The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity. Upcoming Episodes: Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and “The Indian to His Love,”; “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Yeats sailing to Byzantium. We got through Stanzas 1 and 2 last time. Got to talk about those young people, 0:46 Erin: young people today and every day, 0:51 Wes: and what we should be doing with our time as we get older, which is going to the opera or something, going to classical music concerts with all the other older old people singing. Singing about our tatters. All right, so do you want to read Stanza 3? 1:08 Erin: Sure. 3 O sages standing in God's holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall. Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre and be the singing masters of my soul. Consume my heart away sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. It knows not what it is and gather me into the artifice of eternity. 1:35 Wes: Okay, this stanza, I think, is a bit codependent. 1:40 Erin: Yes. 1:41 Wes: Well, this is a little bit. Yeah, the more moderate view, I think, in the fourth stanza. And I'm kind of relying on Helen Vendler's interpretation here. But this is quite extreme, right? Yeah. 1:52 Erin: Yes. 1:52 Wes: Because he's going to end up as a bird. Right. He's going to end up in a different situation than he is hoping for here in the third stanza where he's talking about having his very heart consumed by a holy fire. 2:07 Erin: Right. So this is the pre Nelly Furtado stanza. 2:15 Wes: I actually like that song. I actually like that song. 2:19 Erin: Really? 2:20 Wes: Something about it. It's so dumb. But it's just about how she wants to cheat on the person that she's with. Right. 2:28 Erin: I'd have to. 2:29 Wes: I'm a bird who's gonna fly away. It's not my fault. It's just what birds do. Or. 2:33 Erin: Oh, is that. Yeah, that's right. 2:35 Wes: Is really what that's about. That is. So she's one of the dying generations of young people. 2:40 Erin: I highly recommend just not listening to song lyrics from the early aughts. 2:45 Wes: Listen, there's more than one fish in the mackerel-crowded seas. Sometimes there's five, sometimes there's ten. It depends on. But 2:56 Erin: that's pretty good. I mean, this is what I wanted to say in the last part, but I would be jumping the gun. This is where I get the sense that Byzantium is actually just the underworld. Right. Or the land of the dead. Am I wrong about that? Right. Because that's what I wanted to say is that the. 3:10 Wes: You know, That's a good point. Yeah. There's a Hades like quality maybe to it, but yeah. 3:16 Erin: And because he has to go there, he has to make the Odyssey, he has to perform the Katabasis and go into the underworld. And this is an essential part of any artistic learning, right? You have to visit the. You have to visit the dead. You have to go back in time. You have to follow something to its source to be able to understand the monuments of magnificence. So there's a competing, I suppose, locus of attention. Because I think in the previous part, I was arguing that all one has to do is listen to and then reproduce the sensual music in order to come up with a monument of unaging intellect. And of course, that's only half true. 3:58 Wes: Right. 3:58 Erin: Because they're also monuments of their own magnificence. So one has to be aware of the sensual music and of the tatters in one's own dress, Right. Or in other words, of the material right in front of one. The landscape that one is going to paint. That's important. But one also has to know all the other landscapes that have ever been painted, you know, all the long tradition of landscape painting, the long tradition of this, like, refraction into art. So one's attention is actually pulled away from the immediate sensual reality and into this kind of. To the tradition, to, you know, one's attention is actually pulled away from the present and into the past. And the balance of that seems important, which, if I'm understanding you correctly, the third is the furthest point from that balance. So this is where he gets sucked into the tradition, the past. Is that what you were implying? I'm just kind of trying to figure out what that could mean. 4:58 Wes: Yeah. And I'm not going to be able to relay exactly what Helen Vendler says about this, so I'm just influenced by her view. But in the second stanza, we learn that he's right. So to become an artist, he's gonna have to study the great art of the past, which I think is what you've just been talking about. Your focus goes to the past in a way. So, I mean, this is the interesting thing. It's about the object of art, right. Is the sensual music. Right. So you make music that's about sensual music. But you have to do it by making the sensual music of the past also your object. 5:36 Erin: Yes. 5:37 Wes: So why does it have to be so complicated? So it's like you want to play the blues. You have to listen to a lot of blues music and learn from it. And I prefer to play it rather than to actually listen to it. But that's what you have to do. You have to. Yeah, go ahead. 5:54 Erin: Well, no, and it seems like a very immediate reaction to a bad thing that's happened to you. Right. So it seems like it should be connected. Like it seems like there should be a straight line in the blues between, you know, woke up this morning, I was feeling bad. You know, like it should. Seems like it should just be this like direct recapitulation of experience. And in fact it is a like a highly regulated form which is based on a long tradition of people waking up and feeling really bad. 6:24 Wes: And you spend 20 years trying to learn how to bend properly, for instance, and you realize that, oh, I thought I knew how to bend on a guitar string, but I was doing it wrong. 6:37 Erin: Yep, yep. 6:37 Wes: Or I thought I was playing cleanly, but I'm not playing cleanly. You know, there's a lot of palm muting and other stuff you have to do, especially if you're using distortion. 6:46 Erin: Yeah. The number one thing you learn in singing is that like 99% of people don't even know how to breathe properly. 6:51 Wes: Exactly. Right. That's what I Learned in the one singing lesson. 6:55 Erin: Yes. 6:55 Wes: YouTube video that I watch. It's like breathing is the most important thing. But so. 6:59 Erin: Yeah. 6:59 Wes: So there's so much effort and rehearsal that goes into making something expressive where you want it to be expressive in some natural way. In some way you want it to be a recapitulation of the sensual. The unconscious, sensual music. But it has to be so. It has to be preceded by so much study and self consciousness. 7:22 Erin: Yes. 7:22 Wes: And perfecting one's craft and. Right. And has lots of rules and you know, there are scales and things like that. It's not just a free for all. But in this case. Right. He's talking about becoming the art object here. He's going to be gathered. This sounds like a fantasy of. 7:40 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 7:42 Wes: Joining the sages in the mural, which I take to be saints. 7:47 Erin: Yeah, they would have to be. 7:49 Wes: So. Yeah, so there's this gold mosaic on the, on a wall and you can, you know, you can look up images of the mosaics at Ravenna. So you pronounce Ravenna. 7:59 Erin: Yes. 8:00 Wes: And see what he's talking about. And you know, if you haven't been to places like that. So fantasy is that. Well, it sounds like, okay, they come from the holy fire, which I take to be the gold inlay or the background. And then they come out perne in a gyre. One of his favorite words. So they're twisting and turning. Be the singing masters of his soul. So they've come alive. But then he's going to be what he's going to learn in this. Right. So they've become his teachers at the point where they seem to emerge from the mural, but they are going to. He's already tatters, but now he's going to have whatever flesh is on him consumed away by the fire. And it sounds like, become part of the mural, be gathered into the artifice of eternity, so become the monument as opposed to produce the monument. 8:54 Erin: Right. And this is where I see a. You know, I mean, certainly Grecian urn is all over the first stanza, as you've already suggested. But this is really where I see nightingale being the primary key to informing this. Right. Like that I might leave the world unseen and with the fade away into the forest, dim, fade far away, dissolve and quite forget. Right. So the nightingale here is replaced with these sages in the wall. But the idea of like losing the self in the. What in Keats is the voice of the nightingale, the voice of poetry itself, the sort of eternal song. Right. That Ruth in the alien corn was listening to and the magic casements. Right. So there's this quality of eternality expressed by the nightingale, sor. Which here is being expressed by the sages, which is an interesting contrast. Right. Because the nightingale song, it represents the song that all the other nightingales have sung and therefore it's kind of connected to it, to an artistic tradition. But here sages is far more. This is far more intellectualized. This is not the unconscious bird song. This is the. The peak of self consciousness and the pursuit of the intellectual and of these higher order concerns which would be lost on the nightingale. But the fact that they're both still connected back to the sensual music is, I think with Yeats, as with Keats, we can never be far away really from the body. So the fact that he wants his body to be burned away seems to me to be. To make this like an extreme stanza in terms of what you had mentioned before. Yeah. 10:44 Wes: Sick with desire. Right. We think of desire and having a heart as probably essential to being a singing master. 10:53 Erin: Right. 10:54 Wes: It's interesting because he's, O sage, is standing in God's holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall. So he's not starting with the literal gold mosaic in the wall and then moving to the fantasy of the sages and saying, oh, that's like sages in God's holy fire. He's doing the reverse. 11:14 Erin: Right, Right. 11:15 Wes: What we expect him to encounter in Byzantium is the gold mosaic of a wall, and then he can do with that what he wants. But here he's, you know, within the frame of the poem, he's literally encountering these whirling banshees emerging from a fire. 11:29 Erin: Oh, that's good. Yeah. Because it gives primacy to the art object, actually, you know. 11:35 Wes: Right. So in a way, he's already in it. He's identified with it. Be the singing masters of my soul. It's interesting that what you get from the sages is dancing. We don't see them explicitly sing. 11:48 Erin: Yes. They're whirl. There's the whirling dervish element here. Right. Yeah. Because they're turning. That too, is reminiscent of the urn. Right. The thing in 3D space. I mean, I have a lot that I could say about that, which I won't get into here because I don't think it's quite being. There's quite as close of a connection. But the idea of the 3D object or something turned 3D is really important in the history of ekphrasis. So the idea that the figures in the gold mosaic are actually turning somehow with that. Yeats is making a connection to roundness as part of the cyclical nature of life and of this country of the young. Yeah. It's very subtle, I think, but I think there is a connection that he's making there between these sages, who seem disconnected from that, and the gyre, which is intimately connected to the sensual music. The country of the young, the country of country music. Who's a country music singer? Toby. Toby somebody. So these sages are just like that guy. Anyway. Can't even think of anybody. Patsy Cline is the closest I come. 12:59 Wes: Johnny Cash. 13:00 Erin: Johnny Cash. There you go. 13:01 Wes: Yeah. For good country. Let's not even think about contemporary country. 13:05 Erin: Yeah, I never. Patsy Cline's great. 13:08 Wes: That's all. Yeah. So consume my heart away Sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. So consuming desire, really. He wants to be rid of desire and rid of the body Again, this sounds like a more philosophical enterprise. This is someplace. Socrates famously compares philosophy to dying. Because ultimately you're trying to focus yourself on these eternal truths or forms that one cannot get at in the world of becoming. Knowledge in the world and becoming in the world of becoming are in a way inconsistent. One must in a way die to truly know. To truly. We get to the. To the forms, so to speak. 13:52 Erin: But also, this is. This seems to be connected to like. One can then go back and read the first stanza with quite a bit of. I don't want to. Like, anger is too strong, but bitterness. Yeah, right. Sick with desire. Like he's. Even though he's an old man on a stick, a tattered coat Upon a stick. He still has at least this envy for the young, which means that he's still plagued by his body's. What's the word? Imperatives. He's still sort of tortured by the sensual music, even though he's gotten away from. So the sensual music is inside you. The call is coming from inside the house. 14:29 Wes: Yeah. I think early drafts make it clear that kind of the impetus for this poem is he wrote it when he was 60. Part of the impetus is sexual desire or feelings of sexual frustration or something like that. Or maybe even impotence. Sexual impotence. And no longer. However you want to take it, but no longer as fully engaged with that sexual world of the young and being bitter about it and seeing art as an alternative. 15:03 Erin: Well, as we all know, Yeats wrote his best stuff from here on in. Late Yeats is the best Yeats so at all. He bins out. 15:13 Wes: So he succeeded. 15:14 Erin: He did succeed. 15:16 Wes: He got to Byzantium in the end. 15:18 Erin: Yes. Of course he had to go through all the other. All the other countries first. Otherwise we don't get. We don't get the great late unless we have the striving early. 15:31 Wes: Right. Okay. So I think in the Right. Gather me into the artifice of eternity. Something a bit different is going to happen in the fourth stanza. Do you want to read it? 15:41 Erin: Yes. 4. Once out of Nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enameling to keep a drowsy emperor awake. Or set upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come. This is where I got my idea of the underworld. I knew there was an even better reason and it was the golden bough. Duh. Okay. 16:19 Wes: Right. 16:21 Erin: That's what happens when the fourth stanza is on page two. 16:25 Wes: So we seem to come backward a little bit more from the. And this is, I guess, why the. The dual nature of Byzantium is kind of perfect for this, but a retreat from the Christian to the classical maybe, or to the Greco, when now we're talking about emperors and Grecian goldsmiths instead of the sages or the saints. And it's no longer that he's gonna. It doesn't. Right. That his heart is going to be consumed away and that he's going to be gathered into the artifice of eternity. He does become a. He becomes a gold bird. So take that birds in stanza one, you dying generations. He gets to have it all he's going to be a bird and he's going to be eternal. But he's still singing, right? He doesn't end up in a wall. Yes, it's better. It's a better fate. 17:19 Erin: Yeah. I mean, he becomes the art object itself, right? So if the idea is to take the sensual music and make it permanent somehow, there's no better, I guess, image of that than an automaton bird, a golden bird making an eternal mating call. But what I love about this and what made me almost laugh out loud reading it is, you know, the idea that you're still. What's it all for? Well, it's just to keep a drowsy emperor awake. So, you know, as usual, you have to make your. Your. Even when you're a golden bird in this like idealized situation, you have to. Have to find some patron to make it all, make it all possible. You're still, you're still dependent on someone's patronage who maybe doesn't really appreciate you. 18:08 Wes: But keeping a drowsy emperor awake so very much in the realm of the sensual. Yes, very much in the realm of this world, still. The drowsy emperor. The emperor who's drowsy because he's over glutted at a feast or because he's bored, you know, and probably bored because he's over gratified or over. Or it's post orgasmic or however you want to put it, right? This idea of being drowsy, it's not just a matter of, oh, it's evening and it's time to go to bed. He's being induced with drowsiness by too much pleasure, I think, and so too much sensual pleasure. And so the goal is to reanimate the emperor to wake him back up to life. 19:00 Erin: Oh yeah, I like that. 19:02 Wes: By singing. Yeah. So this is, you know, as a poet, what you can do. And so this is no longer just about becoming, you know, a monument of unaging intellect and a monument of its own magnificence. And it's timeless and it's this and that. It has implications for life. It wakes people up within life and to life. And so it's not all shits and giggles for the, for the birds and the trees, right? They. Hedonism, in other words, can be its own kind of death in life. And the artistic is not. It's not just another hedonism, right? It's not just another sensual pleasure. It's something different. 19:43 Erin: That's a much more positive reading of this than I had. I thought it was just like, you know, instead of because he's wealthy, he has the. This great example of, you know, this great monument of magnificence singing to him instead of playing Candy Crush on his phone in bed. He's. 20:03 Wes: I mean, I think there is a place for that, for that reading. I mean, it does. It seems it's kind of a ignoble fate. Humiliating compared to his ambitions, right? It's kind of humiliating. He's just a toy or it sounds like he's a toy. Do you ever see Clash of the Titans, where long Athena's owl is just this, like, little robot. 20:25 Erin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 20:27 Wes: Which I always thought was kind of interesting. So, yeah, he's a little fake bird and he's in the possession of someone with a lot of power. Maybe he's even a trinket. And he's there for the pleasure of the emperor, who probably can't even fully appreciate what he's doing. And yeah, I think that's a perfectly natural reading. But the more optimistic reading is that there's work, right? There's real. We're real work to do as the singer for those who are living. And so, right, he's no longer simply. He's still in Byzantium in a sense, but he's no longer simply in the country of old men. He's back here with the young, doing something for the young, which is humiliating in a way, but that's the task 21:13 Erin: when he's doing something for power, as you've already suggested. Right, yeah. So something about what he does gives. I love this idea that he lends a kind of alertness which seems like a. You know, too with the lords and ladies. Like, he's, he's. He's shaping the future of, of the country that he's in, in a small way. By being the gold canary in the coal mine or something. No, he's, he's, he's. He's. He's warning people or he's giving them a sense of perspective, right? And he's also kind of prodding them awake. So he's, he's prodding them to pay more attention somehow. So he's moving the needle slightly, right? 21:54 Wes: He's singing about what is past or passing or to come. So, right, this is again, back to the world of becoming. In the first stanza, he's singing about becoming. So as opposed to simply fleeing to the world of being and becoming pure, static, unchanging being. And the object of his art is becoming, as you've already pointed to this, right, so however timeless the Poem might be, it's right, the song, its primary object is the sensual music. So the primary object here, he's in a more realistic position where he understands that his poetry has to have content of some kind. And the content is going to be this world of becoming and its audience is going to be in the world of becoming. These lords and ladies have replaced the teenagers listening to rock and roll in the first stanza, the more dignified version of those libertines in the first stanza. And they are the audience for what he's doing. He's not just going to say, screw you young people, I'm off to Byzantium. But he's going to be engaged with this younger generation. And so it's not just that he's leaving something for future generations in a monument, but influencing. Although you could read it that way, I guess. I guess at the point where he's become a gold bird on a bough, he literally is dead. And that's what's left is his poetry for posterity. I guess you could. 23:28 Erin: Yeah. But he becomes a propagandist for the monuments of unaging intellect. Right, right. Yeah. Which in a way is like all poetry is sort of propaganda for poetry. So what I'm getting from this is that you're saying that there's a. That this is a sort of a different. This isn't necessarily. Oh, no, it is Byzantium. Okay. Yeah, because it is. Yeah. It's like in part three, he goes to Catholic school and in part four, he graduates and goes on to work for the. Work. For the, you know, work in the Trump administration or whatever. Oh, my God, I didn't want to go there, but there it is. 24:07 Wes: Well, who's. Yeah, the Trump. The emperor. Yeah. So God, can you imagine? 24:13 Erin: He's trying to warn J.D. vance of what's passing and what's happening. 24:17 Wes: That is a very dark. A dark ending for this poem. It would be a very, very dark ending. 24:22 Erin: Sorry, I shouldn't have gotten political there. It was just a joke. 24:25 Wes: But yeah, he's a great poet. He's an amazing poet. 24:28 Erin: The best poet in the world. We have all the best gold birds. 24:30 Wes: Best poet ever. Because he's American. 24:34 Erin: Our gold birds are gonna kill and eat all of China's goldbirds. What? No. 24:40 Wes: Well, they are AI driven gold birds. That's realistic. Yeah. 24:46 Erin: That's where we should be putting all our money. 24:47 Wes: Little robot gold plated robot birds producing poetry on the fly using artificial intelligence. That actually could easily be a real thing. 25:00 Erin: Yep. 25:01 Wes: This is an idea. This is something we could sell Yeats 25:03 Erin: Corp, started right here, people on Amazon. 25:06 Wes: They'd be like plastic, but they'd be gold colored plastic little robot birds. And then you have like singing random artificial intelligence produced by Otra in the style of Yeats. 25:24 Erin: There we go. 25:25 Wes: But not actual Yeats poems, but completely extemporaneous. The future is really horrific. 25:31 Erin: Yeah, it is. 25:31 Wes: All right, so this is part of what we're saying is relevant because he is speaking, he is singing about what is to come as well, not just what's past or passing. It seemed like in the first stanza it's all about the past, but now it's about the present, this world, what's happening, what's passing and what will be. So there's perhaps a prophetic element to it. 25:54 Erin: What do we make of the goldsmiths? So it seems like there are multiple layers of, I want to say apprenticeship, but that's sort of not like too apt of a word. Right, but he has to learn from. Right, he has to. It's important that he come from the country of the young. So it's important that he go through the sensual music. So that's kind of like one step in the, the Yeats poetic car wash, right? Like first he has to get sprayed down by the country of the young and then he has to go through the, the scrub. A dub machine of the, of, of the sages in the, in the holy fire. Or maybe, maybe, maybe he has to make the journey right to Byzantium so that. And then, then there's the sages. But then he has to be fashioned or, or he says such a kind as Grecian goldsmiths make. So he's, he's making comparison. Maybe he's self fashioned, but it seems like there is a. 26:46 Wes: He says such a form as Grecian, 26:47 Erin: such a form as Grecian goldsmiths. 26:50 Wes: That's kind of ambiguous, an ambiguous term. It could mean kind or it could mean the particular form of the object. 26:56 Erin: Right? Yeah, but something about being hammered into shape here still. Again, he's making a comparison. So, but, well, we're still. 27:05 Wes: So we still have gold, right, you know, as in the third stanza, but it's no longer fire, it's no longer a holy fire. And it is, as you pointed out, a three dimensional object which is an improvement over two dimensional eternality, eternity in a wall. And it's dynamic. He's not just static on a wall, but he can sing. But yeah, he is something that's been fashioned. And of course we could read that as he's fashioned as a Poet. By the influence of previous poets, which is the whole point of studying monuments. Right. Of its own magnificence. 27:45 Erin: Right. 27:46 Wes: To acquire that influence and to be shaped into the artist that he is. So there is this weird sense in which the artist is an art, also an art product, maybe. 27:58 Erin: Right. And something about the goldsmith and the sage together has to. There's something. Something of a different variety of apprenticeship expressed in those two. 28:09 Wes: This is far less grandiose. Right? 28:11 Erin: Yeah. 28:12 Wes: He is a product of a craft. Right. A craftsperson. 28:16 Erin: Right. 28:17 Wes: As opposed to someone who's been integrated into the. With. Into these. With these sages taught by the sages in a way, but become one of them. You could read three as kind of like, yeah, this has gone to his head a little bit. And then four, it's a little less grandiose. 28:39 Erin: No, I think you need all of them. You need the sensual, so you need the sort of like the bodily, personal experience, et cetera. Then you need this sort of like intellectual education. And then you need something practical, whether that be like just a representative of 28:55 Wes: discipline, which is representative of them. 28:57 Erin: The goldsmith taking the spun gold or something of the sages and actually applying it to some sort of practical application. So if the personal experience is perhaps too low and the sages are perhaps too high, I think you're already saying, right, this is something sort of in the middle that balances the two or that coalesces the two into something which is artisanal but practical. 29:22 Wes: 90% of it is just showing up to your job. 29:25 Erin: That's right. That's right. 29:27 Wes: And you just do it every day. And it's a job. And you're a craftsperson and you're not Shakespeare. 29:34 Erin: Well, Shakespeare showed up every day too. You know, you can't be precious about it. You can use precious metals, but you can't be precious about the precious metals 29:44 Wes: or something very good. Yeah. So less grandiose, more. More of a workman like attitude toward all of this. Perfectly willing to be right. The plaything of an emperor and to be there for the lords and ladies and the emperor, as opposed to someone who simply escaped this world. I've said this before, but I think that grandiose moment, maybe that's essential, or the manic moment that he has in stanza three. There might be. It might be something that you can't really do away with in artistic inspiration, but you also can't do away. Most people get stuck there, frankly, and they don't move beyond it. And they don't move beyond it in the sense that they don't end up with that workaday do it every day attitude because it's imbued with too much significance. Right. This eternal significance, that's too fraught, maybe. So the movement to this point of humility, which I think is a lot of what this is about with the emperor, you know, the position of humility is really important. 30:56 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I think most people are stuck at one. I mean, most people don't care enough to get to three. Right. And that's a much better way to be. 31:05 Wes: Oh, I want to be, you know, this or that. I want to be a poet. I want to be a. Yeah. Musician. 31:12 Erin: I have a friend who was telling me, oh, gosh, I hope. I hope he's okay that I tell this story. It's not. No one will recognize themselves in it. But after reading in my program, someone. Someone came up to him and said, like, I guess this person is always attending these readings and then saying, oh, I wish that I, like, you know, wrote more and more, participating more in the literary scene around here, whatever. And my friend was, like, so exhausted from whatever he had been working on that day and so embittered by what he had been working on that he didn't. He didn't mean to say this in such a way as to slight this poor woman, but he was like, yeah, 10 or 15 years of misery and all this can be yours, or something like that. And she was very taken aback, and he felt embarrassed, but he was also trying to call attention to the fact that it was this, like, dinky little reading anyway. 32:09 Wes: Yeah, no, it makes sense. 32:10 Erin: Yeah. But there's a lot of. That captures it perfectly. There are a lot of people that come up to you at these things and are like, oh, I want to be a poet. 32:17 Wes: Yeah. I am one of those people, you know, wish I wish I could have done that. 32:22 Erin: Wow. 32:22 Wes: But I get stuck, so. And the thing that, you know, I didn't get stuck doing was the Partially Examined Life. Because it. Right. My philosophy podcast, because it's collaborative because I have to show up for that, because I'm called upon to perform. So it's good structure. So you make a necessity out of it. You impose some strictures on yourself, and then you have to do it. But different from being a right. Professional philosopher and writing, doing the very, very hard work of writing and publishing and all that. 32:58 Erin: The third part, too, it's a manic moment, but it's also. I mean, it's a fantasy. It's not real. He's making it real in the poem. But actually it's in the imperative mood. So he's commanding them to do this. But it's not as though it actually happens. Right. It's not as though one can be consumed by some sort of abstract holy fire. 33:22 Wes: This is a really good point. This is all just expressed as a wish. 33:26 Erin: Right, Right. 33:27 Wes: Doesn't actually happen. And then. But then his intent changes in four. But. 33:32 Erin: Sorry, yeah. What is that reminiscent of? Like the lie of the manic moment? The thing that you're after or the thing even. That in your moment of most intensity, you think you're actually in. You're not in it at all. It's not real. It's like a dream. You wake up from it and you're still yourself. You still have a body. You haven't been consumed by a mosaic, probably. I mean, I don't want to speak to everybody's personal experience, but it's never happened to me. 33:57 Wes: So you haven't been doing the right drugs. 34:01 Erin: I know, I know. I've seen some things on NyQuil, I gotta say. But. 34:08 Wes: No, but it's not a bad drug. 34:11 Erin: No, but you know what I mean. Like, there's a. What you're describing that people get stuck in. In three isn't anything with any kind of stuff. Stickiness at all. It's. It's a matter of perception. It's a matter of. You know what I'm trying to say. Do you or do I. Am I not making any sense? 34:27 Wes: Stickiness. 34:29 Erin: Oh, what, that's not clear enough for you? No. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't even happen in this poem. Never mind in. 34:35 Wes: Yeah. 34:36 Erin: There is no state of being in. In three. In three. The way that we're talking about three. Right. Like it doesn't exist. It's not possible. And so, you know, there is no state. There is no. In a way, there is no Byzantium. There is a Byzantium of the mind and of the. I mean, maybe that's the genius of sort of like naming it this outdated term. Right. Because it had. Byzantium only lives on in books, in. In these monuments of unaging intellect. We have this. This apprenticeship which is. Or. Which happens in the mind of. Which is not actually happening out in the real world. And so in three, he's. He's. It's still not even happening in three. He's asking it to happen, but it's not happening. 35:18 Wes: Well, there's no evidence that anything is happening except in one. This is just a curveball. 35:24 Erin: That's right. Yeah. 35:24 Wes: Because he's you know, or he says, that is no country for old men. 35:30 Erin: Right. 35:31 Wes: Why have I always read that as this is no country for. That's interesting. 35:34 Erin: Well, because he's away from it. He's traveling away from it. I'm imagining him in the ship moving in this direction, but facing this direction, looking. 35:43 Wes: I have sailed. Okay. 35:45 Erin: Yeah. 35:46 Wes: Okay. I was thinking he said I will sail and that there's no evidence that he actually did sail. But he says, I have sailed. Okay. 35:53 Erin: And come. So he's in Byzantium. 35:56 Wes: Yeah. Okay. 35:57 Erin: But everything else is. 35:59 Wes: So that's real. 36:00 Erin: Yes, is either an imperative or a future aspiration. Right, Right. 36:06 Wes: So, yeah. Then the next two stanzas, we have. We have a wish in three and then a intention. Right. A promise or a stated intent in four. 36:16 Erin: That's right. 36:17 Wes: Or three is not a wish, but it's a command. It's a command. 36:20 Erin: Yes. 36:21 Wes: That expresses a wish. So the two are. You know, you can see these two stanzas related or as one is kind of causally setting the groundwork for the other. Right. He's consumed by the fire, then he's out of nature. And then he comes back. He's like a phoenix rising from the ashes from the Grecian goldsmiths. 36:41 Erin: And it's dependent. If this. Then this. If I get consumed, then this will happen. 36:46 Wes: Yeah, It's a bit inconsistent because you think, okay, well, he's supposed to end up in the wall. Gather me into the artifice of eternity, which is at least initially what seems like the obvious conclusion there is ending up in the wall, not in a. Not in a bird. Not becoming back as a. As a golden bird. But yeah, we have these two stages. One is the. For the flesh and desire to be completely consumed away. And then there's the. And then there's the return. But I think it's hard not to read 4 as him retaining heart and desire. How could he keep singing without it? 37:24 Erin: Yes. Though I think. Yeah, I think V. The artifice of eternity is something that. Yet strange that the sages seem to have taken a form and therefore they're out of the artifice of eternity, but somehow they're in it. But yeah, it seems like he's returned to the world of potential and then can take shape anywhere. He could go into the wall, or he could go back to the country of the young, or he could do anything from this state, and instead what he chooses is the form of the bird, which in a way makes him, you know. Yeah, now I'm missing Leda and the swan. Right. Because that in a way, it makes him unto a God. And then he can actually incarnate in any form he wishes from that position of eternity. And he chooses a bird. 38:08 Wes: And he doesn't want to take the form of a natural thing. Right. An actual bird. But in a way, he is taking the form of a natural thing because it's the replica of a natural thing. 38:17 Erin: Right, right. 38:19 Wes: He could have just come back as a plate. 38:23 Erin: That's right. 38:26 Wes: And therefore I be eaten off of by the lords and ladies. 38:34 Erin: Yeah. 38:35 Wes: Set upon a table to place. Yeah. Anyway, he's found a good compromise here. 38:42 Erin: Right. To be a real bird is to get put back on the conveyor belt in one. It's just sex. 38:50 Wes: The sexual conveyor. 38:51 Erin: Yeah. That's just regular reincarnation. He wants some sort of eternal incarnation, I guess. 38:57 Wes: This is like a. This is a terminal reincarnation. 39:00 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 39:01 Wes: It's like getting an mfa. That's the end. 39:06 Erin: That's what they told me. You're four of repeats. 39:11 Wes: Some people go. Some people manage to go farther, but you could just stop. 39:17 Erin: Oh, this is painful. My Byzantium is Salt Lake City. 39:27 Wes: There you go. 39:31 Erin: My laptop is sitting on a Book of Mormon that somebody got me the first year I moved here. So that is my Gibraltar. 39:41 Wes: Someone, definitely. And I was working in room service. I've probably told this story before, but at a fancy hotel. And I ended up bringing someone complimentary champagne or wine for some reason. And I don't know. I don't remember why I did that, but I think because they're very, very friendly and nice and this and that. And then I realized that they just wanted me for my soul. It was a conversion attempt. 40:09 Erin: Oh, that's so insulting. 40:11 Wes: I just feel objectified. 40:14 Erin: I thought you wanted me for my body. 40:16 Wes: Beautiful soul. 40:20 Erin: That's the worst. 40:23 Wes: So I think I ended up with the Book of Mormon anyway. All right. I think next time we could do Leda and the Swan and then an Indian to his lover. If I'm remembering the title of that poem correctly, that was always a favorite of mine because it includes a line something like a parrot sways upon a tree, raging at its own image in the enameled sea, which is how I always felt. And we get to have another bird. Is that all right? 40:59 Erin: Sure. I love being given the bird. 41:02 Wes: Yeah. All right, thank you. 41:06 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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