How Eurovision helped us cope with the ‘apocalypse’
As the western front fell truly quiet for the final time, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere.’
The words are bleak but effective, capturing the apocalyptic sentiment those who lived through the ‘Great War’ must have felt. They witnessed how man had spent four years finding increasingly brutal ways to inflict destruction upon itself.
A cloud of palpable doom hung over the continent as is evident in W.B.Y’s writing. Later in the poem he takes it further with: ‘Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.’
Yet despite this sense of doom the apocalypse never truly came.
It can be easy to slip into this morose frame of mind at times of seemingly great global peril.
And those of us living through the early years of the 21st century have had our share of existential threats; 9/11, war on terror, 2008 recession, Covid pandemic and now invasion of Ukraine.
For a time, as despair seeped into my clothes and my bones and my thoughts, I thought this time it was the end days.
While it is easy to imagine ‘some revelation is at hand’ as you stare at the ceiling in the middle of lockdown, it will pass. Although, in the darkest of times, you might wonder what the ‘after’ will look like. I know I did.
And weirdly Eurovision is perhaps the best vision of what to expect after a revelation has been averted. People across a continent coming together to cheer, vote, argue and enjoy a frivolous musical event. It is an excuse for get-togethers, breaking bread, trying to joke, escaping from the realities of normal life for one evening.
Look how Ukraine managed to watch, with commentary from a host hidden in a secret bunker, despite the burning of missiles in the rubble of war.
Man might find ways to push the world to the edge of a second coming, but it is the way man finds silly excuses to get together and lose ourselves that will pull us back.
Turns out that the ‘rough beast’ will have to wait another day to slouch ‘towards Bethlehem to be born’.