Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in "Kubla Khan"

Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan” Working Paper • May 11, 2022 William L. Benzon  Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan” A Working Paper by William L. Benzon May 11, 2022 Abstract: This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding “Kubla Khan,” which has an extraordinary structure. Each of the poem’s two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. Our two interlocutors start talking about traditional symbol processing, with addressable memory, and nested loops, and end up talking about a pair of interlinked neural nets where one (language forms) is used to index the other (meaning). In search of “Kubla Khan”................................. 2 Fee fi fo fum, I smell computation........................ 4 Calculating over symbols.................................. 8 Calculating over a neural net............................ 11 Two linked networks in the mesh.......................... 14 A postscript on method................................... 19 Appendix 1: The text of “Kubla Khan”..................... 21 Appendix 2: Rhyme and sense in the first part of “Kubla Khan”.................................................... 23 Appendix 3: My Work on Coleridge......................... 24 1301 Washington St. #311 Hoboken, NJ 07030 917.717.9841 bbenzon@mindspring.com Copyright © 2022 by William L. Benzon. All Rights Reserved.  Symbols and Nets ...At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Preface to “Kubla Khan” In search of “Kubla Khan” This dialog marks progress in my third attempt to comprehend the structure of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” My 1972 Master’s Thesis marks my first attempt: “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’”. I read everything I could find about the poem in the Johns Hopkins library. Two essays held my attention. The one by Humphrey House, from his Clarke Lectures, pointed out that no one would ever have thought the poem incomplete without Coleridge’s preface. In the other one, “’Kubla Khan,’ Proto-Surrealist Poem,” Kenneth Burke argued that the poem so defied Coleridge's aesthetic theories that he did not know what to make of it, arguing that it was a ”poetized psychology.” I updated my thesis work with a 1988 essay I published in Language and Style, “Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ‘Kubla Khan’.” I tossed out some of the philosophical language and updated it with some cognitive network diagrams, but it was fundamentally the same work. It was an analysis of the poem’s utterly remarkable structure, a structure which no one had seen despit all the attention that had been given to the poem. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, that thesis marked my break from what I now think of as standard literary criticism, which centers on interpreting a text’s meaning. I focused on the text’s form and used meaning as a way to examine form. Whereas the profession had moved beyond structuralism to various post-structuralisms, I had moved beyond it to the cognitive sciences. But I branded my essay “structuralist” both to signal its intellectual roots and as a touchstone literary critics could recognize. Decades passed until, early in the new millenium, I took another pass at “Kubla Khan.” I published “’Kubla Khan’ and the Embodied Mind,” in PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts Page 2 (2003). This was considerably longer than my 1988 article, more prose and many more diagrams, and a section where I speculated on the neural underpinnings of the poem. But I remained focused on the structure I had identified in my 1972 thesis, and which my interlocutors examine in the first section of their dialogue below, “I smell computation.” I paired that with a later essay, “Talking with Nature in ‘This Lime- Tree Bower My Prison,’” PsyArt, November (2004). That poem has a motif, gazing upon the sun, which is closely related to the “sunny dome” of “Kubla Khan” and a glimpse into a “still roaring dell” that resonates with the “deep romantic chasm” of “Kubla Khan.” A decade later I discussed these conjunctions in an unpublished working paper, “STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind” (2013) – where “unpublished” means not published in the formal academic literature; but I posted it online, as I have this dialog. At that time I thought perhaps I had gone as far as I could with Coleridge. There was certainly more to be done, but I couldn’t see how to do it. And then I began reading about machine learning and artificial neural nets, which set me to thinking. In December, 2017, I issued a working paper, “Calculating meaning in ‘Kubla Khan, – a rough cut,” Version 2. Here’s how I characterize calcuation (pp. 2-3): Roughly speaking then, to calculate the meaning of a text is to construct a coherent pattern of signifieds as prompted by the that text. [...] I assume this process involves both composition and convolution. Composition is the primary process and for many texts it may be the only process. I sometimes think of composition as “the freight train” model of meaning, where meanings are discrete entities, each of which is packed into a freight car, and the cars assembled into a train. In fact, nothing in a relational network functions like this, but it will serve as a crude metaphor to underpin the following discussion. Here is how I characterize convolution (p. 5): Still, what do I mean by convolve? I’m going to tap-dance through this one. Some years ago David Hays and I published a paper on metaphor, “Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process” [7], in which we argued that ‘robust’ metaphor (as opposed to ‘dead’ metaphor) works by convolving the tenor and the vehicle. At the time we were influenced by Karl Pribram’s notion of neural holography, which we explain (somewhat) in the paper. Note that neural tissue is active tissue. Individual neurons are always active, but more so at some times than others. Convolution is thus a process involving the interaction of meshworks of neurons, perhaps arranged in a specific architecture. Convolution is a very important operation in the world of artificial neural nets, used mostly for processing images. But then, “Kubla Khan” conjures up rich visual imagery. I should add, however, that it seems likely that my use of convolution in this dialog is both technical and a metaphorical extension thereof. Page 3 Thus began my third attempt to understand the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” This dialog continues that attempt. I have created two interlocutors, a Naturalist Literary Critic (NLC) and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard (STW). I conceive of this Naturalist Literary Critic as one who examines literary works in the way that a naturalist examines life forms. I first explained my conception in a long post at The Valve in 2010, which is now defunct. It’s now on New Savanna, “’NATURALIST’ criticism, NOT ‘cognitive’ NOT ‘Darwinian’ – A Quasi- Manifesto”.1 Nor, I might add, is it formalist, Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, or any other form of interpretive criticism. It is, if you will, post-interpretive. As for the Sympathetic Techno-Wizard, they’re expert in various forms of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which I am not, except for my early-career adventure into Old School computational semantics. Nonetheless, as I alone am writing this dialog, I have to play the role of STW as well, which implies that they say what I want/need them to say. One of my major intellectual goals is to take a topic that has resisted technical development and transmute it into a form where it is accessible to investigators who have technical skills that I lack. That has been one motive driving my work on “Kubla Khan” from the very beginning. I offer this dialog in the hope that some real techno-wizards will read it and take me up on it. Fee fi fo fum, I smell computation Sympathetic Techno-Wizard: So, you’re a literary critic. I thought you guys were skeptical about computers and technology. Naturalist Literary Critic: Some of us are, some aren’t. I’ve been interested in computing for a long time, since my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. STW: Tell me about it. NLC: OK, the short version. I was interested in literary criticism, partly under the influence of Richard Macksey, a polymath who taught comp lit in English translation. He introduced me to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, perhaps the leading thinker of an intellectual movement known as structuralism, who analylzed myths using charts and diagrams and metaphors from algebraic group theory. I was also interested in linguistics and was initially attracted to the work of Noam Chomsky. I liked those tree diagrams. But I eventually gave up on that school. I’d also taken – STW: Why? Why’d you give up on Chomskey? After all, the Chomsky 1 Here’s the link, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/naturalist- criticism-not-cognitive-not.html. Page 4 hierarchy is of some significance in computing. NLC: Mostly because he was all syntax, no semantics. And semantics is what interested me. Anyhow, as I was saying, I’d taken a course in computer programming, one of the first ever offered in colleges in America. As I recall, we did a program to search a hidden surface, another one simulating a queue, and then there was tic-tac-toe. I enjoyed it, but it really wasn’t something that grabbed me like it did some, like my friend, Rich. Anyhow, I sensed a deep resonance between what Lévi-Strauss was doing with myths and computation. STW: OK, I can see that. A computer scientist named Sheldon Klein worked with Lévi-Strauss in the mid-1970s; wrote a program to simulate Lévi-Strauss’s theory of myth. NLC: Yes, I learned about it while working with David Hays at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s. But that was after I’d done my basic work on “Kubla Khan”. STW: “Kubla Khan”? Isn’t that incomplete, something about an opium vision? NLC: Yeah, yeah. Just set that aside. Whether or not it’s true, it’s irrelevant. Anyhow, I’d become interested in “Kubla Khan” and decided to work on it, see if I could do a structuralist reading of it. Things started out well, I had all these neat charts, and was drafting prose like crazy, when I realized that is was going around in circles. I stopped writing, went back to the library and read more stuff, including linguistics, cognitive psych, neuroscience. All very interesting. But it didn’t get me where I needed to go. After more false starts than I care to imagine, I had the idea of treating line-end punctuation like brackets, braces, and parentheses in a mathematical expression. STC: Or nested parentheses Figure 1: Structure of first part of "Kubla Khan." Page 5 in a LISP program? NLC: Yes. So I decided to divide the text into sections according to line-end dominance. Periods dominate colons, colons dominate semicolons, and semicolons dominate commas. [See the text in Appendix 1.] All of a sudden the structure of “Kubla Khan” begins to make sense. We can visualize the poem’s structure as a tree, where each node in the tree represents a stretch of lines. So there’s the tree for the first 36 lines. STW: Hmm...Interesting, very interesting. NLC: That’s what I thought. STW: At the top level we have three subtrees, and the middle of those has three subtrees... NLC: And the middle of the middle also has three subtrees. STW: It’s like one of those nested matryoshka dolls. NLC: You read my mind. And all of the other divisions are binary. STW: Maybe it’s some kind of nested loop structure? NLC: Maybe. But let’s look at the rest of the poem. It’s considerably shorter, only 18 lines instead of 36. There à STW: It’s the same structure. Not as well developed at the beginning and end – NLC: Right, not as many lines. STW: – but the same nested triple branchings. And Coleridge was high on opium when he wrote this? NLC: Who knows. Maybe he was, and maybe he just made that up. He wasn’t very reliable. Plagiarized a bunch of Shelling for his Biographia Literaria.2 But Figure 2: Structure of second part of "Kubla that’s a side issue. However Khan." 2 Maria Popova, “Coleridge, Plagiarist”, The Marginalian, https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/21/coleridge-and-plagiarism/. Page 6 the poem came about, there it is, and we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got. STW: But the opium! The high! Maybe on another plane of reality. NLC: Cool your jets. Whatever Coleridge was up to, he wasn’t channeling intimations of The Coming Singularity. Let’s get back to the text. STW: OK. But it’s astonishingly symmetrical. It really smells like something computational is going on. NLC: And now it gets really interesting. In this diagram I’ve put the two parts of the poem together. I’ve put that arrow down terminal branches of the tree to remind us that the poem is just a string, a one-dimensional arrangment of words. You read them one after the other. That tree structure isn’t visible to you. Figure 3: Relations between the two parts of “Kubla Khan”. Now, look at how the first part of the poem ends. The last line is “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” Look at the second part. What Page 7 do you see in line 47, the middle of the middle of the middle? STW: “That sunny done! Those caves of ice!” NLC: Right. The last line of the first part of the poem, line 36, gets repeated in the structural center of the second part. How’d Coleridge do that? And why? We have absolutely no reason to believe that he did that consciously. He took notes about everything. If that had been part of a conscious scheme, he’d have written it down somewhere . . . and then probably hidden it. STW: So maybe it’s still hidden. NLC: Maybe. But we have to go with what we’ve got. And what we’ve got in those diagrams is even more mysterious than Coleridge’s little fairy tale of an origin myth about opium and a man from Porlock. So, I ask you, as a computer guy, what do you think is going on? Calculating over symbols Sympathetic Techno-Wizard: Well, I don’t really know about those triple branchings. As I said, it smells like a nested loop, which is bread-and-butter programming. But I can offer a hunch about the line repetition. Naturalist Literary Critic: OK. STW: Computer memory is organized as an arrangement of contents and addresses. When you put something into memory, you put it at a certain address and then, when you need it later, you retrieve it from that address. Let’s imagine that, when you read the poem, you’re doing a calculation over the words. Not consciously. Consciously, you’re just reading the words. But unconsciously, computing of some kind is going on. By the time you’ve read through line 35 you’ve finished the calculation. You’ve got the meaning of the poem. NLC: You mean like “42” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide. STW: Sorta’ like that. But it’s probably not a number. NLC: Maybe so-called mentalese? STW: Well, that’s really a word for the symbolic folks and I’m not too sure about that. But right now it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s something. So we’re at the end of line 35 and we’ve calculated the meaning of the previous lines. What do we do? NLC: I’ve got it! The last line, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” – that’s the address. We store the meaning there. STW: Exactly. So when we read the second part and come to line 47 – Page 8 NLC: We read, “That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” STW: – and retrieve the answer and plug it in to the calculation for the second part of the poem. NLC: And then keep on reading, “And all who heard should see them there” yada yada. I like it. We still don’t know what that triple structure is because we’re just looking at the relationship between those two lines – STW: Not so fast. That repetition, where we retrieve the stored meaning, it’s in the structural center of the second part, right? NLC: So we’d like to know what’s in the structural center of the first part? STW: Yes. NLC: The thrusting fountain that’s the source of the river Alph. STW: OK. We have an analogy: The fountain is to the first part of the poem as the repeated line is to the second part of the poem. That’s an aspect of the poem’s computational structure too. NLC: I think we maybe we have another analogy as well. The last line of the poem, ends with Paradise: “And drunk the milk of Paradise.” That rhymes with “caves of ice” in line 36. So the endings of the two parts are analogous, at least in sound. STW: Good. This is what we’ve got: Page 9  Figure 4: Structural analogies, duplication of dome and ice. The colors indicate structural analogies between the two parts and then we have that semantic linkage that ties the end of the first part to the middle of the second. NLC: But, you know, as much as I like this, I think we may have a problem. STW: What? NLC: You say that line 36 is an address for a memory location and that we return to that address in line 47. STW: Yes. NLC: Are all the lines, all the words, addresses? Is that all we’re doing when we reading words, retrieving meanings from addresses? STW: Yes. NLC: But we’re NOT retrieving meanings from line 36. STW: Right, we’re putting meaning there. The results of the calcuation we performed over all the previous meanings. NLC: So how do we know to switch from retrieving meanings to storing them? What tells us, in effect, these next words, they’re just empty vessels, mere word forms. There’s nothing to RETRIEVE from them. Instead, we’re going to STORE something there. STW: Hmmm.. You’re right. There’s an inconsistency. Well, OK, it’s just a metaphor, and metaphors are never perfect. There’s always something that doesn’t fit. Page 10 Calculating over a neural net Naturalist Literary Critic: So maybe we should try a different metaphor. Sympathetic Techno-Wizard: Do you have something in mind? NLC: Yes, I think so. You know how when you drop a pebble into a pond it sends ripples across the surface? STW: Yes. NLC: And when you drop pebbles in succession the ripples from each pebble mix together. What if meaning is like that? STW: So we get a growing interference pattern, with ripples of context accumulating as we read through the poem. NLC: Yes. And the poem is relatively short. I once timed myself reading it out loud. I did a half-dozen readings and they took between 2 and 2 and a half minutes, which isn’t all that long. STW: So now what happens to that special line we’ve been thinking about, that one that appears in one form at line 36 and a slightly different from in line 47. NLC: I saw what you did there! Very good. One ur-line, as it were – a Platonic line? – and two appearances of it. We’re talking pebbles in a pond, handfulls of pebbles. Page 11 STW: Yes. So ripples are accumulating on the pond surface and we drop those line-36 pebbles: sun . ny . pleas . ure . dome . with . caves . of . ice. Plop plop plop plop plop plop plop plop PLOP! NLC: And then we switch to a different realm. The first 36 lines are set in Xanadu. With line 37 we’re in a different world, one where some poet is recalling a vision and thinking about the consequences. STW: Plop plop plop plop...the pebbles drop, ripples fan out, the pattern is getting more complex and wham! Those same pebbles – NLC: The same ones? Aren’t they at the bottom of the pond? STW: Ignore it, it’s only metaphor, analogy, not precise. Those same pebbles drop: that . sun . ny . dome . those . caves . of . ice. Plop plop plop PLOP plop plop plop PLOP! They send ripples out that intermingle with existing – NLC: No, no. Stop. Halt! I think we can do better. Let’s drop the metaphor. Let’s talk about the brain. STW: Now wait just a minute here. Aren’t I supposed to be the technical one here, the one who would know about the brain? You’re a literary critic. NLC: Yeah, but I’m a naturalist literary critic and I’ve been reading about the brain for a long time. And you’re a tech wizard, talking about poetry. STW: Sorry. I forgot. And it’s not just any poem, you know. Orson Welles, Olivia Newton-John, Rush, there’s Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu,3 one of the best known – NLC: OK, I get it. Sheesh! As I was saying, the brain, It’s a huge dense network of inter connected neurons – NLC: 86 billion of them. STW: Yes! And signals don’t just disappear in the neural mesh. They ripple through it. NLC: So we can tell pretty much the same story. Except rather than dropping pebbles into a pond we’re using word forms to excite the neural net. We start at the beginning. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan – and waves of excitement ripple through the net. A stately pleasure dome decree – ripple ripple ripple. STW: And it builds – woman wailing for her demon lover – and builds – a mighty fountain momently was forced – furiouser and furiouser! – ancestral voices 3 A hypertext project that’s legendary in the tech world. See “Project Xanadu,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu. Page 12 NLC: freaking calling for war! This is exciting. Ripple ripple RIPPLE! STW: Calm down now. NLC: The shadow of the dome – ahh – mingled measure – that’s it, take it easy – and the caves. NLC & STW together: It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure- dome with caves of ice! Whew! STW: And now we shift, A damsel with a dulcimer – vision – Abyssinian maid – singing – NLC: Could I revive – delight ‘twould win – I would build – NLC & STW together: That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! – Plop plop bang bang woopsie doodle I’m a ding-dong daddy! NLC: Now we’re cooking with gas! STW: Cooking with gas? You HAVE been around, haven’t you? NLC: But this time it works, I think. Activation has been building up in the mesh since the first words, In Xanadu, and, sure, those early signals weaken, but then what does STC do? Let’s look at those lines right after those damned ancestors were caterwauling about 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. You see what he’s doing. He’s going back over – STW: He’s boosting the signal from the very beginning of the pome – shadow of the dome of pleasure – NLC: – and mixing it with the noisy fountain section so we can cuise on in to the finish: It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! Pleasure-dome picks up the first part and caves of ice – remember that ice is a form of water – picks up the wailing and seething and bursting fountain of the second part. It’s all mixed in together. STW: Right, we don’t need any of that classical computer talk about addresses and stored data. A neural network is an active medium. Let’s call that line the Emblem. Those words have what we might call an intrinsic meaning – ugh! hate that word, it’s so freighted with philosophical resonance – which we can think of as the mesh activation Page 13 that would occur if one enountered the word alone, without any context. All words have an intrinsic meaning. But when they are uttered, or heard, or read, in context, that intrinsic meaning interacts with the activation that’s been building in the mesh through the flow of the discourse. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that words will pick up meaning in the course of discourse. So when the Emblem is encountered in line 36 its intrinsic meaning mingles with the cumulative activity generated by the poem from the beginning. NLC: So when we encounter the Emblem in line 47, it comes trailing more than its intrinsic meaning. STW: Right. It doesn’t mean the same in context as it would on its own. When it shows up in line 47 it brings some of the reverberations from the first 36 lines with it. They re-enter the discourse. NLC: And so the poem moves on: And all who heard should seem them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! That kind of echos those ancestral voices from the first part. They arose after the structural center of that part, the fountain bursting, and these cryers show up after the structural center of the second part. And things calm down. The poem ends with a reference to Paradise: For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. Two linked networks in the mesh STW: I hate to say it, but we’ve still got a problem. NLC: But I like what we just did! What’s the problem? STW: We failed the original computational account, the one with nested loops and addresses, because we had to treat the Emblem words differently from all the other words. NLC: But, you know, that’s a detail that hardly matters. STW: Now you’re sounding like an ordinary literary critic. NLC: But such a critic wouldn’t care about this conversation at all. STW: Right. So stop pretending. We’re talking computing, and in that context a detail like that is very important. It’s about how the device is constructed and how it operates. That didn’t make sense. If Page 14 we’re going to skip over such a critical detail, we better have a damn good reason to do it. NLC: And the fact that it made for an nice account is not itself a good reason. STW: Right. It has to be justified on other grounds. So we switched to a pebbles-in-a-pond metaphor. Sure, it’s looser and in that sense perhaps a step back. But now we’re treating all words the same, and that’s important. Then when the Emblem-pebbles dropped in line 47, they didn’t bring anything with them, like we had in the memory retrieval metaphor we’d just abandoned. NLC: But we fixed that by dropping the pond in favor of the neural mesh. Which is no metaphor, but the real stuff, no? STW: Yes. But these words that are exciting the mesh, they’re in the mesh themselves, no? NLC: What do you mean? STW: We’ve been talking as though words or symbols are one kind of thing and word meanings are a different kind of thing. We’ve got meanings in the mesh and talk like those symbols are something else that we’re plop bang whoopsie doodling into the meshed meanings. Except that there isn’t any something else. It’s all in the mesh, words, or should we say word forms, and meanings, all in the same kind of neural tissue. NLC: OK, I think I can live without the plop plop bang bang. What are you suggesting? STW: Well, as I recall – you know, I’ve read about the brain too – the tissue of cerebral cortex is pretty much the same from stem to stern, starboard to port, so language is implemented in the neural mesh too. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexemics, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, all in the mesh. We’ve got two interlinked masses of neural tissue. It’s all “big vectors of neural activity,” to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Hinton.4 One bunch of vectors is about linguistic forms and the other about meanings. We can say that the linguistic forms are used to index the meanings, and to move from one to another. NLC: Are they still symbols? STW: Sure. What makes them symbols is their position in the overall cortical ecology. It’s their function that makes them into symbols, not the substance of their implementation. One bunch of neural vectors, the symbols, functions as an indexing system for the other 4 Karen Hao, AI pioneer Geoff Hinton: “Deep learning is going to be able to do everything”, MIT Technology Review, Nov. 3, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfather- geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-will-do-everything/. Page 15 bunch. And – here’s the remarkable thing – since symbols are physically expressed, as sounds, as images, or even gestures, they can be treated as ordinary objects of perception – NLC: Right. Roman Jakobson called that language’s metalingual function, no? STW: Yes. The language system can index itself. At least partially. NLC: OK. And come to think of it, putting linguistic form and substantive meaning on the same footing may help us with a problem that standard literary criticism has had since forever. STW: What’s that. NLC: How sound and sense work together in poetry. Good literary critics know that they do, but sound and sense are so different it’s tough to see what to say about their interaction. It’s easy to analyze rhyme and meter, and to point out that this or that theme seems associated with these sounds in a particular poem, but that feels pretty weak. And we know, from, experience, that this is important. Here's an example from “Kubla Khan.” These eight lines from the middle of the middle of the middle of the first part of the poem (ll. 17-24). 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 fragements vaulted like rebounding hail, Of chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. We’ve got three clauses, marked by a pair of line-end colons. The first and second clauses are each three lines long, the third clause is only two lines long. Now look at the rhyme; we have four rhymed couplets. The rhyme scheme thus cuts across the syntactic divisions. But if we look at the whole first part [see Appendix 2] we see that outside the middle of the middle syntax and sound are aligned. STW: So, if we’re talking about waves of neural activity moving through the brain, the waves of semantic/syntactic activity get out of synch with the waves of sonic activity. NLC: Right. Something similar happens in the second part: Page 16  Figure 5: Rhyme and sense in part two. Line 47 is the structural center: “The sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” We have a structural break in the middle of line 49, which begins, “And all should cry...” So that structural unit doesn’t even have a rhyming word. We’ve got three rhyming lines in a row, 48-50, that encompass three syntactic divisions, one of which is in the middle of a line, 49, which thus straddles two divisions. And it’s in these middle sections that something intrudes into the imaginary world. [See the diagram on page 9 above.] In the first part of the poem the fountain bursts into Xanadu, giving birth to the river Alph. In the second part the reconstituted dome-and-caves burst into the speaker’s line of discourse. STW: So, you’re saying that this structural instability is itself generative of meaning in some way. NLC: Yes. But it’s not the sort of meaning that yields to interpretation. It can only be experienced. STW: I’ll buy that. NLC: I’ve got one last issue. STW: Shoot. NLC: What about those nested loops, those matryoshka dolls we discussed at the beginning? Page 17 STW: They’re gone. I mean, sure, those triple structures are there in the poem. But the idea that they are some kind of nested control structure, that seems like a non-starter. We’re going to have to account for them some other way. NLC: Got any ideas? STW: Nope. You? NLC: Nope. STW: Take a hit and pass it on. Let someone else work on it. NLC: ffthhhhh... ahh... Page 18 A postscript on method I can hear the voices now: Naa, naa, you’re crazy! You can’t do science like this, too speculative. Speculative? He’s out to lunch! On the moon! – “To the moon, Alice, too the moon!” That’s not how it’s done, son. How’s WHAT done? Psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, AI, figuring out the mechanisms of the mind. Those things are complicated. We have to take it a piece at a time, get the details right – You don’t think I know that? I read the technical literature, been doing it for years, decades. And you know what? What? What? What? As interesting as a lot of your stuff is, you guys haven’t told me jack shit that’s really useful in figuring out what’s going on in “Kubla Khan.” But that’s not what we’re trying to do? Why not? Because it’s too complicated. We’re not ready. Well, when are you going to be ready? I don’t know. 50, 87, 199 years, who knows? These things take time. Horse pucky! You know what I hear? I hear you saying, “We’re not worthy.” No, you’re not. Neither am I. No one’s worthy. It’s not about worthyness. It’s about work, and desire, and vision. It’s about risk and speculation. Do you think we can understand the mind? No, it’s beyond us. You, you get out! You’ve given up. Come back when you’re sober. I’d like to think can understand the mind. But it’s hard, really hard. We’ve chased a lot of rabbits down holes, spilt a lot of milk, got lost on a lot of garden paths, ‘lotta water under the freakin’ bridge – Page 19 Enough with the cliches! Let’s say I want to build a cathedral. So I hire the best stone masons, the best carpenters and plumbers, the best electricians, the best glazers, and so on. I gather them together on site and give them the best materials. “Now build me a cathedral,” I say, “Build me a cathedral.” What do you think’s going to happen? Hmmmm... Not much. Confusion. Fighting maybe. Why? You need a plan. You can’t build a cathedral from the ground up with just materials and skills. You need to know how to put all those things together. Right. It’s the same with the mind. You guys have the skills and materials. And I’ve got, well I don’t have a plan, but I’ve got this poem, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” And I know a lot about it, not just what I’ve put up there in that dialog, if you reach right out of this dialog, you’ll find some papers listed in Appendix 3. There’s a large literature on the poem. There’s stuff there too, though not much of it has been crafted with the cognitive and neurosciences in mind, much less deep learning and artificial intelligence. Work toward it. Work toward it? Yeah. Dream a little. If you wanted to get there – “Kubla Khan” – from wherever here is for you, what’s the first step you would take? And the next? What kind of cooperation are you going to need from others, from me? But it’s just so hard. We’ve worked so long. Is it all work? Haven’t there been some fun times, some excitement? You’re right. Some of it has been fun. So, keep on truckin’. We’ll get there. In the distance – Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go... Ditty dump di dum, woopsie ding dong daddy, Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho! Page 20 Appendix 1: The text of “Kubla Khan” The numbering to the left matches the trees in Figures 1 and 2. 1.1 1.11 1.111 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 1 A stately pleasure-dome decree: 2 1.112 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 3 Through caverns measureless to man 4 Down to a sunless sea. 5 1.12 1.131 So twice five miles of fertile ground 6 With walls and towers were girdled round: 7 1.132 1.1221 And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, 8 Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; 9 1.1222 And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10 Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. 11 1.2 1.21 1.211 But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 12 Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! 13 1.212 A savage place! as holy and enchanted 14 As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15 By woman wailing for her demon lover! 16 1.22 1.221 And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething 17 As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 18 A mighty fountain momently was forced: 19 1.222 Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, 21 Of chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: 22 1.223 And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever 23 It flung up momently the sacred river. 24 1.23 1.231 1.2311 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 26 1.2312 Then reached the taverns endless to man, 27 And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: 28 1.232 And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 29 Ancestral voices prophesying war! 30 1.3 1.31 1.311 The shadow of the dome of pleasure 31 Floated midway on the waves; 32 1.312 Where was heard the mingled measure 33 From the fountain and the caves. 34 1.32 1.321 It was a miracle of rare device, 35 1.322 A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! 36 Page 21 2.1 2.11 A damsel with a dulcimer 37 In a vision once I saw: 38 2.12 It was an Abyssinian maid, 39 And on her dulcimer she played, 40 Singing of Mount Abora. 41 2.2 2.21 2.211 Could I revive within me 42 Her symphony and song, 43 2.212 To such a deep delight ‘twould win me 44 2.22 2.221 That with music loud and long, 45 I would build that dome in air, 46 2.222 That sunny dome! those caves of ice! 47 2.223 And all who heard should seem them there, 48 2.23 2.231 And all should cry, 49a 2.232 Beware! Beware! 49b His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 50 2.3 2.31 Weave a circle round him thrice, 51 And close your eyes with holy dread, 52 2.32 For he on honey-dew hath fed, 53 And drunk the milk of Paradise 54 Page 22 Appendix 2: Rhyme and sense in the first part of “Kubla Khan” Note: I designed the diagram to emphasize the wave-like nature of the structure. This is temporal structure. Compare the structure of the waves along the right hand side with those along the left hand side. Notice what happens in lines 17-24. Page 23 Appendix 3: My Work on Coleridge Metaphoric and Metonymic Invariance: Two Examples from Coleridge, MLN, 96: 1097- 1105, 1981. URL: https://www.academia.edu/35168392/Metaphoric_and_Metonymic_Invariance_ Two_Examples_from_Coleridge. Abstract: “Kubla Khan and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are two very different poems by the same poet. But they share the same two- part structure, and they share imagery as well. The roaring dell of “Lime-Tree” corresponds to the savage chasm of “Kubla Khan.” The concern with sight and sound manifest in “Kubla Khan” shows up in “Lime-Tree Bower” in the image of the creeking rook flying across the sun. And the way in which both Charles and the poet have access to that sight gives it a role similar to the sunny dome and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan,” where both the poet and his audience are linked through the image. These two poems share the same world. But they take radically different paths through it. One path is regulated by metonymy and unfolds though two consciousness moving through different parts of the same landscape. The other path is regulated by metaphor and so unfolds in two different worlds linked by a common image; the path it takes through these worlds is, however, the same. Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan." Language and Style 18: 3 - 29, 1985. URL: https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Rea ding_of_Kubla_Khan_. Abstract: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a highly coherent structure in which the two parts of the poem exhibit the same ternary structure. Each can be divided into three sections, the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first section ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated in the middle of the second section. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. “Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November 29, 2003, URL: https://www.academia.edu/8810242/_Kubla_Khan_and_the_Embodied_Mind. Abstract: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated at the structural midpoint of the second movement. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. The semantics of the poem’s first movement involves a series of cognitive blends in which the Page 24 neural self provides one input while Xanadu imagery provides the other. The semantics of the second movement involves manipulating the reality status of successive mental spaces. Underlying the entire poem is a “walk” by core brain mechanisms tracing territorial, sexual, and attachment patterns through the poem’s semantics. Coleridge’s 1816 preface embodies an abstract pattern that paradoxically asserts and denies the poem’s validity. On the internal evidence, the poem is whole and complete. Comment: This is my most detailed study of the poem. It is long and dense with detail. You might want to read “Articulate Vision” first. It will get you through the poem quicker and thus prepare you for the greater detail of the embodiement paper. If you are interested in the possible neural underpinnings of “Kubla Khan”, read the section, “Walking the Lizard.” Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004, URL: https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime- Tree_Bower_My_Prison_. Abstract: By recasting Vygotsky's account of language acquisition in neural terms we see that language itself functions as a transitional object in Winnicott's sense. This allows us to clarify the Schwartz- Holland account of literature as existing in Winnicottian potential space and provides a context in which to analyze Coleridge's "This Lime-Three Bower." The Caretaker-Child attachment relationship provides the poem's foundation. The poet plays the Child role with respect to Nature and the Caretaker role with respect to his friends. The friends, Charles in particular, play the mediating the role of transitional object in the first movement while Nature becomes a mediator between one person and another in the second movement. The first movement starts with the poet being differentiated and estranged from Nature and concludes in an almost delusional fusion of poet, friends, and Nature. The second movement starts with the poet secure in Nature's presence and moves to an adult differentiation between poet, friends, and Nature. STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, Working Paper, November 2013, 46 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/8139268/STC_Poetic_Form_and_a_Glimpse_of_the_ Mind. Abstract: "Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are two very different poems by the same poet, Samuel T. Coleridge. Think of them as orthogonal to one another within the overall space of the human mind. This working paper provides descriptive accounts of both poems, compares them, and recounts some of the work in the newer psychologies – cognitive, evolutionary, and neuro- – that has recently been brought to bear on the study of literature and how that work is germane to these poems. It concludes with a brief chronology of the parallel trajectories of cognitive science and literary theory in the Page 25 last half of the previous century. The problem of form in “Kubla Khan”, Working Paper, November 29, 2017, 13 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/35275862/The_problem_of_form_in_Kubla_Khan_. Abstract: “Kubla Khan” has two movements. The movements have the same form: each movements segment into three components (where the middle component, in turn, segments into three components and, once again (the middle component segments into three components)). All other divisions are binary. Iif we concentrate on the centers of the two movements we have that seething fountain occupying the same SLOT (middle of the (middle of the (middle))) in the first movement as the dome and the cave occupy in the second movement. And the dome and caves occupy the same SLOT in the first movement as “drunk the milk of Paradise!” plays in the second movement. Notice that the final words of both movements, “ice” and “Paradise” respectively, rhyme. Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a rough cut (Version 2), Working Paper, December 9, 2017, 19 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/35379665/Calculating_meaning_in_Kubla_Khan_a_ rough_cut_Version_2_. Abstract: “Kubla Khan” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. “Kubla Khan” is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of being. “Lime-Tree Bower” is narrative and personal and makes little or no use of convolution. It reveals the unfolding of subjectivity in time. The two poems also differ in their versification, a differenc which is related to their different strategies of meaning. * * * * * These papers are not about “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge, or poetry. But the metaphor paper is central to my thinking about linguistic meaning and the ayahuasca paper discusses “Kubla Khan” in the context of one of the ayahuasca experiences Shanon reports. Benzon, W. L. and Hays, D. G. Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process. American Journal of Semiotics 5: 59 - 79, 1987. URL: https://www.academia.edu/238608/Metaphor_Recognition_and_Neural_Proces s. Karl Pribram's concept of neural holography suggests a neurological basis for metaphor: the brain creates a new concept by the metaphoric process of using one concept as a filter—better, as an extractor—for another. For example, the concept "Achilles" is "filtered" through the concept "lion" to foreground the pattern of fighting fury the two hold in common. In this model the linguistic capacity of the left cortical hemisphere is augmented by the capacity of the right hemisphere for analysis of images. Left-hemisphere syntax holds the Page 26 tenor and vehicle in place while right-hemisphere imaging process extracts the metaphor ground. Metaphors can be concatenated one after the other so that the ground of one metaphor can enter into another one as tenor or vehicle. Thus conceived metaphor is a mechanism through which thought can be extended into new conceptual territory. Benzon, W. L. Ayahuasca Variations. Human Nature Review 3 (2003) 239- 251. URL: https://www.academia.edu/12667500/Ayahuasca_Variations. Benny Shanon's The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience presents us with an account of the different modes of consciousness that emerge when one has taken ayahuasca, a hallucinogen used for religious ceremonies among various groups, mostly in South America. Shanon provides extensive accounts of ayahuasca visions details the drug's specific affinity for music. I review the salient points of Shanon's book and the explore the implications by examining the nature of jazz improvisation and comparing one of Shanon's own visions with Coleridge's “Kubla Khan.” I conclude by considering ayahuasca visions in relationship to Norman Holland's neuro-psychoanalytic account of literary experience. Page 27 

Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan” Working Paper • May 11, 2022 William L. Benzon  Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan” A Working Paper William L. Benzon May 11, 2022 Abstract: This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding “Kubla Khan,” which has an extraordinary structure. Each of the poem’s two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. Our two interlocutors start talking about traditional symbol processing, with addressable memory, and nested loops, and end up talking about a pair of interlinked neural nets where one (language forms) is used to index the other (meaning). In search of “Kubla Khan” ................................. 2 Fee fi fo fum, I smell computation ........................ 4 Calculating over symbols .................................. 8 Calculating over a neural net ............................ 11 Two linked networks in the mesh .......................... 14 A postscript on method ................................... 19 Appendix 1: The text of “Kubla Khan” ..................... 21 Appendix 2: Rhyme and sense in the first part of “Kubla Khan” .................................................... 23 Appendix 3: My Work on Coleridge ......................... 24 1301 Washington St. #311 Hoboken, NJ 07030 917.717.9841 bbenzon@mindspring.com Copyright © 2022 by William L. Benzon. All Rights Reserved.  Symbols and Nets ...At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Preface to “Kubla Khan” In search of “Kubla Khan” This dialog marks progress in my third attempt to comprehend the structure of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” My 1972 Master’s Thesis marks my first attempt: “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’”. I read everything I could find about the poem in the Johns Hopkins library. Two essays held my attention. The one by Humphrey House, from his Clarke Lectures, pointed out that no one would ever have thought the poem incomplete without Coleridge’s preface. In the other one, “’Kubla Khan,’ Proto-Surrealist Poem,” Kenneth Burke argued that the poem so defied Coleridge's aesthetic theories that he did not know what to make of it, arguing that it was a ”poetized psychology.” I updated my thesis work with a 1988 essay I published in Language and Style, “Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ‘Kubla Khan’.” I tossed out some of the philosophical language and updated it with some cognitive network diagrams, but it was fundamentally the same work. It was an analysis of the poem’s utterly remarkable structure, a structure which no one had seen despit all the attention that had been given to the poem. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, that thesis marked my break from what I now think of as standard literary criticism, which centers on interpreting a text’s meaning. I focused on the text’s form and used meaning as a way to examine form. Whereas the profession had moved beyond structuralism to various post-structuralisms, I had moved beyond it to the cognitive sciences. But I branded my essay “structuralist” both to signal its intellectual roots and as a touchstone literary critics could recognize. Decades passed until, early in the new millenium, I took another pass at “Kubla Khan.” I published “’Kubla Khan’ and the Embodied Mind,” in Page 2 PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (2003). This was considerably longer than my 1988 article, more prose and many more diagrams, and a section where I speculated on the neural underpinnings of the poem. But I remained focused on the structure I had identified in my 1972 thesis, and which my interlocutors examine in the first section of their dialogue below, “I smell computation.” I paired that with a later essay, “Talking with Nature in ‘This Lime- Tree Bower My Prison,’” PsyArt, November (2004). That poem has a motif, gazing upon the sun, which is closely related to the “sunny dome” of “Kubla Khan” and a glimpse into a “still roaring dell” that resonates with the “deep romantic chasm” of “Kubla Khan.” A decade later I discussed these conjunctions in an unpublished working paper, “STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind” (2013) – where “unpublished” means not published in the formal academic literature; but I posted it online, as I have this dialog. At that time I thought perhaps I had gone as far as I could with Coleridge. There was certainly more to be done, but I couldn’t see how to do it. And then I began reading about machine learning and artificial neural nets, which set me to thinking. In December, 2017, I issued a working paper, “Calculating meaning in ‘Kubla Khan, – a rough cut,” Version 2. Here’s how I characterize calcuation (pp. 2-3): Roughly speaking then, to calculate the meaning of a text is to construct a coherent pattern of signifieds as prompted by the that text. [...] I assume this process involves both composition and convolution. Composition is the primary process and for many texts it may be the only process. I sometimes think of composition as “the freight train” model of meaning, where meanings are discrete entities, each of which is packed into a freight car, and the cars assembled into a train. In fact, nothing in a relational network functions like this, but it will serve as a crude metaphor to underpin the following discussion. Here is how I characterize convolution (p. 5): Still, what do I mean by convolve? I’m going to tap-dance through this one. Some years ago David Hays and I published a paper on metaphor, “Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process” [7], in which we argued that ‘robust’ metaphor (as opposed to ‘dead’ metaphor) works by convolving the tenor and the vehicle. At the time we were influenced by Karl Pribram’s notion of neural holography, which we explain (somewhat) in the paper. Note that neural tissue is active tissue. Individual neurons are always active, but more so at some times than others. Convolution is thus a process involving the interaction of meshworks of neurons, perhaps arranged in a specific architecture. Convolution is a very important operation in the world of artificial neural nets, used mostly for processing images. But then, “Kubla Khan” conjures up rich visual imagery. I should add, however, that it seems Page 3 likely that my use of convolution in this dialog is both technical and a metaphorical extension thereof. Thus began my third attempt to understand the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” This dialog continues that attempt. I have created two interlocutors, a Naturalist Literary Critic (NLC) and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard (STW). I conceive of this Naturalist Literary Critic as one who examines literary works in the way that a naturalist examines life forms. I first explained my conception in a long post at The Valve in 2010, which is now defunct. It’s now on New Savanna, “’NATURALIST’ criticism, NOT ‘cognitive’ NOT ‘Darwinian’ – A Quasi- Manifesto”.1 Nor, I might add, is it formalist, Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, or any other form of interpretive criticism. It is, if you will, post-interpretive. As for the Sympathetic Techno-Wizard, they’re expert in various forms of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which I am not, except for my early-career adventure into Old School computational semantics. Nonetheless, as I alone am writing this dialog, I have to play the role of STW as well, which implies that they say what I want/need them to say. One of my major intellectual goals is to take a topic that has resisted technical development and transmute it into a form where it is accessible to investigators who have technical skills that I lack. That has been one motive driving my work on “Kubla Khan” from the very beginning. I offer this dialog in the hope that some real techno-wizards will read it and take me up on it. Fee fi fo fum, I smell computation Sympathetic Techno-Wizard: So, you’re a literary critic. I thought you guys were skeptical about computers and technology. Naturalist Literary Critic: Some of us are, some aren’t. I’ve been interested in computing for a long time, since my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. STW: Tell me about it. NLC: OK, the short version. I was interested in literary criticism, partly under the influence of Richard Macksey, a polymath who taught comp lit in English translation. He introduced me to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, perhaps the leading thinker of an intellectual movement known as structuralism, who analylzed myths using charts and diagrams and metaphors from algebraic group theory. I was also interested in linguistics and was initially attracted to the work of Noam Chomsky. I liked those tree diagrams. But I eventually gave up on that school. I’d also taken – 1 Here’s the link, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/naturalist- criticism-not-cognitive-not.html. Page 4 STW: Why? Why’d you give up on Chomskey? After all, the Chomsky hierarchy is of some significance in computing. NLC: Mostly because he was all syntax, no semantics. And semantics is what interested me. Anyhow, as I was saying, I’d taken a course in computer programming, one of the first ever offered in colleges in America. As I recall, we did a program to search a hidden surface, another one simulating a queue, and then there was tic-tac-toe. I enjoyed it, but it really wasn’t something that grabbed me like it did some, like my friend, Rich. Anyhow, I sensed a deep resonance between what Lévi-Strauss was doing with myths and computation. STW: OK, I can see that. A computer scientist named Sheldon Klein worked with Lévi-Strauss in the mid-1970s; wrote a program to simulate Lévi-Strauss’s theory of myth. NLC: Yes, I learned about it while working with David Hays at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s. But that was after I’d done my basic work on “Kubla Khan”. STW: “Kubla Khan”? Isn’t that incomplete, something about an opium vision? NLC: Yeah, yeah. Just set that aside. Whether or not it’s true, it’s irrelevant. Anyhow, I’d become interested in “Kubla Khan” and decided to work on it, see if I could do a structuralist reading of it. Things started out well, I had all these neat charts, and was drafting prose like crazy, when I realized that is was going around in circles. I stopped writing, went back to the library and read more stuff, including linguistics, cognitive psych, neuroscience. All very interesting. But it didn’t get me where I needed to go. After more false Figure 1: Structure of first part of "Kubla Khan." starts than I care to imagine, I had the idea of treating line-end punctuation like brackets, braces, and parentheses in a mathematical expression. Page 5 STC: Or nested parentheses in a LISP program? NLC: Yes. So I decided to divide the text into sections according to line-end dominance. Periods dominate colons, colons dominate semicolons, and semicolons dominate commas. [See the text in Appendix 1.] All of a sudden the structure of “Kubla Khan” begins to make sense. We can visualize the poem’s structure as a tree, where each node in the tree represents a stretch of lines. So there’s the tree for the first 36 lines. STW: Hmm...Interesting, very interesting. NLC: That’s what I thought. STW: At the top level we have three subtrees, and the middle of those has three subtrees... NLC: And the middle of the middle also has three subtrees. STW: It’s like one of those nested matryoshka dolls. NLC: You read my mind. And all of the other divisions are binary. STW: Maybe it’s some kind of nested loop structure? NLC: Maybe. But let’s look at the rest of the poem. It’s considerably shorter, only 18 lines instead of 36. There à STW: It’s the same structure. Not as well developed at the beginning and end – NLC: Right, not as many lines. STW: – but the same nested triple branchings. And Coleridge was high on opium Figure 2: Structure of second part of "Kubla when he wrote this? Khan." NLC: Who knows. Maybe he was, and maybe he just made that up. He wasn’t very reliable. Plagiarized a bunch of Shelling for his Page 6 Biographia Literaria.2 But that’s a side issue. However the poem came about, there it is, and we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got. STW: But the opium! The high! Maybe on another plane of reality. NLC: Cool your jets. Whatever Coleridge was up to, he wasn’t channeling intimations of The Coming Singularity. Let’s get back to the text. STW: OK. But it’s astonishingly symmetrical. It really smells like something computational is going on. NLC: And now it gets really interesting. In this diagram I’ve put the two parts of the poem together. I’ve put that arrow down terminal branches of the tree to remind us that the poem is just a string, a one-dimensional arrangment of words. You read them one after the other. That tree structure isn’t visible to you. Figure 3: Relations between the two parts of “Kubla Khan”. 2 Maria Popova, “Coleridge, Plagiarist”, The Marginalian, https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/21/coleridge-and-plagiarism/. Page 7 Now, look at how the first part of the poem ends. The last line is “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” Look at the second part. What do you see in line 47, the middle of the middle of the middle? STW: “That sunny done! Those caves of ice!” NLC: Right. The last line of the first part of the poem, line 36, gets repeated in the structural center of the second part. How’d Coleridge do that? And why? We have absolutely no reason to believe that he did that consciously. He took notes about everything. If that had been part of a conscious scheme, he’d have written it down somewhere . . . and then probably hidden it. STW: So maybe it’s still hidden. NLC: Maybe. But we have to go with what we’ve got. And what we’ve got in those diagrams is even more mysterious than Coleridge’s little fairy tale of an origin myth about opium and a man from Porlock. So, I ask you, as a computer guy, what do you think is going on? Calculating over symbols Sympathetic Techno-Wizard: Well, I don’t really know about those triple branchings. As I said, it smells like a nested loop, which is bread-and-butter programming. But I can offer a hunch about the line repetition. Naturalist Literary Critic: OK. STW: Computer memory is organized as an arrangement of contents and addresses. When you put something into memory, you put it at a certain address and then, when you need it later, you retrieve it from that address. Let’s imagine that, when you read the poem, you’re doing a calculation over the words. Not consciously. Consciously, you’re just reading the words. But unconsciously, computing of some kind is going on. By the time you’ve read through line 35 you’ve finished the calculation. You’ve got the meaning of the poem. NLC: You mean like “42” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide. STW: Sorta’ like that. But it’s probably not a number. NLC: Maybe so-called mentalese? STW: Well, that’s really a word for the symbolic folks and I’m not too sure about that. But right now it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s something. So we’re at the end of line 35 and we’ve calculated the meaning of the previous lines. What do we do? NLC: I’ve got it! The last line, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” – that’s the address. We store the meaning there. Page 8 STW: Exactly. So when we read the second part and come to line 47 – NLC: We read, “That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” STW: – and retrieve the answer and plug it in to the calculation for the second part of the poem. NLC: And then keep on reading, “And all who heard should see them there” yada yada. I like it. We still don’t know what that triple structure is because we’re just looking at the relationship between those two lines – STW: Not so fast. That repetition, where we retrieve the stored meaning, it’s in the structural center of the second part, right? NLC: So we’d like to know what’s in the structural center of the first part? STW: Yes. NLC: The thrusting fountain that’s the source of the river Alph. STW: OK. We have an analogy: The fountain is to the first part of the poem as the repeated line is to the second part of the poem. That’s an aspect of the poem’s computational structure too. NLC: I think we maybe we have another analogy as well. The last line of the poem, ends with Paradise: “And drunk the milk of Paradise.” That rhymes with “caves of ice” in line 36. So the endings of the two parts are analogous, at least in sound. STW: Good. This is what we’ve got: Page 9  Figure 4: Structural analogies, duplication of dome and ice. The colors indicate structural analogies between the two parts and then we have that semantic linkage that ties the end of the first part to the middle of the second. NLC: But, you know, as much as I like this, I think we may have a problem. STW: What? NLC: You say that line 36 is an address for a memory location and that we return to that address in line 47. STW: Yes. NLC: Are all the lines, all the words, addresses? Is that all we’re doing when we reading words, retrieving meanings from addresses? STW: Yes. NLC: But we’re NOT retrieving meanings from line 36. STW: Right, we’re putting meaning there. The results of the calcuation we performed over all the previous meanings. NLC: So how do we know to switch from retrieving meanings to storing them? What tells us, in effect, these next words, they’re just empty vessels, mere word forms. There’s nothing to RETRIEVE from them. Instead, we’re going to STORE something there. STW: Hmmm.. You’re right. There’s an inconsistency. Well, OK, it’s just a metaphor, and metaphors are never perfect. There’s always something that doesn’t fit. Page 10 Calculating over a neural net Naturalist Literary Critic: So maybe we should try a different metaphor. Sympathetic Techno-Wizard: Do you have something in mind? NLC: Yes, I think so. You know how when you drop a pebble into a pond it sends ripples across the surface? STW: Yes. NLC: And when you drop pebbles in succession the ripples from each pebble mix together. What if meaning is like that? STW: So we get a growing interference pattern, with ripples of context accumulating as we read through the poem. NLC: Yes. And the poem is relatively short. I once timed myself reading it out loud. I did a half-dozen readings and they took between 2 and 2 and a half minutes, which isn’t all that long. STW: So now what happens to that special line we’ve been thinking about, that one that appears in one form at line 36 and a slightly different from in line 47. NLC: I saw what you did there! Very good. One ur-line, as it were – a Platonic line? – and two appearances of it. We’re talking pebbles in a pond, handfulls of pebbles. STW: Yes. So ripples are accumulating on the pond surface and we drop those line-36 pebbles: sun . ny . pleas . ure . dome . with . caves . of . ice. Plop plop plop plop plop plop plop plop PLOP! Page 11 NLC: And then we switch to a different realm. The first 36 lines are set in Xanadu. With line 37 we’re in a different world, one where some poet is recalling a vision and thinking about the consequences. STW: Plop plop plop plop...the pebbles drop, ripples fan out, the pattern is getting more complex and wham! Those same pebbles – NLC: The same ones? Aren’t they at the bottom of the pond? STW: Ignore it, it’s only metaphor, analogy, not precise. Those same pebbles drop: that . sun . ny . dome . those . caves . of . ice. Plop plop plop PLOP plop plop plop PLOP! They send ripples out that intermingle with existing – NLC: No, no. Stop. Halt! I think we can do better. Let’s drop the metaphor. Let’s talk about the brain. STW: Now wait just a minute here. Aren’t I supposed to be the technical one here, the one who would know about the brain? You’re a literary critic. NLC: Yeah, but I’m a naturalist literary critic and I’ve been reading about the brain for a long time. And you’re a tech wizard, talking about poetry. STW: Sorry. I forgot. And it’s not just any poem, you know. Orson Welles, Olivia Newton-John, Rush, there’s Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu,3 one of the best known – NLC: OK, I get it. Sheesh! As I was saying, the brain, It’s a huge dense network of inter connected neurons – NLC: 86 billion of them. STW: Yes! And signals don’t just disappear in the neural mesh. They ripple through it. NLC: So we can tell pretty much the same story. Except rather than dropping pebbles into a pond we’re using word forms to excite the neural net. We start at the beginning. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan – and waves of excitement ripple through the net. A stately pleasure dome decree – ripple ripple ripple. STW: And it builds – woman wailing for her demon lover – and builds – a mighty fountain momently was forced – furiouser and furiouser! – ancestral voices 3 A hypertext project that’s legendary in the tech world. See “Project Xanadu,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu. Page 12 NLC: freaking calling for war! This is exciting. Ripple ripple RIPPLE! STW: Calm down now. NLC: The shadow of the dome – ahh – mingled measure – that’s it, take it easy – and the caves. NLC & STW together: It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure- dome with caves of ice! Whew! STW: And now we shift, A damsel with a dulcimer – vision – Abyssinian maid – singing – NLC: Could I revive – delight ‘twould win – I would build – NLC & STW together: That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! – Plop plop bang bang woopsie doodle I’m a ding-dong daddy! NLC: Now we’re cooking with gas! STW: Cooking with gas? You HAVE been around, haven’t you? NLC: But this time it works, I think. Activation has been building up in the mesh since the first words, In Xanadu, and, sure, those early signals weaken, but then what does STC do? Let’s look at those lines right after those damned ancestors were caterwauling about 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. You see what he’s doing. He’s going back over – STW: He’s boosting the signal from the very beginning of the pome – shadow of the dome of pleasure – NLC: – and mixing it with the noisy fountain section so we can cuise on in to the finish: It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! Pleasure-dome picks up the first part and caves of ice – remember that ice is a form of water – picks up the wailing and seething and bursting fountain of the second part. It’s all mixed in together. STW: Right, we don’t need any of that classical computer talk about addresses and stored data. A neural network is an active medium. Let’s call that line the Emblem. Those words have what we might call an intrinsic meaning – ugh! hate that word, it’s so freighted with philosophical resonance – which we can think of as the mesh activation Page 13 that would occur if one enountered the word alone, without any context. All words have an intrinsic meaning. But when they are uttered, or heard, or read, in context, that intrinsic meaning interacts with the activation that’s been building in the mesh through the flow of the discourse. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that words will pick up meaning in the course of discourse. So when the Emblem is encountered in line 36 its intrinsic meaning mingles with the cumulative activity generated by the poem from the beginning. NLC: So when we encounter the Emblem in line 47, it comes trailing more than its intrinsic meaning. STW: Right. It doesn’t mean the same in context as it would on its own. When it shows up in line 47 it brings some of the reverberations from the first 36 lines with it. They re-enter the discourse. NLC: And so the poem moves on: And all who heard should seem them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! That kind of echos those ancestral voices from the first part. They arose after the structural center of that part, the fountain bursting, and these cryers show up after the structural center of the second part. And things calm down. The poem ends with a reference to Paradise: For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. Two linked networks in the mesh STW: I hate to say it, but we’ve still got a problem. NLC: But I like what we just did! What’s the problem? STW: We failed the original computational account, the one with nested loops and addresses, because we had to treat the Emblem words differently from all the other words. NLC: But, you know, that’s a detail that hardly matters. STW: Now you’re sounding like an ordinary literary critic. NLC: But such a critic wouldn’t care about this conversation at all. STW: Right. So stop pretending. We’re talking computing, and in that context a detail like that is very important. It’s about how the device is constructed and how it operates. That didn’t make sense. If Page 14 we’re going to skip over such a critical detail, we better have a damn good reason to do it. NLC: And the fact that it made for an nice account is not itself a good reason. STW: Right. It has to be justified on other grounds. So we switched to a pebbles-in-a-pond metaphor. Sure, it’s looser and in that sense perhaps a step back. But now we’re treating all words the same, and that’s important. Then when the Emblem-pebbles dropped in line 47, they didn’t bring anything with them, like we had in the memory retrieval metaphor we’d just abandoned. NLC: But we fixed that by dropping the pond in favor of the neural mesh. Which is no metaphor, but the real stuff, no? STW: Yes. But these words that are exciting the mesh, they’re in the mesh themselves, no? NLC: What do you mean? STW: We’ve been talking as though words or symbols are one kind of thing and word meanings are a different kind of thing. We’ve got meanings in the mesh and talk like those symbols are something else that we’re plop bang whoopsie doodling into the meshed meanings. Except that there isn’t any something else. It’s all in the mesh, words, or should we say word forms, and meanings, all in the same kind of neural tissue. NLC: OK, I think I can live without the plop plop bang bang. What are you suggesting? STW: Well, as I recall – you know, I’ve read about the brain too – the tissue of cerebral cortex is pretty much the same from stem to stern, starboard to port, so language is implemented in the neural mesh too. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexemics, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, all in the mesh. We’ve got two interlinked masses of neural tissue. It’s all “big vectors of neural activity,” to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Hinton.4 One bunch of vectors is about linguistic forms and the other about meanings. We can say that the linguistic forms are used to index the meanings, and to move from one to another. NLC: Are they still symbols? STW: Sure. What makes them symbols is their position in the overall cortical ecology. It’s their function that makes them into symbols, 4 Karen Hao, AI pioneer Geoff Hinton: “Deep learning is going to be able to do everything”, MIT Technology Review, Nov. 3, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfather- geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-will-do-everything/. Page 15 not the substance of their implementation. One bunch of neural vectors, the symbols, functions as an indexing system for the other bunch. And – here’s the remarkable thing – since symbols are physically expressed, as sounds, as images, or even gestures, they can be treated as ordinary objects of perception – NLC: Right. Roman Jakobson called that language’s metalingual function, no? STW: Yes. The language system can index itself. At least partially. NLC: OK. And come to think of it, putting linguistic form and substantive meaning on the same footing may help us with a problem that standard literary criticism has had since forever. STW: What’s that. NLC: How sound and sense work together in poetry. Good literary critics know that they do, but sound and sense are so different it’s tough to see what to say about their interaction. It’s easy to analyze rhyme and meter, and to point out that this or that theme seems associated with these sounds in a particular poem, but that feels pretty weak. And we know, from, experience, that this is important. Here's an example from “Kubla Khan.” These eight lines from the middle of the middle of the middle of the first part of the poem (ll. 17-24). 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 fragements vaulted like rebounding hail, Of chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. We’ve got three clauses, marked by a pair of line-end colons. The first and second clauses are each three lines long, the third clause is only two lines long. Now look at the rhyme; we have four rhymed couplets. The rhyme scheme thus cuts across the syntactic divisions. But if we look at the whole first part [see Appendix 2] we see that outside the middle of the middle syntax and sound are aligned. STW: So, if we’re talking about waves of neural activity moving through the brain, the waves of semantic/syntactic activity get out of synch with the waves of sonic activity. NLC: Right. Something similar happens in the second part: Page 16  Figure 5: Rhyme and sense in part two. Line 47 is the structural center: “The sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” We have a structural break in the middle of line 49, which begins, “And all should cry...” So that structural unit doesn’t even have a rhyming word. We’ve got three rhyming lines in a row, 48-50, that encompass three syntactic divisions, one of which is in the middle of a line, 49, which thus straddles two divisions. And it’s in these middle sections that something intrudes into the imaginary world. [See the diagram on page 9 above.] In the first part of the poem the fountain bursts into Xanadu, giving birth to the river Alph. In the second part the reconstituted dome-and-caves burst into the speaker’s line of discourse. STW: So, you’re saying that this structural instability is itself generative of meaning in some way. NLC: Yes. But it’s not the sort of meaning that yields to interpretation. It can only be experienced. STW: I’ll buy that. NLC: I’ve got one last issue. STW: Shoot. NLC: What about those nested loops, those matryoshka dolls we discussed at the beginning? Page 17 STW: They’re gone. I mean, sure, those triple structures are there in the poem. But the idea that they are some kind of nested control structure, that seems like a non-starter. We’re going to have to account for them some other way. NLC: Got any ideas? STW: Nope. You? NLC: Nope. STW: Take a hit and pass it on. Let someone else work on it. NLC: ffthhhhh... ahh... Page 18 A postscript on method I can hear the voices now: Naa, naa, you’re crazy! You can’t do science like this, too speculative. Speculative? He’s out to lunch! On the moon! – “To the moon, Alice, too the moon!” That’s not how it’s done, son. How’s WHAT done? Psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, AI, figuring out the mechanisms of the mind. Those things are complicated. We have to take it a piece at a time, get the details right – You don’t think I know that? I read the technical literature, been doing it for years, decades. And you know what? What? What? What? As interesting as a lot of your stuff is, you guys haven’t told me jack shit that’s really useful in figuring out what’s going on in “Kubla Khan.” But that’s not what we’re trying to do? Why not? Because it’s too complicated. We’re not ready. Well, when are you going to be ready? I don’t know. 50, 87, 199 years, who knows? These things take time. Horse pucky! You know what I hear? I hear you saying, “We’re not worthy.” No, you’re not. Neither am I. No one’s worthy. It’s not about worthyness. It’s about work, and desire, and vision. It’s about risk and speculation. Do you think we can understand the mind? No, it’s beyond us. You, you get out! You’ve given up. Come back when you’re sober. I’d like to think can understand the mind. But it’s hard, really hard. We’ve chased a lot of rabbits down holes, spilt a lot of milk, got lost on a lot of garden paths, ‘lotta water under the freakin’ bridge Page 19 – Enough with the cliches! Let’s say I want to build a cathedral. So I hire the best stone masons, the best carpenters and plumbers, the best electricians, the best glazers, and so on. I gather them together on site and give them the best materials. “Now build me a cathedral,” I say, “Build me a cathedral.” What do you think’s going to happen? Hmmmm... Not much. Confusion. Fighting maybe. Why? You need a plan. You can’t build a cathedral from the ground up with just materials and skills. You need to know how to put all those things together. Right. It’s the same with the mind. You guys have the skills and materials. And I’ve got, well I don’t have a plan, but I’ve got this poem, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” And I know a lot about it, not just what I’ve put up there in that dialog, if you reach right out of this dialog, you’ll find some papers listed in Appendix 3. There’s a large literature on the poem. There’s stuff there too, though not much of it has been crafted with the cognitive and neurosciences in mind, much less deep learning and artificial intelligence. Work toward it. Work toward it? Yeah. Dream a little. If you wanted to get there – “Kubla Khan” – from wherever here is for you, what’s the first step you would take? And the next? What kind of cooperation are you going to need from others, from me? But it’s just so hard. We’ve worked so long. Is it all work? Haven’t there been some fun times, some excitement? You’re right. Some of it has been fun. So, keep on truckin’. We’ll get there. In the distance – Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go... Ditty dump di dum, woopsie ding dong daddy, Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho! Page 20 Appendix 1: The text of “Kubla Khan” The numbering to the left matches the trees in Figures 1 and 2. 1.1 1.11 1.111 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 1 A stately pleasure-dome decree: 2 1.112 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 3 Through caverns measureless to man 4 Down to a sunless sea. 5 1.12 1.131 So twice five miles of fertile ground 6 With walls and towers were girdled round: 7 1.132 1.1221 And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, 8 Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; 9 1.1222 And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10 Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. 11 1.2 1.21 1.211 But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 12 Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! 13 1.212 A savage place! as holy and enchanted 14 As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15 By woman wailing for her demon lover! 16 1.22 1.221 And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething 17 As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 18 A mighty fountain momently was forced: 19 1.222 Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, 21 Of chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: 22 1.223 And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever 23 It flung up momently the sacred river. 24 1.23 1.231 1.2311 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 26 1.2312 Then reached the taverns endless to man, 27 And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: 28 1.232 And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 29 Ancestral voices prophesying war! 30 1.3 1.31 1.311 The shadow of the dome of pleasure 31 Floated midway on the waves; 32 1.312 Where was heard the mingled measure 33 From the fountain and the caves. 34 1.32 1.321 It was a miracle of rare device, 35 1.322 A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! 36 Page 21 2.1 2.11 A damsel with a dulcimer 37 In a vision once I saw: 38 2.12 It was an Abyssinian maid, 39 And on her dulcimer she played, 40 Singing of Mount Abora. 41 2.2 2.21 2.211 Could I revive within me 42 Her symphony and song, 43 2.212 To such a deep delight ‘twould win me 44 2.22 2.221 That with music loud and long, 45 I would build that dome in air, 46 2.222 That sunny dome! those caves of ice! 47 2.223 And all who heard should seem them there, 48 2.23 2.231 And all should cry, 49a 2.232 Beware! Beware! 49b His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 50 2.3 2.31 Weave a circle round him thrice, 51 And close your eyes with holy dread, 52 2.32 For he on honey-dew hath fed, 53 And drunk the milk of Paradise 54 Page 22 Appendix 2: Rhyme and sense in the first part of “Kubla Khan” Note: I designed the diagram to emphasize the wave-like nature of the structure. This is temporal structure. Compare the structure of the waves along the right hand side with those along the left hand side. Notice what happens in lines 17-24. Page 23 Appendix 3: My Work on Coleridge Metaphoric and Metonymic Invariance: Two Examples from Coleridge, MLN, 96: 1097- 1105, 1981. URL: https://www.academia.edu/35168392/Metaphoric_and_Metonymic_Invariance_ Two_Examples_from_Coleridge. Abstract: “Kubla Khan and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are two very different poems by the same poet. But they share the same two- part structure, and they share imagery as well. The roaring dell of “Lime-Tree” corresponds to the savage chasm of “Kubla Khan.” The concern with sight and sound manifest in “Kubla Khan” shows up in “Lime-Tree Bower” in the image of the creeking rook flying across the sun. And the way in which both Charles and the poet have access to that sight gives it a role similar to the sunny dome and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan,” where both the poet and his audience are linked through the image. These two poems share the same world. But they take radically different paths through it. One path is regulated by metonymy and unfolds though two consciousness moving through different parts of the same landscape. The other path is regulated by metaphor and so unfolds in two different worlds linked by a common image; the path it takes through these worlds is, however, the same. Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan." Language and Style 18: 3 - 29, 1985. URL: https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Rea ding_of_Kubla_Khan_. Abstract: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a highly coherent structure in which the two parts of the poem exhibit the same ternary structure. Each can be divided into three sections, the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first section ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated in the middle of the second section. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. “Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November 29, 2003, URL: https://www.academia.edu/8810242/_Kubla_Khan_and_the_Embodied_Mind. Abstract: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated at the structural midpoint of the second movement. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. The semantics of the poem’s first movement involves a series of cognitive blends in which the Page 24 neural self provides one input while Xanadu imagery provides the other. The semantics of the second movement involves manipulating the reality status of successive mental spaces. Underlying the entire poem is a “walk” by core brain mechanisms tracing territorial, sexual, and attachment patterns through the poem’s semantics. Coleridge’s 1816 preface embodies an abstract pattern that paradoxically asserts and denies the poem’s validity. On the internal evidence, the poem is whole and complete. Comment: This is my most detailed study of the poem. It is long and dense with detail. You might want to read “Articulate Vision” first. It will get you through the poem quicker and thus prepare you for the greater detail of the embodiement paper. If you are interested in the possible neural underpinnings of “Kubla Khan”, read the section, “Walking the Lizard.” Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004, URL: https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime- Tree_Bower_My_Prison_. Abstract: By recasting Vygotsky's account of language acquisition in neural terms we see that language itself functions as a transitional object in Winnicott's sense. This allows us to clarify the Schwartz- Holland account of literature as existing in Winnicottian potential space and provides a context in which to analyze Coleridge's "This Lime-Three Bower." The Caretaker-Child attachment relationship provides the poem's foundation. The poet plays the Child role with respect to Nature and the Caretaker role with respect to his friends. The friends, Charles in particular, play the mediating the role of transitional object in the first movement while Nature becomes a mediator between one person and another in the second movement. The first movement starts with the poet being differentiated and estranged from Nature and concludes in an almost delusional fusion of poet, friends, and Nature. The second movement starts with the poet secure in Nature's presence and moves to an adult differentiation between poet, friends, and Nature. STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, Working Paper, November 2013, 46 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/8139268/STC_Poetic_Form_and_a_Glimpse_of_the_ Mind. Abstract: "Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are two very different poems by the same poet, Samuel T. Coleridge. Think of them as orthogonal to one another within the overall space of the human mind. This working paper provides descriptive accounts of both poems, compares them, and recounts some of the work in the newer psychologies – cognitive, evolutionary, and neuro- – that has recently been brought to bear on the study of literature and how that work is germane to these poems. It concludes with a brief chronology of the Page 25 parallel trajectories of cognitive science and literary theory in the last half of the previous century. The problem of form in “Kubla Khan”, Working Paper, November 29, 2017, 13 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/35275862/The_problem_of_form_in_Kubla_Khan_. Abstract: “Kubla Khan” has two movements. The movements have the same form: each movements segment into three components (where the middle component, in turn, segments into three components and, once again (the middle component segments into three components)). All other divisions are binary. Iif we concentrate on the centers of the two movements we have that seething fountain occupying the same SLOT (middle of the (middle of the (middle))) in the first movement as the dome and the cave occupy in the second movement. And the dome and caves occupy the same SLOT in the first movement as “drunk the milk of Paradise!” plays in the second movement. Notice that the final words of both movements, “ice” and “Paradise” respectively, rhyme. Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a rough cut (Version 2), Working Paper, December 9, 2017, 19 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/35379665/Calculating_meaning_in_Kubla_Khan_a_ rough_cut_Version_2_. Abstract: “Kubla Khan” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. “Kubla Khan” is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of being. “Lime-Tree Bower” is narrative and personal and makes little or no use of convolution. It reveals the unfolding of subjectivity in time. The two poems also differ in their versification, a differenc which is related to their different strategies of meaning. * * * * * These papers are not about “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge, or poetry. But the metaphor paper is central to my thinking about linguistic meaning and the ayahuasca paper discusses “Kubla Khan” in the context of one of the ayahuasca experiences Shanon reports. Benzon, W. L. and Hays, D. G. Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process. American Journal of Semiotics 5: 59 - 79, 1987. URL: https://www.academia.edu/238608/Metaphor_Recognition_and_Neural_Proces s. Karl Pribram's concept of neural holography suggests a neurological basis for metaphor: the brain creates a new concept by the metaphoric process of using one concept as a filter—better, as an extractor—for another. For example, the concept "Achilles" is "filtered" through the concept "lion" to foreground the pattern of fighting fury the two hold in common. In this model the linguistic capacity of the left Page 26 cortical hemisphere is augmented by the capacity of the right hemisphere for analysis of images. Left-hemisphere syntax holds the tenor and vehicle in place while right-hemisphere imaging process extracts the metaphor ground. Metaphors can be concatenated one after the other so that the ground of one metaphor can enter into another one as tenor or vehicle. Thus conceived metaphor is a mechanism through which thought can be extended into new conceptual territory. Benzon, W. L. Ayahuasca Variations. Human Nature Review 3 (2003) 239- 251. URL: https://www.academia.edu/12667500/Ayahuasca_Variations. Benny Shanon's The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience presents us with an account of the different modes of consciousness that emerge when one has taken ayahuasca, a hallucinogen used for religious ceremonies among various groups, mostly in South America. Shanon provides extensive accounts of ayahuasca visions details the drug's specific affinity for music. I review the salient points of Shanon's book and the explore the implications by examining the nature of jazz improvisation and comparing one of Shanon's own visions with Coleridge's “Kubla Khan.” I conclude by considering ayahuasca visions in relationship to Norman Holland's neuro-psychoanalytic account of literary experience. Page 27