Pandaemonium

Ah well - Julien Temple's movie about Coleridge and Wordsworth was on the tv, and I have video'd it, although I only got to watch a little. Spring is in the air, and love and delirium hold sway.

For those of you who don't know the immediate connection, Coleridge spent some time in the Somerset village where I have spent some of my happiest hours. I still visit there, I have lived there.

My friend Mick had some delirious times writing there, when we lived in the same house. We always had a soft spot for Sam Coleridge, even though I can't honestly say I could quote him much.
"Here's Julien Temple in an interview: "Coleridge was exploring the territory of the mind a hundred years before Freud. He took amazing leaps. He was much more than just the first junky of letters, he was a very modern thinker. And a lot of the concepts that are key to our world were his concepts. Psychosomatic is his word, the suspension of disbelief is his phrase, for example."
The best I could say is that he feels like a real person - and the gap between the 18th Century and the 20th Century seemed to disappear...so seeing Julien portraying Coleridge having flash-forwards (to Hinckley Point power station and oil-slicked seabirds) as Mick and I then had flashes backwards seems completely appropriate to me.

Perhaps it's time to break out a new molecule - what have you got? Salvia Divinorum? Somewhere I have the quote to show that Coleridge wasn't just into exotic Opium - I'll dig it out for you - meanwhile - to lovers everywhere - peace and passion - reason is not everything - being sensible isn't all it's cracked up to be....Sam also used to take hemp for his rheumatism.....(medicinal uses in the 18th Century)

And men who feel things too much, and get emotional and crazy, like the Romantic Poets, may appear to be just self-indulgent, self-pitying 'pillocks' to our brisk, hard, present sensibility, but I wouldn't trade my inner self for anyone else's:

People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within.
I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.
She was born in spring, but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

Simple Twist of Fate Bob Dylan

Copyright © 1974 Ram's Horn Music