Colors can not only speak, they can also form a bridge between realities, in the In-Between, and in the Underground of Neverwhere, when Door opens a doorway for the Angel Islington. He expects to find a passageway to heaven, but instead is faced with “a swirling maelstrom of color and light… all vicious orange and retinal purple.” Rather than heaven, or the hell of theology, Door has opened a passageway to a Hades of modern physics, “the surface of a star, perhaps, or the event horizon of a black hole….”20 The most vivid example of colors denoting a pathway between realities is the rainbow bridge of Odd and the Frost Giants. Odd forms a prism out of ice, because when “water freezes, the rainbows are trapped in it, like fish in a shallow pool. And the sunlight sets them free.”21 Odd and his companions, Norse gods transformed into animals, plunge through the resulting puddle, vividly described not in terms of staid red, blue, and purple, but rather in the delicate hues of wine, blueberry, leaf, raspberry, and gold. The travelers are “swept up in the colors” and are carried along by them, across this rainbow bridge to Asgard.22
Colors are a natural part of our experience, but what happens when the colors are obviously wrong? When the colors are at odds with our expectations, they act as an important clue that we are passing from our normal realm of experience into another world, one that is not only foreign but (in the Gaiman universe) most probably perilous. After the goddess Bast recommends that he takes the middle path in his journey through the afterlife, Shadow notes the moon begins “pinking and going into eclipse.”23 In the same novel, the people of Kaluna travel across the Bering Land Bridge to North America in 14,000 BCE under the frightening veil of the most vivid auroral display they had ever seen, a sky that was “alive with lights, knotting and flickering and winding, flux and pulse, white and green and violet and red.”24
When Bod passes through the ghoul gate, he notices that the “sky was red, but not the warm red of a sunset. This was an angry, glowering red, the color of an infected wound.” The moons in this ghoul land are also abnormal in appearance, one “huge and pitted and white” and the other “the bluish-green color of the veins of mold in a cheese….”25Joey Harker first notices that he has passed from his universe into a parallel reality through his observation of colors being out of place. In this reality, McDonald’s golden arches are green tartan, police siren lights are green and yellow, and the usual silver and black of the standard sedan are replaced with “bright colors — all orange and leaf greens and cheerful yellows.”26
Gaiman muses in “Pages From a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky” that “the world will end in black-and-white…. Maybe as long as we have colors we can keep going.”27 But as Gaiman also notes, in our modern technological world colors are often hidden from sight, and the world is artificially presented in a binary mode, not of black and white, but black and yellow. In at least five short stories and three novels, Gaiman bemoans the effect of the ubiquitous low pressure sodium street light (LPS) on our perception of the night. For the last quarter of the twentieth century LPS was the most common form of lighting in the United Kingdom (and likewise found in many U.S. cities). Although highly efficient, because the low pressure sodium lamp only gives off yelloworange light, it robs one of the ability to distinguish colors. In “The Flints of Memory Lane,” the narrator explains that a sodium lamppost “washed out all other colors, turning everything yellow and black.”28 The LPS lamp deceives us by distorting our view of reality, especially in the night, when the power of the darkness already plays tricks on our minds. Anansi Boy’s Fat Charlie sees a brown garden spider as black in the sodium lights, and Shadow is unable to discern the color of Tessie the old roadster for the same reason.29 Human faces are also transformed by the monochromatic LPS lamp. While two teenagers find their “black lips and pale yellow faces” humorous in “Troll Bridge,”30the narrator of “The Flints of Memory Lane” —Gaiman himself — is haunted by the vision of a woman standing outside his house, remembering “the yellow-black of her smile, and a shadow of the fear that followed.”31 Likewise, the narrator of “Keepsakes and Treasures” has indelibly painted in his memory the sight of a naked woman, “a full black-nippled breast which curved disturbingly in the sodium yellow light of the street.”32 In “The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch” Gaiman twists the metaphor, using the eerie yellow sodium light as a sign of normalcy and sanity. Here the narrator and his companions are only certain that they have safely escaped from the nightmarish events of the sideshow when they reach an unoccupied room filled with souvenirs, a room illuminated by reassuring normalcy of the sodium lights from the outside world.
While it appears that Gaiman may have an unhealthy fixation with LPS lighting, as an Englishman of a certain age the effects of sodium lighting would have been part of his entire life. In Neverwhere Gaiman differentiates between the parts of the London Below that are “gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes.”33 From the 1930s through the 1950s LPS lamps were increasingly installed in the British Isles not only due to their efficiency but because their yellow light could better pierce through the ubiquitous English fog than other light beams. However, because of its monochromatic nature (and thus inability to discern color) it was more widely used on roadways than in residential areas and hence became known as the “drivers’ lamp.”34 With the energy crisis of the 1970s energy efficiency overruled aesthetics, and by the end of the 1980s LPS became the dominant form of outdoor lighting in the U.K.35 It is no wonder, then, that the sickly yellowish glare of the LPS lamp became a fixture in Gaiman’s writings. Perhaps he would be heartened to know that in recent decades there has been a movement in his country of birth to replace some of these lamps with High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lamps, which have greater ability to show realistic colors at night. The ratio of HPS to LPS in roadway lighting in the U.K. is now approximately 1:1.36 Perhaps if Gaiman had remained in England his more recent stories might feature nighttime tableaus draped in hues of salmon-pink.
Low pressure sodium lights are recommended by astronomers for the simple reason that because they only emit yellow light, their effects on telescopic views can be largely filtered out. But there are no LPS filter contact lenses available to the general public, and the cumulative effect of all outdoor lighting, whether LPS or not, continues to take its toll on our view of the night sky. The U.K. and the U.S. have been central battlegrounds in the fight against this light pollution, the wasteful upward direction of outdoor lighting which is estimated to burn up 22,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity world-wide per year.37 While the problem has accelerated in past decades, the first warning signs were clearly evident in the mid 1950s, when the British Royal Observatory was moved from Greenwich to Sussex in a vain attempt to seek dark skies. Today there are no world-class visible light astronomical telescopes in the United Kingdom, following the Isaac Newton Telescope’s relocation to the Canary Islands in 1984. Four decades ago the Milky Way was still visible from Liverpool, and three decades ago residents of Finchley, Bexleyheath, and Bristol could still view the magnificent plane of our galaxy. Sadly, this is no longer the case.38 And the problem is accelerating. The same is true in far too many locations in the U.S., as Gaiman is well aware from personal experience. As a result, both American and British citizens have mobilized to begin taking back their view of the stars, and have been mildly successful in passing legislation to protect against light pollution. Amateur and professional astronomers have likewise fought against light pollution during the last few decades, with mixed results.39
In the 1980s the 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson, housed in the mountains overlooking Los Angeles, was mothballed for six years due to the deteriorated sky conditions. One might think it absurd to build a telescope in such a light polluted location, but the observatory was built at that local because of its stable air (and hence stable images as seen through the telescope) in 1904, long before light pollution was even a possi
bility, let alone a reality. Gaiman brings attention to the plight of L.A. stargazers in “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” where the narrator laments that he
wanted to see the stars, but the lights of the city were too bright, the air too dirty. The sky was a dirty, starless yellow, and I thought of all the constellations I could see from the English countryside, and I felt, for the first time, deeply, stupidly homesick. I missed the stars.40
It is certainly not a stretch to call this passage autobiographical in nature. Without a doubt, the skies of L.A. are a foreign landscape when compared with the English countryside (or that of Gaiman’s reported Upper Midwest American homestead), and there is no doubt that the author loves the stars. These primeval lights of the heavens—and their commonly recognized shapes—turn up as welcome reoccurring characters in the constellation of Gaiman’s works. In American Gods Zorya Polunochnaya points out the Big Dipper to Shadow, and explains the celestial myths of her people (including her place in the myths). Miss Lupescu teaches Bod the constellations in The Graveyard Book, including Orion and Taurus, and in Stardust Tristran and Victoria also view Orion, and the Orionid meteor shower that radiates from it each October. Gaiman also invents his own celestial myth (an interstellar creation myth) in the short vignette “The Star.” Here extraterrestrial vampires create a tradition of pointing out the constellation Draco the Dragon to the next generation, explaining that “We come from there. One day we shall return.”41 The younger ones brush off the stories as merely that, until homesickness awakens in their hearts, and they are drawn to live in the Northern Hemisphere where this circumpolar constellation is visible (and from most locales, visible all night long).
Yes, as Gaiman well understands, the stars draw us to them, as they ever have since the dawn of our species. Today we have the technology to reach outward to them, through our telescopes, both earth-bound and earth-orbiting, and humanity has taken its first tentative steps out of its earthly cradle towards the stars from which our very atoms originated. The very title of the novel in which Tristran and Victoria appear reminds us of our unique relationship with the stars. As Carl Sagan often said, “We are star stuff ” —we are stardust come alive and self-aware, and within the past hundred years cognizant of the depth of that special relationship which our ancient ancestors felt with the universe above their heads. Like astronomers, Gaiman understands the power of viewing the stars, and both he and his characters express a longing for, and appreciation of, the simple yet powerful view of the celestial host. Unfortunately, due to light pollution, this human birthright is increasingly relegated to history, memory, and fiction. In “It’s Only the End of the World Again” the narrator is awed by the view of the stars as seen from the seashore as compared to that of the city, describing them as “sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the sky.”42When Bod stands at the boundary of the ghoul gate in the space between his world and that below, he sees the Milky Way above his head “as he had never seen it before, a glimmering shroud across the arch of the sky.”43Likewise Joey Harker sees more stars than he “had even imagined existed” when traveling in the Static or Nowhere-at-All (the boundary of the In-Between).44
The village of Wall also stands at a boundary between worlds, and the stars are similarly a sight to behold. The narrator of Stardustreminds us of several differences between our modern world and that of Tristran’s time, including the important fact that
Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then – our cities and towns cast too much light into the world – but, for the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in the forest or the leaves on a tree.45
Indeed, it is ironic that in our light-polluted times the only “stars” that most people are likely to see are brilliant fireballs that rival the magnitude of the planet Venus (the “Evening star”). These brightest of meteors (or falling/ shooting stars in the common vernacular) are burning bits of stardust that were once assembled into the form of a comet. Once shed from that dirty snowball in its race sunward in its orbit, these primeval dust bunnies float through interplanetary space until our home planet plows into them and the heat produced by friction with our atmosphere destroys them in a blaze of glory. It is no wonder that the ancients had varied and beautiful mythologies surrounding these temporary celestial visitors. Gaiman’s tale of a star fallen to earth in the form of a beautiful woman is a modern echo of these myths. The stars are also destined to fall in the Norse myth of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, as referenced in American Gods. As Shadow wonders at the unworldly brightness and vividness of the stars as seen from “behind the scenes,” Buffalo Man explains that the stars will soon fall, heralding the transition of gods to heroes in this modern world. “This is a poor place for gods,” he reminds Shadow.46
It is a poor place for gods, and perhaps a poorer place for stars. Just as modern society creates new gods in American Gods, so too do we create new stars, ironically out of the very streetlights that have obscured our view of the sky. In the novel the lights of L.A. are described as “a twinkling electrical map of an imaginary kingdom, the heavens laid out right here on earth.”47 In Neverwhere “a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars” is seen at the same time as streetlights and building lights “which looked like earthbound stars,” the entire scene reminding Richard of a “fairyland.”48 But the most deliberate attempt to replace the stars with their modern simulacrum appears in “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories.” The very same narrator who bemoans the lack of stars in the sky in the beginning of the story is lead by June Lincoln to see in the valley of Hollywood “constellations in the streetlights and the cars.”49 But it is only a trick of the mind, wishful thinking on our part. Less than falling stars, the streetlights are fallen stars, perhaps in multiple senses of the term.
Streetlights trick us, obstruct our view of the heavens, and show us false colors; mirrors also trick us, while pretending to be a simple reflection of reality. Sometimes the trick brings us hope or happiness, as in the case of Odd. When drinking from a spring he sees a vision of his father playing with him and his mother, as well as other memorable moments such as how his parents met. Some visions seen in a mirror are startling and unnerving for a time, before we regain our bearings. InterWorld’s Joey Harker is surprised to see his own features distortedly reflected back at him in the mirror-like mask of his parallel world self, and MirrorMask’s Helena is initially shocked to find that a looking glass in the bedroom of the Dark World’s princess has eyeholes cut into it. But the realization that the Dark Queen uses it to watch over her daughter pleased her: “It made me feel loved.”50 Gaiman explains in his introduction to Smoke and Mirrors that mirrors “appear to tell the truth…. But set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air.” Mirrors, he further explains, can “show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.”51 Mirrors, therefore, have a sinister character, as discovered by numerous other literary and cinematic characters. Alice travels Through the Looking Glass and enters a world fraught with peril. Galadriel’s mirror in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring is also an unreliable reflector of reality. In The Matrix, the metaphor of the mirror as an unreliable reflector of reality appears throughout the film.52 Perhaps the most visually vivid is the scene in which Neo is literally consumed by the mirror as he passes from the fantasy world of the Matrix into the real post-apocalyptic world. A less widely known example can be found in the John Carpenter film The Prince of Darkness (1987), in which physics students, their professor, and a priest do battle with Satan and his father, who has been trapped (via the combined efforts of science and religion) on the other side of a mirror (in a parallel universe). At the end of the film, a female student sacrifices herself to save the world when she throws herself and a fellow student whose body had been co-opted by Satan into the mirror in a vain attempt to permanently trap the evil within the mirror universe.
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br /> In Gaiman’s world, various characters use mirrors and the worlds within/beyond them for their nefarious purposes. The Other Mother of Coraline traps the young girl’s parents within the hallway mirror, while Coraline and the ethereal remains of other children she has likewise kidnapped over the centuries find themselves trapped in a dark space behind a mirror. In The Graveyard BookHaroun, an Ifrit (djinn), is trapped in an array of mirrors and burned in its light. The three witches, the Lilim, of Stardust, appear to exist in both the world behind the Wall as well as within the world of their mirror simultaneously. However, their mirrorselves appear significantly younger than their “real world” selves, and one of the younger versions leaves the mirror world in order to hunt for the fallen star (and hence regain years of youth for herself and her sisters). The Dark Princess of MirrorMask uses the device of the novella’s title to trade universes with Helena, and Helena must find the illusive mask in order to return to her original life. She finds it hiding in plain sight, and as she presses her face into the looking glass the Mirrormask forms on her face. Helena’s description of the experience demonstrates the power of mirrors to seduce us, confuse us, and sometimes give us an inflated sense of self:
It was like being in the eye of the hurricane: the world swirled and shook around me, but I was fine….. For a moment I couldn’t remember which one I was. It’s a lot like being some kind of god, when you wear the Mirrormask. Or it’s like writing a book. You can fix things, or you can sort of do something in your head and let them fix themselves. It’s not hard. With the Mirrormask on, I could see everything.53
A normal mirror allows one to fix one’s hair or make-up; the Mirrormask allows one to fix entire worlds. Like a mirror itself, the word fixhas subtleties. For example, the Dark Princess certainly thought she was “fixing” things (from her perspective) when she stole Helena’s life. Mirrors not only have the power to reflect and distort light, but our perceptions and beliefs in the process.
The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman Page 26