A Welcome From the Doctor

Yes, this is Dr. Thursday, honoured to join in yet another grand Chestertonian club, committee and concert out here in the E-cosmos! Or should that be "in" here? You know that's what GKC called it... see Maisie Ward's quote from his "Notebook" in her biography, page 61, when he wrote up his grand invitation for his Christmas party:

My great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet everybody else and like them very much.

AN INVITATION
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
requests the pleasure
Of humanity's company
to tea on Dec. 25th 1896.
Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.

Oh, yes.

Our esteemed blogg-mistress asks us to introduce ourselves. It is a bit difficult for me to say very much just now, as I have said so very much elsewhere, such as on the ACS blogg or on my own blogg (which is named for our dear Aunt Frances (Blogg) Chesterton, GKC's favourite blogg!) or those fictional and non-fictional bloggs of mine for which you can find links there. I have known of GKC from when I was quite young, having heard my father recite "Lepanto", and since sometime in the mid-1980s have read just about every scrap of GKC's writing I could find. Besides doing computer stuff and knowing a little about biology (I can spell DNA. See?) and having collected a variety of GKC's works into what I call the AMBER collection, and spoken at an ACS Conference or three, there's not much more to tell. Except perhaps that I am a strong proponent of the canonization of Aunt Frances and Uncle Gilbert. Ahem. (Really, I'm kind of boring otherwise. But I do like to laugh. Ask Ria; she knows.)

So. Ahem-squared. The natural thing for me to do in cases like this is to see where "Flying In" might appear within GKC's writing. (That's not "Inn" with two N's, you understand, that's something quite different, and you can find that in a book by GKC. It's a wheelbarrow, a wheel of cheese, a keg of rum, a big dog named Quoodle, and some crazy men...) This is not easy to do, since the usual finite automata recognizers will match both kinds of "in/inn" unless you ask nicely. Huh? You know how most magic won't work unless it's in Latin or it rhymes? Yes, they're like that. Hee hee. But I am a bit more than a finite machine, at least if I'm half-awake, and I even know how to make them work. (If you are wondering, these are the simplest kind of computer, and all computers of course are finite; this makes some people happy and others sad, but I cannot talk about that here and now.)

As usual when one plays with AMBER, one finds the most remarkable quotes side by side, which is as wonderful as an encyclopedia, about which GKC said this:

...it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want.
[GKC The Common Man]

That dictum ought to assist us in our efforts to write this blogg.

Ahem. Let us, then, proceed to see some of the remarkable places where GKC uses "flying in":

"Mr. Wells is trying to kill two birds with one stone, though the birds are flying in opposite directions: one being the white dove of an eternal hope and the other the black raven of despair."
[GKC, Where All Roads Lead CW3:57]

For my own part, I do not like this flying in the face of Mr. Chamberlain. Mr. Chamberlain has chosen to wear one flower; why should Lord Meath try forcibly to tie him to another? Mr. Chamberlain has selected the orchid, which is surely a very good
symbol of modern Imperialism. It is very expensive, like the mines in South Africa. It is of hybrid origin, like the people who own them. It is commonly of a very queer colour. It is a parasite. I do not see what is the matter with the orchid.
[ILN June 8 1907 CW27:480]

"Sure!" said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. "And my purpose was about the biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States. In the publicity line there's nothing like saying you can do what folks say can't be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead of providence, I reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work, and got out the first advertisement in no time; just a blank space with: 'We Can Do It' in the middle. Got folks wondering for a week what it was."
[GKC Tales of the Long Bow, chapter 5: "The Exclusive Luxury Of Enoch Oates"]

The men in the motor-car looked anxiously in the direction of his dreamy gaze, and they saw that the whole regiment at the end of the road was advancing upon them, Dr. Renard marching furiously in front, his beard flying in the breeze.
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:598]

In the next year appeared Ferishtah's Fancies, which exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning - his sense of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterizes Browning among all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea - some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. But it may be safely asserted that no other poet having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual idea would call it "A Bean Stripe; also Apple Eating."
[GKC Browning]

For my last-but-one, I shall quote the remarkable appearance of "flying in" within The Flying Inn:

'This aesthetic way we have, Hump, has only two little disadvantages which I will now explain to you. The first is exactly what has sent us flying in this contraption. When the beautiful, smooth, harmonious thing you've made is worked by a new type, in a new spirit, then I tell you it would be better for you a thousand times to be living under the thousand paper constitutions of Condorcet and Sieyès. When the English oligarchy is run by an Englishman who hasn't got an English mind - then you have Lord Ivywood and all this nightmare, of which God could only guess the end."
[GKC The Flying Inn, "The Songs of the Car Club"]

So very suitable. for us. But I think this last one is perhaps the best, and I shall give it in its entirety - if I were an artist, I might try to draw this. Certainly I imagine our Uncle Gilbert adding a sketch to it. It is his poem called:

"The Fish"

Dark the sea was: but I saw him,
One great head with goggle eyes,
Like a diabolic cherub
Flying in those fallen skies.

I have heard the hoarse deniers,
I have known the wordy wars;
I have seen a man, by shouting,
Seek to orphan all the stars.

I have seen a fool half-fashioned
Borrow from the heavens a tongue,
So to curse them more at leisure -
- And I trod him not as dung.

For I saw that tinny goblin
Hidden in the abyss untrod;
And I knew there can be laughter
On the secret face of God.

Blow the trumpets, crown the sages,
Bring the age by reason fed!
('He that sitteth in the heavens,
'He shall laugh' - the prophet said).
[CW10:211]

In case you are wondering, that quote is from the second Psalm (King Jim's version); if you want the Chestertonian discussion, see the very end of Orthodoxy.

Somehow laughter does seem to be a fitting conclusion. And now (whew!) that ought to be long enough. I hope you weren't terribly bored, but then (let us say it together) "Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting." [Tremendous Trifles] Which includes your humble servant.

Paradoxically yours,
Dr. Thursday