And so the leitmotiv of revolution is played off against its analytical counterpart, the idea of a change of state, political, geographical and, finally, chemical. Alchemy may function as a model simultaneously of radical change but also social upheaval, placing the ‘Patience’ of the ‘Great Work’ with its contrary, the revolutionary upsurge of the ‘Great Year’, in which attentisme is brought to term by a millennial suspension of the ethical order. (Observe how Of Sanguine Fire makes knowing use of that childish injunction, ‘wait for it’.) Alchemical theory contended that metals were anxious to improve their status but were forced into hierarchy, by way of a connected chain of correspondences, with gold as their Sun King. In Of Sanguine Fire, alchemy is contrasted with the more mundane task of bakery. “Soul is a good sodden word, of the old verbal dough” as Wyndham Lewis puts it in The Enemy of the Stars, though that deflationary comparison soon re-expands in the mind, by way of what astronomers used to call the ‘currant bun’ model of the universe (‘currant bun’ is rhyming slang for sun), in which each currant represents a galaxy and the surrounding dough is the intervening space between them, so that, when cooked, the dough expands and the currants move further apart from one another.some more rough notes...
lights burn brim to surge or wave a crass suiting foreshore
[...]
in socket trim, hot white partition cryolite
brim / trim
from Chaucer: brimme n. "shore, bank (of a river),"
brim, originally: The border, margin, edge, or brink: Of the sea, or any piece of water: Coast, shore, bank, brink
trim - To fit out (a ship, etc.) for sea
surge / wave - both sea / water related
if alembic refers to alchemy then so far I can identify fire, air, and water elements ( maybe cryolite is the earth element? or the "foreshore" which would be earth / land? )
The new poems book arrived today, and I'm reading Of the Abyss - seems to be about immigration on small boats. Very harrowing vibes.