practical alchemy
when you can't tell the difference between invention and discovery
This is the philosopher’s stone: the love of the good. Of course, this is a device, and a cheap one. It is a way of positioning the love of the good as the end of a quest, as final or central, just by stipulation. It is artificial. But I am making an artifact. All practices are artifacts. Of course, I cannot devise a way to position this practice as central in your life: I cannot commit you to alchemy.
However, if you are like most people, you probably have some desire to love the good, even if you are not committed to doing so, even if it is not clear to you that ‘love’ or ‘good’ track anything anyone could really put a finger on. And even if this desire doesn’t really point to anything — it wouldn’t be the first desire to be sucked into the vacuum — maybe you wish that it did. Maybe it would be a joy to commit yourself to the pursuit of something unassailably wholesome.
Let’s suppose that this does describe how you feel, that you are caught up in an unspeakable, amorphous desire whose meaning is too vague to be acted on, but also too luminous to be ignored. Does this position, in your view, seem like a puzzle? Does it seem like a problem to be solved? If it does, then you already have one foot in the door of alchemical practice.
Alchemy is the art of making practicable the impracticable. If action is only action under a description, then you can only do what makes sense to you, and yet you are called to act beyond the bounds of sense. Alchemy plays at this boundary: it is the constructive exploration of new conditions for meaningful action. If you have no conception of what it would mean to live a life explicitly devoted to the love of the good, the alchemist invites you to fabricate such a conception. It only needs to contain enough truth to be leapt to by faith, and for your devotion to survive confrontations with nature, impermanence, incredulous friends and loved ones — the rest can be pure invention, craft, poetry, myth.