peace comes dropping slow
on Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and Minkowski's Lived Time
The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by W. B. Yeats
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
As I was told to do in times of political strife, I recently took a walk down W.B. Yeats’ mossy brick avenues, uncovered the above poem, thought about it a good deal, and here we are. There’s a lot to glean from the above, imo. Like Yeats, we’re still in the shadow of the industrial revolution’s encroachment upon the comfy human sense of time we describe as free time. But we’re deeper in it. There are simply clocks everywhere. And the new century only brought with it dead futures.
A curious phenomenon takes place when we start to imagine the past beyond terms like “decades” and “centuries” and “nostalgia” and start to seriously consider it in terms of myth and the human spirit. The fact that we sometimes feel nostalgia for things which we might have never experienced for ourselves. What does it tell us that we find ourselves drifting towards images of cozy cottages and meadows? Is it mimetic fantasy to long for warm candlelight, or something more? Where does my soul go when it dreams of peace? And what might peace be beyond its little, drab word “peace”—maybe now a little too flower power’d by the likes of John Lennon and co.
Getting on with it, and getting into the poem above, the island Yeats describes here (“Innisfree”) is an Island in a lake. Such an image demands a moment. If we can project images of animals, oxen, men, women, snakes, and deer onto the stars, who’s to say we can’t project onto the Earth as well? For the continents, a lake becomes an eye, and an island on a lake becomes the iris. This is where Yeats is writing of: the eye of the world. What a feeling that the world itself might be gazing into the stars! Innisfree, as a word, comes from the Irish Inis Fraoigh, which translates to “Island of Heather.” Heathers being those long evergreen flowering plants, low to the ground, producing cone shaped flowers that flow in the wind, we can quickly assemble a whole landscape in the mind’s eye. This eye is hazel and green and flowing with the wind. It’s here where the poet’s soul drifts; here among the humming bees; here among nine rows of bean plants. But disregard the poet entirely: what a place to be a bumblebee! On an island of long flowing purple, yellow, pink, gold flowers flowing among the wheat and the long-hanging trees!
Well, speaking of colors, the second stanza of the poem is awash with natural color. A survey of colors, if you will, and their slow connections to sounds and to times and the ties that lie in between. “Peace comes dropping slow,”—slow enough to catch.
The nature fantasy in the poem is centered on time, on the pace of life according to all its different metrics, as many fantasies at their core tend to be (including the strange simulacra of trad marriage, which hopes to combine the image of a slow life with the bustle of a social collective interiority-such as what the platform internet has become).
But the fantasy is one in which our days pass alongside the timer that’s set by the planet turning, set by the stars, set by the rotation of celestial bodies; in which our days are surrounded by the natural world, in this sense precisely the world of conscious and unconscious living beings whom also recognize and live by a true celestial type of time. A honey-bee or cricket doesn’t know the hour or the minute but they do know the day, the night, the summer, the winter. What on our Earth doesn’t know these things? Mountains, sky, and ocean only know the centuries. But neither do our modern inventions—pavements and styrofoam and plastic—live according to the seasons. We’ve built ourselves a timeless fortress. Perhaps the dream of time travel is less traveling through the real time of the stars and the moon and more of unlocking some sort of time in our timeless places.
But in our hearts, despite the clock telling us when we’re on it and when we’re off of it, there’s still that low sound of the water lapping against the shore. That’s what Yeats writes of. There lies Innisfree. Where else? Knowing the kind of poetic stratagems Yeats loved to employ in his early career, we can find another place where the lakewater laps, and it’s right below our nose. Go ahead, scroll up to the top of the page, read that poem out loud. What does your voice feel like? The up and the down flowing of each line, up (“I will arise”) and down (“and go now”) and up again (“and go to Innisfree”). Each stanza contains three lines that have such a flow but then a fourth line where the movement up again is chopped off, leaving a void where the rhythm wanted to take us. This, I believe, is saying something too. It’s a great big gong in the heart being struck. It’s an omen of the reality of our situation…
Revealing his hand at the end of the poem, the poet rises at the end, off to his dull, mundane duties. This is the terror of our lives. To be trapped within the constructed timeless ticking of the clock. And yet the low sounds of shore are still in his heart’s “core” and “core” is an interesting word to use as opposed to an expressive “beating” or a liquid “flowing” in that it represents solidity—how strange to use “core” to refer to a place where the waves lap. But then again, the Stonefruit, the apple, has a core, as does the Earth itself. The heart, if taken to be a solid object, retains the low sounds and color of these unshakable dreams and memories of sunny pastures, busy bees, cricket songs, the purple glow of the day receding into a sky of stars that might be glimmers or might be periods finishing off the day, each day, as a sentence unto itself.
To run through the long grasses on a cool late summer day, to read a good book while sitting between the roots of an old tree yellowing at the edges. There’s something of the eternal inside the dandelion wine of late summer. There’s eternity in flux and then there’s manufactured eternity and one of the two feels like a safety blanket. The world is a breadbasket, and it seeks to remind us of this fact; what is all of this “progress” for in the world if not to feed everyone and to better give everyone the full option to exist as a life that’s worthwhile in their own hearts’ definition? What are the profits for and what are the advertising campaigns for? What is any of the technological advances of the last twenty years supposed to give us except more of a severe migraine?
If anything, we can let all this rumbling about, all this chaotic, weak-lunged humdrum of our era teach us a real value in Free Time as such, and in time in general. All issues faced by the human mind, material, spiritual, and the rest (thinking of the ticking timebomb between when I eat too much cheese to when there’s too much of a consequence to the poor souls around me) can be boiled down to problems of space and time and how they intersect.
The importance of freetime is that it’s not another link in the chain of what we’re bound down to already—and we’re bound down to quite a bit. I’ve written before about how every relationship is parasocial and while I still stand by that being perhaps one of the greater threats to our shared humanity (mainly in its effects upon solidarity), I want to clarify the point every once in a while by pointing out that the real core of the issue is that modern communications technology essentially puts all of us in the same room together at all times.
There’s an endless directory of people online and in my contacts app who I can reach out to at any time and almost all of whom can probably find a way to reach out to me at any time and poke me in the shoulder when I’m least expecting it. This is fine and good in low doses but it doesn’t do great things for one’s mental health in the long term, especially now that bullets are whizzing around The Land of the Free or whatever. Everyone’s on, everyone’s availabe. Time has been chained like never before and finding free time now is something of a herculean task. If we’re looking for reasons why a nebulous sort of mass psychosis event is looming and snarling on the horizon right now, this is it. So then, how does one free oneself from the chain?
First we ought to establish that free time is only freed when it is released from the quiet scourge of Scheduling. To clear our afternoon’s schedule to focus on “reading” or “writing” or “painting” or whatnot is still not free time. It’s another scheduled block. We’re simply extending out the chain a couple hours, not breaking it. Time cannot be measured in its true nature in the way space is measured: it’s too slippery, chimeral, ephemeral. It changes shape, tone, and language without our ability to necessarily track it in real time or in accordance enough to ever properly wield it. The other day I woke up and had a block of time in place to run a load of laundry, load up on groceries, and clean the apartment but the time I had planned on using as a laundry basket, grocery bag, and vacuum cleaner had chosen itself to instead be a sleepy, bleary staring off into the distance. I eventually spent the afternoon watching ‘60s looney tunes and, all things considered, it was a very good use of my time. It’s the time I needed. An unexpected moment. A surprise. My world came together into something of a unity.
To return to what is natural in the moment is worth its while. There’s no use in resigning ourselves completely to chained time, even if that time is considered from a place of leisure. Boredom is key here. Boredom is not a vacuum entirely. It’s tempered by the sun, the seasons, the weather. It’s in boredom that we can rediscover free time.
And free time can be productive even as it’s not scheduled. To return to what is natural in the moment and to a respect for the flow of time on its own terms is to return to the river of life with tributaries branching out every which way into all types of actual productive work. Anything is possible but anything worth doing is decided on inside our considerations. It’s hard to decide on much of anything when we fill the time of every idle moment reeling about the singular room of the internet to soak up all the information we can get to make the kind of instinctive choices we might make in a dark forest teeming with life. We must not forget that we are animals and thus have animal hearts, nerves, and feelings. Animal hearts are nothing bad, let me be clear, when in a place of safety and love; but in a place of uncertain exposure and cruelty (looking at Elon’s nazi bar, X.com), the animal heart begins to make rash decisions based on cold instinct.
New threats require new practices. What we might need is a sort of Luddite Spirituality (or at least a language of Luddite Ontology). Something to consider. Any proper Luddite Spirituality, I think, would need to draw heavily on the last time we went through such a profound crisis in the face of new technologies. I’m talking, naturally, about the 1890s through the 1930s, when the above poem was written. Husserl and Bergson. Minkowski and Sartre. Even Heiddegger has ideas for us; and in his cowardice, his later nazism, we can perhaps make out the necessary precautions about taking his philosophy work at face value. I’ve been reading Minkowski’s Lived Time; and a lot of the ideas here come from that incredible book. Would strongly recommend if you’re into phenomenology or whatever. Wonderful read and (imo) very readable. I’m going to try and elaborate on more of his ideas below.
Tracking and scheduling time is the creation of scaffolding. It’s not a representation, only a crutch of support. Fixing events on a chart of years, months, hours are benchmarks well suited to making sure schedules are synced; well suited to make sure the train arrives at the right time; well suited to make sure we know when we’re on and off the clock. But “on the clock” has eaten “off the clock” like a snake might make a meal of its own tail. On the clock we work. “Off the clock” is no more when I feel so anxiously inclined to doomscroll, to consume media, to consume content, etc.
The way we truly, deep down, and individually experience time cannot be locked down underneath the prison of an idea that time is merely an A to B succession of moments or the appearances of present moments. The present moment is always our perspective, but not one around which we can ever linger, since it quickly becomes past, becomes memory. Time can be understood though, through notions of duration and stability (not to be confused with immobility and death as those two definitons only apply to us as living things, not to time as a constant in which we tread water). The way we ought to understand time for the sake of this essay, and to push forward our tentative idea of Free Time is placing it under the fantastic, flowing banner of Becoming. But becoming, like time, avoids being examined through our usual way of understanding things.
Discursive thought demands grammar: a subject, object, verb. But nothing of discursive thought can be put over what we might describe as Becoming.
“In its mysterious power, becoming leaves no island upon which we can set foot in order to arrive at a definition or a judgement in its regard. With its waves it covers over all that we might be tempted to set over against it. It knows neither subjects nor objects. It has neither distinct parts, nor direction, nor beginning, nor end. It is neither reversible nor irreversible. It is universal and impersonal. It becomes chaotic. And yet, it is quite close to us, so close that it constitutes the very base of our life. We would almost like to say that it is the synonym of life in the broadest sense of the word.” (Minkowski, 18)
A synonym of life!? WHoa. But we can’t quite say it, can we? Because then we are subjugating the notion of Becoming again to categorization which it will quickly be able to slip out from like smoke floating upwards on the air.
Everything merges into Becoming, the words on the page, the thoughts on the mind, and thus nothing can be separated from it. The world around us becomes with us, but also—and this is important—becomes because we happen to be around to watch it becoming. In a sense the world becomes what it is-to-be through our perception of it becoming that thing. Becoming, as a term we might use for time, bridges the distance between us and the world. “I Become Therefore The World Becomes,” we might tell ourselves. But then, again, we’re attempting to differentiate the two in language, something which Becoming quickly absorbs into itself.
This is because “Becoming” does not try to be expressed—and this is the key to understanding wht it is, I think. To try and untangle it into any sort of expression might certainly kill it just as scheduling out free time in planner actively kills the freetime as it might exist in its true state.
We should hold these two concepts as linked conceptually in some way for no reason other than, perhaps, vibes. Free Time can only work when the concept of Becoming is embraced as something scarcely definable, all-consuming like a movement in which everything shifts in accordance to our perception of it as a coherent, unified entity. Perhaps music, moreso than language, is the only way of gesturing towards the concept. I can think of no better metaphor for Becoming than the swelling of an orchestra or the growing moan of distorted resonances emerging from a guitar amp.
And on a final note: memory is tempered by the present. It’s obliged to take it into account as there is no escaping the present moment without consequences: namely, the blooming of delusions be them creative or paranoid. But the future… Well… History doesn’t create the future, rather it is history as lived and understood and felt through our bones in this undying present that might create the future. We are the glass capturing yesterday’s light, projecting it into the colors of tomorrow. We make the world like we might make our bed: with knowledge that we’ll have to sleep in it. New seeds might germinate in our slumber.
-gbe