the person from porlock
Coleridge’s person from Porlock is perhaps one of the most misunderstood figures in literature. He is not a mysterious envoy. He is banality personified. He is the ringing telephone, the histrionic radio advertisement, the intrusive thought that supersedes and obliterates the incipient recollection of a dream, a vision, or a thought. Imagine Coleridge's the dream of Xanadu as a certain configuration, a delicate web, among the 100 billion or so neurons of the poet’s brain. (It has been calculated, says Ramachandran, that there are more possible “brain states” than elementary particles in the universe.) The possibility of one mental state being repeated, exact in every detail, must be computed at zero. Coleridge saw, and became transfixed, by an image in the cerebral kaleidoscope, but was interrupted by a man on business from Porlock, and so the image was lost forever.
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