ON THE LORDS AND THE NEW CREATURES

ON THE LORDS AND THE NEW CREATURES

Nobody is interested in the new creatures. The future of A. I, the possibility of other dimensions, of Phillip Pullman-esque portals are more interesting. Spirals of epistemological doubt are also out and Love In the Age of Facebook is in.

More to the point, I can’t imagine it ever happening: someone meeting something strange. I can’t imagine someone setting up a business to, say, liberate evolution from the tyrannical hands of hidden parts of government that hold a monopoly on evolution.

Still, I enjoyed Jim Morrison’s book. I liked his Notes on Vision in The Lords more than The New Creatures at first, but recognised the end of The New Creatures is beautiful. Indeed, its post-apocalyptic denouement was stamped on my memory when I first read it.

I think if ever there was someone whose father was sponsored by some philosophers, for example, to provide a real, human witness, he would be silenced, and am glad it is not me. I heard once that James Joyce saw new creatures too and looked it up on A. I. and found there was nothing on record. I also read that Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in boyhood, in a book on Ted Hughes, but looking it up online, with my A. I. co-pilot, found it untrue. Jim Morrison himself, who authored The Lords And The New Creatures, was said to have seen winged serpents in the desert but I would say that’s not technically possible, and if he did, it was psychedelic drugs that did it – either that or he was self-mythologising when he said it.

I suppose then I take the critic Wallace Fowlie’s view that the new creatures are metaphors, alibis in disguise for the law-hounded poet; and that if I ever expressed views contrary to this I was wrong and must’ve been out of my mind with mental illness. So it is that I might need to start again, after putting a few okay things online, and it is why I might like this page.