Sailing To Byzantium

Events of the last few weeks have further hardened my convictions that the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' is indeed total rubbish. Handpicked studies etc — the so-called research is equivalent to saying that 'what works, works' or that 'what is new, is new'. ANY successful technology is successful because others did not achieve that particular success. The best part is the hypocrisy of it all; the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' is marketed by 'Red Ocean' means. That's because you need the entire Red Sea to sustain a blue pond, if you're being honest with yourself.

But away from this evil and ugly rubbish; let's look at a considerably more beautiful picture of a dying and decadent society upheld by freakish hierophants in nominal service to a besotted emperor. Let me present to you a vision from Yeats:

Sailing to Byzantium

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.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

It was a long time ago, when I was a wee bairn, that I first copied out the words of this poem. I have never forgotten it, through the days of my life and the dark nights of the soul. It goes together with the dozen or so others which have enriched the barren wastelands of a long journeying.

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.

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?

The Greater Trumps: (21) Temperance

This time, there are two chalices. In the background, a lady bears the first chalice, pouring its surplus into the empty second chalice. The chalice is held by a man, nude and muscular, kneeling with his left side facing us. It seems oddly domestic, until we notice the tiny details.

The surplus of the first chalice is fiery gold; the pooling liquid in the second seems to be mercury; more unusually, the flow appears to be from the second vessel to the first! The lady has wings, and seems to be of unearthly beauty; the man's skin is stony, and he is unusually plain. The four elements, it would seem, are all present.

In earlier images of Temperance, water is turned to wine, a magician balances two chalices, a centaur juggles balls of fire and air. At first glance, the image is named 'Temperance' because it seems to be trying to produce a happy medium. But the ancients sometimes called this card 'Alchemy', or 'Transformation'. It symbolises the harnessing of change between two opposites to produce Synthesis. It reminds us that we have two types of choice - synergy or compromise - when asked to choose a middle way between two powerful opposites.

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This is one of my favourite images in terms of ambiguity. What on earth is being accomplished here? Will anything ever change? Is any question ever answered?

It is in Yeats's poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, that we see a synthesis of all four elements and an answer of sorts. It's a rather gloomy poem, I'm afraid. But these closing lines will haunt me for a long time:

And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Piers Anthony calls the image 'Transfer'. It raises a further question: after something is transferred from one place to another, is it still the same thing?