Coleridge's lifelong metaphor for the mind was a spiral staircase he had seen in a baronial mansion as a child: "a magnificent staircase, relieved at well-proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places, this adorned with grand or showy plants, the next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately window, with its sidepanes of rich blues and satu rated amber or orange tints; while from the last and highest the eye commandedthe whole spiral ascent with the marble pavement of the great hall, from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested."

His metaphor for the imagination was a snake, as Hazlitt described it, though contemptuously, "with undulating folds,for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself, -- circular,and without beginning or end." Coleridge wrote: "The common end of all narrative, nay of all Poems, is to convert a series in to a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion --the snake with its Tail in its Mouth."

from "The Vortex," in Eliot Weinberger's newest book An Elemental Thing