@hollyr.eth
Framedl 2026-09-07 1/6*
Coleridge said 'Kubla Khan' came to him in an opium dream and dissolved when a visitor knocked at the door. Were the poem's nebulous edges the result of the Romantic sublime or of the molecule? It survives as a fragment of Xanadu with the caves of ice and a fountain flinging up the sacred river 'momently,' a word that means both in an instant and again and again.
The story is unverifiable and the fragment has been read as prophecy ever since. Meanwhile Britain fought two wars to keep selling the drug to China.The second war ended with the sacking of the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace.