W. B.'s Gyre Is Still Spinning

Within a month of returning from Vietnam (July 1970) I began college courses at night at an extension of the University of Virginia in Arlington. I was stationed at a small military intelligence base just outside of D.C. for my final two years of Army time. 

It was in that environment, with my mind still interpreting the war experience, observing and struggling to understand all the social upheavals continuing on from their birth in the 60's, and taking pure joy in returning to the nurture of living with my true love, my soulmate, my wife, Phyllis, that I returned to the college education I had interrupted two years prior in order to unite with her in holy matrimony.

One of my first courses was English Literature. It was in that course that I discovered W. B. Yeats. He has been my favorite poet since then. The most powerful poem I've ever read was created by him, and I'm posting it here for you to read, because no other time in my life has seemed more relevant to that poem than the time we're living in now. He wrote it in 1919, just after the conclusion of WW1 and during the final months of the 1919 flu epidemic, while his pregnant wife, who had barely survived that pandemic, was convalescing from it. It fills me with as much holy dread now as it did the first time I read it:

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: 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?

W. B. Yeats

So, tell the truth, did you feel goose bumps as you read that last verse . . . even if, like me, you've read the poem a hundred times before. In these insane times, I often wonder if that "beast" is, even now, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born . . . if he, she (?), it (?) hasn't already been born, that is.

In addition to everything else, a cult of delusional fanatics believes that the most recent former U. S. President is still ruling America from the shadows; and they seem to be sprinkled everywhere: in Congress, in medicine, in law, in small town governments, in the military, in police forces . . . reminds me of the sequel to the original Omen movie in which Sam Neill starred as the antichrist. His followers were sprinkled throughout society like that. They were willing to kill people for him like that. They were willing to give up their reputations and even their lives for him like that. It would be too hard to believe it was real, except that we all saw it and are still seeing it played out in the news every day.

I hope you'll read my novel, The Four Rivers of Eden. Among many other things, it talks about the beast Yeats was writing about, in a more optimistic fashion than in his poem. More optimistic in that the people who are ACTUALLY following the TEACHINGS of Jesus succeed in beating the beast back down into his black hole. It's available from Amazon in E-Book or Paperback at www.amazon.com/dp/B07YGQHNK7 and while it is a novel, it would make an ideal book for a book club to discuss. The Four Rivers of Eden will make you feel better about your life in today's world, and will give you some understanding of how to navigate through it.