The God of Small Things Chapters 10 and 11

The God of Small Things

Chapters 10 and 11

Vocabulary

Chapters 10 and 11

1. provisions
2. artifice
3. grappling
4. vallom
5. surfeit
6. stippled
7. prise
8. swathe
9. pariah
10. proprietary
11. vapid
12. cognizant

Estha's Wisdom

Estha hides in Paradise Pickles and comes up with two bits of wisdom:

Anything can happen to Anyone.

It's best to be prepared.

Premonition Dreams

from realmeaningofdreams.com

There are a significant number of accounts of people claiming they have experienced premonition dreams, but in today’s world the idea is not given any credibility by the scientific community.

Dreaming of good or bad unforeseen events occurs all the time in our dreams. But what if your nightly visions actually end up happening?

Can we actually dream of events before they occur?

Premonition dreams or precognitive dreams are an ability to gain information about an upcoming event prior to the event happening. These dreams are not common. Premonitions are a certain form of dream, but please know that not all dreams serve as premonitions. We are referring to a very specific form of dream here.

Déjà vu can be put into this category. We have all had an experience when we feel we are experiencing something in waking life that we feel we have seen, usually in a dream, before.

How does this happen, that before an event has even occurred somebody can see it happen in their dreams?

It is impossible is it not? To dream about something before it has actually happened?

It is not known at this stage how this happens, and although it has not been scientifically disproved it has not been “scientifically” proven either that it does actually occur.

How can instances of premonition dreams be scientifically disproved or proven when we still know so little about the full capability of the human brain?

Perhaps we don’t really need a scientific explanation for such an illogical and irrational concept.

I have heard of several cases in my lifetime of people experiencing what we call Premonition Dreams.

A middle-aged woman had woken from a very frightening dream where her son was bleeding emerging from a car accident. She immediately woke up and rang her son who lived in another city and she was informed he had been in a car accident.

Another example from a childhood friend of mine was that one night she dreamed of her grandfather and she woke up and looked at her clock and remembered the time. And was informed that at exactly that time her grandfather had passed away.

Prominent precognitive dream psychologist Dr Hearne has documented numerous accounts of premonitions occurring.

Dr Hearne believes that females are the most likely to experience premonition dreams in the form of untoward events that will happen to somebody close.

Dr Hearne has established that within these forms of dreams there is a category, which is called the “media announcement type”. This is where the dreamer receives a TV. Newspaper or radio announcement about an event that has not yet happened. One of the people Dr Hearne has researched for many years is a woman Barbara Garwell who has apparently had premonitions since childhood.


For example, 21 days before the Egyptian President Sadat was assassinated, Barbara had a vivid and violent dream in which she saw some 'coffee colored' men spray a group of dignitaries with machine guns at a stadium. The scene appeared to be the Middle East. 21 Days later President Sadat was killed with several other dignitaries when he was at a stadium taking the salute at a military parade and men ran into the stadium and sprayed them with machine gun fire. The details of her dream in this instance were very accurate.

President Sadat was actually killed, with several others, when he was taking the salute at a military parade in a stadium. Soldiers ran from a vehicle to the saluting base and fired Kalashnikov guns. Although Barbara could not identify the country, the details were very accurate. There are many interesting and startlingly accurate dreams that Barbara has had if you are interested in her book “Dreams That Come True” or the book by Dr Hearne’s Visions of the Future.

Most precognitive dreams concern unpleasant things that will happen. Many of them concern unexpected death to immediate members of a family or persons close to the dreamer. Here is such a case:
'I had a recurring dream every night for a week. In the dream my mother, who was dead in reality, paid a visit and told me. 'You will not see Doug and Joy again. They will not be here long'. Doug and Joy were my brother and his wife.

The dream was very disquieting and I wanted to warn my brother but my husband told me not to be so 'silly'. Two days after the last dream I bought the local paper and on the front page were my brother and Joy. They had been killed flying to Spain. I had no idea.



Although I cannot prove to you 100% that premonitions dreams are accurate and true, I do think that our understanding of nature, the universe and the human brain is not quite sound enough yet, to discredit the accounts of people who have claimed to have premonition type dreams and the research of people like Dr Hearne.

Kubla Khan

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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.

Interpretation of “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

By Camille Paglia

The theme of “Kubla Khan” is the power and danger of creative imagination.  The poem prophetically describes the artist’s plight in a hostile or indifferent society during the era of the avant-garde, which would begin in the nineteenth-century Paris.  Coleridge was dissatisfied with “Kubla Khan” and held on to it for nearly twenty years; it was finally published at the insistence of Lord Byron.

Sensitive about the poem’s eccentric structure, Coleridge attached a preface whose peculiar claims were accepted as fact by rearly readers and critics.  In it he says that, while recuperating from “a slight indisposition” in the countryside, he was lulled asleep by an “anodyne” (laudanum, an opiate to which he was addicted) just as he was reading a passage in a seventeenth-century travelogue describing the lavish palace of the Chinese emperor Kubla Khan.  Awaking from three hours of “profound sleep,” he began to write out the “two or three hundred lines” that had somehow coalesced during his dream.  But a knock on the door suddenly called him away.  Returning little more than an hour later, he found “to his no small surprise and mortification” that the rest of the poem had faded from memory.

The fifty-four-line text of “Kubla Khan” is therefore to be understood, according to the subtitle, as “a fragment.”  Was Coleridge’s defensive strategy aimed at shadowy carpers or at his own festering doubts?  The poem certainly does not feel incomplete to us, whose looser standards of form descend from the radical innovations of Romanticism and nineteenth-century realism.  We no longer expect perfection, symmetry, or sharp closure in works of art.  Indeed, modernist plays and dance pieces can end so ambiguously that raised house-lights must signal the end of a performance.  “Kubla Khan” anticipates the fractures and fragmentation in Western culture that would be registered in collage, the jigsaw medium invented by Picasso on the eve of World War I and applied by T.S. Eliot to the shards of literature sifted from rubble in The Waste Land (1922).

“A Vision in a Dream”: this beautiful phrase, acknowledging the poem’s hallucinatory genesis, also describes Romantic art-making.  The poet is a seer, inexplicably gifted with the power of divination.  While the master vision of “Kubla Khan” is of then-exotic Asia, the poem also contains two subordinate visions: the first is a dream of a woman singing in Abyssinia (Ethiopia); the second is a cryptic self-portrait of the poet himself in creative ecstasy.  Rejecting the cool discipline of Neoclassicism, the Romantics surrendered themselves to intense emotion and extreme experiences.  They made themselves the subject of their art—a heady approach with its own limitations.  The “dream” of Coleridge’s subtitle takes in all the Romantics’ unorthodox new interests, such as fairy tales and ghost stories, gleaned from folk culture.  Agrarian peoples at the mercy of nature traditionally view dreams as omens or messages from the spirit world.  Freud credited the Romantic poets with discovery of the psychological meaning of dreams, which had been dismissed by Enlightenment thinkers as meaningless excitation of the nerves.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree”: the opening lines, even in their inverted syntax, closely follow Coleridge’s seventeenth-century source.  But the effect is thrillingly trumpet-like, instantly summoning up the luxurious milieu of an imperial court.  The khan (a sovereign or chieftain) is a haughty despot, like Shelley’s Ozymandias.  The Chinese elite live like parasitic French aristocrats, normally loathed by the leftist Romantics.  Kubla Khan (grandson of the ruthless Genghis Khan) both attracts and repels: hence the aptness of these famous lines to Orson Welles’s classic 1941 film, Citizen Kane, where they are elegiacally intoned over a newsreel about a dead press lord (based on William Randolph Hearst) and his private wonderland.

Coleridge’s poem is subtly allegorical: Kubla Khan represents the artist; fabulous Xanadu is the world of art; and the “stately pleasure-dome” is the intricate artwork, exemplified by the poem itself.  The dome is literally created by “decree” or edict, since a poem is magically made of language.  The dome is dedicated to “pleasure” because Romantic art frankly appeals to the senses.  Virtue, the didactic goal of Neoclassicism, has been displaced by beauty.  Kubla’s dome ultimately symbolizes all human construction or fabrications, including the tissue of ideas.  It is poised at a geologically unstable spot—where a “sacred river” flows into “caverns measureless to man” and drops “down to a sunless sea” (3-5).  Thus the earth’s surface functions as a second dome, a brittle crust over suffocating darkness into which the pleasure palace could collapse at any time.  The river is sacred because is a force of pagan nature, the primary energy source of Romantic art.  Its Greek name, Alph, sounds odd in a Chinese setting: it implies that nature, not Jehovah, is the poem’s alpha and omega, its creator and destroyer.  The name echoes that of a real river in Arcadia, the Alpheus, which flowed past the great temple of Zeus at Olympia and, in legend, ran in a pure stream through the salt sea to rise again as a fountain in Sicily.  Hence the Alphueus signifies continuity through apparent breakage or separation.  The cavers into which Coleridge’s river falls are “measureless” because they represent metaphysical mysteries of life that cannot be quantified, much less solved, by science or mathematics.

The royal precinct is a “fertile” pocket paradise, ten miles around (6).  It’s a harmonious marriage of nature and culture, with towered wall enclosing “gardens bright with sinuous rills”—twisting brooks like nature’s snaky signature (7-8).  Visual contrasts abound: alluringly private glades (“sunny spots of greenery”)  are scattered like golden coins amid the gloomy ancient forests, while the gardens are dotted with blossoming trees heavily perfuming the air with incense, as at a sacred service (9-11).  Lulled by these glimpses of mesmerizing beauty, we are jarred awake by a break in the text that mirrors what it describes: “oh! that deep romantic chasm” (12-13).  The earth is split, slashed diagonally across a hill of grand cedar trees.  This “savage place” shows nature at its harshest and least hospitable (14). 

The chasm is “romantic” in the older sense of remote, fantastic, or picturesque.  But the word’s alternate erotic associations surface in the operatic scene depicted by Coleridge’s stunning simile: a possessed, lust-maddened woman, on the prowl beneath an eerie “waning moon,” is “wailing for her demon-lover” (14-16).  The primeval chasm, “holy and enchanted,” is a site of black magic, a perilous point of contact between the human and nonhuman realms. 

…

This sublime scene contains the core of the poem’s aesthetic theory: Romantic inspiration is sporadic, volcanic, and explosive.  Art making draws on primitive, amoral, erotic energies, whose unpredictable, occult workings surprise even the artist.  Coleridge’s turbulent subterranean realm prefigures Freud’s irrational id, where dreams and art are born.  The “huge fragments” of rock sprayed skyward refer back to the poem’s subtitle; “Kubla Khan,” the stunted fragment, was born this way, violently expelled from imagination’s underworld (21).  “Flung up” on land, the raging river spreads out to flow for five tranquil miles through the pastoral “wood and dale” (24-26).  Its “meandering with a mazy motion” represents the smooth surface yet intricate design of art, a labyrinth that invites and baffles.  The barbaric convulsions of the work’s creation are undetectable and forgotten, as the reader or viewer goes along for a pleasure ride and sees the world in a new way.  Reaching the caverns again, the river sinks “in tumult to a lifeless ocean,” its fall seeming to trigger its regeneration at earth’s womblike center (27-28).    With its constantly re-circulating energies, Xanadu is a microcosm of nature, an ingeniously self-contained ecosystem. 

Kubla Khan now reappears for the first time since the opening  line.  Through the thundering cataract, the emperor hears or hallucinates “ancestral voices prophesying war” (29-30).  Is this a premonition of Xanadu’s destruction?  Will its undoing be civil strife or outside attack? Perhaps the ghostly ancestors have been re-assimilated by nature as guardian spirits—like Sophocles’ banished Oedipus at Colonus.  Or are Kubla’s ancestors his real enemies?  The rule-breaking, iconoclastic Romantic poet is at eternal war with his artistic forefathers. 

The winding river has brought us full circle back to the pleasure-dome, whose shadow floats “midway” on the shimmering waves (31-32).  The precarious edifice seems buoyed up by the roar of the waters, a “mingled measure/From the fountain and the caves,” like sonorous orchestral music (33-34).  “A miracle of rare device,” the dome is a triumph of engineering but seems as fragile as a bubble or eggshell (35).  “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”: heat and cold, light and darkness (36).  Coleridge wrote elsewhere that art synthesizes opposites; his favorite proverb was “Extremes meet.”  In “Kubla Khan,” that includes moral extremes: the icy caves recall the pit of Dante’s hell, where betrayers of brotherhood, such as Satan, are pinned for eternity in a frozen lake.  An artist must confront and explore all passions and hatreds.  The dome whose outline ripples in the water is finally the all-encompassing skull of the artist himself, a Narcissus who drowns all his creations. 

At the poem’s second break, we leave Xanadu behind.  Or rather, Kubla’s idyll recedes in space and time, while Xanadu as an internalized state will return at the climax.  We travel first from Asia to Africa for the poet’s remembered vision of an “Abyssinian maid” singing and playing a dulcimer (a stringed instrument struck with hammers;  (37-41).  She is the poem’s second female vocalist: the first was the demon-infatuated vagrant with her banshee wail.  But the mind of the Abyssinian maid is fixed on higher things—on Mount Abora, Coleridge’s half-invented name for a remote locale that he may have indentified with Eden and that he substitutes here for Mount Parnassus, home of the Greek Muses, whose European tradition has presumably been exhausted.  The mysterious woman artist is Coleridge’s African muse. 

…

The finale transports us to imaginary space that may represent Europe remade by global vision.  The poet himself bursts into view,k the emperor Kubla Khan reincarnated as a half-mad artist in creative rapture.  He is swept up in afflatus—a divine spirit-wind that brings knowledge and eloquence.  The “music loud and long” that the poet prays for is the very poem before us (45-46).  Whenever we read “Kubla Khan” aloud, Coleridge lives again to “build that dome in air.”  The poem is literally made of air—the breath we use for speech.  For a privileged moment, “that sunny dome! those caves of ice!”  attain concrete form: “And all who heard should see them there” (47-48).  Talented artists have the uncanny power to materialize their thoughts and fantasies, temporarily invading our minds and becalming our bodies.  But great artists radically transform us, permanently repopulating our consciousness with their own obsession.

What is the audience’s response to such astonishing virtuosity?  In “Kubla Khan,” alas, neither gratitude nor respect.  Even if the artist’s achievements are eventually accepted, he is not.  He remains a pariah, since he is contaminated by genius (49).  Coleridge’s artist is a crank or derelict, friendless and loveless.  Yet at the height of inspiration, he seems to be dancing, like the rocks thrown up by the sacred river.  His long unkempt hair floats in the wind, caressed by nature.  His eyes are “flashing” with inner visions, though he is blind to the here and now (50).

Coleridge grimly warns the world against himself and his kind.  Close ranks, and cast a spell: “Weave a circle round him thrice,” like a village May dance to contain and imprison him (51).  “And close your eyes with holy dread”: don’t even look at him, since Judeo-Christianity cannot tolerate the artist’s lurid pagan testament (52).  The Romantic artist is both hero and criminal.  Cut off from the vanished aristocratic patronage system, he will now starve for his art.  Like the ascetic prophet John the Baptist, who survived in the desert on locusts and honey, the modern artist abuses his body to feed his soul.  Drugged and deranged, he lives off snowy insect sugars (“honey-dew” deposited on leaves) and ambrosia, “the milk of Paradise,” an oracular nectar of the gods (53-54).  Ostracized and entranced, the artist is lost in the hypnotic splendors of his own Xanadu.