The Second Dumming

with apology to W.B. Yeats

Spinning, spinning on internet spires
the demagogues have lost sight of our foundation;
Polls spread apart; the moderates cannot hold;
Seared extremities are loosed upon the land,
The opiate tide is loosed, and everywhere
our old consensus urge gets lost in the noise
The worst gain all attention, while the best
Are mired in mediocrity.

Um, um, some revolution is at hand,
like, like . . . absurdity rules the land.
It’s ridiculous! Immediately as the tweets is tweeted
with some viral bizarrity from lala land,
it occludes our sight: somewhere in the pixels of the dream
a shape with venus body and head of man,
gazing blank and shiftless as The Cloud demands,
is moving its slow members, while all around
retweet droppings splatter from our looney clowns.
The narco takes the cake; so now we reep
as two centuries of freedom deep
spin downward now to chaos bleep by bleep.
So what rough beast, its hour come at last,
slouches toward America to delete our past?

King of Soul

Dover Breach

The air is mad tonight
electric with fright
but drugged with fluff and flight:
hear no evil, see no blight.
America in cyber slumber swoons
while England grooms jihad goons
like 1937 fascist blackshirts
deflowering 2014 democratic skirts.
France ( peace be upon her)
seethes with same old same old stir--
that angst witch discontent doth incur
from yonder barricaded former age
now slit with new jihadi rage.

The air of Faith
so thin of late
as most prefer to flirt with fate
now cringes in this new birth of hate;
its melancholy, long withdrawing gasp
retreating fast, like slithering asp
unable now to grasp
with slipping grips unfurled
the naked idols the world.

Ah, good Christian, let us be true
to one another! for the world, which casts its spell
of rebel chaos and decadent hell,
has no power when all's said and done
to set our ancient faith upon the run,
though the infernal note of madness floods every byte
while polar extremists clash by night.

(This poem's form was adapted from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach.)

Smoke

Order minus Chaos = Passion

As I was listening to WDAV today, an airy figment of Telemann music traveled through the radio and struck my ears. As it happened, the music plucked upon my very soul and, there I was, unexpectedly in the middle of the day, transported for a few minutes, back into the 18th century.

Not literally, of course, but in my mind. My thoughts escaped this present world of work and woe, and took refuge in an age long gone, a era of reason and order, long before the rude disruptions of world wars, global warmings and worldwide economic warnings.

Although there has always been an element of disarray and chaos in human activity, our hindsight view of the 1700s encompasses a world where composers like Telemann or Bach or Handel or Antonio Vivaldi could be seated at a musical instrument and, through intense toil and otherworldly inspiration, impose cryptic inked symbols onto a paper manuscript and thereby draw some amazingly expressive order out of the vast cosmos, by constructing a great work of music.

My all-time favorite is Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Here's the winter movement of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC-USAB530A&feature=related

Now, a few hours beyond that midday moment, the workday is over; the radio-induced flight of fancy has passed, and I sit at home sharing with you that time-travel moment--a sudden glimpse into 18th-century passion.

And I hope to remind us all that, out there in the midst of human noise and haste and confusion, someone somewhere has expressed passionate order by drawing it out of troublesome chaos. That happened three hundred years ago, and somewhere on earth, even now, some person or persons are deriving creative sense from the hopeless nonsense of our present world.

It's a little bit like touching that moment when Logos spoke electromagnetic light into existence from the dark void.


CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress