APOCALYPSE
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apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems
with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it,
ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. "The danger
is
that
there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief
may be changed, civilisation renewed." He saw his time as a time of
transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre.
There was horror to come: "thunder of feet, tumult of images." But
out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find
in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.
There are the Terrors; the clerkly skepticism proper to a learned
aristocrat confronted by these images of horror; a deep conviction of
decadence and a prophetic confidence of renovation; and
all
this
involved in the belief that his moment was the moment of supreme
crisis, when one age changed into another by means of a movement
he called a "gradual coming and increase," an "antithetical multi–
form influx."
We have our Terrors, and specific images of them, though, as I
have remarked, these do not distinguish us essentially from other
apocalyptists. They function as one might expect in an age of easy
communications, under the disadvantage of too easy access; they can
be used as a cover for more indulgent aspects of
fin-de-siecle
conduct.
We do not, on the whole, indulge in the number mysticism which
usually attended speculation on the Johannine Last Days, though it
might be thought that the forty-four steps of escalation-the arithmol–
ogy of the unthinkable-are a substitute for the seven seals and the
blasts on the trumpet. What is certain is that we are interested in
decadence and renovation; the basis of this
is
perhaps primitive,
though its expression can be extremely sophisticated. For example, the
original Marxist ideology, however tenuously it survives in modern
Communism, has not only an inherent utopian element but an element
of annunciatory violence.
If
there is something of this in the modern
revolt of the young, as there is also in the revolt of the Negro, we
must not expect to limit it to such special groups. In general, we seem
to combine a sense of decadence in society-as evidenced by the
concept of alienation, which, supported by a new interest in the early
Marx, has never enjoyed more esteem- with a technological utopian–
ism. In our ways of thinking about the future there are contradictions
