Coleridge in the Bardo

It would be hard for me to overstate the impact that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan has had on me over the years and since I first read it in high school, Fever Literature has become a mainstay in my life. It, along with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, has regularly pulled me out of my own Precambrian fog and briefly into the more difficult altitudes of Creation like a fish being carried by a hawk into the atmosphere and then dropped, and I expect that cycle to continue until I die. Famous lines aside, though, Coleridge’s accidental templates here for ecstatic spiritual experience and when to end the movie, so to speak, are both profound and worth the price admission on their own, and there seems to be little of what the Romantics had to teach us that can’t be found lurking around in the great Khan’s ice caves somewhere.

But something I came back to this morning as I was reading it for 50 thousandth time or whatever is its comfort with its own dimensions. I don’t mean word count or rhyme scheme or even origin story. After a century and a half of literary critics “Wowee”-ing us to death about this thing I don’t want to add to the laboratory clamor by putting any of its component parts under the umpteenth microscope. Instead, I just want to point out how refreshing its incompleteness is. Humanity has been staking claims to The Way Things Are since we graduated from our last form of biological gooberhood to this one, and a bit of honest reflection would suggest that the way we worship our various saviors says more about us than it does about them or any potential broader context. Most of humanity’s churches and temples have been built to worship otherworldly stability while the rest of our lives are spent attempting to resist the permanent fluctuation of the planet we do our thing on. That misalignment is some parts sad, some parts hilarious, and some parts profound, and works of art like Kubla Khan seem to me to provide a certain amount of self-awareness and grounding in the midst of our own metaphysical hoopla. It would be untrue, I think, to say that we experience nothing strange, and it would also be untrue to say that we know exactly what we see or understand exactly what it means. What Coleridge details here is a road to Damascus moment without the post-trip bitchiness, offering up a shoulder-shrug-ish “welp that was weird” alternative medicine to the over-the-counter drug of conventional doctrine that we’ve been hooked on for some time. Which is to say, he shows us that it’s OK to admit that sometimes a sunless sea is just a sunless sea.

If you feel like cliff diving into some longform on the emphasis on human limitation in the midst of transcendent experience in Romantic poetry I would suggest starting with Cassandra Falke’s essay Saturated Landscapes: Sublime and Saturated Phenomena in “Kubla Kahn” and The Arab Dream. It’s a good jumping off point for modern French phenomenology and deeper schleps into the interior of Coleridge’s work. If you want to refresh your memory on why the poem itself bangs, you can find it here on Poetry Foundation. Happy Friday.