Growing up in an Extraordinary World: My essay for English 304

Growing up in an Extraordinary World
Puberty happens during a person’s transformation from childhood to adulthood. This transformation is possible through the increasing function of the brain which affects the growth of the body. Puberty occurs in many stages, and at different times for each individual. Lewis Carroll and Phillip Pullman’s female heroes Lyra and Alice have to deal with the unfamiliar and often uncomfortable process of puberty. Both girls do so with more freewill than the average adolescent. Both characters are ultimately forced to ponder their identity and self while confronting the changing world around them in extraordinary circumstances.
Both Carroll and Pullman show the difficulties of growing up but add a new dimension by showing a surreal world which is only possible in fantasy. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Carroll depicts a strange world of wonder that Alice enters and travels through during her journey from childhood to adulthood; from innocence to experience. Everything is very curious to Alice. She goes through her wonderland meeting many interesting creatures without questioning their origin or their means of existence. In Pullman’s Dark Materials he presents Lyra, who begins as an innocent girl who is protected by scholars at Jordon College in Oxford. However, Lyra quickly realizes the complexities of the world around her, and goes through adolescence unlike other girls her age.
Alice is portrayed by Carroll as a logical, dauntless, and curious girl who refuses to read a book without pictures. Although her adventures happen in a dream, Alice’s vivid imagination is what spurs her outrageous thoughts in her unconscious state. Throughout her adventures, Alice fails to leave a stone unturned. She is in a constant hunt for strange company; anything to keep her curious mind sharp and satisfied. Alice does not segregate or judge, but simply accepts anyone or anything that comes across her path. She never knows in which direction to go, which thrusts her into a constant whirlwind of ambiguity. We find Alice’s unstable idea of herself quite evident when she finds the Caterpillar’s question of her identity difficult to answer; after continually growing smaller and taller due to her pill consumption.
To contend with Alice, Lyra Belacqua is portrayed as a wiry, ruthless, and fearless girl that has been raised as an orphan at Jordan College. She does not let her orphan-status affect her happiness. She spends hours running around the neighborhood playing with children of a lower class without the slightest disdain. One day she eavesdrop on a complex conversation involving dust that soon affects those living around her, and has no choice but to act. She is sent into a whirlwind of events that she must participate in, in order to survive. Lyra goes through many trials and seems to manage every difficult situation she receives triumphantly.
One trait Lyra and Alice share is their ability to put complete trust in the people or beings they come in contact with. As both stories progress and the girls go through more experiences however, they learn to be more cautious of the company they keep. Lyra happily goes to live with Marisa Coulter, who turns out to be a conniving woman who wants power at any cost. Lyra takes this experience, learns from her trusting ignorance, and goes on to meet many noble creatures along her journey that help her succeed. Alice uses sincerity with the Queens she meets, but soon realizes that some Queens are cruel, and being polite will not get her anywhere in the wonderland of her dreams. She becomes aware of her blind trust and goes on to conform, ultimately becoming a Queen by playing by the rules of the adult world.
Ultimately, what sets Lyra apart from Alice is her amazing ability to manipulate the adults around her. Initially, the adult figures in Lyra's life do not give her any credit as she begins her journey to the North. Alice avoids the Queen of Hearts chopping off her head, but that is the extent of her control of the adults in her world. As Pullman’s Dark Materials develops, the adults that come in contact with Lyra grow to protect her, fight alongside her, and ultimately respect her. Lyra is slow in understanding the reason for her tasks that continually put her life in danger. Eventually Lyra becomes successful in using the tools and company she has been given to her benefit as well as theirs. Lyra reappoints the polar bear king to his throne and shows her cruel mother how to love. She gives Mary Malone the strength to stand up for herself and make new scientific discoveries and frees millions of ghosts from the Land of the Dead.
One experience that stands out in Pullman’s Dark Materials is love. Although Alice loves her cat Dinah and Lyra loves her daemon Pantalaimon, Lyra falls in love with a boy named William Parry. Throughout the story Lyra continually builds a bond with Will. Their relationship begins in strictly work-related terms; to save the world. Lyra is loud and ruthless while Will is quiet and strong. Lyra and Will build a trust and are willing to risk their lives for one another. After the heroes have completed their faithful mission together they recognize and embrace their love for one another openly and relentlessly. A few days after their indescribable discovery they are forced to part. Lyra has to make the ultimate sacrifice which is losing her first love in order to preserve safely in the world for the rest of time.
Lyra and Alice deal with the unfamiliar and uncomfortable process of puberty under extraordinary circumstances. In the end of Alice’s story she becomes a Queen while Lyra saves the world. Both girls realize that they have accomplished quite a bit in their childhood. Whether the events happen in reality or in dreams, both girls must cope with the next stage in their lives that is adulthood. Lyra and Alice go through many stages in their detailed journeys and learn a lot about themselves. Their adventures turn Lyra and Alice into young women who apprehensively have new experiences to look forward to, while looking back on their fond memories of the childhood that all adults are forced to leave behind.

Father Gomez and The Ancient Mariner

Throughout His Dark Materials there is quite evidently an environmental undertone. The subtle knife had been used carelessly, opening many windows which caused dusk to leak out of some worlds in to others, thus destroying the balance of nature. In The Amber Spyglass Father Gomez is on the hunt for Lyra Belacqua. He enters the world of the mulefa and discovers huge white birds. He takes out his shotgun and shoots one of the birds without thinking twice. This action reminds me of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when a boat sailing the high seas is cursed after a mariner shoots an innocent albatross who has been following the boat for a number of days without reason. I have provided an excerpt of the long poem which shows the seen of senseless murder, and ultimately, man's unwarranted abuse of nature.

"And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen :
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around :
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound !

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came ;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit ;
The helmsman steered us through !

And a good south wind sprung up behind ;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo !

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine ;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'

`God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--
Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.

PART II

The Sun now rose upon the right :
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo !

And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe :
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch ! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow !

Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist :
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free ;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be ;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea !
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

After this excerpt the the Albatross begins to be avenged through a number of events that that makes the Mariner realize his woes but in vain, because his actions have already been done and there is no turning back.

Interpretations of Dark Materials characters

After looking at a number of images of different characters from Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials, I came across quite an ecclectic mix. From characters in the movie, to a fan's illustration of Lyra, to two fans that decided to impersonate the characters themselves, enjoy!

Nicole Kidman plays Marisa Coulter in The Golden Compass movie. She is a stunning woman and I believe she is a good person for the role.

In The Golden Compass, the movie, Daniel Craig plays the role of Lord Asriel. Craig is well known in his roles in the recent James Bond movies.


A Sketch of Lyra that I partiularly enjoy:


LORD ASRIEL, LYRA, and PAN:

My Daemon, a butterfly

According to Quizilla.com my Daemon would be a: BUTTERFLY - Your daemon may be a butterfly. It is ironic that the butterfly traditionally represents the psyche, yet it is one of the least emotive physical forms that your daemon can take. It is very hard to tell what a butterfly is feeling, and perhaps that is why you feel so comfortable with this form. You have many, many friends and a beautiful soul, but you don't like to reveal what your innermost feelings are. You aren't afraid to be yourself - you are vibrant and colourful. But at the same time, you don't like to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Asriels proclamation

"Few as we are," he went on, "and short-lived as we are, and weak-sighted as we are-in comparison with them, we're still stronger. They envy us, Ogunwe! That's what fuels their hatred, I'm sure of it. They long to have our precious bodies, so solid and powerful, so well-adapted to the good earth! And if we drive at them with force and determination, we can sweep aside those infinite numbers as you can sweep your hand thorugh mist. They have no more power that that!" -Asriel, (The Amber Spyglass 823)

Lord Asriel has been fighting to protect dust from the Authority and his Regent, Metatron thorughout "His Dark Materials." I found this quote to stand out because Asriel knows what it means to be human and how the amount of power one possesses is not what should be respected and cherished. What is most important and sought-after but being alive and enjoying life on earth. After Asriel's praise of life and being human, he realizes that Lyra must have a chance to experience life like he has, and becomes a martyr so save the human race.

ignorance is bliss

"Lyra wandered away on her own, and went to the reedy bank to sit and throw mud into the water. She knew one thing: she was not pleased or proud to be able to read the alethiometer-she was afraid" (109). Lyra, being a small child has no idea what power she possesses or what is in store for her. It is no accident that she was given the alethiometer by the processor at Oxford. As she continues with the childish act of throwing mud she begins thinking about ideas and technology way beyond her once-childish mind. Like all humans, Lyra is beginning to realize that growing up is inevitable. William Blake's innocence experience is something that comes to mind when I read these lines. With the alethiometer Lyra begins to question authority with more confidence. Soon she realizes that size doesn't neccesarily constitute power. Although she is a growing girl, Lyra still has quite an influence on many people around her. She is successful in leading the Gyptians North, and greatly responsible for Iorek's reign as polar bear king. Although her friend is lost, Lyra realizes that in life mistakes will be made, LARGE and small. She must take the death of her friend in her memories and live her life with that painful mistake made forever. Although she lost one friend, she saved tons of other children, and is one step closer to finding out what her father, Lord Asriel is up to. Nobdody can figure it out-not even the witches! Something tells me Lyra will overcome her ignorance of her father's intentions, and might just be there in case his intentions are anything but good.

The Auroras of Autumn

The Auroras of Autumn
Wallace Stevens

I

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beaneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
Ans the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,
Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances
And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base
These lights may finally attain a pole
In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze
Of body and air and forms and images,
Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his position: that we should disbelieve
Even that. His meditations in the ferns,
When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,
Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,
The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

II

Farewell to an idea...A cabin stands,
Deserted, on a beach. It is white,
As by a custom or according to

An ancestral theme or as a consequence
Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall
Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white
That was different, something else, last year
Of before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud
Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.
The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

Here, being visible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist is an excercise...

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.

III

Farewell to an idea...The mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together. Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night. Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.

IV

Farewell to an idea...The cancellings,
The negations are never final. The father sits
In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,

As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.
He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes
To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

He measures the velocities of change.
He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly
Than the bad angels leap from heave to hell in flames.

But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.
He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them
From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye
And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,
At evening, things that attend it until it hears

The supernatural preludes of its own,
At the moment when the angelic eye defines
Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

Master O master seated by the fire
And yet in space and motionless and yet
Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown.
Look at this present throne. What company,
In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

V

The mother invites humanity to her house
And table. The father fetches tellers of tales
And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

The father fetches negresses to dance,
Among the children, like curious ripenessess
Of pattern in the dance's ripening.

For these the musicians make insidious tones,
Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.
The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

The father fetches pageants out of air,
Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods
And curtains like a naive pretense of sleep.

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.
The father fetches his unherded herds,
Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.
This then is Chatillon or as you please.
We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? These is no play.
Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

VI

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire's delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.
The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

The theatre is filled with flying birds,
Wilde wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed
And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico. A capitol,
It may be, is emerging of has just
Collapsed. The denouement has to be postposed...

This is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

VII

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned
As grim as it is benevolent, the just
And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead.
Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,
Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

In the highest night? And do these heavens adorn
And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted
By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,
Except as needed by way of majesty,
In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,
Extinguishing our planets, one by one,
Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought,
A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,
Except for the crown and mystical cabala.

But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.
It must change from destiny to slight caprice.
And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele

VIII

There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place. Or if there is no time,
If it is not a thing of time, not of place,

Existing in the idea of it, alone,
In the sense against calamity, it is not
Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

There is or may be a time of innocence
As pure principle. Its nature is its end,
That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,
Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,
Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

It is like a thing of ether that exists
Almost as predicate. But it exists,
It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.

So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and no false sign

Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,
Lie down like children in this holiness,
As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark
Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,
Created the time and place in which we breathed...

IX

And of each other thought-in the idiom
Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,
Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long
And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,
For whom the outlandish was another day

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike
And that made brothers of us in a home
In which we fed on being brothers, fed

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.
This drama that we live-We lay sticky with sleep.
This sense of the activity of fate-

The rendezvous, when she came alone,
By her coming became a freedom of the two,
As isolation which only the two could share.

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?
Of what disaster in this the imminence:
Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment.

It may come tommorow in the simplest word,
Almost as part of innocence, almost,
Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

X

An unhappy people in a happy world-
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world-

Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world-
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
A happy people in a happy world-
Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

Turn back to where we were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world.
Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

Read to the congregation, for today
And for tommorow, this extremity,
This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,
The vital, the never-failing genius,
Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,
The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.