Flaker of Flints

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.”

...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.

The [Princes]. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the “[Princes]” is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The [Princes] have secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance. The [Princes] appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.

...Please remember that the key element to the understanding of these rituals was that what we might participate in here below, the ritual event in the Temple, was not the real thing. The real thing was already lived out in heaven. And visions given to priests and prophets concerned elements of that which was already unspeakably full, outside time, space and narrative possibility in heaven. That fulness had been glimpsed by prophets and priests such as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel as something that was on its way in, was coming into the world and would eventually arrive as the terrible “day of the Lord” of which Zechariah speaks and which would lead to the end of the Temple. What we have in the book of the Apocalypse is the account of how that fulness, emerging from the Holy Place, interacts with time-structured sequential earthly reality in the form of the coming of Jesus, his teaching, his death and resurrection and the outworking of his prophesies concerning the destruction of the Tem

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

William Blake: Heaven and Hell   |   Homesick for a Place I've Never Been   |   James Alison: Creation Fulfilled   |   C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory   |   Jim Morrison: The Lords   |   Jim Morrison: Testing the Bounds of Reality   |   1 Corinthians 13: Through a Glass Darkly