The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman – his dark precursor to the work on the imagination
You won't understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.
– p. 163
You won't understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.
Yes, the secret commonwealth . . . You don't hear much talk about that these days. When I was young there wasn't a single bush, not a single flower nor a stone, that didn't have it's own proper spirit. You had to have a mind to your manners around them, to ask for pardon, or for permission, or give thanks . . . Just to acknowledge that they were there, them spirits, and they had their proper rights to recognition and courtesy.
– pp. 286 – 287
Out there on land you'll meet all kinds of different opinions. Some people will hear talk about the secret commonwealth and take it literally, and think you do too, and that you're stupid. Others just scoff, as if they already know it's a lot of moonshine. Both stupid. Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.
What's the best way of thinking about the secret commonwealth then, Master Brabandt?
You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out of the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind.
think about it out the corner of your mind
It's there and it en't, both at the same time. If you want to see them jacky lanterns, the absolute worst way is to go out on the marsh with a searchlight. You take a bloody great light, and all the will o' the wykeses and the little sparkers, they'd stay right under water. And if you want to think about them it don't do no good making lists and classifying and analysing. You'll just get a lot o' dead rubbish what means nothing. The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories'll do.
– pp. 312 – 313
I can't think of a better book to be reading, now to have read, over the time that I have been thinking about the power of the imagination. (see molecular communism) Secret commonwealth could be another name for the exploration of the virtual form to produce images that is imagination. I am writing about Minus Theatre's first workshop at present, and an image from Loren Eiseley which I take to be the form of the virtual closely resembles what Pullman here depicts as wykeses and little sparkers.
You think about it out the corner of your mind. And, as a lot of posts have been here, it's all about perception. (see for example On AI: part I by Simon Taylor; part II a self-portrait by Chat GPT 4o as well as the resources on which it draws at the bottom of that post) This morning another line of Eiseley's caught my attention. He is planning his escape, between two golden wheels, but—a child—with no thought as to how to provide for the future.
The future provides for itself. How it provides for itself is not by shining a great light onto either the present or the past; or through their classification and analysis. It provides for itself—the virtual forms which spark and flare—in and from the secret commonwealth. These are the productions of imagination.
And imagination itself is what every flower and stone has, as its reflection in time, to which perception in any one of its infinite attributes gives a virtual form.
