…Sopranos blogging ahead.

As in the extended post, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read it.

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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I missed the first ten minutes and will catch it Monday night, but at the moment my head’s sort of swimming with a few things:

I think one of the main things I’m wondering is if the grand, unspoken theme of this show is actually going to be made explicit in these next two episodes. That is, the stark, lunatic dissonance so succinctly and masterfully expressed in Tony Soprano trying to hide the tooth of the guy he’s just beaten almost to death, caught in the cuff of his pants, while he’s in a family therapy session defending his parenting to his suicidal son.

Well, I guess that’s pretty explicit.

I mean the sociopath sitting, then, in his therapist’s office whining, "I’m basically a good person," wondering how his son could be so screwed up, and revealing his great peyote-inspired revelation about mothers as busses that you just have to let move on…"I get it!"

Er, no.

I am just scraping out my brain trying to figure out if Melfi’s "That’s very insightful" is supposed to be taken seriously or make us beat the couch in exasperation.

Yes, the clearly expressed grand theme of the program, obvious since the first episode has to do with mothers and sons, by extension families and fate, free will and the possibility of redemption. Intertwined so tightly with this, though, is what I mentioned above- that dissonance between who we think we are and who we really are. Which, I supposed is produced in part by the first dynamic, which has warped our vision so that we can’t see at all who we could become.

As I’m sitting here trying to unwrap this I realized that one of the things that makes it so difficult within the context of the show is that there is absolutely no one, I think, who does get it. There is no character who does not either directly cause the evil, enable it,  or benefit from it. It is a world in which hope really does not even glimmer, except in the viewers’ heads. There is nothing or no one to whom these characters can look and see anything different. Is that accurate?

Yeats wrote his poem in the aftermath of the Great War, and it expresses some of his own idiocyncratic mythology/philosophy, but even if we don’t understand those particulars, the general point is clear:  In the wake of such destruction, what next?

Which brings us to AJ – truly such a painful scene out there in the pool, and just dripping with allusions to so much that has preceded it. The pool itself, the site of so much of Tony’s meditative angst. The earlier episode at Bobby and Janice’s lake home, with the story passed round of the child drowned in the lake with its parents nearby, and Janice’s panicked fears about her own baby. A ceremony of innocence drowned. And of course, how many has  Tony sent into the deep, weighted down to their deaths?

That’s all I’ve got for the moment. More later, inspired by your wisdom.

And anyone who wants to guess how it will end, feel free. But no *real* spoilers on that score, please. I’m keeping myself unspoiled for this one.