Maelstrom in Ertrog and Yeats


In 1976 McLuhan wrote a short commentary (‘Spiral — Man as the Medium’) to the film, Spiral, of his friend, Sorel Etrog.1 In it he reverted once again to some of his favorite images, the spiral or maelstrom, and the labyrinth:

The ﬁlm Spiral (…) presents the oscillation of two simultaneous and complementary cones or spirals, constituting the synchronique worlds of birth and death. Spiral is not a diachronique or lineal structure, but a synchronique and contrapuntal interplay in a resonating structure whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The opening [of the film] is a labyrinthine highway and the ambivalent and parallel ambulances set birth and death on wheels. In the interval between time, the preserver, and time, the destroyer, is the creative interval which constitutes both continuity and arrest, both real and imaginary. By grounding his work in the archetype of the spiral, Etrog awakens echoes of the spiral archetype in some of the most celebrated artists of our time. Yeats [for example] explained the process of this unending form of experience…

Elsewhere McLuhan explicitly mentioned “the interlocking cones and ‘gyres’ of Yeats’ vision” (Discontinuity and Communication in Literature, 1970) and in Take Today, on its key page 22, he cited Yeats from The Second Coming:

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…



  1. The commentary appeared posthumously in the 1987 book, Images from the Film Spiral.