Carol Shillibeer
Prima materia
(o transformare), an alchemical essay
Alchemy (Aúrum inpérfectus)
.. The first and last thing to be sacrificed is the notion of purity.
Gold 79: ironic that your perfect crystal squares are, in fact, transitional as metals go.
A. Rubída soláris
.. The Adrenalin hybrid rose is favoured by florists in part because it opens slowly and reaches a thornless maturity.
What species the metaphorical sun? Aqua regia: that red-faced Father and hermaphrodite. Self: anthers with perfect pollen, ovum swollen in the throat, red-rose-lips liberate distillate_sodium cyanide .. mercury_and each drop Midas; Beads; Pollen sacs; Amalgam: largely unreactive, but for the rupturing birth, for dehiscence.
A. Citrinítas lunaria
.. reducto ad absurdum: Matter (or potential), which is moved by form (or actuality), is moved precisely because it is never neutral to its mover: matter is aimed at—it runs after—form.
Transform silver: peahen eye alight in the dark and the yellowing moon. Condense the perfect lacuna. Short ischial spines anchor levator ani and thus will hold the world safe inside life's boundary. Perform. Pre-form. Lunar maps are carved with care, night after night, on the scapula of red deer.
Utter yellow words: incántario, incántatio, incantíto.
A. Albída wórkes
.. Stone as Hermes speaks: Art is nothing else but a knowing.
The nature of the retort is to have a space in which things can happen. Cucurbit: a glass mouth wide; filled with what remains, what will be .. come. That's the secret of the alembic. Made in the image of a gourd long eaten and probably on its 10th or 11th reincarnation, life is chemical, a true and constant preparation.
It's the nature of life to be bounded. Life is, in fact, a special form of chemistry, inherited within some boundary. Nicholas and his beloved Perenelle, the wing span of a monarch butterfly, the love song of a grey whale, flame under a blue heart, whirling crystal in a cellular storm, RNA strings done and undone, folded and unfolded, rhodopsin in a baby's eye: order in small packets; life in small dusty mouse-holes along the roaring blast of universal walls built, I suspect, out of light's precursor.
Alkaline earth metals are silver coloured and soft, yet they are reactive. Burnt in a flame, radium, at least, runs crimson.
A. Melános ecstásia
.. Metals can be malleable. Rocks can shatter. Skin can harden.
.. Bacterial signals can modulate mammalian cell-signal transduction and host hormones can cross-signal with bacteria to modulate bacterial gene expression. In other words, they talk; they change each other; they can act together.
Mercáptans, aka Thíols, got the name because the thiolate group bonds so strongly with mercury compounds_this is the thing, the naming, and, of course, the bonding. Sulfur_sulfhydryl to be exact_that S replacing the O, makes of it a deep earth drink, not wine, nor even absinthe, smelling of skunk, or garlic, grapefruit, or coffee. Paper soaked in lead acetate trihydrate, in the presence of hydrogen sulfide, turns black. There is no ecstasy present, except in the technician's steady hand and yet such things are the heart and the skin, walling in, making possible, the rush of connection.
Give a bacterium a rose, or a benzene ring. It is appropriate since aromatic signals began before life in the sea_formerly known as chaos. In it we all swim.
An alchemical rose: the fifth element: the bonding of │I│ and │you│ into │we│.
A life element: death.
A. Avada kedavra
.. It is estimated that humans have 1013 human cells and 1014 bacterial cells. Purity is not the appropriate metaphor & you and I are not alone.
in principio...
Bedbound
Carol Shillibeer lives on the east coast of Canada, in Mi'kmaq territory. She has a variety of pieces in a variety of journals. Her primary motivation for writing is fun; she says "prima materia" was a delight to write. Ill and bed-bound, surrounded by piles of chemistry and alchemical texts, she spent a delightful, cool sunny day staring out the corner of her window and thinking about the notion of purity and the reality of transitional forms. With such thoughts, and with repeated exposure to endemic illnesses, comes a kind of skewed view of life. Carol believes that sometimes the only choice you have is how you experience the discomfort of being off-kilter. It can be suffered through, or it can be like abstract art, an enigmatic and ambiguous delight. Like with only being able to see a bent corner of the open window - empathy with the meadow or angst about what hides around the corner? When bed bound, why choose angst? Ambiguity is easier to bear, and much more fun.
This piece was first published ten years ago in Klaus Gerken's ezine Ygdrasil.
(o transformare), an alchemical essay
Alchemy (Aúrum inpérfectus)
.. The first and last thing to be sacrificed is the notion of purity.
Gold 79: ironic that your perfect crystal squares are, in fact, transitional as metals go.
A. Rubída soláris
.. The Adrenalin hybrid rose is favoured by florists in part because it opens slowly and reaches a thornless maturity.
What species the metaphorical sun? Aqua regia: that red-faced Father and hermaphrodite. Self: anthers with perfect pollen, ovum swollen in the throat, red-rose-lips liberate distillate_sodium cyanide .. mercury_and each drop Midas; Beads; Pollen sacs; Amalgam: largely unreactive, but for the rupturing birth, for dehiscence.
A. Citrinítas lunaria
.. reducto ad absurdum: Matter (or potential), which is moved by form (or actuality), is moved precisely because it is never neutral to its mover: matter is aimed at—it runs after—form.
Transform silver: peahen eye alight in the dark and the yellowing moon. Condense the perfect lacuna. Short ischial spines anchor levator ani and thus will hold the world safe inside life's boundary. Perform. Pre-form. Lunar maps are carved with care, night after night, on the scapula of red deer.
Utter yellow words: incántario, incántatio, incantíto.
A. Albída wórkes
.. Stone as Hermes speaks: Art is nothing else but a knowing.
The nature of the retort is to have a space in which things can happen. Cucurbit: a glass mouth wide; filled with what remains, what will be .. come. That's the secret of the alembic. Made in the image of a gourd long eaten and probably on its 10th or 11th reincarnation, life is chemical, a true and constant preparation.
It's the nature of life to be bounded. Life is, in fact, a special form of chemistry, inherited within some boundary. Nicholas and his beloved Perenelle, the wing span of a monarch butterfly, the love song of a grey whale, flame under a blue heart, whirling crystal in a cellular storm, RNA strings done and undone, folded and unfolded, rhodopsin in a baby's eye: order in small packets; life in small dusty mouse-holes along the roaring blast of universal walls built, I suspect, out of light's precursor.
Alkaline earth metals are silver coloured and soft, yet they are reactive. Burnt in a flame, radium, at least, runs crimson.
A. Melános ecstásia
.. Metals can be malleable. Rocks can shatter. Skin can harden.
.. Bacterial signals can modulate mammalian cell-signal transduction and host hormones can cross-signal with bacteria to modulate bacterial gene expression. In other words, they talk; they change each other; they can act together.
Mercáptans, aka Thíols, got the name because the thiolate group bonds so strongly with mercury compounds_this is the thing, the naming, and, of course, the bonding. Sulfur_sulfhydryl to be exact_that S replacing the O, makes of it a deep earth drink, not wine, nor even absinthe, smelling of skunk, or garlic, grapefruit, or coffee. Paper soaked in lead acetate trihydrate, in the presence of hydrogen sulfide, turns black. There is no ecstasy present, except in the technician's steady hand and yet such things are the heart and the skin, walling in, making possible, the rush of connection.
Give a bacterium a rose, or a benzene ring. It is appropriate since aromatic signals began before life in the sea_formerly known as chaos. In it we all swim.
An alchemical rose: the fifth element: the bonding of │I│ and │you│ into │we│.
A life element: death.
A. Avada kedavra
.. It is estimated that humans have 1013 human cells and 1014 bacterial cells. Purity is not the appropriate metaphor & you and I are not alone.
in principio...
Carol Shillibeer lives on the east coast of Canada, in Mi'kmaq territory. She has a variety of pieces in a variety of journals. Her primary motivation for writing is fun; she says "prima materia" was a delight to write. Ill and bed-bound, surrounded by piles of chemistry and alchemical texts, she spent a delightful, cool sunny day staring out the corner of her window and thinking about the notion of purity and the reality of transitional forms. With such thoughts, and with repeated exposure to endemic illnesses, comes a kind of skewed view of life. Carol believes that sometimes the only choice you have is how you experience the discomfort of being off-kilter. It can be suffered through, or it can be like abstract art, an enigmatic and ambiguous delight. Like with only being able to see a bent corner of the open window - empathy with the meadow or angst about what hides around the corner? When bed bound, why choose angst? Ambiguity is easier to bear, and much more fun.
This piece was first published ten years ago in Klaus Gerken's ezine Ygdrasil.
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