Note that everyone of these images appeals to reactionary emotions, fear or sensuality; By sensuality the reason is dragged from its throne; while fear destroys all activity of the mind, causing abasement and submission. Moreover--and here is the point essential to our argument--almost every image in this poem turns out on examination to be a lie. There is no such place as Xanadu; and Kubla Khan has nothing to teach us but avoidance. His pleasures were bloody and infamous, and there was nothing “stately” about his “pleasure-dome.” There never was a river Alph, and the sacredness of any river is a fiction of a priestly caste, preying on the people. There are no “caverns measureless to man”; while as for a “sunless sea,” a few arc-lights would solve the problem. The “woman wailing for her demon lover” is a savage’s nightmare; while as for the “Abyssinian maid,” she would have her teeth blackened and would stink of rancid palm oil. From the beginning to the end, the poem deals with things which are sensual, cruel, and fatal to hope. These old fears and cravings are buried deep in our subconsciousness; the poet touches them, and they quiver inside us, and we don’t know what it means, so we call it “magic.” That is the favorite term of the art for art’s sakers; they don’t know what this “magic” is, and they don’t want to know, but the psychoanalyst tells them. Says Mrs. Ogi: “Our Poet will be pained. He lives by magic, and you seek to destroy it!” Says Ogi: “There are emotions equally thrilling, equally wonderful, which are stirred by the discovery of new truth and the contemplation of progress. What I am trying to do is to persuade the poets to use their brains and common sense, and apply melody and beauty of sound to the good things of the future, instead of to the evil things of the past.” “Give them a few illustrations,” says Mrs. Ogi. “I will name eight things which have been in my daily newspapers during the past week, any one of which is every bit as exciting, every bit as provocative of ecstasy as ‘Kubla Khan.’ “Number One: The air is full of music, traveling half way round the earth. Number Two: Aeroplanes are circling the earth for the first time in history. Number Three: A scientist has given his life in the effort to find a cure for cancer. Number Four: Mars is coming nearer, and we have a chance to learn how the canals are made, and perhaps to get messages from a new race. Number Five: In a physics laboratory, only two or three miles from our home, men are taking the atom to pieces and preparing to extract its energy. Number Six: We are discovering how to take control of our subconscious minds and master our hidden life. Number Seven: A group of scientists in New York are exploring, by means of laboratory tests, the energies we call ‘psychic.’ Number Eight: In every civilized country today the workers are organizing themselves to put an end to parasitism based upon class privilege.