Alexandersmap

    Tag: William Butler Yeats

    • It’s the Zombies Who Burned the Witches

      “All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.” — William Butler Yeats

      I stumbled upon the social media rantings of an old college friend recently. I was shocked by the conspiracy theories being spouted, and recoiled at the gap that has developed between her worldview and my own. I’d tried to debate her before on her accuracy, but alas, she wouldn’t budge. Another college friend reminded me of the line they use when logic isn’t working: If you only knew what I knew. Right. If only…

      I understand better how people once burned witches. They were simply too devoid of experience to understand the things happening to them. When we know how to prevent smallpox or the plague, or to mitigate infant mortality or crop failure, we stop blaming the neighbor’s daughter who looked at us funny. We’ve entered a time when extreme opinions are paralyzing our progress, and it’s a direct result of the poverty of experience in the daily diet of so many. We’re all in danger of being burned at the stake as we look at these people who once seemed normal spiral into conspiracy theories fueled by an over-reliance on “Internet facts”.

      Have you noticed that all of the people living in the world’s intellectual centers perish in the zombie apocalypse movies? The survivors all move to remote walled villages with high walls and guns that somehow kill already dead people. In the real world, the zombies are the people building walls that close out contrary opinions and buying guns to fend off those who would dare cross them. We all agree that we must not become zombies, we just don’t agree on what a zombie actually is.

      In truth, I am conspiring—to keep hope alive. To help people find informational nutrition, and with it, to form better opinions. To seek experience beyond the walls, where insight lives. That pendulum has to swing back to consensus and shared beliefs some day, right? The alternative is to build our own walls, and doesn’t the world have enough of those already?

    • Water and Wine, Experience and Emotion

      “The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.’ Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from illusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions, with all the uncounted flavours of old experience, and it is necessarily an antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened by the experiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the cultivated man.” – W.B. Yeats

      “In vino veritas, in aqua sanitas” (In wine there is truth, in water health)

      Water is best when it’s moving. There’s a reason we seek out ocean swells and waterfalls. It taps into out desire for constant change, for movement and action. Stagnant water is usually associated with contamination and sickness. Moving water is associated with vibrancy and health. We seek the fresh and new in our lives for it is life itself.

      Wine is no good at the moment it’s poured into the cask. It must age and mature, and rise to meet its potential depth of flavor. The French call this process élevage, the progression of wine between fermentation and bottling. The term élevage also means procreation. It’s clear the French saw the connection between aging wine and human life.

      Water as experience, wine as emotion. A great life is a proper mix of experience and emotion, new and old. With that in mind, shouldn’t we seek out new experiences? Shouldn’t we mine our deepest thoughts and emotions and create something from it? We need both in our lives, don’t we? Experience to encounter the world, to wrestle with it in real time and find our place in it. Emotion to reflect on what we’ve seen and grow, and ultimately realize our potential through maturity and insight.

      Turning to the Latin phrase, we see that there’s a balance between the two. To be healthy (sanus) we must refresh our bodies with nutrition and hydration and action. To be wise (sapiens), we must learn from this experience, meditate on it and grow. Balancing the two is the key to a vibrant, fulfilling life.

      Slàinte Mhath!

    • Have Your Day

      Time drops in decay,
      Like a candle burnt out,
      And the mountains and woods
      Have their day, have their day;
      What one in the rout
      Of the fire-born moods
      Has fallen away?
      – WB Yeats, The Moods

      The Moods, as I understand it, are the messengers from God (God, in turn, is fire). Whatever your beliefs, there’s truth in the core message: time slips away drop by drop, and we all must pass. Whether a poet or philosopher or the woods or even the mountains themselves, all must “have their day”.

      Let us turn to old friend Henry and consider the phrase differently:

      “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream?” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      We get so caught up in life’s minor distractions that we lose track of the days slipping by. Shouldn’t we channel that inner fire and spend our lives in conceiving while we have this time? But wait! If even the mountains themselves eventually erode to sand, how can we be so bold as to expect a measure of immortality?

      This is why the concept of God and eternity hold so much meaning in our brief lives, we seek to understand the meaning of it all. Poets and philosophers and amateur bloggers each confront the brutal fact that we all must pass, and we don’t really have an answer for what lies beyond.

      So be it. But knowing that the track is indeed laid before us, shouldn’t we reach for our own measure of immortality, as fragile as it might be, and make a day of it? That, friends, seems to be the point all along. Have your day.

    • In the Dew of the Morn

      Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
      Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
      Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;
      Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
      Thy mother Eire is always young,
      Dew ever shining and twilight gray,
      Though hope fall from thee or love decay
      Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
      Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
      For there the mystical brotherhood
      Of hollow wood and the hilly wood
      And the changing moon work out their will.
      And God stands winding his lonely horn;
      And Time and World are ever in flight,
      And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
      And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
      — WB Yeats, Into the Twilight

      The dew of the morn must be reckoned with. It dampens everything, especially your bottom if you should sit down without wiping the surface dry before you land. But I love it for all that it reminds me of; early morning rows, waking up in a tent in some remote place, the first, wet cleats soccer games of the day for the kids when they were cherubs. That damp start is a new beginning, a hope you can cling to until it dries with the rising sun.

      My heart belongs to the morning. For all the grief I get about going to bed early, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I listen to the sounds of the woods as the world wakes up around me and honor Sirius as the last holdout stubbornly fading in a brightening sky. I know we all must fade in our time but why not try for brilliance until the end?

      My heart also seeks faraway places, if only to see what’s there when I arrive. Yeats has recurring themes of time and mysticism in his work. Mother Eire is alive with faeries and magic, and he stirs a dormant but not distant longing to visit Ireland soon. Come heart, where hill is heaped upon hill… don’t worry, I’m already there!

      Wanderlust is nothing new for me, and I often celebrate it here, but you’ll never be happy in this world chasing your dreams elsewhere. Life is right here, where you are. In the dew of the morn, with the world stirring and a cuppa too soon gone. So dry yourself off and get after it. For there’s magic in the air.

    • Beauty as a Gateway

      “I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves.” – W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

      We, born as we are with a shelf life, chase the divine. In big ways and small, putting yourself in the way of beauty is a gateway to the divine within our mortal existence. It’s why we stumble through muddy paths to find hidden waterfalls, wake in the deepest part of the night to make our way to sunrise vistas, and brave the sounds of the forest to dwarf our egos amongst the giants. In nature we encounter the divine, and in doing so coruscate an otherwise dim life with grace and wonder.

      Admittedly, some of us are schemers, carving out time in our lives for glimpses of the otherworldly. On a recent flight north I glimpsed a spectacular sunset above the clouds and cursed myself for not getting a window seat on the western side of the plane for that particular trip. We must be deliberate even with the mundane if we are to enter the gateway to the divine. That particular world of magic and light was meant for others to witness.

      It’s no surprise that Yeats was a fellow seeker. You can’t be a poet without first being a collector of moments of dazzling infinity. If there’s an afterlife, the westernmost reaches must get crowded with poets and philosophers lined up to see the green flash of another epic sunset. And if there isn’t an afterlife, shouldn’t we catch as many while we’re here as our time allows? Who’s to know until we get to whatever come next? But why risk missing out on the divine in our daily lives? Seek it now.

      It’s all around us, waiting for you to notice.

    • The Dew of the Morn

      Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill
      For there the mystical brotherhood
      Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
      And river and stream work out their will;

      And God stands winding His lonely horn,
      And time and the world are ever in flight;
      And love is less kind than the gray twilight
      And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
      – W.B. Yeats, Into The Twilight

      When you read Yeats you feel the old Druid blood stir within. We know this world, where the sun and moon whisper, and the wood and river and stream work their will upon us. We’re never quite right when we’re too far away.

      We all run calculations in our heads, figuring out our time and where we want to place ourselves next. We run the numbers, and they tell us to get back to what’s important as quickly as possible. The world piles atop you, scorning your hopes and dreams, reminding you of responsibilities and your time earned. Save such folly for another day, the voices say.

      The blood of the ancients beats in our hearts, you and me, and it has a different rhythm than this world at large. It grows restless and impatient with our stories of later and soon enough. What is hope but a deferred dream?

      Time and the world are ever in flight. There’s no catching either, is there? Our hope is in the dawn, when we walk out into the freshness of a new day and seek what’s been calling us all along. But the dew of the morn is drying with the rising sun, and soon our footprints will fade. Seize the moment.

    • Let Us Go Forth

      “What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.” – W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

      There is still a schemer in you and me, plotting escapes to faraway places and magical hidden nooks closer to home. There are still stories percolating in our heads, looking to escape into the world in mischievous stacks of words. For everything exists, and we do too for such a short time as this. We must explore it with the urgency that this brief life demands.

      We’ve all learned a hard lesson the last few years. The world isn’t fair, doesn’t care about your hopes and dreams, and far too many people believe whatever Machiavellian story someone else is spinning for them. Is there not worthier magic in this world that needs expression? We must explore the physical world, and swim the sparkling waters of the ethereal within our imagination while there’s still time.

      Have the mettle to rise above the dismal din. Fly, while we may, for the world is only a little dust under our feet. Go forth and bring its wonder back for all to see.