"The Center Cannot Hold" > "Empty Night"

[Mira]

The poem, "The Second Coming" by Yeats

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.

What the plan is according to HWWBs, as told to Harry in Battle Ground page361

"Empty Night," the Creature echoed, in the hushed tone of a holy
phrase.  "So we pressed the attacks at the Outer Gates.  While I sowed havoc within the walls of reality.

Okay, the battle at the Outer Gates has been going on forever.  HWWBs did sew havoc within the walls of reality.  Storm Front, Victor Sells suddenly turns into a first class sorcerer, remotely exploding hearts and cooking up Three Eye..  A curious warning from a junkie that no doubt hasn't a clue of what he is saying or who he is talking about.
Storm Front page 138

'Wizard!" I see you! I see you, wizard! I see the things that follows, those who walk before and He Who Walks Behind!" They come, they come for you!"

Harry begins to suspect other forces at work, for lack of a better word he calls them the Black Council or Circle.

HWWBs continues;

We loosed some of the primal forces of your own precious Creation against you.

Could it be referring to the Fallen here?  At first I thought the Red Court, but primal Creation would fit more with all of it, from angels and stars to planets.  Hmmm.. Nemesis behind the original rebellion of the angels which led to the Fall, which led to the thirty trapped with in the thirty coins, the Denarians?

Here is a wild thought, given the seeming cooperation between Harry and Marcone/Namshiel and perhaps a little of what Nic said back in Skin Game..  Will team Harry and team Denarian ultimately be fighting on the same side in the BAT, because the chaos of Nemesis doesn't serve the forces of the Fallen any more than it does Heaven or mortals.

HWWBs continues;

Undermine Mab, her people, the Accords, the delusion of order you force upon the universe with your useless presence.

As early as Summer Knight,  again Primal Creation, the seasons, are threatened when Mab is effectively accused of murder.  It is sorted out in the end, but revealed an infected Aurora, a traitorous Winter Knight, a vendetta against Harry by the White Council.  Grave  Peril, Lea, Mab's second, craves power and is given an infected Knife, which infects her and ultimately infects Maeve, undermining Mab.  Susan is half turned, Harry kills Bianca which leads to war between the Red Court and The White Council.  Death Masks, a double agent, Martin helps set up the events that lead to the conception of Maggie.

I am not sure whether or not the Red King ever realizes that he was no more than a cat's paw for Nemesis.  He was, down to his vendetta against Eb, the kidnapping of little Maggie which lead to Harry reversing the spell that ended the Red Court.. Hmm.. Did the Red King willingly sacrifice himself and his people for the cause? Or their function finished, they were discarded, making way for  a force, The Fomor.

  Their attacks, kidnappings have served very well, to undermine the Accords, ultimately, Justine/Nemesis arranging her pregnancy, pushing Thomas to his assassination attempt. Plan to further splinter the Accords, but Corb and the Titan's invasion had the opposite effect temporarily.  But as Harry notes when he speaks to the Accords members after the battle, not all the members are there, notably, The White Council, who as Harry says is the sole representative of humanity.  He also notes before he managed to turn it around by invoking the ancient and unwritten hospitality law, that the members were in the beginning stages of a vendetta against humanity out of fear of them. 

The White Council has booted Harry out, because they fear him, but as Mab points out they are going to need him.  Here is another thought, the Gate Keeper keeps things very close to the vest, does the White Council even know who the real enemy is?  Is this going to be the confrontation that Rashid foresaw between Harry and the Council? The opening of the White Council's eyes?

Now is HWWBs calling Harry's presence useless against it, or any force in general?

Back to "The Second Coming"

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.

That is exactly what has happened in the last two books.. Can the center be put together, or is the future truly Empty Night?
 

[Conspiracy Theorist]

Yup, Jim appears to have been influenced by a number of poets or collectors of Celtic rhyme and folklore, Keats, W.B. Yeats, Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott etc he is a literary major after all, and he has made it abundantly clear that he initially looked down upon his tutor who had merely sold 40 novels, and what was the first chapter of Storm Front, was him satirically taking what he had learned from her and turning it on its head, so he almost certainly took romance poets and folklorists and turned it into hard boiled urban fantasy.

For your edification in raising the tone of the forum

'pity this busy monster, manunkind'

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

E. E. Cummings

[The_Sibelis]

Erm, looses some of the primal forces of our own creation could actually mean magic... Most of creation revolves around it in one way or another.

[Mira]

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

Low and behold, the mysterious oath, "stars and stones," that Eb says Harry shouldn't utter, or at least utter lightly, but won't tell him the meaning of, is in this E. E. Cummings poem.  We have the context of the poem, and what has happened in the series so far.  Theories anyone?

[The_Sibelis]

A good universe next door makes me think of MM too..

[Conspiracy Theorist]

The emphasis of the Cummings piece is that man and scientific progress (ferromancy) associated with man is a blight on the world, think of Ethnui’s rants in Battle Ground against mortal man, even the Stars and Stones, two apparently immutable objects are not immune to our depredations. We carve and grind and polish one and obscure the other with pollution and light pollution.

The irony is of course that wizards retard progress, they cannot use new technology, although I would hesitate to describe Harry as “this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence” perhaps a simpler term like “Starborn” might be appropriate. Or “idiot”


Also for your consideration


Nemesis
By H. P. Lovecraft


      Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
     I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

     I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,
          When the sky was a vaporous flame;
     I have seen the dark universe yawning,
          Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

     I had drifted o’er seas without ending,
          Under sinister grey-clouded skies
     That the many-fork’d lightning is rending,
          That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

     I have plung’d like a deer thro’ the arches
          Of the hoary primordial grove,
     Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
          And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro’ dead branches above.

     I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
          That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
     I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
          That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

     I have scann’d the vast ivy-clad palace,
          I have trod its untenanted hall,
     Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
          Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

     I have peer’d from the casement in wonder
          At the mouldering meadows around,
     At the many-roof’d village laid under
          The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

     I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
          I have flown on the pinions of fear
     Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
          Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

     I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
          The jewel-deck’d throne by the Nile;
     I was old in those epochs uncounted
          When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

     Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
          And great is the reach of its doom;
     Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
          Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

     Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
     I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
 

[Mira]

Wow!  Thank you Conspiracy for looking up these poems!  I do find a passage intriguing from the poem, Nemesis;

have haunted the tombs of the ages,
          I have flown on the pinions of fear
     Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
          Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

Match with what HWWBs says;

'I am the doubt that wards away sleep.  I am the flaw that corrupts, the infected wound, the false fork in the trail.  I am the gnawer, the worm in the book, the maggot that burrows in the mind's eye."

Back to the poem, Nemesis you can even throw in a reference to Mab and the importance of Winter guarding the Outer Gates;

And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

 

[Conspiracy Theorist]

Of course in PT Lovecraft is outed by Harry as a Venator who knew a bit too much about the Outsiders. So yes when Nemesis is describing itself, it does seem that Jim had this poem in mind, as it is very much in the same vein.

Of course for BT, I have already raised this piece of poetry

The Kraken -Alfred Lord Tennyson


Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

I think Jim read an awful lot of poetry in his youth... Goth perhaps?

[Snark Knight]

Here is a wild thought, given the seeming cooperation between Harry and Marcone/Namshiel and perhaps a little of what Nic said back in Skin Game..  Will team Harry and team Denarian ultimately be fighting on the same side in the BAT, because the chaos of Nemesis doesn't serve the forces of the Fallen any more than it does Heaven or mortals.

I've been on that theory for a while. The best explanation I can see for Nic musing that he might one day be a saint, and Deirdre describing their mission as to "save the world" is that they believe they've found a (probably literal) scorched earth solution to preventing Empty Night.

[Mira]

Of course in PT Lovecraft is outed by Harry as a Venator who knew a bit too much about the Outsiders. So yes when Nemesis is describing itself, it does seem that Jim had this poem in mind, as it is very much in the same vein.

Of course for BT, I have already raised this piece of poetry

The Kraken -Alfred Lord Tennyson


Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

I think Jim read an awful lot of poetry in his youth... Goth perhaps?

Sounds like Alfred.   

[Conspiracy Theorist]

The poem very much reflects the additional chapters written for Battle Ground about the Kraken, especially the last three lines where the flare and the grenade kill the Kraken in front of Murphy, Freydis, Lara, Molly and Harry.

Murphy has been depicted in Sight as a war torn Angel, Freydis is a Valkyrie, a Norse angel equivalent.   

[Wicked Woodpecker of West]

I also would like to point - there is literal text about centre that cannot hold in one of Dresden books straight up from "Second Coming" poem.

Oh, I found it - in last chapter of "Storm Front" in his sort of Badass Boast Harry says: "The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers. The center cannot hold..."

[Mira]

I also would like to point - there is literal text about centre that cannot hold in one of Dresden books straight up from "Second Coming" poem.

Oh, I found it - in last chapter of "Storm Front" in his sort of Badass Boast Harry says: "The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers. The center cannot hold..."

Yup, but then Harry was still young and foolish..

[Wicked Woodpecker of West]

Well yes but it's still sort of foreshadowing of things to come.
And Jim said - there are Chekhov's guns in Storm Front that will shoot only in BAT.

[Mira]

Well yes but it's still sort of foreshadowing of things to come.
And Jim said - there are Chekhov's guns in Storm Front that will shoot only in BAT.

Which is why I started the post to begin with, what HWWBs tells Harry really maps out the coming BAT and reflects the above poems.  It was also an effort to tie events from the series to them.