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“The Second Coming” Keeps On Coming: Re-examining Yeats, in the Context of the Recent American Election, Through the Works of Joan Didion and Chinua Achebe

“Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe; Didion's book not pictured as I have lent it out. 

There exist at least two books in the world that are titled after lines in “The Second Coming”, a poem written in 1919 by William Butler Yeats; and when I say “the world” I mean “the world”. I know that they exist because I have read them. The first of these is called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, and it is by California journalist and fiction writer Joan Didion. It is a collection of narrative essays built around the concept of society’s increasing atomization. The second is called “Things Fall Apart”; it is a fictional narrative by Nigerian Igbo writer Chinua Achebe, and its topic is very similar: the fictional story of an Igbo man’s tribal and familial relationships, and his first encounters with white missionaries, are used to illustrate the erosion of group solidarity. And so from opposite corners of the globe we hear the warning that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold”. Our bonds and our social ties are becoming ever more fractionalized as our people and our systems remove relationships from their context and as we bask conveniently in our individualism. We do not stand together for long before we begin to stand against one another or retreat into our own isolations.

I spoke about these books in the order in which I read them, but that is the reverse order in which they were written. Chinua Achebe published “Things Fall Apart” in 1958; Joan Didion published the pieces in her collection during the period between 1961 and 1968, although the particular essay for which the collection was named was published in 1967 - almost ten years after Achebe’s novel. Whether she was aware of Achebe or not during this time is unclear, but there is certainly ample reason for the contemporaries to have been thinking along similar lines. And what is this reason? It is simple: Yeats believed in circular time.

A poem entitled “The Second Coming” already implies a sense of repetition. When Yeats wrote it in 1919, the effects of modernization were already in full swing. Industrial capitalism and globalization were fueling the rise of a consumer society through an emerging middle class. There had been globalization before, and capitalism before, and technological advances and even consumers before, but Yeats lived on the cusp of a change in the scale of all these things that served to make them stand out. The atomization that flourishes alongside an individualist and worldly middle class is not an event or a moment in time so much as it is a tendency. Moreover, it is a tendency that will continually be captured in stop-motion every couple of decades.

That is why, in 1958 and again in 1967, Yeats was resurrected twice at opposite ends of the earth, but for the same reason. Achebe was writing about the past; Joan Didion was writing about the present and future - but they wrote about the same phenomenon. Didion had gone to Haight-Ashbury to live with the hippies, talk to the runaway youths, and to try to understand the social and systemic tides behind the blooming counterculture. She writes of them, “We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that society’s atomization could be reversed [...] we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing” (p. 122-123). Everybody is on their own “trip” here - symbolically, not just the children, but the adults of America as well. Because of this, the youth have no concept of their relationship to society, or how to find a meaningful place within it. There seems to be no way to gracefully accommodate the needs of both the parents and the children; they’ve lived in such separate worlds for too long, and the world has changed too much, too quickly.

Meanwhile, the children of Achebe’s Igbo clan, presumably a hundred years before the hippie children stormed Haight-Ashbury, are facing a similar problem. There are holes in the fabric of their tribal education that have left them feeling isolated and hungry. Nwoye, son of the wrathful warrior Okonkwo, feels betrayed by his father’s prideful bouts of cruelty. It is these holes that the English missionaries exploit when they come to assemble converts to their church. In Nwoye’s case, “the hymn about the brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul” (p. 147). Thus, it is their own clansmen who establish the English government on tribal land; it is the Igbo people who whip and fine them for pursuing their own customs against the will of the white man; it is their own race acting as interpreter in favor of the British crown, and because their numbers have dwindled or have become divided and filled with doubt, they have no force for resistance.

Fast forward to the “now”. A little bit of research yields some quick results: Yeats has infiltrated book title after book title. Time is cyclical, but like a spiral it trends outward. The atomization is not repeating itself - rather, it is increasing in entropy. It is a trend that is trending ever more towards the extreme of itself. We talk to people, in moments, from all over the world. The ether is constantly abuzz with the voices of billions. There has been another technological revolution, which has left us with the same types of benefits and problems as the ones before, without first having rectified the old problems. The children of Haight-Ashbury were left to their “trips”, the people who read Joan Didion’s essay enjoyed it but completely missed its point, and the isolation brought about by individualist consumerism and technologically driven capitalism continued to grow. It wasn’t painful for everyone, and often the pain wasn’t even immediate when it existed, but still it affected us; and for many of us who believed we were happy, it came in the form of a “vague and persistent question”, like the one that had haunted Nwoye. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…”

Now we are turned against ourselves due to that atomization, due to the individualism that we had been taught to think of as “good” because it allowed us to come to our full potential, because it allowed us to manifest progress. We are so specialized and specific that we have found seemingly insurmountable differences even among those of us who are supposed to be our greatest allies. It has been like this, but I write about it now because the recent American election has splattered it with such stark colors. We are seeing something important. We are seeing citizen against citizen, working class against working class, feminist against feminist, racial minority against racial minority, neighbor against neighbor, friend and family against friend and family, and so on. It is the schisms of our own tribe that really bring disintegration. And in a global society, it becomes increasingly clear that these struggles are just variations on the simple, age-old theme of human against human, spurred by the isolation that is a guard to our self-interest. We tried to create community, but there is still a vacuum.

In the preface to the collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, Joan Didion talks about not being heard. “I suppose,” she writes, “almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening” (p. xii). Perhaps that is why our writers feel the need to say the same things over and over again. I’m sure that is why I am writing this now. She’d painted this elaborate picture of life up in Haight-Ashbury; she’d drawn the vivid comparison to the Yeats poem; she’d implicated the structure of American society in the shattering of the mirrors that displayed the youth; but people thought that she was merely covering a fashion trend. The gyre is still widening. But despite entropy, I wonder to myself: might we still prove Didion wrong? Might we yet stop living cyclically Achebe’s tragedy, which we are cursed to enact again and again as we get lost inside our differences? Can we stop referencing “The Second Coming”? Can we, in fact, reverse the atomization of society?

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From "The Circadian Tarot" by Jen Altman (illustrated by Michelle Blade). "Often, we gain the most strength by confronting fears that have abated our progress for some time. It can be emotionally & physically daunting to not only acknowledge these fears, but to combat them. The Seven of Wands is an encouragement to have resolve & face those anxieties head on. It also reminds us that standing your moral ground is never easy, & that the road will be difficult but in the end richly rewarding. The Seven of Wands calls for your deepest inner courage. What are you ready to fight for?" Found at @shopsonomama in #highlandpark #sonomama #tarot #symbolism #magic #illustration #innerstrength #courage #faceyourfears #sevenofwands #innertruth #spirituality #sacredmyths

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Current Reading: “American Property: A History of How, What, and Why We Own” - Stuart Banner, professor of law at UCLA, published 2011.

Most of my friends don’t own their own house - they rent. Among my acquaintances who are 35 and above, there is a higher percentage of homeowners, but still, many of them rent. Part of this is because I live in an urban area. Around the country, homeowners are split (roughly) half with renters. At times, this number is a little bit higher than half, and at times, it is lower; but throughout America’s history, it has typically hovered somewhere between the 40-60% range.

Many of us think about owning our own homes eventually; some of us (like me) would even like to build them ourselves. Others are motivated by different visions, however, and will gladly cough up monthly dollars indefinitely in exchange for access to desirable urban amenities. An increasing number of us accept rent as an unavoidable fact, because we believe we will never be able to purchase a home for ourselves at our income level.

Where is that money going?

How is it that property can come to have “owners” who exist as owners only so that they can profit off the needs of their fellow citizens for shelter?

How did society arrive at the modern form that “housing” has taken, and how have other, non-conforming (& sometimes ancient) forms of housing become illegal?

What does it mean to own property? Does it matter if we own space, and if so, then why?

These questions, and ones like it, are important as we struggle - especially in Los Angeles - with gentrification, competitive apartment hunting, and with rents that can consume 60-80% of our income. They are not easy questions to answer, but perhaps, if we explore them, we can actually begin to hope to build something different. I picked up this book looking for insight into some of these issues.

Banner’s book focuses more on the American legal concept of “property” and all its forms than it does on real estate alone, but it is clearly written, reads very easily and does contain a lot of insight. It turns out that a lot of historical American legislation revolves around the protection of property rights. Property has always been symbolic of American values; in the early years after the war of 1776, many prominent Americans proclaimed the superiority of the American property system over that of the British. Primogeniture was disposed of; lords and officials no longer held property titles simply because of their rank of office; and there was so much land that theoretically any upstart could just go out and grab some. Property was symbolic of the people, of democracy, and of each person’s perceived right as an individual to exert influence and control over their own personal domain. Most people in the nineteenth century believed that the right to own property was a right of “natural law”.

Property is about control.

Early legal definitions of property came from a few different perspectives. Some people contended that “property” referred to the thing itself, which was owned by an individual: a house was a property, land was a property, a work of art was a property, for example. Others believed that the term “property” referred not to the thing itself, but to a set of rights - to use and abuse - that were owned by an individual with respect to a thing. By this definition land itself was not owned - rather, a person won or purchased the right to use a plot of land. A third viewpoint conceived of property as a relationship between people - that is, when you purchased land, what you really purchased was the right to exclude others from controlling or entering a corner of the earth if you so chose.

All of these definitions support the above statement: property is about control. If you own a property, you can control it, and if you are on someone else’s property, you must defer to their control. So when someone owns many properties, what it means is, they have a lot of control over space. And when the majority of a city is owned, by an individual or a set of individuals or a corporation, that means that a few people are making the rules of space. And the ones who do not own land in that city, with the exception of any public areas or transcendental government laws, do not get to contribute to the laws of space and how it is used. Not only that, but they can be taxed by the owners for existing in the space.

Early Americans were proud that they had taken land ownership out of the hands of the government. They felt that they had dismantled the feudal system and put power in the hands of the people. But today, those who own land make their own set of rules for that land - and sometimes for surrounding land as well. Homeowners’ associations band together to determine how people are allowed to use land in a neighborhood; their restrictions and obligations can exceed the traditional powers of government. Real estate developers, as Banner notes, often replace city governments as urban planners, and once they have developed tracts of land they are free to make regulations regarding its use. While these regulations can seem on the surface to be relatively democratic, they really reflect a power transfer that Americans have made: America has transferred power from the government to those private interests that have accumulated the most wealth and space. The modern feudal system is not based on the power of government-appointed lords; it is based on the power of landlords and developers, who control space. Yet government still defends these lords, even if it doesn’t appoint them; zoning, permit and construction laws were written with developers in mind, often making it unfeasible or impossible for people to build on their properties if they want to. There are minimum square footage laws, approved and non-approved building materials, and rules for how interior elements must be constructed in relationship to each other. Many of these laws were designed to protect the average person buying pre-built homes from a developer. But for those who want to build their own home, they can make construction and permitting so costly that it renders the dream impossible. As a result, we continue to let developers design and build our homes and thus, to control, in a way, the narrative structure of our built environment.

The way that space is structured determines how we think about using it, and how we relate to our societies and each other. Cultures around the world since ancient times have recognized the sacred nature of space in their temples and churches, the way they have constructed homes and community centers, and in their monuments. The ways in which we build highlight our relationships to each other and to our world. Do we think about the world in terms of control or in terms of contribution? Do we want to dominate or do we want to make a place for ourselves within the woven tapestry of something bigger? Obviously, everyone needs a place to take shelter, but do people have a right to make money off of that need? Should we let others create the rules of space without our input? Who are the people who are making these rules, how did they end up in a position to do so, and what sort of power do they really yield? It goes deeper than we think, and it is more complex than the dichotomy of rich and poor, gentrified and non-gentrified. This investigation warrants our attention.

In a Chinatown plaza that connects the city to the train station, a security guard orders me to dismount my bike (I refuse). “You must walk your bike through here!” He barks. But my alternative is to lug it down a flight of stairs. The plaza is a luxury apartment development that is privately owned. In Highland Park, a group of tenants across the street from the train station band together to fight rent hikes, remodels, and ultimately eviction, as their landlord decides to cater to the trendy development aesthetics entering the gentrified neighborhood. Most of Los Angeles is privately owned, though we must exist there. And we don’t have the privilege to help make the rules - even though others profit off our need to exist *somewhere*.

But maybe our options aren’t so limited after all. Maybe there are ways we can contribute, after all, to our shared mythology of space. Let’s find them.

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At the roots of my neighbors' jacaranda tree grew bountiful clusters of brown mushrooms. They had sprouted up overnight in the wake of the recent rains. As I passed by on my bike I couldn't help but think how meaty and delicious they looked. They were not slimy, and they were a beautiful golden-brown like the mushrooms I might find at a farmer's market. They just looked appetizing, and there were so many there that they could feed me for awhile - if they were edible. I am well aware of the potential dangers involved with foraging mushrooms. You need to be very sure of your identification, because there are thousands of mushroom species and only some of them are edible. If you pick wrong, the consequences can be as mild as gastric distress or as serious as organ failure and death. There are some evil fungi out there, and they're no joke. So I took some pictures and did some research. I searched for brown mushrooms that grew in clusters on the roots of trees, and my searches turned up pictures of the "honey mushroom". The honey mushroom is a type of edible mushroom that is extremely parasitic. It grows in clusters on rotting tree roots and wreaks havoc on the wood. It looked like the mushrooms in my pictures, which had thick white stems and little round caps that were darker brown in the center and golden brown on the outside. Looking good. However, there were some other identifiers for the mushroom that I couldn't be sure of by simply comparing pictures. The honey mushroom usually has a "five o'clock shadow", or very faint and sporadic dark brown hairs on the cap. It has white gills, and usually possesses a ring around the top of the stem. In order to be sure of my identification, I would have to go back and check for these markers. The next day when I went back to check the mushrooms on my way to work, I found that someone or something had pulled them all up and thrown them haphazardly around on the grass and the street. Knowing that they would now start to rot, I grabbed as many as I could carry and took them with me. Later, when I got home, I examined them and found they had all the same markers as the honey mushroom. The odds seemed pretty good. But I was not done yet: finally, I had to check on something called a "spore print", which you can see by cutting the cap off a mushroom and placing it face down overnight on a dark colored piece of paper. As it sits it will drop spores from its gills, which can be different colors depending on the shroom. The honey mushroom has a white spore print, while one of its very toxic lookalikes, the Galerina, has a rusty brown spore print. Mushroom foragers recommend getting a spore print once a mushroom has checked out on every other identifier, to confirm the suspected identity. So I left one of my mushroom caps on a sheet of black construction paper overnight (pictured above). After reading up more on some of the toxic lookalikes for honey mushrooms, and confirming the white spore print, I decided that what I had was in fact the edible honey mushroom and I cautiously cooked one and ate it. I cooked it with butter only so that I could experience as much as possible of its natural flavor. It tasted delicious - woodsy like some of my favorite farmers market specimens. After 24 hours had passed I had no nausea or any other ill effects. Score! I told several people this story and usually received some sort of horrified response. People said, "it's not a good idea to forage mushrooms!" or, "you really shouldn't do this without the help of an expert", or "you never know! It could kill you." When telling the story I included the process of researching and confirming identifying markers and reading up on toxic lookalikes. Even provided with the narrative evidence, most people I told were skeptical. This experience really highlighted for me the way in which we are socially trained to blindly fear nature. Some mushrooms could kill us; therefore, it's best not to try to forage mushrooms and instead to buy known varieties from the grocery store. Even with lots of evidence that you have an edible mushroom, what if you're still wrong?? Even if you do decide to forage, you can never trust your own attentive and detective processes - you are in danger unless you consult a trained mushroom forager or mycologist. There is good reason for this fear, of course - the consequences for failure could be very serious. Mushroom identification is nothing to make light of. But it amazes me how "foraged mushroom" equals "death" without much nuance in people's minds. Yes, there are many lookalikes, but there are always distinguishing markers that you can use to identify a species. As long as you're careful and attentive and do your homework, you can trust yourself to make a good decision. And that's true of nature in general - not just with mushrooms. Nature is not like civilization. It doesn't always live in boxes. It can be unpredictable. Nature doesn't reward those who live by habit and routine; in fact, often, it kills them. And because people like to live by habit, because habit is easier, we equate that with harshness and danger. Nature will kill us. It is something to be feared. In society, to a certain extent, if we follow the rules and stay within our boxes, we will survive and be rewarded. Nature doesn't reward habit; it rewards attentiveness and awareness. It doesn't reward stereotyping, unlike society - it rewards an understanding of nuance. In nature, if you stop paying attention, you are in danger; but if you are aware and perceptive, you will learn when to engage and when to be wary. We don't need to fear the wild, we just need to learn how to be attentive to its signs and its rhythms, and to be in touch with it. In the end, its rewards are more work, but are greater than the easy rewards of the supermarket.

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Thunderstorms are a great time for rituals. Lightning symbolizes the regenerative spark that infuses creation. Thunder symbolizes the confidence and strength of spirit to carry through with one’s determinations. Rain symbolizes the gentle, loving spirit that nourishes the world around us. I threw coins with the I Ching and came up with hexagram number 3, “Difficulty at the Beginning”, composed of the trigrams of thunder below and water above. “A thunderstorm brings release from tension, and all things breathe freely again.”

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Current reading: this literary tour of the Sierras reads like a fantasy novel, which is really what it feels like to hike (or ride) the California mountains. Fun fact: California actually got its name from a Spanish fantasy novel, "Las sergas de esplandian", in which California was a paradise ruled by Amazonian women. #hikelosangeles #bikelosangeles #mountainbike #californiamountains #johnmuir #johnmuirtrail #sierramountains #explorecalifornia

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"california wabisabi"

California's past is intimately interwoven with Japan's "future". Japanese aesthetics subtly bloom in California architecture & design. A prime example: the Pasadena bungalows. In Japan there is an aesthetic philosophy called "wabisabi", which celebrates the beauty in imperfection. Wabisabi is the idea that things are always in process: they are either degrading through entropy (from which they will later be reborn), or evolving and blossoming. It is a parallel of the craftsman movement in the US, as both movements were responses to a societal glorification of the overembellished and seamless elite art forms and foreign imports. The ecosystems of California live this philosophy. They are constantly dying to be reborn; they are destroyed by fire only to come back fiercer than before; and while the chaparral is nothing near lush, it produces incredible colors, healing medicines, and calm smells. It is admirable by the sheer force of will by which it becomes humbly beautiful. Japan is a country that is both intensely modern and incredibly ancient. It lives both. California, however, is a place that glorifies the future and continually erases its own past. While its landscapes live wabisabi, its civilizations forget themselves in their quest for the next big thing. California wabisabi is a reuniting of nature and cityscape, of sacred lore and science. It gives the past a breath of life with which to invigorate our present and future. It recognizes the ancient and the universal dwelling within the specific and the modern. And it joins opposite sides of the world in a common value system and mythology. It recognizes that life is cyclical and that we are always in process. And that process, not the destination, is what we live for.

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Welcome to H Kynefin Arts.

I study the ways in which our mythologies and our experience of the sacred create social structures and relationships. I write about my work here, and I also express some of those relationships through artwork. My goal is to use this research to contribute both practically and philosophically to modern social design in a way that unifies people and benefits everyone.