June 6, 2006. 6/6/06 The sign of the beast. It puts me in mind of Yeat's "THE SECOND COMING". I thought I would share the parts I remember with you. The poem is about the second coming of Christ which if one thinks of it in Hegelian terms would be about the coming of the antithesis or the antichrist. I think this says it all even with the forgotten parts.

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 best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

......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?

Joan Didion wrote a book called "Slouching toward Bethlehem". I did a painting called "Things fall Apart"