Poems I Journey With 4

W.B.Yeats, surely one of the greatest poets of all time who wrote in the English language, offers me so much artistic, literary, and dare I say it, spiritual sustenance, that my volumes of his poems are always well thumbed.  Therefore, let me offer the reader another of my favourites from his pen, here.  It is called, aptly enough, "The Long-Legged Fly."  There is something at once beautiful and somewhat gauche about the title as "long-legged" applied to any species suggests a certain ungainliness and a definite awkwardness in the first place. And yet the poem suggests a certain transcendent grace that builds its myth upon lowly nature; a certain extraordinary beauty that transcends the ordinary quotidian experience of life.

Long-Legged Fly

That civilization may not sink,

Its great battle lost,

Quiet the dog, tether the pony

To a distant post;

Our master Caesar is in the tent

Where the maps are spread,

His eyes fixed upon nothing,

A hand upon his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence. 

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts child,

That nobody looks:

Her feet practise a tinker shuffle,

Picked up upon a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence. 

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on the scaffolding resides

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence. 

Commentary

Something as beautiful as this poem simple defies commentary, and in so doing I am, in a sense being somewhat sacrilegious in attempting, as it were, to nail down the "sacred" experience of these well-crafted lines in more mundane words.  Despite that caveat, I shall try to express here, at least what this poem means to me, one solitary reader.  I love the scientific, very unpoetical term, a word, naturally enough, avoided by Yeats, namely "dolichopodidae" that describes that most cosmopolitan of fly families, namely that of the "two-legged flies." Apparently there are about 7,000 species of these flies at a conservative count.

When I read a poem I don't necessarily go in search for an exact meaning, for such an intention, to my mind, is sacrilegious.  In other words, I search for connotations more than denotations.  I have learnt to let a poem suggest meanings, obviously not outlandish and impossible ones, but rather more possible ones and as many of them as is reasonable.  In a sense, obviously, we will never know exactly what was in  the poet's mind when he wrote the poem, but we can make an educated guess anyway.

The refrain which marks the ending of each stanza is an amazingly powerful chorus that suggests the power of human reflection, awareness, concentration, meditation or contemplation from whose seeds all of civilization emerged.  It suggests that through this self-reflective power civilization emerges and is greater than the individual parts that go to make it up. Civilization and all its cultures transcend the individual.

Western monasticism and Eastern practices of Buddhism have always rated silence highly because silence is, as it were, the seedbed of creativity and wisdom.  Silence is also the seedbed of genius.  In the first stanza we meet the great Julius Caesar sitting in his tent looking into the distance, obviously pondering, with his eyes "fixed upon nothing."  In silence, he is obviously contemplating what he and his troops have as a goal.  The Romans were great conquerors, great men of action and one of the great builders of Western civilization.  Caesar needs to enter the realm of silence to garner inspiration for his conquests, to tap into his vision of future possibilities:

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence. 

In the second stanza we encounter the great Helen of Troy. Obviously, her beauty is directly conjured up in our minds by the lines:

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

These lines remind us of the lines from Christopher Marlowe's play, Doctor Faustus, especially these lines put in Faustus's mouth by the playwright:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium -

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Helen is the very essence of beauty, a beauty so natural and so rhythmic that she captures its quintessence in the gorgeous peasant girl that dances so lithely in the streets. Through her, Yeats seems to be arguing that all beauty is made possible as she is its symbol or emblem in Greek civilization.  The Greeks, obviously, with the Romans were the two great builders of Western civilization. In this sense, we may say that the first stanza is essentially about politics/military affairs, which lie at the physical foundations of civilization, while the second stanza is about aesthetics and the innocence of pure alluring beauty which is also another source of the creative spark that set civilization alight.  One could also maintain that this second stanza highlights or underscores the power of creativity in the realm of mythology.  

In the last stanza, Yeats contemplates the spark of genius that inspired one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance period, one Michel Angelo, whom he calls Michael Angelo here in this poem.  It is, as it were, the "Arts" stanza as it describes the painting of the Sistine Chapel.   To put it rather bluntly the poet's wish "That girls at puberty may find the first Adam in their thoughts" suggests that the power of Michel Angelo's depiction of the naked male form may entice them to have children.

Once again, genius thrives in silence and peace:

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Each of the three characters, one in each stanza, viz., Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy and Michel Angelo achieve transcendence, or an elevation to a higher plane, or a going beyond this physical world just as the long-legged fly defies gravity as it walks across the water.  Let us note here that the imagery in the last two lines, which function like a chorus from a song, is simply beautiful and so gently put because the long-legged fly can move across the surface of the water effortlessly, without disturbing it in the same way, as it were, that the genius of Caesar, Helen or Michel Angelo can move creatively from one idea to the next.

Michel Angelo, like Helen and Caesar, is inspired by a vision beyond him, some transcendent pull, as it were.  Aristotle called such a pull, a "telos."*

*A telos (from the Greek τέλος for "end", "purpose", or "goal") is an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle. It is the root of the term "teleology," roughly the study of purposiveness, or the study of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions.  See WIKI here.

Journal of a Soul 26

Order versus Disorder

Clouds over Baldoyle recently

Somewhere, sometime, long ago at the dawn of consciousness, which, I should imagine, roughly corresponded to the emergence of civilisation around the great rivers of the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt to China and so forth, there was a first great push for order among humans.  Humankind had begun to order itself, to create systems to help itself better survive in a hostile world.  Together, human beings could create and invent ever easier and better ways of surviving.  And so, progress was now possible with these first steps of co-operation. And so, indeed, prehistory gave way to history as civilisation after civilisation sought to record all their efforts at self-betterment, both successful and unsuccessful.

And today, we are the rich inheritors of multifarious cultures and we possess a sheer abundance of ever-expanding knowledge which has its foundations in those early cultures we described above.  Having been born in a relatively poor and young nation, namely Ireland, in 1958, I was, like my contemporaries exposed to very little new knowledge as it were – most of it was then contained in the written media and in the school books from which we learned our traditional school subjects. I recall well the arrival of the first television set into our little town of Roscrea, Co Tipperary in 1962 when I was only four years old. The National Television Service, RTE, was founded on January 1 that year.

And so as I grew up, the world became simultaneously and paradoxically both larger and smaller.  Larger, insofar as we would gradually come of age by learning through the medium of the TV how bigger and richer nations lived.  We would also desire the goods they had and to do the activities they engaged in.  We would want to travel more and experience and learn at firsthand what it was like to live elsewhere.  It became a smaller world, too, insofar as we are now beneficiaries of what Alvin Toffler long ago so aptly described as “the acceleration of change” in the early 1970s – so much so, indeed, that we can now call up any amount of relevant (and irrelevant) information at our fingertips through modern technologies such as smart phones and i-pads etc.

Obsessed with Information and with organising it

The Public Library, Baldoyle

In short, we are still obsessed with information – indeed, we might truly describe it as information overload – and we are equally obsessed with ordering that information into all its relevant categories and classes, subcategories and subclasses.  The web of knowledge gets evermore intricate as the world seemingly progresses.  Note the adverb here, as human progress is surely a matter of philosophical importance, and questions can indeed be raised as to what exactly progress consists in – thoughts for another post there, I should think. The internationally famous contemporary British professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling puts it thus, and many are wont to agree with the learned professor:

“The development of science and technology shows us that, as a species, we have grown clever; their misuse for war and oppression shows us that we have not yet grown wise.  Moral heroism is required for us to teach ourselves wisdom” (The Choice of Hercules, Phoenix, Orion: London, 2007, p.68)

Disorder breaks in

If you own a property you will realise how much maintenance is required and much if not all of it on-going.  Things naturally break down – The Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that.  As soon as a house is unlived in, nature begins to have its way all too quickly with grasses and weeds growing from every available crack and crevice.  In other words, we have to constantly labour to bring about order, and also to keep order in place lest it suddenly descend into disorder and chaos.

Meditation as a Coping Strategy

I remember one of my acquaintances remarking many years ago that no one gets out of life alive.  In spite of all our individual efforts to keep order in our individual lives we grow old and die.  The existentialists were keenly aware of this patently obvious absurdity at the very heart of the human predicament: - the self-project which each individual sets out to accomplish will come to nothing in the dust of our death.  Admittedly, collectively as a culture we amass mounds of information, much art, buildings of great architectural value, languages, the intricacies of mathematics and sciences of all types as well as the more creative stuff of poetry, novels, drama and so forth.  And yet, as individuals we come to nought.  This was at the heart of Irish National Broadcaster, Marion Finucane’s interview with the dying writer Nuala O’Faoláin some two years back.  Nuala was heartbroken, she said, on learning that her death was imminent because all the order and shape she had built up in her individual life would now simply become nothing – all the facts she had learned, all the experiences she had gained, all the insights, the teeming brain, the languages, the literature, the writings, the music she so loved, the art, her three or so apartments, her wonderful friendships, her next writing task – all gone, forever, dissolved into nothing as her individual life, her little selfhood of her own creation, was snuffed inexorably out.  That, indeed, is the human dilemma, the existential condition under which we all live. 

And yet, meditation is only too aware of this. After all, it was Siddhartha Gautama’s (the Buddha) own lived dilemma, too, how to deal with suffering in all its manifestations – mental, spiritual and physical.  For him, the key was to learn to become detached from the concerns of life, to learn to get over clinging to either things or persons – in short, to learn acceptance and detachment.  This is the Buddhist philosophy of life, a way to live serenely and sanely in an all too frenetic and insane world.   

And so, what does living wisely mean? I argue that it means something along the following lines:

To learn that there are no easy answers to life’s big questions and that  those who propose such easy answers are singularly unwise, misled and misleading.

Sometimes we have to learn to accept events in life that we can never ever understand.  Acceptance, of course, here is never blind acceptance which is sheer fatalism.  By acceptance here, I mean that graced place of equanimity where one arrives spiritually, having worked hard at either solving the problem at hand, looking for help from as many quarters as possible, seeking advice, doing one’s best to come up with some partial solution and so on.  There is little or nothing more one can do against the inevitable at that stage.  Hence, acceptance is a wise position because one has expended all the necessary energy and a further expending is nothing short of wasteful and useless.

Knowing one’s strengths and limitations, and playing life’s game in that knowledge.

Forming good relationships and working at them like a gardener cultivates his patch of ground.

Learning the limits of human knowledge.

Being humble in a Socratic way – the admission of ignorance can be the beginning of knowledge and wisdom.

Learning things by doing – the practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis) advocated by Aristotle.

Learning through meditation to accept whatever order there is in chaos.

Doing things slowly, mindfully and consequently well.

Perfection does not exist – it is an unobtainable ideal.  Everything has slight imperfections somewhere.  Excellence is a different matter.  To excel at something need not mean being perfect at it.  The nearest description I found for “perfection” was in the Bible where one translation described it as being “whole” or complete.

Finally, one must learn the harsh truth of all existence, namely that life is not fair, and by all the logic of statistics could never be.  Mostly, life is a matter of sheer randomness and luck.  How, when, where, to whom and in what medical and monetary circumstances we are born are all matters of varying circumstances.  We are dealt a specific hand of cards and we had better play them as best we can to our advantage if we are to engage positively at all with life!