The Bridge and the Beloved

From Dr. Thursday:

Much as Jesus called attention to a piece of recent news ("How about those 18 killed by the falling tower in Siloe?" Lk 13:4) and GKC to the June 30 flooding in London including his then hometown of Battersea (ILN July 21 1906 CW27:238) our faithful bloggmistress called our attention to the recent disaster in the Twin Cities, so near to the home of our intrepid and daring friend Sunday - er - I mean the president of the ACS.

In a strange coincidence I happened to just finish re-reading the awesome Builders of the Bridge, D. B. Steinman's biography of John Roebling and his son Washington, who together with Washington's wife Emily are the three great ones whose dedication gave us the Brooklyn Bridge - considered the engineering marvel of the 19th century. These three were great engineers, amazing people, hard workers, heroic exemplars of America.

I wish I had time to review that book, or another text, also awesome - The Great Bridge by David McCullough - but as fascinating as these books and the Brooklyn Bridge are, this posting is about Chesterton, and I will try to keep on topic for once. (Yeah, right.) But perhaps as we pray for those who died or were injured in Minnesota, and discuss the important issues of civil Engineering brought to the fore by this recent event, we might ponder bridges in a somewhat larger - and Chestertonian - approach, for GKC tells us: "It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning." [GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:43]
Click here to you wish to study the theory of bridges.
Near the end of 1907, GKC wrote about the death of a great English poet, Francis Thompson, who wrote one of the most mystical and entrancing poems I know - "New Year's Chimes". GKC's entire essay is a wonderful introduction, but I shall just give you the one relevant paragraph:

In one of his poems, he [Thompson] says that abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by "Pontifical death." There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing - these ideas, and twenty more, are all actually concentrated in the word "pontifical." In Francis Thompson's poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness; and he was a great poet.
[GKC, ILN Dec 14 1907 CW27:603-4]

Where does the "beloved" come in? It is a very touching story, and one quite thoroughly in keeping with both the poetic and engineering aspects of bridges. Except for the hint in the paragraph I am about to quote, you will not find it in Chesterton's own work - but Maisie Ward tells us that "Gilbert stood on a little bridge in St. James's Park. It seemed to him in that hour to be the bridge of his first memory, across which a fairy prince was passing to rescue a princess. On this bridge he asked Frances to marry him, and she said yes." [Return To Chesterton 27-8] Indeed! But let us hear Uncle Gilbert tell us of that moment:

It was fortunate, however, that our [his and Frances'] next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun. She has often affirmed, during our later acquaintance, that if the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might have been quite different. It happened in St. James's Park; where they keep the ducks and the little bridge, which has been mentioned in no less authoritative a work than Mr. Belloc's Essay on Bridges, since I find myself quoting that author once more. I think he deals in some detail, in his best topographical manner, with various historic sites on the Continent; but later relapses into a larger manner, somewhat thus: "The time has now come to talk at large about Bridges. The longest bridge in the world is the Forth Bridge, and the shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village of Loudwater. The bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St. James's Park." I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved safety; and perhaps I was affected by my early romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess's tower. But I can assure my friend the author that the bridge in St. James's Park can frighten you a good deal.
[GKC, Autobiography CW16:151]

Wow. Leave it to GKC to use the most perfect symbol of unity in its most perfect manner!

Francis Thompson was not the only poet to ponder bridges and their building. A certain fraternity I know makes much of a poem about a bridge-builder who was "going a lone highway" and about a certain Greek conjunction... Curiously, its most recent history concludes with a poem by GKC - a poem which summarises all my own attempts at explanation:

For Four Guilds: II. The Bridge Builders

In the world's whitest morning
As hoary with hope,
The Builder of Bridges
Was priest and was pope:
And the mitre of mystery
And the canopy his,
Who darkened the chasms
And doomed the abyss.

To eastward and westward
Spread wings at his word
The arch with the key-stone
That stoops like a bird;
That rides the wild air
And the daylight cast under;
The highway of danger,
The gateway of wonder.

Of his throne were the thunders
That rivet and fix
Wild weddings of strangers,
That meet and not mix;
The town and the cornland;
The bride and the groom;
In the breaking of bridges
Is treason and doom.

But he bade us, who fashion
The road that can fly,
That we build not too heavy
And build not too high:
Seeing alway that under
The dark arch's bend
Shine death and white daylight
Unchanged to the end.

Who walk on his mercy
Walk light, as he saith,
Seeing that our life
Is a bridge above death;
And the world and its gardens
And hills, as ye heard,
Are born above space
On the wings of a bird.

Not high and not heavy
Is building of his:
When ye seal up the flood
And forget the abyss,
When your towers are uplifted,
Your banners unfurled,
In the breaking of bridges
Is the end of the world.
[GKC, Collected Poems 86-87]

Maybe it's time for us to get out the old hard hat and transit, and work hard towards real unity... for it is right to study civil engineering when a bridge has fallen.

--Dr. Thursday

PS: Just in case you wish to know a little more about the Brooklyn Bridge, or others, here are two from Dover which I have, and can thoroughly recommend: A Picture History of the Brooklyn Bridge and Bridges of the World: Their Design and Construction.

A Great Piece of News for all Dover and Chesterton fans

Dover has reprinted GKC's Tremendous Trifles!!!

This is a great collection of essays which originally appeared in the London Daily News; they are not yet in the CW. Among them are such delights as "A Piece of Chalk" and "What I Found In My Pocket" and (for those studying fantasy) "The Dragon's Grandmother" - but each of the 39 essays is wonderful and has its own power and insights...

Thanks for the info, Dr. Thursday.

UPDATE: The American Chesterton Society has just received a shipment of these books, and will put them on their site shortly for your odering purposes. Thanks for supporting the ACS by buying the books from us. ;-)

It's Thursday

Again I must apologise for writing so briefly - though perhaps some of you who have read my voluminous postings elsewhere wish I was always more brief. But I am busy writing something a bit different, (hee hee) in a language where I use rather more semicolons than GKC did. Yes, that's one of the Great Sins committed by our favourite "second-rate" author of detective novels, dull theology, rhyming poems and such trash. But I assure you, it is only because I myself use the semicolon correctly that I can tell you GKC's average semicolon use was 14.2 semicolons per 1459.5 word essay which he wrote for the Illustrated London News. Put that in your next journal article and smoke it!

Ahem. Well, since I have been trying to explore some of the books GKC wrote about, or mentioned, which are still available from Dover Publications, I ought to resume - but I haven't written one. Also, when I asked our esteemed blogg-mistress about current efforts, she mentioned she was hoping to resume our consideration of The Poet and the Lunatics - which unfortunately is not yet available from Dover.

So I will cheat. I will give you an interesting quote from Chapter 2 "The Yellow Bird", and suggest a Dover book which I have, and which I think GKC would have enjoyed purusing. First, the quote:

this particular artist, whose name was Gabriel Gale, did not seem disposed even to look at the landscape, far less to paint it; but after taking a bite out of a ham sandwich, and a swig at somebody else's flask of claret, incontinently lay down on his back under a tree and stared up at the twilight of twinkling leaves; some believing him to be asleep, while others more generously supposed him to be composing poetry. ... "If you look up long enough, there isn't any more up or down, but a sort of green, dizzy dream; with birds that might as well be fishes."
[GKC, "The Yellow Bird", The Poet and the Lunatics]

Here we see one of GKC's usual "inversion" tricks, recalling the kernel axiom from "Cinderella" - the words once uttered by a young woman in another context: "exaltavit humiles = "He has lifted up the lowly." [See Orthodoxy CW1:253 quoting Mary in Lk 1:52] But there is also a very funny swipe at the absurd anti-logic of Nietzsche and other death-eaters, who said: "Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of the same upward movement of the universe." To which GKC (even at an early stage) replied: "Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?" [See GKC's Autobiography CW16:154]

Ah - the book. It was suggested by Gale's perception of birds as fishes, and is simply a very beautiful study called Hummingbirds. The pictures of these tiny birds hint at the power called discrimination - the ability to tell both similarities and differences correctly - which is strengthened by such fantastic tricks. A poet who looks up into the trees and seeing birds as fish swimming in a green sea will be better able to know both fish and birds correctly. In a more modern context, the fantasy that a boy waves a wooden stick and says "Lumos" shines a light on the more mundane but far more magical flashlight, the distillation of thousands of years of work and thousands of years of knowledge. Or, as Gabriel Gale says in another part of that same story:

What exactly is liberty? First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself.
[GKC, "The Yellow Bird", The Poet and the Lunatics]

Didn't know you were reading an ontology textbook here, did you? Hang on the ride might be bumpy in spots but it's well worth the admission price.

--Dr. Thursday

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

During the recent conference, there were break-out sessions, and I attended the Aidan Mackey talk, not knowing if he'd ever make it across the pond again. However, there was another talk that hour on Heraldry, given by Dr. Peter Floriani, and from what I heard, it was excellent. And that ties in with today's post. And now, Dr. Thursday.

I have heard (from people who have reason to know) that the seminar on heraldry at the recent Chesterton Conference proved to be of interest to those who attended. The topic of heraldry may seem a bit unusual for the typical Americans to express such an interest - but then that's just because it sounds ancient. As if someone were to say something crazy, "Hey, let's write software for a cable TV company, and put Latin quotes on the main screen!" Or for a mother to say to her daughters, "Today, let's have a picnic lunch on the floor in the playroom!" But then we're so very, very, very Chestertonian. (And I hope you are, too.)

Anyway, since I happened to be at that seminar, I can tell you that heraldry is actually very well known in America - though perhaps not by that name. There are those two yellow upside-down U shapes one sees at the side of the road - it makes one thing of clowns eating hamburgers. There is that little curvy check-mark seen on all kinds of clothing, which means one has paid money to a sneaker company in approval of their efforts. And so on. There are also what we might call the "inverse" forms, where people who know nothing of the laws of heraldry have broken them, and so have made their attempt at communication futile: like white trucks with yellow lettering. Or, even worse, a certain state license plate is a pale color, upon which the license numbers are printed in white - hence they are nearly unreadable, even from close-up.

But what is heraldry? Why does it matter to Chestertonians?Click here to discover more about heraldry.Heraldry is simply the art and the science of symbol, but particularly serving as an identifier of a person, and of a family. The "coat of arms" which is simply a decorated form of the old shield of a knight, told everyone - even those who could not read - who that person was, just as surely as the yellow U's or curvy check-marks indicate ... uh ... what they indicate. Remember, advertising is just a form of communication, and its first principle is identification. (See Romans 10:14-15 for a Biblical justification for advertising!)

Speaking as a computer scientist, the real delight in heraldry is that it comes with a very elegant and technical way of describing those decorations: what the heralds call the "blazon" - that is, the "code" which specifies the colors and shapes and arrangements of the design:

"A blazon, like a chemical formula, means one thing, and one thing only, hence, every heraldic artist can make a correct drawing from it..."
[Julian Franklyn, Heraldry, 41]

But what does heraldry have to do with Chesterton?

It would be possible to cite many illustrations from Chesterton's work about heraldry. He relates one of the most dramatic, and intricate, pieces of history in his book on Chaucer:

The fashionable world, as we should put it, was divided into enthusiastic factions over a quarrel which had arisen about the legitimacy of a coat of arms, which then seemed almost as thrilling as the legitimacy of a child or a last will and testament. The arms borne by the great Border family of Scrope, in popular language a blue shield with a gold band across it (I can say 'azure a bend or' quite as prettily as anybody else) was found to have been also adopted by a certain Sir Thomas Grosvenor, then presumably the newer name of the two. The trial was conducted with all the voluminous detail and seething excitement of a Society divorce case; reams and rolls of it, for all I know, remain, in the records of the heraldic office, for anybody to read if he likes; though I have my doubts even about garter King-at-Arms. But somewhere in that pile of records there is one little paragraph, for which alone, perhaps, the world would now turn them over at all. It merely states that among a long list of witnesses, one 'Geoffrey Chaucer, gentleman, armed twenty-seven years', had testified that he saw the Golden Bend displayed before Scrope's tent in the battlefield of France; and that long afterwards, he had stopped some people in the streets of London and pointed to the same escutcheon displayed as a tavern sign; whereon they had told him that it was not the coat of Scrope but of Grosvenor. This, he said, was the first time he had ever heard tell of the Grosvenors. Such small flashes of fact are so provocative, that I can almost fancy he smiled as he said the last words.
[GKC, Chaucer CW18:214-5]

But this is America, you say. Fine. Let's see what we can find there...

There is one of the United States called "Maryland", which has a very nice flag: red, white, yellow, and black - all kind of shredded into a curious pattern. But it is nothing more than a very elegant statement about a man and his family: a man named Cecilius Calvert, who became Lord Baltimore. His father's father had a coat of arms which is blazoned:

Paly of six, Or and sable; a bend counterchanged.

This means six stripes alternating yellow (gold) and black, with a diagonal stripe cutting through them which reverses the colors of the underlying stripes. And his father's mother, who was named Crossland, had a coat of arms which is blazoned:

Quarterly argent and gules a cross botonny counterchanged.

This means four squares, white above red, red above white, on which is imposed a cross with triple rounds at each end - and this cross reverses the colors of the underlying squares.

The Maryland flag is Lord Baltimore's which is blazoned: Quarterly Calvert and Crossland. Just so you don't struggle, here is what it looks like:
So now you know. And, if you would like more information, there are many books which will help, but for a start you can check out Heraldry in America by Eugene Zieber, available from Dover Publications.

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

An American Poet

Over 200 times GKC invokes the name of Walt Whitman - in books from NNH to STA, from Browning to Chaucer, from Heretics to The Thing. An entire essay (ILN June 13, 1925, CW33:569) was about him, and it appears in Maisie Ward's biography of GKC over two dozen times, calling the discovery of his poems a "powerful influence in the direction of mental health" for the young GKC: "I shall never forget," Lucian Oldershaw writes, "reading to him ... in my bedroom at West Kensington. The seance lasted from two to three hours, and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery." [Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 50]
Click here to discover more about Whitman.We who delighted in the thrills of ChesterCon 2007 saw how it provides a foretaste, a vague hint, of what GKC calls the "Inn at the End of the World" (in Dickens CW15:209 and NNH CW6:371) and which the Bible reveals in somewhat greater detail. Among our many researches, we must consider how Chesterton saw this in Whitman's works:

The whole point of Walt Whitman, right or wrong, is that the great heart of man should be an inn with a hundred doors standing open. It is that there should be a sort of everlasting bonfire of special rejoicing and festivity for all men that come and all things that happen; that nothing should be thought too trivial or too dull to be accepted by that gigantic hospitality of the heart. [GKC ILN June 13 1925 CW33:572]

Perhaps even more important for us is how Whitman played a role in GKC's philosophical and spiritual development. GKC gave us some insight into this difficult and personal matter:

I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered. This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning's "God must be glad one loves his world so much", or Stevenson's "belief in the ultimate decency of things". But I do not think it is too much to say that I took it in a way of my own; even if it was a way I could not see clearly or make very clear.
[GKC, Autobiography CW16:97, emphasis added]

This phrase "one thin thread of thanks" is one of the most important of the great Chestertonian motifs. It may be that GKC has added to the famous "five proofs" for the existence of God by giving us "the argument from thanksgiving"... certainly it is worth investigation. And just as Aquinas accumulated references, both in support and in attack of each of his questions, so too we shall have to lok at Whitman if we want to understand more about the Chestertonian motif of thanskgiving. Perhaps someone from the "American Whitman Society" (if such exists) might give us some insight into this poem by GKC, which somehow summarizes this entire point:

"Eternities"

I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well hath He spoken: 'Swear not by thy head,
Thou knowest not the hairs,' though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in His own strange book.

I cannot count the sands or search the seas,
Death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.
Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon the trees.

In heaven I shall stand on gold and glass,
Still brooding earth's arithmetic to spell;
Or see the fading of the fires of hell
Ere I have thanked my God for all the grass.
[GKC, CW10:209]

I almost forgot! If you want to read some Whitman, you might check out Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition available from Dover Publications.

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

We have returned to the tempus per annum which some call "Ordinary Time" because the weeks are marked with ordinals (first, second, seventhy-ninth, ten-thousand-and-twenty-fifth, etc). This remarkable time, which is remarkable just as (for us Chestertonians!) the "common man" is remarkable, offers us the delights of anything and everything which is the one single subject of our interest.

But yes, perhaps I ought to say just a word or two about ChesterCon07 which has just ended - or I should say, has just completed... for it has not truly ended. It is just deferred. Someone has pointed out that these conferences are a tiny foretaste of "the Inn at the End of the World" - the one for which "the Good Wine has been Kept" - those of us who know about scripture remember that this coming banquet wil be a Wedding-Feast, and happy are those who are called to partake. I readily grant that, in our fallen state, we poor weak ones tend to make a mess of things, and even at a ChesterCon will find speed-bumps, and spilled wine or beer (or mead!), or talks we do not like, or talks we disagree with, and even, yes, even people who are bumpy or spilled or disagreeing or disagreeable. This reminds me of a very famous letter from GKC to his fiance:

11 Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked July 8, 1899)
... I am black but comely [See Canticle of Canticles 1:4] at this moment: because the cyclostyle has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. But I think it my duty to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance....
[GKC to Frances Blogg, quoted in Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton 108]

Hence, let us sincerely be sure to shall wash ourselves (cf. Rv. 7:14) before we get that invitation to the banquet.

So it might be useful for me to draw attention to one small matter.
Continue reading.
At least one speaker mentioned GKC's very important essay titled "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" which was printed in The Common Man, presently not in print - but can be found on line, and was also reprinted in On Lying in Bed and other Essays which is available from the ACS. I mention it because it is GKC's solemn sermon on Pride and Humility. I have just learned that the mere mention of GKC's sermon led to its being referred to in an actual sermon preached last Sunday. Clearly it has a very important lesson for all of us. Consider just this one excerpt:

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself.

Yes, it can be easy to forget, amid all the verbal fireworks, the real reason for our meeting.

But all in all, it was a wonderful conference, and I met many friends there - some old, some new - some unfortunately not yet friends - nevertheless I will indeed pray for all of you, and hope that we shall all meet again, whether at a future ChesterCon, or at the Inn at the End of the World. Please likewise pray for me; I've used the cyclostyle.

Meanwhile, I shall resume my exploration of the books which GKC read, referred to, or commented on, and which are still available.

Today's book is Doré’s Illustrations for Ariosto’s "Orlando Furioso", available through Dover Publications. It is suggested by this quote:

...horse and man together making an image that is to him human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like a vision of St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak “chivalry.”
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:148]

Ludovico (or Lodovico) Ariosto, (1474-1533) was an Italian poet and dramatist. His best known work is the chivalric epic poem Orlando Furioso, (Roland the Mad) a sequel to Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (Roland in Love); containing 50,000 lines of such things as magic, winged horses, evil Orcs, a trip to the moon on a hippogriff, and Christian knights, it is generally considered the most perfect poetic expression of the Italian Renaissance, and a principal model for Spenser's Faerie Queene.

In Orlando Furioso, the hero travels on a hippogriff, a mythological creature which is part eagle, part horse. There is also a flight to the moon in Elijah's chariot, which is drawn by winged horses. See pages 105 and 113 in the Dover edition. Here are some other suggestive GKC quotes:

The cow jumping over the moon is not only a fancy very suitable to children, it is a theme very worthy of poets. The lunar adventure may appear to some a lunatic adventure; but it is one round which the imagination of man has always revolved; especially the imagination of romantic figures like Ariosto and Cyrano de Bergerac.
[GKC, ILN Oct. 15, 1921 CW32:254]

We speak of the Renaissance as the birth of rationalism; it was in many ways the birth of irrationalism. It is true that the medieval School-men, who had produced the finest logic that the world has ever seen, had in later years produced more logic than the world can ever be expected to stand. They had loaded and lumbered up the world with libraries of mere logic; and some effort was bound to be made to free it from such endless chains of deduction. Therefore, there was in the Renaissance a wild touch of revolt, not against religion but against reason. Thus one of the very greatest of the sixteenth-century giants was almost as much of a nonsense writer as Edward Lear: Rabelais. So another of the very greatest wrote an Orlando Furioso which might sometimes be called Ariosto Furioso.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:328]

Let it be agreed, on the one hand, that the Renaissance poets had in one sense obtained a wider as well as a wilder range. But though they juggled with worlds, they had less real sense of how to balance a world. I am sorry that Chaucer "left half-told the story of Cambuscan bold" and I can imagine that that flying horse might have carried the hero into very golden skies of Greek or Asiatic romance; but I am prepared to agree that he would never have beaten Ariosto in anything like a voyage to the moon. On the other hand, even in Ariosto there is something symbolic, if only accidentally symbolic, in the fact that his poem is less tragic but more frantic than "The Song of Roland"; and deals not with Roland Dead but with Roland Mad.
[ibid CW18:330-331]