I was perusing John French’s 1650 English translation of a text by Michael Sendivogius and found a tale of a poor alchemist who was visited once in a dream by an old man, and then spends his days trying to initiate another visit.

In one of the birds’ speeches from The Conference of the Birds, an excuse is offered for not undertaking the journey to the Simorgh, where the bird highlighted in the passage below is not wrong about rubies — about the life therein — but wrong about his reason for stopping there.

Finding authenticity between the stagecraft and theology of 18th century Western alchemy

A short dialogue buried in an 18th-century German alchemical anthology, Wasserstein der Weisen ('The Water-Stone of the Wise'), reprinted in 1743 and traditionally attributed to Johann Siebmacher, begins like a domestic quarrel. Nature appears as a central female power figure, speaking through a name other than the author's, and she arrives on scene with quite the temper. She calls the seeker a fantastical fool and a coarse ass who breaks glassware and burns coal until the fumes cloud his head (p. 118). Every other creature does its office faithfully, she complains, and only man, presuming to take up hers, strays from it (p. 120). For a text about sacred secrets, the opening is strangely familiar — not the voice of an oracle, but of someone who has been misunderstood one too many times.

As a traveler on the road of an anomalous inner life, I can report that fatigue and a certain inability to fix my attention are its tolls now. It is the act of living two lives simultaneously, and today I feel that burden plainly. A choice made for the sake of two, and freely made — but a burden all the same.

The 17th century French diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère published a treatise on fire and salt. The title is literal — Traicté du Feu et du Sel — and the premise acts as alchemy at its most reductive, where the whole of transformation is compressed into a simple binary: two principles, two substances. Vigenère’s text, however, is actually stranger than its title suggests. It is not really about fire or salt. It is about the impossibility of speaking about anything for the first time. And the implication that an idea, once spoken, cannot be controlled or contained and may perpetuate beyond its source in ways its speaker never intended.

I had a vision in the small hours before dawn, somewhere far from home. Not a dream. I know the difference. I’ve known the difference for a very long time. Dreams are random nonsense. Incoherent. Flat. Fleeting. Visions are vivid. Visceral. Profound. The five senses are all active and engaged. I’m conscious though unconscious. I control my mind, speech, and actions despite sleep.

I suppose it’s presumptuous to assume that my posts are of any interest to anyone, let alone worthy of a few minutes of attention to be read. But that assumes I’m writing this because I desire or crave attention. Honestly, I do not.

But I am compelled, for reasons I myself do not entirely understand, to share my thoughts and opinions here on things that probably should not be shared.

Every language I reach for comes pre-loaded. Biased. Stigmatized. Traumatized. Baggage.

Clinical language wants to diagnose me. It hears “experience” and answers: pathology. It reduces the living to objectified processes it can quantify and name externally, or pretend to.