luka

Well-known member
I do remember running away at midnight to get away from the hugging and kissing and standing on the shore watching the waves come in and thinking, well nothing's changed has it. It just goes on and on.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reminds me of something Yeats wrote down (in a journal), which seemed utterly profound to me, sat under a tree in the afterglow of an acid trip: "Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it."

We're products of our time and place, whether or not we know it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
That quote is great. Always loved that one.

It's in the same vein as

"O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
 

luka

Well-known member
The horse cheshuts are looking magnificent at the moment as it goes. Keep an eye out for them.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree."

Yeats is quite a psychedelic poet, really, and it's very odd because his tone is so lofty and pseudo aristocratic.

Not that he smoked opium or anything, so far as I know. Some people say acid is a shortcut to transcendence in the mystical/religious mode.
 

version

Well-known member
This is one of my favourite tree quotes,

"Consider," replies the Geomancer, "-Adam and Eve ate fruit from a Tree, and were enlighten'd. The Buddha sat beneath a Tree, and he was enlighten'd. Newton, also sitting beneath a Tree, was hit by a falling apple,- and he was enlighten'd. A quick overview would suggest that Trees produce Enlightenment. Trees are not the Problem. The Forest is not an Agent of Darkness.
 

luka

Well-known member
The kind of symbolic universe magic maps out is what LSD gives you direct access to, so not surprising
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
To be a tad boring about it, LSD disables your default mode network, so that different areas of your brain that don't usually "talk" to each other can communicate and merge. Hence being able to see sounds and so on.

And metaphor/symbolism is a sort of willed merging of that kind. It's blending two images or concepts - and in the recognition of the connection between disparate things we arguably can obtain a fleeting sense of transcendence.

Again, Joyce - the snow in the Dead.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
This is one of my favourite tree quotes,

"Consider," replies the Geomancer, "-Adam and Eve ate fruit from a Tree, and were enlighten'd. The Buddha sat beneath a Tree, and he was enlighten'd. Newton, also sitting beneath a Tree, was hit by a falling apple,- and he was enlighten'd. A quick overview would suggest that Trees produce Enlightenment. Trees are not the Problem. The Forest is not an Agent of Darkness.

This is where the lineage of Milton Blake and Yeats connect - the imagination as portal to higher meaning. The use of symbolic characters and world's. And the grand manner (Milton writing English as if in Latin, Blake's michelangesque drawings) used to evoke that.

I mean Eliot's a really interesting one to compare to Yeats cos he subverts and obliterates that grand manner while still struggling tormentedly towards some sort of spiritual oasis in the desert of modernity.
 

version

Well-known member
The effects of the lockdown are quite psychedelic. Things have become blurred and fuzzy, people are forgetting what day it is.
 

luka

Well-known member
The effects of the lockdown are quite psychedelic. Things have become blurred and fuzzy, people are forgetting what day it is.

The walks I go on remind me of my drug walks. The same sense of being in a magic fairyland. Everything ravishingly beautiful and enchanted
 

luka

Well-known member
The air more transparent. Everything more distinct. The colours a little brighter. A sense of the aliveness of it all
 
Top