The Widening Gyre, or Sign me up for the Barbarian Hordes
My good friend Violet remarked a couple of months back upon how the internet is (slowly, so far) bringing about the downfall of Western Civilization. On the traditional purveyors of The News, she wrote:
Having grown up in an environment where you built your identity on the trusted words of a few white men, it must be terrifying to look at the enormous, overflowing wealth of voices that can now be heard and realize that people are listening. Not that many, not yet, but they are listening to them and not you. It is in a very real way the downfall of western civilization. It’s not a violent revolution so much as simply the collapse of that particular institution that distills the world into a pleasant hour to be taken in at the end of the day. It’s the slow degradation of our ability to say the world is like this and have it simply be true.
And I, for one, welcome the barbarian hordes.
I’d like to use that post as a jumping off point for the content of this little corner of the internet to which I’ve laid claim. See, I’m pretty much of the opinion that Western CivilizationTM could use to collapse just a wee bit, or perhaps entirely. But I don’t think the best way to do that is to just start tearing shit down, as fun as that would be. I’d rather pull the rug out from underneath Western Civilization by just going and doing something else. And that starts with thinking and saying something else. I chose the name of this blog for a reason (other than that it sounds cool, or that it makes a cultural reference that might make certain people think I’m smart). Here’s the context (W. B. Yeats’ “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
In a nutshell, “oh noez, it’s Teh Apocalypse.” Only Yeatsy. Which is actually important, because Yeats is a firmly established figure in the Western TraditionTM, and he’s not too happy about them things falling apart. (To be fair, I’m not all that happy about WW1 either, but I’d be likely to put the blame in a different place.) Anyway, what’s important here is the imagery of the falcon and the falconer. To me, the falconer is all those rich (mostly) white (mostly) men sitting in their newsrooms and their boardrooms and their White Houses and their Kremlins and their basilicas and their megachurches and thier capitol buildings. Or rather, it’s the whole structure of perspectives and ideas and values that they represent and benefit from, but to which they are also servants. And the falcon is us. And we can still hear the falconer, but we’re learning not to listen. And each day, gods willing, we’re widening that gyre just a little bit more.
July 7th, 2008 at 2:33 am
Welcome to the
jungleblog-o-sphere.August 12th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Sometimes I feel like the multiplicity of nature becomes undermined by the limiting locality of childhood, or what we sometimes think about as “Western Civilization”, depending on who we are. The idea that there is any unified “Western Civilization” that can crumble is to me a bit laughable. Certainly the “Western Civilization” that near destroyed itself in WWII is not the same animal that gave us video games and LSD. The ideas in the west about human rights are not the same as social darwinism. To tell the truth I don’t necessarily have strong opinions on any of these subjects. I do see however that sometimes we make our targets simply too abstract and too fantastic. What dreams of men who don’t exist inspire jealously in your mind is not really my concern. Sure, they are all smoking cigars and laughing at your suffering… but have you really met them? It is so easy to blame the rest of the world for your own mindset. Do I understand the need to transcend, grow and surpass?… Of course I do. The growth of youthful ambition bears beautiful fruit no matter its intention. I merely warn against the intuition that white men tell us all what to think just because a white man or group of white men told you what to think. The voices are the eternal modes of God and the extent to which you listen may be a result of your own preoccupation and obsession with “Western Civilization”. Are we sometimes horrible gangsters? You’re damn right we are and anyone who opposes us simply hasn’t been sufficiently exposed to the allure of crime. And doesn’t it suffice us still to simply find reconciliation in empty gesture, insincere like the forced apologies of children, biting our lips at the accursed farce because we know deep inside it was ALL TOTALLY WORTH IT, every seductive criminal second, overflowing with the pheromonal smell of having went ahead with it anyway. What can get to bother me is the way in which the liberal mindset can criticize the status quo and then run in terror whenever we actually take action that seems out of the ordinary. To hell with those cigar smoking white puppeteers but bust out the holy water when we stoop so low as to listen to gangsta rap. “Because its all about subversion” …so they think… as if doing it some other way would just look so natural from within the paradigm. This is why people get to sell you the safe version and you dish out 10 bucks for the t-shirt. The truth is… sometimes it is worth it to have your ID checked at the door, because when we get into shit this heavy… out of ignorance or out of greed, somebody else is gonna want to fuck our shit up… so perhaps its better to not teach the peasants math and simply let them believe it is magic. That way we can at least run the damn reactor in peace.
August 16th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
August 29th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Matthew–
It’s not actually the rich white men I’m concerned about. They’re just as much prisoners of the crazy ideas that create our world as anyone else–in fact probably more. I’m concerned about the fact that we can only see so far outside of the world that the language of our times offers. I’m interested in moving away from the nonexistent center of the Western (for lack of a better term) worldview. And I don’t particularly care in which direction any given one of us wanders, although I’m more interested in certain directions than others.
I understand that to some extent when I talk about dismantling Western Civilization, I’m simultaneously constructing it. It has never been so unitary an entity in history as it is in rhetoric such as mine. However, there are certain ideas and assumptions that decrease the friction of the social structures that currently dominate the planet. You are absolutely correct in implying that one of these ideas is that there are a bunch of guys smoking cigars and plotting to control everything–that there’s some big bad capitalist white-supremacist patriarchy out there somewhere directing all of this. It’s all much more chaotic than that. In fact, it’s much more chaotic than language can possibly touch. But what this means is that the mythologies that we write effectively create our world and make our experience what it is. The mythology I’m creating at the moment is one of a falcon and a falconer. Neither of these things is real, per se, but they are as real as anything else.
Essentially, you’re at another step of the game. I’m creating something to push away from, and you’ve already dissolved yours and are floating contentedly in the void. I’ll get there.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:16 am
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