Flaker of Flints

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?

I'm connected in a daze, Roam unconscious disengaged. In a simulated world I sustain. Swimming senseless through a void, Ease my appetite with noise. In a stimulated world Go insane. Shadow in a matrix, Searching for a light. Captive of the jungle, Hiding in the night. Break me free to live enchanted. Enchanted, Beyond control. Hide me, hide me. Hide me in your mystery. Break me free to live enchanted. Enchanted, Beyond control.

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination? And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

The single individual is higher than the universal.

...But for a few years he had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a haunted man; for anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted....Sometimes, however, to be a ‘ruined man’ is itself a vocation...

...[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...

..."The Matrix" makes clear claims we can step outside the world of images (the internet, the television, the movie screen) into something Real, most notably when Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the blue pill, which will keep him in The Matrix, and the red pill, which will take him to Reality. Christians are taught we “see through a glass darkly,” or that our perceptions on this earth are distorted and limited. But there is Reality both on this earth and outside of it, and that’s because our narrative has an apocalyptic ending, the ultimate revelation of Christ. The Reality of Christ’s unveiling gives us hope and faith in our daily realities. It provides us with a distinction between true and false, fantasy and Real...

"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.