Monthly Archives: March 2024

Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem

McLuhan ended his 1969 Playboy interview with a vision of the world at a crossroads — “its [decisive] hour come round at last” — where there is potential to usher in the millennium, but also of realizing the Anti-Christ: the two possibilities together as captured in “Yeats’ rough beast (…) slouching toward Bethlehem to be born”:

There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ — Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants.1 It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.
Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of humans2, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in the potential of human beings3 to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of their4 his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.
I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new humans,5 linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and human themselves6 will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man’s destiny — if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image — tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I’ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

Fifteen years before, in his 1954 St Joseph College lecture on ‘Christian Humanism and Modern Letters’:

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion.7 Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno. Knowledge of the creative process in [the artefactual domain of] art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.

 

  1. Earlier in the Playboy interview: “our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies.” ↩
  2. McLuhan has ‘man’ here, not ‘humans’. It has been edited to accommodate the wokesters who will see division in his vision, ignoring his appeal to the “human tribe” as “one family”. ↩
  3. McLuhan: ‘man’s potential’. ↩
  4. McLuhan: ‘his’. ↩
  5. McLuhan: ‘the new man’. ↩
  6. McLuhan: ‘man himself’. ↩
  7. According to McLuhan, the modern world — the last 500 years, say — has been shaped by the extraordinary application of elementary forces in both the factual and artefactual realms. Consciousness of the physical elements reached its take-off stage with Lavoisier around 1790. It then took almost a century before Mendeleev was able to formulate his table. But the physical elements had been active, of course, always and everywhere, throughout the cosmos, since the beginning of time; and in the centuries immediately before 1790 their laws and properties had increasingly been applied with great success in many different sorts of manufacturing. But before Lavoisier those applications remained unconscious of the elementary processes they themselves were manipulating. In the parallel field of the artefactual (the domain not of physical facts aside from human perception, but the artifacts of human perception), a comparable application of elementary forces has enabled the great ‘successes’ of our information environment: news, entertainment, advertising, global commerce and politics — all tending increasingly to crass propaganda. The elementary forces manipulated so successfully in these ways remain unconscious to this day, however, just as were the chemical elements before Lavoisier. It is just this ‘successful’ use grounded in unconscious elementary forces that defines the great dangers of our time: nuclear war, environmental degradation, political tyranny, social disintegration, psychical madness. Therefore McLuhan’s “survival strategy” as formulated in the Playboy interview: “man (see note 1 above) must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him (see note 1 above) (…) But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious (…) We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large.” Just as the world was revolutionized following the discovery of the physical elements, so might it be revolutionized again by discovery of the artefactual elements. It was in such a revolution based on collective research that McLuhan saw a potential “survival strategy” and, therefore, grounds for “a surge of excitement and hope”. Now this “strategy” would remain abstract and only a “hope”, of course, unless these “artefactual  elements” were dis-covered and increasingly specified. But it was just such dis-covery that McLuhan attempted to communicate following on the prior truly great (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempts by Plato, Aristotle, and many others — especially, in McLuhan’s case, Vico and Joyce. See A whole new genus of sciences. ↩

Dilworth: McLuhan on The Waste Land

McLuhan on The Waste Land
Introduced and edited by Thomas Dilworth1

Introduction
In 1968/9 I [Tom Dilworth] was a student in Marshal McLuhan’s fourth-year class in Modern Poetry — together with about 25 others in the Honours English Programme at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. At the time, he was at the height of his fame, and I for one was excited to have him as our prof. He co-taught the course with his former graduate student, Sheila Watson, the author of the novel The Double Hook, who was on sabbatical leave from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She was deferential to him and warmly personal to students, whereas he was entirely interested in his ideas on media and the poetry. Sometimes grumpy, he was still recovering from a prolonged brain operation he had undergone the year before while at Fordham. (He gradually improved — I subsequently was in a graduate seminar he taught and audited his seminar on media.) His hearing was hypersensitive, and the sound of construction nearby in the city irritated him.
The class took place in the former dining room of what is now called Founders House, which had originally been a family home. During the first class he sat on the edge of a table, dangling his long legs as he spoke. He began with the aesthetic of Modernism, which is that of fragments and incompletion and which involves the reader (or viewer or listener), who co-creates the work. For that reason, he said, buildings were more interesting when in ruins or not yet complete.
Halfway into the class a student named Terry Edgar arrived clutching in one hand a can of Coke, and McLuhan announced, ‘Here is a representation of the current shallow art.’ (None of us then had any knowledge of Andy Warhol.)
He never prepared for class but, speaking spontaneously, was usually interesting, often brilliant. After hearing him differentiate between visual and acoustic or tactile space and how radio was so effective for Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill, I could think of nothing else for the next four days. (He did not mention Conrad, but what he said illuminated Heart of Darkness for me.) I remember him during the course praising Hopkins, whose ‘The Windhover’ is, he said, ‘the greatest modern sonnet’ and referring dismissively to Dylan Thomas’ ‘monism’. He played for us a record of Wallace Stevens reading his own poetry, despite Stevens being a dreary reader.
During the course, he taught T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which clearly meant a lot to him because of its affinity with reality perceived as different, i.e., ‘modern’, owing to the revolution in media and human experience brought about by electricity.
When McLuhan taught he monologued. Not in these notes is an analogy he at other times made between Eliot’s poem and the newspaper, which juxtaposed incongruous reports, stories, features, and advertisements, all unified solely by the dateline.
Slightly expanded and clarified, here are my notes for the class or classes on The Waste Land. They include nothing said by Sheila Watson, if she was present, nor anyone else other than McLuhan.

*****

McLuhan on The Waste Land
The Waste Land is a non-visual poem, fragmented, yet the people of the poem live in a visual continuum — a 9 to 5 world. That world is unlike the tactile reality of the poem. Touch is the experience of the blind, which is full of shock, surprise, and demands maximum alertness.
Living in visual space, the lives of these people are rootless, without tradition, with no sense of the past (no seeing the past in the present), no depth. But the reader experiences the poem differently, in symbols, non-visually, in tactile or acoustic space.
Dead, the people in the poem are all together without a deeper memory. They flow over London Bridge — ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’
‘April is the cruelest month’ refers to the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote’2 — The Waste Land is the opposite of Chaucer’s world of joy. By the 18th Century the city was seen as an enclosure, a prison — by Fielding, and later Dickens — the human community had changed since the world of Chaucer. Now there is a need for spiritual roots. This is implied by the allusions to scripture.
‘You gave me Hyacinths” — the Roman death flower. The descent into the underworld —‘The Burial of the Dead’.
Madame Sosostris ‘had a bad cold’, slang for v.d. She is a poor attempt at salvation since her ‘wisdom’ cannot avoid v.d.
The ’Unreal City’ — a change — organized along visual lines, people walking with eyes before feet in strait lines.
‘The Dog’ — now man’s enemy because of hypercritical friendliness, the dog beneath the skin. ‘Hypocrite’ — Greek for mask. The mask is the language, the poem, a way to present self to the world, but also a way of seeing — you look through a mask — a style — a composite, a way to power, ‘the cool one’ — we pick and choose whom we will resemble.
‘The Game of Chess’ — the treachery women exact on each other for power.
The people are dead now, all systematically deprived of a spiritual life or meaning of life.
The dressing of the dead. The artificial perfumes — not natural — drugs, LSD, the inner trip — preview of formaldehyde. Metal imagery — cold, inhospitable — line 138: ‘lidless eyes’. ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’. Jazz, ‘O that Shakespeherian Rag’, change for the sake of change. Cold — money, teeth — artificial.
‘The Fire Sermon’. Meeting of East and West, Augustine and Buddha.
The ironic hunter-fisher — rat, slimy canal, gashouse, not very rustic or natural.
‘Horns and motors’ — 1922, the world of Gatsby. People like children in the fiery furnace.
‘She puts another record on’. The discotheque, mechanical sounds. Prostitution, cold, the go-go girl. The go-go girl in a cage — a widely participated in ritual — a pre-act act. The mechanical canary, sterile, unproductive. Sex — no touch because of cage — Playboy. Elizabeth and Leicester — lovers — ‘Beating oars’ — the vulgarity and triviality of the Queen in the same situation as the girl in a canoe. The same even then.
Augustine and Buddha, the collision of worlds, the moving together. LSD is a huge step eastward. Japan a huge step west. China — Marxism — another step west.
‘Death by Water’ — drowning of the possibility of baptism. Phlebas: Ulysses steers, man knocked by tiller overboard3 — free boat, loose, ‘the barges drift’ (line 268), turning east.
‘What the Thunder Said’. 1st line, allusion to the Passion. The Third beside you — Xt on road to Emmaus. The rock, the Church.
Swarming over endless plains — the Russian Revolution.
Then oriental responses to the human position — compassion. The Spanish Tragedy, Heironimo — everyone dies at the hand of his neighbour.
Uniform standardized repetitive life. Eliot reads the poem in an Anglican-pulpit equitone, the potent mask of the Establishment. Wendell Berry writes on the voice and how it effects the way they wrote — the effect of Dylan Thomas’s voice on his poetry.
In The Waste Land all the boundaries of all the cells merge into a whole. Like Siddhartha.
An LSD dispensation. The human Teiresias-man-woman merges at the end.
Unconsciousness, which LSD is for some people. For Eliot the soul is not an oversoul, a mass whole.
The poem is inclusive — unconsciousness includes tradition. Exclusive conscious — visual — excludes tradition.
Poets—masters in depth of their present, seers, 60 years ahead. The future, as the past, is included in the present. Seers see the present. The latest is always old hat to a knower. We are all unified in a drastic inability to see the present. Only a whole man can look at the present without blinking.

*****

Afterword (Tom Dilworth)
On a gray November day during the year that I was in his Modern Poetry class, after leaving St Mike’s library, I joined McLuhan in crossing St Joseph Street. He recognized me as a student in his class, and by the time we reached the far curb, he had begun a conversation with me that finished on that curb a half-hour later. He told me that the conventional Western linear conception of time is mistaken, that a circular sense of time was better, and that Aquinas was right in conceiving God as the ground of being. His taking the time to talk to one of his students like that exemplified 1) his compelling interest in what he was thinking, and 2) his generosity as a teacher.

  1. Tom Dilworth is University Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. His excellent essay, ‘McLuhan as Medium‘, is included in At The Speed Of Light There Is Only Illumination (ed, Linda Morra and John Errington Moss, 2004). ↩
  2. Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ to Canterbury Tales begins ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droughte of March hath perced to the roote’. ‘Soote’ is ‘sweet‘, akin to Danish sød and Middle Dutch soete. ↩
  3. A kind of holy drowning, life by water, baptism is the antithesis of physical drowning (‘death by water’), which is the culmination of a secular orientation, the steersman knocked “by tiller overboard”. ↩