Last year I wrote an essay in which I compared Neil Young’s song, “Cortez the Killer” to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan.” The reader can consider the following essay something of a sequel.
Xanadu, in real life, is a city that was constructed by the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in Northern China. It was first described to Europeans by Marco Polo, and in the proceeding centuries took on a legendary status in the European imagination, similar to the effect of the marvels described in 1,001 Arabian Nights.
Xanadu, then, despite initially being a real place (more accurately called Shangdu), became an imaginary place. This is epitomized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem, “Kubla Khan.”
In the poem, Coleridge visits Xanadu via an opium-fueled dream. In the first stanza, he describes the pleasure-dome decreed by Kublai Khan, with its “twice five miles of fertile ground”, and “gardens bright with sinuous rills.” In the second stanza, he focuses on the sacred river Alph, which originates from a tumultuous fountain in a savage enchanted chasm. In the rush of this river, Kubla Khan hears “ancestral voices prophesying war.”
In the third stanza, Coleridge abruptly brings up a “damsel with a dulcimer” (a dulcimer being a type of stringed instrument) which he once saw in a vision. He claims that if he were able to revive within himself the song he heard her play, he would “build that dome in air,” which would cause others to cry,
Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
The imagery in the poem is deliberately confounding, and the abrupt shifts in time and subject reflect the incomprehensible timespan of a dream, where events separated by vast time periods can be experienced simultaneously. Coleridge presents the poem as a “fragment,” but its ending is poetically satisfying, and its hard to imagine any longer narrative stemming from such a jumbled opening. As a complete dream-image, it evokes a variety of mythological concepts and fantastical visions, while also taking the reader through an emotional journey from peaceful serenity to implacable fear.
The poem is very much emblematic of what an 18th century Romantic poet might think of upon hearing the word “Xanadu”. The 1977 song, “Xanadu”, by prog-rock band Rush, on the other hand, is emblematic of what the word “Xanadu” might sound like to a hardcore science-fiction-and-fantasy reader in the mid-20th century. Rather than an ethereal “Eastern” dream, Neil Peart’s narrative feels more like a Conan the Barbarian story, with Xanadu serving as the final destination of a hero’s epic quest for immortality.
Most of the details in the song are lifted directly from Coleridge’s poem, although the context is significantly different. The hero is seeking the sacred river Alph described in the poem, which he found about from an ancient book. On his journey, he scales “frozen mountaintops of Eastern lands unknown” to reach the “lost Xanadu,” which is where this river runs. The sunny Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan is explicitly named, along with its paradoxical caves of ice.
The major thematic difference arises from a new element added to the fable of Xanadu. In the song, to “dine on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise” grants one immortality, a detail absent from the poem. This serves as the impetus for the hero’s journey, and sets up the tragic nature of the song’s second half, when the hero, after a thousand years, laments his life as a “mad immortal man… waiting for the world to end.” The song ends with Geddy Lee wailing the question, “Woaaahhh, is it paradiiiiise?”
While I certainly read science fiction as a kid, I wouldn’t say I was an avid fan. Most of my memories surrounding science fiction novels are of browsing the SF section at the library, feeling smart because it was located in the Adults wing and not with the children’s books. I would look at the spines and the covers, imagining what the novels could possibly be about. Usually when I picked one up and opened to the first page, I found it started with some guy doing something boring, or with some words I didn’t understand, and so I put it down.
I liked the idea of reading beyond my reading level, so I spent a lot of my childhood confused, bewildered, and often bored by books that I thought would impress grown-ups. My dad liked science fiction, and would often recommend certain authors (Wells, Clarke, Asimov). I certainly carried these books around and flipped the pages, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I read them. I would read all the individual words, but I wouldn’t stop to put them all together, and if I didn’t understand one, I’d just skip ahead. If I got lost in a scene, I just powered through until the next chapter break, where hopefully I could find my bearings again.
Thus, my impression of science fiction was a vague collection of interesting images and ideas that rarely cohered into any sort of plot or story. When I returned to science fiction as an adult, I was often disappointed by the clumsiness of the prose, which rarely did justice to the concepts being played around with; as well as the fact that, in the end, they were novels that had to contain plots, and these plots never quite lived up to what existed in my head — or, to put it more accurately, what didn’t quite exist in my head. The essential mystery surrounding these novels for me was how ideas such as “An ancient race guides humanity through its technological development via a trail of monoliths” could fit inside of a paperback. The images and ideas that I connected with science fiction novels were so vague and ethereal that they seemed unsuited to being written or even spoken of directly.
The essential problem of creating engrossing space-based science fiction is retaining enough distance from the cosmic mysteries at hand to maintain their status as “mysteries.” If you reveal too much, the spell is broken. On the other hand, if you keep too much distance — if the plot and characters that fill the book’s pages don’t seem to connect at all with the cosmic mystery at hand — then the entire narrative becomes trivial. A lot of these novels work much better as blurbs on the back cover than they do as 100- to 300-page works of prose.
This is where a band like Rush excels. The “story” of “Xanadu” is told in less than 200 words. It offers a bare-bones narrative of a seeker on a journey who finds that what he seeks is not what he expected. The journey takes him to illusory places that are both real and unreal at the same time. Xanadu is a historical city, but that’s not the Xanadu he travels to. There are several real mountain ranges in the area, but the song simply refers to the “frozen mountain tops of Eastern lands unknown.” The river Alph, a carry-over from the poem, is thought to refer to the Alpheus River and its mystical qualities, but that river is in Greece, nowhere near the Mongolian capital in which he has it run.
All these obfuscated allusions give the song an equal sense of reality and unreality. By referring to real places, one could imagine that it takes place on our Earth, but the way they are divorced from their Earthly contexts provides the flavour of fantastical realms.
The instrumentation that accompanies these lyrics is certainly evocative of outer space, with its synth hits and jingling chimes. This “space sound”, of course, has nothing to do with outer space, but simply with the musical technology and trends that accompanied the mid-century fascination with space travel. When paired with the concept of Xanadu, we can observe that the literary fantasy of the exotic East that so captivated the European imagination for centuries has been replaced by the fantasy of interstellar travel. You can no longer write a novel about travelling to Asia or the Middle East with the confidence that you can make anything up and your readers will be none the wiser; even the formerly uncharted islands of the New World have become a known quantity. Thus, writers with active imaginations had to turn to outer space and fantasy realms for their settings.
“Xanadu,” the song, seems to occupy both these worlds at the same time, with the lyrics reminding one of a fantasy novel, while the music reminds one of a science fiction novel. When I was a kid listening to Rush, I just assumed that Xanadu was the name of an alien planet. Why else would someone sing about it while playing a synthesizer? If you’re going to talk about Mongolia, I’d expect you to be accompanied by something more appropriate, like a Tovshuur.
The city of Xanadu, in the song, inherits the exaggerated characteristics included in the poem, along with a few new ones, such as a vague sense of science-fiction and a newfound ability to grant immortality.
It’s probably not a reach to imagine that the honeydew and “milk of paradise” in the original poem refer to the effects of opium, Coleridge’s drug of choice. This claim is strengthened by the author’s preface, in which he cites an opium dream as the source of the poem’s imagery (and, less believably, its entire composition.) The contrast between the Edenic-sounding foodstuffs and their devourer’s “flashing eyes” and “floating hair” gives us a sense of the drug’s divergent effects.
In the Rush song, the ambiguous complexity of drug abuse is replaced by a more straightforward struggle with the consequences of immortality, a trite theme to which Peart adds little originality or depth. However, this is okay, because what the theme lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in bombast. It is an epic theme appropriate to an eleven-minute prog-rock ballad, complete with a five-minute instrumental opening and a blasting guitar solo. It is a theme appropriate to a performance in which Geddy Lee plays both a double-necked bass and a synthesizer; Alex Lifeson plays a double-necked Gibson (and actually uses both necks); and Neil Peart sits entrapped within a 360-degree drum set. It is — to put it plainly — rock and roll.
Both works delight in the exotic mystery of Xanadu; in the thrill of the unknown; and in the ecstasy and despair that take hold of those who glimpse behind the curtain. They promise worlds brimming with such intense emotions — in which mysteries, when revealed, shock and stun rather than deflate. They each say little that is concrete, instead relying on dream-like imagery or synthetic sound to lull us into a fantastical state of mind. Xanadu, as a theme, is perfectly captured by both; in both, that inscrutable word/place resides unsettlingly within its many layers of meaning and non-meaning.
Xanadu has become a keyword for the inscrutable, for the fantastically grandiose. It evokes both a naturalistic paradise and a techno-neon metropolis. It combines The East and Outer Space into a vague-and-yet-so-enthralling nowhere-land that at the same time seems to exist, somewhere, just beyond our reach. Through its constant reinterpretation throughout the centuries by wildly different artists it has come to signify both everything and nothing at all. I’ve wondered while writing this essay whether I might have been better off simply asking you to repeat the word to yourself, to allow yourself to be entranced by its unfamiliar syllables: Xanadu, Xanadu, Xanadu. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…
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