Psychonautation

[poliphilo]

 ....A sovereign mind
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone....

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

Only this isn't Coleridge but his compadre Wordsworth. Those two guys did a lot of such voyaging together.

As Cohen has his Jesus say,

All men shall be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them.

It's the human condition. 

Most everything else we do beside the voyaging is distraction.

And who was Wordsworth talking about? He was talking about Newton.

Had Blake known about Newton's alchemical experiments he might have been a little less stringent.

Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Cohen and Newton- all psychonauts.

Sailing, sailing, sailing,

Also the Beatles in their yellow submarine.

That's so not "just a kids' song". 

Do psychonauts suffer from psychonausea?

Indeed. That's why Coleridge and Wordsworth made landfall before they sailed too far beyond the known and the understood.

Not so Blake and Newton and Cohen. They kept on going...

Comments

[cmcmck]

I still wonder where Hopkins might have gone had he not died so young- he was certainly having doubts about his faith which makes for some powerful poetry at times.


Myself unholy, from myself unholy
To the sweet living of my friends I look
Eye-greeting doves bright-counter to the rook,
Fresh brooks to salt sand-teasing waters shoaly:
And they are purer, but alas! not solely
The unquestion'd readings of a blotless book.
And so my trust confused, struck, and shook
Yields to the sultry siege of melancholy.
He has a sin of mine, he its near brother
Knowing them well I can but see the fall.
This fault in one I found, that in another:
And so, though each have one while I have all,
No better serves me now, save best ; no other,
Save Christ: to Christ I look, on Christ I call.

[poliphilo]

Hopkins' catholicism is guilt-ridden, woozy, not healthy at all.