Byzantium

Yesterday I began to assemble the final framework, a ten-year accounting of the work of the College of Wyverns from 1997 to 2007. In essence, these years constituted the final period of my 40-year wandering in the early world, and placed me in position to see something of the vision of William Butler Yeats.

It was in 1886 (yes, there's that year again!) that Yeats began to expound his terrifying, romantic, and painfully sad vision of the Celtic twilight. That was his public mythology, one of the seeds of a renaissance in humanity's remembering of the Irish world. In his private mythology, he spoke of Byzantium, the heart of the Eastern Empire of the Roman Age. In his Sailing to Byzantium, he wrote

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Yeats's Byzantium suffered from the slow ossification of excellence; the Emperor drowses on his throne while the soul dies wrapped in trappings of gold and silver. The Byzantium of Yeats is of course not the city known as Constantinople and then as Istanbul; rather, it is a confabulation—something like M John Harrison's Viriconium. Eventually, the story painted gets more and more fantastic, and only the lone poet is able to tell what is true. To do that, he must rewrite the story and in doing so, he destroys the dream.

Some of us prefer, like Yeats, to hang on to both: we try to preserve the vision as well as the mission of the ancient founders, while pointing out how far we have fallen. It is the pointing-out that terrifies the heavily-invested. Once the Emperor is shown to have no clothes, or is at best Yeats's "tattered coat upon a stick" towards the end of days, the barbarians are but one step away. It is hard to dream dreams; it is harder and much more painful to dream reality.