Outside The Box

“Turning and turning in a widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” – “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, 1919

Yeats’ poem was written soon after the end of WWI and it speaks of uncertainty in a troubled world. In the last line of the poem he asks the haunting question, “What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Here in the cove and far from Bethlehem, the dogs barked in the wee hours of the morning and I heard the sound of things falling on the deck. From within the fog of sleep, I remembered the groceries left on the front deck that didn’t make it inside yesterday. “I wonder if Ursula is paying us another visit,” said my self to myself as I drifted back to sleep.

We don’t think of Ursula as a rough beast at all, and she is much too agile to slouch. She is, in fact, quite healthy and beautiful, and as bears go, as polite and unassuming as they come. But she is a beast, after all.

As for Yeats, if you are a consumer of mainstream corporate media, you might be asking yourself the same question he did, even if you prefer, like our readers do, to look outside the confines of the box constructed for us, beyond the falling sky pearl clutching permanent breaking news emergency. There is plenty of cause for concern there as well.

Much of that concern lies within our own borders, and don’t expect it to diminish between now and November. The court verdict from New York yesterday was the shot fired to start the race in earnest. The left celebrated while so many presidential campaign contributions flooded into the right, that the website crashed.

It is an interesting time for the student of history who knows that the politically motivated prosecution we just witnessed is nothing new for either Democrats or Republicans. For a little perspective on the matter I would refer you to the Debs Sedition Case, The Smith Act Cases, The Coffin-Spock Prosecution, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, The Siegelman Prosecution – the list is long. The observer of history knows that such things are not confined to “banana republics.”

In fact, perhaps it is time that we look in the mirror when we use the term. Let’s run down the list of the characteristics of a banana republic: Socioeconomic stratification, check. Political instability, check. Lack of sovereignty (where citizens have limited control over the state), check.

During the 2016 election campaign I heard a self-described Democrat say that he doubted whether he could be friends with anyone who voted for a Republican. I heard the same in 2020 and yesterday I heard a Republican say the same for Democrats. Shame on all of them. This is precisely how the center that Yeats wrote about falls apart. And on a personal note, if you can’t be friends with someone based on how they vote, don’t bother to tell me about your Christianity or your faith.

It’s a reflection on us all that we have allowed our choice of leadership to be reduced, herded, corralled into a choice between two old grifters, and we react as if criticism of either is as personally offensive as an insult to our mothers.

For the sake of my own peace of mind, I recoil once again from the sound and fury of the pixel universe and turn in gratitude towards the sanctuary the Creator has given us in this quiet cove away from the noise. As we witness human behavior becoming more bestial, perhaps there is some understanding to be gleaned from the actions of the creatures living around us here, creatures that were actually designed to behave like animals.

Somewhere on the farm this morning a 26-ounce jar of Smuckers Natural Peanut butter is missing in action. In the closest possible proximity to that missing jar, there is a bear, probably with circles under her eyes if bears are subject to such things, who has been up all night trying to get the lid off.

Several years ago when Sneaky Pete lived here, I picked a lot of wet garbage out of the mountain laurel thicket while we learned about bear behavior. Then came the day when I threw away an empty glass jar of peanut butter and Pete, having carried the entire garbage can into the woods, neglected to shred the garbage bags because he was so intent on getting the lid off that jar.

Pete was so focused on getting into that jar that, like the trolls of Tolkien’s “Hobbit,” he was caught out when the sun came up the next morning, and I surprised him in his labors. He left the other bags intact, and from then on, we kept anything organic or with food residue inside.

How like that bear we are, so intent on the aroma of drama we have picked out of the garbage that we have lost all perspective, and without a center for balance, all control over what happens next.