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.

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.

 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.

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?

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.

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?

"We have many professors in the philosophy department who study and admire Plato, but none of them actually believes in the theory of the Forms, or feels it, or lives by it."

Interviewer: What do you mean you’ll sometimes extend yourself … work the people up a bit? Morrison: Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That’s all it was: just curiosity. Interviewer: What did you do to test the bounds? Morrison: Just push a situation as far it it’ll go. Interviewer: And yet you don’t feel at any time that things got out of control? Morrison: Never. Interviewer: There is a quote attributed to you. It appears in print a lot. It goes: “I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos…” Morrison: “… especially activity that appears to have no meaning.”

If all eyes were made of green glass, and if all that seems white was really green, who would be the wiser?

Successful hills are here to stay. Everything must be this way. Gentle streets where people play. Welcome to the Soft Parade. All our lives we sweat and save, Building for a shallow grave. Must be something else, we say, Somehow to defend this place. Everything must be this way. Everything must be this way.

...The knight of faith drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would have no trace of a fearful, anxious routine, and yet he has this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were the surest thing of all. And yet—and yet!—the whole earthly figure he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it, and no one ever suspects anything else...

They still call themselves the intelligentsia. Writers! Scientists! They don't believe in anything. Their capacity for faith has atrophied through lack of use. My God, what kind of people are they? Their eyes are blank. They're thinking how not to sell themselves cheap, how to get paid for every breath they take. They know they were born to "be someone," to be an elite! They say, "You live but once." How can such people believe in anything at all?

I got a feeling I can't describe: I see this place when I close my eyes. Wake me up if we ever arrive. And tell me how did we, How did we get here?

...[Coleridge] once believed he could grasp the truth of things in his pantheistic ecstasies; in the daemonic poems ecstasy is still a reality, but the possibility is raised of it being profoundly misleading....Coleridge is not just afraid of loss of self in ecstasy, he is afraid of hallucination, of being wrong...

...In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence...

"Homesick for a place I've never been." I want to go home. Not like my childhood home or the home I live in but the real home. The real place. Since I was little, I’ve gotten this feeling intermittently. It’ll happen when the light shines through my window a certain way, or when I’m comfortable in blankets, or when I feel like everything is ok. Sometimes it happens when I’m feeling neutral as well, but mostly it comes when I’m almost fully relaxed.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.