Coleridge arrives and more or less immediately becomes second-in-command to the Governor of the island, impressing him with a disquisition on luck. Was there any such thing when one thought of the luck of a commander or some other active soul? Well, Coleridge was certainly lucky enough to find a position there. But he also develops in Malta, a theory of generation versus fabrication, in connection to creativity:
“The difference between Fabrication and Generation becomes clearly inducible: the Form of the latter is ab intra, evolved; the other ab extra, impressed.”
This is a precursor to Coleridge’s later theories of imaginative generation.
It seems that one might look at luck similarly. Coleridge himself is shaped by internal and external pressures (or vacuums), and to watch him twist and exult in their fluctuations is sometimes agonising, sometimes inspirational. Was he lucky? Was he driven forwards by some inner compulsion? Were the forces of his interests (or whatever pushed him onwards) akin to that belief resulting in action, which makes luck? One reads his diaries as he contends with shame at his addictions, at his selfish failings, at his sexual fantasies and other things external to him (where he does not live up to other’s expectations or what he considers to be the norm) that mould him and sometimes seem to impress upon him, sometimes seem to inflect the growing-outwards of his imaginative power. And then, at other times, the forceful flight outwards of the man’s power breaks through these shaping forces, impelled itself by Coleridge’s ideas and attachments; and perhaps by something native to him alone. We are hard-pressed to find out what is within and what is without, since he is so attached to his interest in the world, its symbols and abstruse meanings, and the delights that the particular brings with it. What is within him comes as a result of his being already in the world without; but his imagination engages with what already is the more keenly because it comes to know the world as its own. The counter to this- as we also see in Coleridge – is the despondency of the world which is not his own, which he is alienated from in profound dejection.

Working through artists’ books, one takes things that the form seems to offer as part of its makeup, evolving outwardly from the book’s core, and relating closely to the responses of material and form. But, nearly simultaneously, one often imposes form. But this isn’t like a moulding. It’s more like a selective mutation, or a pruning, or a shaping. It changes what evolves, for as one watches, the shape continues to change in response to our promptings. And at that point the proclivities of the individual artist take over: to control or to let go. But the form is certainly seeded, early on, with our intention. There is always a combination of ab intra and ab extra.  A fluctuation. A breathing? Somewhere I remember the systole and diastole, given to me as a kind of technique, as a ‘grammatical’, formal effect. But it seems here to reflect a process of creativity; to take what is encompassed and seed it with one’s thought- to see where it leads.

Coleridge was unlucky enough to lose most of the writing he did in Malta, including accounts of his ascent of Mt Etna (in Sicily), because the man carrying his post died of plague on the journey and all his effects were burnt. But Coleridge notes his ascent of the volcano later: we get only a dark echo of what he might have seen then. Today seems a day of volcanoes. An eruption in Iceland has filled the sky above the British Isles with volcanic ash like some vast Yggdrasil-fart, grounding aircraft and causing turbulence on the Radio 4 program You and Yours as consumers try to find out what the airlines will do for them (reasonably enough, most will be offered alternative flights). Coleridge complains that he does not know what to do when his time in Malta seems to be coming to a close. He is faced with a cloud, when what he wants is a pillar of fire. He wants a structure, not this diffusion. And so he ambles around until the money runs out.

O! for a pillar of fire! Would that be lucky?