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Saturday 31 May 2014

A Penny For The Old Guy.......& Godheads Of The Little Mind-Jim Morrison's The Lords And The New Creatures


Sentence upon sentence
Words are healing

Words got me the wound
& will get me well

If you believe it

THE END OF THE RAINBOW

The end of the rainbow

Put all my screaming phantasies
Into one giant
Box-trap

Image of self -image-propagation
Image of elation

Ungulation
Limit 1st free

Image of Utopia
A slaughter of phantoms

Innocent guilty

The Human World
Bounded by words
& dust

Sweet soft & velvet
Dust

Medium trust.
                          - Jim Morrison

TIRESIAS THE BLIND PROPHET

The blind clairvoyant of Thebes, Tiresias had the gift of foresight and prophecy bestowed by Zeus (The King Of the Gods). For seven years he was transformed into a woman by Hera and blinded by Athena. The Prophet of Apollo and the son of Everes and Chariclo, Tiresias prophesied for the seven generations at Thebes also being a personal advisor to the Phoenician prince Cadmus.
He also appears to Odysseus in the book XI of Odyssey and is associated with Thebes legendary history.

Tiresias's oracular powers were invoked by the following methods
By hearing and interpreting a birdsong as he had been bestowed the power by Athena, the ability to decipher bird's decoded messages through thier songs.
Secondly, by invoking visions in the holy sacrificial smoke created by burnt offerings or by invoking and commincating with the spirits (nekyia).

Tiresias finds mention in an array from traditional to modernist literature including Ovid's Metamorphoses, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, Sophocle's Oedipus The King and Antigone, Euripedes The Bacchae and The Phoenician Women, Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem Tiresias, Eliot's The Waste Land along with allusions in The Hollow Men.....

Thank You Oh Lord
For the white blind light
Thank You Oh Lord
For the white blind light
A city rises from the sea
I had a splitting headache
From which the future's made.....
                                               
                                            - Jim Morrison

A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS WITH SELECTED LINES FROM T.S. ELIOT'S THE HOLLOW MEN

Eliot's The Hollow Men derives its title by the combination of The Hollow Land, a romance by William Morris and The Broken Men a poem by Rudyard Kipling. The old guy (Fawkes) is the referenced to the ritual burning of the straw man effigy . Other references include the agrarian mythos of Frazer, the Lord's Prayer, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Joseph Conrad's An Outcast Of The Islands.

A penny for the old guy .....

Walking Alone
At the hour when we are trembling 
With tenderness 
Lips that would kiss 
Form prayers to broken stone......

DANTE'S BEATRICE
Eyes that i dare not meet in dreams...
.....these do not appear
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.....

The above lines are attributed to Beatrice in reference to her character depiction in Dante's The Divine Comedy.

Beatrice has been the subject of Dante's Platonic Love and ideation and had been modelled in many of his works including Dante's La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy with significant references in Paradiso and Purgatorio Cantos  where she serves as a guide, an incarnation of beatific love as her name implies, taking over Virgil (Dante's companion in Purgatorio) thereby leading Dante through the pathway to heaven or the beatific vision.

The Hollow Men marks the end of Eliot's Inferno post The Waste Land leading towards Purgatorio in Ash Wednesday.

Let me be no nearer...........

Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer.........

Not that last meeting place.........

........The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
Sightless, unless 
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose......

The only hope of empty men.....

OTHER REFERENCES - THE MYTH OF THE FISHER KING

The myth of the fisher king sprung from the roots of Celtic mythology. Among the King Arthurian legends the myth of the fisher king is associated with the Grail Legend along with arrival of Percival as the healer knight accompanied by Sir Galahad and Sir Bors.
In mythology, the fisher king is depicted as the forebearer or the keeper of the Holy Grail, who loses his potency by a inflicted injury. His impotence brings forth infertility in his kingdom, thus forcing him to strive on fishing in the river of his Corbenic castle until a magician, healer or a knight arrives in his land to cure him of the inflicted wound.
In other versions of the myth, the wounded king appears to be the father while the  task of fishing is undertaken by the son who is entitled as the fisher king. This account is echoed many times through the mythos of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

THE GUY FAWKES MYTH

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Celebrated on November 5th every year, the Guy Fawkes Day or rather the Guy Fawkes Night commemorates the failure of the Gunpowder plot of 1605 involving England's House Of Parliament capturing Fawkes a failed revolutionary and an arsonist. Ever since, the event is celebrated every year by lighting ritual bonfires setting ablaze straw man effigies of Fawkes as a mark of victory over conspiracy.

THE IRONIC JUXTAPOSITION

Eliot uses the imagery of an ironic juxtaposition of the hollow men and the children at play. The loss of innocence and the worship of false Gods. Dancing around the prickly pear, metaphors the loss of faith and childhood memories.

Here the stone images are raised 
Here they receive

................Here we go around the prickly pear 
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go around the prickly pear
At five o clock in the morning.............

In this last of meeting places
We grope together and avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
                                     
                                              -T.S.Eliot

JIM MORRISON'S WILDERNESS

                       Repent
None of the old Things worked......

Stained eyes
You see time fly

The face changes as the heart beats
& breathes

We are not constant
We are an arrow in flight
The sum of the angles of change

An angel runs
Thru the sudden light
Thru the room
A ghost precedes us
Shadow follows us
And each time we stop
We fall

THE END OF THE DREAM

The end of the dream
will be
When it matters

All things lie
Buddha will forgive me
Buddha will


I can forgive
my injuries
in the name of
Wisdom
Luxury
Romance

Sentence upon sentence
Words are healing

Words got me the wound
& will get me well

If you believe it

                               - Jim Morrison

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