Monday 22 October 2018

Hartley Coleridge: Clockwork Boy



Coleridge's son Hartley was christened 8th November 1803. The run-up to this event clearly preyed, in some small way, on Coleridge's mind, for on the morning of the 28th October 1803 he recorded the following dream in his notebook.
Frid. Morn. 5 oclock—Dosing, dreamt of Hartley as at his Christening—how as he was asked who redeemed him, & was to say, God the Son/he went on, humming and hawing, in one hum & haw, like a boy who knows a thing & will not make the effort to recollect it—so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening «gradually I found I was able compleatly to detect, that» it was the Ticking of my Watch which lay in the Pen Place in my Desk on the round Table close by my Ear, & which in the nervous diseased State of my Nerves had fretted on my Ears—I caught the fact while it Hartley’s Face & moving Lips were yet before my Eyes, & his Hum & Ha, & the Ticking of the Watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of Sleep—that curious modification of Ideas by each other, which is the Element of Bulls.—I arose instantly, & wrote it down—it is now 10 minutes past 5. [Notebooks, 1:1620]
There's something wonderful about this, I think, in part because of its familiarity. It speaks to an experience we have, surely, all had: where sense data from the wideawake world seep into our half- or quarter-conscious dreaming mind. An Irish bull is a ludicrous, incongruent or comically absurd line, designated ‘Irish’ either because of the longstanding and racist belief held by some Englishpeople that the Irish are prone to speaking foolish nonsense, or else because of the Irish MP Sir Boyle Roche, sometimes called ‘the father of the Irish Bull’, who once asked Parliament ‘Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?’ Coleridge was fascinated by ‘bulls’ (there's quite a lot of discussion of them in the Biographia Literaria) And whilst we're on the subject, isn't ‘dosing’ an interesting spelling of the word ‘dozing’ for a man who so notoriously had the habit of dosing himself with a tincture of heroin in alcohol? Not least because, as famously was the case with ‘Kubla Khan’ such dosing often led directly to dozing.

But the heart of this entry is its charmingly steampunk iteration of Hartley as a clockwork boy, his gears whirring hum and ha. Evidently Coleridge's imagination was preoccupied on some level by the difference between a proper human being and a complicated automaton, a Dennettian machine-being of interconnected inputs and reactions, or ‘associations’ and ‘vibrations’, of the sort David Hartley (1705–57) hypothesised was the secret truth of homo sapiens. That same Hartley that Coleridge named his son after. Then again, it's worth stressing that Hartley was no more an ur-Dennettian atheist-materialist than was Coleridge himself. Alhough volume one of Hartley's 1749 Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations elaborated his mechanistic, associationist theory of human existence, volume two was devoted to pious Christian observations, something Hartley considered compatible with the rest of his theory because (in a nutshell) God can do anything. Still, Coleridge did eventually grow out of his Hartleyan affiliation, a spiritual as much as an intellectual evolution he related at some length in the Biographia. What's the problem with this fundamentally mechanistic theory of the human animal? Coleridge thinks something is missing from it, and that the missing thing is precisely: a Christian soul, that very thing that is sacramentally affirmed during baptism.

But hold on a moment. Describing this dream as being about a clockwork boy is me letting my sciencefictional imagination run away with me. If I look at it again I can see it's not at all about that. The boy in the dream is the real, living-breathing Hartley. We can tell that dream-Hartley is not a machine because he manifests precisely those qualities of which a machine is incapable: indolence, or perhaps willed repugnance to command: a boy ‘who knows a thing & will not make the effort to recollect it—so as to irritate me greatly’. Kids, however much we love them, can indeed be irritating; but as Spielberg's Kubrickian project A.I. shows it is in their resistance that they prove themselves actually alive and therefore worthy of love; a perfectly compliant child would be a kind of elaborate toy, and, unlike an actual child, would be liable to being discarded once we'd finished our game—which is what happens to the mecha David in the A.I. movie. Soul means that we can move in ways that an automaton or (Coleridge's own example, from the Biographia, this) a weathercock cannot: by our own volition.

Jonathan Rée notes that ‘Descartes had a special fondness for clockwork’:
He possessed a fine wall-clock of his own. He greatly admired the ornate clock at Strasbourg with its automatic crowing cockerel, and when he explored the hypothesis that ‘the body is nothing but a statue or an earthenware machine’ in his early manuscript On Man, his main conclusion was that human actions are, from a physical point of view, no more mysterious than the workings of an intricate clock. He saw no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ingenuity’. The late treatise on the Passions rests entirely on the assumption that the body is a ‘machine’. Even the truculent hero of the Meditations will emerge from his week of arduous self-examination as a convert to the idea that a healthy human body functions like a ‘well-made clock’. The main point of all this business about clockwork and physiology was to shake up the practice of medicine by suggesting that there is no disease of the human body that cannot be fixed by timely mechanical repair.
Coleridge was no Descartian, and one, little noticed, sense in which that was true is the way he repeatedly conceptualised his own many illnesses, from rheumatic fevers and neuralgic pains, through frequent bouts of constipation (and occasional diarrheoa) up to and including his lifelong addiction to opium, not as malfunctions in the machinery of his body but as diseases of his will. It occurs up again and again in the notebooks—you can see it in the entry above when ‘nervous’ is struck through as STC is writing and replaced by ‘diseased State of my Nerve’. It always carries the same self-lacerating implication: if only I had stronger willpower I wouldn't be ill.

We tend not to think of illness that way nowadays of course, and indeed the pendulum has swung away from diseases of the will even where matters like drug-addiction and alcoholism are concerned. Willpower may be a fine thing, but it on its own deters neither germs nor viruses. But saying so I'm struck by another aspect to the dream STC reports. He dreams his boy (his boy) humming and haing, refusing irritatingly to do what he is told to do—which is, in a nutshell, to sign up to eternal life. Then he wakes to find the humming and haing was the whirring of his watch. The child has become a timepiece, and the metamorphosis has the rightness of a well-chosen poetic image. Because, of course, that's what kids are. In a very large sense that is the point of kids. We have them to supersede us. No worse fate imaginable than our children predeceasing us. This is also a problem, though, and the problem is the brute fact that our children will be living, laughing and drinking wine in the sunshine when we ourselves are cold and dead in the ground. That's both a consumation devoutly to be wished and a profoundly unheimlich Halloween story. A little child is the very rebus of life, but he or she means, amongst other things, that we who are old are dying. The tick and tock of our children's existence measures out our own pilgrimage towards our inevitable deaths. Hum and haw indeed.

9 comments:

  1. I note here, as a kind of PS, the famous story (that Rée also discusses) about Descartes's clockwork child, who was also according to some tellings, his angel-lover:

    “The earliest biography of Descartes revealed that the famous loner had fathered an illegitimate daughter called Francine, who died in 1640 at the age of five. The child was apparently the only creature he ever loved, but by 1700 rumours were appearing in print saying that she was really a machine – ‘an automat that he made for himself with the greatest care’ – and that he carried her with him wherever he went in a special hardwood case. The philosopher’s mysterious luggage with its lavish satin lining naturally aroused suspicions, and one night when he was at sea the ship’s captain stole into his cabin and furtively opened the box. Francine-machine immediately sprang into life and after a struggle the terrified captain manhandled her overboard, convinced she was the work of the devil. From that day on the philosopher looked on the world with a darkened eye. The story of Descartes and his clockwork nymphette was to be improved with frequent retelling, and she was eventually transfigured from mechanical toy to fiery angel. She was ‘infinitely loving and beautiful’, in the words of Anatole France, and offered ‘unions of inconceivable delight’ to the genuine seeker after truth. After being thrown into the sea, according to the Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque , the salamander Francine sped back to the clouds to await her master’s return.”

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  2. Philip Pullman's take on these themes in his Clockwork is one of the most wonderful things he has written, I think.

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  3. Also, and rather randomly: “Man is a meer piece of Mechanism, a curious Frame of Clock-Work, and only a Reasoning Engine. I must remind my adversary, that Man is such a curious piece of Mechanism, as shews only an Almighty Power could be the first and sole Artificer, viz., to make a Reasoning Engine out of dead matter*, a Lump of Insensible Earth to live, to be able to Discourse, to pry and search into the very nature of Heaven and Earth.” — William Coward (1702)

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    1. That's fascinating; and I don't know William Coward at all [pauses for a moment to check Wikipedia] I am of course a William Coward expert of longstanding.

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    2. Clockwork is a Pullman title I've never read, but certainly will if you recommend it.

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    4. Oh by all means read Clockwork. It'll take you half an hour if you savor every page. It's a set of old themes handled with perfect assurance and style.

      I learned about Coward in Jessica Riskin's marvelous book The Restless Clock, which is probably in the top ten of Books I Desperately Wish I Had Written.

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    5. _Clockwork_ vaut however long a détour it takes. It's a shame Pullman's writing big thin books now, instead of little dense ones.

      Mention of early Pullman - and of the double-sided joys of parenthood - also recalls the distant Sunday morning when I read _'I was a rat'_ aloud, cover to cover, to my children and wife. I don't think I've ever been happier, before or since. Hum, haw.

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    6. I hear you, Phil, and it's my whole bigthing point: it's those blue remembered hills that the tock tock of raising kids marches you over and then, forever, away from.

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