Exerunt

Not many of you who land on this blog stay here; you leave so quickly you would think that a blog dedicated to reflection, introspection, and the search for an elusive “nowness” epiphany is not only disinteresting but also toxic. I know most of you land here because you are looking for information on W.B. Yeat’s Poem, “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Interestingly, this blog – like Yeat’s poem is about aging. Physically, intellectually, and emotionally Yeat’s found himself out of synch with the world…the culture – that bore and reared him. “Sailing to Byzantium” is not a rational analysis of the evolving values and social structure of his time; it is an expression of his emotional conflict – a spiritual and intellectual duel with reality.

Everyone goes through a similar, personal alienation whether they recognize it as such or not; the world that shaped them evolves and is transformed. Soon we all become strangers in a strange land – distressed and astounded that somehow all that was familiar and comfortable about our operating reality is rapidly fading – replaced by values and behavior and symbols and images in which we have no referents.

The brutish opportunism of the young – their deliciously lecherous concupiscence and unrepentant decadence – engenders jealously in the aging. The aged often delude themselves with petty rationalizations about the joy of escaping “the tyranny of the hormones,” and regale the pleasures of distancing themselves from the many turbulent and chaotic joys and sorrows of youth; but, I think it is a fiction…an act that protects against the unfulfillable wish to return to another time.

Life is a raucous emotional journey; Yeat’s “Sailing to Byzantium” presents poetically what many of us feel but cannot express so nobly. The feeling- people engage glimmers of solidarity with Yeats – perhaps without knowing exactly what it is about the poem that compels them. The young have no frame of reference or context available to them to experience the poem; they will memorize its explication from a critics review.

Experiential blogs of value are defined by the vulnerability and emotional truth expressed therein – the personal honesty that is so ambivalently and inconsistently, and often reluctantly articulated – without any attempt to edit-in public acceptance or to apologize for contradictions in behavior and beliefs.

I am astounded at the number of people whose genetics and development alienated them from their feelings and isolated them from vulnerability to the pendulum of alternating dread and euphoria that marks the emotionally sensitive’s stream of reality. The Twitting zombies of this era are all talk – lips without sound, words without meaning; the constant chatter of noise that forestalls true engagement. “And he said, like…”

As Yeats headstone exhorts, “Horseman, pass by”; of what interest is the ramblings of some aging man foundering among the rubble of his years? Some fading intellect that missed opportunities, made legions of mistakes, and is diminished by the guilt of obdurate misbehavior.

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet

T.S. Eliot