Back to the Future

I keep thinking I've made entries on here, when in reality I've just made notes to myself in margins and notebooks. I apologize for greedily and secretly carrying on without you--but here I am! I write tonight on Chapter II: The Maniac.

By way of introduction, allow me to lament the abandonment of abstract thought.

It seems the less folks are agreeing to grow up, the less they are able to venture outside themselves into the realm of the abstract. Which, if you are a psychology nerd like myself, you will see as being a curious psychosocial phenomenon. Which, if you have no idea what I just said, I will explain like this:

When you are a child, you think in concrete terms. Things are literal and personally biased and you can't really be empathetic or see things from my point of view or think deeply about hidden meanings or consider the vast planes of the universe so well. Then (so I hear it once went) you begin to grow up, and you become able to think in abstract terms. Things are not so black and white and you realize you are not the Great Owner of the Right Answer and you are able to "walk a mile in my shoes" and consider how I might hear what you are saying and pull great Truths out of simple stories and venture off to explore invisible or unreachable places, and hey, maybe even create things instead of just consuming them.

The great debate of this chapter brings us into a discussion about which character is the maniac: the one who "owns" the answers, or the one who admits his inability to.

"Let us begin then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey." (p.18) (<-- here I compensate for the aforementioned scholastic deficiency by including proper referencing. siiiick...)

Chesterton begins with a delightfully dark reiteration of a conversation in which a colleague proclaimed the foreseeable success of a man on the grounds of his "believing in himself." Chesterton suddenly saw the absurdity of the popular cultural doctrine when he simultaneously noticed a sign for an asylum. "I said to him, 'Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.'" (p.18)

To tie down what may look like a flapping tether here, we are laying some groundwork regarding the Source of Truth. Steeped in the age of reason (the book was published in 1908), Chesterton goes on to argue against man's assumed ability to intellectually contain/own/explain/ultimately answer his own (and the universe's) existence. In a time when scientists and "materialists" and intellectuals were getting their egos in a twist over usurping God and such "primitive" things, he sounded a warning about attempting to become your own personal Ultimate Source. (Hmm..now doesn't this all sound kind of familiar?)(If not, please refer to the first 4 pages of a bible.)

So anyways, at this point I think Mister C. and I would agree that you can't make God into math, and that if you are at all aiming to become a more developmentally advanced version of a human being, it's probably more productive if you just skip that whole part where you try to one-up him, because that was the very first mistake ever made and they put it in a book for us to remember, much like the thoughtful folks who wrote down lists and pictures of poisonous things so we wouldn't each have to find out on our own.

And here we get to one of my favorite parts so far: Where we touch on the last blog I posted (which I thought was a pleasant coincidence), and where we explore The Overall Cripplingly Juvenile Desire to Put Things in Boxes and Call Them What We Think They Are vs. The Perhaps-More-Mature (Or At Least Better Informed) Relinquishing of Intellectual Ownership for the Sake of Sanity. (What's this?! A paradox!? Mais ouis! Abandon reason--gain sanity! Ah, to be human...)

(Here is where I dread that nobody reading this will have any idea what I'm saying anymore. This is why I reluctantly write for the public--because when I'm saying what I really want to say, I fear I am the only one able to understand my strange dialect! Aaahh...save me!)(If this is really the case, and I have entirely lost you and am just seeming narcissistic and painful, please do leave a comment to tell me, and I will cease and desist. This can all just as easily be politely kept to myself! Which I often think would probably be best for us all!) Anyways, as you can't answer now, on to the good stuff! ;)

"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite...The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in...only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." (p.22) Ah, I absolutely love this image! Because I know that horrifying ache (see: pleasantly coincidental previous entry), and because I also know the wonderful freedom of ownership's abandon (see: things that kind of look like poems but are mostly just garbled 4am nonsense). There is nothing quite so comfortable and safe feeling as creating something unnamable out of ideas and words that aren't quite your own, to express nothing in particular to no one at all.

I met a man outside a bar on East Hastings once, who was sincerely intent on showing me just how horribly smart he was by vehemently refuting and decimating every possible argument for the hope of God there ever was. I'm pretty sure I hadn't even said anything about God to him, and possibly hadn't even said anything at all to him. And I certainly wasn't looking to argue with anyone. But there he stood, arguing away like he could go on forever. For all I know he's still standing there and has said everything possible against it and has had to resort to just saying "nothing nothing nothing" over and over again to stress his ultimate point. (Literally, on two levels: he aimed, I assume, by such thorough deconstruction, to arrive at "nothing"...and the product of such a dedicated and finite analysis would quite simply be: nothing.) I feel sorry for the poor guy, 'cause while he's been working tirelessly away at the nothing, I've had the delicious luxury of imagining all kinds of something.

"And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners." (p.22) The redundancy and unoriginality of undoing everything is especially tragic to me. To be in this world and to say "today I shall undo this place" is the equivalent of arriving on the heels of a hurricane in a bulldozer.

I think I've come to the point where I've lost myself at last here. (If you've had a conversation with me, this would be where I stare off to the side and say "umm..." and we both realize we're not sure quite why I started the tangent that has now led us around too many corners from the initial thought for any hope of return.) Perhaps this is fitting, considering the subject at hand? hahah. I do immensely appreciate when a medium embodies its message, so I can appreciate the irony ;) I hope you can too! In any case, I've a bit more to say about these topics, and I'll try to make a cohesive conclusion after I've been away a day and come back to collect my thoughts.

And if you are beginning to regret visiting this space, feel free to abandon ship--there are only 7 more chapters. (Though the second-next one is going to be about fairy tales, which I would strongly recommend checking back in for--mm, fun!) And after Orthodoxy, I am thinking about carrying on to another book I have recently read and very much enjoyed, called The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity-Lite, written by one of my faaaavorites, Mister Dick Staub. So if you want to hear me go off about the horrors of modern cultural mediocrity and the even more horrifying horrors of the "Christian versions" of such sad things (oh, and the hope and inspiring challenge to create change--there's that?), tune back in to Professor Shaina's upcoming course: "I'm Gonna Country Woman This Place Up." (Which will make sense, should I remember to explain it in that section.)

Alright! See you soon--I promise!