Monday, September the 20th, 2004

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Pod Person From Porlock

For readers unfamiliar with the person from Porlock, here is the gist of the story. In 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was staying at a farmhouse near Porlock in Somerset. One day he was reading about Kubla Khan, but—having taken his habitual dose of opium—he fell asleep and had a vivid dream. As soon as he woke up, he had a lengthy poem clear in his mind, famously beginning “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree…” He started to write down the words in his head, but was “called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour.” By the time Coleridge got back to his desk, the dream was forgotten, and the visionary poem remained incomplete.

Dobson had a theory that the person from Porlock was in fact a Pod Person from some other, uncanny universe, sent as an emissary to Coleridge for reasons we can only guess at. The pamphleteer carried out a number of experiments in an attempt to summon the Pod Person, many of which ended up with him being taken to Casualty. Even when he managed to escape injury, neighbours became so vexed by various banging, hammering, wheezing, snorting, thudding and high-pitched whistling noises issuing from Dobson's hovel that the police were called to give him a ticking off.

On one famous occasion Dobson actually travelled to Porlock and accosted people in the streets, accusing them of being Pod People. He was hounded out of town by ruffians and never returned. Oddly enough, he never wrote any pamphlets about the matter, and it has been left to the octogenarian film director James Paste to bring it to wider attention. Paste's drama-documentary Dobson And The Pod Person From Porlock is currently in pre-production. Rumour has it that Ringo Starr has been signed up, but for which role—Dobson, Coleridge, or the Pod Person (or perhaps all three)—is not yet known.