Posted on: August 28, 2008
Ancient of Days, by William Blake. 1794
After John Milton and his Paradise Lost, the second guiding spirit for much of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is William Blake. Its radical, subversive nature, its speaking truth to power, its combination of ancient wisdom and modern rebellion, are prefigured in the life and work of the great poet, painter and mystic. When we meet the Ancient of Days in the last novel of the series, Blake’s vision comes before us, though Pullman adds a few twists and surprises. We learn prior to his appearance that the Old Man, or the Authority, may not be the Creator. Gnosticism comes into play in the view that the god of organized religion is not the creator god, but a usurper, a demiurge, which follows yet another ancient pattern of divinities overthrowing divinities and rewriting history. Rather, their devotees rewrite history by…
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Posted on: August 26, 2008
We have a new essay by Robert Mueller below, about my dear aunt, Barbara Guest. He knows her work well, and offers a unique perspective. Barbara Guest deserves a much wider audience, and with the expected release of her collected poems in September, I have faith that that will happen. A new generation of readers should follow.
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Finished Philip Pullman’s wonderful trilogy, His Dark Materials, and will write about the last two books this week. I will say up front that the last two books in the series provide fabulous material for more movies. No amount of pressure from church groups should prevent that. It would be a shame if it did. The philosophies involved, the overall and underlying spiritual messages, are positive. Very positive and life-affirming. And any attempt to snuff those films out would really only help confirm the fictional picture of dominant…
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Posted on: August 25, 2008
The Silent Confucius, The Confetti Trees, Hollywood, Who
Else but Barbara Guest
by Robert Mueller
Barbara Guest’s books are wonderful because of how they come to us with their bountiful co-valencies and layering. The Confetti Trees, a series of short-short stories or quasi-filmmaking anecdotes that qualify as prose poems (Sun & Moon, 1999), has this implicating character, so that when it takes its measure in the rich play of glitter and artifice that are Hollywood, one of its expounding layers is a blending cosmic plot. Guest’s stories, deft and trothfilled-wacky in their fabulous causes, propose circumstances that concern none other than the coming to America of Confucianism. By way of making and divining not only events on the set but their twice-felt reflections, they are the outpouring of sublime Tao (taking the concept “universal law” to be the application thereof), and thus the cream of informed understanding of…
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