Dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I am in no doubt that the creative story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s composition of Kubla Khan had some general influence on my subconscious, for I was aware of this story, having encountered it in my early teens, and yet it now found itself reflected in a similar personal experience. In my mid-thirties, on a mid-October morning during a workweek, I was encumbered by a vivid dream from which I was shaken awake by my two dogs, Skye and Curly, who wanted to go out to attend to their morning needs. I tried to recollect as much as I could once I had finished attending to them, but much of the dream’s vividness, language, and vision had already escaped my conscious memory and entered the realm of oblivion. What remains are but fragments of the power and beauty of such a poem, of which this account is but a distant, watered-down version.
During this dream, I found myself in conversation with the poet, a professor, in what appeared to be a lecture hall. A stranger approached the desk and handed me a piece of paper, as if submitting a homework assignment or an examination that I seemed to be grading on behalf of the poet, the professor. At this point, the poet asked the stranger to describe his submission, to which he responded with the most eloquent and poetic verse I have ever heard. The poet then remarked, in turn, that it was the most beautiful and sublime piece of verse he had ever heard. Unfortunately, much to my frustration and to my dismay as the one tasked with communicating this experience, I do not fully remember, nor can I wholly grasp in detail, what was said. I remember only fragments and strings of melodies and phrases that somehow reverberate with the poem’s beauty and complexity.
The title of this piece comes from the most vivid and reverberating word of the poem. For some reason, this word kept reverberating as if through an infinite tunnel, accompanied by visions of wanderers at sea who would eventually land upon the foamy waves of a clear, sandy beach that marked their destination. The poem itself, however, was accompanied by visions that unfolded with everything that was said, building to a crescendo of feeling that reached its zenith in the aftereffects it left on the mind. Rather than being immediate, the full force and influence of the poem’s meaning and musicality took more than two seconds to fully develop. This was demonstrated in the dream by the poet, who opened his eyes wide only after a few seconds of silence and then declared that it had been one of the most beautiful verses he had ever heard.
Poem
What is a thing but its relational composition in the vastness of being?
Are we to say that being and thing are the same by the object or unit of relation, or by virtue of the dynamic state of becoming, as wayfarers of mystery and finitude?
What is not a thing but a non-being whose limit exists beyond that which is itself limited, and yet above and beyond the limited?
Are we not that which itself is and is not to be, and has been at some point, as a distant memory or remembrance in the grid of existence?
Are we to say that, like waves crashing upon the sand of the beach where you ponder the point in your life at which you, and your kin, have encountered the other, and, in so doing, encountered yourself in full definition, for we have then lost all direction, but gained infinitude?