Tada!
I am going to take it upon myself to write the first Post With Substance. *chews fingernails nervously* As per the rules (see the user info page if you missed them [they're really not overly restrictive, I promise]), my thoughts are going under an lj-cut. I'm abbreviating The Man Who Was Thursday as TMWWT, because that just makes sense, and I'm
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I'd just like to quote Chesterton on the subject of order and what we generally think of as monotony (i.e. as something decisively boring), since it seems he'd say the two were very different.
"All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of some of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue... But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness."
"A child kicks his legs regularly through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say 'Do it again'; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike, it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition on Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg."
-- excerpts from ch. 4 of Orthodoxy
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Admittedly I've had to read those quotes (and the writing from which they came) over and over to make sense of it; I realize I am very much a child of the world of 'towering materialism which dominates the modern mind' when it comes to the supposition that repetition inevitably becomes boring. Well, in fact, it does play out that way for us, but if, like Chesterton says, the ideal is that one thing could be so fascinating and could bring so much joy as to make us happy doing it forever, then we have some idea of God's joy in the order of the universe.
I had a hard time, also, wrapping my head around and seeing the point of view of Syme when he talks about poetry as order, with his example of Victoria station. I am beginning to be able to understand -- to agree with -- the idea that order is a much less likely and thus much greater thing than chaos. It's my very human need for variety and novelty that makes me balk at the idea that order is so very beautiful. But, let's take chaos for a moment: I can not imagine that art has anything at all to do with chaos. I remember, when I was in highschool and in love with art classes, I used to see some people's art work and the beautiful, free form of the brush strokes, and thought that if I just dipped my brush in some paint and tried to free form a picture myself, it would come out wonderful and abstract and interesting. But I discovered that it wasn't like that at all. Art -- even abstract art -- is ordered. Haydee, I though you made a very good point in noting that poetry is an ordering of words -- even free verse is ordered. A random tossing of words onto a page would not make poetry, and a random smattering of paint on a canvas would not make art. And chaos is, indeed, random and can by its very nature have no rhyme or reason.
I guess it follows, then, that order doesn't necessarily mean a lack of creativity. Order, by the examples that Chesterton gives of God's encoring of Nature, is in its very essence, creative; it does involve impossible and beautiful elements. It would, not, however, be in art's interest to say that these elements were random.
A lot of rambling there, and thoughts which I'm not even sure are really pertinent to each other. Have you all any thoughts though?
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