You know alchemy?
(Listen along to the audio version on the podcast, here: https://kevangilbert.transistor.fm/episodes/you-know-alchemy)
I’m not sure alchemy is real thing; my main awareness of the word comes from Terry Pratchett’s off-beat fantasy series, Discworld. An alchemist is someone who deals in chemical/spiritual conceptions for all that ails. A medieval pharmacist whose blends may or may not heal, but whose guild and profession is to combine, to mix, to suggest, and most of all, to wait.
Alchemy, as a metaphor, is a loose but gorgeous concept. The idea of things coming together in a mysterious way to create a result that is entirely remarkable. Like the word synergy (which has sadly become a corporate zombie of a word), it’s about the remarkable collective spirit and outcome that happens with combining individual parts. It’s a muchness.
To alchemize, is it allow mystery to work, to combine disparate elements, to wonder and guess, and to wait a bit.
It reminds me of compost. Get your food scraps and dinner table waste, all that appears to be junk, unwanted and lost, allow it to wait, and it will explode in slow-motion, set fire to itself, and become the most effective fertilizer for supporting the nourishing growth of new life in a garden. Waste becomes life-ingredients, if you’re patient and okay with gross-ness.
A few years ago, I was processing some deep themes of personal hurt, and despite my strong motivation to find healing, I couldn’t seem to locate the way out. There was no fire escape plan for the heart, conveniently outlining my evacuation path and muster station. I remember googling an absurd phrase along the lines of “how does one heal from [a highly specific combination of personal story elements that is not actually a valid search query but made me feel amused to type out].”
A writer buried in the results said something along the lines of, “You have to alchemize the pain.”
Alchemize? Was that a typo? Did she mean acclimatize to it; get used to it?
Alchemize. I again amused myself by googling, “HOW TO ALCHEMIZE PAIN.”
I watched in front of me as the “no results found” text warped into the pixels of my monitor, zipping away from me like Hans Solo attempting the Kessel Run in a disputed number of parsecs. The search engine company folded in on itself, becoming the first black hole of cyberspace, my search question bankrupting the entire field.
Okay, well, there weren’t any meaningful results. To me, anyway. It was as if I was blinking at a bot whose cursor eyes were blinking back at me. A vacant vacuous vacuum of a response, like Siri intoning insensitively “Here’s what I found on the web.”
In a different timeline, I might have asked a different bot, but the clawed lobsters and chatting jippities hadn’t been released from their deep underwater mutation laboratories yet. If I HAD asked the chat, you know what it would have done? It would have given me an answer.
I didn’t need an answer. I needed to go on a quest.
There was a question that broadcaster and music-lover George Stromboloplous once answered on his instagram page. A listener inquired, “How did you used to find out information about bands before the internet?” It may have been a rhetorical question, a rage-baity kind of out-loud musing that nobody expected an answer to. But Strombo took the bait. He said something along the lines of this:
“When you had a question about an artist or album, what you did was: you carried it around with you for years. When you found people with common interests, you’d ask them if they knew. If you were ambitious, you might go to the library, but there weren’t a lot of books about current music, especially emerging acts. You might invent a story in your mind that gives you the answer. You might actually never find out. And then again, you might, years later, bump into the answer waiting for you when you see a certain record at a vinyl store.”
He’s describing the art of letting a question become a quest.
Sometimes, it’s not the answer we need, it’s the whole journey we go on to get there.
Another Canadian music-lover and broadcaster, rapper Buck65 (also know as Richard Terfry) has a line in his fantastic hip-hop track “463” where he complains, “Problem is today they got an answer for everything.”
Back to alchemy. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t want to google it or ask a bot during the writing of this piece, because I want to keep my knowledge gap, and I want to use it to invite you into the space you keep for keeping space.
Alchemy can have a slowness to it, as you wait for the fermentation to occur.
Alchemy can have quickness in it, because sometimes change takes forever, and then suddenly it’s here, like a weather change where gusts of wind erase as summer’s day and bring an unexpected downpour.
Alchemy is in the slow-motion explosion of your interior world, taking roots and forming neural connections, a becoming, at a possibly glacial rate.
You know where I’m going with this, but as I see the prognosticators and technology infatuants continuing to laud the unending progress of AI, claiming speed speed speed speed as the win, I feel like I’m watching a people enter a library for the first time wearing speed-reading spectacles. They’re taking books off the shelf and with one glance, getting an instant-summaries, and tossing the book aside. They’re doing it to every shelf. tThey’re satisfied with their knowledge of Shakespeare because they know enough about Romeo and Juliet, though they know nothing of the heartbreak that took these fictional lovers to their end. They’re treating human knowledge like a hot-dog eating contest, gorging themselves on the tube-packed meat, not knowing that speed-of-ingestion is not how one measures the quality of a meal.
Food is for savouring. It comes from growing, harvesting, preparing, sharing with others, eating it with intention, and letting your body move through the process of digestion. You wouldn’t want to speed-run a scotch, or design cheese for hyper-growth, neither the making of it nor the consumption.
The time it takes is the feature, the point, the intention, of life’s most important elements.
I think of my own pathways to navigate grief and loss. The emotional realities of becoming a parent for the first time, and the fourth time, and the years in between where I uncovered edges to my own growth I didn’t even know where there. I think of the contours and winding roads of my 20-year marriage with my partner, and the endless grace she has shown me as I have matured, the patience we have had with each other as we have both evolved and learned. I think of my work during my lifetime to find my own voice, find courage, develop skills, and grow as a human being; I think of the relationships with my friends, and their unique textures and changes over the years. I think of the time. The time it takes.
Wisdom is not a race.
And art is for the alchemy.
And life is for the living.
And questions are for the quest.
You know alchemy?
I don’t.
But I’m going to spend the rest of my life in the alchemical process of becoming someone who does, deeply.