A Man's Brain is A Bomb ...

"A man's brain is a bomb...it has to explode." This is a line spoken by "Monday", the secretary of the high council of anarchists G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday in which each of the 7 members of that council in the book are named after days of the week. It also echoes a statement by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, "I am dynamite!" (among those who follow Nietzschean studies it is noted that he was supposedly already well on his way to crazy when he wrote Ecce Homo.) This statement connects greatly with a comment Pauli made on my "speculation" about Cedric and Harry representing Hogwart's as earth and fire. And this is a crucial point of much needed temperance if one is to keep their sanity when studying these things - and not have his or her brain explode. SYMBOLS In regards to the symbols I think that they do all fit but that Paul is right, we must not narrow any given character down SIMPLY to one element alone. Fleur is from Beauxbatons, which arrives on the air or wind, but in book 6 we see her as "phlegmatic," which, If I remember correctly what Pauli was saying in our conversation over Thanksgiving weekend at my parents, the "humor" of phlegm - in medieval 4 Humor anthropology - corresponds to the element of water in the 4 Elements cosmology. As Pauli noted, we are all made up of all 4 elements, and really that is what the books are about, finding harmony and balance within ourselves and the cosmos, just as the golden soul is the balance between the biological and intellectual souls and Dumbledore pure spirit (Dumbledore) and pure matter (Voldemort). I'll describe this more in the next section on narrative because I think I can draw it out better there. But for here I will say that I think that all the symbols are true and they all intersect. BUT to try to understand HOW is probably too big of a task for even angelic intellect, and reserved only to the Divine intellect. As for us humans it would probably "blow our minds" like a big ol' bomb. ASIDE: A really good movie on this is the movie "Pi". I do not recommend it for everyone because its black and white presentation (meaning the actual color, not figurative of its tone toward morality or truth) is of a very unique style that some will find jarring and difficult to watch (and even for me, who loved the movie, it's not a "good time" movie). But, in that movie, Max is right, mathematics is a universal language that expresses the essence of nature (at least of physical nature). To try to figure it out, however, is like looking into the sun, it will make you blind. Max's quest to do so has burdened him with migraine's and when his friend Sol eventuallout thes him by re-working out the 216 digit bug in pi for him, it sends Sol into his second - and possibly deadly - stroke. NARRATIVE Ok, Here is where I tie this in with narrative. We all know that in good narratives there are always "sub-plots" which connect with and fill out the main plot. We are tempted to view a lot of the "mundane details" of our lives as accidental and not necessarily thematically connected to the main development of our lives; and this is indeed what we MUST do if we are to survive and function and avoid a dangerously explosive brain (to continue the bomb analogy.) But in reality all of the subplots are connected to the main plot of our life. The thing is, only that Divine author/providence can understand that ultimate inter-connectedness of all those "disparate" sub-plots in our mundane lives. That is why we need narrative, a "Kairotic Chronology." We need artists to weave us images and movements that accentuate the kairotic in our lives so that we can see at least some of it, so that we do not get so bogged down in physical details, politics, etc. that we drown in them. Narrative is that place we go for meaning (at least on the natural level), not so that we can escape the mundanity of reality but, rather, so that we can return to it and be effective in our lives without having to neurotically agonize over "whether it all means anything" because our natural limitations prevent us from being able to see how all the details fit into the "big picture". One should neither "lose the forest for the trees" nor vice versa). This is why, I think, in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings you do not have as much of a concept of God present. You do have a feeling of a "providence" (I am borrowing here from Joseph Pearce) BUT (and here I am not borrowing) that directing from that provident will is always implicit, never explicit. Were it to be explicit, the explication of how it worked what it worked would, again, "blow our minds." THE SACRED There is a realm where these things cross a line into the sacred and that is the area focused on by John Granger, Iconography. I will only make one comment on this area. In thinking about these things after reading Pauli's comment and planning this post I became more and more aware why it is that the Eastern Orthodox ascribe a quasi-sacramental to icons. I do not believe as I have heard the Amish and Native Americans do, that a photograph of a person is sacrilege because it captures a piece of the person's soul, but I can see why they might think that. Even in regards to natural image and narrative making keep in mind that Tolkien referred to human art as "sub-creation" because it is indeed mystically connected to the creative power of God. IMAGINATION AND THE MUSE I think that what we are talking about when we discuss these things is the imagination of the author. But that distinctly human imagination is a doorway to a world that is larger than the human author and even larger than humanity itself, the world that is what the Greeks spoke of when they referred to the "muse" as a god, the muse which visited and inspired (literally "breathed into") the poets. But we must always remember when discussing a particular work that we are talking first about a human work, and that world of the imagination must never overtake completely, in a fascist manner, the physicality of the world in which God has placed us, in such a way that that mundanity of "chronos" gets completely obscured (and I think that this is some of what Pauli's warning was speaking to) for that mundane day to day existence is also distinctly human/created in the image of God; temporality reflects eternalness in a distinct way. A good example of this would be a movie I am really into, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - the Johnny Depp version. I love that movie but I have one problem with it. In the very end the Buckets' house has been moved inside the factory. It was originally only a few blocks away, so why could Willie not have simply come there every night for dinner - while of course donating some much needed repairs? The thing is, the factory and candy is symbolic of human imagination; and while the transcendence of God to which that imagination is a pathway DOES encompass all of the world, the human imagination does not. The "mundane" Bucket life should have been left to exist in harmony with, but distinct from, the imagination symbolized by candy. For, if the "higher" things not simply rule over the "lower" things in a proper hierarchy, but rather dominate them in such a way that the very nature of the lower things is obliterated this becomes the tenet of Gnosticism in which it is said that matter is essentially evil. In The Hidden Key To Harry Potter Granger does a good job of emphasizing that the point of alchemy is for spirit and matter to be reunited once the matter has been refined, which I think makes Harry Potter a great example of how Chistian Alchemy is really a Christian response to Gnosticism. This is basically the same thing as I was talking about in the post I did on "Religion and Love in Tolkien," when the interpretation of the statement that "Grace builds on nature" is that Grace completely deconstructs nature and rebuilds something with the parts that bears absolutlely no resemblence to the nature of nature. In literature it is metaphor without methexis (which is a Greek term I discussed meaning "participation" that indicates a real connection between symbol and reality, not merely amentionedal or arbitrary connection). The "escapism" that I mentionened above and asserted that it was NOT the role of narrative would also be an example of such Gnostic tendencies which truly good narrative combats. A FINAL EXAMPLE : Humor and Humility So, thus far I have tied together Chesterton, Nietzsche, Harry Potter, Eastern Orthodox Iconography, Tolkien, Gnosticism, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Amish, Native Americans ... and I may as well throw in one more for good measure. It may be justly leveled against me that tying together all these disparate works and elements and seeing them as all connected is a bit schizophrenic and lends to an ever-rambling and digressive style of communication. And such a charge puts me in the mind of a novel that I have often thought scary in how well it probably describes my mind (and it's an often much needed reminder to humility LOL), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne (18th century English writer). In that book Sterne focuses on "Hobby Horses". A hobby horse is your "deal," your paradigm, the system of hooks on which you hang your hats in order to understand the world of your experience. Of course, no individual hobby horse does the task entirely of explaining that world, but without a hobby horse you would fall apart. For Stern as the implied author, his hobby horse is narrative. As I said, a hobby horse is always a "wobbly horse". Sterne's narrative intentionally wanders and rambles all over the place, digressing further and further back on tangents and then jumping forward in time in an astoundingly disconnected leap. He even sets aside one distinct chapter to surrealistically draw out the image of himself on his narrative hobby horse: it becomes a wild bucking bronco on which he crashes through the stands and even knocks over a bishop - (a reference to one of the earliar chapters where a bishop is discussing baptism - and hilariously runs amok over his material ... and this type of self-lampooning is what I a much needed humility. At one point Sterne symbolizes the silliness of the hobby horse of narrative with 10 completely black pages smack dab in the middle of the book...BUT, he did write the book, the narrative. The point is that you have to keep trying and humbly accept that sometimes in doing so your own human efforts are quite simply comical - and sometimes, as Pauli insightfully noted, you have to reign that horse in a bit if you're going to stay sane. This is doubly important for my own field - I watched one friend NEVER complete his thesis for his MA because every week he had another book that connected with his themes and that he was going to try to work in. Part of the work of an academic is to find the scope for a discussion that you can present for others to read and digest without overly burdening them, otherwise nobody will get anywhere - and I apologize for my GROSS breaking of that rule in this post LOL. THE END (Did I really say that was the last example?) So, I'l close by adding one more to my ragtag bag of wildly divergent examples. This is perhaps one of my favorite lines ever from a popular song on the distinctness of being human; it' from Tom Waits' song Hoist that Rag from his most recent album, "Real Gone" (to which I am listening at the moment.. that and Love and Peace or Else, by U2 .... In the Waits song I think the "cracked bell" is the liberty bell, symbolizing liberty, the distinctively human capacity for free will lived out in the time-bound movement of life, and the "gods" are like the Greek gods, as opposed to God with a capital "G"). The cracked bell rings as the ghost bird sings And the gods go begging here So just open fire when you hit the shore All is fair in love and war.