Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I forgot to mention something quite important, which is that Yeats wrote most of his great poetry at a relatively advanced age. This is unusual for a poet (or any writer/artist), who tend to do most of their best stuff when they're young and full of spunk.

Yeats is perhaps the great poet on the subject of getting old and both pining for and regretting one's youth. This is another, unfortunate, reason why I related to his poems (prematurely decrepit at the age of 35). It's all sighing because you never had the balls to tell that person you fancied them, or to be a heroic and courageous figure. (Stirred in with a big dose of vanity, as Luka says.)

But Yeats was brave, in his own modest way, to face up to his age, and to his delusions.

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.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
He obviously had a "thing" about shopkeepers. Probably was an absolute nightmare of a customer.

:crylarf:
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

"Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal"
(Sailing to Byzantium)

"What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?"
(The Tower)
 

catalog

Well-known member
I think it was that book, 'a vision', I tried to read previously but never got anywhere.

Would years have been into MMA do you think?

I'm also sure I remember grapejuice saying somewhere that whilst he and Joyce were not friends exactly, they were aware of one another and Joyce knew all the hermetic magic stuff and it worked it's way into all he did
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Joyce famously dissed Yeats face-to-face (but still relied on his patronage throughout his career):

"One day, Joyce stopped Yeats in the street and introduced himself. Yeats had previously been warned about Joyce by George Russell, who wrote: "The first spectre of a new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer."

Yeats invited Joyce to a smoking room off O'Connell Street, where he endured one of the greatest put-downs in literary history. Yeats records that Joyce "began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done; politics, folklore, historical settings of events and so on. Above all, why had I written about ideas? These things were all the signs of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. . . his own little book of poetry owed nothing to anything but his own mind which was much nearer to God than folklore".

Yeats was exasperated, puzzled and walked up and down expounding that all good art depended on popular tradition. He ended in triumph, as he thought, by referring to the art of Homer, and of Shakespeare and of Chartres Cathedral.

Joyce's reaction was to stand up to leave. As he was going out he asked Yeats, "How old are you?". Yeats said, "37". Joyce said, with a sigh, "I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old. I am 20". Despite this, Yeats reported, "A young poet who wrote excellently, but had the worst manners"."
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/how-joyce-bit-the-yeats-hand-that-fed-him-31488044.html
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The rabble aka youse

http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/authors/classic/Joyce_J/Criticism/Rabblement.htm

"No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself. This radical principle of artistic economy applies specially to a time of crisis, and to-day when the highest form of art has been just preserved by desperate sacrifices, it is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabblement. The Irish Literary Theatre is the latest movement of protest against the sterility and falsehood of the modern stage. Half a century ago the note of protest was uttered in Norway, and since then in several countries long and disheartening battles have been fought against the hosts of prejudice and misinterpretation and ridicule. What triumph there has been here and there is due to stubborn conviction, and every movement that has set out heroically has achieved a little. The Irish Literary Theatre gave out that it was the champion of progress, and proclaimed war against commercialism and vulgarity. It had partly made good its word and was expelling the old devil when after the first encounter it surrendered to the popular will. Now your popular devil is more dangerous than your vulgar devil. Bulk and lungs count for something, and he can gild his speech aptly. He has prevailed once more, and the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe."

The Irish Literary Theatre, in case I haven't mentioned it already, is the theatre co-founded by Yeats.

It is equally unsafe at present to say of Mr. Yeats that he has or has not genius. In aim and form The Wind among the Reeds is poetry of the highest order, and The Adoration of the Magi (a story which one of the great Russians might have written) shows what Mr. Yeats can do when he breaks with the half-gods. But an esthete has a floating will, and Mr. Yeat’s treacherous instinct of adaptability must be blamed for his recent association with a platform from which even self-respect should have urged him to refrain.
 

catalog

Well-known member

I just read a tiny bit of this and the mention of diagrammatic thought caught my eye. I wonder if we might make more headway with some of the 'mapping' and 'framing' talk if it could be diagrammed out.

I think a process of drawing would suit some of the conversations here cos it allows for an element of non-linear thought.

So not exactly a mindmap cos they tend to be a bit limited but maybe flow diagrams, graphs and so on.
 

luka

Well-known member
The problem is yyaldrin was saying he doesn't want you to start thinking of yourself as 'the drawer' cos he said he was here first and had the reputation as 'the drawer' already. He said you should find your own thing
 

luka

Well-known member
He's got a typology of character synced to the phases of the moon. I've never been able to work out which one I am though.
 

version

Well-known member
In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y."

I dunno that Napoleon actually said that, but it's intriguing. What was happening when Dissensians were 20?
 

version

Well-known member
Maybe that's why you're fixated on catastrophe, resets and so on. The shadow of the millennium bug. The catastrophe that never came.
 
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