End of year - 12.31.25
how did we get through this one? I can’t imagine last year at this time predicting what would happen this year. Heck I can’t imagine at the millenium predicting anything in the new century. 25 years ago a Canadian radio program called “As it Happens” called me and asked me to do a live program documenting what happens in Tel Aviv on the Millenium. I said there was no point because nothing happens – it was a Friday night, raining, and we don’t celebrate new year. Then Shlomzion suggested to me that we might check out the lion on Anonymous Alley that was facing Bethlehem St. After all, the lion may well be the ‘rough beast’ in Yeats’ poem. The poem seemed eerily relevant, although we didn’t know exactly why:
The Second Coming
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 best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
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?
What rough beast indeed? We arranged a group of people to watch the lion slouch to Bethlehem. But as we stood there, reporting to “As it Happens,” a couple appeared, climbed onto the lion, and began to make love. “What is happening?” they asked, “Is the lion getting up and slouching to Bethlehem?” “He’s trying to,” I shouted into the phone, “But the couple is too heavy!”
So we never had a chance to see if the lion would slouch to Bethlehem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBA7qrkmRTA
But we did discover that the usual Friday night in the neighborhood was ignoring the potential apocalypse.
who could have imagine how true the poem was?