The Holy City

Yeats - Byzantium

Many admirers of Narnia (including myself) have found themselves wishing that the country was real and that they could somehow, some day, find themselves in it. Whenever I see a painting of a ship, for instance, I think of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the picture in Lucy’s bedroom that goes from looking realistic to spraying water into the house and gaining in size until it pulls the children into the ocean, clean out of our world and into the adventure that Aslan is sending them.

We long for another world - deeper, richer and stranger than what modernity allows. C.S. Lewis believed that this is because we are literally made for Paradise, that it’s where we come from and where we’ll go back to and that it calls out to us and we call back to it in mutual recognition and exchange all the time. But the fallen world we live in jams the signal and we get confused and start spinning like tops, flailing around for our heart’s desire in frequently barren and fruitless places.

It’s worth remembering though that the Narnian universe is not a higher or an innately better milieu than our own. It’s an other world, yes, but it exists in parallel to the world we know. Like ours, it has a beginning and an end. It’s a finite construction, a gateway to the Real, but not in itself that pure and gem-like state.

It’s this foundational zone of truth and meaning that Lewis evokes so superbly at the end of The Last Battle. The protagonists pass through the Stable Door as Narnia is devoured by lizards and drowned by a wall of water that turns at once to dead, cold ice. It’s the end of the world, yet the story, paradoxically, is only now just beginning, and it’s one where every chapter, as Lewis remarks in the final line, is ‘better than the one before.’

We are in a world of stunning three-dimensionality which looks exactly like the Narnia the characters knew and loved yet somehow seems more solid and substantial, ‘more like the real thing’, in Digory’s phrase. The Narnians go ‘farther up and farther in’ and find that they are no longer capable of wanting the wrong thing - there is no ‘wrong’ any more - and that they can run without tiring and even scale the great waterfall of the Western Wilds, the original Platonic Form and archetype of the waterfall they knew below.

This is Heaven - a dynamic, expansive setting, where the farther up and in you go, the bigger and more substantial everything gets. You recognise the place. It’s congruent with your soul. You have come home, and you realise then that there was never really any other home than this. ‘I have come home at last!’ says Jewel the Unicorn. ‘This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.’

We find a similar pattern, I think, in W.B. Yeats’s two ‘Byzantine’ poems, Sailing to Byzantium (1927) and Byzantium (1930). It’s the same three-step narrative arc that we live through as lifelong Narnia ‘fans’:

(1) A continual longing for the other world that we’re drawn to by nature …

(2) A Dark Night of the Soul experience (equivalent to the Narnian apocalypse or a real life personal catastrophe) …

(3) Resolution and renewal in fresh, fertile and ongoing expressions of faith and sacred imagery.

In Sailing to Byzantium, the poet perceives that he doesn’t belong in the world as it is. He doesn’t have a place. And he’s glad. He’s seen through it - ‘taken the red pill’ - and while he doesn’t condemn ‘those dying generations’, he realises that such a life is not for him and that he’s being called to something different - somewhere different. So off he sails in search of the changeless and eternal - Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’ - out of the whirling, ceaseless flux of things and into the ‘artifice of eternity’:

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

There’s a sense of finality in these closing lines, I feel, as if the poet believes he has arrived at the end of his quest and achieved fulfilment. I’m not sure if Yeats intended Byzantium, published three years later, as a direct sequel, but that’s certainly how it reads to me, a continuation and deepening of the themes staked out in Sailing to Byzantium. What this second poem gives us is not an end but a beginning, not stasis but movement, not achievement and completion but purgation and renewal. ‘The way up is the way down’, to borrow from Four Quartets again. The vivid, shining world of Sailing to Byzantium cedes place to a brooding, meditative darkness:

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Here we are in the Dark Night of the Soul and Spirit as elucidated by St. John of the Cross, a terrifying, pathless terrain where everything we assumed about the world and our place in it is made null and void. It’s a crucifixion that remakes us, but this is a searing, shattering experience as we’re stripped bare, naked and shivering, and divested of every falsehood, delusion, and deceptive, ego-soothing comfort. We come face to face with the mystery of death, and the only consciousness we have is that of our nothingness in comparison to that ‘changeless metal’, the great immensity of eternity:

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

We only have one thing left to do now - to step onto the Emperor’s pavement and into the otherworldly flame - the ‘fire that no faggot feeds’ - in a consummation of self-giving and surrender:

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Yet it is not annihilation that awaits us on the other side but life, largesse and plenitude. The way out is the way through, and it’s only now, burned clean and purified, that we become who we truly are. Life-giving images pour forth from us like molten gold, and those images beget further images, like the ever deeper, ever more substantial layers of Narnia that keep on unfolding after the end of everything we had thought was real:

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

So how does this apply to our daily lives - the highs and lows, the sorrows and joys, the struggles and strains? Life sets us so many challenges - too many really - the vicissitudes of raising children, building and maintaining relationships, managing loneliness, care for ageing parents, the devastation of bereavement, living with illness, finding meaningful work, and so on forever. None of it is easy. Much of it is rewarding. All of it is (or can be) hard.

The good news though - the core, essential message - is that there are other worlds, both ‘out there’ and within ourselves. No greater lie has ever been told than the one that says, ‘this is all there is.’ There’s always more, and as we develop in wisdom and perception we discover all sorts of alternative realms in art and nature and within the riches of our own imagination.

Yet this only takes us so far. We’re still essentially in Plato’s Cave, and all these different and seemingly higher spaces are in reality just parallel strands of the same perishable and illusory nexus.

That’s the bad news. But the better news - the great news - is that what feels like the end is actually the beginning and that the world, like our lives, only gets going once the wheels stop senselessly turning. So we shouldn’t be anxious or afraid when inner and outer collapse fall upon us. But it’s easy to talk and harder to do, and I haven’t come anything close to this level so far in my life. I’m the King of Plato’s Cave, all too often subsumed by illusion, but because the Byzantium poems exist and because The Last Battle exists and because of all the saints, sages and visionaries who have lit up the path before us, I know in my soul that the Holy City is real and that it’s constantly calling me, and all of us, home to its most blessed precincts.

And when the eschaton comes and the world is rolled up like a scroll, the City will be the one thing left standing and substance and being will only be found within it. Everything else will have ceased to be because none of it was ever properly real. Only the City is real, and now there’s only the City. It’ll be like when Christ appeared to Julian of Norwich, and a held out a tiny little thing in His hand like a hazelnut and said, ‘This is all that is created.’

We’ll be glad then that on that night long ago when we had, or thought we had, so many options and glittering futures before us, that we did the one thing needful, went down to the harbour, unfurled our sails, and charted our course for Byzantium.