Tarradiddles
G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man has been on my shelf for well over a year now, but I've finally cracked it open, and though it's dense, I'm finding it harder and harder to resist. This morning's chapter was"Man and Mythologies"and not only did I get a great new word--terradiddles--out of the deal, I also got some gorgeous words on the nature of imagination, the pursuit of beauty, and the common need of humanity to reach out to touch the invisible.
Chesterton argues against the scientific deconstruction of myth, calling us to leave the mythologies of the world in the realm of imagination. He sees them as deeply honorable fancies whereby human beings find their proper posture--kneeling with outstretched hands offered to something. Doesn't even the atheist feel something of the mystery behind (or perhaps for the unbeliever, embedded in) the material, even if it is nothing more than his own fanciful consideration of his ability to construct fancy?
"Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows off things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up."
Listen to this:
"Suppose somebody in a story says,'Pluck this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,' we do not know why something stirs in the sub-consciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable....Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past finding out, are in an idea like that of the external soul."
One more quote:
"Mythology, then, sought God through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness."
"Tarradiddles"--I think this is what he means--are stories of imagination told in the way children tell tales, with a sort of wide eyed honesty that is perfectly delighted in cows jumping over moons.
Maybe that's how I'll answer the question from now on.
"What do you do?" says the curious stranger, sizing up the worth of the balding man.
"I make tarradiddles."
Or maybe even...
"I tarradiddle..."
7:53:13 AM
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