pertaining to cloud castles

You will grow tired of continual Chesterton here, but I have not grown tired of him.  Last night I wrote another honors response to him – this time to his book The Everlasting Man.  It was some of the most satisfying writing I’ve done in a long time.  So here it is for you.  Any uncited quotations are from The Everlasting Man: 

            “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds” writes Chesterton.  He delights me with the sentence, and immediately my turrets and arches sweep up in soft, rosy swirls.  I have pointed Gothic windows with colored glass and little square windows with their crooked panes thrown open to give a sea breeze freedom with the white curtains.  I have a wide front staircase down which I may sweep in dress with a silver train, and a crooked little wooden back staircase up which I can run in my dusty bare feet. 

But though there are no architectural rules for cloud castles, there is one rule which may not be ignored.  I may build everything to perfection, but I may not live there.  The floors will not hold.  No, always I must descend into Pimlico — “A desperate thing,” Chesterton said, in Orthodoxy.  It is a wretched suburb of London, evidently, but I use it here as the world – which must be loved in spite of itself.  Loved in spite of flat roofs, dirty little windows with aluminum mini-blinds, and no stairs to speak of. 

            Chesterton, however, said a great many other things.  He said, for instance, “that one branch of the beautiful is the ugly.”  This theme comes up again and again.  Chesterton took it in one direction; I shall take it somewhere else, but I think we will not disagree.   Just as a hero must be eatable to make his not-being-eaten worth telling, so must there be ugliness to make beauty apparent.  There must be sorrow for there to be joy.

            My castle in the clouds is a place without goodbyes.  Pimlico, I find, is rather full of goodbyes lately.  Goodbyes to people, to ways of life, to plans and stability.  The I who will graduate from college in May is not the I I had imagined would be graduating; she is not doing what that imagined I was to have done.

            But, somehow, goodbye is the essence of what life on earth – in Pimlico – is.  It is no accident that the dreams of the pagans “tend to continually hover,” as Chesterton said, “over certain passionate themes of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death or a death that is the beginning of life.”  The pagans are not the only ones who dream thus.

            We spoke in colloquium of Chesterton’s passage on Job, but I shall speak of it again.  For certain bitter moments of crying out “I do not understand” have become beautiful, again and again, as the answer comes, “You do not understand.”  “And under that rebuke,” as Chesterton said, “is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.” 

I fall, again and again, from my cloud castle to sit with Job in the dust of Pimlico crying out, “I know that Thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can be thwarted” (Job 42:2).  And there comes back this other answer, beautiful and somehow bitter, “What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter” (John 13:7).  And if I am crying, it is with tears only of relenting, with the question: Why cannot hereafter be now?

not being sick

“There again,” said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being in revolt?  You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick.  Being sick is a revolt.  Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical.  Revolt in the abstract is — revolting.  It’s mere vomiting …
“It is things going right,” he cried, “that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.   Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars — the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”  -G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

There are some things which one does not readily believe upon first reading, but yesterday upon the couch, miserably nibbling at bland crackers and taking tiny sips of Sprite, I was in perfect harmony with the above sentiments.   Today, then, is a very poetical day.

again

“It sounded like a welcome already overshadowed with the coming farewell.  As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note.  Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows.  Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.  Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide doors she may not enter.  Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.” -George MacDonald, Fantastes

reading

“Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality? — not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?  Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trambling, unresting sail below, is fairer still.  Yea, the reflecting ocean itself reflected in the mirror, has a wondrousness about its waters that somewhat vanishes when I turn towards itself.   All mirrors are magic mirrors.  The commenest room is room in a poem when I turn to the glass … Even the memories of past pain  are beautiful; and past past delights, though beheld only through clefts in the grey clouds of sorrow, are lovely as Fairy Land.”
-George MacDonald, Fantastes

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
-refrain of “The Stolen Child,” William Butler Yeats

Yeats writes of escaping, again and again, and of sorrow, of things lost, of things weary, of things dead.   I read it, weary, and am glad. 

It seems that most of my favorite poetry partakes of this weariness to some degree.  It need not be gloomy always, but it must understand that there is such a thing as gloom.  If there were not, the idea of escape would make no sense.  

It might sound rather nice to go into the waters and the wild hand in hand with a faery, but it is rather a strange thing without the reason that the world is full of weeping.  

And I do not think it would be very appealing to talk of escaping the weeping world unless escape were actually possible.   No, I do not think I can run away holding hands with a faery.  

But I do have a promise of an end of tears.  That is very good.