Okay - So From Where Did I Get the Blog Title?

"Nine Times Circling" is a phrase from my favourite poem, Col's Phantasm Speaks.

It is my favourite poem because it was composed together by me and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I should explain that STC or Col, as he liked to call himself, had no notion that we were in this together, because he composed his portion of the poem way back in 1797, publishing it in 1816 as Kubla Khan. He did at least have the grace to call Kubla Khan "a fragment".

In 2011, I  composed the rest of the poem - and very much the longer part of it.

In all, I think that Col and I did a great job together, especially considering that Col was plagued by illness and laudanum dependence while he composed his lines and I was recovering from brain surgery as I composed mine!

And so to the Blog title:

The phrase "Nine Times Circling" can be found in my portion in Col's Phantasm Speaks:

"Nine times circling the moving waters swirled
Below Earth's face in fluid bliss
And sank in silence into the abyss."

and:

"But nine times circling, sacred Alph ever
Washed over and over the glowing soul river."

Here's the link:
Col's Phantasm Speaks

In the poem, I envisaged Alph, the sacred river, as an embodiment of the forces and flow of creativity and their movement through the deep inner world of the sub-conscious. There, ideas flow in "lordly concourse" with one another and sink into the "abyss" of the unconscious, later to arise "as a great tide turns by full moon drawn" - refreshed and enabled to fountain "once more into the radiant day", and renewing the creative impetus in the upper world of conscious thought. There is more to the analogy, but it is better to read and ponder it in the poem itself.

The phrase itself is derived from the idea of the Styx, a mythological Greek river said to encircle the earth nine times to form the boundary between the upper Earth and the Greek Underworld. The Styx was so sacred that the gods themselves were inviolably bound by oaths sworn on it.

That is the kind of respect I feel that the creative mind is due.

On a lighter note - the act of creativity is not a linear thing. The creative thought weaves and meanders ("five miles meandering" - that was Col's phrase) and sinks "in tumult" into apparent oblivion, forces itself back into consciousness, meanders a bit more and sinks again, where it finds and becomes "conjoined" with other rivers of unconscious thought and impression.

Well, at least that is how my mind works!

So now you know.