Neurotexting the Sublime

Neurotexting Coleridge’s Sublime

by Allie Schulz

This half creative and half literary paper is about four things- our general

conceptualization of the Sublime how philosophers similar to Coleridge have talked

about the Sublime, how Coleridge defined the Sublime and how he evokes Sublime states

through his poetry. In part about the Sublime, in part about Coleridge, with a connecting

theme of theory of mind as it relates to the Sublime abilities of poetry and philosophy.

The Sublime: The mind-body pursuit of Awe

When I was young I lived in Colorado where we had a bay window that overlooked the

Rocky Mountains. Feelings of awe would strike me every time I looked out on that grand

view. Even today I can recall the way I stared at the little details, all the while taking in

the whole. Each trip I make home to the Rockies brings me back into a Sublime state,

that sense of childlike wonder which can overtake the senses and the mind in full.

Copper Mountain, Colorado. Summer 2013. Photo by Author.

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The Sublime has potential to take any number of forms: a feeling one gets during an art

or a craft, the energy in a crowd during a game or a sport, or even an interaction with a

celebrity. As we consider how we think about the Sublime we uncover several interesting

questions about our minds and our views on the very concept of being. Investigating the

multivariate term and we find a connecting thread, something you or I would see as being

awestruck, feeling part of some greater, higher perspective. So a study of the Sublime

becomes a study of perception of the self in connection with whatever it is we perceive as

worthy of Awe. In looking over the Oxford English Dictionary definitions…

• Of language, style, or a literary work: expressing noble ideas in a grand and

elevated manner.  

• Belonging to or designating the highest sphere of thought, existence, or human

activity; intellectually or spiritually elevated.

• Of a person, personal attribute, action, etc.: morally, intellectually, or spiritually

superior; of great nobility or grandeur.

• Of a feature of nature or art: that fills the mind with a sense of overwhelming

grandeur or irresistible power; that inspires awe, great reverence, or other high

emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur.

…we find that words like reverence… vastness… power… awe… all suggesting the idea

that we are apart of something ‘more’. And what Coleridge saw in the ‘more’ was outside

of the traditional Religious realm of a formal God or Gods, but about a being we are a

part of, a fabric we are made of. Though he continued to believe in God and the Church

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he also spoke of something else, encompassing us all, something that scholars are now

arguing could be conceptualized as the Sublime. (Coleridge and the Sublime)

This attitude becomes apparent in his poem, The Pains of Sleep:

A sense o'er all my soul imprest

That I am weak, yet not unblest,

Since in me, round me, every where

Eternal strength and Wisdom are.

By painting a picture of himself feeling ‘weak, yet not unblest’ he reiterates that feeling

he has of something ‘greater.’ He sees it as all encompassing-- ‘in me, round me’. And in

the end, he is talking about the creative force within and outside of all of us. Declaring,

“The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all

human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creating in

the infinite I AM.” (Biographia Literaria, XIII) He theorizes that the imagination is an

infinite force that we are a part of, much like the painting below, which shows the

imagination kind of both uncovering and coloring in this beautiful array.

Use Your Imagination. Digital Art by DeviantArt user Arigulla.  

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Imagination and Thought

Historical viewpoints

Interestingly enough it is precisely because of the concept of self that we have the

concept of the Sublime- the bigger, the other, and not the other person, but the other…

consciousness? Whether or not the “other” exists in any sort of actually reality-- a God,

Gods, a cosmic consciousness-- humans have generally believed in the existence of this

alternate space for thousands of years. We have all imagined it in vastly different ways,

but the important thing is that we have imagined it. Coleridge writes:  

“Now the third pronoun could never have been contra-distinguished from the first

but by means of the second: no He without a previous Thou—and of course, no I

without a previous Thou.” (Essay on Faith)  

This paradox of subjective experience has been keeping our great thinkers busy for

centuries. The Eastern philosopher Chuang Tzu was pondering a similar thread in 300

BCE. In Wandering on the Way he writes, “If there were no ‘other’ there would be no ‘I’.

If there were no ‘I’ there would be nothing to apprehend the ‘other.’” (13) Although not

something we will soon get to the bottom of, this doesn’t mean we cannot praise what we

do think this great power might be. Coleridge does just that, in The Aeolian Harp:

O! The one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where—  He says “O!” like he greatly reveres what he is talking about or talking to. He shows that

he believes we are united with some other life (one Life) even while acknowledging the

dual perspectives (within us and abroad). He speaks of a fabric (all motion) with a great

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energy (its soul). I would argue that he basically describes the concept of the Sublime,

our way of thinking of how we can potentially join some other, bigger state of being.  

Alex Grey also meditates on cosmic perspectives in his painting Theologue: The Union of Human

and Divine Consciousness Weaving the Fabric of Space and Time in which the Self and its

Surroundings are Embedded.

Separation from Symbol  

Think of that ungrounded position, away from the ego; just sit and try and view the world

from that different ‘spatial’ viewpoint. The one that Sartre, in Being and Nothingness,

says “flees from me.” Not easy, right? The theorist Ricoeur says that this process is

difficult because we have, “a ‘double dependence of the self on the [symbolic images of

the] unconscious and the sacred” and so “reflection must include an archaeology and an

eschatology.” (Poetics of Imagining 156) Meaning, because we usually think in symbols,

we cannot stop thinking and understand what we are experiencing in any way that we

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could then understand symbolically- yet this is precisely what we have to do (or get to

do) when entering into a Sublime state.  

Poetic Mindfulness  

An early writer on the aesthetics of the Sublime theorizes, “A lofty passage does not

convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself.” (On the Sublime: I, 4)

Funny how we even call the mind a place. We say things like, “at the back of my mind,”

“put it out of mind,” and the ever so ironic “you are out of your mind.” The mind is not

necessarily a physical structure, bound in the way the rest of our bodies are. The truth is

that we don’t how we stay attached to our consciousness, the part of us that gives us

subjective experience. However, what we do know is that by engaging the imagination,

we can disengage from some of the rest of our senses or faculties and learn about minds

from a new perspective. It seems that hearing a poem requires the focus to direct towards

the faculty of imagining, and so that detachment is actually what helps one to best

interact with the work. Poises is the official term, describing how “narrative fosters

wisdom by encouraging us to sympathize with the characters of imitated and plotted

action while simultaneously provoking a critical attitude of withdrawl … a paradoxical

attitude or empathic detachment.” (Poetics of Imagining 243)  

Echoes and Mirrors  

Why all this focus on the self, but the need for a reflection, for leaving the self- and not

just looking inwards and asking directly? A great man- the activist Eddy Lepp- once told

me to look in the mirror, really look at myself for a long time, and that was how I could

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know if something I was doing was just. I hear his words often, and practice the mirror

technique- especially during yoga where I am in a deeply meditative state- and realize his

idea aptly applies here; increasing the complexity of a topic such as our self and we have

to deflect. On this subject, Coleridge writes, “All true reality has both its ground and its

evidence in the will, without which as its complement science itself is but an elaborate

game of shadows, begins in abstractions and ends in perplexity.” (Complete Works 469)

In other words, we cannot know existence from our own perspective. He continues, “For

considered merely intellectually, individuality, as individuality, is only conceivable as

with and in the Universal and the Infinite, neither before nor after it.” (Complete Works

469) The argument is that we have to uncover the buried symbol of the self by viewing it

in a reflection, and only then can we have a method of applying the imagination to our

psyche. I see this as having to switch from watch to watchmaker in order to act on the

inner workings of our machinery.

The tinkering sounds of the faceless clocks transfigured into the fluid animation of gears and robotics— each part progressing ever further into the realm of majestic function. The crinkles and folds of skin became deeper and stronger, as the watchmaker, for the first time in years became animated. “It worked,” he said, as the beads of joy flowed down his cheeks, soaring through the air as they broke upon the finely detailed etches and sketches of his imagination. –Illustration and Prose by Nam Tran, stylized by Author (with permission)

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Bringing New Perspectives, Rescuing Truths  

Like the above snippet, poetry works on the imagination specifically well in that it does

not use language in any other way than to get you to imagine a scene. As the theorist

Ricoeur puts it, poetry works at “disclosing the symbolic function of the image per se in

its nascent state.” (Poetics of Imagining 152) In other words, poetry produces clear and

vivid imagery, like listening to a poem or meditating, going on a mental journey. It is an

active engagement of the mental processes in or of the imagination. Whereas with a book

you have erased imperatives and delayed gratification, with a poem you basically have a

sort of mind-movie playing, wooing you in the most direct sense. Ricoeur says that

poetry “holds sense and image together in an intuitive manner” and can “bring conceptual

meaning to intuitive fullness” (Poetics of Imagining 159). Intuitive, meaning innate or

instinctive, without reasoning… Fullness: that adding dimension idea. In the poem

Apologia Pro Vita Sua Coleridge reflects on this very role:  

The poet in his lone yet genial hour Gives to his eyes a magnifying power Or rather he emancipates his eyes From the black shapeless accidents of size In unctuous cones of kindling coal, Or smoke up wreathing from the pipe's trim bole His gifted ken can see Phantoms of sublimity. Since poetry has the potential to magnify the delights of both the mind and the body, this

dual role becomes a key in the total engagement of the listener. Coleridge’s work

suggests the aptness of using poetry to investigate the lofty concepts that require such

engagement. He works to bring complexity of life to the forefront of the mind. Believing

strongly in this power of poetry and philosophy, and seeing their potential for bringing

new perspective and adding dimension to concepts he writes, “In poems, equally as in

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philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it

rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of

their universal admission.” (Literaria Biographia 105).

It's all really there, but you have to stop and think about it. About the complexity to really get the pleasure, and it's all

really there. The inconceivable nature of nature. -Richard Feynman, Scientist

Coleridge’s Truths: Imagination, Reason, and Awe

Coleridge bridges the concepts of spirituality and reason, saying “The understanding of

the brutes has only organs of the outward sense, and consequently material objects only;

but man’s understanding has likewise an organ of inward sense, and therefore has the

power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or spiritual objects. This organ is his

reason.” (Complete Works 145) In the way that we can think about infinity, about

nothingness, about God… Coleridge believes we have the ability to reason on these

‘invisible realities or spiritual objects,’ even saying, “God, the soul, eternal truth are the

objects of reason; but they are themselves reason…” (Complete Works 144-145)

Basically saying that through the imagination, we can feel reason, and discover what is

just. “Imagining otherwise lies at the root of the two main principles of human value-

freedom and solidarity.” (Poetics of Imagining 233) This is due to the idea that “the

receptive power of imagination lies at the very root of our moral capacity to respect the

otherness of the other person, to treat the other as an end rather than a means, to

empathize.” (Poetics of Imagining 232)

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Coleridge uses poetry and prose to offer up his own theories about reason, the

imagination, and the Sublime. In poems like “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” he

considers the ways that we think about the imagination in relation to the mind. As he gets

a Sublime pleasure from imagining that his friend is also experiencing a pleasure he

himself has enjoyed on many occasions, he explores the Sublime from the perspective of

reason. In other poems, Coleridge explores the pleasure of Awe, stylistically demanding a

state of resolved listening (Secret(ing) Conversations 68). By alluding to the way we

position ourselves in great reverence, and describing the way our perceptions and our

imaginations work he goes meta- with the purpose of getting the listener to fantasize, to

actively imagine what the poem is describing, and not as a means to an end, but as the

end in and of itself. This could be called enacting “the image-ing function of language”

(Poetics of Imagining 159). Where language transcends symbols and works in an image

like way. This will help the message to reach the minds eye. Put in another way, “poetry

has an intimate relation to thought, but in its shaped verbal form it cannot simply become

thought; it will often offer more than can be thought” (Poetry and Directions for Thought

468).

The first miracle brought about by mindfulness is your own presence,

your real presence… where mindfulness is, true life, solidity, freedom,

and healing also manifest. -Thich Nhat Hanh

A Theory-of-Mind Reading  

In order to tie all of the above with the final section of my paper, I am going to try and

look into more specific ways in which Coleridge pushes us to consider theory of mind

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concepts like subjective experience, like the senses and the emotions, the imagination and

the soul…  

First- Imagining the Imagination  

Coleridge’s poem, Frost at Midnight, arguably about the imaginative processes, starts off

by describing a force, a secret ministry, and continues:  

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought.  In the first two lines he argues that although we can’t translate it into reasonable form, the

imagination is like a flame that is always lit. In the last three lines he concludes that not

only does it have a will of its own (‘by its own moods interprets’) but also that it can

potentially affect any part of our minds (‘every where’). In using this word ‘seeking’ he

makes it seem like the imagination is active, a mirror hoping to play in or with the

reflections of one’s thoughts.  

Second- Meditation and Conversation

Though Coleridge called many of his poems “conversational” there has been some links

to 17th century “meditation poems” which were structured in the following way:

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[In section one] the poet uses his memory to reconstruct a scene… he relies on imagination to create a life-like setting for fantasized events.

The analysis [section two] of the meditation demonstrates the rational soul

of the poet and his ability to use his cognitive faculty… the poet uses his reasoning abilities to analyze the significance of his earlier sensory experience… [one of its purposes] is to induce the acquisitive power of the human soul, the will, to hold firmly to the principle of goodness as it is understood by reason.

The concluding section of the meditative poem, the colloquy, is usually a

petition directed to God, to Christ, to the soul or to a loved one. It expresses the actions of the will in its attempt to embrace that which is good. (Coleridge, Nature, and the Conversation Poems 627-628)

Coleridge seemed to use this structure in order to best apply his work to both the greater

spirit and to his examination of the imagination. (ibid 628) A perfect example of a poem

that follows this meditation structure is Frost At Midnight. The poem is in three parts. In

part one he sets up a scene- a frost in the night, a secret ministry- quite possibly the

imagination. Delving into his own thoughts on the subject in part two he writes,

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form

 And finally, in part three we find his ode to someone or something- in this case, his son.  

Coleridge had a deep wish for his son, who he hoped would learn to “ask.” He hopes that

raising him in such a wild and natural environment, full of awesome sights, will help him

to develop that ability to meditate, to reflect on that ‘nature of nature.’  

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.

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Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.  We can see that Coleridge has interchanged many traditional/canonical terms for other,

more simplistic vocabulary from outside of the religious structure. He switches between

“God” and “universal Teacher.” He also ponders an ‘eternal language’ which implies an

overarching way of being able to describe being-- not a human language but something

‘other.’ Giving us one final way of thinking about how we think about that higher, other

being, he uses the phrase, “Himself in all, and all things in himself,” reminding us of the

Sublime aspect of nature, God, the soul…  

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

-The Aeolian Harp  

Skylight Bookstore, Los Angeles.  Winter 2013.  Photo by Author.    

Third- active enjoyment  

Coleridge often uses Alliteration to add musicality to his poetry. He also employs

Enjambment, or the cutting off of lines at certain irregular and jarring places. Read the

above poem aloud. The enjambment technique varies the cadence of his rhythm; ensuring

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listeners stay actively engaged with the work. His Metaphor use is twofold: he uses

metaphor as both the medium and the message. He gets you to use metaphor to get us

thinking about the metaphors of the mind. For example, the metaphor of the imagination

as a chasm he uses in the Kubla-Kahn piece. Coleridge also plays with the foundations of

poetry, he “imitates meters from Homer, Catullus, and Ovid; he tries out Pindaric odes,

Popean or Akensidean epistles, and sonnets, showing how poets exercised their prodosic

muscles.” (Coleridge and the Pleasures of Verse) He was creative, but never afraid to

stand on the shoulders of giants.  

Conclusion  

Coleridge writes in just the style that brings a listening to the state of the Sublime, and the

literary conversation on the Sublime nature of philosophy and poetry has been greatly

enhanced by his work.

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Works Cited:

Kearney, Richard. “Poetics of Imagining.” Fordha University Press, New York. 1998.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Essay on Faith. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Literaria Biographia. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and Marsh, James. Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2. Harper & Brothers, 1871. Eileen John. "Poetry and Directions for Thought." Philosophy and Literature 37, no. 2 (2013): 451-471. Gaskins, Avery F. “Coleridge: Nature, the conversation poems and the structure of meditation.” Neophilologus. October 1975, Volume 59, Issue 4, pp 627-635 Larkin, Peter. "Coleridge Conversing: Between Soliloquy And Invocation." Wordsworth Circle 38.3 (2007): 113-117. Lawder, Peter. "Secret(ing) Conversations: Coleridge and Wordsworth." New Literary History, Vol. 32, No. 1, Views and Interviews (Winter, 2001), pp. 67-89. Longinus. "On The Sublime." Translated Into English By H. L. Havell. Macmillan And Co. New York 1890. Stelzer, Skaidrite D. Coleridge and the Sublime: A True Language (Aesthetics). Kent State University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 1985. Taylor, Anya. "Coleridge and the Pleasures of Verse." Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 547-569. Zhuangzi. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. University of Hawaii Press, 1998