Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Xanatopia
1995
Ink, Gouache, Handset Lettering, Collage on Board
30 x 30 inches

Subject: The Utopic Space of Xanadu

Homage to: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

Symbol Evocation: It is my contention that Coleridge was attempting to express unconsciously aspects of utopic space during the lucid-dream composition of his poem: Kubla Khan: Or a Vision in a Dream.

Comments: Now totally under the spell of William Godwin (1756 - 1836) (the father of political anarchism), Coleridge at 21 returns to Jesus College, Cambridge in April. On a walking tour he meets the poet Robert Southey (1774 - 1843), then 20 and studying at Oxford. Together they plan a utopian community in the New World. The specific site is to be an island in the Susquehanna River.
In 1797, between July 4 (the 21st anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States) and July 14 (the 8th anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille - the beginning of the French Revolution), Coleridge writes Kubla Khan, or more correctly the poem is presented to him in a totality (an esemplastic event) in a 3 hour dream. His dream would be called today a lucid dream -- where the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming.

As an inveterate "armchair traveler" Coleridge happened to be reading Pilgrimage and Pilgrims by Samuel Purchas (ca 1577 - 1626), an English compiler of travel books, when he came across the sentence "here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden there unto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground where inclosed with a wall." At that moment he fell into a deep sleep and instantly began to dream in the most vivid manner. He endured a "forced rem cycle" induced no doubt by a combination of his normal dosage of opium plus a prescribed anodyne (alcohol, ether and ethereal oil - a distillate of alcohol and sulfuric acid).

When he awoke he had enough dream material for a poem of 300 lines all pre-composed for him" "If that can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort". Immediately he began to write but was interrupted for an hour by someone from Porlock on business. When he returned to his transcription he realized that he had lost from his waking memory all but the concept of his vision and the few lines that form the famous fragment.