Reflections...

...on Coleridge and returning to College.

I was reintroduced to University this week, after a nearly four year hiatus; it's a bit of an anomaly. My hiatus included living in three different states (now four including Louisiana), working as a barista, a nanny, and tutor while attending classes at the local community college. I worked as an administrative assistant at a folk music organization and spent time traveling to Ireland for a a singing workshop, merriment, and blarney of course. Various other 9-5 jobs line my resume, but they all still left me scrambling for rent and food money. It's interesting what desperation does to your sensibilities and spirit. I feel like I developed a fairly "practical" approach to things, and matured my "idealism", sometimes to the chagrin of my creative faculties.

I had forgotten that as an English major, returning to school meant having the exquisite pleasure and luxury of explicating poetry, and delving deeply into the meaning of existence through literature. I can ponder identity and self, creation and truth, beauty and destruction. This right now is actually my job! It's almost perplexing.

Perhaps a few years ago, I was much more apt to get swept up and completely enveloped in these thoughts and exercises, loose myself an idealism of Romantic rhetoric. "What does it all mean?" or "is there any meaning?" become mantras; an insatiable metaphysical hunger for knowledge to quell these questions ensues. I still have that hunger for knowledge, but its different now; that deep quest isn't so demanding. Coming back affords me a different perspective, a critical distance where I am not so easily persuaded away from the terrestrial world. Still I am torn between practicality and poetry; idealism and pragmatism; discovery and experience.

Reading "Kubla Khan" jolted me back into that space of dreams, seeking, and uncertainty. Reminiscent of my underground poetry society at Wittenberg University, Coleridge very aptly elucidates this paradox between two worlds; our imperfect earthly domain, and a world beyond this one, an "imagination rendered through the voice of the poet." Perfect, except a little addiction to opium. This dream world is not tainted by our pain and destruction; it is spiritual, and creative. His distress comes from being interrupted in this memory by obligation, falling away from his feelings of ecstasy, possibility and beauty.

I too feel his distress, as I also feel interrupted in my quest, the quest for the higher self . An illness in my sophomore year of college left a schism in my development of personal philosophy and discovery of self, and I had to return home to get well. Deep depression followed, and my journey of discovery took a different route. I error. Innocence and wonder is a bit more aged now. Its like Coleridge's vision, in trying to remember it, you can never quite fully reclaim it.

Coleridge, I empathize with your bewilderment.

But I am also critical.

For Coleridge and many poets like him, there is that deep and aching desire to live outside of this "practical" world that interrupts our creative and poetic "genius". The ability to even hint in fractions at this ever evading place of beauty and freedom beyond ourselves is what the poet must do. He must be that bridge, and Coleridge would have rather failed--or died-- than to do it imperfectly. But imperfection is all he is ever able to achieve, as "Kubla Khan" only hints in fractions at this world in which he saw. Perhaps fully attaining this world is impossible for humans--even poets-- and we dull our senses striving for that eternal flame that perpetually eludes us. The coal of Coleridge's "poetic genius" burned hot and bright for a short time with nothing to fan the embers, and keep the fire going.

Again I am caught, is he really genius? or just manic and stubborn? I feel the disconnect of the worlds Coleridge describes. I have seen the changes in myself over the past 7 years; from striving for the castle in the sky to loving the earth where my feet are planted. Cradled between a love of literature, rhetoric, and discovering beauty, and being practical, I've questioned the validity and relevance of "Kubla Khan". Its so distant from us, almost unattainable?

I both cherish and detest his somewhat vain and solipsistic quest. We must seek more than this world--yes Coleridge we must stay flexible to the impossible--but we must also be useful in this life, to this world and not absent from it. I too have one foot on the ground and one in the sky, and a fire in my belly to build a bridge, but I do not wish to burn my toes, or float away.

I've concluded, after considering this paradox, that I must learn to be comfortable in contradiction, and the meaning comes in balance. I do not wish to float away to Xanadu, but maybe to bring it closer to home, home being where ever I plant my feet for the time being.