/// xanadu.quest // an inquiry in glass
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…"
— S. T. Coleridge, 1797
A wandering through the four lives of one word: a poem, a palace, a hypertext, a metaphor.
/ four glass towers
Each module is a tower of frosted glass. Look in. The neon between them is a citation, not a road.
facet i — the poem
Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan in opium-heavy sleep. He woke with hundreds of lines in his head and began transcribing. A stranger from the village of Porlock knocked on the door. By the time the visitor left, the dream had drained out. The fragment of fifty-four lines is what remains.
facet ii — the palace
A real summer capital of the Yuan dynasty, eight hundred kilometers north of Beijing. Marco Polo described it in the 13th century. It was abandoned in the 14th. The English ear caught the syllables, lost the geography, kept the dream.
→ Inner Mongolia · est. 1256 · UNESCO 2012
facet iii — the hypertext
Ted Nelson coined "hypertext" in 1963 and named his system after the unfinished poem. Xanadu was meant to be the network we did not build: bidirectional links, transclusion, no broken references. The web we got is a smaller, more forgetful version.
facet iv — the metaphor
Welles places the word on the gates of Charles Foster Kane's monstrous private museum. By 1941, Xanadu has become shorthand for any wealth that has consumed itself — a palace built with too much, retreated into too far. The word now means a kind of beautiful loneliness.
a connection
"All four Xanadus are the same Xanadu, dreamt by different people. The poet wanted a vision. The emperor wanted a summer. The engineer wanted a network. The newsman wanted a word for what wealth does to a person. Each kept the syllables, each filled them with their own emptiness."
— xanadu.quest, editorial
/ further wandering
Coleridge, S. T. — Kubla Khan (1797 / pub. 1816).
Polo, Marco — Il Milione, ch. on Shàngdū (c. 1300).
Nelson, Theodor H. — Literary Machines (1981).
Welles, Orson — Citizen Kane (1941).