riding a high horse on a soap box

A poet named William Butler Yeats from about one hundred years ago talked about an idea he called "gyres."  Here is a gyre (I drew it myself.  It's not supposed to turn into a square at the end.  You get the idea, right?):

You'll notice that the center is where the turns are the closest together.  The turns are tight and strong, as opposed to the widening gyre where the turns are getting weaker and weaker and further and further apart.  He used this to represent the complex procession of time and he actually had the whole past and history of the earth mapped out.  Here is what part of it looked like:

It's kind of cool because he plotted the rise of the big civilizations on the timeline- cultures kept maturing and getting stronger and stronger until the Roman empire was created.  That was one apex of the gyre.  After that, the gyre started its cyclical spiral downward as the Roman empire declined.  This led to the lowest point on the cycle of the gyre which was the death of Jesus Christ.  However, with the appearance of Jesus Christ and His establishing Christianity, the gyre started to spin back outwards and get stronger and stronger; thus, the decline ceased and civilization started getting stronger and stronger.  This pattern is repeated over and over throughout the history of the earth.

Here is why I like the idea of the gyre and why I think it works.  Think of the beginning of Christianity- at first, the members were few but quite converted.  It started out with some of the most powerful testimonies of Christ ever offered (i.e. Paul, John, Peter...)  They started the gyre spinning out and helped it gain momentum.  As the gyre of Christianity increased in power and strength, the bigger and bigger it got.  It really formed the European culture, totally shaping it and making it what it is.  Eventually, basically everyone was a "Christian" in name and at some point, there would have just been too many people who were a part of Christianity who actually didn't really believe in it and did not live by it.  Thus, the widened gyre had been stretched too much- the gyre was spinning too wide to handle, and must have started its decline.  You can see that it declined in the dark ages and look at Europe now- once predominantly Christian, now you are hard pressed to find someone who believes in Him.

I think I have been very broad, general and sweeping in talking about this, and so this isn't exactly a great persuasive idea.  But do you kind of understand the basic idea of a gyre?  It's strong at the center, and as it expands and widens, it loses its force and thus must slow down and the arcs get closer and closer to the center.  When it gets close to the center, it starts spinning faster and faster again, expanding outward once again.  Spinning, spinning.

I think, and maybe Yeats thinks this too (I haven't done enough research to say if this point is true or not), I think that individuals and their lives can also be represented by the gyre.

If my life is represented by a gyre, then right now I am on the phase where the revolutions are beginning to be condensed and closer to the center.  My spinning is slowing and my arcs are condensing.  Why do I say that? I don't know if you noticed, but recently I started to dip my little feetsies into a lot more pop culture than I usually do.  I felt like I had a strong grasp on who I was and I was spinning strong at my center.  So, I started to spin faster and wider outward, expanding, engulfing and experiencing a lot of things that were brand new for me.  I had a lot of new experiences, but the one that might be most telling and so I will focus on it the most is the music I started listening to.  I started listening to rap.  Before this, I could not even stomach the stuff.  It was so counter to everything I believed in in my heart and it grated on my soul so much that I could not listen to it.  However, as I was expanding outward, I started to find that I could actually find what the allure of good rap music is (I believe that everything- I hope I can say that word- that is influential and popular in our culture has something good somewhere in it- or it could be something good twisted...anyways...  Maybe sometimes that something good is a little harder to find some things than in others, but I think it's there.  There is a mood rap music fits that I've never seen anything else fit.  There is a mood that country music fits- the mood where you are just on the road with friends or just sitting enjoying a free sunset and everything is pretty carefree.  End of tangent.)  So I was spinning and spinning wider and and wider to the point where I feel like I was losing control and I was so far away from my center that I could hardly remember what I believed any more.  I realized that this was happening a week or two ago.  It just hit me that I was doing things that I never had before, and I wasn't sure that I liked what I was doing and I wasn't sure if those things were really making me happy.

So I started to slow down.  I started to let the edges of the gyre condense and come back in.  What did that mean, music-wise?  I started listening to calm music that let me think.  I started to listen to a lot of classical, beautiful music.  I started listening to (for those interested) Owen Pallett and Jonsi and Sigur Ros and Jonsi and Alex and Peter Gabriel and Antony and the Johnsons and (haha) The Owls.  The point is, I started coming back to who I have always been.  This poem was inspired by this idea that I've been discussing:

watch me slide back into my Self
like the gyre's swift arms
have run their course,
have collected their life,
and sink back into the center.

hi, i'm home.  and it's nice to be back.

What does this mean for me right now?  Oh it means great stuff for me, but I am not sure for everyone else.  I have started to try to objectively look at the things that my culture is trying to feed me.  The objective view I am taking is kind of "is what I am consuming soulfood?  Will what I'm doing feed me in a good, uplifting way and make me happy?  Will what I'm doing bring me peace and help me find who I am?  And does it fit the morals I truly believe in?"

This has helped me find a peace I have been without for far too long.  I have, in the most literal sense, slowed down.  I have simplified my life and started focusing on the most important things.  I am still working on coming back to the center, but it's working wonders on my happiness.

Why might this be bad for everyone else?  Because now I am starting to hate our culture again.  Looking at a list of the music that is popular now makes me so, so sad.  And this is the point that relates to the title of this post.  I am going to denounce the same music I found myself loving a week or two ago (keep in mind, I do think that this kind of music has its place, but that place is not on the forefront of the music scene and should not  be most prominent in our lives.  Also, I am probably going to be offensive.  Sorry.  At least you can have the satisfaction of knowing I will be eating all my words, because I always do.)

I took this little image from playlist.com just now.  Look at the top searches:

If our culture is on the same principles of a gyre, we are now past the part that is swinging out of control and onto the decline part.  Look at who we are venerating, even if subconsciously.  We may not think, "Oh yes, I think what Katy Perry has to say about a lover making her feel like she is living a teenage feeling again is the most important thing I can focus on."  We don't consciously walk around thinking that.  However, when that is the sort of stuff we spend most of our time listening to, we have essentially made that a priority, right?  We have chosen that as being more important than other songs.  If we spend our time listening to stuff like that, it is obviously becoming more important to us to listen to Katy Perry singing about light drivel, little fluffs with catchy hooks and good beats, than to Sufjan Stevens trying to understand the balance between sanity and insanity, trying to find happiness (and himself) in wellness in a world that is way too big for us.  When we do something, anything, that something we are doing is obviously more important to us than something else.  (Me?  I'm writing this instead of an essay I am supposed to be doing for school.  Meh.)

I heard a really, intensely scary statistic the other day that may be at least in part a result of the music that is at the front of the scene right now (or the music is a result of this statistic...they are somehow connected, right?)  My friend who is also going into teaching here at BYU told me that a recently taken poll found out that the percentage of Americans who read two books or less after completing a university degree is 80%.  That means that 8 out of the 10 next college graduates you see will pick up and finish only one or two novels in the next 50ish years of their lives.  Some might not even read any.  What the heck??  Does this not freak anyone else out?

I hope it does.

A man who I can sympathize with, even though he is mostly unfair, wrote about this in an article about the state of our Stephen King-horror-novel-driven society.  He might be able to sympathize with me here, too.  His name is Harold Bloom, and you have to take everything he says with a grain of salt, but he is on the side of things that is trying to swing society back round to sensibility, so he is deeply embedded as far as he can be in his side of things. 

He talks about the decline of the ability to read Shakespeare in the conclusion of his book, The Western Canon:

"When I was a boy, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, almost universally part of the school curriculum, was an eminently sensible introduction to Shakespearean tragedy.  Teachers now tell me of many schools where the play can no longer be read through, since students find it beyond their attention spans.  In two places reported to me, the making of cardboard shields and swords has replaced the reading and discussion of the play.  No socializing of the means of production and consumption of literature can overcome such debasement of early education.  The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.  Trotsky urged his fellow Marxists to read Dante, but he would find no welcome in our current universities."

Scary?  I also liked this article he wrote for the Boston Globe.

Bloom vs. Stephen King

So what is the conclusion, here?  Why did I write all of this?  I think it's because while I was swinging out of control in the wide arcs of the gyre, I had forgotten that there are more important things out there than little Justin Bieber singing about his little crush.  There are things more important than parties and fun beats.  There are things more important and satisfying than just "having fun."  I think that if we just stand the music of Ke$ha next to, say, Beethoven, it is easy to see there is a difference.  And I do firmly believe that one is deeper, richer, and more satisfying, even if it is less fun and harder to find the joy in it.  

I watched a movie about another poet named John Keats.  He recited a lot of his poetry in the movie.  The words worked inside of me in the most amazing way.  There is something that is rich and full of flavor in things that are dignified and lovely.  It brings you to a soft and beautiful, lush place that none of the radio's music brings you to.  We are deep beings living in a shallow society.  Our souls want so much more than we're getting.  There is love, real love.  There is beauty and there are feelings in art (this poem deserves so much more discussion than I am going to give it now, but wow, this poem is incredible.  You can read it if you want...).  There is life in truth.

I want to be the only person to inherit my own soul.  It is no one else's.