In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great poem, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, the old mariner hauls aside a man on his way to a wedding and captivates him with the tale of his catastrophe-ridden voyage to the south seas, undertaken many decades earlier.
After the mariner shoots an albatross for no apparent reason, a series of nightmarish disasters unfold – the ship is knocked off course, the crew dies of thirst and starvation, the mariner lives on to see their ghosts haunt the ship, ‘a thousand thousand slimy things’ pursue him from ‘the rotting sea’ and he is visited by the ghastly spectres of Death and Life-in-Death who play dice to decide his fate.
For much of the poem, the mariner is made to wear the dead albatross around his neck, a mark of shame for a pointless murder. But in a moment of absentmindedness, he ‘blesses’ the supernatural snakes, apparently ‘unaware’ of what he is doing; the albatross falls from his neck, he can pray again, and all this paves the way for kind of uneasy redemption, though there is more misery to come on the journey home – plagued, as he is, by the vengeful Spirit of the Deep which purses him across the ocean.
After being alone for months on end and enduring just about every form of torment Coleridge could conjure up, the mariner reaches the shores of his home country. But this is not quite the end. Beset by guilt and harrowed by the misery he has lived through, he feels compelled, like some early Christian preacher now converted to the true faith, to travel to new lands and tell his story to every third person he meets:
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
This is why the mariner is ancient: Coleridge intended that the mariner’s troubles had befallen him as a young man; it is in those long, ensuing years that he has spent time as penitent and preacher.
What has any of this go to do with brain retraining and recovery stories? Coleridge makes an acute psychological observation here: those who have suffered terribly for years and eventually reach firm ground often need to revisit their experience, to explain it to others and, perhaps more importantly, to themselves. They are trying to understand an experience that confounds understanding. They cannot completely move past it. Like the mariner, the need they feel to transmit their tale of woe is in no small part down to the isolation and the despair they experienced in the depths of suffering, a kind of retrospective compensation for years of silent anguish. Crucially, the repeated telling of the tale becomes a ritual, a way of exorcising the horror that never properly disappears and so needs a kind of ongoing ablution.
