THAT is no country for old men

Okay for all you Yeats heads out there...

W.B. Yeats is one of those old poets that lend resonance to the word protean. He went through phases and rolled with the times, adapted..fixed his mind...changed it. He was enthusiastic and crazy prolific as a result. And he was the author of those very catchy words "That is No Country for Old Men," a sobering, yet lyric musing on old manhood.

In America we tend to give a lot of credence to the art that burns young and dies before it can get old. But Yeats offers us a refreshing contrast. All through his life, Yeats was hitting literati with interesting angles and duplicities. His nationalism is otherworldly in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds. In the famous 1902 uprising poem where a he manages to sound cold, scientific and a believer at poem's end. As layman, guys you couldn't pay Yeats to have a stout with on a normal day, become martyrs for the new Irish state, Yeats realizes that "A Terrible Beauty is born..."

I think of Yeats the way I do because of my travels in Ireland. Yeats loved that land. It created the wild weather that blew any sense satisfaction away from him. It was the home of the woman who never returned his love for her. It was where his plays were booed...

I was talking to a musician/young idealist from Illinois at Galileos tonight and we talked about how we embrace new media, but like to hold the object as well. He wants to work in zines and likes to have one to carry around. I was reminded of the strengths of the online option. The NYTimes ran a story about Yeats, and they found this learned woman to dissect Yeat's whole process in slide shows and audio. This is what online journo is doing that's so great. It may be tough to handle with all 10 minutes, but it's nice to probe for a bit. I'll link it here...

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=1d933b7a401812e13341edb76287c6574ce321a8

I don't have an ounce of Irish in me, but that place and its people still have enormous weight in my mind. Can one's nationality be transformed through the alchemy of words?.... That's a question Yeats probably couldn't answer if he had lived on miraculously until today. He might say that it's okay to like a little bit of them all.