The Way / The Gyre

“When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.”

Yeats’ system of the gyres and Taoism have astounding commonalities and can be seen as two different systems expressing the same idea; an idea that Carl Jung would say, comes out of the universal unconscious. Although Yeats said nothing of Taoism, his discoveries in A Vision, express Taoist ideas with different terminology. Yeats said, when first talking about A Vision, that it is based on a system made of “a series of unresolved antinomies, which must find its representation in a perpetual return to the starting point.” As we know, the symbolic representation of this is two gyres, or interlocked cones, the “apex of each vortex in the middle of the other’s base.” As each gyre diminishes, its opposite increases until each has reached its limit and then begins to decrease in turn.
Taoism has a similar visual representation of this idea, the yin and yang symbol that expresses two antinomies: male and female, soft and hard, cold and hot, etc, that forever are in flux and move in the direction of balance.
In all of Yeats’ poetry, antinomies are expressed, but never do they reach such a level of balance as in his later works. Night is day, day is night; Good is evil, evil is good; Being / birth is death / non-being, non-being/ death is being/ birth. Although, balance is not quite the right word; enantiodromia, which is the word Blackmur borrows from Jung, seems to express this the idea of both the gyres and of the Tao,a bit more efficiently: not only does any force inevitably produce it’s opposite, it is its opposite. In Taoism, the opposites fade, both are apart of ‘the source”.
I first noticed this semblance of antinomies in Parnell’s Funeral. The first lines of the poem evoke daytime by speaking of clouds about the sky, brightness remains, but a brighter star shoots down. Obviously clouds and brightness evoke the day, but he then says, “a brighter star shoots down.” After this, as the poem takes on the characteristics of night, the second stanza describes the scene with the visual clarity of daylight, but in fact, we see this all in the stars. He goes on the say, “An age is the reversal of an age”, which implies timelessness, the specific age of a human being, and a historical age that will soon be repeated: Leda will again open her thighs and birth another Helen. By using the same word implies the inseparability of the two; time and the lack of time are one in the same.
Yeats’ refrain in The Wild Old Wicked Man, seems to express the essence of the gyres and the Tao the most effectively.
Day-break and a candle end.
This simple refrain expresses the unending cycle of the intertwined gyres and the harmonic quality of the balance of the Tao.
“The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.”
Birth and death endlessly flow from one to another and are, in fact, indistinguishable.