The Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity

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.

I'm pausing to greet R, a Romanian teacher I've started to get friendly with, on the eve of my decision to bolt. She is intelligent, and not at all smug. She listens to me complain. She says "you know, I knew this teacher who talked like you at the school I was at before this. She deep-sixed her job, her spouse, her credit rating, everything. Lost it all." I pause again. I thank her and walk on. "I'm different from that," I think. "When I leave, I'll leave smart."

The quotation above from Yeats seems inappropriately lofty for a mere discussion of one vain middle-aged woman's bolt from a fortunate safety net in a middle class life in North America. Surely, the Yeats quote applies first to the poor woman in Somalia watching, in the early 90's as the country spirals south from minority rule to anarchy.

Bronwen, the friend I told you about, and I parsed this poem, "The Second Coming" over the phone, long distance, a week ago. We are oddities. Speaking in Yeats' words wakes up the living part of our supposed-to-die-but-can't souls.

5:30 a.m today.
A booming crash beside the bed. It doesn't startle me. I know what it is. Eddie, the black and white Great-Dane-mix, is attempting to place another log on the bed. It has slipped from his great slobbering mouth and fallen onto the wooden floor.

"Jesus, the floor will be wrecked," I recall my sister saying when I told her last summer the two huge mutts and I were really happy with the wooden 1930's floor in the house. Yesterday, Sunday, he attempted to load two big wooden logs on the bed and both slipped. I know because I heard the crashes and tripped on the logs on my way to letting him out the back door. This is how he wakes me today.

Eddie can't leave the house without something, anything, in his mouth. Greed. This past weekend it is always a log. Maple, birch, cherry, apple. I have lovely pungent wood from the best salesman of winter firewood anyone ever found. His methods are not ethical, let me warn you. (I'll tell you about that in the next post.)

Poverty has made me an intelligent shopper. I can't believe how I used to shop. Feeding my addiction for spending, wandering aisles where brand new things are sold and credit card CEO's are slobbering in the fluorescent lights above me.

Nowadays I shop from home by wandering through the pages of Kijiji. I bought a breadmaker this way: 25.00 for a great breadmaker. Easy as hell to use and I love it. Before I left the apartment, I bought a fantastic complete set of pretty, simple, stoneware: plates, saucers, cups, sideplates. Eight of each: dove grey with a thin navy band around each. Perfect, simple, and lovely.

As Eddie's log crashes beside me a new idea pops into my head. I must have been dreaming. Circling, floating, above something that used to matter to me.

As I return to bed, I think about how the center cannot hold, the centrifugal force splattering the Newtonian constellations out into the galaxy. It seems to me that if you really love the core life you've created: a tiny world of friends, neighbors, or the fact your family loves you and you love your work, your hangouts, your little habits, places you see daily...if you love this small whirling dervish called your life, it is, as the second law of thermodynamics says. Things remain the same.

Happy teachers exist and flourish, thanks be to God. Their lives are slowly gliding around with the rest of heaven and earth, circling in upon themselves. Their lives stay together, much like the fact our feet, while glued with gravity to the earth, allow us still the freedom to make like a snowboarder, if we so will, and fly up and spin around, or like a figure skater, to leap and accomplish up to four complete spins before crashing back to earth. And then one day it isn't enough.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned. "Things Fall Apart" . . . Chinua Achebe's Nigerian novel. I'd read it, preparing to teach a term's worth of African literature. How precious is the centrifugal force that convinces big potential military tools, or men, if you like, to engage in the democratic process, when taking arms against a sea of rape-able women and helpless children guarding the toys that can be stolen is, to other African men, so much more satisfying.

Convincing a human being to engage in a secure little constellation, me, for instance: convincing me to keep rising each day in a loveless marriage with no children, to board a cement highway to teach in an unattractive inner city, this was a constellation where I couldn't hold it together.

"The worst were full of passionate intensity." I heard the falconer though I couldn't hear his words. Where was I to go? He was not in the suburb, that much I knew. On top of it all, a false falconer was beckoning. My equally married lover.

As the year wore on, I discovered that an entirely different falconer was calling him. That falconer was a mathematician. Numbers were the reason he cheated. His falconer was the ancient one. "A numbers game," my friend Tim, from the city, used to say, when I asked him about polygamy. "Spread the seed wide," was the name of the game, for my married lover, Tom. It seemed the same with all his affairs. The woman fell in love with the incredible love-making gift he possessed. He fell in love with Number 35, in a long succession of conquerable dames.

Men who know how to please a woman don't waste it on just one. The women were all like me. They wanted him alone, wanted him to leave his wife and they would leave their husbands. He knew how to keep an affair going in any way possible. We women believed what we wanted to hear. Had I stayed in the suburb I'd have continued the miserable merry-go-round, rising with hope, and crashing with despair, as my increasing knowledge of what falconer was calling him rose.

I had no idea who was my falconer. Yeats? No. Shakespeare, yes. Years earlier, I'd begun a script, egged on by students who heard my version of the story of Shakespeare, gleaned over the years by, first, my own intuition. The author was not the man of Stratford. Fortune and research led me to Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford, and, joining thousands of others who loved the words of Shakespeare, I became an Oxfordian. Piecing together his life, rereading his words, there was no turning back. I wrote the beginning of the screenplay and headed to a screenplay workshop where the teacher, at the end of the course, took me aside and told me he'd broker the deal, with his friend, a producer who does BBC co-productions, as soon as I'd finished the first draft.

Why haven't I finished it yet? This was the falconer, the way out of my job, out of my mini-life, into a larger constellation.

Chaos theory allows that particles moving around tiny nuclei sometimes fly away from their tentative centers and, not knowing where they'll next attach themselves, join, from caprice, or intuition, to the flow of particles around another center.

The flow of the world was like the flow of the stars. You leave one falconer and end up circling around another. When my electrodes and mind obsessed around an unworthy center, I knew, deep down, this was merely the agent of my detachment, not the final center I deserved.

"The best lack all conviction." My husband either never knew about the other man, or did not wish to. I pray he never does. Don is good for me, good to me. He loves me in his own way, loves his animals, loves me for me, good and bad. The problem with him is that he has parsimony as the centrifugal force and analyzes the content of our weekly garbage with greater intensity than anything else. He's loyal, anal, ungenerous, penny-pinching. He fails to engage. Should I hope for more? He is, as the poem says, the best.