Thursday 30 January 2014

Looking for these Keys

(photo from unknown source)


Questions of the self have been coming up recently, with my morning pages of squibbling journals, social dysfunctions and experiences of macrotic dreaming. In these moods then, this poem with visual poem seeks for the key of patience, peace and collaboration with circumstance, as the poetry scene in Melbourne evolves around a dying governance and capitalist cultures in fascist disarray. Indeed we here represent a strange breed, the left and the sensitive few, a core of survival, clinging to bridge the gaps between communities, the earth and massive psychotic conditions... in joy :)



Monday 27 January 2014

Yeats; Upon the Balance of Two Worlds…

(photo care of www.Totemical.com)

By Jason B.R. Maxwell
Griffith University
s2832398




 “To escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science; at that moment 

Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a back ground not of 

Judaisim but of Druidism, not shut off in dead history, but flowing, concrete phenomenal. I 

was born in this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it”   (Yeats cited in Harrison 371)
Introduction: Two Religions
Much has been said about the theological complexity of William Butler Yeats.
Yet from the moot of his critics, there remains a question via one structure of thought; on judgement day, does he believe in any form of Christian salvation? Even though it is clear that Yeats is far from Christian, answering a definitive negative to this question would be far from truth. Therefore this essay unearths an agnostic balance of religions leading to his visions of salvation. This balance can be seen behind two key works; the mechanistic logic of Christian enlightenment in “Sailing to Byzantium” and the natural beast of Paganism in “The Second Coming” (Yeats 124-129).
A Vision:  Conceptual background.
Yet we cannot discuss these works without first mentioning Yeats’s philosophic view point in ‘A Vision’. Inspired by Mrs Yeats’ exposition as a discovered psychic in 1920,  ‘A Vision’ details, in prose, that history was a “Wheel”, where a “Great Memory” and the influence of Christ, lasts two thousand years and then falls to a new cycle, directly opposed to its predecessor (Weeks 286-287, Griffith University 16). But to complicate this determinism, analysis made by Empson suggests that spirits “time travel” to ancient kingdoms and decide where and when to incarnate themselves (72). Indeed Yeats himself was interpreted as desiring to do so, to around 1000 AD (Empson 84).
Yeats; Sailing to a perfected Eternity…
But where was Yeats going and why? Byzantium, one of the major birthplaces of Christianity, to Yeats, represented a “unity of aesthetic and religious experience” (Empson 69) and thus a pivotal point in the two thousand year Christian cycle (Empson 84).  Further, in Yeats’s first poem of the city, “Sailing to Byzantium”, it is singing that is given detailed and contrasted metaphors relating to the perfection of art, where each stanza beholds music in different forms (Empson 69).
In the beginning the poems youthful song seems to accelerate the cycle of “whatever begotten, born and dies” and thus a distraction from “the monuments of unaging intellect” or collective mind (Yeats 6-8). Further, in the second stanza, the structures involved in the schools of art also distract, this time from the individuals “soul clap”, i.e. the individuals music amidst the songs or monuments of Byzantium (Yeats 11). In the third he turns to his new masters there and makes prayer, to “pern in a gyre” or reach out to help “Gather … [him] /Into the artifice of eternity” (Yeats 19-22). These three stanzas form an advancement of the soul in song, from the distractions of youth, to learning an individual’s place, to sharing art until enlightenment.
However it is the completion of the poem which creates the most controversy. For once he has achieved the highest purification of his soul, he wishes not for any type of flesh-full immortality amongst the lords and ladies of Byzantium, instead he wishes to reincarnate as a golden bird in order to sing to a “drowsy Emperor” to keep him awake (Yeats 29). 
But why would Yeats do this?
Some critics see this move as “hollowness” and Yeats was deeply criticized even by his friends for turning his back on the naturalism that is so strong in other works (Kimball 216, Empson 80). But nowhere does it say that Yeats’ song itself is unnatural, mechanical or monotonous. So in light of Yeats’ circular theory, Yeats might believe that for personal AND political reasons, he had to travel to the very critical time of Byzantium where the real bird is said to have existed (Empson 84).  This mission might seem so vital, that even immortal flesh, subservient to impurity, will fail him and his Emperor to the decisions that might decide the fate of all future Christianity. And so the question; why couldn’t Yeats’ ‘unaging intellect’ lead Christianity to salvation?
Absolution and Armageddon
Perhaps art can lead to salvation, but to give such a world burden to one man alone would be to define Yeats (or his yawning, un-god like Emperor) as Christ himself, and too far from Yeats’s agnostic and war hardened reality. No, Harrison defines Yeats in similarity to Nietzsche, in that Christianity parallels Paganism as “two principles” that are in a state of constant flux that is “contrary, not negation, not refutation” (368). Indeed, this was a natural unending cycle, one after the other.  Nowhere is this more relevant than in his poem; “The Second Coming”, where rather than signalling any “reforming zeal,” Yeats depicts civilization on its “blood dimmed” knees (Harrison 368, Yeats 5).  
The poems semiotic structure is simple enough; two stanzas contrast contemporary torn realities with a mystic’s narrated vision. It achieves the former with Yeats’s cone shaped ‘gyre’ system for the soul embodying contemporary Christianity as a whole; for “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ … /Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (Weeks 286-287, Yeats 1-3).  This system predicts that in the largest ‘gyre’, furthest from the birth of Christ symbolised ideologically as the Falcon, innocence is lost, the wise are silent while “the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Weeks, Yeats 2-8). 
This environment builds into the second, where Yeats then imagines a sleeping Sphinx awakening in the desert as a consequence.  Here Yeats comments on his own symbolism, of the East and its Sphinx as “human power … stretched to its utmost” and thus a symbol of “laughing, ecstatic destruction” (Yeats cited in Harrison 368). But to finish it all in true Christian dread, this gigantic beast “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” (Yeats 22).
In contrast to “Sailing to Byzantium”, the symbols in “The Second Coming” seems to leave no real room for interpretation, it is “quite plainly the association of the beast, the anti-Christ” and thus the destruction of Christian civilization (Weeks 291).   But to differ from interpretations inherit in ‘anti’, perhaps seeing the second coming of Christ in a contrary form rather than a ‘refuted’ form, one such as Michel Angelo, would absolve many concerns amidst the sheer chaos (Yeats 20, Yeats cited in Harrison 373).
Conclusion: The Completion Storey…
By contrasting the dualistic bird of “Sailing to Byzantium” and the ‘Anti’- Christ in “The Second Coming” we can see the beginning, the middle and the end of Christian civilization in political failure AND artistic beauty.  Yet past Christianity’s life cycle, it is perhaps answering “What rough beast … slouches towards Bethlehem” with a Pagan one, a rough yet natural “druidic” Christ  with the tough task of leading the world back to nature, where we come closer to Yeats’ intended influences upon Christianity. For to Yeats, life was a balance, not a conversion, of two contrary forces; of the logical, temporal mechanics of Christianity and the natural, eternal song of Paganism.


Works Cited:
Empson, William. Yeats and Byzantium. Grand Street 1:4 (1982): 67-95. Web. 20th Dec.            2013.
Griffith University. Study guide; LCI12 Irish Literature.Brisbane: Digitisation and Distribution,    2013. Print.
Harrison, John R. What Rough Beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and historical Rhetoric in “the Second Coming”. Papers on Language and Literature 31.4 (1995):362-373. Web. 28th Dec. 2013.
Kimball, Elizabeth. Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium. The Explicator 61:4 (2003): 216-218. Web.     26th Dec 2013.
Weeks, Donald. Image and Idea in Yeats’ the Second Coming. PMLA 63:1 (1948): 281-            292.    Web. 26th Dec. 2013.
Yeats, William Butler. Selected Poems. Ed.Timothy Webb. London: Penguin       Books,            1991. Print.


Sunday 12 January 2014

Trinity Child (dedicated to W.B. Yeats)

(photo care of deviantart)


Studying Yeats at online University, I've been pondering the-end-of-the-current-civilizations symbol of the sphinx in his poem "A Second Coming". This symbol i.e. the moving collective consciousness of all things connected to the falcon, or the bird of the enlightened one, moves to reincarnate as a 'contrary-Christ' (NOT an anti-christ) and represents a major change in civilization as we know it. Granted a change of massive chaos. However this poem attempts to personalize this symbol and its aftermath with my experiences of family life. Thus a babe, attempting to sleep, twists as chaos reigns, "teething and seething", the symbol of this change, and then the bliss-romance of all after dream time becomes the poems truth...

yeats' poem:

 Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?





Thursday 9 January 2014

Can't Believe It; Meditation and the Classroom...

(photo from eScienceCommons)


By Jason B.R. Maxwell
Curtin University Student
16072794


I didn’t believe it. Nah, no way…  Yet this wasn’t the fact that our regular terminator-jawed teacher was away for the day. No, this was the fact that in one of those mass-produced, shoebox classrooms, there shoved up back of our country Victorian school in Yea, we were all quiet. Yes there with the summers cow-paddock haze coming into the open windows, the whole afternoon year 8 class, rowdy as bay 13 was now meditating. There was no spit-balling, no names, no hideous  obnoxious jokes, for once  I  felt safe, there was  nothing but    the sound of breathing and the gentle music  and calm voice coming from one of  those bulky  grey  Sony  CD  players prolific in the nineties.  
 
If you’ve ever taught in a primary or secondary situation you may end up asking, so who  was  this miracle working emergency teacher and  when  can she come work this miracle for me? Like some pseudo mystic, I’m afraid I’m going to have to say that the answer was not some super-powered psychologist/hypnotist/teacher, although she had the good sense to briefly step out of the usual  monotonous curriculum that turns normal 15 year olds into howling demons on ‘those days’.

No. The answer is called Mental Silence. 

Granted, my experience back in 1997 was probably called something different, but today, the essence is the same, it’s the ‘new’ weapon in a schools arsenal to combat a lack of classroom concentration. Yes, with the help of the head of Sydney University’s Meditation research program, Dr Ramesh Monacha, schools are coming around to the old idea.   With   his book ‘Silence your Mind’,  and many eye-brow raising, peer reviewed research   papers,  he   tells  of    the benefits  of  Sahaja  meditation, where the goal  is  to  achieve a more peaceful and therefore healthy and elastic mind.
                                                                                   
 But with my mind  and  for  the 22.2  per  cent  of  Australians declaring no religion in the last census, I’m  going   to   say  no, you don’t have to be religious to believe in this practice. Sahaja meditation sounds very hindu-kesh, code word for complete placebo balony, but what comes with Dr Monacha’s angle is some serious, non-sectarian, evidence-based research. Dr Monacha defines, with clinical standard experiments, the most beneficial meditation as the experience of ‘mental silence’.  What he calls in a podcast with Nightlife on the ABC “turning off the monkey chatter”. In his demonstrations he encourages affirmations such as “I am the pure silence” and boasts of 10 per cent of students achieving complete Mental Silence on the first try.

But some of the most impressive results go beyond simple volume control. What comes out of Dr Monacha’s University level data is that meditation improves the bodies self-regulation and hence the bodies reactions to things like inflammation, Asthma and Epilepsy, it improves mental health; improving the the release of happy hormone oxytocin and conditions such as depression and ADHD, and even the big one; social health - through awareness, reducing the bully - victim cycles in schools. 

Now if you’re a teacher reading this I’m sure I don’t need to say that this is golden news. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that in the current Australian classroom, mental and social health are in a serious situation.  Beyond Blue reports 1 in 4 people between 16-24 experience depression, Census data shows 7 per cent of 0-17 year olds are diagnosed with a disorder, and anxiety in our teaching population? The Sydney Morning Herald claims that “School teachers in NSW are making more than 800 compensation claims a year for stress-related injuries”. Here “unacceptably high” seems to be a little bit of an understatement.

Of course, many schools are trying to stem this tide through meditation on their own. One of which is Sacred  Heart Primary in Sydney where  they  had  40 volunteer students on the first go and great results concerning thought sequencing and class concentration.  At Climatech in Adelaide, assistant Principle Sue Nixon is also receiving positive feedback - that it’s great for exam preparation and how students are easier to settle.  She even had a boy come up to her at a school camp and say “I don’t feel pathetic in side anymore.”

Thus the question has to be asked; if there is proven, curriculum savvy methods available to us, then why aren’t we implementing these techniques structurally? Doing research for this paper, the search results for “meditation” in the Victorian Department of Education website turned up only three minor results for the word ‘meditation’. In their Mental Health section it isn’t mentioned once.  Here ‘unacceptably ignorant’ comes to mind.

Especially since there was positive data in the 80’s.

Personally, paradoxically, I really can’t answer this question without expletive poetry. However, for your sanity and mine, I’ll save you the extensive ramble. For one thing IS for sure, if Dr Monacha and others passionate about this amazing classroom tool have any part in it, the main stream WILL be coming around sooner or later. And having experienced it myself, I believe our children of the future will have something to look forward to…

Works Cited

Australian Bureau of Statistics. Who Are Australians older people?; Stories from 2011      Census. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 12th Dec. 2012. Web. 23rd Dec 2013.

________________________. Mental Health in Australia: A Snapshot, 2004-05. Australian          Bureau of Statistics. 30th Aug. 2013. Web. 23rd Dec. 2013.

Beyond Blue. Young People. Beyond Blue; Depression, Anxiety. N.d. Web. 23rd Dec. 2013.
Delroy, Tony. Nightlife; The Science of Meditation Podcast. ABC local. 6th Aug. 2013. Web.           23rd Dec. 2013.

Manocha, Dr. Ramesh. Meditation, mindfulness and mind-emptiness. Acta           Neuropsychiatrica. 23: 46–47. 2011. doi: 10.1111/j.1601-5215.2010.00519.

Patty, Anna. Ed. Conflicting views on teachers' stress claims. Sydney Morning Herald. 8th             May. 2007. Web. 23rd Dec. 2013.

Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. Search Results. Victorian               Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. Web. 23rd Dec. 2013.
Picture:

eScienceCommons. Can meditation calm your kids?. Bing.com. N.d. Web. 23rd Dec. 2013.