That the Witch of Atlas Knew

"Under Ben Bulben" (1939)

II. 

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger's toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men

Back in the human mind again. 

VI.
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

(-- William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939).

Today's Rune: Harvest. 

The Spanish Civil War

'The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 was a class war, and a culture war. Competing visions of Spanish identity were superimposed on a bitter struggle over material resources, as the defenders of property, religion and tradition took up arms against a Republican government committed to social reform, devolution and secularisation . . .'

And so begins Frances Lannon's masterful, even-handed volume in the Essential Histories series: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Osprey, 2002), page [7].

When the majority of people in any nation, region or even village fail to find and hold some kind of acceptable common ground, there is always a tendency and danger that they'll instead fissure and then harden into monstrous, sharp-edged and pitiless warring factions, separated by a No Man's Land filled with spitting hatred and exploding land mines. 

If the "centre [center] cannot hold" (as W. B. Yeats phrased it in his 1919 poem, "The Second Coming"), beware, for 

'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.'

Which brings us back to Frances Lannon's The Spanish Civil War, 1936-39: 

'It would . . . be difficult to exaggerate the significance of the civil war . . . Winning . . . was the precondition for shaping the future of Spain, and losing it meant political, economic, cultural and even physical exclusion from that process . . .' page [7].

More details in a future post, I suspect, but until then, the end: 

'Postwar Spain would be Franco's Spain . . . The postwar repression removed tens of thousands of opponents of the new regime by execution, and more by imprisonment. Others fled into exile. The dictatorship was determined to make the peace a continuation of the war by other means. . .' [Ibid.]  

Thirty-nine years after Franco's rise in 1936 came his death in 1975. Thirty-nine years after Franco's death in 1975 came . . . the year 2014.  

Today's Rune: Flow. 

Bad Hair

Third time's a charm: saw No Country for Old Men (2007) on a screen large enough to pick up more of the Coen Brothers' meticulous attention to detail.  Thoroughly enjoyed it -- the story, the framing and themes including luck, fortune, fate, and the sometimes shifty nature of both good and evil.  It's a pleasure when artists can pull off the subversion of easy expectations and formulas with seeming ease. Source novel: Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005). Title source: William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1926, 1928).

Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.  












Javier Bardem as the "ultimate badass," a relentless hitman with memorably bad hairdo -- Anton Chigurh. The film is set in 1980 along the Texas-Mexican border.  

Today's Rune:  Breakthrough.  

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Le déjeuner des canotiers / Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Saw this up close about twenty years ago, and stood in amazement at its vibrancy. It's pretty big, about four feet by five feet plus some.

The Phillips Collection showcases a lot of works, ranging from Goya (I remember standing in amazement before anything by Goya) through bigtime French and American paintings. If in DC, it's just about as good or better than anything else one might want to see there culturally. Website link: http://www.phillipscollection.org/











Also in DC, there's the amazing Corcoran Gallery of Art, where the above painting is housed: John Sloan's Yeats at Petipas (1910). This is about half the size of Renoir's Boating Party. For more on the Corcoran, please see: http://www.corcoran.org/

Do you like one more than the other?  If so, why?  I have a definite preference, but like them both.

Today's Rune: Fertility.  Happy Birthday to my sister Vickie and several other peeps today!   (Note: Post title derived from Delmore Schwartz).

Down on the Street

Malcolm McDowell has a good part in HBO's Entourage, but his early films grabbed my attention first, way back in the day. My sister Linda "turned me on" to the bizarro Lindsay Anderson films If. . . (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973), and I've extolled Malcolm McDowell's charms and hold ever since. I guess it's because, like many lingering things, through McDowell's character, these movies carry multiple layers of delivery: dark satire, political and cultural expose, quirky humor, a flavor of the times, and the inimitable McDowell himself, anti-hero deluxe. Besides, in how many other movies does one hear modern references to Tom Paine? Freaky stuff, leading one to believe that McDowell the person is genuinely interesting and genuinely strange. Sandwiched in between these wicked gems came Stanley Kubrick's equally unsettling masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange (1971). Still unsettling even in a world awash with ultra-violence, when Palestinians model scenes from Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) to kill their enemies by tossing them off roofs, and disenfranchised American schlubs vent their frustrations in public displays of gunfire and mayhem. Life imitating art after art had its first glimpses at the shape of things to come.


Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Birthdays: Fanny Burney, James Clark Maxwell, Lucy Christiana Sutherland (Lady Duff Gordon), William Butler Yeats, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ben Johnson (Sam the Lion), Malcolm McDowell, Ally Sheedy.

Mere Anarchy Is Loosed Upon the World

When the US entered WWI in 1917, Woodrow Wilson, the country's president at the time, assured the American people that it would be the "War to End All Wars." We know how well that turned out. After all, the world has been such a peaceful happy place since 1918.

One of the great poems generated in the wake of the Great War (it wasn't called the First World War until a bit later -- who knew what was to come for sure?):


William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)

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?


Today's Rune: Harvest.

Birthdays today include those of James Joyce and James Dickey. And let's not forget Stan Getz.

Happy Groundhog Day!