Having completed a couple of the embarassingly overdue projects that have
been weighing me down, I want to return to continue a thread started at
the beginning of the month.
for those interested, I suggest going to the web archive to pick up missing
pieces, including the text of Among Schoolchildren and the discussion that
led up to it (via the dancer/dance figure that grew out of the discussion
on transaction versus interaction and the question of progress/development
in history (and god knows what else!)
Paul Posted the last stanze to Yeat's "Among Schoolchildren" seeking to
distinguish the view there from... budhism, or some xmca members notion
of it (?). Anyway, here is what paul wrote:
there's some confusion I think about the dancer/dance image. As I
understand it, for buddhism there is neither dancer nor dance, nor is there
not dancer or dance. For William Butler Yeats however the figure was clear:
"Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul
Nor beauty born out of its own despair
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
------
I have spent a many stolen moments reading and re-reading the entire
poem which ends with this stanza. My thought when I realized it was
from a poem somehow involving schoolchildren that the dancer/dance/
progress issue might someone be dealt with in it. And maybe it was.
But whatever else it is to others, this Poem is NOT clear to me,
although I have figured out part of it.
I have gotten a lot of help from a friend interested in these issues
but I am still unclear on a lot. Perhaps reader/writers here can provide
more insight.
The first stanza is about being in a school where he feels children's
eyes upon him, a sixty year old "public man."
The second stanza takes up his repeated use of Leda (a queen-to-be) and
a swan who is zeus in feathers, who rapes Leda. the event that "changed
some childish day to tragedy." But there is more here, because "our
two natures blent into a sphere" (with invocation of plato and a parable
about yolk and egg of one shell). (In the Greek myth, Leda gives birth to
two children, each half human/half olympian, one of whom is the future
Helen to Troy).
In the third stanza he looks at one of the children and wonders if she, too,
"shares something of the paddler's heritage".
I do not understand the fourth stanza. Who is she in "Her present image?"
the child before him, before whom he thinks that "he had pretty
plumage once" (as a young man, presumably).
The fourth stanza is not entirely clear, but it appears to contrast the
pain and hopes of a mother when contemplating her young son with what she
would think to see him with "sixty or more winters on his head."
The fifth stanza invokes Plato, Aristotle (playin taws (marbles) with
Alexander the Great as a child?), and Pythagorous, and ends by commenting
that they too became "old clothes upon a stick to scare a bird" (desipte
their great achievements?).
The sixth stanza considers the difference between mothers and (?) nuns,
the latter of whom gaze upon idealized iconic images, not real people. But
these images too can "break hearts" and constitute self-born mockers
of human undertakings.
Which brings us to the seventh stanza.
1) Lobour= blossoming/dancing "where the body is not bruised to pleasure soul."
2)I do not undestand the following two lines in relation to what precede
and follows. It seems to add to the prior line, saying that not only is the
body not bruised, but that beauty is not born out of despair or fatigued
thought late at night, when one is exhausted.
3) How we get from here to dancer/dance still leaves me puzzled.
-------
In so far as I can figure this out, the poem does NOT help me understand
more deeply the issue of transaction/development/chickens and eggs, etc.
I'll settle for understanding it in its own terms, as best I can, and
welcome others' interpretations.
Paul-- the Hegel quote from the subsequent message alligns the chromosome
with what part of the chestnut tree?
-----
thanks for whatever help you-all can provide.
mike
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