November 15, 2020

Finding my way. While I continue my reading of Being Wrong I came across a poem The Circus Animal's Desertion by  W.B. Yeats a poem I never was exposed to (the link below includes an analysis). 

 https://poemanalysis.com/william-butler-yeats/the-circus-animals-desertion/

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed � 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

So this brings to my mind my attempts to write throughout my life about my inner world and workings of my mind. Diaries begun and gone. Fragments of thought and scribblings of consciousness my I attempts to bridge the gap to you. They may lay scattered in this computer under the category of Documents or in folders stored somewhere, in notebooks of my handwriting that I often can not find decipherable. From college years perhaps since my ramblings were sporadic and hazy in memory. While on trips more clearly in memory Israel, trips to Europe, family trip to Italy writing daily with Ann, quite musing over some crisis in my life! Now I resonate with Yeats last three lines in this series of blogs  I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Yesterday our hearty seven hiked into the volcanic terrain of Windward Oahu. Some five and one half miles later I had Rebecca call Ginger her best friend to come to Maunawili to pick us up toe ferry us back to Waimanalo for our cars. Monica had fallen twice and we were tired but not exhausted. Along the way we visited the flume on Ainoni Ridge and gone down this ridge three times to find our way through this green lush tropical wonderland to the dirt road leading to the abandoned home in the forest near Maunawili community. We ran into hiker Bob who accompanied us part way. We all enjoyed the challenges of maneuvering in the narrower sometimes muddy trails down the steep way across small gorges and over the gorge onto a rusting metal bridge. We marveled at the wild ginger flowering canopy we past and the odors from the vegetation. While walking I was able to talk with Richard Rovin about my interest in understanding our minds attempts at capturing reality and the errors that occur during this process. We did talk somewhat about politics and some very strange Trumpian views of a former hiker. Richard told me he attempts to always view his own beliefs and perceptions with some doubt knowing he may be wrong. He also claimed that he was not interested in changing others but then we were amused at this since he's a psychiatrist realizing that his job is to change some of the very troubled people he sees at Hawai'i State Hospital. He smiled when I suggested that he was not very good at it (no one is). He shared some important memories of his first wife's death from cancer bringing me to recall Ann's bravery and decision for assisted suicide. Ginger was very nice and picked us up for our transport. She shared some of her current life and Randy's her boy friend. We commented on the strangeness of our lives with the pandemic creating mask wearing and social distancing. So these words on this screen are from me to me and possibly someone else from the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 

Leonard

https://www.flickr.com/photos/leonardsjacobs/albums/72157603520494610