Sadness has become a constant state.

The whole enterprise is going down. I wake up each day with Yeats’s lines in my head:

The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity

It’s the prefiguring of Catch 22. At some level I do lack conviction. I feel more forgiving than I used to. I feel more understanding than I was raised to be. I’d rather schmooze than fight. I can see more sides of arguments than I ever thought possible. But… The fanatics and ideologues make me want to cut their throats.

Where Yeats failed. He was an Irishman standing on a cliff. He thought that the “widening gyre” was something occurring below, an historical event he could somehow avoid. It’s a disease of poets. And even would-be poets. We think we’re just watching.

Maybe he knew better. Probably did. The chief attribute of a real poet is self hatred. The perception to realize all the darkest impulses, to feel them literally pulsing through your being, while knowing — actually seeing in some rare moments — what virtue might be.

Which means that The Second Coming is not a commentary on the 20th century. It’s a distillation of personal fury at one’s own self. Sorry. Here’s the whole thing:

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?

I console myself that he was Irish and I am Scottish, meaning I never ever give up. But when the best lack all conviction, as they do, and the worst are full of passionate intensity, as they are, I find myself slowly, gradually retreating. From everyone.

Then I reread the last two stanzas. Which whip my head right around. Stupid fucking mick. Only the Irish give up. The Scots always want to, beg to, need to, but we just can’t. Something slouching toward Bethlehem? Cut its fucking head off. End of poem.

The Irish have mastered the art of seeming surrender, the flight to other values, other worlds. Scots can’t do that. They just fight, no matter what, even if they’re certain to lose or get killed in the process. So, yes, the Irish are smarter and more lyrical. Why I love my wife so much. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t change myself. The battle, the war, is lost, our country is gone, and I can’t stop fighting.

Which means, I guess, to the eye of the greatest Irish poet ever, I’m one of the ones who is full of passionate intensity, even as I feel all my convictions fading.

Hmmmm. Maybe the poem isn’t about global civilization. Maybe it’s about each and every one of us. Can your center hold? And what would your own Second Coming be? Hell. Think for a change. Read the poem as if it were about you. Oops. Sorry. Even the old mick never thought of that. Mackerel-snapper bugger…

In my case I think I’ve had it. Don’t like it. But I’m adjusting. To the fact that we’ve had it. Sigh.