Arcanum Paradoxa

Ostensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory… (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.
Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001
Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy WebsiteOstensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory… (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.

Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website
 

Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001

Hermes Bird

 

The poet, through aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust provoked by the nigredo, the unregenerate night-world state, perceives how, divorced from everyday functions or associations, ordinary situations, objects, even people, may take on a magical perspective. They acquire an ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchantment of absolute beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ beauty, this ‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is a force which consumes with a unique intensity. It is not only sublime, it is also of The Abyss. (from The Aesthetic Transformation of Perception, 1993)

Illustration: Dawn Voices/Hermes Bird, 1968

Several Sonnets

Stephane Mallarme

Several Sonnets 1883-1887

I

When the shadow menaces with its fatal law
A particular old Dream, desire and evil of my vertebrae,
Afflicted at dying beneath funereal ceilings
It folds within me its indubitable wing.

Luxury, o hall of ebony where, to seduce a king
Ceremonial garlands writhe in death,
You are nothing but mendacious hubris uttered by shadows
In the eyes of a hermit dazzled by his faith.

Yes, I know that in the distances of this night, The Earth
Emits a giant flare extraordinary mystery
Beneath the hideous centuries that darken it the less.

Space like unto itself whether it expands or contracts
Unfurls in this boredom vile fires for witnesses
That a festive star has illuminated its genius

II

The virgin, the everlasting and beautiful today
Will it shatter for us with a drunken wing beat
The hard, forgotten lake haunted beneath frost
By the transparent glacier of flights not taken!

A swan of previous times recalls it is he who
Magnificent but hopeless surrenders himself
For not having sung the place of living
When sterile winter’s ennui gleamed.

All his neck will shake off that white agony
By space inflicted on the bird which negates,
But not the horror of plumage ensnared on the ground.

Phantom assigned here by his pure light,
He is paralysed in a cold dream of disdain
Assumed in useless exile The Swan.

III

Victoriously fled the beautiful suicide
Firebrand of glory, spume of blood, gold, storm!
Oh laugh if down there a purple spreads
To cover royally my absent tomb.

What! Of this flare not even a gleam
Remains, it is midnight, in the shadow celebrating us
Except that a head’s presumptive treasure
Tumbles its nonchalant caress without a torch

Yours as always the delight! Yours
Yes alone retaining from dissolved skies
A residue of puerile triumph rimmed

With light as you lay it on the cushions
Like the war-helmet of a girl-empress
From which to depict you cascade roses.

IV

Raised high her pure nails dedicate their onyx
Anguish, this midnight upholds her lampadophore
And many vesperal dreams burned by the Pheonix
Are Never gathered in any cinerary amphora

On the tables, in the empty salon: nul ptyx
Abolished trinket of sonorous emptyness
(For The Master has gone gathering tears in The Styx
With this solitary object that bestows honour on The Void)

But near a vacant north window, a gold
Expires complementing perhaps the décor
Of unicorns kicking fire towards a nixie,

She, defunct, naked in the mirror, while
In the abyss bordered by the frame, are fixed
So soon, the scintillations of The Seven Stars.

translated by AC 1996-1999

Sonnet IV, the first truly hermetic poem by Stephane Mallarme,  is also known as the 'Sonnet en X' (first version 1866)

Find out more here

Illustration: Dream Space, 2001

Always Bizarre

THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION OF PERCEPTION

The aesthetic transformation of perception is closely linked to the purification and transmutation of language: the alchimie du verbe of which Rimbaud and the Surrealists spoke.

The transformation of perception arises from the disclosure of the Essential, the revelation of the Quintessence, and from the elimination of all inessentials, all deadly serious prosaic elements.

Cautionary tales? Not today, thank you. Weighty Issues? Oh yeah? Huge Challenges? You must be joking. The revolution? Oh, I say! The People? Oh ha ha. Devotional tracts? Give us a break.

It is this ‘alchemical’ or Hermetic theory of poetic language and aesthetic image, to which Mallarme was alluding when he referred to the task of giving ‘a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’ and which lay behind Baju’s desire to re-designate the Decadents as the ‘Quintessents’. In this sense the poet can become a shamanistic custodian of the modern – or the traditions which comprise the modern, for traditions enshrine ways of seeing the world and, contrary to popular belief, are never static, mutating in response to deep-running, impersonal, evolutionary currents. In this sense the ‘visionary’ role of the poet, uniquely attuned to these mutations, is not metaphorical – he, or she, may become the instrument of change – change, through transformation of perception.

In his seminal Lettres du Voyant Rimbaud defined the visionary role of the poet of the future as ‘the supreme savant’, the initiator of universal transmutation, the harbinger of a new era in human evolution, un multiplicateur de progres.

 

The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time. He would produce more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march towards progress.

 

Poetry, like all art, should be founded on a special vision of the world, a different way of seeing, even a new reality principle. To a degree any artist will transgress accepted ideas of normality, if only by presenting familiar objects and situations in an unusual way. Poetry is bound to conflict with consensus opinion because the special vision will incorporate the negative as well as the positive; it will be an indictment as well as an affirmation. As Sartre once said ‘literature is, in essence, heresy’. When an artist – a poet, a novelist, a composer, or an artist in any medium – adopts a different way of seeing the world he or she has taken the first step towards total idiosyncratic vision attained through various stages of initiation. This ‘initiation’ or rite of passage will involve a state known as ‘the dark night of the soul’ in which enhanced awareness of ‘supernal’ perfection, the Ideal, or, to use Mallarme’s phrase, ‘the dream in its ideal nakedness’, leads to a similarly enhanced awareness of human, existential imperfection and a breakdown of the mystified and petrified realities of the everyday social world. For Baudelaire awareness of human or worldly imperfection was called spleen, for the alchemists it was the Nigredo or ‘blackening’. Celine used the term noircissement to identify the same state of mind – a night-world of horror, viciousness, pain and dread. It is this ‘core of horror’ which, since the eighteenth century, has given rise to a current of militant pessimism in modern art and literature, represented by the works of Sade , Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Jarry, Artaud, Genet, Burroughs and Beckett, among others. Here one may think of that ‘nocturnal language’ of which Anais Nin once spoke regarding the writings of Anna Kavan – that lexicon of dreams and alienation.

It is of some historical significance that this nihilistic vision is closely linked to the emergence of new stylistic trends. Most of the authors and poets in this current of development contributed to a revolution in syntax and to the deconstruction of traditional conventions. Barriers between fact and fiction, between spoken and written language, between poetry and prose, have been dismantled in order to express a vision of transmutation – in order to effect a transmutation. This disruption of syntax, literary form, musical tonality and pictorial representation is symptomatic of the dissociation and psychic dislocation brought about by the first stage of initiation. For many it has become a metaphor of cultural collapse, of the rejection of the telos, of the atomization of the world – a break-down, not a break-through.

In addition to the ultra-nhilist vision there is a second way of seeing which, like the first, was derived mainly from Baudelaire: modernity.

Many of Baudelaire’s followers regarded themselves as more modern than their contemporaries, despite their frequent denunciations of modern beliefs. Although they loathed modern society, they admired modern technol­ogy because they regarded the artificial as superior to the natural. This was reinforced by an adherence to Naturalism, a concentration on the depiction of ‘slices’ of modern (urban) life, a challenge to the taboo of ‘morality’. This Naturalism complemented a need to cultivate intensity despite all social limitations: indulgence in perversity could be masked as Naturalistic research or ‘field work’. For Huysmans, the most powerful of the Naturalist writers, such methods offered some way of coming to terms with the otherwise banal exigencies of everyday life. His transition from Naturalism to Decadence, from Downstream to Against Nature, represented a need to augment dry Naturalistic description with some ‘deeper’ more acute vision, even though his subsequent transition from Decadence to Catholicism, from Against Nature to La Cathedrale, represented a retreat into a comfort zone of ‘faith’. The traumatic identity crisis caused by the arrival of modernity; the erosion of hitherto established cultural norms, the feelings of isolation, of powerlessness and meaningless self-estrangement, can often lead to a resurgence of, or relapse into, religion (the ‘flight into faith’). This is a circumstance which can apply to both the individual (such as Huysmans in this case) and to the collectivity as a whole.

In most of his critical writings from 1845 Baudelaire, inspired by Poe and Gautier, advocated the theory of ‘the heroism of modern life’. He argued that the artist must oppose the false charm of nostalgia by extracting the essence of beauty from the everyday world – to look for the ‘classic’ in the remote was an error. In her discussion of his aesthetics in her biography of Baudelaire Enid Starkie wrote: ‘Thus all forms of modernity were capable and worthy of becoming classic, and if they did not do so the fault lay with the artist and not with his age.’ The implication of this view, its implicit relativism, and the doubt it casts on orthodox definitions of the real, renders ‘the heroism of modern life’ a disruptive, perhaps magical, idea.

From the alchemical perspective, if the essent­ial beauty of the everyday is equated with the philosopher’s stone, Baudelaire’s theory corresponds to the ancient Hermetic doctrine that the ultimate substance must be distilled from a despised and neglected prima materia. Thus, Rimbaud and Verlaine, in London in 1873, sought the marvelous and the fantastic in immediate urban images, in ‘modern-Babylonian’ architecture, in The City, in station hotels, in the docks and great iron railway bridges.

This potent urban psycho-geography prefigures the Surrealist poet Aragon, who in 1924, wrote of those other places, ‘sites... not yet inhabited by a divinity’, but where a ‘profound religion is very gradually taking shape’ as though surreality precipitates ‘like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass’. For the Surrealists these privileged locations were in Paris: the Pont des Suicides at the Buttes-Chaumont, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Tour Saint-Jacques, or the vanished Passage de l’Opera. For us London may take the aspect of a modern Babylon, of a ‘concrete jungle’, redolent with psychic portents and hermetic symbols. Like St Giles High Street, Hungerford Bridge has always possessed features associated with Gateways to Otherness, where – to use Questing jargon – the ‘veil between this world and the next is particularly thin’.

As the filmmaker Georges Franju once remarked ‘Doesn’t this mean that poetry is in reality… and that it is less a question of expressing it than of not preventing it from showing itself?’ And so the poet becomes a shaman of multiple dimensions, creating the classic from the mundane, distilling the essential from the inessential, revealing ‘heroic’, interpenetrating parallel realities, or, to use Franju’s terminology, to allow the insolite (unusual) to emerge beside or in-between the interstices of the accepted Real.

But, in order to experience, or even portray the ‘heroism’ of modernity the poet must unlearn preconditioned responses and engage in a critical, initiatory process of dissociation. August Weidmann has shown how this process of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was a key tenet of Romanticism and fundamental to modern conceptions of art. The Romantics however, tried to gain access to a ‘primordial vision’, whereas it can now be understood that deviation from conventional perceptual norms is, in fact, a way of transmuting the world around us.

In his struggle to apprehend Poe’s ‘supernal beauty’ filtering fitfully through profane sensory mechanisms, the poet uses his or her art to deconstruct, or dismantle, a preconditioned worldview.  Under­standing of ecstasy, or The Ideal, generates a blackening, or noircissement, as the horror of existence overwhelms the subject with disgust, inducing a hellish night-world experience. However, this dissociation brings a more fantastic, if not more positive, vision – the everyday world loses its narrow, constricted frame of limitation and becomes, thankfully, bizarre.

The artist-poet, through an aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust provoked by the Nigredo or unregenerate night-world state, perceives that, divorced from everyday functions or assoc­iations, ordinary situations, objects, even people, may take on a surreal perspective as words and images function as ‘so many springboards for the mind’ (Andre Breton). They acquire an ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchant­ment of absolute Beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ Beauty, this ‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is not only soothing but a force which consumes with a unique intensity: it is ‘subversive of perception and understanding’. It is not only sublime; it is also of The Abyss. It is not some transcendental enlightenment, but more a much sought-for diversion from the banality of the mundane or even ‘the appearance of the image of liberation’ to cite Marcuse.

It partakes of both elegance and the grotesque. “If I am not grotesque,” said Aubrey Beardsley, that most perfect example of the aesthetic sensibility, “I am nothing”.

Beauty, said Baudelaire, is always bizarre.

A revised version of an article first published in Chaos International No 15 March 1993

Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website

Illustration: Aethyr of Le Voyant, 1979

The Stride Interview

Rupert M Loydell interviews A C Evans, January 1985

You describe your work as hermetic art; can you enlarge upon that?

For me the term ‘hermetic’ has three meanings. In general usage it has the sense of ‘obscure’ or ‘impenetrable’, as in the phrase ‘hermetically sealed’. In literature the term 'Hermeticism' was used by the Italian critic Francesco Flora, with reference to the work of Ungaretti. He was placing Ungaretti in the French poetic tradition of Valery, Mallarme, Rimbaud and their precursors, Nerval and Baudelaire. Mallarme was the supreme master of hermetic poetry in this sense. Then, of course, there is the original sense, referring to the Corpus Hermeticum, the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, which in the context of traditional alchemy gave rise to a pejorative use of the word to mean a sort of willful obscurantism. Both Mallarme and the Surrealists have subsequently seen poetry as a mode of psychological purification akin to what is known as ‘spiritual alchemy’. I would be quite happy to apply all these definitions to my own work both graphic and poetic - I use the term hermetic to refer to the fact that I do not feel the reader/viewer is obliged to ‘read’ my works searching for ‘meanings’ in the narrow sense. I would hope my work effects people in a surreal, non-rational way. 1 think one has to recognize that any valid modern artwork is only ‘meaningful’ to the artist himself - solipsism is intrinsic to the modernist position, and the prime objective of pure artistic activity should be personal self-transformation, not inter-personal communication.

What physical process do you use to draw?

For equipment I use Rotring Rapidograph needle tip pens of a number of grades ranging from 0.1 which is very fine to 0.5 which is quite broad. I just use a pencil, these pens and some reasonably good quality drawing paper. If I need to work with non-linear black masses I use an ordinary felt-tip pen. I use the Rotring pens to create a number of different effects. The needle tips scratch the surface of the paper making broken lines, as in the drawings ‘Stigma III’ and ‘Vectors of Hate’, which remind me very much of photos of particle tracks taken in cloud-chambers. I can also use them to generate cloudy masses of dots and stippling which can be elaborate, as in ‘The Astral Widow’ (Exosphere frontispiece). I like the harsh machine lines of these pens; they suit the general tone of alienation that characterises my pictures.

How about ideas? What are your Inspirations?

I feel bombarded with ideas all the time. I’m often inspired by words and phrases like ‘freezing fog’ or technical terms like ‘xerosere’. Words like this may conjure up an image or spark off a chain of word associations, which become the basis of a poem. I have drawn inspiration from scientific photos from the extreme ends of research - high-energy astrophysics, astronomy. Often a poem or picture will relate to a specific historical or political idea, like ‘The Cathedral of the Future’, which was a kind of warning - I hope not a prophecy. Other artists often inspire me, and some poems relate directly to my emotional life - drawings rarely do.

The drawings seem connected, have you created a mythical world or is it just style?

Most of the drawings are interconnected. I often work in cycles of related motifs. To begin with this is just a stylistic exercise and the interest lies in manipulating the same motif in different contexts.
I regard this as a form of unconscious scanning; it’s rather like looking down a microscope, watching related images float into and out of view. The procedure then becomes more developed. Certain motifs remain with me for a long time and operate like a form of pictographic language. These interconnections do become the basis for, what could be called, a ‘private mythology’. Sometimes this mythology appears to take on a life of its own, with named characters (Xezbeth, Nyktikorax, Scabra Sanguinea, Tzeth, Nuigh) and places (Jet City, Metacropolis, Nylokeras Charontis) providing the setting of the poems - for example ‘Jet City’ and ‘Mock Transcendental Notes’. All of this should be distilled in order to avoid direct, literal interpretations.

Do you use things symbolically or allegorically in your work?

Both: in a drawing like ‘The Cathedral of the Future’ almost all the motifs are allegorical - the monumental tower is an ‘allegory’ of theocratic oppression, and refers to a Tarot card - but I try to preserve a form of ambiguity which gives the entire picture a ‘symbolic’ aura. Again I do not think the viewer needs to realise all this - although it is interesting - it is all a tactic, a technique, to create the ‘hermetic’ effect.

Do you regard your work as frightening, eerie?

I rarely set out to create horrific effects. However I am aware that the reader/viewer may react as though I have set out to do just that. ‘The Astral Widow’ has been used in Dark Horizons (British Fantasy Society Magazine) to illustrate a horror story, and also a drawing called 'Le Grimoire' - these are examples of overtly weird/macabre images finding their rightful homes. I think it is true to say that all my work is imbued with an atmosphere of unease or the uncanny. I have occasionally produced brutal images, which some people may find repellent. If someone found my work frightening I would say that it is because I use material which is ambivalent and borders on the non-human. My own term for this type of effect is ‘grotesque’.

Is the work negative or is there a hope lurking somewhere?

If you are suggesting that there is a spirit of hopelessness in my work I would say that this should be seen as more a sense of outrage - I view the entire human condition with a sense of outrage. But I think the negativity of this can be mitigated by humour - black humour as in Beckett or Andre Breton.

Stride only ever sees photocopied work ready for use, what size is the original work?

Almost always A4 size, or smaller. Large works are difficult to store.

Do you sketch different versions of the same picture?

A visual work may exist in a number of different versions. Usually it starts off as a pencil sketch - sometimes a naturalistic life study, sometimes a quasi-automatic calligraphic expression of a non-naturalistic idea. Some drawings like ‘The Tapestry of Life’ are based on collages. Most drawings are pieced together from different sketches that come together by chance – ‘Atavism’ for instance is a combination of three different sketches.

How long would one piece take on average?

An elaborate piece can take a number of days. Simple linear compositions can be completed in a few minutes.

Do you exhibit the originals?

Never.

Does your writing relate very closely to your drawings? The poems often have picture titles within them.

Yes. I regard prose writing as a sort of dredging, trawling exercise; a way of sorting out my aesthetic ideas. I will often use lines from poems as picture titles, or incorporate picture titles into poems in an aleatoric way. A good example is ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’. The collage was made at least two years before the text was written but seems to illustrate it quite well. The poem itself is a cut-up. This sort of intersection is the Burroughs-Gysin ‘Third Mind’ effect. I am extremely interested in the borderland between writing and drawing - the two activities overlap in areas like callig¬raphy, glossolalia and ‘nonsense’ poetry. I quite often use a form of calligraphic automatism that can be a sort of half-writing, half-drawing.

What are your literary tastes?

I like Burroughs, Beckett, Borges and Pynchon. On the whole I find the English tradition rather tedious, although I greatly admire Lewis Carroll and Thomas De Quincey. I am much more at home with Mallarme, Rimbaud, Artaud and Baudelaire - I read them all the time. I also read quite a lot of literary criticism and non-fiction.

Do they effect your visual and written work?

Yes. Direct influences are Huysmans, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Antonin Artaud. Also Andre Breton and the poems of Max Ernst. I am very interested in the Dada and Simultaneist poets.

What about your tastes in the art world?

Many artists I like are direct influences - the Surrealists: Matta, Tanguy, Ernst and Hans Bellmer. Bellmer particularly. I am also interested in the contemporary Fantastic Realists, like Ernst Fuchs, or H. R. Giger, who did the designs for the film Alien. Other art historic influences would be Bosch, Schongauer, Durer and earlier, medieval Gothic artists like Villard de Honnecourt who made beautiful drawings for the cathedral-builders. My earliest influence was Aubrey Beardsley. The drawing Sphinx in Exosphere is a Beardsley tribute. I am very at home with fin-de-siecle artists like Toorop, Klimt and A. O. Spare.

Do you see illustration as separate from fine art?

I find the term ‘fine art’ unacceptable. It relates to what I would call the ‘art industry’, an institution based on obsolete concepts of art trading and co1lecting. ‘Illustration’ can be stimulating. Beardsley was an ‘illustrator’ though Wilde didn’t think his Salome designs were literal enough. Wilde’s definition of ‘illustration’ was rather limiting. I rarely produce illustration from specific works and if I do they tend to be disastrous. But I am always very happy for my pictures to be related to other people’s stories, poems, tapes etc. This often generates unforeseen interconnections of word and image. The drawing ‘Stigma II’ was used in Velocities (a US magazine), in conjunction with a poem by Ivan Arguelles containing the lines:

names scattered in the perfumed air shining like the lights
used to code the various ancient constellations

For me this sentence matched/illustrated the picture perfectly - but who is illustrating who? Third Mind effect again.

Any artistic aspirations?

My overriding artistic aspiration is to be as hermetic as possible.

What are you working on at present?

I am working on a set of collage-poems in the wake of ‘Random 1/Random 2: The First Hermetic Poem’ (Stride 19), trying to assemble an anthology of pictures and texts which has the working title Ambiguous Signals and I’m writing some poems - of which ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’ is an example - under the general title Ethos Mythos. No drawings for 1985 yet...but I have some ideas.

You worked on the artwork for the last Stride compilation cassette; does music interest you, or inspire your work?

I am and have been influenced by music - although I have a very ambiguous attitude towards it - sometimes I think we live in a society of melomaniacs. In the field of ‘classical’ music I like Olivier Messiaen, Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy, Wagner and Scriabin, among others. ‘Word Music’ was a tenet of late nineteenth century hermetic symbolism, of course. I think most of my poems use words in this ‘musical’ sense, they can have an incantatory quality and are intended in many instances to be read out loud (by someone other than myself, I hasten to add!) I listen to a lot of rock. I’m totally addicted to Bowie and always have been - he’s head-and-shoulders above all other chart-orientated performers. I also like all the early Roxy Music albums and anything by Brian Eno...other likes would include The Banshees, Bob Marley, or jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. I find rock lyrics very inspiring: almost any line from a song by Lou Reed, for instance, is streets ahead of conventional poetry.

Do you want to be famous?

If I became famous I hope I would take it in my Stride.

Interview from Stride 20, 1985

Illustration: Hopes Lurking Somewhere, 1985

Phantoms Dissolving in Time

Notes For A Preface to Colour Of Dust


1. NOTES ON EARLY INFLUENCES 1966-1969

Where to begin...?
A starting point may be: Aestheticism...
Its intensity of experience, its ‘hard gem-like flame’...
Decadence and Style - the independence of the word (Havelock Ellis and Paul Bourget), ‘self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement...’ (Arthur Symons). The short lyric – ‘I hold that a long poem does not exist’ (Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle): Poe’s aestheticism as the origin of minimalism in poetry.
Nature – ‘To say to a painter that Nature may be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.’ (Whistler’s Ten O’clock).
Ideas of the fin-de-siecle – modernity, transience, impressionism, The Tragic Generation:
Davidson, Johnson, Dowson, Beardsley, Enoch Somas, Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank…
The Occult – W. B. Yeats & The Golden Dawn...The Master Therion...
Precursors – Blake, Coleridge, De Quincey, Swinburne... Japonisme... France... ‘If I spend my future life reading Baudelaire in a cafe I shall be leading a more natural life than if take to hedger’s work or plant cacao in the mud swamps’ (Oscar Wilde, 1897).

...from Symbolism to Surrealism...
The Hermetic sonnets of Gerard de Nerval (‘El Desdichado’) and the fusion of dream and waking (Aurelia).
The great innovators: Baudelaire and Mallarme....
Baudelairian themes: correspondences (occultism), le neant vaste, the voracious irony, the city, l’ennui, the whip of pleasure, The Heroism of Modern Life, the Cytherean gibbet, dandyism, cosmic aestheticism, the obscure and the uncertain... ‘I am enthroned in the azure like a sphinx beyond all understanding...’ ('La Beaute'). Baudelaire’s visionary landscapes prefigure Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy... Baudelaire and ‘absolute incompatibility’ (Charles du Bos).
Poetry without God... ‘after I found nothingness I found beauty...’ (Mallarme). The hermetic mysteries of Herodiade, Igitur, 'Prose Pour Des Esseintes' and The Sonnet on X. 'Un Coup de Des' and the radical displacement of The Word. The demon of analogy.
J-K Huysmans – Naturalism – Decadence – Occultism – Catholicism... a fate worse than death.
Rimbaud and Lautreamont – the poetry of revolt and dissociation, the Alchemy of the Word.
Laforgue and Jarry – towards the Absurd (Pataphysics), Dada and Pop.
Then, Surrealism...
Surrealist ideas: the poetic image, l’amour fou, intuition as gnosis, objective chance, automatism, the occult under the poetic angle, urban psycho-geography (Aragon), Psychoanalysis, black humour, picto-poetry, inspiration to order (collage, frottage), convulsive beauty, convulsive identity (Ernst), the crisis of the object, Open Realism, the mythology of the modern. But can there still be art after Duchamp’s Fountain?

1966: Still at School
We were ‘into’ all of this around 1966, and I was still at CTHS (Chelmsford Technical High School). So was this the Sixties...? Well, sort of... I remember the big Beardsley exhibition at the V&A (May l966), the death of Andre Breton... seeing Der Golem at the NFT’s Romantic Agony season… visiting The Hellfire Caves, The Indica Gallery, Better Books basement, and reading impenetrable articles on AutoDestructivism in Art and Artists or Studio International. After school we sat in Snow’s Coffee Bar opposite the library or the Wimpy Bar near the station… we listened to The Doors and The Beach Boys... we liked Osiris Visions Posters, silver fashion (the Rabanne metal dress), Op Art carpets, Biba retro style, Allen Jones fetish furniture, Bridget Riley’s monochromes… we thought The Beatles were rubbish (I still do)... one of my mates was into John Mayall. In 1967 I read Frank Harris’ Oscar Wilde on a family holiday to Grange-Over-Sands, Cumbria. In October 1968 there was another big exhibition at the V&A, The Mackintosh Centenary Exhibition. Then there was Les Salons de la Rose-Croix at the Piccadilly Gallery. I saw the Six Days War on TV.
I was doing lots of drawings and paintings but not much writing. By 1969 I was doing collages because we were all Surrealists – despite the fact that Jean Schuster had just officially disbanded the movement on February 8th of that year (we didn’t know that).
Then I was gobsmacked by Nova Express – do you have to be American to write like this?

1970: First Writings
In 1970, I was given my first typewriter, an Olivetti Olympia Portable from Low’s Business Machines... and that was it! My first writings were moody, decadent, gothic prose poems. Poe-esque short stories and semi-surreal autobiography, inspired in part by Boris Vian. I got bogged down in a sprawling horror novel called Debris – not all these early texts have survived and most are unprintable. What was I reading? Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Genet and Cohn Wilson’s The Outsider. Apart from Boroughs and the Beats (we all read Ginsberg’s 'Howl') the other big influence was Artaud. Through Artaud I discovered the poetry of pain and abandoned ‘literature’ for what I called ‘the sub-textual’ – the border-world between writing and graphic sigils: hieroglyphs, ideograms, calligraphic automata, nonsense poetry (via Carroll, Dada and Kurt Schwitters), glossolalia, fictional languages... the deconstruction of discourse, the open fields of strophic fragmentation, nameless things and thingless names.

Marginalia, 1973
As I remember, those first ‘pure’ poetic texts (grouped here under the title Marginalia) were noted down on a train one evening as I was commuting from Brentford, where I worked, to Witham where I still lived. Undoubtedly ‘Refracted’ and ‘Express Train Interior’ were ‘surrealizations’ of immediate experience – I still think of that girl with the photocopy face. I liked these pieces because, somehow, they seemed transparent. They were, to my mind, ‘un-literary’. What they were not was more important than what they were... I wanted to avoid emotional profundities – they weren’t realistic hut they weren’t abstract either. I wanted something stripped bare, stripped down; words on a page like slivers of glass...
There had been, I think, I minor breakthrough. The catalyst had been translation.
For some reason I had started translating a few poems by Max Ernst taken from his 1970 collection Ecritures. Sept Microbes (1953), Cinq Poemes (1958) and Cap Capricorne (1965). Ernst was a painter-poet like Blake and Hans Arp. His poetry was a continuum with his paintings and graphics. Titles of paintings became titles of poems and vice-versa. There was a Carrollian fantasy, a sense of the absurd and a feeling of vast spaces in his short, enigmatic, texts. At the same time I also translated the lyrics of Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi (1945) which were similarly erotic, hieratic, mythic, cosmic and full of strange, alien wordforms: Kahipapas, mahipapas/pia pia pia doundou tchil. I immersed myself in the similarities I detected between, for example, the invented language Artaud used in his later texts, and the quasi-Quechua onomatopoeic sound-poetry of Harawi; or, between the visual and aural correspondences in Messiaen’s music and Ernst’s imagery (birds, crystalline textures, monumental ‘blocks’ of sound-colour)… I found analogies between the decalcomania paintings of Leonor Fini, the encrustations of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Turangalila-Symphonie.
I typed up all these poems and translations on the Olympia Portable, holed-up in my bedroom away from the summer sun, eyes itching with hay-fever, the downstairs filled with the heavy scent of bearded irises. My father, a keen gardener, loved these irises and grew them in large numbers. I developed a fascination for their ornate, fleshy forms and ‘pubic’ beards. ‘Silence: a cascade of irises/ an obdurate totem.’ (‘Silence’, 1975).

2. LOOKING AT COLOUR OF DUST

Glancing through Colour of Dust I can see various contrasts or tensions. At the level of theme
and content a tension between fantasy and realism, or the fantastic and the naturalistic. On the plane of language (poetic diction) there is a complementary tension between the hieratic and the vernacular. On the level of strophic form there is a contrast between open-field ‘scatter’ and dense compacted stanzas.
The fantastic mode includes: (1) visionary-apocalyptic pieces (‘A Demon Speaks’, ‘Life of Glass’, ‘Phobos’, ‘The Shadow Guide’, ‘The Borderlands of the World’, ‘The Crystal Snake Book’); (2) cosmological visions (The Xantras, ‘Black Hole Binary’, ‘Nil Revolution’, ‘Nebula’, ‘Externity’, ‘AL the Core of the Sun’); (3) genre pieces like the Horror Poems of The Black Mask, ‘Vampfires’ ahd ‘Cyclonic Patterns’ or Science Fiction Poems (‘Crashdive’, ‘Metacropolis’, ‘Freezing Fog’); (4) occult poems which appropriate esoteric ideas and symbols: ‘Void Mysterium’ (mystery religions), ‘Candlemas’ and ‘Gargoyle Emanations’ (ritual magic), ‘Dawn Chorus’ and ‘Black Moon Gateway’ (alchemy); ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’ and ‘Virgin Pages’ (re-incarnation/transmigration); (5) others, like manna, ‘Urspasm’, ‘Beyond the White Wall’ and ‘The Vision of Morgan Le Pay’ seek inspiration from ancient myths, legends and The Books of the Dead.
In sharp contrast to these visions and fantasies there is a large group of ‘realist’ poems -essays in urban naturalism and subjective impressionism, sometimes incorporating fragments of overheard conversations (‘They found something wrong with my brain patterns, Jack” – ‘Cascade VI’), often using a style of slangy, vernacular, street jargon: ‘No Drama’, ‘Human Wallpaper’, ‘Some Charisma’, ‘Hovering Stress’, Neon Aeon, ‘Stranger Here Myself’ and ‘Stunning Sunbirds’ – dead broken fool stroll on (‘Dodgy Electrics’). Some realist poems adopt a more clinical Camera Eye, documentary approach, for instance: ‘Time Slips’, ‘Somewhere in England’, ‘Edge City’, ‘Could be Anywhere’, ‘Vignette’, ‘Denim Yoof Type’ and ‘Artschool Blonde Type’. ‘Viewed Through Crystal’ refers to the multifaceted insect eye denoting a dispassionate interest in fleeting grotesque moments: scruffy youth pukes up a cod burger (‘Viewed Through Crystal II’).
Other modes of content: there are a few inter-media pieces, poems which relate directly to collages and drawings. This group would include ‘The Anti-Virgin’, ‘Silence’, ‘Black Light’ and ‘Dawn Chorus’.
There are some poems dedicated to poetic and artistic heroes such as Mallarme (‘Onyx Master’), Artaud (‘Cosmetic Surgery’), William Burroughs (‘The Man You’ve Been Waiting For’), Max Ernst (‘Enchanter’) Leonor Fini (‘Crystal Express’) and Andre Breton (‘Eyes’). Finally, there is a large group of personal-introspective-existential poems devoted to a corrosive nihilism: ‘What Sort of Game’, ‘Edited Skylights’, ‘Dirt Aria’, ‘No Date’, ‘The White Earth’, ‘Let There be Night’, ‘Melt’, ‘Effluent Landscape’, ‘More and More’, ‘There Was No Horizon’, ‘Thinking Of, ‘Concrete Cancer’, ‘Walking Wounded’...as Baudelaire said, ‘this life is a hospital...’. Let’s drown it in acid.

NOTES ON FORM

A multi-dimensional metamorphosis – like the anomalous formations extruded from the surface of Solaris. Basic oscillations between solidity (the prose-poems) and insubstantiality (condensed ‘minimalist’ strophes); between The Open and The Closed, between structure and de-construction, between the linear and the non-linear, between predetermination and chance.
The density of the prose-poems (The Xantras, Neon Aeon, ‘Stranger Here Myself, ‘Then Nowhere’, ‘The Vision of Morgan Le Fay’) edges towards conventional narrative. But non-linear techniques cut across narrative: collage, montage, cut-up. De-stabilize the expected, derail convention, open-up the supernatural, many-faceted, plurality of the convulsive self. Identity will be convulsive (Max Ernst). All anachronisms welcome.
The spectrum of the Open-Closed. At one pole open-field, alloeostrophic, scatter poems annexing negative space (‘Only Kiss’, ‘Still Far Figure’, ‘Transit and Culmination’, ‘Scatter Zone’, ‘The Face of Fear’, ‘Splintered Avatar’ and others). At the antithetical pole, condensed, minimalist quantum poems like ‘Imagine’, ‘Askance’, ‘Shade’, ‘Perhaps Ravens’, ‘Withdraw Into Silence’ and ‘Impossible Games’.
So far The Xanths is a one-off, a conceptualist conundrum – it has to do with the magic number seven.

CUT-UP POEMS

The ‘time’ poems are Cut-Ups, using found phrases and the now traditional techniques of
‘inspiration to order’: ‘The Entranceway of Unrecognised Time’, ‘The Sickness of Time’, ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’, ‘The System’. All linked to the picto-poem ‘Contact Zero’ (see The Serendipity Caper). Enter The Colourless Peruvian Bishop and The Flesh Eating Beasts. Some poems are like old photographs: pristine monochrome images of childhood memories cut-up and folded-in - strange origami shapes of Juliet Greco in The Elusive Rose Rouge (‘Subtitled for the Incredulous’), distant sound of Doris Day singing ‘Move Over Darling’, catatonic couples slow-dancing to ‘Strangers in the Night’… Other Cut-Ups include ‘Issue 63’, ‘Chapter 6 (Autobiography)’ and (of course) ‘The Man (You’ve Been Waiting For)’. ‘Chapter 6’ might be autobiographical, then again it might not –eventually ‘inspiration to order’ becomes internalized – psycho-collage, psycho-frottage, psycho-cut-up...t hose ‘caffeine-driven psycho-montages’ (‘Now You See It Now You Don’t).

CONVULSIVE IDENTITY

The poem ‘Desecration’ is a judicious warning -just because a text includes personal pronouns does not mean that it is autobiographical. There are overt autobiographical elements in Colour of Dust (‘The Talisman’, ‘The Bloody Image’, for example). But these rare instances and (for the most part clearly signaled). Some poems read rather like self-portraits, for instance, ‘Nil Revolution’, ‘The Invariant Speed of Light’, ‘Fearful Other’, ‘Mirror Picture’ (a photograph of ‘me’ taking a photo of ‘you’, or is it ‘me’?), ‘Moi’, ‘Like the Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Ashen Light’ and others. Am I The Gryllus’? Am I The Most Beautiful Monster? At this point, poetry, with a cruel spotlight, heightens the problem of identity. Personas: Self images not images of The Self. I is ‘another’ declared Rimbaud. Perhaps because poetry is alchemy, an art of transmutation, the ‘I’ evolves continually - here today, gone tomorrow, now you see it, now you don’t. In a draft epilogue Baudelaire wrote ‘From all things I have extracted the quintessence. The filth you gave me I have turned to gold.’ Poetry changes the ‘base’ material, the prima materia of The Art. And the base matter is the poet him-her-self (or selves).
Writing about Max Ernst’s concept of Convulsive Identity, Pere Gimferrer said ‘like external reality, we ourselves are dissociated and disintegrated: we are the space at an intersection, a confrontation.’ This is the space of Convulsive Identity. But perhaps this is the ‘space’ of the mutating self, the diverse, multifaceted intersections of the secret, evolving, ‘me and/or you,’ present at every simultaneous here-and/or-now of the immediate, infinite, multiverse of the conscious-unconscious, indeterminate subject-object.
So the author of Colour of Dust is/was/will be Inanna, Morgana, Old Scarfe, Anthea
Heartnul, Nykticorax the Demiurge, The Contortionist, Saint Anthony, Veronica Lurk, The
Scolopendra, Xezbeth, Astrid Hainault The Pet City Squeegee Menace, the ghost of Gerard de
Nerval, The Raven, The Bride, The Hanged Man, and the numerous quasi-autonomous ‘I’ figures and
sub-personalities scattered throughout these pages, slipping through negative space – but, then again –perhaps he-she-it is just The Camera Eye, observing, with cold, inhuman, insect, detachment, a kaleidoscopic spectacle of transient, diverting phenomena – images, feelings, moods, ideas –

trajectories of transformation, phantoms dissolving in time.

Illustration: The Mutant Spectre, 2001

Swan of Yuggoth

Swan Of Yuggoth

Albedo
Becoming music unfettered, white-winged, the Swan
Calls out from where a blue supergiant circles
The Ancient of Days.
Beneath a leprous, hermaphroditic moon the Earth’s Lover
Sees a rabid dog
Escape through a secret rose garden.
White roses covered in snow,
The sacred source of illumination, kalas out of space.
Sounds awake, aeons of light years so far distant
Before the scattered remnants of the Milky Way
Spawned this Swan of other aeons,
Cross of Northern Skies, Bird of Aethyr returning to aethyr.
Penetrate unhindered
Even here
Crystalising arcane colours.
Eidolon of Yuggoth, glorified, spotless, virginal,
The light touch of your icy plumage ruffles this lake’s
Clear surface, reflecting tall trees, pale pillars
Descending quiet as splintered sunlight
Glances from your rippling wake.
Opposites are transformed
Into a new cold being, Diadem of My Heart.
Incorruptible, arising reborn,
Displacing ashes of purgatorial fires, long-necked body thrusting
Towards Leda, as the cries of her conjoined twins
Smash open the cosmic egg.
So, you are still dreaming.
But your eyes are perfect stones, like mirrors;
Transplutonic realms,
Awesome power zones, disguised as petals.
Their supreme light pervades the Ultimate Snow,
An incursion of otherness, a visible vibration.

Bird of Aethyr, returning to aethyr, Swan of Yuggoth.