Reading and Alchemy

I went to visit my parents and my sister who is on R&R from Iraq, and I've been reading Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I love this man. He has such a way with words...gets right to the point but very eloquently, and he knows how to spin a good yarn. What a raconteur.

I have an older version of the book--one that cost $2.95 when it was printed :) Love that illustration.

As it says on the cover, it is the chronicle of a family living in an enchanted little village called Macondo. Before I began reading, I had read all about the magical realism genre and went through some Kafka and Saramago but didn't know what to expect. What a pleasant surprise. Alchemy, magic carpet rides, and contagious insomnia in perpetuum. I was especially moved by the mystical charm and transcendence and absolute wretchedness of Pietro Crespi's death (I'm still relatively at the beginning).

The progenitor of the Buendia brood is Jose Arcadio, husband to Ursula Iguaran. J.A. just becomes fiendishly fascinated by the knowledge and inventions that the gypsies bring to town, and he befriends the gypsy leader Melquiades, who introduces him to alchemy.

The engraving to the right was taken from the Elementa chemicae of the Leiden chemistry professor J.C. Barchusen. In the manuscript, there are a whole series of illustrations that illuminate the process that alchemists call the Opus Magnum (Great Work), which alludes to their belief in the divinity of creation and the plan of salvation within it. Materia prima, the volatile and chaotic base of all matter, contains incompatible opposites and seeks to be regulated and transmutated to a "redeemed state of perfect harmony" (from Alexander Roob's Hermetic Cabinet)-- the Philosopher's Stone or lapis philosophorum.

In the first medallion, there are the emblems of the lapis on the crescent moon: the lion represents normal gold, which must be twice driven by antimony, the wolf, in order to be purified. The dragon represents philosophical quicksilver--mercury. In circle #2, God corroborates with the alchemist--laying to rest any fear of impiety in the work. #3 shows chaos. #4 depicts the coat of arms of the lapis, and #5 shows the four elements.

Reading, Writing, Lunatics

Too much perversion makes me sick. Not really, just more apt to read something, ha.

So I had Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies on while I was writing, and it reminded me of my June 1 post about Beelzebub and Binsfield's classification. I read the book again a while back and recalled when I first read it and how much Simon's death really affected me. I read it over and over and over again, sickened by adolescent brutality (not even adolescent--many a time I've witnessed a little four-year-old bulldozer, flattening a smaller one to the ground, even when the weaker one is crying and on his knees and not fighting anymore), so filled with frustration and misanthropy for how pathetic and absurd it was. And then the ocean just washes him away, into its injudicious depths (very tragically beautiful, really). It really hurt my feelings...being the weak kid with the asthma problem. Did he have respiratory problems?

And then, of course, the pig and her piglets, and the pig's head on a spike...the gluttonous demon Beelzebub incarnate, foreshadowing the death of Piggy, his little porcine body rupturing like some infected pustule on the rocks. That was such a wonderfully disturbing book.

Presently, I'm in the midst of Lolita and can't get Jeremy Irons out of my mind. Way scarier than James Mason. Ehh. Creepy Creepy. Humbert Humbert, the silver-tongued rake (or so he says). Amateur poet, professional pedophiliac. BANGING writing. I'm so envious of Nabokov.

Science Is My Religion, I Think

Listening to: Philip Glass, Glassworks

Reading: Flowers: How They Changed the World by William C. Burger

Just Finished Reading: Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin

I've recently become quite obsessed with evolutionary biology. Ever since I read Loren Eiseley's book The Immense Journey (particularly his essay about flowers and the one entitled The Snout), I can't get enough of it. That and cosmology. Recently, the Science Channel aired a biography of Albert Einstein and followed it up with a show chronicling the history of humanity's interest in the Universe. That prompted me to get down with some Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. Cosmos, here I come. Well, maybe not now, but you're definitely going on my wishlist.

Just before discovering Eiseley, a naturalist who really has the artistic shrewdness of a poet, I read Hesse's Siddhartha. Each gave me a spiritual connection with the rest of the world as I read it...both have underlying themes of some kind of primordial monadic kinship with the entire universe and eternal existence on a basic level.

Alright, I just started Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and I think I'll be off to finish it. :)