Tag: paradox

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What Does it Mean to Be Ordinary People?

Sunset at Horsehoe Bay, Magnetic Island, Queensland, Australia. A 2-section panorama of twilight colours and crepuscular rays, taken with Canon 60Da and 10-22mm lens.

What does it mean to be ordinary people? G.K. Chesterton famously said,

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” G.K. Chesterton

Dante was regarded as a poeta popolare—a poet of the people—and he took pride in that title. He was read and loved by ordinary people rather than intellectuals. When I first read The Divine Comedy in the early 2000s, most of it went over my head—except for a few haunting images from Inferno.

In the 14th century, however, ordinary Florentine citizens gathered money to establish a Dante cathedra (a professorship dedicated to Dante’s works) at Santa Maria del Fiore. Giovanni Boccaccio was the first one to occupy that cathedra and read Divine Comedy to common city folk passing through the cathedral on the way to work.

Somehow, culture has little to do with intelligence but everything to do with mysticism. Pure intellect is incapable of the one thing from which culture emerges—love. Intellect shuns emotion and filters out what it cannot see, touch, calculate, or predict.

“If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.” Intellect is very good at constructing but very bad at creating.

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” Charles Dickens

Ordinary people are extraordinary because they are lovers. They are never professionals but always amateurs (from Latin amor — love). They love, and that’s why they are capable of creating. What is not loved, cannot be created — it can only be constructed. Constructed reality is artificial. It lacks the Love and Life that all mystics delight in, because they tread on earth and wander in fairyland at the same time.

“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.” G.K. Chesterton

Ordinary people permit twilight. They understand that what they see are particles of light scattered through the atmosphere at a certain angle. And yet, they see twilight. They are mystics; in the scattering of light, they see marriage between heaven and earth. For them, there is no contradiction.

Their mystical gaze pierces through the veil of the physical as an arrow of Cupid pierces the heart with love and desire. They understand that to truly dwell on earth, you must have one foot in fairyland. Without fairyland, there is no earth. With fairyland, there is both heaven and earth.

God himself is a lover, not a professional. He loved twilight before it emerged—that’s why it emerged. The ordinary person, through their love of twilight, recognizes the essence of twilight. Particles of light is not what it is but only what it is made of. To love is the highest form of sanity. To be in the right mind is to delight in the twilight — in everything where heaven meets the earth.

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Is Winnie-the-Pooh Wise?

Is Winnie-the-Pooh wise? The two most sane characters in literature, Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh, are poets.

“The poet 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.” G.K. Chesterton

They are poets to such a degree that they speak in rhyme about everything. They see poetry in everything. Sanity is all about seeing the world as a multi-layered nesting doll for you to open up and explore.

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.” G.K. Chesterton

Poets don’t go mad. They don’t rely on their reason. They don’t try to get the heavens into their heads. They already have the heavens in their heads — that’s what poetry is. The presence of heaven informs their minds, which is the very definition of sanity.

Tom Bombadil is J.R.R. Tolkien’s absolute metaphor for pure poesis — the Divine making. The world was created through poesis — speaking Divine words: “Let there be light. And it was light.” This is poetry at its pinnacle.

Tom Bombadil, who calls himself “the Elder,” was the first one to see the first dust of the universe. He is the pure poesis, the speaking of the world into being. The world is still held together by poetry.

“He [The Son of God] holds everything together with his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3

Tom Bombadil is unaffected by the One Ring. He is immune to insanity. He is like the awakened Neo in The Matrix who is able to see the code behind the world. The code is poetry. He sees it and speaks it — 24/7. He knows that the world is spun from words. He doesn’t look for words; words look for him.

Winnie-the-Pooh’s head is also in that word-heaven. He famously said,

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”

Winnie-the-Pooh is another paragon of sanity. His every sentence is just as silly and whimsical as Tom Bombadil’s and yet they reveal incredible profundity of perception.

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

Behind his hilarious puns hides a world of meaning. Obviously, nothing is not nothing, it is everything. It is something full of potentiality. It’s the womb of the world. That’s what poets do 24/7 — birth the world into being through speaking. Speaking out of nothing. That’s how God created the world.

Winnie-the-Pooh took words out of Heidegger’s mouth (or the other way around), who said that “nothing” is inextricably connected to being.

His “Das Nichts nichtet” means “The nothing nothings” — nothing is not merely the absence of something but an active force. A poet does nothing every day — because he does everything. Winnie-the-Pooh’s nothing is everything, just like Tom Bombadils silly songs are nothing, and yet they order the Old Forest.

Old Man Willow obeys Tom’s silly song because Tom is Master. He is Master because he knows how the universe is ordered and run. It is ordered and run through words. He goes around his realm, he picks flowers for Goldberry, he talks to the trees — he does “nothing.” Every day. He is too connected to being to waste his time on trifles.

Sanity is art. Sanity isn’t the thing you get; it’s the thing that gets you when you leave the trifles of the world and do the only productive thing in the world — the nothing of Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh.

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G.K. Chesterton and the Psychology Behind Fairy Tales

What is the psychology behind fairy tales? G.K. Chesterton’s ability to turn ordinary things into extraordinary things is extraordinary.

“For those who think that dandelions are only a nuisance, let us point out that they possess the pure gold of a fairy tale.” G.K. Chesterton

I watched a video once about him years ago where he was challenged to find something poetic about a mailbox. In minutes, he came up with an ode to the mailbox as one of the most magical objects in the universe.

When you stand in front of that slot holding your letter, you suddenly realize that you are entrusting your whole life to that “thing” and when you let go, there is no going back. Mailbox is the ultimate symbol of letting go and letting God.

Dandelions are a symbol too. Or rather the ultimate test of whether we can find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

“Through mere complexity of the earth, we may no longer see the dandelions; yet they have all the point of the stars, with none of their terrible distance.”

Modern life is complex; dandelions are simple. Modern life distracts us from appreciating simplicity. Dandelions test our ability to remember the stars in heaven.

In Genesis 4:17, the first thing Cain did after killing his brother Abel was build a city. Why would he even come up with such a strange idea? There were no cities before. Apparently, he instinctively sought protection from “those who might kill him.” Also, he was afraid of becoming “a fugitive and wonderer,” so he built a place that accumulates people.

Apparently, the city served two purposes — by accumulating many people in one place, you make life complicated. Complexity allows you to not notice simple things — like dandelions. Cain didn’t want to see simple things because they reminded him of the stars of heaven. You don’t see many stars in the city. You are too distracted to look up — or down.

In Russian, the word for “city” (город) is etymologically connected to the verb “to insulate oneself” (отгородиться). The city allows you to insulate yourself from everyone else even though you are literally among thousands. You have the illusion of being around people, but in reality, you are protected from them all. That’s why the cities exterminate dandelions — they are too simple and remind people of the stars.

They remind us of the pure gold of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are simple, and they rarely take place in the city (unless it’s an enchanted city). Fairy tales usually call us out of the city and lead us into forests, meadows, dales, and mountains. The function of a fairy tale is simple — return us to the original simplicity. Only original simplicity is powerful enough to re-enchant those who have been disenchanted.

What is the psychology behind fairy tales?

The doors to Narnia are many. In fact, they are everywhere. We don’t see them because our lives are too complicated. We weed the fairy tale out just like we weed out dandelions. However, the fairy tale still grows wherever it can find a patch of land. It can’t be exterminated. It is stubborn like all weeds.

Its function is simple — to re-enchant us back from the barren place of self-isolation and into the enchanted woods where everything is a door into the enchanted land. We need those “tremendous trifles” — like dandelions — to remind us that there’s nothing ordinary, and everything is, ultimately, a living symbol ushering us into an invisible Kingdom.

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Why is the Frame Important According to G.K. Chesterton?

Why is the frame important? Believe it or not, the most important thing in an artwork is the frame. Without the frame, it looks incomplete and undefined. However, if you have the right frame for it, it acquires some completeness — almost by magic. The frame allows the inherent beauty of a thing to come out.

If you take a few dry leaves and put them in an appropriate frame, you will get a herbarium. The frame limits the scope of your possibilities, and yet it reveals beauty. Beauty is revealed in and through limitations. Every piece of literature that has endured through centuries frames the hero’s adventures in some limitations.

The limitations allow the beauty to shine. Les Miserables, The Lord of the Rings, The Shack, The Brothers Karamazov, the Gospels — the more limitations the hero has the more this silent question arises in our minds, “Will he go through it beautifully or not?”

We know how our own limitations make us feel. We know they present obstacles to how much we can do. We wish them away. We wish we weren’t limited — or at least, less limited. We think without limitations, we will walk through life more beautifully. We won’t. We may get through life, but it won’t be a piece of art.

For a life to be a piece of art, limitations must exist. The question is not, “What will I do to get rid of these limitations? The question is, “What will I do within these limitations to reveal beauty?” The frame gives us the impetus to transcend our limitations without getting rid of them.

Of course, we can get rid of some of our limitations (thankfully). However, there will always be some that will stay. They are the frame within which we have the opportunity to rise above the frame. The frame is here to lead us out of our limitations. A framed piece of art doesn’t look limited. It looks boundless.

G.K. Chesterton once sprained his foot and used the opportunity to write an ode to his healthy leg. He reflects on the poetic pleasures of standing on one leg and appreciates the strength and beauty of his healthy leg. He points out that the isolation of one leg, similar to a single tower or tree, allows for a deeper appreciation of life. In conclusion, he says that to truly value something, we must realize the possibility of its loss​.

“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”

And:

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

We are all artists drawing our lives within the constraints of our frame. What will I do with my limitations today? I can either bemoan them or try to rise above them. They can be either an obstacle or a beauty revealer. The question is, “Will I walk through this beautifully today?”