And what if the women, too, had creative aspirations?
They had both failed to make a Hollywood living and now held jobs that they hated while they struggled to nourish what remained of their creative aspirations.
There's the still unrealized creative aspirations: "I just meditate," he raps, "about how I could build a new Rome in one day".
Kokoschka taught himself to paint in oils and executed some canvases, but economic necessity forced him to spend most of his time on decorative work, and the general artistic milieu around him continued to be unsupportive of his creative aspirations.
Joseph Jackson, whose rhythm-and-blues band, the Falcons, disbanded in the early years of his marriage, is not the first father to have channelled his thwarted creative aspirations into his children, but he had more success than most.
Life for them, though, is not easy because their creative aspirations are kept firmly in check by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, responsible for approving all publications in the country.
"It's almost as though I've been lifted out of a 10-year rut and placed in a position where the offers finally match my long-held, deeply cherished creative aspirations," he wrote last November.
The spiritual and creative aspirations of the decade rub up against more mundane realities: a snazzily dressed gentleman at a cocktail party is just a letch in Charles Saxon's drawing from 1972, and George Price's dentist asks a hippie which numbing agent is his "bag".
The first two stanzas show the two sides of what Coleridge elsewhere calls "commanding genius": its creative aspirations in time of peace as symbolized in the projected pleasure dome and gardens of the first stanza; and its destructive power in time of turbulence as symbolized in the wailing woman, the destructive fountain, and the voices prophesying war of the second stanza.
