On 27 November 1799, while taking the night coach from Yorkshire to London, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after fitful sleep, awoke at sunrise and watched a starling murmuration. As he observed the flock, he attempted a concurrent description on the first page of a fresh notebook, (‘black leather, with a leather tongue clasp, and a fold along one side to hold the metallic pencil’):

Coleridge’s starling description, alive with the continuous, non-finite rhythm of the present participle, happens discernibly in the vividly elusive real time of its occurrence – now. Begun on the inside cover of one used-up notebook, where there was not enough space, the description was copied in a faint, barely legible hand into a new volume, and begun again. The archival description of notebook 4, the fresh starling notebook, was written during World War II on an island in Lake Huron, in Ontario, Canada, by its editor Kathleen Coburn.

Coleridge obsessively kept notebooks for his whole life. The first one was dated summer 1794, when he was twenty-two, and the last, July 1834, three weeks before his death. Coburn, a Coleridge scholar and academic at the University of Toronto, described, transcribed, re-sequenced, annotated and oversaw the publication of all seventy Coleridge notebooks between 1930, at the age of twenty-five, when she was a graduate student at Oxford, and her death in 1991. Additionally, Coburn organised their purchase from Coleridge’s descendants by The British Library and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. So the ten published volumes of the complete notebooks, extensively annotated, form a record of two lives, Coleridge’s and Coburn’s. Her life-long notebook project began almost accidentally, during a two-year scholarship at Oxford, when, studying the poet’s relationship to German Romantic philosophy, in summer of 1933 she first travelled to the Coleridge family home in Devon, where she was welcomed as a houseguest. From that first visit, through all the years of her work with the Coleridge papers in his family home, she would always be given the same bedroom, with its deep windows, red linen-hung four-poster bed and hodgepodge of old furniture and knick-knacks. On that first visit, after tea she was shown the alcove near the library fireplace which still contained all of the poet’s notebooks and papers, in jumbled disarray. After a long search she located the notebook containing Coleridge’s extensive German Romantic notes; it had been hastily thrust in among ‘French novels’ as she describes, by the family maid. Too extensive for her to transcribe during this first brief visit, the contents were crucial for her research. After delicate discussion with the family, the young Coburn was permitted to borrow the notebook in order to have it photographed. This uncharacteristic act of trust on the part of the family towards the visiting Canadian student was the first step of the scholarly consolidation of the then-overlooked poet’s archive. Mapping would be another term for this massive lifework; Coburn characterized the trove of notebooks as ‘an extraordinary mental landscape’ where ‘the pleasures of these first journeys […] were sharp and unpredictable.’ (2) This landscape is composed of some 7000 entries, which Coburn numbered chronologically in her edition, although the material sequence in the notebooks themselves jumped synchronically, since the poet often wrote into blank spots in earlier volumes, or wrote from front to back and back to front simultaneously in a single booklet, making each bound volume a polytemporal composition. No space was wasted. So, Coburn’s edition is a synthesised chronology that does not reflect the material space of Coleridge’s written pages, but which respectively assembles the line of his life as notes. The chronologically numbered entries range in kind, from brief, fragmented jottings to long discursive passages on philosophy or theology to be used by the poet in sermons or lectures, and also domestic lists, remarks, problems, jokes, recipes and transcriptions from books, some in his hand and some in the hand of his beloved Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge would also re-transcribe earlier notes at later dates, changing and ameliorating as he recopied, as he did with the starling murmuration.

In October 1803, starlings return in notebook 21 (red leather with a leather tongue from the back cover which fits over a loop in the front, forming a clasp. There is a pocket inside both front and back covers):

Between the two murmurations, a little more than four years. But they are a continuation of the same murmuration – Coleridge has recopied and reworked the initial description, and included it in a transcribed group of earlier entries under the fresh heading ‘Images’. Each of these transcribed passages, Coburn says in her annotation, ‘is an essay in description’. Each description observes irregular movement within a visual event: the effect of a breeze on the shadow of a tree in ‘ruffled water’; a star ‘twinkling behind the motionless Fragment’ of a ruined castle tower (CN 495); rising through the clouds, the glory of starlings; a host of little flies on snow. The 1803 starling transcription is lengthened, and refined. In the second iteration it is newly preceded by a description of the shifting colours of clouds at sunrise, so that starlings and sun seem part of a singular swirling emanation:

Why is Coleridge returning to, altering and augmenting the earlier description? He tells us, in a note from December 1803 (the image of the murmuration has stayed in his mind, remaining active, for months), ‘My spirit with a fixed yet leisurely gaze following its ever yet quietly changing clusters of thoughts, / As the outward eye of a happy traveller on a flock of starlings’ (CN 1779). For Coleridge the returning starling murmuration is a figure for the swirling, coalescing and dispersing motion of thinking, as well as an explication of his physical theory of motion, as presence and absence in ongoing irregular fluctuation. His practice of rereading earlier notebook entries is itself a flocking or murmuring, his attention gliding over the landscape of accrued notes in changing patterns of intellection. In her annotations, Coburn says of Coleridge’s descriptions of this period ‘one notes his kinetic responses – a desire to cross bridges, pass under arches…’ (CN note 1899). The notebook, as an external organ of intellect and imagination, both map and laboratory, is the material support that permits his leisurely but kinetic gaze to turn and return to form new mental relationships, where the mind’s movement crosses and links – like swallows beneath bridges, like starlings above clouds – points in time, and across landscapes.

These notebooks are at the foreground of my current reading. Each time I open them – to check a reference while writing this essay, to find out what Coleridge thought of Robert Burton or of botany, to attempt to read straight through, consecutively, in the evenings, which is impossible, since I’m inevitably pulled into the labyrinth of Coburn’s gregariously thorough annotation of almost each entry – I’m delighted, stunned, irritated, awed, bored, piqued and also overwhelmed by their scale, since they fill ten thick hardcover volumes. They seem to contain everything.

Although I expect to continue this reading for the rest of my life, I didn’t come to it through a particular scholarly interest in Coleridge, nor through a consciously formed interest in the notebook genre. Until beginning his notebooks I hadn’t read much Coleridge, not beyond a few passages from Biographia Literaria, and Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s early collaboration Lyrical Ballads. I was more interested in tracking Wordsworth’s ambivalent position in revolutionary politics. I began to read the Coleridge notebooks because I fell upon them by chance.

I live and work in a fairly remote rural region in central France. Our house is at the edge of a village of around 200 people. At evening in winter I watch starling murmurations over the bordering field from our upstairs windows. It’s a poor region – small-scale agriculture on family farms, no vineyards or wine production, a scattering of small factories turning out plastic bags and concrete building blocks. In our village most people are retired, and the younger ones are often long-haul truck drivers or paid homecare workers. It’s an economic desert. There are no surviving services in the village other than the post office, and by the skin of its teeth, the elementary school. This year three children were born. The nearest shopping towns are both twenty kilometres distant. One of these two towns has an English-language bookshop, with a very good stock of used books, run by a British man, James, who entertains me with stories of having worked at Faber & Faber in London in the 1960s, where he knew T. S. Eliot. His shop attracts anyone in the larger region with an interest in English literature, or simply in reading in the English language. I browse there two or three times a year, and, four years ago, during my seasonal browse, I noticed, on a top shelf, the bulky, creamy row of the Coleridge notebooks. They looked beautiful, like an imposing geological formation. I dragged over the step-stool, pulled down the heavy first volume and read the opening page. The entries were curious and compelling: two written-out arithmetic problems meant for a child; a description of a card trick; a fanciful etymology of the origins of the word smile; an analogy concerning cities, cottages and ruins; the beginning of a sermon on faith. What compelled me right away as I stood reading on the step-stool was the space travelled between the entries, the vivid suggestiveness of their non-causal sequence. I was plunged into the gregariously mobile associations of a seeking mind, with the implausible and so completely compelling sensation of thinking thoughts that were not my own, as those thoughts composed themselves. The strange immediacy of this reading experience was new to me. I arranged with the bookseller to buy them in instalments. It was a sizable investment for me, the equivalent of three month’s rent. Such was my immediate obsession.

I learned that these volumes had belonged to the Welsh-Canadian Coleridge scholar David Miall, who had retired to this region of France from Edmonton, and his job at University of Alberta, and then fallen ill. Although I never met him, Miall’s fine pencil marginalia, Post-it notes, underlining, slipped-in bus schedules and various ephemera, some from a French village not far from where I live, now accompany my Coleridge reading. The traces of Miall’s life are interspersed in the notebooks among the traces made by Coleridge, and what I have gleaned of Coburn’s life in Oxford and Toronto and at the Coleridge farm in Devon by reading her published 1977 memoir, In Pursuit of Coleridge. These fragments open repeatedly into the realisation that the daily composition of thinking in a notebook is a deeply familiar, mobile and situated art at the same time as it traces the movement, as Coleridge noted ‘when the soul begins to be sufficiently self-conscious, to ask concerning itself, and its relations, is the first movement of its intellectual arrival into the World. Its Being – enigmatic as it must seem – is posterior to its existence.’ I think that with each notation, this first movement is refreshed and transformed, as is the world where it arrives.

My Toronto grandmothers, Olive Snare Robertson and Elaine Lynette Hodgetts Kennedy, each kept notebooks, and I am lucky to own two of them, which now form part of my archive. What did my grandmothers note? Household accounts, doctor’s appointments, the clothing sizes of the various grandchildren, gift lists, the names of three varieties of roses seen in the botanical garden in Edinburgh, travel details, bus schedules, reminders, drafts of letters. These were small, pocket- or purse-sized cheap blue-lined booklets, one spiral bound, the other stapled. My grandmothers were not intellectual or literary women but they had their own forms of culture. They wrote in notebooks, which, in turn, I do daily. I would have seen my grandmothers’ notebooks sitting on the telephone table, or being slipped back into a handbag after use. I am not sure to what extent my grandmothers read books, or if they did. I don’t recall ever seeing them read or hearing them talk about it, although each kept a shelf of books in her apartment. I recall a set of encyclopaedias, a volume of Rabbie Burns, Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, an old blue volume of Poe. One grandmother was a sewer and a hobby painter, painting small oils (as we called them) of rural Ontario scenes; the other, who showed me how to snuff out a candle flame between my bare fingers, I would characterise as a walker, and knew Toronto in that way. One sold Avon cosmetics door to door for a time, the other worked as a bank teller then a babysitter. Both were homemakers, cooking, cleaning, mending, shopping, decorating and upholding the events of the family calendar. But on their much smaller scale, my grandmothers’ domestic notes are not altogether different in kind than Coleridge’s, who also listed plant varieties, items for laundry, household necessities, recipes for ginger beer, travel observations, the curious developments of his children and drafts of sermons and letters in the variously sized blank books he began to fill in 1794. Coburn calls the earliest ones ‘memorandum books’. The notebook is a domestic writing genre. It contains and preserves transient instants of attention. It is commonplace.

The Edinburgh roses my grandmother noted in July 1967: Sea Pearl Floribunda, Anne Watkins Floribunda, Grandpa Dickson.

Here I think of Sara Hutchinson copying out the long index of plant names from William Withering’s An Arrangement of British Plants in Coleridge’s notebook in the summer of 1800 (CN 863), having borrowed the Withering from Wordsworth because the book was so costly, and I think too about the odd little preposition ‘out’ in this locution ‘copying out’, the way it suggests the transcribed text has been extruded from the original, like a cast object being turned out of its mould, or an outpouring, the text flowing out to the world through the conduit of the pen. And I recall Coburn describing her early experience in transcribing Coleridge as rife with ‘sharp and unpredictable’ pleasures. The historian Arlette Farge, in her book The Allure of the Archives, (3) emphasises the tactile and physiological nature of transcription work, the volatile and emotionally potent space between page and hand, the curve of the scholar’s shoulders and the sound of her pen.

What happens between the desire for the rose, the desire for the book and the copying out, between the notebook and the poem? How does that space become plastic, expansive, volatile? The mind moves across the plenum of the present to fall upon the forms of its own attention: a proper name, a phrase, a sentence, an intensity of image. A note is a mental sensation of incipience, a tiny item from and at the same time within the composition of the present. Roland Barthes, in The Preparation of the Novel, develops what he calls a ‘theory of notation’, exploring in his lecture notes the proliferation of the noteworthy. And what is noteworthy, for Barthes, who emphasises the ‘drive, the physical pleasure taken in noting down’? ‘Life’, he says, ‘in all its tenuousness’. (4) For Barthes, the tenuousness begins to move towards a form, which is the incipient sentence. There is nothing rarefied about this pleasure of noting a passing form – a rose, a riddle, a murmuration, the dress size of a grandchild, the wobble, in Barthes’s observation, of a woman walking in high heels. Anyone’s sense of what is noteworthy represents a form of living. Vis-à-vis the disorienting pleasure of this realism as its own end, Barthes cites Charles Baudelaire – ‘One’s sense of temporal and existential proportions is disturbed by the innumerable swarms of intense feelings and ideas…’. (5) It seems relevant to add Baudelaire’s qualification of ‘intensity’ to the pleasure of involuntary mobility recorded by Coleridge. What is not willed, as in a murmuration, is the more intense pleasure. The sensation of noting pertains to an involuntary pause at a fleeting intensity in sense perception and proportion. There’s a twist, an ellipsis – the external becomes internal, the involuntary is seized as thought. Reading Baudelaire in Barthes, I recall Coleridge’s 1803 fragmentary note on ‘a host of little winged flies on the snow mangled by the Hail storm’ (CN 1779). How like writing are those mangled flies on snow, I suddenly realize. The intensity has to do with the reflexive instant of the conscious capture of the idea or image. One of Coleridge’s names for his notebooks was Flypapers! What of this creatural motion and its capture? It’s the case that just before noting I feel an interior sensation, somewhat pleasurable, somewhat irritating, a buzz of flies, a disproportion. Perhaps this disturbance can be assuaged by the action of noting: I feel for my pen. Between the desiring sensation and the notebook, between the creatural buzz and the citation, within the small effort of copying out, and then among the small variations and augmentations introduced in the manual copying, a kinetic freedom opens, a thought begins. What gets noted? The ‘purely, gratuitously, inexplicably, enigmatically noteworthy’ Barthes unhelpfully specifies, (6) which is to say, life, not in its stories, but in its transient detail as it coalesces and comes to attention in the imagination of the continuous present.

Noting is a sensual work of the imagination; the notebook’s its external organ. I’m thinking here of imagination in Coleridge’s very dynamic sense – the psychic organ that associates and recombines received sensual data to make new meaning, new images, which are not the same as what already exists, but which relate to the existent by means of our bodies, our memories, our ways of living together, and how we recompose this sense experience. The composing and recomposing is intuitive work.

By intuitive, I mean there are senses that aren’t commonly named and quantified but which nonetheless act, receive and transmit. Karl Marx, in his 1844 ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ (themselves unfinished notes belatedly published), reminds us that ‘the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world, down to the present’. (7) Since I came across it – around 2005, while working on Lucretius’s materialism, or was it in 1989, in some blurred-out dirty photocopy that had circulated from hand to hand on Adanac Street, I can no longer be certain – I have held this statement as a sort of talisman, loving the philosopher’s insistence that sensing is not a given, but rather is formed – and distributed I would add – by practice (sensing for Marx is a culture, and so infinitely historically malleable and inventive). I’ve appreciated how Marx further specifies that economic possession is an ‘estrangement’ or alienation of all of the senses, a forced restriction of experience. One way to think of the elusive idea of freedom is as nonalienated sense experience. This experience moves outside, or in spite of, the metrics of market theocracy. In my work in writing, I have tried to learn how to recognise and describe the historical work of sensation, in order to approach and discover within the sensually given the existing presence of freedom. Reading and working in poetry has shown me that there is no limit to the number of human senses. The infinity of sensing has no number. While conventionally we count five senses, the English Baroque librarian Robert Burton, in 1621, to give one example, counted eight senses in his encyclopaedic treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy (his Arab precedents in the anatomy of the mind need to be named – Ibn ’Arabi, Ibn Rushd [Averröes] and Ibn Sina, or Avicenna), because, following the philosopher Ibn ’Arabi, he included in his sensual anatomy the internal senses – memory, imagination and common sense. (8) Or even eleven senses, because the three internal senses function differently in wakefulness and sleep, Burtons points out. Marx says that we create human sense ‘corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance’. The creation of sensing then must include and foster the inner senses. Perhaps they alone are free, not necessarily confined to or possessed by the individual. The inner action of images, which is to say the imagination, also moves across and transforms mentalities – collectively, trans-historically and in nature. I think, with Lucretius and Marx, that freedom is the dynamic imagination of nature, is in nature, as the clinamen, that anti-law of uncaused movement. The clinamen is a wild turning. I think it can be glimpsed in the notebook. I’m proposing that the notebook is a free organ of the imagination.

I became a reader of Burton’s Baroque encyclopaedia of the inner senses after I learned of his stylistic influence on my great love in prose, the modernist novelist Djuna Barnes. For Barnes, Burton’s sprawling, inclusive, enumerative sentences patterned an exploratory grammar that held contradiction as core to historical experience and desire alike. There is such a polyvalent web of transmission for Burton’s work, and another one of those points or nodes of transmission is Coleridge, who in 1800 proposed to his friend Charles Lamb that he should compose a forgery of Burton – new feigned fragments. That year, a new edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy had been published, after a long pause in readerly interest in Burton and the Baroque during the rationalist eighteenth century, and the two friends shared a single copy since neither could afford the book alone. Coleridge was reading their copy of The Anatomy in February of that year, and copied out a brief citation from the book (a phrase that Burton had himself taken from Macrobius) into his notebook: ‘I never travelled but in a map, in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated’ (CN 674). By September, Coleridge had listed Burton and his book at the top of a projected series of topics for future essays: ‘Character of Burton & his anatomy of Melancholy’. The list ends with ‘Smoking’ and ‘Drinking’ as its two final topics, and is sandwiched between a list of local mountain names and a detailed description of a countryside walk, ‘a heavenly walk’ he says, which itself reads as a detailed mapping, containing within the written description six small hieroglyphic-like drawings of a path that bends like a bow, then two bows, a bridge across a river at the bottom of two vales, a Zed-like mirroring of river water. Coburn has transcribed Coleridge’s map-drawings into the typographical rendering of his hand-written text (CN 803, 804).

This mapping of nows, which include the reflexive and the citational, across the two-page spread of the notebook, also constitutes a graphic work, a form of drawing, a drawing-out at times. The map posits a spatial frame for the tumble of perceived, remembered, dreamt, embroidered and iterated images and sensations that constitute consciousness, which is, in Coleridge’s reckoning, the free disjunction of elements. Yet as a map, each spread of pages reinvents the conceptual protocol for mapping. The established scales and legends and orientations don’t hold. His composition of the mind’s trembling flight is an involuntary, formed dispersal, a glyphic clustering, not a unity. In March 1827, he wrote on the first leaf of notebook 56, as a title, ‘Volitilia or Daybook for bird-liming / small thoughts, impounding stray thoughts, and holding for trial doubtful thoughts’. There is much freedom in the declaration of a site for the stray and the doubtful. As senses are unnumbered, formed by the variables and iterations of material practice, consciousness is volatile. Nothing will remain of it that is not noted. The turn in time to recognize the mind’s movement, to map space for new senses, is the only freedom. The poem flies across the notebook, that lumbering, implausible, impersonal external organ, trembling like starlings.