19th May 2008

A Dorset country lane at night. The moon seems to rise behind its beam continuously, against a sky on which light drums. The intensity of the beam shrouds areas of the landscape in lunar shadows. It seems so purposeful, and so immense in its radiance over hill, plain and sea. Intense silence. The silence of the moon, related to the whiteness of the light, is piercing.

The fall of snow is silent also, muffling any hint of sound. Snow changes everything – its silence is understandable. Moon changes nothing. It presides over stillness like an owl, panic–arousing by its purposeful vacuity. Its light dries out the hills. Blocked silhouettes, delicate traceries, washes of white shadow: a photograph turned into its negative. The moonlit landscape is unrelatable to the waking world. Its light silts: an unviolated series of flattened surfaces that mind finds hard to grasp. A man, dancing in ecstasy at the crossroads, is shot dead.

TERROR. A poet of night. ‘His landscapes are moonlight, or seen by the light of stars, or in the twilight, when objects perceived can most easily be detached from their utilitarian association, and become the figures of whatever dream the imagination may choose to elaborate – the eyes of hidden birds, the living mountains seen in the coals of a fire, glow–worms, the half–human voices of wind, cataract, or baying dog.’ (Kathleen Raine) In the immediate there is nightmare, fear; beyond, a moon which he writes about as a soft and gliding loveliness, something as seen when drunk or when some absence is sensed. The moon is of that other dissociated world,inimitably his, of sea–serpents, disinterestedly serene, untouched by human anguish.

Against the finger indicating knowledge in the sky, like some mariner’s map, he discovers vastness, unlocatability, awe. Mind, unanchored, traverses the night sky; loses itself; finds itself in terror. His official self was interested in theories of the Imagination – a theme that others could publish too. Nightmare often swallowed up his unofficial self. The infant in Frost at Midnight is invited to enjoy the language of nature, ‘The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/Of that eternal language, which thy God/utters...’ This occurs in the mind of a father giving his infant space, as formerly its mother had given it womb space. Dislodge the father’s mind, though, and the infant will find its foetus self displaced and unspaced and exposed to intolerable sensation.

IMPEDIMENT. He awakes from a nightmare, having dreamt of two sons being cheated of their inheritance. The two sons merge into one figure, himself. The cheating is transformed into some conflict with his former headmaster. ‘...I was carried back to bed, & was struggling up against some unknown impediment, some woman on the other side about to relieve me – when a noise of one of the Doors, strongly associated with Mrs. Coleridge’s coming in to awake me, awaked me – the first thing, I became conscious of, was a faint double scream, that I uttered. – Drizzle. The Sky uncouthly marbled with white vapours,& large black Clouds, their surface of a fine wooly grain: but in the height & Key–stone of the arch a round Space of dim watery Stars the seven Stars in the Central, seen, thro’ white vapours that entirely shapeless gave a whiteness to the Circle of Sky, but stained with exceedingly thin and subtle flakes of black Vapor might be happily said in language of Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his Genealog. de gli Idii) to be Vestito d’una Pallidezza affumicata. 10 November 1803.(N.1.1649)

The dream struggle occurs within a dream space that is like an absence of space. Being cheated, in itself a form of action, solidifies into constricted sensation, body movement, the struggle with an impediment. (The dreamer, the man who coined the term psychosomatic, is a Platonist knowledgeable with the possible exchanges of space and matter.) A door bangs. He awakes from dream into seemingly another spaceless dream, a dream of awakeness, drained of conflict, equally space deprived – the whiteness of first light, the never endingness of dawn drizzle, face pressed to marbled sky, as though stupified, face pressed against a marble floor. Syntax registers a change which is no change, a skewering about of the self, jarring, that brings it back to what it had been before. Through the endurance of microscopic close–up detail, he begins to find release in gothic fancy – ‘the friar’s crown’ – and by a declension into the soft flamboyance of the language of Romeo, he is freed into a moment of discriminated delight,vestito d’una Pallidezza affumicata.

Shakespeare, wearied of some contriving magician–artist part of the self, hungers to return to some primal source in creativity, where the dictions of body and mind can be freshly engendered. Immense metaphoric transformations occur in the uterine sea: the eyes of a non existent submarine figure become pearls. Astronauts tread air – gymnasts in a night sea, phosphorescent bubbles rising from their limbs! Powerful minds are minds capable of being immersed in powerful ideas, manifestations of the future, creatively in the process of becoming the present. A Shakespearean nowness, in which past and future press in on a disquieted present. Coleridge recognizes these powers. He meets up with unwelcome forces, seemingly from nowhere.

(N.1.1726.) ‘Wednesd. Morn. 3’clock, Dec 13., 1803. Bad dreams...One thing noticeable in an after Dream/ a little weak contemptible wretch offering his Services, & I (as before afraid to refuse them) literally and distinctly remembered a former Dream, in which I had suffered most severely, this fellow leaping on me,& grasping my Scrotum...’

The scrotum–grasper might be a Byronic somebody who hangs about with Regency pugilists and rakes. He haunts the dreams of a parson’s son, who meditates on a God in whom he lives, moves and has his being. The scrotum–grasper is meanly worldly, beneath the dignity of a poet’s attention – worldly in the way that bad literature is worldly, gothic–literary, in a manner that consciously would not have impressed Coleridge.

The wish to limit art and science to areas of thought which confirm human dignity is moving and desirable. Art requires contemplation, the marked out sacred ground. And yet surely the figure Coleridge so fears is an aspect of himself that he could not get effectively deal with. He seeks futilely to placate the scrotum–grasper. How far does Coleridge the sponger, the constrictor of others, invalidate the theory of the Imagination? (N.1.1726.) ‘Wednesd. Morn. 3’clock, Dec 13., 1803. Bad dreams...One thing noticeable in an after Dream/ a little weak contemptible wretch offering his Services, & I (as before afraid to refuse them) literally and distinctly remembered a former Dream, in which I had suffered most severely, this fellow leaping on me,& grasping my Scrotum...’

‘I therefore most politely assured him of the 3 guineas, but I meant only to get rid of him/ – Again too the slight pain in my side produced a fellow knuckling me in there/ – My determination to awake, I dream that I got out of bed,& volition in dream to SCREAM, which I actually too did, from that volition, & the strange visual Distortions of all the bed Cloaths, some lying as on a form (no,delete) frame towards the fire/ some one way, some another/ all which, I in my dream explained as the effects of my eyes being half–opened,& still affected by Sleep/ in an half upright posture struggling, as I thought, against involuntary sinking back into Sleep,& consequent suffocation/ twas then I screamed, by will/& immediately after really awoke.’

During 1801 he had undergone a series of excruciating, possibly psychosomatic compliants, including swollen testicles. He is concerned at this stage to disclose some relationship between unwelcome images and physical distress. He wants to justify the contents of his mind. At this moment in time, he does not see the images as autonomous, as portents, an inner world insisting that its ideas are their own evidence. He does not allow himself to think that the God of the spiritual envelope might be here in these images as an object of Reason – an object which has the divine attribute of being the thing it represents.

Trapped in no space and no time, he yearns for something that can be formulated as the Keswick model: Reason as plate–glass, the transparent frontier between internal and external space. He seeks for space through a Platonic model. His slip of pen – ‘a form (no,delete) a frame’ – suggest that the crumpled clothes are like a world that has lost its skin and slipped off the Platonic paradigm. A few notes later, he continues: (N.1.1735) ‘In the next world the Souls of the Dull Good men must serve for Bodies for the Souls of the Shakesperes and Miltons – & in the course of a few centuries, when the Soul can do without its vehicle, the Bodies will by advantage of good company have refined themselves into Souls, fit to be cloathed with like Bodies.

N.1.1737. ‘The Soul within the Body, can I any way compare this to the Reflection of the fire seen thro’ my window on the solid wall, seeming of course within the solid wall, as deep within as the distance of the fire from the wall? – I fear, I can make nothing out of it...’

Rumpled stuffs and violent hard attacking things, dishevelled cloaths lying on a form (no,delete) frame, becomes bodies for great souls, who in time transfigure the bodies into souls. The sordid disorder of a bedroom – rumpled bedclothes like discarded skins – becomes an emblem for the spiritual life. Did Coleridge see himself as the body to the genius of Wordsworth – and when he thought himself discarded, did he believe he had died? Soul transfigures a fire reflected on a solid wall – another aspect of the logos, manifesting itself in some lower–order translation. Meanwhile, a fellow who knuckles him becomes the pain in his side. We tend to think that the pain precipitated the phantasy or dream image of the knuckling fellow; but this is not necessarily so; the dream image may induce the pain.

A Caliban seeks to understand the nature of Prospero’s attack. His wish to observe the intolerable and to describe it – and sometimes, somehow, to relate it to his other interests – is heroic. The intensity of his insight into what Rilke called ‘the angelic order,’ and his erudition, are counterpoised by the intensity of body demands. Opium–increased physical spasms and spurs are things he would readily be without: ‘the dull quasi finger–pressure on the Liver, the endless Flatulence, the frightful constipation when the dead Filth IMPALES the lower gut – to weep & sweat & moan & scream for the parturience of an excrement...’(2091) How do these torments make sense within the monist picture of things? The Id speaks out: it cannot be contained by traditional forms. Coleridge does not allow himself to be a Caliban in public; and,later, his anima poetae must be edited. He cannot practise a Joycean dissolution of language and form.

N.2.2085.’ Tuesday Night, a dreadful Labor,& fruitless throes, of costiveness – individuated faeces, and constricted orifices. Went to bed & dozed & started in great distress – Wednesday Morning, May 9th – a day of Horror – tried the sitting over hot water in vain/ after two long frightful,fruitless struggles, the face convulsed,& the sweat streaming from me like Rain, the Captn. proposed to send for the Commodore’s Surgeon.’ The surgeon, bringing a pipe and syringe, ‘ with extreme difficulty & the exertion of his utmost strength injected the latter. Good God! – What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly SHOT up! – I remained still for three–quarters of an hour with hot water in a bottle to my belly (for I was desired to retain it as long as I could) with pains an& sore uneasiness & indescribable desires – at length went/ O what a time! – equal in pain to any before/ Anguish took away all disgust,& I PICKED OUT the hardened matter & after awhile was completely relieved. The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face – A Warning!’ The spiritual envelope of the good father in whom he lives, moves and has his being has become an impaling paranoiac finger in his entrails.

(N.3.4046) ‘Jan.25.1811. – I drew up my legs suddenly: for a great pig was leaping out direct against them. No! – a great pig appeared to leap out against me because by a fear–engendering disease of the stomach, affecting the circulation of the Blood or nervous powers My legs were suddenly twitched up.’

He wonders whether nightmares are related to states of stupor in sleep. ‘This stupor seems occasioned by some painful sensation, of unknown locality, most often, I believe, in the lower gut, tho’ not seldom in the Stomach, which withdrawing the attention to itself from its sense of other realities present makes us asleep to them indeed but otherwise awake.’

‘Last night before awaking or rather delivery from the nightmair, in which a claw–like talon–nailed Hand grasped hold of me, interposed between the curtains, I had just before with my foot felt some thing seeming to move against it ( – for in my foot it commenced) – I detected it, I say, by my excessive Terror and dreadful Trembling of my whole body, Trunk & Limbs – & by my piercing out–cries – Good heaven! (reasoned I) were this real, I never should or could be, in such an agony of Terror – ‘

Soon, and astonishingly, he begins to question the assumption that images gain their authority from their relationship to the actual. He begins to doubt whether dream images are necessarily tied back to the world,like the gossamer spider whose slender thread ‘is always fastened to something below.’ Is he being psychotic or insightful? He begins to believe that images and ideas are facts in their own right. Some people dream of things; others dream the things themselves – and discover in themselves evidence of a primal creation. He no longer can diminish the impact of experiences by describing them as delusions brought on by physical distress. The hell of his dream is an actual hell, not a simulation or reflection. The idea of hell (and heaven) begins here, as a mental fact.

He wants to believe that ‘ terror does not arise out of painful sensation, but is itself a specific sensation==terror corporeus sive materialis. – To explain & classify these strange sensations, the organic material Analogons (Ideas materiales intermedias, as the Cartesians say) of fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, & (strongest of all) Remorse, forms at present the most difficult & at the same time the most interesting Problem of Psychology.’ Presciently he continues – ‘The solution of this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on this present dogma, that the Forms & feelings of Sleep are always the reflections & confused Echoes of our waking thoughts, & Experiences.’

It must have taken courage to assert that the terrible images that sometimes attacked him were not comfortably caused by bodily pressures. They were evidences of mind, manifesting itself to mind in revelation. Mental portents, awkward, irrefutable and unverifiable: the idea as its own evidence. 

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