> (6) If one wants to see history as rise and decline (a fairly
> traditional attitude), then think about Yeats's Lapis Lazuli:
I don't read "Lapis Lazuli" as being about the rise and fall of civilizations, or not just about that at least. What I like about the poem is that it doesn't collapse the distance and distinction between "society" or "civilization" and the events, beings, and ways of thinking and feeling that exist with but also depart from it: avalanches and the sweet smell of plums; mournful music and gay eyes. In other words, Yeats refuses the totalitarian logic that says since the government/state/the "common" is failing or dead, "life" (for lack of a better word) is also. One way to insist on the difference is to laugh while Rome burns.
I don't think Yeats's attitude is the same as Menckenian cackling, but it certainly does rely on a purely mystical erasing of history and/or individualist transcending of it, as if all *I* have to do is *think* differently, or not think about it. I wonder if Yeats would have been so placid if Irishmen replaced the Chinamen. I also wonder if Joyce had Yeats in mind in these lines:
"For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop. Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted."
History isn't a nightmare as easily awaken from as Yeats thinks.