Toad-imp whispers

26 April 1826. Wednesday Night. This Morning a little before three suffered one of my most grievous and alarming <Scream->Dreams—and on at length struggling myself awake found just such a focus of Ferment just above the Navel as if the Dæmon of Aqua Fortis had just closed in with the Genie Magnesia, or as if a Chocolate Mill were making a Water-spout dance a reel in dizzy-frisk.—It is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me in so many other points—viz. that I shall die in sleep […]
    Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers. 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 

* There are spirits that are not yet conjoined with Hell: they love things undigested and malignant such as befouled victuals in the belly.

Privy matters (4)

Quænam in mundo admiranda?

 

Resp. Quod omnes cornices sint nigræ; quod ratti æque cito currant ac mures; quod canes ossa arrodant et duglutiant; quod rusticus armaturam induat, galeam capiti imponat, hastam arripiat ad defendendum pullos gallinaceos, cum singulis diebus tam diligenter observentur a vulpium orphanis. Mirabile quod feles nequam post cœnam, densis existentibus tenebris, sine lumine, sine gladio, sine pileo, nudis auribus pedibusque, absque crepidis calopodiisque audeant aggredi ingentem exercitum honestorum murium et glirium. Mirabilius quod hiems nunquam ita caleat sicuti æstas; uti legitur apud Quinquarillam,* sine perspicillo† in libro per omnia albo, in illis verbis pata, pata, pon.§ Mirabilissimum omnes fœminas hoc vitio laborare, ut per unum idemque foramen mingant et cacent, cum (scilicet) latrinæ podicem obverterint.

 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant Neminem; sed tamen Ubique. 

What things in the world are to be marvelled at?

Answer. That all crows are black; that rats run as fast as mice; that dogs gnaw and suck bones; that the peasant dons armour, puts a helmet on his bonce, lays hold of a spear to defend his hens’ chicks, as noted by orphaned fox cubs every day. It is a marvel that rascally cats, emerging in post-prandial pitch darkness, without a light, without a sword, without a cap, their ears and feet bare, dispensing with sandals and clogs, dare to attack the vast army of noble mice and dormice. More marvellous still is that winter is never as hot as summer, as may be read in the Quinquarilla, without eyeglasses, a book completely blank, worded tappity-tappity-tap. Most marvellous of all is that all women labour under the fault that they micturate and defecate through the same orifice, as is obvious from the fact that in both cases they turn their rump to the privy .

* Quinquarilla (fem. sing.) - ‘Five-Basket’, a hapax legomenon, derived from quasillum, the diminutive of qualus ‘wicker basket’, and perhaps with an echo of Quinquatria (neut. pl.), a Roman festival of Minerva thus named, according to Varro, because it began five days after the Ides of March. The anonymous author of the Nugae Venales (first published in 1632), a work steeped in the Latin-speaking student (sub)culture of the German universities, here provides an inventive translation of the phrase ‘the first Shrove Tuedsay basket’, found in Bruscambille’s ‘Autre prologue & discours’ (Fantaisies, 1612): ‘Comme li se lit sans lunettes au premier pannier de Mardy gras en ces mots pata, pata, pon.’ On borrowings from Bruscambille in the Nugae Venales, see: Annette Tomarken, ‘Borrowed Nonsense: The Nugae Venales and the Prologues of Bruscambille’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, Vol. 64 (2015).

† perspicillus - the word for telescope used by Galileo in the Sidereus Nuncius (1610) and which in subsequent early modern texts was also used in the sense of ‘eyeglasses’.

§ pata, pata, pon - onomatopoeic. ‘Mot inventé pour exprimer le bruit d’un tambour’: Philibert-Joseph le Roux, Dictionnaire Comique, Satyrique, Critique, Burlesque, Libre et Proverbial. Avec une Explication très-fidèle de toutes les manières de parler Burlesques, Comiques, Libres, Satyriques, Critiques & Proverbiales, qui peuvent se rencontrer dans les meilleurs Auteurs, tant Anciens que Modernes. Le Tout Pour faciliter aux Etrangers, & aux François mêmes, l’intelligence de toutes sortes de Livres (Lyon, 1735).

Privy matters (1)

 

Privy matters (2) 

Privy matters (3)

Une maison onirique

La poésie, dans sa grande fonction, nous redonne les situations du songe. La maison natale est plus qu'un corps de logis, elle est un corps de songes. Chacun de ses réduits fut un gîte de rêverie. Et le gîte a souvent particularisé la rêverie. Nous y avons pris des habitudes de rêverie particuliere. La maison, la chambre, le grenier où l'on été seul, donnent les cadres d'une rêverie interminable, d'une rêverie que la poésie pourrait seule, par une œuvre, achever, accomplir. Si l'on donne à toutes ces retraites leur fonction qui fut d'arbitrer des songes, on peut dire [...] qu'il existe pour chacun de nous une maison onirique, une maison du souvenir-songe, perdue dans l'ombre d'un au-delà du passé vrai. 

Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l'espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957

The great function of poetry is to restore to us the situations of the dream. The house of our birth is more than an embodiment of home, it is an embodiment of dreams. Its every corner was a refuge for reverie. And often the refuge placed its distinguishing mark on the reverie. It was here that we acquired the habits of distinctive reverie. The house, the bedroom, the attic where we were alone furnished the frameworks of endless reverie, of a reverie that only poetry, through a poetic work, would otherwise be able to accomplish, to attain. If we grant to all these refuges their function of having arbitrated dreams, we may say that there exists for each of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, lost in the shadow of an otherworld of the real past.

Quis nasus est optimus?

Quis nasus est optimus?

R. Magnus. Vide catalogum Imperatorum Romanorum, omnes fuerunt nasuti. Numa secundus rex Romanorum sesquipedalem nasum habebat, ideoque nominatus fuit Pompilius, quasi dicas, nasus in superlativo gradu. Lycurgus et Solon habebant insignem nasum, si fides sit adhibenda Plutarcho. Summa omnes reges Italiae fuerunt nasuti, excepto Tarquinio superbo, qui ideo etiam urbe et regno pulsus fuit. Quisque apprehendat nasum suum, et videat, num possit fieri Imperator. Qui habent magnum nasum cæteris sapientiores sunt, et melius exercent animi functiones, quia melius excrementa exeunt. Unde Homerus quia era sapiens nasutus dicitur. Et proverbio illi dicuntur prudentes qui e longinquo odorantur, et de stupido dicitur, non habet nasum. 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant Neminem; sed tamen Ubique.

Which nose is best?

Answer. Big. See the list of Roman Emperors: all had big noses.* Numa, the second king of the Romans, had a one-and-a-half-foot nose, on which account he was named Pompilius,† as if to say 'nose in the superlative degree'. Lycurgus and Solon had prominent noses, if that which Plutarch reports is reliable. In the main, all the kings of Italy were big-nosed, with the exception of Tarquin the Proud, who for that very reason was expelled from the city and kingdom. Whoever can grasp his own nose in his hand, whoever can see the end of his own nose, might be made Emperor. Those who have big noses are wiser than anybody else and better able to exercise the mental faculties, because they are better able to pass mucus. Whence Homer was said to be big-nosed because he was wise. Also, the intelligent are proverbially those who can smell from afar, whereas it is said that the stupid have no nose. 

 

* Cf. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 7, where, in listing the late-repentant negligent rulers, Sordello dwells on their nasal appendages: Philip III of France is 'quel nasetto', or 'the snub-nosed one' (Purg. 7, 103), Peter III of Aragon is 'colui dal maschio naso', or 'he of the manly nose' (Purg. 7, 113), Peter, son of Charles I of Anjou, is 'nasuto', or 'big-nosed' (Purg. 7, 124).

† Pompilius, the name of a Roman gens, derives from the Greek πομπίλος, the pilot-fish (Gasterosteus ductor), a term sometimes also applied to the nautilus, but here it is humorously taken to derive from the early modern Dutch pompe or Middle Low German pompe, pumpe, a wooden water pipe or ship's pump.

Privy matters (3)

 —then the fantastic puppet-old-man that threw himself in my way and under my feet where ever I went—my intreatng some one to take him away—and a huge bloater fat fellow came & sat on him, saying, there was no other way—I went it—and a villainous little dog contrived to fly at me & bit me, with a sharp nip (the nearest imitation of proper pain, that I have found occur in sleep—Some one of the half-friendly Inhabitants of the Sleep-world observed, that the little old man had contrived to let the dog slip in the moment, the fat fellow sate on him—then the Drama of Puppets—& that I must stay it out before I could go to relieve myself—but I grew angry—& stole away down a hollow lane that led to a river, on the other side of which was a field or plot with a number of rather pretty yet fear-inspiring Child-men, with sheaves, as in a harvest field, of dry exceedingly light <Bean> Halms or the dried out Rushes in a dry summer ditch/ —I was on a sloping hillock or bank of the River—& said to myself—These are Tieck’s Fairies / alluding in my mind to the exquisite tale of the Girl who passed from Childhood to Womanhood among the Fairies & supposed she had been only a few hours / —and then a white-faced Boy came on the left of the harvest field but the other side of the Stream, as if to watch what I was about to do—and as I thought, to bring the natives about me, should I persist in profaning the place by letting down my small clothes— —& in this uneasy feeling I awoke—.. P.S. I had deferred taking my regular quantity of Mustard Seed till the moment, that I was undressing—three hours later than my wont—& in consequence, had to undergo all the process in sleep / But from these dreams (and no week occurs in which I have not one or two; always originating in the Kidneys, or Bladder, or Intestinal Canal) I derive convincing confirmation of the diversity between Reason & Understanding. The latter we retain in Dreams—it is “I” still, & the Understanding belongs to “I”—but Reason is a Loan, a Light.—The memory is lost: for it is objectivity that differences Memory from Fancy—and Objectivity, the offspring of Reason, is by divine ordinance connected with the Senses in our present fallen state—We have not God within; but must look out of ourselves for him.

 

Entry 5641, November 1827,  The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 5: 1827-1834, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding, Routledge, 2002

Untitled

 

An somnus mortis frater sit

As for Sleep, which the dying Philosopher called the Brother of Death,* I do not see how it argues the Soul’s Mortality, more than a man’s inability to wake again: but rather helps us to conceive, how that though the stounds† and agonies of Death seem utterly to take away all the hopes of the Soul’s living after them; yet upon a recovery of a quicker Vehicle of Air, she may suddenly awake into fuller and fresher participation of life than before. But I may answer also, that Sleep being only the ligation‡ of the outward Senses, and the interception of motion from the external world, argues no more any radical defect of Life and Immortality in the Soul, than the having a man’s Sight bounded within the walls of his chamber by Shuts, does argue any blindness in the immured party; who haply is busie reading by candle-light, and that with ease, so small a Print as would trouble an ordinary Sight to read it by day. And that the Soul is not perpetually employ’d in Sleep, is very hard for any to demonstrate; we so often remembring our reams merely by occasions, which, if they had not occurr’d, we had never suspected we had dream’d that night.

Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), Book III, Chap. xiv

* ὁ ὕπνος θανάτου ἀδελφὸς. Aelian, Var. Hist. lib. 2, cap. 35. With reference to pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias Leontinus.

† stound - state of stupefaction or amazement

‡ ligation - condition of being bound, suspension (of the faculties)