IN X ANADU....IT'S...COMPLICATED.
"Life should not be lived
in black and white...
...but, in colour!"
Coleridge thinks.
"Man should not believe in
'No-can-do"
but in 'Yes...
we can!'
Even a legless man can
dance the Can-Can
with the uppermost part
of his body and
dancing with imaginary
legs!"
Sammy( sometimes he )
displaces himself into
the third person
decanting the fine wine of the mind.
"Naw...scrub that line
don't know where in hell I was
going with it.
Gawd! This laudanum is strong!"
And so, he sits, sips and pens
in a vision or a trance if you like
a dream of future-time
where people can be made
into paper replicas
of themselves.
The "picture-graph"
he calls it
for want
of a better word.
And now he pushes the boat out
pictures that can talk and walk
so that even the dead
will flicker for a second
back into the life
they had.
A world going to ***
and other such drugs.
Machines that can take your voice
and fling it over to...say...Japan
and back and forth
again.
The world shrunk to your hand
" a miracle of rare device."
Just think!
Think of it man!
Or to be Blake-an about it:
"What is now proved was once, only imagin'd."
"I have a dream..." the poet proclaims
beginning to sound like a speechwriter
"...that one day man
may fly...sitting down in the sky!"
Oh I'm really getting going now!
Laughs at his mind's daring derring-do!
Gawd....this laudanum is strong!
And that one day facebook(sic)
will come to be.
"...things unfathomable to man!"
These the dark caverns of the mind.
Cute cat videos...selfies
whatever!
"Look here is a picture
of my dinner!"
Relationships: It's...
...complicated.
He crosses out "unfathomable"
writes "immeasurable" above it.
"...miracles of rare device..."
So good I've said it twice.
Such "...mingled measures..."
will life be really so?
Suddenly a 'ping" or some
such thing!
A message request from
Kubla ****** Khan.
Now one is being poked
by some bloke
an Alf
from Porlock it would appear.
Good Gawd is that really his
Profile Pic...he looks sick.
Claims to be a Jehovah's Witness
and can he come 'round and
have I found
Jesus?
Jaysus no! Delete...delete!
This facebook is
"...a savage place...
as e're beneath a waning moon
was haunted..."
Bit flowery that but
it will have to do.
Now **** it all to hell
where ****** was I?
And now...now...this very now
a poem put upon my timeline.
My timeline's mine!
Yet another poem by some
"woman wailing for her demon lover."
Is it my imagination or
are there more demon lovers around
than this time
last summer?
Humming some **** tune
by that Olivia Newton John.
An annoying earworm.
Ada Lovelace
wants to be my friend
even though she isn't
even born.
Oh get a life!
Do I 'heart' Byron"
"Wot...that ***!"
Describing her mindset as 'poetical
science."
Goes on and on
about an analytical machine
and how individual and society
relate to technology
as a collaborative
tool.
She makes me feel
a fool.
I deign to
decline.
This stately "pleasure dome"
device is not for me.
I delete my future
account and listen
to the dear birds
( alas no albatross )
in my lime tree bower
as they twitter.
Make myself a cup of tea.
No sugar.
Constipation is
killing me.
Eat an egg out of a tea cup.
A fat slice of ham.
Gawd! This laudanum is strong!
I do not like things
"...flung up momently..."
"I close my eyes with
holy dread and cry
Beware! Beware!"
Have... God...
**** run out of laudanum!
And so set out
for Porlock
avoiding Alf
if I can.
Kubla Khan
BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Oh that naughty Lord Byron making such an *** of Sam!
Shall gentle COLERIDGE pass unnoticed here,
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?
Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
Yet still Obscurity's a welcome guest.
If Inspiration should her aid refuse
To him who takes a Pixy for a muse,
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to elegize an ***:
So well the subject suits his noble mind,
He brays, the Laureate of the long-eared kind.
***
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was born Augusta Ada Byron, the only legitimate child of Annabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Her mother, Lady Byron, had mathematical training (Byron called her his 'Princess of Parallelograms') and insisted that Ada, who was tutored privately, study mathematics too - an unusual education for a woman.
Ada met Babbage at a party in 1833 when she was seventeen and was entranced when Babbage demonstrated the small working section of the Engine to her. She intermitted her mathematical studies for marriage and motherhood but resumed when domestic duties allowed. In 1843 she published a translation from the French of an article on the Analytical Engine by an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, to which Ada added extensive notes of her own. The Notes included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer'. The collaboration with Babbage was close and biographers debate the extent and originality of Ada's contribution.
Perhaps more importantly, the article contained statements by Ada that from a modern perspective are visionary. She speculated that the Engine 'might act upon other things besides number... the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent'. The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that number could represent entities other than quantity mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Ada was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. She has been referred to as 'prophet of the computer age'. Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. In this the tribute is well-founded.