Personal Freedom vs. Social Responsibility

This posting is rated AR (academic rambling) for references to specific works of literature and abstruse rumination.

In Yeats’ play ‘On Baile’s Strand’ (1904), Cuchulainn and Conchobor are presented as two opposing forces: passionate personal freedom vs. rational social stability. These two characters are two heroes from the Tain Bo Cuailgne, the early first millennia saga of the contest between the Queen of Connaught and the King of Ulster. Yeats was better known for his poetry, but this is regarded (by at least one erudite professor) as his finest piece of drama. Surely, as an artist in the early 20th century, and a person who valued artistic passion, Yeats would have seen these two ideas as necessarily opposing forces unable to peacefully co-exist. It seems that this point of view has not become passé in the last hundred years or so. Nevertheless, I saw a survey he filled out for a creativity research study (!) at an archival exhibit of his work in Dublin. On it he indicated that he was very disciplined about practicing his art. While he found creative inspiration to come to him in flashes and that he felt like it came from a non-rational place, he also indicated that after the initial blast of an idea, he would revise constantly and write even when he didn’t feel like it. So maybe this play presents a balance in the poet’s mind. Perhaps Cuchulainn futilely fighting the waves was about the poet futilely trying to control passion. The criticism of Conchobor’s rationality is the poet’s frustration of trying to polish this uncontrollable passion in some kind of publicly presentable product, which is annoying but necessary.

The play was presented by the lecturer as two opposing forces in Irish society, the passionate Irish free-state republicans and the rational unionists who thought Ireland could remain Ireland but economically stable by retaining union with England. Thus, when Conchobor triumphs, and Cuchulainn goes mad and wades into the sea to fight the waves, then the symbolism can be read as criticism of the futility of the Irish nationalist cause. However, this reading does not make sense to me. Yeats wrote one of the great nationalist plays, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, where his character is the Goddess Eire who exhorts the audience that it is a higher duty one owes to one’s country that supercedes duty even to family. Then he writes all these very personal poems about Cuchulainn with whom he seems to identify. And lastly, there is that creativity survey that so clearly shows the conflict in his mind between passion and discipline. Therefore, it seems that this play may be more profitably read as the conflict of the artist trying to express himself within the confines of social institutions rather than as a political criticism of the futility of the republican cause. In this way, the desperate final action of fighting the sea might not be a symbol of futility but of the artist’s condition in conventional society.

Myself, I am a prisoner of that institution, sometimes too ready to see the waves as futility, too ready to sit with Conchobor on his institutional throne and be safe even as I admire Cuchulainn’s madness in the waves because he is so committed to this artistic passion. Why is the image of self-destruction so often associated with intense creativity? Maybe because when a person is in the grip of the Muse it can feel like one is overwhelmed or burning up. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “I burn my candle at both ends/ It will not last the night./ But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/ it casts a lovely light.” And let’s not forget the immortal lines from the poet Neil Young, “Better to burn out than fade away, my my, hey hey.” I think Yeats would have liked that song. Did you know he got some kind of penis-oriented procedure as an elderly person so he could have some sort of 'second youth', as it were? Be that as it may....But even though the life of creative passion seems like it requires some kind of romantic self-destruction in the metaphors these poets use of water and fire (such elemental destruction!), these poets all manage to communicate these ideas within the limits of the institutions of print, being poet laureate, publishing, and the music industry. Thus it seems that the artist thrashes around in the destructive elements, burning and drowning in creativity, and if he or she is lucky, pull out in time to survive for another bout with the Muse. Of course, the Tate is full of artists who didn’t or couldn’t…

Of course, all of the above is *very* Eurocentric. Asian philosophy takes a totally different tack. The question I will think about now is what is it about the Greco-Roman Western European Weltanschauung that associates creative passion with destruction? Is it the institution of the Church? How does this work in East Asian perspectives? Tanizaki writes about the destructive power of creativity, Kawabata writes about how institutions kill creativity, and Lu Xun writes about how people strain to be creative but the culture stifles it. Hmmmmm. But the Vedas and the Dhammapada and the Sutras write about how true creativity comes from silence and centering. Of course, there is the Diamond Sutra that talks about how Desire is actually a Burning House that we need to escape from to find peace, so there is that passion as destructive fire thing. Oh, oh, it's getting complicated and there is no elegant way to stop! I suppose this where I am supposed to burst into flames...