Tag Archives: language

Yeats: The Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart

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Image by K.R. Hamm via So Fake It’s Real

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

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.

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 faery 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.

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.

Comment

William Butler Yeats wrote “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” toward the end of his life, in a moment of insight into the limits of aesthetic pursuits. The poem speaks equally to the limits of ideology.

Propaganda Nation: Libertarian Labels

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Robert Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

Tyler Cowen has listed from “his gut” the 10 books that have influenced him the most. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises is not on the list. None of Mises’s books are on the list. Keynes makes the list. Of Keynes, he writes:

John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Keynes is one of the greatest thinkers of economics and there are new ideas on virtually every page.

Which raises the question for me, “Why does Cowen even care what Austrian economists call themselves?” If he can’t put a Mises book on a list of ten books that influenced him,when Human Action is the greatest economic text ever written, yet finds room for Keynes and “his new ideas,” I have to classify him a Keynesian, pure and simple.”

Why does Cowen care? It’s all about subversion of language…

“Libertarianism” thus defined (or, more accurately, labeled) comes to mean something not very removed from “liberalism”….

…which today has moved so much to the left that in many areas it’s indistinguishable from communism.

Which means you get to call yourself a libertarian but still push for the same programs and policies that the left-liberals push for.

Which keeps you within the range of “respectability.”

And keeps you out of SPLC lists that have you rubbing shoulders with the Pentagon shooter and anyone else who decides to get physical with the state apparatus.

Mind you, at our little blog, we have no quarrel with communism or communists. We don’t think they’re evil. We just don’t want them turning us into guinea pigs for their experiments. When they feel an urge to test the limits of human malleability, we suggest that they try it out first on their spouses and off-spring. See how that turns out after a generation, and then give us a call and we’ll talk….

Samuel Johnson on Hypocrisy

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Samuel Johnson writing about the misuse of the charge of “hypocrisy”:

“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”