“He that is dead lives again.”
The chanting wasn’t coming from a church, and it wasn’t for William Butler Yeats, although that statement applied to him was in fact true.
William Butler Yeats was sitting on a park outside, relatively innocently, thinking that he had always believed that every two thousand years things came around again, which is what he meant about all those gyres, but he was wrong about that. It was every three thousand two hundred. He had forgotten to carry the two.
This was the second time WBY had gotten reincarnated, which is pretty good for a guy who only died in the forties (commemorated in Auden’s famous poem which concludes, “Earth receive an honored guest/ William Yeats is laid to rest/ let the Irish vessel lie/emptied of its poetry/but then let him get resurrected a couple of times/ for fun or whatever.”)
The first time was narrated in Little Gidding, that hilarious poem by the comic author T.S. Eliot, who meeting what he thought was the ghost of Yeats said: “The wonder that I feel is easy/ Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: I may not comprehend, may not remember.”
And Yeats, supposedly replied “I am not eager to rehearse/ My thoughts and theories which you have forgotten/ These things have served their purpose: let them be./ So with your own, and they be forgiven/ By others, as I pray you to forgive/ Both bad and good.”
Which was a massive improvement on what Yeats, who was not dead, actually said, which was “have you managed to get laid yet, you ponce?”
But these are private matters.
“So I find words I never thought to speak,/ in streets I never thought I should revisit/ when I left my body on a distant shore.”
Anyway.
Yeats, because he technically studied Latin and Greek, as he was abominably bombing high school, knew that the Trojan War had begun this way:
Eris, the goddess of Discord threw a golden apple into a party and said to Paris to grant it to whoever was most beautiful. Three goddesses offered him many bribes, not figure that that would cheapen the prize at all, but Paris gave it to Aphrodite because she offered him the most beautiful girl in the world, Helen, who had so far only been raped once, by Theseus.
And it turned out there was some assembly required, and here we are.
And then….
Well, then Eris had stolen Pluto, hadn’t she?
“Eris,” classified as a dwarf planet, had been discovered in 2005 by the good folks at the Palomar observatory and enjoyed a brief life as the solar system’s 10th planet[1]. But then they decided that it wasn’t really big enough to be a planet.
Since it is probably 10 km larger than Pluto, that meant Pluto wasn’t a planet.
Just like she’d planned it all along.
People were upset—oh yes, they were. It had touched a chord in a lot of people that they had no idea they had, just like an apple with a bit of glitter and somebody else taking someone else’s wife from across the ocean had 3,200 years ago.
People were really upset. They were too upset to take the time to imagine why anyone would give a rat’s ass in a snowstorm, then to think that maybe something was going on here from the other side of reality. They had begun doing things like wilderness survival training, and going to Renaissance faires. It was like they didn’t know they had no control over themselves any more.
People were upset. And not just people. The great dark god had rather liked being a planet, and good things do not happen to people who fall afoul of him.
“He that was dead lives again.”
It was chanting, that sound. It was coming from a Physics convention in the great building behind the bench that looked like a carbon atom mounting an oxygen atom with amorous intent (so Yeats thought). A flag was waving, proudly, over the convention center. A red flag, red like blood or ketchup. On it, emblazoned boldly, was a simple box.
“He that is dead lives again.”
The chanting was directed at (the godhead of) Schrodinger’s cat, a Jesus for the modern world if ever there was (and if it wasn’t Jesus, which, to some people, it were). The box on the flag represented him (or her, or whatever).
And over the box, on the ketchup-red field, rose a pale white dot, with a red X through it.
That was Pluto.
And it was up to William Butler Yeats—who had once kept himself from leaving his wife on their honeymoon night, for the woman he’d been proposing to for over two decades[2], only because she had “spontaneously” displayed a “talent” for “spirit-writing”, and who had later convinced that same wife that, to keep his poetic vitality into his old age, it was necessary for him to bang whoever he wanted—to save the world.
Again.