The Labyrinthine Ways

I am currently teaching a tutorial on some of the Great Works of the Catholic Revival at Thomas More College. As well as the TMC juniors and seniors who are taking the class, it is being audited by Peter and Mariellen Gallaher. I was particularly intrigued to read Peter’s musings on Chesterton’s Man Who wasThursday and would like to share them with Ink Deskers:

Perhaps it could be said they begin before time, continue outside time (or as well within it, running forth and back and sideways) and finish God only knows where.

I was deceived by the book’s first few chapters, expecting what I did not get, not getting what I got instead.  I remember asking Mariellen if this was not the silliest ever detective story.  Though I don’t know now what her answer may have been I do recall that she was puzzled, too.  I kept forgetting that this “thing” was at least a dream if not a nightmare, and thinking that things should have been done with some logic, and wondering if I was reading a more genial Kafka about a fellow in a place with “up so many floating bells down”.  I wondered if it would all turn into a Chagall painting with floating cows (http://www.chagallpaintings.org/iandthevillage.html ), or something like this guy’s work ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJbOK2EGWXA) .

Then I thought of some kind of Mack Sennett/Keystone Cop comedy as a setting for the whole thing when I read about the anarchists hurtling down into the long tunnel to their meeting room while Syme and Gregory pointed guns at each other in a room full of bombs.  I expected a Buster Keaton disaster scene, smoke and bits of buildings and Buster sitting forlorn and alone in the middle of a big mess when it all cleared.  This couldn’t be a nightmare.  How could I believe that this absurdity was about a bunch of fellows who seriously wanted to abolish right and wrong (p. 38 in the Ignatius press 199 edition, P.54 in the one we used in class.)  But of course there are plenty of folks around who think that is perfectly the right thing to do.  I was working in Law Enforcement in New York in the 1960’s and can attest, and I have relatives who were at work on Wall Street on 9/11/2001.

I read further in the book and began to see all of the nightmare elements emerging; the gradual discovery by Syme that all of the men whose name are days are themselves policeman as Syme is, recruited by Sunday, how in some of my own nightmares this same thing happens.  He learns he is not alone (and they do, too).  He has allies.  Evil reveals itself at a desperate moment not to be evil, but a harmless vision; a mistake.  Remembered in the morning when fully awake, the nightmare becomes a kind of critical review, a deep response…at least it seems to me…and perhaps a solution to problems or questions facing one, facing me.  Facing us all?

Several chapters into this novel, after many of the Days have been identified as police, philosophical police (though I’ve not bothered to figure out what ‘school’s of philosophy they each represent..who is the Aristotelian, who the Platonist, who the Thomist, who the Idealist, etc…has anyone?) I looked up in Genesis where Thursdaywould have been, and found it to be, well, what it is; the day the lights go on.  And, I figured out the plot.  I smiled and really did smack myself on the forehead.

But I still have some problem trying to figure out why Chesterton put six undercover agents of the philosophical police and their C.I.C., God, in as the Central Giverning Council of the Anarchists. The only thing I can figure out is that the nightmare isn’t a nightmare at all.  It is a kind of nonsense tale where, as in Through the Looking Glass, nothing is quite going to be the way it seems, and a snickersnee will cut nothing more than cheese.

That’s what happens, anyway in the real world, the one controlled by a loving God, whom Sunday proves to be in the end.

I’m left on finishing the book with the picture from the poem that has possibly made the greatest impression on me, of the Holy Ghost who “over the bent world broods with warm breast and with, ahh, bright wings”; something I saw many years ago before I’d read the poem, or the book but had thought this about the matter:

The Mystery

I have glimpsed today the slow and constant dance,
Creations’ song, before the throne of might and glory,
The wheel and fire, the majesty of movement there
Repeated down to dust and atoms, out to planets
And blackest space.  Each part knows its place in adoration.
Birds and grasses fly and weave in windy syncopation.
Fish and waters far above primeval mud, move
Swift through spears and shafts of prismed light.
The aqueous ooze appears alive itself in fluvial movement
Endowed by ponderous gravity’s touch; while ancient
Sharks, coelacanths and cetacean monsters glide in
Balneal luxury through abyssal eternal dark.

Down through pressing heat to nucleal fire
Burning eternal at the molten core,
Iron and nickel, granite and basalt compact
Mash, re-petrify and slowly explode, expand, up
With glacial agony through aeonic rock
Renewing earth’s only skin over and over.

Always changing, ever new, outward swings
The dance of time, compass wide and atom deep,
Moving to the music of the Maker.
Through all of it pure angels move
The evidences of Love’s self knowing;
And you, and I and everyone growing
Into It, to Them, outstretched waiting
For return, for end, for beginning.
Seeing as They have seen.
Being as They have been.