William Butler Yeats and the Politics of Enlightened Agoraphobia
Phil Mershon
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed in the ultimate synthesis of paradox, that the past is contained within the present. Fiction writer E. B. White declared that everything is something it isn’t and everyone is always somewhere else. Pop singer Harry Nilsson opined that everything is the opposite of what it is. While I am willing to concede that philosophers, writers and rockers can all be wrong, even at the same time, it just so happens that this time they are all right. This situation would be of no particular interest were it not for a string of incidents compressed into only a few days which collectively convinced me that not only have we as a society tripped ass over teakettle down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass, we have left terra firma behind and signed onto an interstellar flight captained by Wrongway Peachfuzz. This realization left me sick and bedridden for the better part of a week. The least I can do is explain.
The first incident began while my friend Amber and I were talking about the interconnectedness of humanity. This brought to my mind John Donne’s “No Man is an Island ,” parts of which I recited with the intent of impressing my lunch companion.
She drew back her head and laughed. “The atheist believes we are all one?” she asked, giving me her patented slippery when wet grin.
I replied in all naiveté that nonbelievers can be just as committed to high moral precepts as anyone else and more so than some. She continued to stare and mentioned that while humanism does not reject the notion of ethical interdependence, it does not necessarily embrace it either.
I had to admit that was an excellent point. I changed the subject.
Incident number two was a collage of telephone calls I received over the next few days from people to whom I had not spoken in a long time. Among these people were former girlfriends, one-time coworkers and assorted erstwhile clientele. It was odd enough to hear from seven people in only a few days. The fact of being contacted by seven people who at one time would have found it hard to deny that they wouldn’t have pissed up my ass if my guts had been on fire was completely off the wheel. Some of them said they didn’t know why they called while others mentioned that they had been wondering about me, and one, Heather, screamed that I was still detritus and slammed down the phone.
The final incident happened half a month after the first. I had been having a dandy fine time with a professor friend at the library one afternoon, rapping on about various theories about the identity of Shakespeare, the hidden meanings in Raymond Chandler’s novels, and the best place in town to get a hamburger at three in the morning, when all at once we noticed the place was getting set to close and I was due to meet up with some far less interesting folks. The professor gave me a ride to the Irish pub where all the so-called fun was scheduled to happen. Before getting out of his car, I said, “Most of the time I would rather read a book than interact with other people.” He shook my hand and wished me luck.
I had not been to this bar in ten years. I noticed immediately that someone had dusted off the chairs. The electronic dart boards flashed and whistled, something that could not be said for the slack jawed patrons, transfixed as they were with the rims of their mugs. The carpet, which I got to know quiet well, smelled as if it had previously been used to line the bottom of a tuna boat. Names of various clans were scrawled on one wall. A woman who looked like she might have been born around the time of the Great Potato Famine draped herself over one end of the record machine. The bartender, a lad of about twenty-two, wore a set of baggy jeans, a company t-shirt and a fedora. I met my friend Jason up at the bar and we drank beer.
Looking behind myself in the bar mirror, I noticed at some point that everybody in the place was white. The joint was Irish, so at first that didn’t seem all that surprising. But thinking about it, I realized that every time I’d been to this bar—maybe forty times over the years—each and every customer had been Caucasian. This came to mind because someone played a Bob Marley song on the box and I told Jason that the only reggae act this crowd ever heard of was singing "No Woman No Cry." Marley is acceptable to the Wonder Bread demographic who think all that moaning and chirping is as good as it gets, primarily because they’ve never been exposed to Toots and the Maytals, I-Roy, King Tubby, or any other Rastafarians south of Houston Street
Before the song was over, the pool table opened up, so Jason and I grabbed cues and sized up the green felt. The table still had a very slight bow in the middle and no one had lacquered over the word “Louie” carved into the varnish. Jason and I drank shots of Patron and could not help but notice that the most attractive people in the place were the six lesbians who were watching us play. “Diversity at last!” I brayed at them. “Who wants to shoot some stick?”
Partnered up, we all danced around the table, mocking the Coldplay song someone, probably the rotund oldster, had punched up. One of the women (I recall she wore a discreet tattoo of a cat on the back of her neck) called Jason a barnacle, a remark which offended him for reasons I cannot fathom. All in all, our group was a real hoot and very relaxed and free flowing. I did notice that the bar owner, Jimmy, kept giving us the greasy eyeball, but I didn’t care.
Of the six women, Rachel and Kim were the most outgoing, possibly because they were out-drinking their friends three to one. Sometime during the second shooting match, Kim disappeared into the ladies room. After fifteen minutes Rachel went to check on her. Three minutes after that, I decided to check on them.
Kim had passed out and her lips were blue. The paramedics said it was alcohol poisoning. They plopped her on a gurney and I escorted the muscular medics out through one of the bar’s two exits. They drove her to the nearest hospital where, I later learned, she made a complete recovery. On my way back into the bar, Jimmy, who was perched on one of his own barstools, blocked me with his arm and said, “Next time, take them out the other door.”
I should admit that while I have never liked Jimmy, even now that he is dead, until that very moment I never considered him an idiot. He then compounded the lunacy by adding, “Because if you don’t, I’ll kick your ass.”
The ridiculousness of all this was just too much, so I just shrugged and kept on walking in the direction of my seat. “Do you think I’m kidding?” he spat, hopping off the stool and clenching his fists. He was a little guy, just a bit over five feet tall and the capillaries between his nose and ears had prematurely ruptured. I thought he was going to take a swing at me so I stepped up and said, “I don’t think about it that much.”
I had had all the incongruity I needed for one night, so I rejoined Jason and we drank vodka Redbulls. Jason asked what had happened. I told him and, in the process of doing so, apparently referred to Jimmy with a popular synonym for “genital licker.” The bartender, who I must admit had very good hearing, leaned in and told me not to say that ever again because this was Jimmy’s house.
With the beautiful lesbians gone, the fun had vanished, so we left. Jason’s wife picked him up. I walked the twelve miles back home where I ate some spoiled peanut butter and couldn’t get off the couch for six days. I was temporarily certain that the world as we know it and sometimes love it had come to an end and that I was in my own personal purgatory awaiting some type of malevolent apocalypse which would sweep me into a hideous mass of swarming humanoids, each nastier than the next, pitchforks flying and blood a-flowing. This was actually nothing more severe than the worst and longest hangover of my life, but the celestial overtones seemed palatable.
It has been said that one definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior and expecting different results. Just in case that is true, I am staying clear of bars. I am also avoiding people I do not like, or am not apt to like, which accounts for ninety-five percent of the people I know. In fact, my next project is to develop some way that I can live without ever leaving my house. When I emerged from the aforementioned mental fog I remembered that much of the time the prospects of being around other people fills me with what Lester Bangs called the dominant emotion of our era: dread. When I explain this to others, someone invariably suggests that I may be agoraphobic, but I like to think I am more discriminating than that. There remains, after all, that five percent of the population who do not leave my flesh sweaty, my breathing labored, and my mood claustrophobic. For me the sense of dread emerges from a revulsion of interacting with people whose minds the consumer culture has transmogrified into a poppy knoll of psychic receptors screaming for more needless merchandise. These are often the very same people who insist how enlightened they are and yet are helpless to explain why they own two hundred fifty-three pairs of shoes.
Not everyone who hates going out in public is responding to the materialist aesthetic. Some no doubt are seriously mentally ill. The rest, however, are transformed to a greater degree than others by societal events which for at least the last one hundred years have lurked around every corner. Often these conditions lead to emotional paralysis. In a pocket full of situations they produce great art.
With the possible exception of September 11, 2001, every significant manmade catastrophic occurrence since the early Twentieth Century has evoked art that explicates the emotional reality of the tragedy better than the best narrative retelling ever could. Our war adventures vomited out inhuman malevolence with such predictable and numbing intensity that responses such as Picasso’s Guernica, Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down, and Altman’s M*A*S*H changed the way these events were re-experienced.
The Twentieth Century saw an abundance of art prophets declaring the nearness of the end. An easy example from poetry is Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” For spellbinding fascination, no novel has exceeded Stephen King’s The Stand, although Tim LaHaye has tried with his idiotic Left Behind series. And several obvious examples from popular music are Bob Dylan’s "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," The Doors’ "Roadhouse Blues," Prince’s "1999," Elvis Costello’s "Waiting for the End of the World," and best of all Jackson Browne’s "Before the Deluge."
Some of them were angry at the way the Earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power.
And they struggled to protect her from them, only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour.
Even Woody Allen boarded the Dread Express in Annie Hall. As a child, the film’s narrator explains to his mother that the universe is expanding and will eventually break apart. As a result he refuses to do his homework. “What’s the point?” he asks.
Despite these and other contenders, nowhere has the foreboding sense of tribulation been more powerfully articulated than in “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats to which it is my pleasure to at last focus our attention.
The poem was completed in 1919 and published the following year in Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Composed of only two stanzas, the first of which being a solitary sentence, the poem requires no contextual cognition for its power. A reader unaware of the historical, psychological and mythological references can still find “The Second Coming” and its frustrating images as disturbing as anything in modern popular culture. Conical spirals spin without passion, the beasts of the earth no longer submit to the will of man, corruption abounds and apathy enables. The cause is clear: The Messiah is back in town. But this return engagement (or Second Advent, as the poet himself sometimes coined it) is not the Prince of Peace. This rough beast on its way to the Christian Holy Land where its reanimation will be complete is a different kind of Messiah. This is not the Redeemer. This cat comes to destroy.
Distressing as this may be, the intensity of the story is enhanced with a deeper understanding on the part of the reader. Here then are some details. The momentum of the Soviet Revolution of 1917 rattled the walls of the world for over fifty years. It was fifty years hence that an effete snob and European aristocrat recounted: “Stuck around St. Petersburg/When I saw it was time for a change/Killed the Czar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain.” For that matter, the “Russian experiment,” as Freud called it, never really did end. It was certainly going strong when Vladimir Lenin employed defeatism by surrendering to the Germans while the White Russian czarinas utilized the borborigmus rumblings of European fascism. These hungry purveyors of extremism guaranteed a return to order and stability, a prospect that the poet Ezra Pound, among others, found comforting.
Now to me (and I hope to you) that is pretty interesting because Pound and Yeats (along with Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot) are often heralded as intellectual poets and yet the appeal of fascism has never been to cerebral passions. Critic John L. Waters claims that the oblivious falcon reacting to the widening gyre is a metaphor for all the young whelps who have turned away from the old beliefs to embrace a new way of creating things. But then his analysis believes the relationship between the falcon and the falconer is akin to the intellect ignoring the imperatives of the body, a position which disregards Yeats’ view of history, one which he formulated in A Vision (1925), saying (approximately) that history is conceived of two overlapping cones, always in geometric opposition to one another so that as one widens, the other closes in. Jon Stallworthy writes that:
In the symbol of the falcon, the falconer represents control but stands at the lowest point of the gyre’s apex, so that, as the falcon towers higher, it can no longer hear the controlling centre.
Pointing out that the falcon in the text was originally a hawk, Richard Ellmann extends the silly intellectualism argument even further by insisting that the presence of the falcon approaching oblivion suggests the way that man has been divorced from the security of his own ideals. Both these views are desperate in their reach and ignore the Alpha-Omega-Genesis-Revelation Testament dogma versus New Testament idealism of the poem. In the beginning, God gave Adam dominion over the beasts and birds, but on the day in which Yeats expresses himself, nothing is subjugated by man. To borrow again from the same Rolling Stones song, “Every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints.” The universe, as predicted, breaks apart. The center, indeed, does not hold.
Biblical allusions explode out of this poem like antiballistic missiles. The title itself and the beginning of the second stanza harkens back to Matthew 24: “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders. . . .For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together. . . .Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened.” Daniel 7 prognosticates the demons: “And four great beasts came up from the sea. . . and they said thus until it, Arise, devour much flesh. . . .It was dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly.” And Ezekiel 1 draws the impending creature: “Every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. . . .and they sparkled like the color of burnished brass.” Revelations, of course, is full of nightmare visions of the ascendance of The Beast, followed by the ultimate return of Christ, one of the two of whom, it is unclear which, has the words “King of Kings, Lord of Lords, tattooed on his thighs.
The mere anarchy loosed upon the world is the ultimate aim and means of the Russian Revolution, Yeats intimates. Whether the poet considered the similarity of sounds in the words “anarchist” and “antichrist” is unknown, but the sixty years later the Sex Pistols caught it. “Don’t know what I want/But I know how to get it/I want to destroy/Passersby.” While this song was crowed by a man who called himself Johnny Rotten, Yeats finds himself in the role of John the Servant, our humble narrator in Revelations. Neither Yeats nor the Servant nor Johnny Rotten necessarily understands everything they see—at least initially. In the Yeats’ poem the vision comes out of mankind’s collective unconscious. The desert sphinx travels a slow and deliberate path. The birds scatter. Then it hits the narrator: Christ’s half-brother is Dionysus! Two thousand years after the original Messiah, the tribulations are at hand. Surely the Christ of Revelations shares little with the Christ of the Beatitudes. No, in this war the innocent and guilty perish together. The rough beast with the power to deceive even the best and brightest slouches fetus-like on its journey to birth. The only thing that can crush the ensuing anarchy, Yeats apprises, is the hard and fast iron fist of fascism, a movement that was then dragging its knuckles on the soil of Italy , Germany , Spain and even Great Britain
Esteemed critic Harold Bloom doesn’t buy any of this and that bothers me because I generally agree with him and have always feared that he was far more intelligent than I. He takes the poem and the Bible literally and points out that Revelations makes no explicit mention of Christ’s return (or the Beasts) occurring in Bethlehem USA Italy a fat Benito who called himself Il Duce was spinning deals with the Vatican
“The Second Coming” is, in the final analysis, Prophecy, an entirely appropriate response to the early days of the Twentieth Century. Two thousand years into the Aftermath, a lot of false Christs had come to prominence: Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Robert DeGrimston, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Osama bin Laden, among other strange visionaries, each offering his own version of the Testament. Each capitalized on what John Harrison said, referring to Yeats’ poem, that society was in disintegration and what Yeats really wanted was cohesion. I would add, he wanted a cohesion of the loins.
Yeats had read a lot of Nietzsche and the predictions of the latter’s Ecce Homo (revolutions, anarchy, reanimation) seemed to manifest everywhere. The phrase “the ceremony of innocence” is the bourgeois concept of divine rights, in this case drowned by the emerging red tide of Bolshevism. What Yeats shared with Nietzsche was the belief that the inherent weaknesses of the New Testament religion brought forth mankind’s downfall. Christ’s reign was about to be replaced by the blind destruction of egalitarian anarchy.
At the same time that Yeats was creating this poem, he was tying together his own philosophy of life, death, and the beyond. As I mentioned, the first version of A Vision appeared in 1925. Yeats wrote a second edition thirteen years later. By sharing his view of the nature of things, he hoped some insight might be gained in deciphering “The Second Coming.” As a mater of fact, so far removed from even the most determined reader was the poet’s mighty brain that he constructed two volumes of essays to help people fathom it. While he did fail in his effort to make the poem inaccessible (which seems to have been his genuine, secret objective—nothing made Maud’s skin pucker like a poem no one could understand), he did provide some clarification about the historical context of the work.
We do not get far in his poem before we are introduced to the first obscure and troubling image. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre.” The gyre is the DNA, or more properly, the double helix of the universe. It is two spiraling cones, overlapping one another in reverse so that one’s apex meets the other’s nadir. The conception permeates all time and space in that it is representative of the human mind, of history, of the psychological unconscious, and of the Hereafter. One is always at some given point upon the spirals while always also in a state of constant motion, allowing that as one gyre narrows, its counterpart widens.
Yes or no, this leads to an explanation of the poet’s four principles of existence. The first is the celestial body, the earthly incarnation of a person. Within this first principle resides a faculty called the body of fate, implying the internal view of the outside world, a reality beyond the pale of the individual. Tied to this is the principle of spirit, which is to say the creative mind, the impetus for life. To me this impetus has been both rock and roll and jazz. To you, it may be a drawing your kid brought home from kindergarten or a painting hanging in a museum or whatever form carries you away from despair or dread.
The second principle Yeats called the passionate body. For the poet, this condition is a mask which displays what the person wants out of life. It is that collection of ideas and objects which humans see as good and moral. While this principle continues to exist after the human dies, it is dismissed between the second and third stages of the Afterlife.
The lowest of the four principles is the third, the one known as the husk. As the least permanent construct, it corresponds to the faculty of will, which is to say, the life force or ego.
Once a human enters the Afterlife, he or she must go through several stages while awaiting rebirth. The vision of the blood kindred is the metaphorical life passing before one’s eyes as the person begins to shed the husk of humanity. This is followed by the Return, which occurs as the spirit moves through the zodiac sign of Taurus, enabling the spirit to understand its preceding life. Over time the spirit passes through the stages of shifting, beatitude, purification and foreknowledge, traversing the signs of Gemini, Cancer, Leo and Virgo, respectively.
If Yeats’ views sound a tad involved, take comfort in knowing that this is only a simplified translation of his ideas. One of the more curious concoctions he developed with his wife George (yeah, you read that correct). Automatic script, as the two of them called it, is a condition of self-hypnosis or mediumship during which the conscious mind is void of any distractions, allowing the poet (or songwriter, or any other artist) to create from a spiritually unfettered point of view.
Yeats anticipated that mankind’s trip from one end of the historical gyre to the other would take 2000 years, demarcating the transition from one epoch to another with the exclamation of incredible violence, or in the case of “The Second Coming,” with the blood-dimmed tide. Two thousand years of Christianity closes down as the great wars of Armageddon rage along the spiraling mortal coil of history.
Neil Mann insists that Yeats wrote A Vision in part as a way to decode “The Second Coming.” Be that as it may, the only value the geometric loquacions add to the poem is a persuasion that its details are predetermined. The Bible is one source of this prophecy. Another is the empirical evidence of the revolution and repressions in process. And for those who remain unconvinced, Yeats developed his quasi-occult version of reincarnation.
Of course, the best argument is the force of the poem itself without all of what Steinbeck called “hooptedoodle.” The monster is on its way, ready to shed its husk and reveal its terrible beauty. Or in the words of John Kay, “There’s a monster on the loose/It’s got its head into the noose/And it just sits there/Watching.”
Nowadays our own sense of horror arises not from the Yeats-Nietzschean concept of the Roman Emperor Messiah, but rather from the false freedom of the marketplace. False freedom, to be sure, is another phrase for the word tyranny. The transformation of humans into consumptive units mesmerized by their own commodity fetishism yields symbols of presumed affluence. While this trend may be abhorrent to the numbers of my growing minority, Yeats did not mind the objectification of people. What he hated was the prospect that the rising degenerate middle class masses might want to join him at the table. When it came to fear of the marketplace, Yeats was an enlightened agoraphobic.
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