Troy McNaughtonIf Coleridge were a coffee connoisseur...
August 26th 2006 05:04
Nothing pulls you out of pointless, indulgent, wallowing self-pity like reading about someone else's. Poor Samuel T. Coleridge was a chronic whinger, and frankly he inspires me to cut the crap. Don't get me wrong, there are glimmers of poetic genius - but there would have to be in a lifetime of deluded grandeur and lyrical waxings.
Mr C also inspires me to get on with it. The perfect procrastinator, he scribbled his musings in notebooks, often unintelligible, full of slashes and dashes and squiggles, and left so much unperfected, unpublished. A mere germ of an idea here, a few lines of philosophical fantasy there. For a prolific writer, he rarely produced finished products.
And here am I, deadlines approaching, battling through the life and times of a man who, when he got anything done, was often half-assed about it. Better not to try than to fail, he thought. Better to expound in all manner of informal scrawlings (letters, marginalia, scribbles on his own works, scraps of paper) than finish a poem anyone could assume was a measure of his potential and have it criticised.
So maybe I won't put my heart and soul into this paper. Who wants to know what they're capable of, when instead they could walk the earth with the quiet smugness of unlimited potential?
Instead, perhaps, I will wander the streets of Sydney drinking cappuccinos with whoever cares to join me and letting the caffeinated energy evaporate into the air like heat from the cup - wasted, irretrievable potential.
Coffee gets cold by itself, but it doesn't get hot by itself.
Mr C also inspires me to get on with it. The perfect procrastinator, he scribbled his musings in notebooks, often unintelligible, full of slashes and dashes and squiggles, and left so much unperfected, unpublished. A mere germ of an idea here, a few lines of philosophical fantasy there. For a prolific writer, he rarely produced finished products.
And here am I, deadlines approaching, battling through the life and times of a man who, when he got anything done, was often half-assed about it. Better not to try than to fail, he thought. Better to expound in all manner of informal scrawlings (letters, marginalia, scribbles on his own works, scraps of paper) than finish a poem anyone could assume was a measure of his potential and have it criticised.
So maybe I won't put my heart and soul into this paper. Who wants to know what they're capable of, when instead they could walk the earth with the quiet smugness of unlimited potential?
Instead, perhaps, I will wander the streets of Sydney drinking cappuccinos with whoever cares to join me and letting the caffeinated energy evaporate into the air like heat from the cup - wasted, irretrievable potential.
Coffee gets cold by itself, but it doesn't get hot by itself.
"This is your life. And it's ending one minute at a time." -- Fight Club.
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Optomystic Opportunism
Just like to say to you guys that which some may have noticed - Coleridge spent more time chasing the dragon than the pen.
Check out the book "Writing on Drugs" by Sadie Plant for more info