Monday
Last week I reported on surviving Rohinton Mistry’s roller coaster of an epic, A Fine Balance. In it, I quoted a key passage in which Vasantrao Valmik, who has been journalist, marketer, campaign writer, proofreader, and lawyer, reveals the secret of life to college student Maneck. Despite things having gone wrong in each of his professions, he refuses to despair, choosing instead to follow advice offered up by a William Butler Yeats poem:
“Please always remember, the secret of survival is to embrace change, and to adapt. To quote: “All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay.’”
“Yeats?” guessed Maneck.
The proofreader nodded. “You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.” He paused, considering what he had said. “Yes,” he repeated. “In the end, it’s all a question of balance.”
The poem is “Lapus Lazuli,” which begins with “hysterical women” questioning the worth of painting, music, and those poets “that are always gay.” Why aren’t they out there doing something drastic rather than “just” making art. Given that these hysterics are forecasting the carpet bombing of cities—the year is 1938 and the London blitzkrieg is only two years away– their hysteria can’t be casually dismissed.
W.H. Auden famously said—this in his 1939 poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”—that “poetry makes nothing happen,” which is why doomsayers are questioning it. Yet Valmik relies on poetry to keep him going. As you look at the poem, keep in mind that “gay” for Yeats means joyous affirmation of life:
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
Yeats then points to Macbeth—“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage”—and perhaps as well to Jaques’s similar analogy in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely actors.” How can either we or the theater actors performing those roles keep going, he asks. The answer is that they feel lifted up, not beaten down, by the poetry. Gaiety transfigures desperate humans at the moment when tragedy is “wrought to its uttermost.” When we are in the presence of Hamlet or Lear, all our dread over what we have aimed at, found, and lost is blacked out. Heaven blazes into the head:
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
Essayist Himadri, like Mistry an ex-pat Indian, captures Yeats’s point beautifully in his blog Argumentative Old Git:
In a nutshell, [the poem] seems to me to be about that paradox of “tragic joy.” We can experience a tragedy as profound and as bleak as Shakespeare’s King Lear or Sophocles’ Oedipus, and yet come out of it strangely exhilarated, uplifted. To Yeats, this curious reaction to the witnessing of human suffering points to rather complex issues not only about human psychology, but about the nature of destruction and of creation, and the elusive interactions between them. In this poem, Yeats juxtaposes the cataclysmic waves of destruction and of suffering that humanity has faced and continues to face, with the joy of rebuilding, of creating out of the ashes.
This is the advice that Valmik offers Maenick, who unfortunately does not take it, choosing instead to commit suicide. The Parsi woman and the two untouchable men do so, however, even though their situations are more desperate. When everything else has been taken away from them, they hold on to their improbable friendship. The precious moments they continue to build together far outweigh anything that the scoundrels in the book achieve with their horrific actions.
It’s a point Yeats continues to make in his poem’s final three stanzas. Although old civilizations have been “put to the sword” and precious works of art are forever lost, life continues to affirm itself through the creative spirit. In a Lapus Lazuli carving of two musicians and a servant carrying their instruments, he imagines that they are off to play “mournful melodies.”
Despite this, he writes, their “ancient, glittering eyes are gay.”
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilizations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a watercourse or an avalanche,
On lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
In think of William Carlos Williams’s observation about poetry that doesn’t acknowledge the news of the world, which would include aeroplanes pitching “like King Billy bomb-balls in/ Until the town lie beaten flat”:
While it is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
One thing found there is hope in the face of despair. Yeats understood this at the end of his life and the character Vanick, recognizing this essential message, uses it to guide his life.
