Who Can It Be Now?
I was having a meal with the Japanese currency speculator today. La divina principessa was waxing lyrical about the life up in the aerie, and Hyperion joined in soon after. It was, however, a somewhat tragic libretto that unfolded first in her redoubtable harmonics, and then in his gravelly baritone.
As I chatted with them, I suddenly became conscious of an overwhelming sense of detachment, as if my umbilical to the world of everyday events was detaching slowly and stealthily. People I had known for more than a decade were falling away, fading from the picture, like those retouched October Parade photographs in the former Soviet Union – almost as if they no longer existed even though they were still walking around the workplace. I could only thank the Highest that I no longer feel like Trotsky in Mexico these days.
Yeats's famous lines are of course in the air. They have been for years now, as we transit the post-millennial epoch. But I still get that frisson of sinister premonition when I read those opening lines:
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.
It is possibly worse than that. We see the heads rolling in the winter of our discontent, in the galling revolution against the right order of things. We see the southward migration of birds, and all the auguries spell troubling times ahead. And we are afflicted with a dull and nagging paranoia: who is the third who walks always beside you? It is indeed Eliot's fear in a handful of dust. Why do these tiny things concern us? Because they strike at the root of our reasons for existing the way we do, the way we hope the world should be – a world and not a waste land; a world enough, and time.
As it is, I sit here in the calming amber light of my reading room and try very hard not to think of that portentous jazz riff, the one that first inspired this evening's post, the one in Men At Work's Who Can It Be Now?
As I chatted with them, I suddenly became conscious of an overwhelming sense of detachment, as if my umbilical to the world of everyday events was detaching slowly and stealthily. People I had known for more than a decade were falling away, fading from the picture, like those retouched October Parade photographs in the former Soviet Union – almost as if they no longer existed even though they were still walking around the workplace. I could only thank the Highest that I no longer feel like Trotsky in Mexico these days.
Yeats's famous lines are of course in the air. They have been for years now, as we transit the post-millennial epoch. But I still get that frisson of sinister premonition when I read those opening lines:
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.
It is possibly worse than that. We see the heads rolling in the winter of our discontent, in the galling revolution against the right order of things. We see the southward migration of birds, and all the auguries spell troubling times ahead. And we are afflicted with a dull and nagging paranoia: who is the third who walks always beside you? It is indeed Eliot's fear in a handful of dust. Why do these tiny things concern us? Because they strike at the root of our reasons for existing the way we do, the way we hope the world should be – a world and not a waste land; a world enough, and time.
As it is, I sit here in the calming amber light of my reading room and try very hard not to think of that portentous jazz riff, the one that first inspired this evening's post, the one in Men At Work's Who Can It Be Now?
Labels: Discontent, Eliot, Men At Work, Yeats
etched with acid at 10:24:00 pm
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