4. Obama and Yeats; or, O Spiritus Mundi, Say It Ain’t Show
President Obama:
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs. . . .
Which is another way of saying what several headlines have announced this morning: now the hard part begins.
Barack Obama last night gave one of the great speeches in American political history. So, I would argue, in an entirely different key did John McCain; as concession speeches go, his was one of the most graceful I have ever seen. Of course he has known for a good while what was coming. He has seemed almost happy in his impending defeat for the past week or so; he’s a savvy old politician, and the handwriting on the wall must have been absolutely clear to him. I must say, if I were in his place, I would be relieved at being turned down for the job. The presidency is going to be an incredibly tough gig. America has much to be proud of this morning (even the French say so!). But let’s face it: the country is in woefully bad shape at the moment. Bush has seemed determined not to leave the White House until he could see it in flames in his rear view mirror. The task facing the new president is of mythic proportions; the rough beast has only begun to slouch.
Last night was a wonderfully auspicious beginning. Obama was gracious, brilliant, generous, and yet incisive. He looked, as the old joke goes, marvelous. His family looked marvelous. The crowd gathered to hear him in Chicago looked marvelous. We all looked marvelous.
Looking marvelous is not everything. But it’s something.
The end game was, put simply, a wonderful show. But beyond the show: disaster waiting to happen. Backlash. Violence, Darkness. The flip side of the human soul.
To quote the loser: My friends–
It was Obama’s night; it was his show. It was our night too. But now that the show is over, we don’t all get to go home and hop in the jacuzzi. Nothing against jacuzzis per se, but we’ve been doing rather too much of that. There is an enormous job to do. We have (I have) enormous hope that Obama is the right man to be the catalyst for the job.
But he cannot do this job alone.
Now is the time for vigilance. Now is the time for real discourse. Now is the time for deliberation.
Dare I say it? Now is the time for intelligence.
We don’t all get a job in the cabinet, true. We don’t go to Congress. We don’t sit on the Supreme Court. That’s obvious. What we do is what we always did: to quote Voltaire, we tend our garden. But we tend them vigilantly, deliberately, intelligently, and we tend them not for ourselves alone but for everyone.
A writer writes. Now is the time, then, for writerly vigilance, deliberation, and intelligence. Didn’t we have that before? We did. And yet, and yet. . . .
*
A dear friend of mine, a poet of marvelous intelligence and relentless honesty, sent me a message a couple of days ago. Some very good editorials he had read lately prompted him to ask some hard questions. In reference to one such piece he declared “I read this and felt the man’s outrage and passion, which was moving. He’s right, but why hadn’t he said these things BEFORE? DURING the theft of our country? Why were the pundits, intellectuals so craven?”
These are excellent questions, and imply an incisive challenge. In a real sense, my friend is protesting the fact that, from 2001 to the present, by and large “The best lack all conviction, while the worst. . . .”
Contemporary US writing, and poetry in particular, has been praised for breadth and diversity, and in the same breath faulted for insularity and shallowness of focus; in particular it has been faulted for capitulation to the marketplace. To the extent that these criticisms are true, it is time to grow bolder, leaner, edgier. We do not all need to become “political” in any narrow sense; we have instead to understand our own strength more fully, and to trust its truth. This, I take it, is one message of the Obama campaign, encapsulated in the unlikely success of the simple phrase “Yes we can.”
I will confess that for the past eight years I have felt as if there were a dark force field at the center of my psyche; I have interpreted it variously, and am even medicated in response to it. When I woke up this morning, having witnessed Obama’s masterful victory, it was gone. My body, embedded in the larger body of humanity, was responding to an illness of massive proportion. Today, a convalescence has begun. But it has only begun. It is still nascent, still fragile, still uncertain.
One man has precipitated that change. But the maintenance of that change–like the election of that man–cannot be left to him alone.
Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is a well known admonitory text; it is often evoked in political discourse (Paul Krugman quoted it in reference to the financial crisis a couple of weeks ago). A Jeremiad, it is usually brought up in the context of disaster, real or imagined, immediate or foreseen. To bring up this poem in reference to Obama’s victory–a victory that has left me ecstatic–may seem a strange, even perverse, rhetorical maneuver. But in my reading of this poem, it is an utterance as much of hope as of doom. It issues an invitation not to despair or violence but to understanding, to conviction. If the best lack all conviction, then let them gain conviction. If the “rough beast” is stirring, let us understand him. The truth is, we have had our rough beast for eight years now (and no, I don’t mean President Bush; he’s not a heavy enough actor for that role; the “rough beast” is a collective phenomenon) and the beast has sapped the best of us of our most precious energies. The miracle of Obama is that he has transcended the problem; he has, for the moment, short circuited the beast.
The outcome of this election is a tremendous, almost-impossible-to-conceive achievement–for President-Elect Obama, for his family, for his team, for the Democratic party, for so-called “progressive” politics in this country. A moment of great possibility has arrived. The gyre has widened. Celebrate, yes. But don’t forget to keep your eye on the falcon.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
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.
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?