Thursday morning, another single-digit day of winter cold.  The first day of spring is just a few days away,–March 20th.  Surreal!  No more surreal than the early broadcast of today’s news on NPR.  The much ballyhooed summit with the North Koreans reached a swift end with absolutely nothing achieved.  Imagine asking the North Koreans to give up their Nukes?  By their lights the nuclear arsenal, developed at great sacrifice, is insurance against military obliteration by the West.  Certainly it takes great hubris, on behalf of our President, to think they’d give those up.

Some things remain constant, unchanging, a recurring pattern since the beginning of recorded history.  The complexity and willful  blindness of human nature has not changed since the rage and embarrassment of Agamemnon at the seduction of Helen by Paris, plunged the Greeks into a ruinous war with Troy.

I read this W. B. Yeats poem some days ago.  I saved it because I wanted to include it for your consideration, instruction and pleasure.  W. B. Yeats points to the great ebb and flow of history, the dance of good and evil; the good which cannot be celebrated apart from handling its defining contrary.

I’ll append a comment or two at the end of the poem.

A Dialogue of Self and Soul

I

My Soul.   I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

My Self.   The consecrated blade upon my knees
Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady’s dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound,
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

My Soul.   Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect its wandering
To this and that and t’other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self.  Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery
Heart’s purple-and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier’s right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul.   Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.

II

My Self.   A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what’s the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action, or in thought;
Measure the lot to forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

“Who can distinguish darkness from the soul,” —-indeed!  The poets use of an antique Japanese Katana, a long sword as a symbol of culture,— a complex of technology, high craftsmanship in the mirrored blade, the aesthetic affect of the lush embroidery of a court-lady’s dress embellishing the scabbard, —all constitutes an instrument of slaughter.

One is speechless; there is no proper language to convey the admixture of the man who fashions this emblem of the community-of-man.  Yes the soldiers charter to commit crime remains as real a feature of our own day as it was in the stories passed down to us in the history books.

Yeats effectively uses the technique of an internal dialogue between the soul and the self.  Who has not engaged inward debate  over the awful/magnificent paradox which is described in the poem?

The challenge left by Yeats to the reader, is whether as to one’s own quotient in the larger story of humanity: Would I be content to live it all again? 

That is a question that stops one dead in his/her tracks.  Perhaps to this question there is no answer which will finish off the question, a final ‘yes or no.’  If I live with the question long enough,  will I be able to conclude with Yeats:

……Measure the lot to forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.