Flaker of Flints

I lost my ability to read in the old way. When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror-image poems erase themselves half-formed in my mind. I miss those poems. Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid lines of singing color, the world drops out, and its hidden shapes snap forward to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light, the books are all hunched together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate.

One symptom of a society approaching some critical point is autocorrelation. Another one is what the physicists would call susceptibility, meaning you push the system in one direction—you give a little kick to it—and it starts running in that direction. You kick it the other way and it starts running in the other direction. The system is actually extraordinarily sensitive to very small perturbative events. One blog post can change the world. We've seen this more than once. One 4chan greentext will change the world. That kind of hypersensitivity suggests to me that we're in a period of great instability where we don't quite know what's coming out the other side.

To believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system or sector run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major banking institutions and the Federal Reserve — the point is, a conspiracy is an inherently anti-democratic force.... Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn’t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.... Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed. The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

In the Book of Daniel, the Son of Man is not a personification of the righteous community, but is conceived, in mythological fashion, as its heavenly doppelgänger. Now it is characteristic of mythological thinking that such a doppelgänger is conceived to be more real and permanent than its earthly counterpart and prior to it in the order of being. (From a modern critical perspective, the reverse is true. It "is a question of men before it is a question of angels." The human community is the datum of our experience and knowledge. The heavenly counterpart is posited on the basis of this datum.)

What I wanted, most deeply, was to depict a case of religious hysteria or, if you will, a schizophrenic individual with heavily religious tendencies. Martin, the husband, struggles with his god in order to win Karin back to his world. But since he is the type of person who needs that which is tangible, his efforts are in vain.

The world is mysterious and revelation must be transmitted from a supernatural source, through the mediation of angels; there is a hidden world of angels and demons that is directly relevant to human destiny; and this destiny is finally determined by a definitive eschatological judgment.

 It's hard to tell the difference of a prophet from a crackpot;  I wouldn't blame you if you'd rather stay in bed.

Once upon a time, there was a city full of buildings. One day, the sun was not rising up. Then something worse was happening. All the buildings were wobbly. Crashing into each other. They used the magic wand again. Then something really bad happened. Everyone was falling off the buildings, the humans were switching buildings. So the humans put a magic rainbow. Every building was having little cracks, so then every day they glued them back. And it turns out the whole earth was upside down.

The end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

When they closin' all the curtains to convince you that it's night time, Don't believe 'em, Don't believe 'em.

Beware of agitators and instigators who use legitimate protests to ignite chaos between protestors and police.

So rests the sky against the earth. The dark, still lake in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire...Content? No, no, no—but refreshed, rested—while waiting.

When you look closely at the seams between order and chaos, do you see the same things I see? The strain, the tears, the glimpses of truth hidden underneath. Why do they fight so desperately to mask what they are? Or is it that they become who they are when they put on the mask?

God uses the animals Behemoth and Leviathan to remind us that, like everything that exists, the enormous forces of chaos and disorder are subject to divine power, even if it does not annihilate them. From the opening words the emphasis is on the creatureliness of these mighty beasts: "Look at Behemoth, my creature, just as you are!" (Job 40:15). Job has a trait in common with these animals: all have come from God's hand. They are, as it were, holdovers from the chaos out of which the world, the cosmos, emerged. Because of his undeserved suffering, Job sees existence as a chaos, a continuation of the original disorder. God is trying to show Job that divine power controls these chaotic forces, although at the same time God says that they will not be destroyed. They represent the wicked of whom God has just been speaking (Job 40:11–13); they are forces existing in the world. The Lord does not forthwith put an end to these remnants of the original chaos (into which Job has ...

Where does the frontier lie? Where do we travel to in those dreams of beauty satisfied, laden with significance but without comprehensible meaning, etched far deeper on the mind than any witness of the eyes? Our memories of physical reality, where do they vanish to? While the images of this dream world never grow older. They live—like the memory of a memory. Now. When I have overcome my fears—of others, of myself, of the underlying darkness: at the frontier of the unheard-of. Here ends the known. But, from a source beyond it, something fills my being with its possibilities. Here desire is purified and made lucid: each action is a preparation for, each choice an assent to the unknown. Prevented by the duties of life on the surface from looking down into the depths, yet all the while being slowly trained and molded by them to take the plunge into the deep whence rises the fragrance of a forest star, bearing the promise of a new affection. At the frontier—

Many times when going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes.

                                          ...see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language, which thy God utters, who from eternity doth teach himself in all, and all things in himself.

I am being driven forward into an unknown land. The pass grows steeper, the air colder and sharper. A wind from my unknown goal stirs the strings of expectation. Still the question: Shall I ever get there? There where life resounds, a clear pure note in the silence.

What is interesting here is that Coleridge looks to his son, Hartley, to read the "eternal language" in a way that he cannot (as has been made clear earlier in the poem). For the first time, the question of hermeneutics raises itself—the poet may interpret nature, but who will give authority to his interpretation? The Romantics' models as poet-prophets, the Hebrew writing prophets and John Milton, were confirmed in their role by long acceptance, but who was to give this confirmation to the Romantics themselves?