How Yeats echoes through our lives

Fallsapart is Sherman Alexie's website address. Things Fall Apart is the title of Chinua Achebe's masterpiece and also the title of the Mario Van Peebles' upcoming film about a football player with cancer, starring 50 Cent.

chinuaachebe.jpgSlouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion at her brilliant best. Dan Savage tips his hat to it in Skipping Towards Gomorrah.

When law professor Elyn R. Saks wrote about her illness - "paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation; prognosis: grave" - she titled it, The Center Cannot Hold. Paul Krugman went to the same well this morning to explain the problem with Obama:

Mr. Obama's attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction.
Fans of horror fiction know H. R. Knight's What Rough Beast. Even if they read few poems, chances are good they know where her title comes from.

Everybody's quoting William Butler Yeats, and not from the range of his work but from a single short poem published in 1919, The Second Coming. Nearly a century later, it has become the key to the millennial divide.

    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?

He even got the geography right. This is the problem with judging art by the artist. From his person - weak-willed, ineffective, given to flights of fancy (talks to faeries), holds grudges and doesn't hit his stride till he's past middle age - who would guess Yeats would become (on the basis of mere handful of poems) the most powerful writer in the English language since Shakespeare? 

Update: James Harris reminded me of Lawrence Lemaoana from the gallery's current show. (With admirable restraint, Harris did not add, How could you have forgotten this?)

Lawrence Lemaoana, Things Fall Apart, 2009 Textile 49 x 32 inches

lawrencelemyeats.jpg
July 30, 2010 10:36 AM | | Comments (1) |

1 Comments

By Banjo on July 31, 2010 9:13 AM

Easy to figure out the politics of this blogger.

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About

Another Bouncing Ball
This blog continues Art To Go, which I wrote as the art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, beginning at the end of 2007 and continuing through March 15, 2009. ABB is an exploration of art in Seattle that extends outward, both geographically and by topic, touching on art, politics, literature, dance and whatever it is that the cat drags in. Its title comes from a poem by Delmore Schwartz, The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, specifically, "The ground on which the ball bounces/ Is another bouncing ball."
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Regina Hackett ... is the former art critic for the former Seattle P-I. I loved that job every day, but it's gone and I've moved on. As they say in the movies, to infinity and beyond.
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Contact me Click here to send me an email, or email me directly at anotherbb(at)gmail.com. My mailing address is 300 Queen Anne Ave. N. Seattle, WA 98109
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This page contains a single entry by Another Bouncing Ball published on July 30, 2010 10:36 AM.

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