SCHEMATIZING (46)

By: Joshua Glenn
November 5, 2024

AI-assisted illustration by HILOBROW. Prompt: “scary lion head with the famous hairdo of a presidential candidate inside a gyre diagram”

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

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?

W.B. Yeats’ Radium Age proto-sf poem “The Second Coming” (w. circa 1918-1919; p. November 1920 is a dark vision of the fate of the world written in the aftermath of WWI and the Spanish flu pandemic, the unspoken but manifest double catastrophe — a “jackpot,” as William Gibson might put it — that summons into our world an apocalyptic “rough beast” that has been waiting for this moment to be born.

And what’s this widening gyre business? (A gyre is a circular or spiral motion, a widening vortex brought into being by mutually exclusive opposing forces.) In Yeats’ Preface to Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920), a collection of his recent poems, he offers a clue as to the source of some of his imagery and thinking by noting that after he’d written the book’s first few poems he “came into possession of Michael Robartes’ exposition of the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum of Geraldus.”

A fictional occultist whom Yeats had first conjured up in the 1890s, it’s been suggested that Robartes represents “the side of Yeats that could believe in the System of [Yeats’] A Vision.” A System, one hastens to point out, which involves mutually exclusive opposing forces that influence the course of human history… and each individual human life as well.

In the Notes at the end of Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Yeats writes again of Robartes and “his discovery of the explanation of Geraldus’ diagrams and pictures in the traditional knowledge of a certain obscure Arab tribe.” Geraldus is another fictional Yeats character, one loosely based — or so it seems — on the real-life Gerardus Cremonensis (1114–87; also Girardus, Gherard, Gurrardus and Giraldus), who translated many works from Arabic into Latin.

Yeats’s “Note on ‘The Second Coming’,” *Michael Robartes and the Dancer* (1921).

From a (fictional) book by (the fictional) Geraldus, a book via which G records and analyzes deep insights from an obscure Arab tribe’s — the “Judwalis”^* — into the true nature of reality and history, (the fictional) Robartes has extracted “several mathematical diagrams,” we read in the Notes. As shown above, these take the form of “squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes of great complexity.”

^*What does the name of the Judwali tribe mean, according to Yeats/Robartes/Geraldus? “Their name means makers of measures, or as we would say, of diagrams.”

What is Robartes’ explanation for Geraldus’ intersecting and revolving gyres — which we might call a “G schema?”^* Yeats explains: “The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form.” This form is the gyre — another “G schema.”

^*Here’s an example of my own G Schema, from The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021).

A gyre begins at an origin point and and spirals out from there in a progressively wider circle. Sociocultural developments develop, over time, in such a fashion — beginning locally, and becoming universal (or nearly so). Progress, in other words. However, this is merely a partial understanding of how human history works, according to Yeats’ Robartes’ Geraldus’ Arab sages. In history there’s always a mutually exclusive opposing force at work; for every gyre there’s a counter-gyre. At the moment that one sociocultural development becomes universal, a new counter-development begins its own counter-spiral. Progress… in an opposing direction.

Neil Mann’s website The System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision (also available in book form) suggests that we think of Yeats’ Robartes’ Geraldus’ Arab double-gyre diagram like so:

If each gyre is depicted as a single principle, then the gyre moves from the total preponderance of one principle over the other, through increasing admixture of the second principle to equality at the point where the surfaces cross each other, until the minimum of the first and the maximum of the second principle are reached. At this point the reflux starts, so that there is never more than a momentary predominance of either principle, and the system is constant movement.

In Yeats’s own words, the to gyres represent “two movements, which circle about a centre because a movement outward on the plane is checked by and in turn checks a movement onward upon the line; & the circling is always narrowing or spreading, because one movement or other is always the stronger.” Not just human history but the individual human soul develops and counter-develops in the same fashion: “The human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; & this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness.”

And what can we predict for Western civilization? According to Yeats: “All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place.” A civilization (if that’s the proper term) that will be un-scientific, un-democratic, anti-fact, and homogeneous.

I’m writing this post three days before the 2024 presidential election. Brrr…

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SCHEMATIZING (46)

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