Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

44 looking away
came—I talked with him—he left me alone—I shut my eyes—beauteous
spectra of two colors, orange and violet—then of green, which
immediately changed to Peagreen, & then actually grew to my eye
into a beautiful moss, the same as is on the mantle-piece at
Grasmere.—abstract Ideas—& unconscious Links!! (N 925)
From the spectrum of prismatic colors arise “beauteous spectra” of more.
Colors give way to aftercolors, as in the literal meaning of the word “spectra,”
and words generate images and vice versa. The terms of Coleridge’s
description suggest that this is the way things were longer ago than he can
remember. While he is immobilized in the middle of the day in an infantine
fashion (as in “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison”), Wordsworth
looks in on him. After the conversation has stirred Coleridge’s associations,
he forms a kind of protopoem of resonances. Green spectra take on
vegetal characteristics that typify the “streaminess” of association (thus
Coleridge also writes of “wild-weed spectres” and perceives “grasslike
Streaks” on his muslin curtains). 13 The vegetation association brings up a
“pea” shade of green, then the animation of associations allegorizes itself
in the transformation of green color into “moss” as at “Gras(s)mere.” 14
The model for contact with others here consists in finding oneself literally
prone to their influence, then elaborately creating distance and context.
Earlier we saw Coleridge identifying with the (relatively) powerless child;
here we see what that child can do. Coleridge sketches his own version of
the growth of the poet’s mind: the infant in his crib mingling thoughts and
colors in free association before autonomy or even vision has fully developed.
15 This radiant virtual environment responds to the mind’s wishes,
13. See N 1770. On Coleridge’s interest in vegetation in connection with his “immersion
in a continual present-tense of pure phenomenality,” see Harold D. Baker,
“Landscape as Textual Practice in Coleridge’s Notebooks,” ELH 59 (1992): 651–670, especially
p. 667.
14. “Mere grass” is a good synonym for imaginary moss.
15. Colors exemplify the nexus of construction and perception in romantic color theory,
since their appearance is context-dependent; Coleridge’s Notebooks show his enjoyment
at being able to change the colors of appearances (N 1974, 2094). Coleridge is
aware of himself as a colorist, even through the similarity of his name to the word
“color.” Of an unnamed person—a painter, or even himself?—he writes, “Women . . .