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Rant #243
(published September 8, 2005)
Yeats on New Orleans, from Beyond the Grave
by David Erik Nelson
In the days following Hurricane Katrina springing the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau from her crypt in Cemetery Number 1 in the French Quarter, I had a couple of lines of quasi-poetry stuck in my head:

All the best are silent
And all the worst run everything

For four days I couldn't place them—Bob Dylan song? Something in the middle of Ginsberg's epic "Howl"? A paraphrase of a verse from the Gospel of Luke? On the evening of the fifth day following the disaster, I finally realized what they were: The final couplet from the first stanza of Yeats' "Second Coming"; to whit:

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 convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(emphasis mine)

Having just listened to Mayor Ray Nagin tear the Federal Government a new asshole viz. the quality and quantity of federal rescue efforts in New Orleans, I couldn't help but find the entirety of Yeats' verse somewhat portentous:

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 convictions, 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?

I love this poem, and I loved the French Quarter of New Orleans, I loved the Preservation Hall and its jazz band, and every morning I awake to NPR on the clock-radio, and I just want to cry and cry and cry. Isn't this the poem of the last 5 years? The best lack all convictions, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity. In that final line, don't I see every looter, every shoot-to-kill National Guardsmen, every blogger hollering for Active Military to be deployed on U.S. soil? In that first, don't I see Hunter S. Thompson with a gun in his mouth? Sandra Day O'Connor stepping down from the Court? Don't I see well-meaning Democrats pulling punches and being civil and loosing in election after election? Isn't the President himself, his compassionate conservative neo-con war-mongering chicken hawks—aren't they all in those two verses?

The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Isn't Yeats saying to the world, to all of humanity, to himself, exactly what Ray Nagin is saying to the President? Hell, am I even (may I flatter myself?) part of that Best, who are lacking conviction? Or, as I write with copper in my mouth and vitriol in my gut, aren't I really the Worst, who is full of passionate, if impotent, intensity?

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees"? I find this hard to believe, only because my wife has written a book of poetry, the interlocutor of which—the unnamed Archivist—is a woman who was born in New Orleans but fled when the city sank to the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea. Again, this reminds me of 9/11, when "No one could have imagined terrorists flying an airplane into a building," despite the fact that I can think of no fewer than three novels that end with that very scene (e.g.: Stephen King's Running Man, Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor and, predictably, The Turner Diaries), despite the fact that a hip-hop album was pulled from record store shelves in the week following 9/11 because its cover depicted that very scene—presciently photoshopped into existence—despite the fact that my mother, a gallery director, had to pull a piece off of her gallery wall that morning, a collage, which showed the Twin Towers in flames.

No one imagined this. No one but poets.

Are we artists the Best, lacking all convictions? Or are we the Worst, full of passionate intensity? And, the question that sounds most flip but is most serious: Do we, in our vivid imagining, in the fever dreams in which we live, somehow draw these horrors into being?

Did my wife call the waters down on New Orleans? Did Stephen King draw flight 175 into the World Trade Center?

But, I guess the real question, the question behind the questions is this: Even today, even amid rumors of cannibalism, New Orleans is worlds better than, for example, Darfur is on its best day. I can talk about how terrible what's happening in the Sudan is, but I don't actually feel anything about it. My heart is cold. Banda Aceh? Same story: I don't really feel anything at all; maybe mild curiosity. Maybe the strange glow that is a residual reflection from the awful glory of nature, an awe at what happens, at the strength of pressure systems and water vapor, the compression of waves across the ocean. But New Orleans, I think about New Orleans, and my hard fucking heart breaks.

I reload blogs and click on picture after picture after picture, punding, going through the gross gestures of finding something, of doing something useful, but really only counting the useless, secular rosary of running down the clock. Running it down to what? Running it down 'til the end of this round, 'til the next Terrible Thing that monopolizes our attention by helping us focus on feeling bad for ourselves, for our own nail-parring of loss in the midst of some catastrophe. Realistically, no more Preservation Hall probably means more to my heart than 10,000 of my countrymen's corpses on the Mississippi Delta.

The real question, the question behind my questions, is "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

The real question is "What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

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