W.B.Yeats (1865-1939): Irish poet, occultist and Magus. Yes, that’s what the biographical dictionaries say, but what, indeed, is a Magus? Yeats - member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. But what is the Golden Dawn? These esoteric questions or questions about esoterica are answered in any examination of the 1890s [aka the fin de siecle, last decade of the century, a period of summation, perhaps, of monumentalism in art (one recalls the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, architectonic, rhapsodic, obsessed with death and it’s antithesis, resurrection.), supposed endings and possible contrived resolutions.] The Order of the Golden Dawn, an hermetic sect dedicated to ‘magick’ (or ‘sex magick’ as Aleister Crowley – another member of the order founded by McGregor Mathers which included such luminaries as Madame Blavatsky, aka The Anti-Christ – formulated his own particular simony.). This ‘magick’ manifested itself in (mostly harmless) initiation ceremonies, ouija boards, planchettes (useful for automatic writing) and even more ceremonies, naturally.
Of course, one accepts that W.B.Yeats was a poet and not bound by any strict or obvious convention to conform. If such ‘machinery’ was useful for his poetry then we need look no closer nor farther for rationalisations, raison d’etres or explanations for his behaviour and involvements. Simultaneously, Yeats was developing an interest in politics, more specifically, Irish Nationalist or Republican politics. Yeats’ politics were a combination of seeming romantic and naïve commitment to ‘traditional’ rural mores and the seeming traditionalism of an enlightened yet benevolent aristocracy and a romanticised, poeticised peasant class. Of course, this really ignored the ‘real’ trajectory of Irish politics, the rise of an urban bourgeoisie and, concomitantly, an urban proletariat. (Marxist terms and possible anathema to Yeats and his aristocratic, remote patrons such as Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory. However, the Order of the Golden Dawn was also a front for radical views and counter-culture stratagems very like those of the post WW1 fall out and of the period after 1960. Intrinsically they sought to question the relations of man to a world ruled over by a fallen angel or anti-christ or a world in which all values were inverted or negated.) It seems that Yeats’ despairingness at encroaching Modernity, (although he is sometimes viewed as something of a Modernist, hence his affiliation with the American poet Ezra Pound – Ez and Old Billyum – who was, for a time, his secretary and editor.) – that ‘filthy modern tide’ (Yeats’ summation of flicks – an Irishism for films, no doubt summoned up by the projector’s silky hum, jazz, dance hall days and the complete subordination of art to filthy lucre and the intrusiveness of mass propaganda techniques. Significantly, Yeats was born in the era of steam trains, the American Civil War, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels when an aesthetic of ‘art for art’s sake’ was commonly accepted but died in the era of Joseph Goebbels, ‘Battleship Potemkin, the Spanish Civil War and Joseph Stalin. An enormous, epochal shift had occurred.
This general or generic discussion of Yeats brings me to the ‘illness’ (state, condition??) known as Asperger’s Syndrome and named after the Swiss analyst (aren’t all analysts Swiss? – Carl Gustav Jung??), Hans Asperger (Biography:Hans Asperger was born on a farm outside Vienna, the elder of two sons. At an early age he showed special talents in language, and already in the first school years he was known for his frequent quotations of the Austrian national poet, Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872). He had difficulty finding friends and was considered to be "remote". In the youth movement of the 1920's, however, he met with some comrades with whom he maintained contact all through his life. He was conferred doctor of medicine in 1931 and assumed directorship of the play-pedagogic station at the university children's clinic in Vienna in 1932. He married in 1935 and had five children. From 1934 he was affiliated with the psychiatric clinic in Leipzig.Hans Asperger had a special interest in "psychically abnormal" children. His paper, submitted to the journal in 1943, was based on investigations of more than 400 children with "autistic psychopathy" beyond his home district. However, since he travelled little, and all his publishing was in German, until recently Asperger's name was not as well known as that of Leo Kanner, who described infantile autism in 1943.In the later part of World War II Asperger served as a soldier in Croatia. He was habilitated as a lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1944 and became director of the children's clinic in 1946. He became professor at the university children's clinic – the Universitäts-Kinderklinik – in Innsbruck in 1957, and from 1962 held the same tenure in Vienna. From 1964 he headed the medical station of the SOS-Kinderdörfer (SOS Children's villages) in Hinterbrühl. Asperger was became professor emeritus in 1977. He was working until the last, delivering a lecture six days prior to his death.His list of publications counts 359 items, a majority of which concern two themes: "autistic psychopathy" and"death".) Asperger’s Syndrome, a benign form of autism, in other words, the positive expression of the condition and has been linked recently to names as diverse as Andy Warhol, Eamonn de Valera, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newtown and Yeats himself. The main ‘symptoms’ (I use this term hesitatingly, the term ‘illness’ too because ‘mental illness’ does not follow the same dialectic – diagnosis/prognosis/cure – as physical illnesses. There is unfortunately no real cure for psychosis or autism of any of the other major mental illnesses – bipolar affective, schizo-affective or manic-depressive psychosis. All of these illnesses have overlapping, shared symptoms but also much divergence and also differing sets of treatments and medications, thus making them very difficult to talk about in general terms but a set of symptoms are connected to the human, empathetic functioning. Empathy, in itself a coinage and the conjunction of the German word ‘einfuhlung’ (meaning ‘empathy’) and sympathy. Another related term is the generic ‘emotional intelligence, (a trope in itself since emotions and intelligence are palpably separate) covering a seeming multitude of human behaviours and behaviourisms. Most of them can be easily recognised: self-awareness, control of impulse, empathy, self-consciousness. So, here we have two coinages, a newly coined illness and a newly coined term describing a set of symptoms that we can define as in some way ‘new’ and specific to the 20th century.
Yeats’ interests therefore bifurcate towards romantic nationalism and towards theosophy and the occult but these two concerns are also directly connected together through his poetry, his infatuation with Maud Gonne (the obsessional characteristics of this infatuation mimic the wasted and ultimately futile obsessions of the autistic. Incidentally, sufferers from autism are much more likely to be male, thus iterating seemingly typical male preoccupations with logic and systems rather than feelings and emotions. Men who suffer from autism are very often referred to as being ‘more male than males’.), his inner development as an artist.
NIETZSCHE VS THE SMOG MONSTER
(I had to try to get Nietzsche into this essay, so pardon this banner heading. Imagine being whisked out of your living room suddenly by aliens and then given a free ride around our solar system. This is an exercise for you and some real imaginative work.)
NIETZSCHE VS GODZILLA
The difference between early Yeats and late Yeats (apart from his early affinity with Blake, Swedenborg and Boehme among other mystics and visionaries, adherence to Victorian yellow wallpaper sentimentality [Victorian yellow wallpaper possibly adorned with a poet’s bloodied tuburculosis vomit.] is the toughening of his work via his encounter with the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche influenced many creative writers of this period (G.B.Shaw, D.H.Lawrence, further influence in Germany and Italy in Anarchist political movements possibly because of his materialist and anti-Christian stance although there are significant and strongly anti-Liberal, authoritarian tendencies in Nietzsche’s writings, and Expressionist artistic and literary circles in Germany, particularly the movements der Blau Reiter and die Brucke.) possibly because creative writers find heavily systemised works and rather long tomes tiresome and enjoyed the aphoristic and decidedly succinct writings of Nietzsche.
The real development of Yeatsian ontology, his widening political and social awareness, and his aristocratic, neo-Nietzschean contempt for masses, mercantilism and markets, can be demonstrated by a poem such as ‘TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED PICTURES’ which I quote in full here:
TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED PICTURES YOU gave, but will not give againUntil enough of paudeen's penceBy Biddy's halfpennies have lainTo be 'some sort of evidence',Before you'll put your guineas down,That things it were a pride to giveAre what the blind and ignorant townImagines best to make it thrive.What cared Duke Ercole, that bidHis mummers to the market-place,What th' onion-sellers thought or didSo that his Plautus set the paceFor the Italian comedies?And Guidobaldo, when he madeThat grammar school of courtesiesWhere wit and beauty learned their tradeUpon Urbino's windy hill,Had sent no runners to and froThat he might learn the shepherds' willAnd when they drove out Cosimo,Indifferent how the rancour ran,He gave the hours they had set freeTo Michelozzo's latest planFor the San Marco Library,Whence turbulent Italy should drawDelight in Art whose end is peace,In logic and in natural lawBy sucking at the dugs of Greece.Your open hand but shows our loss,For he knew better how to live.Let paudeens play at pitch and toss,Look up in the sun's eye and giveWhat the exultant heart calls goodThat some new day may breed the bestBecause you gave, not what they would,But the right twigs for an eagle's nest!
Yeats bemoans the loss of the idealised ordering of the past, aristocratic patrons who might boast superior ‘breeding’, intelligence and insight and contempt for the masses as an ignorant mob, wholly uninterested in art but only in debased entertainment, pleasure as against seriousness. Of course, the Renaissance period was marked by widespread questioning about the nature of power and its uses and mis-uses, by challenges to power not simply of a political nature but also shifts in scientific understanding such as the Copernican revolution in knowledge. In fact, it is hard to believe that Yeats’ romantic, elitest and aristocratic attitudes could possibly have persisted into the modern era given the incredible changes that had occurred during the era he prefers to idealise. Of course, such attitudes could only persist in Ireland because of the lateness of industrialisation and the island’s generally peripheral status in relation to the rest of Europe. By 1900 the complex frisson created by Yeats concluded with various historical epochs – Byzantium, Renaissance Italy, Medieval Ireland – that could not possibly be compatible with the development of Ireland in the direction of Nationalist and Socialist politics. A further identity (or mask) is Yeats status as a Celtic Bard or Shaman in the ancient traditions of Bards and Shaman. Such figures as the Celtic (Welsh) Bard Taliesin (see ‘Gwion’s Riddle’, Robert Graves’ ‘The White Goddess’) and their Shamanistic powers, magical abilities, special powers influencing everything from animal behaviour, weather, physical illness, fertility and, of course, very similar to the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenics. Yeats’ association with the I.R.B. (Irish Republican Brotherhood, a nascent form of the Irish Republican Army or I.R.A. Latterly, this organisation split into two parts, the Official I.R.A. and the Provisional I.R.A. The Official I.R.A. were motivated more by their Marxist associations and gravitated away from violence as a means of perpetuating their political project. The Provisionals, however, embraced Green Republicanism with the aim of a United Ireland although some members, such as Martin McGuinness claim to be Marxists while asserting that their Marxist views were fundamentally at odds with their membership of the Catholic Church [Note the very strongly anti-Marxist and reactionary views of the ruling hierarchy of the Catholic Church.] rather than a Socialist Republic or Soviet. Today the organisation has once again split into the Provisionals who want to maintain the Good Friday Agreement and other splinter groups as the Real I.R.A.) was a harmless affiliation and Yeats’ aim was a loosely focussed and seemingly sentimental Irish Nationalism which was possibly the result of a reaction against his domineering father. Yeats came from a Protestant, Orange background and was first inspired to write poetry by a book of Orange rhymes. His Nationalist, Republicans views would have seemed decidedly odd to many of his contemporaries given his background and also deeply contradictory. These contradictions, symptoms of a search for identity, seem to be the foundations of Yeats’ art. Oddly, Yeats wasn’t much influenced by the vogue for Realism and Naturalism, current on the Continent in the early part of his life and throughout the 1890s and exhibited in the works of Zola, Flaubert, Ibsen and Strindberg. Naturalism was mainly associated with the novel and theatre. Ibsen rejected verse drama after his early work ‘Peer Gynt’ and adopted a lucid prose style to deal with the rather anti-poetic (it’s hard to say exactly what this means but probably alludes to dead traditions in theatre and poetry that Ibsen was rebelling against.), drab, sunless Norwegian landscape (light being an important metaphor for Ibsen – Osvald demands ‘more light’ at the end of ‘Ghosts’ - in such plays as ‘A Doll’s House’ and ‘Ghosts’. All in all Naturalism is an overt reaction against the conventions of the bourgeois novel and of the bourgeois theatre, recognisable, comfortable themes, verse drama, resolution, comforting and familiar depictions of domesticity and women. Since Ibsen dealt with themes of women’s oppression, schizophrenia, syphilis, guilt, repression, indeed a host of Victorian taboos.
