SHORT ESSAYS

the Walrus

Note the relationship to alchemical literature is fetishistic at best. To collect phrases, spellings, patinas, ordinarily. To compile. At best, to skim along. To set out on vast instructions, put a bookcase together, a recipe, turn the reddifh rich Virgin Earth, impregnate it with ferene and dew, till the end of May. To guess. It is like writing a walrus stomp the snow. Captured, at best, quietly. At a good distance. To stand for the good distance. To watch nature make a mistake. By nature, be specific. Walrus. Between each motion is snowy blankness. Between each line. Between teeth. Mystacial vibrissae 30 centuries long. Writing whiskers 30 centimeters long.

o. romarus divergens

walvis ros / wal reus

hrossvalr

Its blockish history, ornery, onward. Sounds like. Typography. Tea-stains. The burned edges of Xeroxed pages. If it shall and it has and if its puffy text steps on. Blusteringly. A figment thrumming clams, its ungainly offerings, its see-thru show, is a vague perpetual place.

on Anchemy

Alchemy attends to language. Which whatever way. However lovingly applied. In the wet nursery of science; smudged, blooming, the alchemist. Writing by touch and smell, folds the question in on a particular color, ascribes, atones, imagines. This is the juicy center of science. Stretch it out, temper it, droplet one at a time to a piece of glass. A glass eye. Memorized like prayer. Unfoldingly. To Sublyme trewly therefore thou fhall not mys: / If thou can make thy Bodys firft fpirituall, / And then thy Spyryts as I have tought the corporall. It is and is not partaking. Taking a part. Taken apart.

Take Philosophers' Mercury, prepared and purified to its supreme degree. Dissolve this with its wife, that is to say, with quick mercury, so that the woman may dissolve the man, and the man may fix the woman. Then, just as the husband loves his wife and she her husband, the Philosophers' Mercury pursues the quick mercury with the most supreme love, and their nature is moved with the greatest affection towards us. …Conceal both in a glass vessel, thoroughly fastened, so that the woman may not escape or evaporate ; otherwise the whole work will be reduced to nothing.

the Economy

One step further. To maintain an economy of language. A system of hoodwinks, kickbacks, dead-ends, loopholes. Value slides around. To namesake it. To narrate the invisible performances of science. To capitalize, package assets, to price to sell.

These symbols... already start the mind on its way toward that fiery purification, that unification and that emaciation (in a horribly simplified and pure sense) of the natural molecules; on its way toward that operation which permits, by sheer force of destructive analysis, the reconception and re-constitution of solids according that equilibrium of spiritual descent by which they ultimately become gold again.

Every procedure, balanced on the tide of consumer confidence. Symbols for earth, air, fire, water up, up for exchange and then down smashingly five, four, down to three and two and one. More powerful now crashing, writing the orchestra down. Wreathed in whispering flames . Snapdragons. Whooping cranes. Extinct sounds like there.

Go outside and find something new and convert it into freedom.