A Storm Blown from Paradise by Paul Kingsnorth - Emergence Magazine.

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 Paradise
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Made with in Inverness, California & Utrecht, The Netherlands.

by Paul
Kingsnorth

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Narrated by Paul Kingsnorth

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Beginning with W. B. Yeats’s iconic

poem, “The Second Coming,” this
essay is an inquiry into linear and
cyclical time and the sweeping
momentum of progress.

We have broken the

circle and made
ourselves a new
image to live by. Not
a return, but an
onward movement.
Not a cycle, but a
progression. Not a
circle, but a straight
line.

N
ot far from where I live in
the west of Ireland is the
former home of the
country’s greatest modern poet,
William Butler Yeats. Thoor
Ballylee, an old Norman tower
attached to a low thatched
cottage, is set in a quiet river
valley which seems to have
remained curiously untouched
even as the development boom of
the “Celtic Tiger” years has
changed Ireland almost beyond
recognition.

Time has toyed with this column

of stone. Built in the fifteenth
century by an Anglo-Norman
family, the Burkes, as a grand
military and social symbol, it later
fell into disuse, at one stage being
rented for five pounds by a farmer
to house his cattle. The poet
bought it as a ruin a century ago
and spent several years restoring
it with a local architect. When he
was finished, he composed a
poem which can still be read
today, carved in weatherworn
slate on the outside of the tower
wall:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green
slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George.
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.

It didn’t take long for the tower to

become ruin once again. Yeats
moved out in 1929, a decade
before his death, and Thoor
Ballylee was abandoned. In the
1960s, it was reopened as a
museum by admirers of the poet,
then later taken over by the
government, which promptly ran
out of restoration funds when the
country went bust in 2008. The
tower was abandoned again, then
restored and reopened to the
public by a band of local
enthusiasts. Shortly after it
reopened, a series of devastating
floods wrecked their work. The
river adjacent to the tower has
flooded every few years since the
twenty-first century began, in
common with much of the rest of
the country, as climate change
throws old patterns up in the air.
Near rivers and on flood plains
and canal banks across Ireland,
all is ruin most winters now.

IT WAS WHILE he was living at

Thoor Ballylee that Yeats wrote
one of his greatest and most
mysterious poems, “The Second
Coming.” Dense with symbolism
and heavy with prophetic energy,
“The Second Coming” is a
foretaste of fated catastrophe:
 Turning and turning in the widening
gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned;

The imagery is mystical, the

cadences biblical. Something is
coming to an end, something new
is being born. Destiny is at work,
beyond the grasp of mere humans.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

“The Second Coming” presents us

with a particular image of time: a
movement from light into
darkness and back again. There
has been a First Coming, now
there will be a Second; and this
one will be the antithesis, after
two thousand years, of its
predecessor:

The darkness drops again; but now I

know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
 cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come
round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born?

I remember having to study this

poem at school and having no
idea at all what it was about, even
as I could feel, on some level, its
power. At sixteen years old, I was
not qualified to parse its dense,
mythic imagery. What was going
on here? What rough beast? What
falcon? What was a ceremony of
innocence? Why twenty centuries?
And what on earth was a gyre?

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The answers are to be found in the

work Yeats and his wife, George,
began at Thoor Ballylee, which
they bought shortly before their
marriage in 1917. Only a few days
after their wedding, George—who
shared Yeats’s passion for the
esoteric—began to produce what
spiritualists then called
“automatic writing.” She would sit
and write, in a trance state,
producing words which she
believed were handed down to her
by a “superior power.” After
several years of these writing
sessions, in which Yeats would
ask questions and George
produce answers, the poet began
to believe he was being given
access to a “system” which
explained much about the mystery
of human life and the universe
itself.

Yeats’s “system” fed directly into

the imagery of “The Second
Coming.” It also led to by far his
strangest book, A Vision,
published towards the end of his
life, in which he attempted to
explain the revelations he and
George had had in the tower. One
of its central images was a picture
of time, of history itself, as a
series of great repeating cycles,
beyond the ken and power of
humankind. Yeats became
convinced that history, biology,
and metaphysics were all
governed by these cycles, which
he called “gyres.”

A gyre, when drawn out as a

diagram, looks like a cone. It
begins as a tiny circle, then spirals
outwards and forwards, widening
with each revolution. When it
reaches its widest point, it is
unable to hold together; each
point of the circle is too far from
the others to be able to connect or
communicate. The gyre begins to
break apart under its own weight;
but at the same time, another
begins spiraling out again in the
opposite direction to the first. To
Yeats, this explained the great
historical cycles of rise and fall
that he seemed to see in human
civilizations, religious notions, and
ways of seeing.

Each gyre, Yeats stated, has a

fixed timescale: just over two
thousand years. As it reaches its
widest point, the seed of a new
gyre is sown, which will be the
antithesis of that which has gone
before. The gyre which began with
the birth of Christ, he suggested,
sowed the seed in the West of two
thousand years of monotheism
and Father-worship, replacing the
localized paganisms and small
cultures that had gone before it.
After two thousand years, the
Christ-gyre would begin to spiral
down, and the seed of its
antithesis would be sown:

At the present moment the life gyre is

sweeping outward, unlike that before
the birth of Christ which was
narrowing, and has almost reached its
greatest expansion. The revelation
which approaches will however take its
character from the contrary movement
of the interior gyre. All our scientific,
democratic, fact-accumulating,
heterogeneous civilization belongs to
 the outward gyre and prepares not the
continuance of itself but the revelation
as in a lightning flash, though in a flash
that will not strike only in one place,
and will for a time be constantly
repeated, of the civilization that must
slowly take its place.

This is the subject of “The Second

Coming.” We are now reaching the
historical moment at which,
according to Yeats’s theory, the
age of monotheism, centralization,
and linear time itself begins to
crumble. Some rough beast,
perhaps slouching towards
Bethlehem even now, will sow the
seeds of a very different way of
seeing and being. It will take
another millennium for those
seeds to fully grow and flourish.
But in the collapse of whole ways
of understanding, as the center no
longer holds, as anarchy spreads,
as stories no longer function, are
somewhere to be found the dim
outlines of a new seeing.
 The time is ripe
for new
cosmologies, built
on the best of the
old ones.
EXPLICIT IN YEATS’S vision of a
history governed by gyres is a very
particular notion of time. In this
vision, time is a series of cycles. If
it is not quite a circle, it is not a
line either. Perhaps the most
challenging and unwelcome
aspect of the vision, at least to our
eyes, is the notion that time is
both cyclical and fated. History
moves in cycles and, in its
broadest aspect, we cannot
control it. It controls us.

There is nothing particularly

unusual about this vision of time.
If we step back to take in the
sweep of world history and the
diversity of human cultures, we
begin to see that it is pretty
standard fare. This great circular
planet has offered up circular
visions of time to most of its
peoples. Hindu cosmology, for
example, sees time circling
through four great cycles, or
yugas, each of which lasts many
tens of thousands of years and
each of which becomes
progressively more fragmented,
before the cycle begins again. We
are currently living through the
last of the cycles, the Kali Yuga,
an age of deterioration, decay,
greed, and ecological destruction.

The cyclical nature of Hindu

cosmology is mirrored throughout
much of Asia, in Buddhism and
Jainism, for example, in which
each human life is a manifestation
of the endless cycle of
reincarnation and rebirth. It is
mirrored too in the cosmology of
classical Greece and Babylon, and
in indigenous cultures around the
world, from Aboriginal Australia to
the Inca, Mayan, and Hopi
cultures of the Americas. In this
vision, time is a circle. Life is
endlessly dying and being reborn,
there are no beginnings and no
ends, and each individual
creature, human or otherwise, is a
temporary part of a greater
unfolding. Cultural ecologist David
Abram, in his book The Spell of
the Sensuous, explains it like this:

To indigenous, oral cultures, the

ceaseless flux that we call “time” is
overwhelmingly cyclical in character. . .
. Time, in such a world, is not
separable from the circular life of the
sun and the moon, from the cycling of
 the seasons, the death and rebirth of
the animals—from the eternal return of
the greening earth.

These are nature cosmologies,

developed by peoples who lived
closely with the cycles of
subsistence agriculture or hunting
and gathering. Nature itself is
cyclical—it is a cycle of flow and
interconnection, with no obvious
start or endpoint. Hence, most of
the world’s human cultures from
the premodern period—which
covers 99 percent of human
history—believed that time itself
could be best understood in the
way that nature presented it to
them: not as a line but as a circle.
Oglala Lakota medicine man Black
Elk offered up perhaps the best-
known enunciation of this
indigenous cyclical worldview in
the early twentieth century:

Everything the Power of the World

does is done in a circle. The sky is
round, and I have heard that the earth
is round like a ball, and so are all the
stars. The wind, in its greatest power,
whirls. Birds make their nests in
circles, for theirs is the same religion
as ours. The sun comes forth and goes
down again in a circle. The moon does
 the same, and both are round. Even the
seasons form a great circle in their
changing, and always come back again
to where they were. The life of a man is
a circle from childhood to childhood,
and so it is in everything where power
moves.

If the world, and time itself, is

cyclical, then everything that will
happen has already happened.
Change is inevitable, death is part
of that change, the future and the
past hold hands. In a cyclical
world, as in a calendar year, what
has been will be again, and vice
versa. The leaves of the tree die
every autumn and grow every
spring. Nothing changes and
everything changes and each
human life, like each leaf on a
tree, is part of the endless,
effortless, turning of the wheel.

But we do not live in that world.

Or, rather: we do not think we do.
We—the modern peoples of the
post-Enlightenment, post-
Reformation, post-industrial world
—have invented a new and
singular vision of time, and of life.
We have broken the circle and
made ourselves a new image to
live by. Not a return, but an
 onward movement. Not a cycle,
but a progression. Not a circle, but
a straight line.

Time, imply the

old stories, moves
at different
speeds, and in
different ways,
depending on our
quality of seeing.

IN 1940, A FEW MONTHS before

his suicide as a prisoner of the
fascist government of Spain, the
German Jewish philosopher
Walter Benjamin, despairing as a
second catastrophic war engulfed
Europe, reflected on a painting he
had purchased twenty years
earlier by the modernist artist
Paul Klee. The painting shows a
curious, lion-like angel, seemingly
moving in one direction while his
gaze is focused on another. Klee
called the painting Angelus
Novus. Benjamin called it the
“Angel of History”:

His face is turned toward the past.

Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The
angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can
no longer close them. The storm
irresistibly propels him into the future
to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call
progress.

The notion of “progress”—the

unsteady but inevitable
improvement of the human
condition—seemed absurd to
Benjamin, as fascist armies swept
across Europe and communist
armies advanced to meet them,
bodies piling up in the camps on
both sides. But his deep
pessimism was merely a
photographic negative of the kind
of positivist optimism commonly
associated with those who
identify as “progressives”:
believers in the cult of the line.
Whether we like it or not, those of
us who live in the postmodern
world are all progressives now.
Even those of us who believe we
are rebelling against this notion
find ourselves caught up in it. We
have been brought up to believe
that history marches in one
direction, and that this requires us
to be either optimistic or
pessimistic about the direction of
the march. We can choose to
believe that everything is getting
better or that everything is getting
worse, but both beliefs take us
endlessly forward. Whether the
past was misery and the future is
utopia, or the past was the utopia
and the future offers only
apocalypse, the progressive vision
requires us to believe that the line,
not the circle, is the framing image
of our journey through life.

In her exploration of the nature of

modern time, Pip Pip, the author
Jay Griffiths describes the
measured, monitored regime
which the average urban human
now lives under:

Time’s measurement is everywhere.

The gridded screen surrounds you like
barbed wire. Leaving London, Berlin,
New York, Washington or Paris: at the
airport, every transaction, each ticket
and money exchange is timed. Around
Heathrow, as at any other major
airport, there are clocks on corporate
buildings and hotels, blinking the date
and time, down to tenths of seconds,
compressing time. CCTV times your
progress along streets. Stop to buy a
shoelace and your receipt will tell you
the date and time—to the minute. The
pips of time measurement are spat out
by the radio. . . . Traffic lights run on
timed schedules. Telephones tell you
 the time, breakfast TV has a constant
clock, there are pingers on cookers and
eggs have sell-by dates printed on their
very shells. Urban modernity lives
under an assault of clocks.

Measuring time is hardly new. The

clock, in its various forms, has
been with us for at least eighteen
centuries. Elsewhere in her book,
Griffiths shows how the people of
the Andaman Islands measure
time by scent, and the Karen hill
tribes of northern Thailand use
the forests they live in as a giant
clock. European agriculturalists
have for millennia marked the year
with a series of ritual festivals, at
midsummer, midwinter, and the
equinoxes. Humans have been
using bones to tally months and
days since the Upper Paleolithic.

But measuring or tallying the

cycles of the year has a very
different taste to what Griffiths
calls “the assault of clocks.” The
obsessive time-measurement of
modernity is a product of the
onward-pressing needs of
industry and commerce. The
Industrial Revolution broke the
power of land-based communities
and ushered in the urban mass
society; and a mass society needs
mass timekeeping. Progress, if it is
to succeed, needs to be
measurable at every point along
its journey.

In my home country, Britain, the

cradle of that revolution, the mass
enclosure of farmland owned by
peasant communities was the
foundation of the enforced change
from a cyclical, rural life to a
linear, urban existence. Those
people made homeless or
workless by enclosure and—later—
by the destruction of cottage
industry by mechanization (the
rebellion of the Luddites against
this process was a last-ditch
attempt to halt the industrial
Machine in its tracks) trudged into
the expanding cities to form the
world’s first industrial proletariat,
living in poverty under the
watchful eye of the clock on the
factory wall.

The Industrial Revolution could be

seen as the theft of land, power,
and time by the concentrated
forces of industry. It paved the
way for the society we live in
today in the West—a world in
which we have more disposable
plastic than we know what to do
with, but we have no power, and
are subject always to the
impersonal forces of state,
corporation, and clock. You will be
up at 7 and in your car at 8 and at
your desk by 9, and you will be
there until 6, and then you will
drive home and you will repeat
this pattern for 5 days in every 7 if
you want the monthly injection of
numbers into the bank account
that you access with your
smartphone, a device which
measures time to the second, and
can, if you so wish, measure also
your heartbeat, footsteps, pulse,
and the number of times you chew
each mouthful of your dinner.

We are all slaves now to linear

time. The march of
industrialization is also the march
of mechanization and
standardization. It began by
standardizing goods: tools,
clothing, furniture, houses. Then it
standardized nature: monoculture
crops, factory farms, tree
plantations, genetic engineering.
Now it is standardizing humanity,
through the spread of a global
economy and its associated global
culture of one-size-fits-all
humans, bound together by their
“shared values”: the values of the
market and its associated political
project, liberal democracy.

If a circle of time sees individual

humans as part of an unending
and largely unchangeable cycle, a
line of time sees them as units.
Units of production, units of
consumption, units of progress,
working together like ants towards
a goal that is never quite defined
but which always involves more
work, more speed, more
measurement, more control, more
sameness. We believe that what
we can measure we can control;
and in the end, the concept of
linear time—of linear progress—is
a project of control. Progress adds
up to exerting human control over
the levers of nature itself.

In the early twentieth century, at

the height of Western
industrialism, the writer J. B.
Priestley wrote of a nightmare that
haunted him:

Between midnight and dawn, when

sleep will not come and all the old
wounds begin to ache, I often have a
nightmare vision of a future world in
 which there are billions of people, all
numbered and registered, with not a
gleam of genius anywhere, not an
original mind, a rich personality, on the
whole packed globe. The twin ideals of
our time, organisation and quantity,
will have won forever.

We are perhaps not far now from

the realization of Priestley’s
vision. This is where the line of
time takes us; it is the endpoint of
progress. A machine world of
machine people: productive,
efficient, equal, self-monitored,
self-measured, long-lived, and
well-behaved. Perhaps ultimately,
with the aid of silicon chips or AI
programs, immortal too. As with
any vision of the future,
perspectives on this endgame are
divided. If you work for Google or
Facebook, the future probably
looks like heaven. To some of the
rest of us, it is a vision of hell.
 Progress is a
quest for
transcendence:
a quest to always
be somewhere
else; somewhere
better.
HEAVEN AND HELL, though, are
also progressive concepts. The
great, world- conquering
Abrahamic religions gave us, in
their mainstream manifestations,
a vision of a world governed by a
stern Sky Father, whose
cosmology would steward us from
Genesis to Apocalypse. Good
behavior was the path to leaving
this world behind and being
promoted after death to another,
better, one. This God is not
immanent—present in the world—
but transcendent—above it—and
this is where we are encouraged
to be too.

It is not hard to see how this

cosmology translates into its
secular version—silicon
transcendence via computer; an
uploaded immortality. In essence,
they are the same story; only in
the newer version, we have made
ourselves the Sky Fathers. There
is, after all, no need of God if you
can do His job better.

It is not hard to see, either, how

the progressive vision, in its
religious or its secular form, has
led us to ravage the earth: to
disconnect us from nature and our
own bodies, entomb us in dying
cities, suck the water from the
aquifers, fell the forests, and
replace the fish in the oceans with
plastic. Progress is a quest for
transcendence: a quest to always
be somewhere else; somewhere
better. Mass extinction and
climate change represent the
collateral damage of linear
progress: regrettable but
necessary if we are to move
forward to where we must be.

If we believe the poet, this is what

happens when gyres come to an
end. In Yeats’s cosmology, the
winding down of one gyre sows
the seeds of the next, which is its
antithesis. Thousands of years of
polytheism gave way to thousands
of years of Abrahamic
monotheism, which later spawned
a secular variant: progress. Now
those worldviews are hitting
planetary boundaries and
stumbling, what rough beast will
sow new seeds, and what will the
shoots look like?

It seems to me that—appropriately
—a return is in order. Not the kind
of straw-man “return” which
disciples of progress so love to
mock—the notion of “going back”
to some particular period of
history, whether it be the High
Middle Ages or the Upper
Paleolithic, where we might
imagine a “better world” to have
existed. A return to cyclical
thinking—to notions of fate and
repeating time, to an
understanding of the small place
of a single life in the great
unfolding—would be something
different. It might allow us again
to notice the other life forms that
surround us, to see ourselves in
the cycle of life, and to sit
amongst the ruins of our fantasies
not with eyes full of despair, but
of possibility.

If Yeats was right, and some

revelation is at hand as our
systems and assumptions crumble
under the weight of the ecological
overshoot we have set in motion,
the time is ripe for new
cosmologies, built on the best of
the old ones. If the progressive
project was about controlling time
in order to control history and,
ultimately, nature, then its
cascading failure is a chance to
reassess what time is, how we see
it, and where we are within it.
What if we are at the end of an
age of monotheisms and
monocultures; an age which could
only ever be supported by
expansion and colonization? What
if our challenge now is to build a
series of smaller visions, focused
less on the future and more on the
present; less on the sky and more
on the ground?

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Yeats knew well how curious and

unpredictable time was, and so
did the Irish peasantry he walked
among, whose lives were still
measured by the old cycles. Few
people who casually read his
poetry know much about A Vision,
or have much interest in his more
esoteric notions and occult
theories. But most have heard of
his early book The Celtic Twilight,
in which the young poet,
determined to rebuild a sense of
“Celtic” identity for a newly
nationalist Ireland, wandered the
country collecting the folk tales of
the peasantry and weaving them
into a tapestry of his own
particular making.
The tales in The Celtic Twilight are
full of ghosts, demon dogs,
enchanted woods, mermaids, and
—most of all—meetings between
humans and the Sidhe, the
ancient faerie race who dwell in
the “dim kingdom” beyond the
reach of humanity, and whose
understanding of time is unrelated
to that of humans. The notion that
human children were sometimes
stolen by the Sidhe and taken to
their timeless domain inspired one
of Yeats’s early poems, “The
Stolen Child”:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand.

Any adult human who makes the

mistake of eating faerie food, or
any child unfortunate enough to
be kidnapped in this way and
taken below the hollow hills,
might spend an ageless eternity in
another land while time passes
above at a very different speed.
Seven years under the hill might
amount to centuries in our world.
British and Irish folklore is full of
tales of this strange, parallel
kingdom in which linear, human,
surface time does not function.
Perhaps this is the realm in which
imagination is born, and new ways
of seeing created; the realm in
which we meet with the spirits,
and the gods. As Yeats put it
himself in The Celtic Twilight:

Are there not moods which need

heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland
for their expression, no less than this
dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not
moods which shall find no expression
unless there be men who dare to mix
heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland
together, or even to set the heads of
beasts to the bodies of men, or to
thrust the souls of men into the heart
of rocks?

Time, imply the old stories, moves

at different speeds, and in
different ways, depending on our
quality of seeing. If we choose a
different notion of time, we can
have one. Linear progress commits
many crimes against nature and
humanity, but one of the worst is
to promote the notion that no
other way of seeing is valid; all
have been superseded by the long
march into the future. Yeats, poet
and magician, disagreed.
“Everything exists,” he wrote,
“everything is true, and the earth
is only a little dust under our feet.”

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