The Widening Gyre

Yeats, The Second Coming:

    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?

Okay. So I'm finally starting the blog I planned a year ago. It was meant to start a year before the 21st of December, 2012, which is the proposed date of the 'end of the world' or the 'Mayan Apocalypse' or whatever you want to call it. If you don't know much about the "2012 phenomenon", as the great modern authority on All Things (Wikipedia) calls it, go look it up. The date apparently marks the end of the cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, which belonged to the ancient civilisation of the Mayans, being pretty good at astronomy as far as I can tell (though I'm not sure how good they were at other bits of science. Medicine, for example). However, I got caught up doing Christmas and having fun and studying for my exams, so I ended up starting this little project typically late.

So, what do people think this prophecy means? Some New Age types reckon humanity will enter into the dawning of a new spiritual age, where all the chicks and dudes of the world will love each other and there will be no war and we'll all walk around barefoot at one with all the animals. Other people simply think God's wrath is upon us and the end is nigh and the lake of fire shall open up and swallow the people that one particular denomination (of which there are thousands) see as sinners. Ok, so, so far I'm not exaxctly convinced. But there is something in the air, as it were. Maybe it's just the curse of youth, but every day I see turbulent changes in the cultural discourses I am exposed to, and a growing dissatisfaction with the accepted societal critiques of the last half a decade. My uncle, who lives in France and is the 'Successful' member of the family (he designed guns for the MoD, if I told you his name I'd have to kill you), he told me with the fire of wine in his eyes, in his empty draughty villa, "It is an interesting time to be alive". His words stuck.

Anyway, some other people think that we'll just be struck by a shitload of natural disasters, like the piece of Hollywood disaster that came out a couple of years ago. I live in a very hilly place, far from the coast, with lots of natural resources and high above sea level, so I won't start losing sleep over that possibility. Or maybe it will mark the moving of a disasterous asteroid or secret planet into our orbit, fucking everything up big time. Or maybe it's something about particle physics, uniting the quantum with the subatomic, the end of entropy or the destructive discovery of the Higgs boson.

In case you can't tell, I don't exactly believe in all this stuff. but I do believe that a hell of a lot of people believe in it, and have invested a lot of hope or fear, or even money, on the fact that the 21st of December 2012 marks a giant change in the journey of humanity. I guess this blog acts mostly as a kind of social commentary. It says a lot about Western society at the moment that there has been a rise in 'End of the World' prophecies and cults, and there's a hell of a lot of literature and 'documentaries' about it out there, espousing all sorts of dogmas and theories, claiming repent now or prepare now or open your eyes now. People sense change, people are tired with the cultural and political milieu and although there is a general malais among everyday people, discourses such as globalisation, consumerism, capitalism, socialism, and ecology have become cliches. People want change, they just don't want to have to instigate it themselves, so they defer responsibility and passion, resign themselves to the idea that change is on its way no matter what. I'm guilty of this to an extent; I'm a proper armchair activist. I'll enter heated pub debates about political corruption but I've only been to one protest. I'll write my own blog, but I won't read yours. I'm too arrogant or self-conscious to join a movement of any kind; I care too much about my own success in life to sacrifice more than a few hours or a few quid for others. I'll be benevolent, as long as it doesn't get in my way. I guess It's got me too. Oh well, eveything will be ok, I just need to finish my degree (I graduate this summer) then I can give away a load of stuff then get to a high place and party like there's literally no tomorrow... see how easy it is?

Turning and turning in the Widening Gyre... the increasing chaos of the world, a centrepoint of order which we are whizzing further and further away from, ready to reach the end and collapse in on ourselves and begin the cycle once more. The Big Crunch. Rapture. Revolution. Primitivism. Chaos. Extinction. Death. All the end of a cycle with a counterpart as a beginning. We like cyclical patterns; we find comfort in them. We fear linear endings because we can't comprehend them. Time as cyclical. A new cycle in the Mesoamerican calendar; a new cycle in our existence. 

Political unrest in the West, disunity, fragmentation, art that's so META it's collapsed in on itself and is endlessly turning cycles of self-gratification, fucking nanoscience, the obsession with self-image, alcohol, morbid obesity, uncertainty, change, cancer, shifts in the political and social spectrum, a consensus of capitalist corruption, yet it's somehow embarassing or cliche or ultimately futile to act out against it, global fucking (you got it) warming...
 Oh, for fuck's sake. can we just get this apocalypse over with, please?