Roger Cohen offers a poet's paradigm
to explain what is happening in the Arab world. The poet is Yeats. The poem is The Second Coming. Yeats wrote it in 1919, in the aftermath of the horror of the Great War. The key word for Cohen is "gyre" which is a vortex, a circular or spiral motion, especially in ocean currents. While Cohen says that Yeats has a theory of history that is confused and mystical, what matters is lines like these"“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” And thus in his op ed, titled THe Arab Gyre, he sets the stage for his remarks with these words about the idea of Yeast:
His vision involved the notion that at any moment forces were raveling and unraveling, forming and disintegrating in Yin-Yang polarity, an idea Yeats represented through two conic helixes — “gyres” superimposed on each other with the apex or narrowest point of one at the center of the other’s base. Moments of crisis occurred as history shifted from the outer to the inner gyre.
Cohen is not willing to predict the exact form of what while transpire, but in this remarkable column he notes how