconciliations, see

  • The New Yorker on Milton meeting Galileo: "Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
  • This journal on Milton's world system: the four qualities "hot, cold, moist, and dry" and the four elements "Sea, Shore, Air, and Fire."

    But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
    Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
    Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
    His dark materials to create more Worlds….

  • This journal's "For Galois on Bastille Day" reconciles, if only in a literary way, physical and non-physical worlds. The work of Evariste Galois allows us to depict an analogue of Milton's (and Philip Pullman's) physical world of dark materials within the purely mathematical world of finite groups. (For a less literary connection between physical and mathematical worlds, see this journal on Bastille Eve.)

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Sunday June 28, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 am

Raven Steals the Light

Raven from the home page of 'Dark Materials' author Philip Pullman

Home page of 'Dark Materials' author Philip Pullman

Thanks for a reference
to this story go to
Robert Bringhurst,
in his own way a
Cleric of the Grammaton.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Saturday June 27, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Dark Materials

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise
Thir embryon Atoms....
                                ... Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage....

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II

Friday, June 26, 2009

Friday June 26, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:48 pm

Apocatastasis Now

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE

"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (JBSSJ [Journal of the Blake Society at St James's] 6 [2001] 18–25), Susanne Sklar argues that Blake is not apocalyptic but apocatastatic, that is (following a doctrine of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) he believes that all free creatures will be redeemed by God's universal love."

— The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547

Related material:

 

Thriller

 

From the website of Philip Pullman,
president of The Blake Society:

 

"I must create a System…"

The Blake Society, 25 October 2005: St James’s Church, Piccadilly

I see that the title of this lecture is given as BLAKE'S DARK MATERIALS. Now in the lecturer's handbook, the second rule says "You need take no obsessive notice of the title that has been announced in advance." Whether Blake's materials are dark or not I couldn't really say, but I am going to talk about Blake, partly, and partly about religion. Appropriate, perhaps, in a place like this, but you might think not appropriate from someone whose reputation is that of a scoffer or mocker or critic of religion; but I haven't come here to scoff or mock. Nor have I come here to recant, as a matter of fact. I'm profoundly interested in religion, and I think it's extremely important to understand it. I've been trying to understand it all my life, and every so often it's useful to put one's thoughts in order; but I shall never like God.

Download the full lecture
(pdf format, 155.62 KB)

 

For more dark materials
from the Halloween season
of 2005 — in fact, from the
  very date of Pullman's lecture–
see Darkness Doubled.

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Wednesday January 15, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:55 pm

Conversations in Hell

Part I: Locating Hell

"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
           che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
        c'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto."

— Dante, Inferno, Canto 3, 16-18

"We have come to where I warned you
       we would find
Those wretched souls who no longer have 
The intellectual benefits of the mind."

— Dante, Hell, Canto 3, 16-18

From a Harvard student's weblog:

Heard in Mather  I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal.  I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves. 

" … one more line / unravelling from the dark design / spun by God and Cotton Mather"

— Robert Lowell

Part II: The Call of Stories

From a website on college fund-raising: 

• “The people who come to us bring their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives.”—Robert Coles, Harvard professor, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination

• “If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them.”—Mary Pellauer, quoted in Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

From a website on "The West Wing":

THE LONG GOODBYE   
9pm 2003-01-15    

"ALL NEW!

In a special episode guest written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, C.J. (Allison Janney) reluctantly returns to Dayton, Ohio, to speak at her 20th high school class reunion…"

From a website illustrating language in Catholic religious stories:

"Headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, the Sisters of the Precious Blood is a Catholic religious congregation…"

From a Catholic religious story by J. R. R. Tolkien:

"It shone now as if verily it was
 wrought of living fire.
'Precious, precious, precious!' Gollum cried.
'My Precious! O my Precious!'"

From a website on Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials: 

"'Stories are the most important thing in the world.  Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all."

From the same website, a short story:

"Philip Pullman was born in Norwich on

19th October 1946."

Part III: My Story

For a different story, see my weblog of

19th October 2002:


Saturday, October 19, 2002

 

What is Truth?

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