Alchemy and Paranoia

            Good evening to you, dear reader. It’s wonderful to see that you’ve successfully made it through another day. I hope you’re enjoying these little entries of mine as much as I’m “enjoying” getting them to you. It’s an odd thing I’ve noticed—although I must admit that I expected it, even planned on it—that the effort of sitting myself down, churning out these posts, and then sending them off nightly into the wide world is getting progressively easier with each day that goes by. I’m a very private, even very quiet person by nature; it’s very difficult for me to think these idle musings of mine would be of any great—or even slight—interest to anyone. The whole project seemed and seems to me to smack of the most crass, brazen, inexcusable sort of presumptuousness.

Which, strange to say, is one of the reasons I decided to start this blog and to keep at it tenaciously. There’s nothing else for me to do in this life but write. I look around me, and the world appears to me to flow by as some massive, beautiful, terrifying thing—a thing to be caught, as best as we can, in the frail, diaphanous net of our language. If I don’t put myself through the daily rigors of trying to put some crumb, some piece of the world into words, if I don’t weave at least a few strands of a web to catch the world as it goes by, the world quickly sinks into unreality for me. Very rapidly, instead of a well-ordered, fairly predictable world of people, places, and purposes, I find myself descending into a nightmare realm, fragmentary, haunt of shades and a thousand conspiracies. It’s not a nihilistic world, it’s not a world drained of meaning or significance—not at all! To the contrary, it’s a world that suffers precisely from an overabundance of meaning, in which every object positively seethes with a potential to harm, in which every gesture or offhand remark hints, darkly but insistently, at gargantuan sinister currents of absolute malevolence. And all the while you look on, eyes wide, watching for the knife. The whole experience is something like seeing the world in Technicolor, where the whole mass is so oversaturated that you can’t help but shrink away because it hurts your eyes.

The danse macabre from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a black and white film that doesn't exactly fit in with the Technicolor idea... but you get the point.

You’ll call this paranoia… and you’d be right! But paranoia, after all, is nothing more than the flipside of imagination. In its raw state, an overabundance of imagination can be a very painful thing, a very alienating thing. I think all of us, as readers, have had this sort of experience to varying degrees—imagination, like any other human capacity, is perfected by being practiced, and reading is one of the most effective ways of training imagination that I know of… but more on that some other time. As I was saying, though, raw imagination is extremely painful, because it’s there, it’s active, but since it’s not being put to any actual work it’s got nothing to do but feed like a sucking parasite on the mind that’s been unfortunate enough to pick it up. And so we have the nightmares, the terrors, the headlong rush after anything that seems likely to bring relief. We have the progressive movement into a constant fever pitch of anxiety, a steady shrinking away from every contact, even the warmest interaction… after all, if everything is a trap just waiting to be sprung on you, kindness is certainly the most obvious disguise for evil intent. Such is the logic of paranoia.

But there is a way out. It’s not immediate, it’s certainly not painless, and it’s not without its own terrors. It has to do with alchemy. Now, alchemy is the ancient art of transmuting baser metals (particularly lead) into purer metals (particularly gold). Ostensibly. Granted, alchemy, taken literally, does involve making tinctures of various plants and employing them medicinally in a weekly cycle having to do with the position of the sun, the particular virtues of the plants, etc. It’s a fascinating subject, and one I’ll have to look into more deeply at some point. But—and this is the really relevant point—alchemy, while it does invoke this material imagery of the transmutation of metals, is an allegorical process. Although alchemical processes and practices take place on the material plane, the real alchemy is a spiritual progress of the soul up from its base natural state (lead) to a purified state (gold). Now, as I said, I’ve not done extensive studies on the subject, but as I’m writing this I’m becoming increasingly convinced that I ought to. Alchemical texts, once one learns how to read them, are really marvelous pieces of literature, great allegories up there with the very best our world has to offer.

But to return to writing. Writing, the writer’s life, and the discipline of writing constitute, in their own way, a form of alchemy. This horrible paranoia that I was talking about, this constant self-defeating attitude of wide-eyed impotent terror in the face of the universe—this is lead. But it can be made better by steady discipline, by allowing itself to be itself and to overcome its fears… among these, the fear of speaking openly, as itself. The fear of revealing itself to the world. The fear of seeming conceited or pretentious, or like an old windbag. And so, dear reader, dear sweet reader, that’s one reason why I keep at this thing, night after night. I’m a ridiculous creature. But I hope I have the potential to improve myself, and so I’ve dedicated myself to this discipline. I hope it brings you some enjoyment, reader, and that someday I’ll be able to write beautiful things for you to read. I send you all my best wishes and hopes, reader.