L5. Cosmic History As A Series Of Ossicles

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was more than a poet. He was also a deep-thinking, ambitious philosopher. Throughout his life he was obsessed with ‘the secret recesses, the sacred adyta of organic life’,1 and following this guiding thread ultimately led him deep into ‘the dark groundwork of our nature’.2 Plagued by personal demons—many resulting directly from his philosophical investigations—he never quite successfully transmitted this into print, however. His systematic vision, what there is of it, remains fragmented throughout his voluminous private notebooks. Nonetheless, he was an astute, syncretic, yet wildly idiosyncratic thinker.

Reading Thomas Browne in the opening years of the 1800s, Coleridge had already remarked that ‘the History of man for the 9 months preceding his Birth would probably be far more interesting & contain events of greater moment [than] all [the life] that follow[s]’.3 He thereafter envisioned a Shandean situation whereby the writing of this foetal epitome would take ‘4,000 years’—easily filling ‘300 volumes’—and thus the hapless author would ‘die in a Dream’ before they even reached their birth.4 This, of course, is because the prenatal comprises the whole of cosmic evolution. Nonetheless, having recently studied German, post-Kantian philosophy soon provided Coleridge with the tools and determination to write this prenatal chronicle, or, in Coleridge’s words, the ‘omni scibile of human Nature, what we are, & how we become what we are’. And yet, from the outset he remarked to his friends—with perfect prescience—that ‘between me & this work there may be a Death’.5

Becoming an ardent teutophile, Coleridge read Kant and Fichte widely and deeply (he even dabbled in Hegel, though only cursorily). He lays solid claim to the title of the first real British post-Kantian thinker.6 However, he simply couldn’t accept what he called Fichte’s ‘subjective idolism’. This was because of what he called ‘hostility to nature’.7 Accordingly, Coleridge spoke of the ‘emancipat[ion]’ by ‘Schelling & the Physiosophists (Naturphilosophen) from the monkish Cell of Fichtean pan-egoistic Idealism’. This was a ‘ris[ing] above the point of Reflection [to] contemplate the births of and genesis of things’, he commended.8 It is telling, in this regard, that Coleridge singled out Kant’s enigmatic description of the critical project as an ‘epigenesis of pure reason’: he deemed this Kantian turn of phrase the ‘knot of the whole system’.9 Accordingly, he saw that Naturphilosophie offered the tools to unravel this knot (to spread out its surfaces, lay it bare). Schellingian philosophy, therefore, is the panacea to ‘the many phantoms, with which the whole continuity both of Nature and Thought is crumbled down in modern Analysis’:10 this is because Schelling offers not just another physics or physiology but a ‘Philosophy of Physics & Physiology’—a map with which to access those adyta.11

Coleridge read Schelling’s System sometime around 1813, and the Entwurf in 1815,12 and subsequently requested all of Schelling’s works not already in his possession.13 He also devoured Steffens at around this time, whom he sometimes commended above Schelling.14 Despite distancing himself from Naturphilosophie after 1818 (often deriding ‘Okenisms’ in his notebooks), Coleridge never stopped consuming their works nor gave up their core principles. Indeed, recapitulation had become a central tenet of his worldview. He would write of how, in nature’s ‘activities’, ascending forms are produced before being ‘abandon[ed] to inferior powers’ (i.e. becoming permanent and mature forms of lower organisms), which themselves ‘repeat a similar metamorphosis according to their kind’. These are ‘not fancies’, conjectures, or even hypotheses, but facts’.15 One can clearly see, he pointed out, that the ‘human Foetus exists as a Plant, an Insect, and an Animal’,16 and thus in ‘the embryonic Structure, the Vita uterina, the higher animal Classes is found as the regular and permanent form, the […] Vita matura, of some lower grade’.17

With these recapitulatory tools in tow, an older Coleridge teamed up with his doctor and protégé, Joseph Henry Green (1791–1863), in order to systematize what they both called a ‘Physiogony’, or universal genetic history. Coleridge proclaimed that the ‘high prerogative’ of his and Green’s physiogonic ‘Method is that each Evolute suggests the next, and throws back light on all the former’.18 Elsewhere he described this physiognomic project as ‘a Nature-history on a new scheme of Classification’: the scheme of ‘Powers’.19 (This novel direction—inspired by Schelling’s Stufenfolge—came largely from the new science of chemistry and its focus on nature’s creation of products qualitatively different from their precursors.)20 Coleridge wrote, therefore, of ‘the great problem of the Multiplication of Powers in Nature—, the generative Multiplication, I mean; of their progressive potenziation, A(4 being as truly a Unit as A(1, and the latter together with A(2, and A(3 remaining and co-existing with A(4’.21 In other words, the problem of what it is that ties together the arrival of the new and the repetition of the old in nature’s developmental series. Physiogony’s answer was that each individual product is qualitatively distinct from—yet simultaneously also contains—all of its precursors. An abstract formalization of recapitulation was the ‘high prerogative’. Continuing this grand vision, six years after Coleridge’s death, Green went on to give a ‘Recapitulatory Lecture’ to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1840, wherein he chronicled the outlines of this project, telling a story of how the cerebrospinal system pieced itself together, across evolutionary time, through various dialectical deformations on the way from mollusc to insect to brain (the parenchymal mollusc represents life ‘drawn inward’; the exoskeletal insect represents life ‘thrown outward’; and only in the synthesis of these antipodes does one derive the equipoise of the vertebrate CNS).22

Studying naturphilosophische texts, Coleridge had previously postulated that geology’s developmental series ‘conclude[s]’, within us, in our inorganic ‘Teeth and Bones’.23 Dentition is orogeny. Mineralization streaks through organic form: from basic examples like ‘Shells’ to ‘Mother-of-Pearl’ and ‘egg’ up to ‘cartilage’ and the chitinous carapaces of ‘Lobster-Claws’; ‘still higher, Zoophytes [i.e. corals] repeat the process’; and, at ‘the summit’, ‘Bone’ and ‘Teeth’ conclude the conservation, or reuptake, of the geological into the biological.24 In a vision arguably even more fevered than that of Kubla Khan, Coleridge thus witnessed lithic externality snaking its way throughout organic inner time: he noted that annelids ‘deposit a calcareous stuff’ as if they have to ‘drag about’ a piece of the planet’s ‘gross mass’ whilst also observing that, in the ‘insect’, this mineral ‘residuum’ has ‘refined itself’ into a carapace; in ‘fishes and amphibians it is driven back or inward’ into an endoskeleton; and, at the pinnacle, this inwardification of stone climaxes in humanity’s grand ‘osseous structure’. Oken, indeed, had said that ‘the skeletal system is the reappearance of planetism [within] the human’.25 In Coleridge’s eyes, the ‘physical hardness of the insensitive nail’ could thus be accounted for as a type of temporal nonlinearization.26 (One need only look at Deleuze’s fingernails.) Notably, the German for ‘vertebra’, Wirbel, also denotes ‘spiral’ or ‘vortex’: each osseous whorl a cyclone in time. The ‘Bones of the Human Ear furnish a remarkable Instance’ of such ‘retroition’, Coleridge noted, for ‘hearing depends’ on the ‘vibrations’ of ‘felsenharten’, or rock-hard, ‘adamantine bones’. (Sound propagates through ‘solids’ and ‘even deaf people hear through’ skeletal transmission, he pondered.) Thus, one can arrive at the ‘profound […] derivation of the Auditual’ from the ‘zωομεταλλικον’ (zoometallic).27 ‘Sound is volatile Metal’, he glossed, envisioning that hearing arises from the sonority of miniature mountain-ranges.28 (Our hearing apparatus derives, indeed, from the otoliths, or crystalline-inorganic accelerometers, found in ancient fish.) This idea of the audible as a form of mineral retroition comes from Oken, who impressed upon his readers that hearing was part of the ‘metallic system of animality’ and claimed that one could therefore trace an unbroken line from the bones of the inner ear down through the spinal column right into the metallic veins of the earth. All of this, he remarked, forms one grand and unified bone system: ‘all just one row of ossicles’ repeated in various forms from ore to spine to cochlea. ‘The ear flows onward as a soul into the bones, and these flow as a soul into the metallic skeleton of the planet’.29

Bodies are thus temporal manifolds. Yet their coevality can splinter. The primal past ‘continues to be incessantly active in individuals’, Schelling intoned, and it can ‘break through once again’30—the ‘opening of the floodgates’ between past and present that John Hughlings Jackson would later speak of.

Indeed, following this guiding thread led Coleridge to disturbing results. Reading Schelling’s Freiheit essay, he was arrested by the German philosopher’s geohistoricist and catastrophist vision of nature’s tendency to sink, again and again, ‘back into chaos’ (as evidenced by ‘previous world collapses’ and the continuation of their fossil ‘monuments’ into the present).31 Coleridge was struck by this, proposing that such ‘sinkings back’ and pathological persistences of the past might provide a ‘Theory of Hydatids’ and ‘other excrescences of Life’.32 (Hydatids, notably, are cystic growths that are prone—like the pineal gland—to calcification.) Going beyond the hypotheses of the Victorian doctors who treated railway spine, he thus went on to diagnose ‘nervous diseases’ as the recidivist eruption of ‘ante-organic activity [in] the nerves’.33 Disease isn’t just relapse into a prior organic state, but also a resurgence of prior inorganic ones. CNS-degeneration, again, as chronopathic decentralisation. Describing such time-sicknesses as ‘Relapses’ of nature ‘or sinkings back from the organic and vivific’, Coleridge similarly anticipated Hartmann and Ferecnzi in classifying somnambulant states precisely as ‘that sinkback of the Mind into an inanimate animal’.34

Having previously speculated that the ‘globific tendency’ of granite boulders betrays their desire to become ‘planet itself’, Coleridge, just like his German peers, observed that the hemispheric structure of our ‘Cerebral Substance’ is ‘strikingly’ composed of a form of ‘life’ that appears to want to recapitulate the ‘planetary’. Yet he also noted that this ‘life’ would, of course, needs be ‘προυργανικος’ or ‘pre-organic’.35 As Kant had mused many decades before, we have only penetrated ‘one six thousandth’ of the earth’s stony depth: thus, to proclaim that the brain is a planet is to admit that we know absolutely nothing about it. Of course, one need only look to afflictions of cerebral calcification to find instances wherein the grey matter is truly attempting to ‘repeat the planetary. Sublimity has a petrifying effect’, the German poet Novalis (1772–1801) once corroborated: the ‘lithic world’ re-erupts cerebrally as a ‘mineral-cortex’ intruding ‘inward’.36 Perhaps sublimity primarily activates the pineal gland?

These troubling implications of Naturphilosophie are, in part, what caused Coleridge eventually to shun it. Such implications violated his theistic principles. But even when he celebrated the divine in man, those darker threads never quite went away. In one notebook entry extolling human uprightness, his philosophical demons get the better of him: ‘Man alone seems drawn upward, his Base narrower than his shoulders’, Coleridge wrote: ‘[h]e stoops to procure’—in the acts of labouring and eating—but ‘he enjoys with his face and eyes fronting his fellow man’ in social intercourse. However, Coleridge’s jubilation abruptly segues into a troubled rumination (now in Latin for purposes of secrecy) on how the ventro-ventral fumblings of sexual intercourse destroy this uprightness as ‘[h]is eyes from above are cast down towards the earth’ and the fornicator becomes once more ‘the servant of Nature and Earth’. Tearing himself away from such carnal visions, he concludes by ejaculating ‘Man truly is a solar animal’:

With feet adhesive to the earth, we shun, Headward we gravitate toward the Sun.37

As Bataille later declared, however, such celestial orientation merely combusts into the precocious futurity of pineal mineralization. Thinking like a planet will only give you brain-sand.

‘Will is assuredly followed by the appropriate Organs—so the Butting of the Calf predicts the coming Horns’, Coleridge wrote.38 Perhaps if you spend too much time thinking like a planet, your brain calcifies entirely. Certainly, Coleridge—who proselytized that ‘man must either rise or sink’—worried about the organic changes just waiting to be unleashed upon our bodies given the correct conditions and cues.39 (Picturing morphology as a delicate balance, always ready to be disrupted, is an unavoidable by-product of the idea that particular morphologies are arrested stages within a wider series of possibilities. Hence why the notion suggested itself to Ballard as much as to Coleridge.) Thus, in a strange conjunction of the theological and nature-philosophical, Coleridge rallied this as a strange quasi-naturalistic explanation for devils and demons, presuming that an imbalance of organic forces could cause a devolutionary ‘descent’ of healthy cranial bone-growth

into a yet meaner & more vegetative form than the Skull itself—namely Horn! and thence, by enkindling & propagation of [tumescent] Productivity, manifesting itself at the other extremity, a Tail. What a Devil is a Man-beast! What a Beast is the Devil!40

Behind Jackson’s heterochronic ‘floodgates’ lie the lithic tumefactions and protuberances of horn and tail. Following his death, Coleridge’s autopsy—performed by Green—would report strange ‘organic changes’ in the poet-philosopher’s body. Green recorded that Coleridge’s was a ‘“body of the death” in which to live was a continued dying’.41

Romanticism is where Spinal Catastrophism proper first ignited. Intimations stretch from the era’s beginning to its end. Already in 1784 the Parisian diarist Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) wrote of an ‘uninterrupted tradition’ of ‘antient disasters’, running from the ‘visible traces of profound ruins and devastations which are spread over the surface of the earth’ all the way into the ‘terrors’ that are subtly ‘engraved in the fibres of human brains’.42 By 1845, De Quincey was talking of the ‘convulsions’ that inscribe ‘themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain [in] endless strata [of] forgetfulness’—precisely as the ‘primary convulsions’ of geohistory successively scarred our ‘dark planet’. For De Quincey (who noticed that the ‘virtual time’ of dreams was ‘ridiculous to compute’ in scales ‘commensurate with human life’ and must instead be measured in ‘aeons’ and ‘diameters of the earth’), certain minds are undoubtably ‘truer than others to the great magnet in our dark planet’:

Minds that are impassioned on a more colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, and more extensive in the scale of their vibrations [will] tremble to greater depths from a fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of undulations.43

‘Upon entering deep [into] barren, rocky chasms’, wrote Goethe, ‘I felt for the first time that I envied the poets’: for, ‘in speaking of primal beginnings’, he proclaimed, ‘we should speak primally, i.e. poetically’.44 In a theoretical framework within which individual consciousness was interpretable only as a retrograde amnesia for its own preconscious cosmogenesis, there could not but be a porous border between geognostic investigation and poetic enthusiasm. Precisely this porosity looks forward to many of the figures we have explored in our secret history: from Ballard to Velikovsky. Yet in order to finally locate the very first kindling of the notion of Spinal Catastrophism, we must travel back before Romanticism and to a spat between a tutor and his tutee.