Yeats Infection

            On Wednesday morning I found the last set of chords for “Le complaint de progres” by Boris Vian. I always stop searching after four.

            I memorized two more verses of “Pamela Popo” by Serge Gainsbourg and there is only one more to go.

            A few weeks ago the rubber ring that had been directly moulded onto the stopper in my toilet tank broke off. I rigged some wiring around the hinge so I could still pull and flush but yesterday the wiring broke off. This morning I rigged it again with a new and longer wire. The water back there is cold on the hands!

I worked a bit on my Indigenous Studies essay but mostly on changing the wording of the first paragraph.

            I had time to take a shower before leaving for Aesthetic and Decadent Movements class.

            I delayed leaving for fifteen minutes because it had been raining. Fortunately it stopped just before I headed out.

            A little after Dovercourt on College there was a short construction area in the right lane and so I moved to the centre. After clearing the construction I went back to the right lane but the cyclist behind me stayed in the centre to pass me. He then wanted to pass the rider ahead of me and so he continued in the centre lane. The cyclist ahead was going pretty fast and when the guy in the centre lane got to Ossington he perhaps was too focused on speeding up to pass the other cyclist and not paying attention to the turning streetcar tracks and so he wiped out. It looked like it only hurt his pride though because he was getting up by the time he passed.

            There were two students in the classroom when I got there.

            I plugged in my laptop and fiddled some more with the first paragraph of my essay.

            Professor Li said that colours figured prominently in the Decadent Movement and peacocks.

            William Butler Yeats was a bridge between Decadence and Modernism. When he was with the Rhymers Club he was a Decadent and when he wrote Easter 1916 he was a Modernist.

            The Decadents wrote about the rose a lot. George Meredith talked of the rose and so did Rossetti in “Body's Beauty”.

            Swinburne: Shall I strew on thee rose?

            Dowson: Flung roses. Roses riotously with the throng.

            The Decadents were about subtleties of feelings.

            She mentioned Terry Eagleton and a book called, “Hope Without Optimism”. Optimism is more external than hope.

            We looked at Yeats's “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time”.

            “Rood” is the cross.

            Eternal is out of time.

            Yeats was a member of The Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucians. The Golden Dawn seems to have been a spin-off of the Rosicrucians.

            I mentioned that Henry Miller had a series of novels called The Rosy Crucifixion.

            Renna gave us our first seminar starter of three on this poem.

            The first line “Rose of all my days” is personal.

            “Cuchulain” is a mythical Irish warrior.

            In the poem he is talking to the rose.

            Sadness is the spirit of Decadence.

            There is indulgence but a surprising anchorage in reality.

            Yeats regretted not learning to speak Gaelic.

            He tells the rose to keep approaching him but not too close. It's like Xeno's Paradox.

            We looked at “The Rose of the World”.

            This poem has a more universal take on the rose.

            Jacob gave us our second seminar starter and pointed out Yeats’s complex use of time, circular time and eternity in the poem.

            Is Yeats talking about outside time or outside our sense of time.

            The professor reminded us that it’s always helpful to read a lot so we know what we are talking about when we analyze a poem.

            The speaker eternalizes the rose, which represents beauty.

            Yeats is more mystical than the other Decadents.

            During a break I mentioned to the professor that when I was a kid the Rosicrucians used to advertise in comic books and that Leonard Cohen mentions them in “The Dress Rehearsal Rag: “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians? They will give you back your hope. You can find your love in diagrams on a plain brown envelope.”

            We looked at “Easter 1916”, which is later Yeats when he was a different guy. It’s raw history.

            The poem is about the unsuccessful and fatal Easter Rising by some members of the Irish Nationalist Movement against British rule. It addresses idealism versus reality.

One of those martyrs of the cause mentioned in the poem is John McBride. Yeats had hated McBride while he was alive because he married Maude Gonne, whom he loved. She turned down four marriage proposals from Yeats before marrying McBride.

Yeats is searching here for a sufficiently chaotic form.

Professor Li suggested that we write a poem and become more sensitive to prosody.

“Terrible beauty” is a loaded term. The Irish Nationalist Movement was beautiful in its ideals but terrible in its actions.

In the first stanza he shows that the people that died were familiar to him but distant. He knew them well enough to stop and chat meaninglessly but he would not have written about them if they hadn’t died.

He refers to a “shrill” woman as if she was one of the ones killed. This was the Countess Constance Markievicz. She was sentenced to death but spared because of her sex.

“This man … rode our winged horse”. Pegasus is associated with poetic inspiration.

            The rebels knew they would fail and so their martyrdom is like a stone.

            In Yeats’s poetry there are always two sides linked together and worked through in a tangibly tortured manner.

            Next week for our last class we would be watching a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Earnestness is mocked. He is challenging the moral seriousness of the Victorian middle class. Ernest becomes an ironically empty name. The characters emphasize principles of Aestheticism.

            I like chatting with Professor Li but I had to leave right away because I had to work that night and I wanted to get home as soon as possible so I could eat a late lunch first.

            I had an hour and ten minutes at home. I ate a salami and cheese sandwich for lunch. I went out and bought a six-pack of Creemore. I started feeling tired and so I sat on the couch with my feet up and dozed for ten minutes before leaving for work.

            I worked for Brendan Flaherty in the Fine Arts department of OCADU. He told me he remembered drawing me when he was a student there. I think this was a Continuing Studies course as the three students looked like they were between their late twenties and late thirties. This was the first time they’d drawn from the figure.

            I did ten thirty-second poses and three fives for my first set. I just did twenty-minute sets after that. During the breaks I typed my lecture notes.

            When I got home I made a quick dinner of a mini-pizza with a slice of bread, salsa for sauce, three slices of salami and some melted cheese. I had it with a beer while watching Zorro.

            This story begins with the soldiers of Los Angeles having captured Zorro, but we see it’s not really Zorro because the real Zorro in his secret identity of Don Diego is watching in the crowd. The fake Zorro turns out to be one of Commandant Ortega’s men and it is a trap because he knows that some of the peasants will try to rescue Zorro. The real Zorro arrives to warn them but he is almost captured. He escapes on the commandant’s horse but Zorro’s horse Tornado is captured. An auction is held for the horse and Don Diego gives Sergeant Garcia money to buy it. Ortega had hoped Zorro would try to rescue Tornado. One of the soldiers begins whipping Tornado in the corral but inadvertently sets it on fire. He is trampled just before Zorro arrives to ride Tornado away.