57K, 1995 Digital image based on a vision of Yeats, by Chris Wayan
Yeats's poem THE SECOND COMING has always impressed me, but troubled me nearly as much.
THE SECOND COMING
See, I always thought he was wrong, predicting a brutal post-Christian era, and using the Sphinx to symbolize it. Seems to me the rough beast he should have worried about is religious ideology itself--and its cheesy spinoffs, Marxism and Capitalism.
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 Comingl Hardly are those words out
When a vast image 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?
You don't think they're kin? Come on! They all promise a future heaven, if you'll just be tough and make someone suffer now (preferably someone else). Isn't that their history? Islam's conversion by the sword, Christianity's witch-burnings and support of empire... all in the name of Paradise. And how are capitalism and communism any different. Th-th-thaaaaat's progress, baby!
But the sphinxes in MY dreams (whether or not they hold paintbrushes like this girl) want a better texture for life here and now. They're unanimous who the "rough beasts" are: humans! Scary creatures... and haven't they always been? I welcome the beasts of the future. For the beast of the past--humanity--was no fun at all.
So I tranced out in front of the computer one evening and looked into Spiritus Mundi, or the astral plane, or wherever Yeats's visions came from... and what I got was THIS.
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