The effect on my feelings [...] I cannot better represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those names.
This imaginary friend is reporting his amazement. Knowing that the Ancient Mariner was amazed, shattered, shocked, adjusted, I'm wondering if this was the poet's vision of an ideal exchange, one party returning from a mind-blower and the other party listening humbly until they are transformed. The action of the Ancient Mariner is transmission. The fake friend tells Coleridge not to rest, the Mariner needs to "pass, like night, from land to land," and the Guest is not completed. "He went like one that hath been stunned." Friend Wordsworth venturing back from childhood. Richardson's Miriam, who has to leave home so that she can earn a living, notices, whenever she takes a holiday back to her old milieu, that she has been modified psychologically because she has adventured out. She knows that she has deepened. But she can't convey it to the others. Their experiences are different now, and her ability to communicate has developed a gap. She wishes people would read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. "These wonders are brought to our own door." (Emerson, Nature (1836)) John Clare, going out to glean the wood for his brain's nourishment, decides to retrieve the noise of a nightingale. That written transcription is not a poem to him. He never wants to publish it. The words he picks are the same ones that people before him have used when they wanted to show a reader the same bird, "tweet tweet" and "jug jug jug:" established words. What did he go to find? The German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff transmits her uncle's story and it is not her uncle's story. Born in 1797, four years after Clare, she died sixteen years before him. I don't wonder who killed those men in her Judenbuche (1842). I want to know where Johannes the doppelgänger went.
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i very vaguely remember a poem i read somewhere supposedly written by the bridegroom in "ancient mariner". don't remember the author, unfortunately. anyway, the deep, dark, vast gap between author and subject is indeed a mysterious place. annette(i looked her up)had much to say about the subject as did ann radcliffe(mysteries of udolfo, et al). maybe C. met annette while he was in germany? for some reason your post made me remember walpole, "castle of otranto". most readers dislike(d) it. i thought it fantastic and a wonderful achievement: the echoing halls with dark, gloomy portraits looming out of the unfathomable darkness while the observer is impelled down the huge empty hall... not to mention the very large armored glove precipitated off the top of the castle to crunch into the paved courtyard. something about that rings a very large bell, having to do with walpole's ambient social environment and his relations with it. mysterious and unknown, the hinterlands of consciousness...
ReplyDeleteThere's a Wired article open on my computer right now that starts with the journalist telling you that human beings create stories in order to make sense of the world (he is clearing his throat before he begins to discuss the role of the internet in story-self-creation) but things like the Jews' Beech Tree and Otranto remind me that the signs and gestures that make up these satisfying stories don't have to owe anything to narrative (which sometimes gets confused with story, when people talk about stories).
DeleteSoon I am going to return to Coleridge, and then to these posts.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Clare, too. "What did he go to find?" Good question. "I want to know where Johannes the doppelgänger went." Me too.
One interesting thing about the imaginary friend letter, is that it comes before the end of the first volume of the Literaria, and not after the beginning of the second. He didn't have to promise the essay and then excuse himself from writing it. He could have erased the promise and the excuse before the book was printed and no one would have known. If he had written the promise in book one then you could argue that he felt forced to write the excuse in book two, but if both of those things are in book one then they exist because he wanted them to. So this is not a man trying on a cover-up. This is a strategy. A strategy aimed at what?
Deletei wonder if there are any investigations into laudanum use in the nineteenth C. and it's affect on the intellect. i highly suspect coleridge of overindulging to the detriment of his writing, although apparently it didn't affect his oratory. my memory of bio. lit. still remains the same: a mishmash of blaming and whining without much solid substance, although as always, i could be wrong... maybe the imaginary friend WAS real to him; split personality? i like what you said re tales not being the same as narration. it's so difficult to pin down subtle differences in communication and even to express them when they become apparent... i for one appreciate your efforts in that direction.
ReplyDeleteIt's not an unbiased investigation but the Opium Eater thinks that laudanum will improve your intellect by removing your unhappiness. "[W]ine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance, and beyond a certain point it is sure to volatilise and to disperse the intellectual energies: whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted."
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