so i was doing some thinking over some old texts that i read from borges, specifically this one: the dream of coleridge.

you should definetly go read it but if you dont have the time here is a quick summary of what it is about.

it talks about colerdige’s famous poem, “Kubla Khan”, which is basically a description of this fantastic palace built by the king Kubla Khan in xanadu, and how this poem came to coleridge in a dream but the writer was never able to complete it.

then borges goes on to reference some old text, the General History of the World by Rashid al-Din where the author describes that the idea for a palace also came to Kubla khan in his dreams.

so that is a pretty neat coincidence, first the idea to build the greatest palace in the world in Xanadu came to Kubla Khan in a dream and then one of the most beautiful poems in history about the palace in Xanadu came to coleridge, also in a dream. Borges draws a very interesting connection between both of these.

The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace. The similarity of the dreams reveals a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman performer. To inquire the purpose of that immemorial or long-lived being would perhaps be as foolhardy as futile, but it seems likely that he has not yet achieved it. In 1691 Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of the palace of Kubla Khan; we know that scarcely fifty lines of the poem were salvaged. Those facts give rise to the conjecture that the series of dreams and labors has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If the plan does not fail, some reader of “Kubla Khan” will dream, on s night centuries removed from us, of marble or of music. This man will not know that two others also dreamed. Perhaps the series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one who dreams will have the key.



now this is where you put on your tin foil hats my friends.

borges was right.

Barely fifteen years after borges published this essay in his book “other inquisitions” a young, lets say, computer scientist called Ted Nelson (who suffered from ADHD and so was quick to forget what he was doing with the minimal distraction (!)) was starting to kick around the idea of a revolutionary new software that was supposed to be thre greatest invention of mankind, meant to change the face of the world, to usher in a new age of information sharing, a giant global hyperlinked database with all the information in the world. The hypertext system known as Xanadu.

i really cant do justice to the whole torturous story behind this project, just please go and read the link, suffice to say it was either the mad dream of some prophetic visionary or the biggest con by the most shameless of crooks. The greatest piece of vaporwave never developed, 30 years in the making, thousands of dollars, man hours and different sets of teams working on it, and it will never be completed.

i hereby propose that the Xanadu software was the third instance of this phenomena Borges descrives thusly:

Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to men, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term), is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation was the palace; its second was the poem. Whoever compared them would have seen that they were essentially the same.



did you catch the subtle horror in that last paragraph? Whatever archetype this Xanadu entity is, trying to enter into our world through our dreams, all i can say is that a part of me is relieved that so far it has been foiled thus far, yet i worry for how long will providence manage to keep Xanadu away from manifesting into our reality.