… and the “no one” referred to above includeeeessssss? …
… below find a few lines of comfort in the midst of our most recent continuing unpleasantness
… Napoleon, Napoleon where are you?
… to paraphrase Ezra Pound … Our Culture (most assuredly “the law”) is now majoring in Inanities …
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?
by William Butler Yeats
The Dark Night of the Soul
I.
In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.
II.
In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
O, happy lot!
In darkness and concealment,
My house being now at rest.
III.
In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought myself,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.
IV.
That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,
And where none appeared.
V.
O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.
VI.
On my flowery bosom,
Kept whole for Him alone,
There He reposed and slept;
And I cherished Him, and the waving
Of the cedars fanned Him.
VII.
As His hair floated in the breeze
That from the turret blew,
He struck me on the neck
With His gentle hand,
And all sensation left me.
VIII.
I continued in oblivion lost,
My head was resting on my love;
Lost to all things and myself,
And, amid the lilies forgotten,
Threw all my cares away.
by St. John of the Cross … trans. by David Lewis
The Logical Conclusion
When earth’s last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme;
When truth shall ‘baaa’ on the hill crests
And no one shall dare to dream;
When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship’s zinc-plated bull,
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
And Baalam’s arse shall inquire
The price of imported oats;
Then no one shall tell him the answer
For each shall know the one fact
That lies in the special arse-ignment
From which he is making his tract.
So the arse shall sigh uninstructed
While each in his separate book
Shall grind for the love of grinding
And only the devil shall look.
by Ezra Pound