Why is this image smoking, while countless others featuring falling down barns are born stone cold dead? Renaldi’s absence of nostalgia. His image is a clean hit.
The title of this post comes from the 20th-century’s most influential poem, 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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?
Sherman Alexie’s Web site is titled, Falls Apart. Joan Didion’s breakthrough essay collection? Slouching Toward Bethlehem. And
Chinua Achebe’s best novel, the African version of King Lear? Things Fall Apart. The first 8 years of the 21st century suggested an answer to the poem’s last line. What beast slouches toward Bethlehem? We do.
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