Wes & Erin discuss “Leda and the Swan.” For paid subscribers, includes “The Indian to His Love.”
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Transcript
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part three of our four part series on Yeats. Back in the day we did the Second Coming. That was a long time ago, I guess. Maybe 2020. I don't know. Wow. Yeah. In our last recording we covered sailing to Byzantium. And now we're gonna do for part three, Leda and the Swan and part four, the Indian to his Love, which I always thought was an Indian to his lover. That's the way I remembered it. But it's the Indian to his love and poem that he wrote when he was really young, like 23. So. Yeah, this is Leda is one of the ones you picked. Why did you pick this one?
1:09 Erin: I prefer the romance of Ley. I'm just kidding.
1:14 Erin: Yeah, it's incredible.
1:15 Wes: Zeus. You miss the part where he wines and dines her, but it's all implied. He puts on. What kind of music does he put on? The vinyl player.
1:27 Wes: It's gotta be vinyl.
1:32 Erin: You know, I know this poem pretty well, so that's probably why I picked it. And it always reminds me of. I thought we'd get some great, I don't know, great discussion out of it. This poem reminds me of arguments about people always talking about how they want to. They would go back in time and kill baby Hitler or something. And this is.
1:54 Wes: You'd go back in time and kill Western civilization. Well, this is sort of like preventing this rape.
2:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah, this is sort of like going back and you'd have to kill his parents or give them birth control or something. But anyway, that probably sounds completely nuts now that I'm saying this.
2:09 Wes: If we were a different podcast, this podcast would all be all about the meaning of Consent and the complexities of consent.
2:19 Wes: But I guess we have to talk about that anyway. I guess that's in there. But before we do that. Yeah. Why don't. Can you tell us a little bit about the myth, the mythology behind us.
2:28 Erin: Yes. Okay. So. So didn't Leda have. So she had sex with her husband. Right. But then she also was raped by Zeus. And she had.
2:39 Wes: On the same night.
2:40 Erin: On the same night. And she had two eggs that she. Like, big. I don't know. I don't know how big the eggs were. I'm not an expert in that. That regard. But anyway, she gave birth to these two eggs from which hatched Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra in one and Castor and Pollux in the other. Is that right? And each of them were. Were half siblings of each other. Right. Because one. It was like one and one went to the. I don't know, there was this one
3:09 Wes: egg and one, and one went to the other.
3:12 Erin: Half twins, exactly. Yes. And so then the brothers. There's a sort of complicated history with Castor and Pollux. I believe they're the twins from the constellation Gemini, but also, like, they helped. I think they helped rescue Helen from Theseus. And there was a whole they die in the Iliad, but then somehow they're still alive in the Odyssey. Like, it's very, very confusing. And then obviously, yeah, Helen and Clytemnestra are the other two, the good brothers and the bad sisters or something. Sounds like my family.
3:45 Wes: So. Yeah. So the Helen and Clytemnestra, two important figures in the Trojan War. Right. So Helen's husband is Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra's husband and murder victim. And as we saw in the Odyssey, there's a bit of, I think, worry for Odysseus about getting back home and having the same thing happen to him that. Right. Happened to Agamemnon. And there's a bit of discussion of that in the. In the underworld, but these are two. So it's a foundational myth. Yeah. What is this, you know, is just from doing a little research, it, you know, oft depicted in the Renaissance, but also for the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was on.
They found a fresco of it in Pompeii, which you can see why those libertines in Pompeii would. Would like it. But, you know, it was frequently engraved on small items, pieces of, you know, jewelry, decor, I think. So it got me wondering, well, what is the. What did it Mean, what did this myth mean to the ancient Greeks? Which I don't have a good answer.
4:48 Wes: I mean, I have a speculation. Right. Just, just the association with the Trojan War, which you could say is a foundational myth for the ancient Greeks. You know, it unites all the different tribes in the same place back in the day. But more importantly, it's what they have in common as a literary tradition. And not just literary tradition, but the first. Maybe the first thing that's written down. But Homer unites Greek culture. So sometimes I think, is it really. Yeah. Is it really the content, you know, of the Troy myth that's so important? Or is it just the fact that.
That the Iliad and the Odyssey are sort of common. You know, Homer is the, is the common possession of the Greeks and the foundation of their culture, and it's the sort of thing. But, you know, you, you get the impression from reading Plato, right, that it's like the Bible of the society. Everyone knew it and could recite long passages from it. It was just foundational to their, to their education. But so, so anything that, that touches on that, on that myth is of course, important. But I, you know, I couldn't find much. But specifically, I know we can say a little bit why it was significant to Yeats, but I'm just.
Before we do that, I don't know much more about why this specific myth got at the imagination of.
5:58 Erin: Yeah, right. Well, that, that's, you know, that was sort of my baby Hitler joke. It's like, how can we trace back to the, you know, the big terrible thing? How can we prevent that from happening? And if we scroll back to this point, could. It's, you know, and eventually it's, well, it would be better if the people involved were never born in the first place or something. Something. Right. But that, and this seems like the origin point, the genealogical basis for the myth. But of course, what we find is that it's turtles all the way down. Right.
I mean, we could say that the origin point is really the Judgment of Paris, which itself is, I think, like, very similar to this Leda and the Swan idea in which we have a story about the intervention of the gods, which seems to be just reverse engineering human tragedy and trying to find a cause for it, which is itself no cause at all. Right. So I think that tension is wrapped up in the Leda and the Swan myth in a way which holds all of the complexities of that tension between maybe something like human will, free will, and divine intervention or terror or accident or something like that.
Like are all held together in this myth in a way that they're not in the jungle Judgment of Paris. Because the Judgment of Paris is just about how the gods are just causing a lot of trouble. Like, this is about parentage, it's about accident, it's about desire. And all of these things cloaked in something that seems willed, but which is in fact just made up. It seems to me like the perfect point. Like, if we're looking for, okay, how and why did this all happen? Like the same thing with baby Hitler, you know, that's the point at which we would go in and make an intervention or his parents or whatever.
You know, this is the point where we would go in and make the intervention to stop the tragedy that happened in Homer.
7:43 Wes: But in this case, if we intervened, we intervene in the foundational myth for Greek civilization, for classical Greek civilization. So in a way, right, what this myth is about is the birth of Greek civilizations through the events that Helen engenders. That's the way Yeats saw this, although he saw it through his weird lens of 2000 year eras. Actually, I'll read a little bit just from what Yeats says about this. I don't want to spend too long on his crazy theories, but it's good
8:18 Erin: to know he demands to be taken seriously.
8:20 Wes: This is. Yeah, right. So to see this kind of thing as a weak point, in a way, in Yeats, but you know, all the stuff in his A Vision book and all his mysticism. But he says, I imagine the Annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda. So it's right that this is an annunciation for him. And we did the Second Coming, which was sort of the annunciation of the era that comes after the Christian era. This is the Annunciation of the era before the Christian era. So in Yeats's terms, this is a subjective Greek era as opposed to an objective Christian era.
And what he means by that, it's more associated in his mind with imagination and aesthetic values, whereas the objective era of Christianity is more about. Christianity is associated with dogma and the power of institutions. So there's a bit of nostalgia on Yeats's parts for the mythic and the polytheistic. And in a way, what comes after in the Second Coming in a way sounds like a bit of a return to that. So let me just continue what he says about it. I imagine the Annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers and that from one of her eggs came love and from the other war.
But all things are from antithesis. And when in my ignorance, I try to imagine that older civilization that annunciation rejected, I can but see birth and woman blotting out some corner of the Babylonian mythical starlight, which is for him a positive thing. He also wrote in another note. I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor of the Of a political review asked me for a poem. I thought, after the individualist demagogic movement founded by Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution. So not a fan of the Enlightenment after that, we have a soil so exhausted that it cannot grow the crop again.
For centuries then I thought, nothing is now possible but some movement from above preceded by some violent annunciation. My fancy began to play with Leda and the swan for metaphor, and I began this poem. But as I wrote, Bird and Lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it. And my friend tells me that his conservative readers would misunderstand the poem. So, you know, at this point. Right. The political aspect of this is Yates's idea that democracy is on its way out at that time, and there will be violent authoritarian governments on the rise, as in the Second Coming.
So I think he's related these sorts of things. Anyway, that's all I'll say about what Yeats said. He thought about it because more important is what we. We think it means. Of course.
11:19 Erin: Well, shall I read it?
11:22 Erin: Okay. A sudden blow, the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body laid in that white rush, but feel the strange heart beating where it lies, a shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower. And Agamemnon dead, being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air. Did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop.
12:09 Wes: Very nice. You should always end the poem with a nice cliffhanger.
12:14 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
12:15 Wes: So when you write the next poem, people will be waiting for it.
12:19 Erin: I should say what I really love about this poem, actually, are the questions. That's something didn't occur to me until I was reminded reading it.
12:29 Wes: Yeah, I like that as a rhetorical device as well. And it right at the end of the poem, any sense of a typical conclusion or climax or resolution Is it's not completely done away with. Right. But you end with attention instead of a full resolution. And it's a tension that reflects the fact that this is just a, you know, a beginning.
12:52 Erin: So it's interesting that we did Rosemary's Baby just before this because we talked in that about the Antichrist coming into the world through the rape versus the Annunciation, which is, you know, Mary's assent is crucial in that story. Yeah. What you mentioned about Yeats's ideas of these different eras and the Christian emphasizing authority and these types of structures, there's a sort of interesting paradox there, it seems to me, where one emphasizes actually free will, like despite this sort of authoritarian system or these structures which Yeats was sort of like chafing against, they seem to have in them this inherent idea of free will and of one's own, you know, of salvation on the individual level of the idea of redemption.
Whereas Greek mythology, you know, we have this rape, this idea in which things just happen to you and you just have to deal with them. So the oppression seems to come, you know, it's just interesting that there's. One is associated with authority and oppression. And then we have Leda and the Swan on the other hand, which is sort of like what? Just the oppression of these sort of cosmic faded, faceless forces which are then just given a face by structures which, as I think I said before, are just trying to. Or by the. By the society which is just trying to reverse engineer the mindless things that happen to people.
Right. In other words, like, you know, the drought happens because we didn't pray to the rain God. Right. Like there's an after the fact, a consciousness imposed upon it which is more or less authoritarian. Seems to me to be, you know, open for debate there.
14:39 Wes: Yeah, sounds very anti enlightenment and very romantic. His sympathies?
14:46 Erin: Well, those are mine. So I.
14:48 Wes: Are they really?
14:50 Erin: Yes, I'm very anti enlightenment and pro romantic for, I mean, you know, some big exceptions.
14:55 Wes: That's another discussion. I'm not sure how. I'd be curious to hear about that. But I think with ancient Greek, like mythology, right, as you're pointing out, there's this interface between the divine and the mortal, and in particular the fates of mortal beings are closely connected to the divine. So that what you might see as random chance is connected to the actions of the gods. And in those myths and in Homer, right, you have the gods impregnating mortals and having demigods. And these are demigods. Right. That the ancient Greeks could trace their lineage to Some people somewhere in a particular part of Greece could say, yes, we're the descendant of that demigod, of that hero.
And others could say the same thing. So there's this tighter connection between the divine and the mortal. And of course the gods look more, they resemble mortals more, they're less abstract and they have desires. Right. Zeus wants to come down and have sex with Leda. I don't know why he has to do it as a swan, but whatever, you know, whatever you're into. And for him, right, you get at the end of the poem, the indifferent beak drops. There's a kind of. It doesn't sound as if he cares about what fate he's engendering for the world. It's just, eh, I do what I want.
Your mortal fates are connected to my desires and my whims. It's kind of tyrannical. Right. But it's not like some sort of providence where he's imagining some future for these, for this people and then forming some covenant with them. Right. Instead it's just rape. And then what follows from that?
16:44 Erin: Yes. Yeah. So it seems to me, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me then that there's a closer connection in Christianity. No, I mean that the gods are more, or, sorry, the God is more involved in mortal life in Christianity, you know, I mean, there is this connection. I know what you're talking about, but at the same time, like just less.
17:05 Wes: He's just. He's not as sexually active. Should we put it that way?
17:10 Erin: Sure, sure, I see what you mean. I see what you mean. So actively coming in and changing fate in that way. Okay, okay. Because I was gonna say, like, there's. There's also like the personal relationship. There's the. I mean there's no more direct intervention in a way than the incarnation. Right. And.
17:25 Wes: Well, yeah, well, the comparison I was making is that. That's. There's more intent in that.
17:29 Erin: Oh, I see. Okay.
17:31 Wes: And providence. And so God has a plan, there's design to all of this, where for Zeus, it's not about a larger plan for the good of humanity, it's about. It's a plan, but it's a plan about his desire to satisfy his own desires. Yeah, yeah. And then there are cosmic implications for that. But the. They're kind of. But they're not intended. Although, you know, maybe there, There are. I suppose if, yeah. If you looked at Homer and ancient Greek literature, you would say you'd see counter currents to this, this idea because you see the gods sitting around and bickering about their favorite mortals and whether the Greeks are going to win the war and blah, blah, blah.
18:18 Wes: But underneath it all, just because it's so based in the subjectivity of the different gods and their particular, very human, like, desires and opinions, it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't have the same quality as a monotheistic God who is interested in the good, in the fate of humanity in the larger sense. Right. They're not just taking sides, you know.
18:46 Wes: Ooh, I like Odysseus. Well, I don't like it, you know, there. Or I like the Greeks, I like the Trojans. It's more about the fate of humanity as all a whole.
18:56 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's very well put. I like the psychological closeness because this is the way in which I think, you know, these. These gods are invented, if you like. I mean, I know that there's, like, so much murkiness around this that we can. We can only speculate, but I would imagine that, you know, in trying to come up with a reason why something happened and one attributed it to a God's desire, really it's just some guy's desire, you know.
19:21 Erin: It's the same. The same kind of principle. You know, people behave in this way, and it's because Hitler's mom and dad got together, you know, that Hitler was created. I keep going back to this example. Of course, it's like far more the Schickel.
19:34 Wes: The Schicklgrubers, I think, is the real name. Right. Is that Hitler's real last name? Meet the Schicklgrubers. It's a basis for a really funny sitcom.
19:44 Erin: Oh, God, yeah. Obviously, as. As you said, you know, that's. That's a far more straightforwardly just negative example to give of, you know, of an unfolding which only had negative consequences. But in this case, obviously, it's more. It's like any instance where you have kids and there's going to be some good and some bad and hopefully not. Not too much bad. But.
20:06 Wes: Should we get into the stanzas?
20:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So I. You know what I really love in this first line? So a sudden blow. I'm. You know, that seems to be. Actually, that's. That in itself, the blow is quite. Quite mysterious. I'm almost. Almost thinking of like a wind blowing, but it could also just be like an act of violence. Swans are nasty creatures.
20:28 Wes: So I. Yeah. What's hitting her?
20:32 Erin: Right, Right.
20:33 Wes: Other than the obvious. There's the phallus, there's the wings, there's the beak. I mean, we Hear about the dark webs caressing her thighs, the nape. So he's catching her neck and his bill. But, yeah, he starts out with a blow, but it's left very vague, you know, unless we think she's been hit by the wings.
20:56 Erin: Yeah, it's quite shadowy, what's actually happening. And I think that blow, too, I connect to beating still, which is also a kind of a paradox, right. Like their movement and stillness in the same image. That word still contains, you know, either perpetuation, like it's still moving or it stopped moving. So there's. And that seems to be inherent in this idea of, like, this is almost the sort of the Big Bang, if you will, for the God, for the Trojan War. But it's also. Yeah, I'm sorry, I just got it. Unintentional. It's the singular moment. But then it's also this moment of reverberation, right, that still goes on.
So it's sort of like a still image and a moving image at the same time. It's like one scene and every other scene that follows it at the same time. And so that kind of like thunder, fuzziness and the identification with the blow, what's happening where, when it's happening. Seems to me to be. Yeah, very thematic of this event, which sort of, like, happened and did not happen at the same time. Something of that intangibility is being expressed, I think, in the description.
22:09 Wes: Yeah. So there's some ambiguity here between. Famously, between rape and seduction. And so that becomes a question about power and the kind of power that's being deployed here. Right. So one can use brute force, but one can use seduction in the sense of appealing to desire. And sometimes it's the desire for force. But famously, right, Aristotle conceived of God as an unmoved mover. He doesn't push things around in the world by way of. In the same way as material, efficient causes, like us pushing a billiard ball. He is just good. And the world moves because it is moved by the good.
To try to be like the good. There's an appeal to. Ultimately to human subjectivity. So here it starts out, right, so she's caught in his bill. And it begins certainly as a rape. And then how can those terrified, vague, vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And then her fingers are vague, but the question is also vague because it's. The question is, can she do it physically? Is this physical force that can be. That's being used and she doesn't have the physical power to resist? Or is it psychological? Force that's being deployed and she can't get herself to actually do this.
23:37 Erin: I mean, it's amazing that this hadn't occurred to me before. But, you know, we have. We have staggering girl. We have helpless breast, you know, so that first stanza seems to indicate the fact that she's being overpowered. And then. But then when we get the mechanics of this in the second stanza, I think to myself, how difficult is it to fight? How big is this swan? And what.
23:56 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
23:57 Erin: There's. I guess I always conceived of this more straightforwardly, in which it's one of the many. Rape. I mean, sometimes, obviously, Zeus's rapes can be quite brutal and.
24:09 Wes: Well, it's depicted in different ways. Interestingly, you know, in some depictions, she's. I mean, you know, in the visual arts, she's. In some depictions, she's enthusiastically getting it on with the swan. And others, she's obviously being raped.
24:29 Wes: Just notice you, you.
24:30 Erin: Yeah, I'm pretty disgusted by this.
24:33 Wes: Disgusted. Is it worse? Which one is worse? The bestiality or the. Yeah, but anyway, she's terrified. But the fingers are also vague, which gives you the idea that. Yeah. What does it mean to have vague fingers? She's not putting all her power into grasping the swan and pulling him away. Something like. Like that. You could really wring it. So you'd think you could just wring Zeus's neck really quickly.
24:59 Wes: Then have some swan for dinner. Right.
25:01 Erin: And they're terrified. They're terrified and vague at the same time. So there's a doubling there. You know, we can compare it to dark webs, which are also, when you think about it, similarly, you know, so there's this idea of when we think of the feet or whatever, you know, the webbed feet of the swan, there's. The dark web. Seems indicative of entrapment. Or if you know something that takes something into itself. Right. You can get entangled in it, but it's also blunted. So is there actually a sort of comparison being established here between the vague fingers and the sort of vague. The blunting. The webbing of the swan.
25:41 Wes: Yeah. That's really good. I hadn't thought about that. Her vague fingers, it sounds like they look like the webbed feet.
25:49 Erin: Right, yeah, well. And I think there's something to that in this not quite knowing where we are and this fuzziness in general. Right. The feathered glory from her loosening thighs. Like that could be. It takes a while to parse this and try to figure out which. And you would think that feathered would give us enough of a clue. But it seems at first maybe almost to be an adjective for her sexual rapture or something like her glory in this moment rather than the actual. The body of the swan itself. I don't know. Like, there's a bit of a confusion, at least on first read.
And the white, the white rush, that's very difficult to try and picture. I mean, I'm, you know, also like, trying not to picture this. But it's very, very difficult to figure out what that is and how she would be laid in it. Is that simply just something that's underneath him, that has nothing to do with the bird, but it has to be probably some part of the swan's body.
26:44 Erin: But what kind of tantric position are they in?
26:49 Wes: Yeah. And it occurs to me you could reverse this, right? So you could see this as, you know, he's asking the question of whether how can she but feel his beat, his heart beating? But one might wonder if it's also, how can he but feel her heart beating? I don't know. I'm not that keen on that idea of reversing it, but it just occurred to me. So you get two questions. One is about whether she can push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs. And the other is about whether it's possible to avoid feeling the beating of the heart. So it's a weird type of parallel
27:29 Erin: to make when we get the two, we get laid and lies. Right. So we get this idea that she's laid on the white. If we take this to be, say, like in his feathered wings, she is laid sort of like enclosed or embraced by his body. And then his heart is sort of enclosed within his chest. Right. The strange heart beating where it lies. I mean, that could be on top of her, but also it's sort of inside his chest. In that same way, she's being pulled
28:04 Wes: so close that she's feeling the vitality of the animal, which seems to have. And of course, feeling. And you imagine the heart is beating hard because the swan's excited. Gross. And so she's. She's feeling the excitement, right? She's feeling. She's viscerally connected to the excitement of the animal. So again, it's more suggestive of a seduction and the idea that if she feels the excitement, she might be getting excited, in which case pushing the feathered glory from her loosening thighs. It's not just a matter of her inability to conjure up the physical force, it's an inability to conjure up the will to do that.
28:46 Erin: Yeah. How is such a suggestive question. It makes a bit more sense in this first question. And the second question, it seems like it's just more of a rhetorical device, because, of course. Well, how could she not feel the heart if she's that close to him physically? And that's. I mean, how can she. But that is the. That is the question. But why is it even a question?
29:05 Wes: Because, yeah, I think the idea is. Right. The danger is in tuning into the arousal of the swan and therefore becoming aroused herself. So the tendency would be to shut oneself off psychologically from the arousal, but it's not possible. And this is one of the horrible things about rape, which is, you know, people can be. Right. Pushed into arousal by rape because it lies beyond their will and that there's a trauma just to that.
29:34 Wes: Because you're right, you're invaded at a very deep psychological level. Your instincts are taken over by someone else.
29:42 Erin: Right. But perhaps the how. Because I'm interested just in the, like, why phrase it this way? Why phrase it as a rhetorical question and just say, you know, she can't not feel. I mean, you know, that's a horrible way of putting it. Right. But why not put it in a more declarative manner? It almost seems to. Seems to be inviting us into her conflict. Into this position. Yes, exactly. So we're invited to occupy that ambiguity or ambivalence.
30:09 Wes: She's conflicted, I think, about whether or not to wring his neck and have swan's tooth.
30:17 Erin: That would have saved a lot of problems.
30:19 Wes: Right. Which I might have done. Or. Yeah. To go along with it. Gross. But that's what she did. Yeah, that's. I mean, am I reading that right? That seems to be what the questions invite. They invite us into the idea that she's conflicted. I mean, there are two different parallel ideas. One is that she might be conflicted and she's overcome psychologically. And the other is that. That she's overpowered physically. And the rhetorical questions are just a way of emphasizing the irresistibility of Zeus's physical power.
30:54 Erin: Yeah. I think even.
30:55 Wes: Even when he's in the form of a swan.
30:56 Erin: I think that's exactly right. And I think that leads us into just strange as. As a modifier as well. Because it's a swan's heart. Right. What's so interesting about that word to me is. Is the strangeness because it's an animal? Is it the strangeness because it's a God?
31:14 Erin: Could the strange hers, you know, because you could read it as she's feeling her own heart. What makes a heart strange?
31:23 Wes: Her mortal heart must be very strange to him, certainly.
31:27 Erin: And also, as you already have suggested, the identification between God and mortal means that the very desire that is provoking this attack is a human one. And therefore there's nothing strange about this heart at all. There's nothing strange about its motivation to us.
31:42 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. It's alien insofar it's divine, but it's familiar in the sense that the divine is being read through the lens of human desire.
31:53 Erin: It's just got to be the fact that it's a swan heart. That's.
31:56 Wes: Yeah. And then. Yeah, if you read it as the. It's really gross. If you just think, yeah, it's strange. It's a swan's heart. It's really gross.
32:04 Erin: And swan's hearts have seven chambers or. I don't know. I don't know anything about swan's hearts. I'm just making that up. Just imagining it's a very odd organ
32:13 Wes: and they probably beat at three times the rate and, you know, even when they're not excited.
32:21 Wes: So many gross things. But, yeah. You know, and. And this speaks to. Yeah. The concept of physical difference and metamorphosis.
32:29 Erin: Well, you could even say there's sexual difference or the difference between any heart and any other heart. The difference between any person's body and my body is strange. But I like this lies again, actually, the beating, where it lies. There's the beating still, too. So there's this perpetuation and stillness in the same image.
32:48 Wes: Yeah. The wings beating and the heart beating. I didn't notice that. And still and lies. Yeah. You know, and another way of looking at this. Right. Ultimately is these rhetorical questions say something like, you know, can we resist fate?
33:02 Wes: And I think the other. Other thing to bring in here, because I was thinking about with the fact that the foundational myth for the ancient Greeks is not so much the content of the myth, although it is, you know, so Troy. But the. It's the foundational possession of a shared literary artifact, Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey. And so you can read all of this. Right. As divine inspiration of the poet. It's Homer who got things going. It's Homer who has been impregnated by the divine. So I would just lay that out there as another level here.
33:42 Erin: Sure. Yeah. And then the strangeness would be any kind of inspirational force. Yeah.
33:48 Wes: We could think of those forces in terms of the muses or the divine, more generally. Or the. I guess it's some. Yeah, it's mousa. Andra moi ennepe, mousa is the way the Odyssey begins. Sing to me, Amuse you address her directly. She speaks. Sing to me, but sing in me. Maybe, but likewise, you could just think of that as instinct, or you could think of that as character. Everything that you've laid down in yourself, including your ability as a poet, that gets unleashed in the right moment, gets unleashed, but produces something that has a form, doesn't just produce chaos. You let go. You let instinct do its work, you let desire do its work. You let passion do its work. But it's channeled into something specific and formal and defined.
34:40 Erin: Of course. How could we not think that this is about the poem itself when we have beating still. Right. This is the still object that beats is the poem itself, Right?
34:49 Wes: Oh, yeah, good.
34:50 Erin: The Petrarchan sonnet.
34:52 Wes: And then you can always think of our inability to resist fate in a way as our inability to resist character. We're just ingrained with certain habits that we can't escape dispositions except insofar as we're redeemed, I think aesthetically by taking our character and releasing it into the object, the art object. Maybe there's. In sublimation, there's some sort of redemption for fatedness. And the whole artistic process sort of recapitulates the process of being fated, except that one is free in the sublimated version, in a sense, as opposed to just forced.
So, again, we get that ambiguity between being forced and being free. It's free if there's aesthetic. If it's an aesthetic outlet, it's forced. If it's just fate and being. Being overpowered. And so what are the gods doing with us? Have they given us the gift? Have they. Are they Prometheus bringing down the fire or are they just pushing us around?
35:55 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. Hence the. The sort of, like, weedy, you know, the unseparability of those two forces and why it seems at one moment like one and at the other, like the other. That's really interesting. Well, I think. Oh, I hate saying this. I just. I. But I have to say it, that I think that Volta is the. The point of ejaculation. Is that. Right. A shudder in the loins.
36:20 Wes: You don't like saying the word volta.
36:22 Erin: I know it's. It sounds too much like. Thank you. I just. Anything that makes this more picturable to me is disgusting. Yes.
36:36 Wes: What I know from sex ed class. What's going on here? He's impregnating her. I want to make a lot of jokes here, but I'm not going to do it.
36:52 Erin: I'm already turning a little red, so.
36:57 Wes: I thought you were using protection.
37:04 Erin: Yeah, just wait till she finds out she has two sets of twins on
37:07 Wes: the right and they're gonna come out as eggs and I guess her husband's. There's no questions asked about the. Yeah. You're giving birth to eggs. That's weird. They're all yours. Don't worry. They're all yours. Well, I have been seeing you hanging out with a swan down at the tavern. People have been talking. Completely unrelated. So. Yeah. So what's being engendered there is the fate or the. These. These great foundational events for Greek civilization. The broken wall, which I suppose is a rape in and of itself. Right. The Greeks overcoming the Trojans and penetrating the wall and burning everything down and literally raping and murdering all the men and raping all the women and taking
38:04 Erin: them slaves, inspiring the Trojans to use protection ever after.
38:10 Wes: That's great. That's fucking great. That's so perfect.
38:22 Wes: So. And the death. And the death also of Agamemnon. Let's not leave that out. Right.
38:26 Erin: Let's not forget that there are two bad women that came out of this justice for Clytemnestra. Yeah. The. The men escape, the other egg escapes, causing all these problems.
38:44 Wes: I mean. Yeah. I think we've already kind of said.
38:48 Wes: A bit about the meaning of this for Yeats and the possible significance of this in terms of being a foundational event. And, you know, it's a picture of fate in action, this idea of. Right. Impregnating someone with these future events in a way, almost. So it's a very rich idea. And in the end, it'll. He'll ask the question of whether it gives her a premonition, really. Right. Did she put on his knowledge with his power?
39:16 Wes: Is he giving her knowledge as well? Is he making her a prophet of a kind, or is he just making her the mother of Greek civilization, to put it crudely.
39:27 Erin: Right. Yeah. Being so caught up seems to contradict. I mean, that in itself is a contradictory phrase. Right. She's either caught up, I. E. Trapped by him or caught up in her own.
39:40 Wes: Caught up in the moment, caught up in her desire.
39:43 Erin: Response. Sure. And then that seems to be. That also seems to be resisting at any rate. What. Regardless of the reading we give that it seems to resist this idea of knowledge. To be caught up in something seems to resist conscious Awareness outside of the immediate physical moment, whether that be one of struggles or one of desire, excitement, whatever the case may be, like that emotion seems to work in contrast.
40:08 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting because one might also read this as her understanding the significance of union with Zeus. Right. So that she might have known as things progressed what this was all about. She might have known that this was about the burning roof and tower in some sense. Right. So one question is, was she so caught up in the moment and the desire that this fated future didn't enter into her consciousness at all after the fact. After the fact of the shudder of the loins? But the other is, the other question is, did she succumb to the swanne merely out of desire? Did she sort of know was part of, in other words, was part of her arousal and, and being overcome? And was part of that about a kind of instinctual grasp of the significance of all of this? And I suppose, you know, hopefully she at least knew it wasn't just a swan.
41:13 Erin: Yeah. The emotion seems crucial. Like strangely, this being caught up seems crucial to the knowledge. Like the way that this is constructed. We have this idea of being caught up and being mastered as actually being signals that she perhaps did have this knowledge. Right. Because it's not. Yeah, it's not. Did she not put on his knowledge with his power? It's that these two things are somehow evidence for the fact that she put on his knowledge with his power. I mean, I know it's a question, so that's ambiguous in and of itself, but they seem dependent.
Like this is evidence that perhaps she did. Right. There's no negative in the construction. So that she did put on his knowledge with his power. So this, this is the strange sort of knowledge that's being suggested here, which is by being mastered by him, in other words, subject to him and also having this emotional experience, this is somehow giving way, Right. To this deeper knowledge of whatever is engendered, which is to say like the potential result of any sexual experience. Right. Like there's a sort of. There are different types of knowledge, I suppose, and whether this suggests a sort of ancestral bodily knowledge or something else.
42:24 Wes: How do you mean ancestral?
42:26 Erin: Well, you know, the idea of just what you're saying, she, that she knew this was going to happen or she knew that this was Zeus.
42:32 Wes: Yeah. The options are she, hey, it's a swan. It's a sexy swan. It's just a swan. The next one up is, well, this is a special swan. I definitely would not have sex with just any old swan. This is special. Next one up from there. Okay. It's God, right? I would not feel this way about a swan if it weren't God. And then the next level is, hey, this is a mother of the future. This is my chance.
43:04 Erin: Yeah, so. So you're saying that perhaps she did know that she was. That she was engendering the future. And I would say in that same way, any sexual encounter or any, Any desire, like even. Even before the sexual encounter has the potential to engender some kind of new future, I think is what I'm trying to say. And is that in itself a kind of a knowledge? Is that like a bodily knowledge? You know, I'm thinking of like, whatever. Anything from sort of like genes being expressed. Right. Merely the idea of sexual desire and drive as this sort of the world or humanity itself perpetuating itself into the future through us.
Therefore, like, do our bodies have some sort of knowledge that we don't necessarily consciously have? You know what I'm saying? I'm trying to connect this maybe to something. Something that goes back to this kind of pre mythological idea for which the Greeks presumably then came up with the mythology to explain.
44:06 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we. We normally think of sexual desire as distinct from the desire to propagate. Even though, of course, evolutionarily sexual desire is there because it, because it facilitates propagation.
44:20 Erin: Yes, yes. It's primordial.
44:23 Wes: Human beings can want to propagate consciously, unlike animals.
44:28 Wes: Animals are just following their instincts or desires. And then the question is, well, to, to what extent does that desire to propagate feed into sexual desire, consciously or unconsciously? And to what extent is arousal a premonition of a twist of fate, of an alteration of the future? So we might, on some unconscious level. In other words, even if we're not intending to have kids, we might be aroused at an unconscious level by the possibility of a new future. Maybe. I don't know if that's the idea, but you're trying to get at.
45:05 Erin: Yeah, and I wonder too, if the world, you know, if it feels as though the world is. I mean, these are the forces that push the world forward, whether we're. Whether we're conscious of them or not. You know, and so this is just. What if we look, if we zoomed out and looked at this on this kind of macro level. We can almost argue that like we are the. That our individual reproductive happenings, occurrences are like the world sort of working out its own plan in which we are less than conscious participators, but which we might have some sort of insight into or like people talk about.
I don't mean to be so mystical with this, but I think that people talk about this when they have kids that like the world finally made sense to them, right? Because they were participating in some sort of. They were collaborating in some sort of vast project that they prior to this did not have access to, but which we might say looking back, they were participating in that higher knowledge even before they had the knowledge or before they were conscious of having the knowledge. Do you know what I'm trying to say? I'm being very woo woo about this just very simple idea of just having kids.
I'm perhaps putting too fine a point on something which is just very easily said, which is just that any kind of child is a new possibility. And when you have a child or when you conceive a child, you're sort of participating in the kind of the knowledge of the world or the knowledge of the future which you don't fully know that know yet, but what you know is perhaps like you're affecting the future in some way and you're affecting the world in some way. And that seems to be a sort of subterranean knowledge which is at the base of any child that's born.
46:44 Wes: I think I get it.
46:46 Erin: Do you? Because I don't.
46:48 Wes: I should say, since I took us down this path, this kind of alternative reading, that the straightforward reading is just that the question is about whether when, at the point where she's being inseminated, is she with his power, which is to say his seed, right? And power is potentiality with the thing that's going to open up this new future, whether she also, whether a premonition follows on that or some kind of knowledge. Zeus is, and Zeus read, is presumably omniscient in some sort of way. So. And then you could ask the same thing of the poet, whether the poet is taking on divine knowledge in some sense, when, at the moment of being engendered, inspired.
The reading that we're toying with is this idea of premonition that goes back to the beginning of the encounter and explains to some extent why she's agreeing to the encounter. I just wanted to be clear about that for listeners who. Why are they talking about. Yeah, sure.
47:45 Erin: And to that more baseline reading, you know, there's also the idea of sex is knowing someone right in the. In the biblical way that one receives some knowledge of a person through sexual encounter. And that therefore, if through sex one truly comes to know another person on some level. Which again could be, could be sort of mystical, I suppose, or one has knowledge of that other person which is intimate and if that other person is a God, then do you have that, then do you become invested with some kind of divine knowledge by virtue of that encounter? Which is again, I think like pretty straightforward, but maybe, maybe is enriched by this idea of like knowing on a. In the sexual way, which I think he's sort of toying with here from a different tradition.
48:33 Wes: Why the brute blood of the air? That's something I don't quite understand.
48:39 Wes: Mastered by the brute blood of the air. I mean, unless we think of the swan as a representative of the life of the air divinity.
48:49 Erin: I mean, I don't think of swans as being in the air at all, you know.
48:53 Wes: Well, he's flapping his wings so you kind of get the idea that he's. Yeah.
48:56 Erin: Hovering a bit.
48:58 Wes: Hovering a bit. But probably not for long.
49:01 Erin: Right, right.
49:01 Wes: It's hard to have sex that way, Wings flapping, all this. Yeah. We don't associate swans. Yeah. With being in the air. That's a good point. Mastered by the brute blood of the air.
49:14 Erin: The contrast too perhaps is inherent in this idea of the, you know, the divinity who is a brute, who operates according to his own appetites. Yeah. But it's this sort of mixing of the elemental. Right. Because we have brute blood which is sort of earth and then air at the same time.
49:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean we can think of brood in terms of. Yeah. The mere animality or the brutishness of Zeus's desire.
49:39 Wes: You know, I think we can associate the air with the gods, but the blood part I think is.
49:46 Erin: Yeah. The blood is so instantiated. It's such a strange.
49:51 Wes: And the question again, you know. Right. So she, the questions are always double. So is she mastered by the carnality or the physicality of this thing or is she mastered by her own hot bloodedness, let's say. But just the whole phrase together, I don't quite, don't quite get it.
50:08 Erin: Well, this is. I suppose we just have to relate this back to the beating and to the heart. Right. So it's the blood that's. That's pumping, that's actually operating all of this. So that's the force somehow at the bottom of the experience.
50:23 Erin: I don't know. I wish there was something more I could.
50:25 Wes: No, that helps. Relating it back to the heart.
50:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And then we get the indifferent beak, which is the, maybe the cruelest part of this whole poem.
50:34 Wes: Yeah. He never called her. He yeah, exactly. She gave him her number, but he never called her. The indifferent beak.
50:45 Erin: What a player.
50:47 Wes: So, yeah, he's just off, back off to Mount Olympus to slam, bam, thank you, Leda.
50:54 Erin: Yeah, and beak too. Like there's a poem. So it's words, but there are no words exchanged, of course, between Swan, you know, can the swan even talk? And yet beakiness seems suggestive of a mouth of words. And the idea of an indifferent beak means he's not going to call her, he's not going to speak to her. Right. There's a sort of refusal of communication.
51:19 Wes: Yeah. And brute, right? Yeah, the brutes are mute. There's always that association with the brutishness of the animals, the fact that they can't speak.
51:27 Erin: Yes, they're dumb.
51:29 Wes: Speechless. Yeah. So I like that. Yeah. This, I mean, the indifference, right? Yeah. We can read it as the indifference of animality, of, you know, of being less than human. We can read it as the indifference of the divine as being more than human. Right. So our human affairs are not the concern of the gods in a way, which is a special irony because, of course, the momentous things that follow from this union of the men, you know, and then there's the indifference of this post coital indifference. Right. Where arousal and excitement are gone and one enters a radically different world after orgasm psychologically. So there's a kind of malaise post coital malaise, let's say. So I think of those three things,
52:20 Erin: Swan's gotten what it wanted.
52:23 Wes: That wraps up part three of our four part series on Yeats. Next we're gonna do the Indian to his love for part four. [email protected] subtextpodcast or you can just. If you're using Apple Podcasts, you can just hit the subscribe button right on Apple and listen to that immediately. Otherwise, you can wait a week and listen to the next part.
52:48 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
