Tag Archives: W.B. Yeats

The falling centre

I’ve been absorbed in Jon Ronson’s BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, about the origins of the culture wars going on in the West, especially in the US. It uncovers misunderstandings, misrepresentations and conflations that have morphed into the polemics of our times.

Ronson was recently interviewed in the New Yorker where it was noted that the title of the podcast comes from the W.B. Yeats poem ‘The Second Coming.’ When questioned about the centre crumbling and if he was trying to achieve a centre, his answer included: ‘For me, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”—it’s a sort of human centre of being curious and trying to understand people’s perspective and look for the nuances. It’s not the centre that, to be honest, the centrists talk about.’

This resonated with me as in recent years I’ve struggled to call myself a left-of-centre person. Politically, as the right becomes the far-right, the centre is tilting towards the right. Socially, what was once left-leaning liberalism has edged towards the acceptable centre. I don’t know what left or centre are anymore. Ronson’s humanist and less political take on this is a far more comfortable space for me to inhabit. It can also be found in Buddhism and in the self-therapy promoted by Judson Brewer (who helps people overcome anxiety and addiction). Both are integral to my daily life – my ‘practices’ as I call them. Yet, until I read Ronson’s comments, I wouldn’t have seen them as a kind of centrism – but now I do.

What I’ve been reading

Mostly, things Italian, though not intended to be a thematic spell of reading. Filling a gap in my George Elliot education, I thought I’d give Romola a go. It’s not her best work, written when she was steeped in philosophy and translating Spinoza, the novel comes off as a vehicle for ideas and debates rather than the evolving narrative and character study I would expect. It’s set in 15th century Florence and has been praised for its historical detail. Readers might also find it enjoyable in a nerdy way for its use of Latin and Italian.

A much better read was Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults (translated into English by Ann Goldstein). Set in Naples and its environs like most of Ferrante’s work, the protagonist is a teenage girl dealing with her parents’ divorce, interfamilial feuds and the onset of womanhood. It’s full of memorable and gently humorous characters and renders deception into a truly creative act.

This Italian journey ended with Robert Harris’s Conclave, set in the Vatican during the election of a new pope. It has the intrigue that one would expect from Harris, along with his attention to liturgical detail and in this case a seasoning of Latin, culminating in a cracking good ending (I’ll stop myself there as this is a non-spoiler zone).

To close, and having nothing to do with Italy, the death of N. Scott Momaday last week has had me reading his poems again. Masterful.

Brexit, Trump and W.B. Yeats

Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ has had a revival over the past year or so. With reactions to Brexit and Trump, the poem was quoted more in 2016 than in the total of the previous 30 years. (Wall Street Journal and Factiva).

 

Now here we are in 2017. So far, Brexit has unleashed a rise in hate crimes, economic uncertainty and feelings of general incomprehension in the UK as ‘things fall apart’ and as we watch as ‘the centre cannot hold.’ In Trump’s America, a ‘blood-dimmed tide’ is both present and inevitable as mass shootings are condoned and conflicts overseas are rekindled with heated rhetoric.

But what is to come of all of this? I revisit the poem:

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 to be born?

Written in 1919, soon after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, this work reacts to the horrors and violence of such conflicts. More importantly, it expresses apprehension over what is to come. Over the years, many have seen this poem as an accurate premonition of a second coming in the form of an anti-Christ – Adolph Hitler. As has been pointed out by many in the press, the present day holds startling parallels to pre-War Germany, with the rise of nationalistic propaganda and untruths capable of seducing millions.

Yet, I feel the need to put this into perspective. Others have alluded to this poem over the years. Joan Didion’s collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Night Ride Home’ are among the many works to keep this poem alive. These works were written long before Brexit and Trump and each with their own political concerns and fears at their time.  Seen collectively like this, I do wonder if the recent malaise – the far-right, the hate crimes, the nationalistic fervour – are all part of a tide that will inevitably ebb back to something perhaps different, but manageable, less worrying.

Yet, the recent surge in quoting from ‘The Second Coming’ is still significant in itself. Most of these allusions can be found in the press, where the educated, the so-called ‘urban elite,’ dwell. As recent investigative reporting and British and American government enquiries are starting to show, it was the elite class of billionaires who indirectly funded both Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaigns. Both employed social media, which spread into mainstream media, to disseminate their propaganda and untruths. The response to this has come, during these campaigns and even more now, from the true masses – the urban and educated. We are the ones seeking to understand what is going on, turning to Yeats en masse. In our bewilderment and fear, we ask if what we have witnessed is a sign of the ‘rough beast, its hour come round at last.’