Alchemy is many things to many people, to some it the secret language of the mind and to others it is the road to perfection. Alchemy is a scientific and philosophical system which attempts to understand the workings of the universe; it also has spiritual underpinnings which aim towards intellectual and moral self-improvements. Carl Jung compared it to the process of individuation or our search for self. There is an old alchemists’ axiom which sums it up rather nicely “the obscure is explained by the more obscure” which brings us to the latest book of poetry by John Amen titled “At the Threshold of Alchemy”.
John Amen’s poetry is unique and riveting. He is a modern T.S. Eliot and his writing reminds me of Eliot, particularly his much analyzed early work “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the measuring of life with coffee spoons. John Amen has the same eye for decay and withering that T.S. Eliot had and always manages to pop in an image of a flower, one of God’s perfect moments, into his stream of words too. There are similarities in the stream of consciousness of the writing, the life-death-life cycle that recurs in the poems themselves and the writer’s suspicions about what is really occurring. Let us not forget the intense monologue style of the writing itself and the exploration of loss which dominates the work of both these poets. Who are they speaking to? Us? Themselves? God? No-one in particular? The woman/women they love? His love song to his wife Mary reminds me of Eliot’s “Circe’s Palace” and “On a Portrait”.
“On burdened nights, I tack Mary with my troubled visions,
transform her from a bride in white
to postmodern Kali towering in heels wielding dead roses
and a crop…….
masculinity braying at the gates of death and transcendence”
Portraits of Mary
Alchemy is full of symbols and processes. Snakes, dragons, lions, wolves, trees, forests, flowers, mountains, fountains, castles and peacocks are all common symbols. The elements: earth, air, fire and water as well as their qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry are also important. It was believed that all of these corresponded to the reality of the human mind. Alchemists toiled long and hard, praying constantly for God’s grace to do the “Great Work” and achieve the Philosopher’s Stone. They believed if they could alter elemental structure of anything, they could turn it into gold. Alchemists also believed that all things originated from a substance called “first matter”; the substance from which the world was originally made. If you stripped away the qualities from any material such as its colour, weight, shape, and size (anything quantifiable) then you reduced it back to it’s state as “first matter”. From there you added back the qualities it would take to turn it into gold. It also implied that an alchemist could do the same thing with his own character.
The alchemical process itself involves 6 stages: calcination (the extinction of desires); putrefaction (separation of charred elements); solution (wise man resisting temptations); fermentation and congelation (union of opposites); and sublimation which was gold as a symbol of perfection. Is John Amen truly “At the Threshold of Alchemy”? I would have to answer with a resounding “Yes.”
“I’ve dredged my psyche, put my genes beneath the microscope,
but still I sense something I never quite track or salve,
a feral ghost stamping at my core, dissonance turning
malignant in the fleshy gloom. That I too might perish
at the patient hands of what I can’t transcend, something
visited upon my bloodline, long before I was born.”
Curse
From the poem “lineage”: “….with their final breaths, they mumbled – some riddle about golden hammers, a place where lava never cools, mother after father after mother.”
The true gem in this book is called “All Night (for Kyros the Eternal Moment)” full of name dropping, pill popping jarringly brilliant juxtapositions. “..Gandhi mingles, offering free batteries to the enlightened.” And “Helen Keller on LSD – stand –up comedy in sign language.”
John Amen shines offering strange fruit, meaningful meaningless truths and tributes to the other hard travellers he met on his journey. Powerful, wonderful, thought-provoking, raw, visceral, tender and pure. Absolutely golden.
You can learn more about John Amen by visiting his website at http://johnamen.com or at http://thepedestalmagazine.com. His music CD, “All I’ll Ever Need” is available at http://coolmidget.com.
