‘In the first place, and underlying all, the isolation of the soul releases in a society a furious new accession of force. The break-up of any stable system, in physics as in society, makes actual a prodigious reserve of potential energy. It transforms the power that was keeping things together into a power driving separately each component part, the effect of an explosion.’
[H. Belloc. Europe and the Faith.]
‘Bootless for such as these the mighty task
Of bottling God the Father in a flask.’
[H. Belloc. Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine.]
‘Right in the middle of all these things there stands up an enormous exception… It is nothing else than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into this world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologies hand down myths; the man who Made the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things has indeed been implied by the best thinkers, as well as by the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort has ever been implied in any of them. It was simply false to say that the other… heroes had claimed to be the mysterious master and maker, of whom the world has dreamed and disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present… in the daily life of the Roman Empire — that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word…’
[G. K. Chesterton. The Everlasting Man.]
‘These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church.’
[G. K. Chesterton. On Gargoyles.]
‘Nevertheless, the struggle between good and evil remained in the world as a sad legacy of the original fall. Nor has the ancient tempter ever ceased to deceive mankind with false promises. It was on this account that one convulsion following upon another has marked the passage of the centuries, down to the revolution of our own days… Entire peoples find themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the redeemer.
“This all too imminent danger, Venerable Brethren, as you have already surmised, was Bolshevestic and Atheistic Communism…’
[Pius XI. Atheistic Communism.]
‘Only because it is inclusive can Catholicism be exclusive; only because it comprehends all religious truth can it be intolerant of all error. It is because it is the Catholic Center that it cannot admit any other center, to regard as central any portion of the circumference.’
[E.I. Watkin. The Catholic Center.]
‘But there are too the day to day, or rather the moment to moment choices of heaven and hell. Before every human heart that has ever beat out its allotted measure, the dare of goals a high as God himself was tossed down; to be accepted, or to be fled from in Terror.’
[Farrel & Healy. My Way of Life, the Summa Simplified for Everyone.]
“There are certain Iron Meadows that are inhabited by Aspects, and we cannot be sure that God knows about them. Some aspects of the Argo Legend dwell in one of these Iron Meadows, and neither God nor Duffey knows about them.’
[Bascom Bagby. Letters After I Am Dead.]
‘A Duffey there was who had views
On subjects diverse and diffuse.
But we are the stuffy
Inventions of Duffey,
And Duffey's a gruffy magus.’
[Dotty Yekouris. Pelican Pellets.]
‘The boys in the street often call ‘Hot Stuff’ at me, and it is a familiar and friendly name. But they do not know, except for several medical students among them who have heard of my case, that I have a body temperature of one hundred and eleven degrees. The doctors have told me that I should be a bird, or that I should be dead. Well, I am not a bird. I fly sometimes, but privately. And I am not dead. I will never die.
‘I have asked for almost every gift that comes into my head, and I have been given many of them. One I much prize was the gift of calmness. I cannot command everything, but I can command tempests, alike meteorological and society and soul tempests, and they will be silent. I can rebuke the winds and the sea I can make hurricanes veer off and lose all their substance in rain.
‘I have been given other gifts, but I wonder why some such strong gifts have been put into my hands: no hands have ever been weaker than mine. On the ‘grip machine’ at the ‘Fun House out on the Lake’ I can grip only thirty-seven pounds. Dotty Yekouris can grip a hundred and ninety pounds. But it is into my hands that the care of the whole world is placed for as much as one full hour out of every twenty-four.’
[Margaret Stone. Third Epistle to the Kids in St. Louis.]
‘It is written that if they will not believe Moses and the Prophets, neither will they believe one risen from the Dead. My God, My God, they have got to believe the One risen from the Dead… Why should I not affirm the doctrine of the Real Presence of Dauphin Street at midnight? There are people on Dauphin Street at midnight to whom it has never been preached… Don't you ever have the feeling that this night one more must be found? Imagine the panic of the Patriarch when he could not find seventy. And the figure was reduced, and he still could not find them. This night, perhaps, something will happen to the world unless one more can be found. He may destroy it if it falls short by that one. I fancy that thousands of times it has just got by, and many times it has just got by by one. And what if I alone can find that one tonight, and the world will stop if I don't… others who knew the urgency. Maybe one of them was worn out and not allowed to die until I came to replace him…’
[Margaret Stone. In Archipelago.]
‘We are all of us Argonauts of the Argo, but we have been shipwrecked or stranded on this mundane shore. We are stranded with the caution that we must not allow this shore to remain wrongly mundane. This has become a virtual exile to us, and we come to doubt whether we will ever sail on those sweet seas again.
‘But we are more fortuned than most. And we have the surety, if we do not destroy it, that we will be on that Bark again, in another world if not in this one. We remember it and ourselves. Duffey may remember it less than any of us, but he was custodian of the talismans which were our recollection; his was the responsibility of activating us to new life after we had slept.
‘It was the Risen Christ who said ‘Wait here on this shore until I call you.’ All who have been on the Argo understand this.’
[Hans Schultz]
‘If Duffey did indeed make us, it was three thousand years ago, for we sailed together on the Argo that far in the past. But the talismans (they were part of the gold filigree of the Argo, laid over pieces of the ‘Talking Oak’ Dordogne, and the gold that was used came from the Great Fleece that we carried), the talismans have not the function of creating so much as the function of Anamnesis or Recollection. They were to awake us and fill us with remembering. It is by us having held the talismans at our birth that we now recognize and recollect each other, now that we are once again in a wakeful state. Our coming together and knowing each other now is a prefiguration of the Resurrection Itself. We are under a blessing. In our own life (our mysterious latter life now in the contemporary world) we have some of the experiences that are Beyond Life. We are born again more literally than are most. We have here our first resurrection in the Resurrection of Christ.
‘It was a sweet, sad paganism that said,
‘And if thou wilt, remember.
And if thou wilt, forget.’
And we have remember
ed, as yet in fragments only, but we remember more and more as time unwraps from us. The talismans that we grasped at birth were pieces of the Holy Argo. They re-create us and tell us who we are.’
[Teresa (Showboat) Piccone.]
‘The temptation and fascination, Melchisedech, was always to be going somewhere. This temptation will become even stronger with the personal release of the Adversary. But better than going somewhere is being there already. There is a saying that ‘Happiness is not a destination but a journey’. This is wrong. Oh, our life is a journey, but it is only a journey through time and space. It isn't away from our foundation ever. We are born or reborn into the state of having already arrived. We have an inner orientation. We know where it is. The ‘Quest Completed’ was our basic state. The Golden Fleece had already been found, and we were already wrapped in it. The ‘Grail Abundant’, the ‘Grail-Filled-to-Overflowing’ has been possessed, and we eat and drink in that possession of it. We are in Paradise. Our task is to rebuild the world, but not yet to rebuild it in another place.
‘Our construction will always be ‘old-fashioned’, and it will be hooted at by the hooters. It will be as old-fashioned as the first Creation: it will be from the beginning. Oh, we will drink new wine out of new bottles, but both the wine and the bottles were already new when the Day Star was made.
‘Avoid the perils of the false activists who are always bedeviling one to be moving and doing. There is, among the urgencies which we must find or make, a paradisal laziness which we must cultivate. This is absolutely required of us. It is not slovenliness, it is not indolence, it is not pigritia. It is laziness in its proper form. When we examine our consciences at night, after no matter how many hectic hours, we must ask ‘Did I take sufficient time to be blessedly lazy this day?’ There can be no peace or calm without it.
‘Is this prospect of rebuilding the world sufficiently exciting? A spastic or jerky excitement is not consonant with grace. A stimulate is only a goad, and most often it is a self-torture. Excitement is one of the fleshy things that is easiest to give up and most useful in its absence.
‘Are there, in rebuilding the world, any details too trivial to concern ourselves with? Oh, we concern ourselves where the spirit dictates. Right management of the muskrat population on Barataria Bay may be a detail that we should be concerned with. The election of a president will almost certainly be too trivial for our bothering. And do not be misled by evil persons who say that everyone should vote. In three votings out of four, no honest person can vote for any candidate listed, and no honest person does. It will be given us to know what things are important and what things are not.
‘Duffey, whom I have not met yet, reminds us that we are all Kings in the Kingdom, from our childhoods, and in our own right. We may be leper kings, but the ‘Leper King’ was a holy man.
‘Margaret Stone, whom I have not met, reminds us that we must always be aflame. Why yes, that is another thing. When we examine our consciences at night, we must also ask, ‘Did I spend sufficient time in the Fiery Furnace today?’ It is so easy to forget these things.
‘Now the times become clotted and portentous. It is the second coming of Satan after his release from bondage. It has happened already, or it is happening right now. Some say that, if Satan is to be released, it seems most likely that he was released at the start of the First World War and that he was responsible for the bloodshed then and since. No, the blood so far is only a trickle to the blood that will come. What has gone before was only the Devil rattling the bars of his cage. Now he is out.
‘The millennium has already been here. The bolting of the door on the Devil was done quietly by Otto I of the Germanies at Aachen in the year 946. Later, but in the same year, the prisoner was transferred to another and faster prison. This was on the peninsula called the Euxine Chersonese, and modernly known as the Crimea on the Black Sea.
‘And you, Duffey, be in St. Louis the last week of May and I will give you your instructions for the rest of your life. That sounds pompous of me, does it not? It isn't though.’
[Henri Salvatore. Letter to Melchisedech Duffey.]
(This is the longer letter, the one that was not sent.)
‘The Argo Voyages are not merely something that we took part in many centuries ago. They still go on. This is our rich other life that continues in reserved places while we wake and sleep and wake again in this place which I call ‘The World of Record’.
‘There is one first instruction that we remember when we wake: “There are not any ordinary persons on the Argo; and such ordinary persons as you may find on the Shore must be reformed out of their ordinariness.”
‘Yes, we have with us King Melchisedech the Duff who was always intrinsic to our crew. A King on Land he was, but he was never Captain of the Crew except on a temporary acting basis when he took his regular turn of duty. His main assignment was always to activate us from any periodic sleep. Persons of other Holy Quests and Successes do sometimes fall into these sleeps, and they sleep until the end of time. Not so with us. We wake, and we wake again.
‘God bless our Crew. God bless our Ship. God bless this shore, which was named ‘The World’, until we go to sea once more.’
[Dotty Yekouris.]
5
Teresa Piccone was a delight. She was all kindness and clairvoyance and charm. She was one of those sly-eyed, urchin-grinning, gray-stone-carved Blessed Virgins who broke out all over Northern Italy in the latter part of the Tenth Century. Whatever forgotten rooms or forgotten grounds they are dug out of, they have a shouting freshness as well as a mossy sense of absurdity on them. It was almost certain that there was some moss growing on Showboat Piccone, for she was an Earth Creature. Green moss growing in the corners of her eyes, yes. It is quite certain that there was star-sparkle growing all over her, for she was a Heavenly creature. There was no reason for Duffey to be ashamed for his workmanship in her or for her electric presence. This Showboat had great compassion and affection for her scenarist in the human comedy, for her maker Melchisedech Duffey. And she was the finest thing that the talented Duffey ever did.
And Vincent Stranahan — Oh, he was the young man that this Teresa was marrying. He was the best friend of Finnegan. He was the best friend of almost everybody. He was brilliant, of course, since he was one of Duffey's Animated Marvels, but he may have been the least brilliant of the bunch. It would be close, between Vincent and Casey and Mary Catherine. And yet he was outstanding by any other standards. He was so outstanding that Duffey could say to his old friend, Vincent's father Patrick:
“They don't make them like they used to, Patrick,” this to that huge and somewhat weed-grown father. “They make them a lot better now.”
“I know it, Duff, I know it,” Patrick Stranahan said.
And then there was Finnegan. Finnegan had all the goodness (what an odd, what an only word for him!), all the preternaturalness, all the monsterness of his father Giulio. He hadn't quite the sheer and shocking ugliness of appearance that had belonged to his father; he didn't have the great bulk of his father; he hadn't quite the same roaring protest under torture: he may not have suffered such abysmal tortures, though he had suffered. Finnegan believed himself to be half Human and half Teras; but it's only to the narrow vision that there's a difference between the Human and the Teras. Only in a manner of speaking are they different. There are, to one who sees with open eyes, half a dozen such nations of the one and intermingled people of God.
It was hard to come onto the essence of this Finnegan who was as quicksilverish as Teresa. It was Finnegan who explained to Duffey (probably at their first meeting over the one hundred oysters) the difficulty of finding the essence of any person.
“We had a great and high-ranking analyst,” Finnegan said. “He was of the equivalent of demiurge or archangel rank, and he was examining a contrary and powerful person to discover the essence of him. Duffey, he dissected that person, and stripped down the layers of him as if he were a Duffey onion. He took the hide cle
ar off of that fellow and threw it into a corner where it glimmered and glowed with its electric aura pulsing and throbbing about it. ‘Why do they put so much wrapping on them?’ the analyst asked. He unstrung and removed the limbs, and he decided that they were not essential. They looked somewhat like giant limbs and somewhat like statuary limbs as they lay there. The analyst took out all the viscera and decided that they spent a very long journey to go a short distance; he decided that they weren't essential either. He removed all the organs and lights from the person's cavity, and he could find no essence in them. He took out the brains with their dangling cords. He discarded it all, layer after layer and wrapping after wrapping. ‘We've got to be getting close to the essence of it,’ he said, but he wasn't. When he unwrapped the very last portion, he found that it was all wrapping with nothing inside it. He hadn't found the essence. The whole thing had been an empty jug wrapped in primordial straw.
“But, in the middle of the night, he got up and went to the dissecting chamber where he had unwrapped the man. ‘I must have left the light on in there,’ he said, but he hadn't. And yet there was a light. The whole scattered thing glowed with light. So the analyst wrote a note to himself ‘Examine, tomorrow, whether there was not an essence somehow diffused through all these wrappings themselves. This light has got to come from somewhere.’
More Than Melchisedech Page 22
