Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon the World

Turning and Turning and Widening Gyre:  the titles of episodes 305 and 307.  Maybe Sutter likes Yeats.  Maybe one of the writers has a degree in English Lit.  Maybe someone thought it would be cool to be all literary and shit and googled "anarchy" and "poem" together.  I really don't care.  What's interesting, whether it's intentional or not, is how this season is echoing the themes in the first stanza of Yeats' poem


The Second Coming:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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.

CHILLS!

First:  what the fuck is a gyre?  Well...it's a vortex, a spiral, a spinning ring.  There are naturally occurring gyres everywhere.  Ocean currents actually move in big gyres.   Hurricanes are big gyres of spinning storm systems.  Whirpools are spinning gyres of water. 

So, a widening gyre makes me think of a spiral of energy getting wider and fatter and faster with every rotation.  Where two things were once close together, they grow farther and farther apart.  Tara and Jax. Sam Crow and Sam Bel. Jimmy O and Father Ashby. Unser and Clay.  Charming and the MC. But spiraling energy also has a way of bringing things together.  Think of your washing machine, or a centrifuge.  Gemma and Tara, Tara and the Admin, Clay and Jax, the Mayans and SAMCRO. Jax and (God forbid) Stahl. 

The circular imagery of a gyre also brings to mind the "circle of life" archetype.  And not only the one about "dust to dust, ashes to ashes."  I mean how patterns tend to repeat themselves.  "Secret babies are bad ideas."  Well, now we have two secret babies:  Trinity and Sweet Baby Tara Jr (everyone assumes Tara's baby is going to be a boy, including Gemma.  Why the fuck can't it be a girl?  Oh, I forgot...we live in a paternalistic society where boy babies are preferred over girl babies...okay, I'm off my soap box).  Another repeating pattern:  JT went to Belfast to settle some business, now Jax is headed there for some business of his own.  JT had children from two different mothers.  So might Jax.

What really makes the hairs on my arms stand up about this poem and the Sons of Anarchy are the last two lines of this stanza of "The Second Coming" - which also have a lot of tie into the Hamlet parallels of Jax.  The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. 

Jax's allegorical characterization to Hamlet is so spot on here.  He is "the best," but we as fans are often left to wonder - does Jax have the courage of his convictions?  Why does it seem like he's dilly-dallying around in the quest for Abel (because having sex with a porn bitch and arranging the movement of heroin through Charming are SO important)?  Why does he preach the Brains Before Bullets mantra, but act so impulsively and violently?  Has he even opened John Teller's book this season?  Why is he suddenly okay with heroin being trafficked through Charming?  Is that something his dad would be savvy with? Let's not forget that the heroin is being fed to the Aryan Brotherhood in prison!  Or did I miss the press release that convicts who leave prison as drug addicts are LESS violent than when they entered. Does he even remember that he wants to recreate the club into a kinder, gentler MC?  Wouldn't that protect Abel and Tara and everyone else he loves? 

Then there's that part about the worst and all of their passionate intensity.   Let's see...who are the worst:

• Stahl
• Salazar (we have yet another villain to loathe)
• Darby (I doubt he's done with the game...he'll be back)
• Jacob Hale and the rest of the developers trying to "bring Charming into the 21st century"
• The Real IRA and the Sam Bel traitors
• Ima (she's not really a contender in this list...but I really dislike her)

Yes indeed....anarchy is loosed upon the world.

On to more positive things...to the Turning and Turning imagery.  This brings to mind the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot and takes me to a happy place.  I realize Yeats probably didn't dig on the Tarot (if he did, let me know...that's the kind of useless shit I love to carry around in my brain), but the imagery is there, regardless.  The Wheel is about luck, fortune, or change that can bring joy. 

 I have a lot of hope for this imagery in the coming episodes of Sons of Anarchy.

Thoughts?  I appreciate your comments and thoughts as long as they aren't in Mandarin. 

-TCB.