Architectural Possibilities and Impossibilities of Geometry of Coleridge’s Dome

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hands enough that your extended fingers touch the line of the top of your head, know that the centre of the extended limbs will be the navel; similar to the position of the sun as the centre to creation; universe; soul. The space between the two legs will be an equilateral triangle, hence a perfect structure, and the phallus acting as the geometric-punctum. The geometric-punctum or the perpendicular is equal to the primary imagination.

The hypotenuse of the two right-angled triangles is equal to the

CHASM PUNCTUM chasm: Vast romantic chasm which slanted athwart a cedarn

Cover” and the base of the triangle serves as the Earth or Plato’s

Gaia.

EARTH (GAIA)

The “punctum” is the dimensionless geometrical point through which all manifestation issues from the “unmanifest” as stated by the Pythagoreans. A river that flows from a hidden fountain is found in many Greek myths. Psyche, in Apuleius’ legend of Cupid and Psyche, is sent to draw water from the unapproachable source of the Styx and the Orphic Hymn to the Fates (Thomas Taylor had translated it) describes those weavers of destiny as dwelling in a dark cave from whose depths the sacred river flows. Porphyry’s “De Antro Nympharum” (“On the Cave of the Nymphs”) is a symbolic description of the cave (Plato’s symbol of this world) from whose darkness, "Through caverns measureless to man," issues the river of generation.

Now about “sunless sea” into which the river flows; ‘ hyle’, or matter, is invariably symbolized by water, on account of its continual flux. If we assume that Coleridge is following tradition, the sea into which his river descends is called "sunless" because it is the farthest point from the source, the divine light; like "the wat’ry shore" where Blake’s Earth sits in the darkness of the world of Experience.

On the waves of "the sunless sea" the "pleasure-dome" is reflected—an image used by Coleridge when he described the fleeting of the idea of the poem itself, "like the images on the surface of the stream."

Here we see images of the temporal world as a reflection, in water, of the eternal forms; and Plato himself in the “Timaeus” calls this world "a moving image of eternity," and eternity a sphere, the domed vault of heaven; the same dome which was retained in the symbolic architecture of the Byzantine basilica, itself a product of Platonism.

All knowledge, Plato says, is remembrance, anamnesis—not memory of events of time or of the individual life, but remembrance in time, and by the individual, of permanent intellectual realities: as of number and geometry, and the harmonious order which underlies all things. Kubla Khan both is, and is about, remembrance; its theme is the imaginative experience itself, written in that exaltation of wonder which invariably accompanies moments of insight into the mystery upon whose surface we live.

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