Nights of protest and rage: we are paying the price

 

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….

 

From “The Second Coming”
William Butler Yeats

 

I remember when I first read this intensely prescient poem by the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. It was almost exactly 50 years ago to the day. I was a 19-year-old English major in college battling depression and a sense of failure after ignominiously having to leave my first college and transfer to the large public university in my hometown of New Orleans. I, an honor student in high school, was in danger of flunking out at a school where just about everything that could possibly have gone wrong academically, did go wrong. The Vietnam War was still raging. I had missed the draft by a just barely high enough lottery number , and college was the only thing middle class, privileged suburban kids like me aspired to. One of the worst and most tragic years in American history – 1968 — with its assassinations and riots, had blown past me during the time I was a conscientious, hardworking and well-mannered 17-year-old high school student. I was mowing lawns in that summer of unrest.

Then, in the Spring of 1970 a tornado of bad tidings bore down on me out of black clouds of misfortune and misery. Eager to try to redeem myself after that disastrous failure of a first semester, I started tackling my five courses with total concentration and determination to succeed. My fast-moving, highly motivated train was nearly derailed, however, by the worst possible roommate I could have gotten. His name was Doug, he was from New Jersey, and he had just returned from Vietnam, a bitter, jaded, cynical and paranoid young man of 24. He viewed me as pathetic “product”of a totally conformist society, made no attempt to understand me, and belittled me at every turn. He was into drugs and our dorm room was busted just before he was to receive a shipment of marijuana. But it wasn’t him they were after. The room’s prior occupants were the targets. They didn’t find anything except a tin of innocent brownies my mother had baked for me.

Of course, innocent, wet behind the ears me was horrified. I saw the downward spiral beginning again. I fled that roommate after six weeks, practically begging the dorm supervisors for a new room away from that messed-up vet who seemed intent on destroying me. Years later and today I have a much greater understanding of why he was that way.

I got my wish and found myself in another bizarre situation for the final four weeks of the semester, which I won’t go into. Suffice it to say, I got through all the ordeals barely, but I made it by sheer willpower and because I was so young. It was after that year that I developed severe and almost debilitating OCD.

So there I was struggling mightily to find my way and taking an introductory English lit course the summer after that most horrible first year. Chaotic anti-war protests bypassed my school. It was no hotbed of activism.
All I wanted was to get my college career moving in some, any direction. I didn’t want to be a failure in life, and college would be my lifeline, as it was for so many other males of a certain age who escaped the draft in 1969.

I can picture myself now in that literature class. The wizened old professor with the grey beard was near retirement. I could tell. I don’t recall much of anything about him or his instruction or lectures. I do remember writing a paper not on “The Second Coming,” but on a much calmer poem by Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The professor liked it.” I was thrilled by the “A” I got on the paper and his comment, “Pretty good paper, as I read it.” What a boost that was to my tattered ego. I did pretty well in the class. It was a turning point. The apocalyptic, jarring and utterly memorable words in “The Second Coming” went right over my head then. What was he talking about? What does a 19-year-old know about anything, anyway? Really. Ah, but later…. But as I keep hearing from time to time, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

The mental torment I had experienced that first year remained with me all through my college years to one degree or another, but by the end of my sophomore year I was coping much better and my junior year in the dorm was filled with good experiences. My senior year I found my first apartment near campus and I felt liberated.

I think the mental turmoil of my OCD must have made Yeats’ words stand out to me back then for, if nothing else, the sheer intensity and emotion the words were obviously meant to convey.

Now, 50 years later I read that poem again tonight, two days after my city and countless others were torn apart by riots following what were mostly peaceful protests to call attention to the horrific murder of a handcuffed black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis and three complicit fellow officers. Saturday night after a peaceful protest had broken up mere blocks from where I live, groups of violent rioters made their way up Our main shopping street with numerous new and chic restaurants, bars and hotels, smashing windows, entering restaurants and brandishing guns at diners who hadn’t been able to rush out back exits. No one was killed or injured, but it was a horrifying and shocking night of chaos, not far from where I live, with helicopters droning in the sky directly above me for hours. It sounded from above like a war zone. The next morning it looked like one.

Just as those businesses were trying to emerge from the pandemic, more frightening news and events. The racist fuses had been lit time again with killings by police of black men over the years, but this time it didn’t fizzle. This fuse exploded with the force of an atomic bomb.

Are things falling apart so that the center cannot hold? Is anarchy being unleashed upon the land by a president who encourages violence and hatred with weekend long Twitter storms? What is happening to us? Are the events of our history as a nation catching up with us finally?

A terrifying global pandemic, and now a plunging economy and level of joblessness that is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Is the end near? No one knows, but this time no one’s mocking the doomsayers. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” makes much more sense to me now, more so than a naïve 19- year/old could have ever imagined.

 

From “The Second Coming”
William Butler Yeats

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?

 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.