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 convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats 'The Second Coming' has been on my mind recently. I last encountered the poem while reading Stephen Kings apocalyptic novel, 'The Stand.' The lines, "The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," were penned by the colonel, whose hubris and negligence allowed a superflue to be unleashed on the world. The first half of the novel takes typical 1980s America and turns it into a wasteland of decaying corpses and paramilitary groups vying over the last pickings of industry. I think of it now, and have been over the last few months. Now, when we stand at what may be the fulcrum in American, excuse me, United States history, the apocrayphal lines, "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold," call out to be redressed.
As men we build and build, our entire lives spent in the act of creation, whether it be building a home, a business, writing an essay, and of course, the bearing of our young. And we are the builders. But there are destroyers as well, and sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference. For even an association of destroyers have created something. And yet, the centre cannot hold rebounds at us now in light of that fact. For as St. Augustine said:
"And even when men are plotting to disturb the peace, it is merely to fashion a new peace nearer to the "heart'' desire; it is not because they dislike peace as such. It is not that they love peace less, but they love their kind of peace more."
For though it can also be said, that such a peace, based as it might be, on the rapine of civilized society, is a peace, it relies on a permanent class of prey. For when the waste is completed, where can predators turn, but on themselves and each other for sustenence. We casually call dub this evil, and yet When there is no such dearth, it is commonly called the "circle of life" and is annointed by the holy water of accepted science. The prey far outnumber the predators, and typically the predators only kill the weak and the old. The strong survive, the weak perish, evolution moves on, unforgivingly. To quote from Stephen King, "The world moves on." Social Darwinism is the meeting of German nihilism and the ghost of American secularity. And though as a theory it originated on the continent, with the admirable Herbert Spencer, it did not reach it's full flourish until it was established on the giant laboratory table that was the New World. Spencer was a liberal, believe it or not, "If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state -- to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support." This is NOT the cause of the conservative, but indeed the words of an anarchist. The father of social darwinism did not suggest that to the conqueror go the spoils ... But here in the United States, the colonial experiment--the last gasp of mercantilism--social darwinism became the norm only after what remained of Austro-Hungarian eloquence migrated here in the bloody aftermath of two world wars. It has become the order of the day, for the conservative, who cannot believe in anything, to justify his own immorality with the righteousness of his own blunders. To him we say, "Don't you care if him you hurt is me?" To us, he replies, "The end justifies the means." To him we cry, "what are your ends?" We are hoping of course, expecting even to hear, "The end is a just society." But to our utter surprise, he answers honestly-- "No, the end is me." And we mourn, because we know he's correct. Our friend Henry Miller tells us:
"Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation."
He is a killer. He might not ever, actually hurt another person in his entire life. But the greatest killers in the world were equipped with pens or pulpits. His entire life is based on his own strength--and at the end of it, when he is "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," we hear him complain bitterly that no one cares about him, that "the world has moved on," that "kids today have no respect!" Can he not taste the bitterness of eating his own words--his own life. We are born into this world helpless. We end our lives in this life similarly, to live a life not somehow in the service of those who cannot help themselves can only be dubbed nihilism.
And yet, men do not make good prey. As we remember from "The Most Dangerous Game" Richard Connell's short story on the same subject, Rainsford escapes his predator! We must remember that men are not deemed weak by themselves. Nietzsche himself was not a well man, and a riding accident as a young man forced him into early retirement. And yet, the power of his pen, though likely underappreciated in his own time, still sets young (and old) hearts aflame. In fact, Nietzsche, who despised religion, oft complimented the Jews, on turning their 'weakness' into strength by maintaining solidarity. How is a man made weak? When he leads, or when he follows? When he acts, or does not? By what he can and cannot do?
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Some have taken it to mean, as Maynard Hutchins once wrote, that "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from an ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." And I agree, for it is so. Yet, it is also so for the other side. A lie is a simple thing to cover up when no one asks or pretends not to see, but any questioning must by necessity create another lie. And so the lie spreads, like an infection sometimes. For as it grows in size and power, it corrupts and eats away at the truth. One of my favorite Nietzschaen maxims begins, ""I have done that," says my memory. "I cannot have done that" says my pride, and remains adamant. At last - memory yields." Such is the danger we face today. However, our position is likewise filled with equal chance--equal chance that the yeast will die, and this pastry will flatten as the hot air leakes out. THe story of the matzoh is a telling one. The Jews did not have time to let the bread rise before they were forced to flee. So, the yeast died, and they did eat their bread flat. But perhaps the lesson of passover is something slightly more subtle than this traditional moray, perhaps, the flattened bread we eat reminds us that sometimes, we must examine ourselves and those around us. To take a second look at the hot air that surrounds us, to remember, that what we are is essentially points of matter spaced galaxies apart. To eat the Matzoh is to taste the wasteland. To taste in a single bite, layers upon layers of destroyed civilization: to remember what we have lost.
I said earlier, that we stand at the fulcrum. There are many ways to move a boulder, but one is a lever, and a lever requires a fulcrum. What is this fulcrum? With our boulder it is a stone a hundredth the size and weight of the boulder, placed just so. In our history, it is likewise a time and a place, just so, from which the whole thing can be shifted. And we are quickly approaching this time. When it became evident, as many here knew from the start, that the government was lying in its reasons and methodology, then it became evident that things would change. When a few tiny lies, magnified into a few thousand lives lost, trillions of dollars, and a stagnating economy reliant on foreign investment and labor, (much like Weimar,) the vast unthinking heart of this country would have to move. Our arteries are clogged with the fats of a thousand propaganda machines, advertisements, mindless entertainments and the basic fear of not 'going along to get along.' Which revolutionary said that men would not fight so long as they had something to lose?
We have the power now, to bring us back from the brink of this bleak prospect. The age demands violence, says Miller, and I ask what age hasn't? We must not capitulate! We must NOT give in, though our biology tells us, kill or be killed. We cannot! And we must show that this is not weakness but strength, great over-powering strength. As much as I despise it for its ritualistic potency, the old adage "What Would Jesus Do?" is the popular remedy for this age old curse. If the son of God, allowed himself to be tortured and executed rather than persecute his assailants, then we owe him nothing less! The science-fiction classic "Dune" by Frank Herbert puts it in a different light: the old witch holds a poisoned needle to the young man's neck, while his hand is placed in a box that simulates the burning of his hand to a cinder. Are you a man, or are you a beast, she whispers hoarsely in his ear, threatening him with the needle if he should draw his hand out of the fire. And though it pains him to feel the layers of his flesh peeling off and flaking away in the blaze, he does not submit to the pain. He rules his emotion and his fear, and is thus judged human. But this does not make him cold, nor does it make him bitter. Nor should it with us. The strength of civilization is judged not on cold Malthusian number crunching, or Mill's "the greatest good for the greatest number," but by how we judge the smallest, and the meanest of men. We must say, to the politics of hate and indifference, "Stretch out a helping hand to the fallen man to raise him, or shed bitter tears over him, if he faces ruin, but do not jeer at him. Love him, remember that he is a man like you and deal with him as if he were yourself, then shall I read you and acknowledge you" (Ivan Goncharov.)
We must do this, always as rememberance. Because our society would not be the first to have fallen. As the bombs destroy baghdad, and what's left of the Imperial City of Babylon, we must remember the lessons our forebears have written with costly, bloody, eloquence.
"The wise warrior must consider how ghostly it will be when all the wealth of this world stands waste, just as now here and there through this middle-earth wind-blown walls stand covered with frost-fall, storm-beaten dwellings. Wine-halls totter, the lord lies bereft of joy, all the company has fallen, bold men beside the wall. War took away some, bore them forth on their way; a bird carried one away over the deep sea; a wolf shared one with Death; another a man sad of face hid in an earth-pit." Anonymous, The Wanderer
I'll close with the second half of the Second Coming. Much more chilling than the first.
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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?