The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke

Author:Lindsay Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2011-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

It was, she thought, perfect for her needs. Gnomic, succinct, its puns and allusions introduced all the themes she must develop, yet it remained abstract enough for her mind to keep firm purchase on her errant feelings.

Such was her hope and her intent, but once launched upon her exposition she quickly found herself confused by the royal actors of the Art. They were not to be chastened by homilies like children at a Sunday school. Flamboyant, mercurial creatures, they had passionate wills of their own; they exercised a devious, seductive fascination. She struggled to preserve detachment, yet even as her mind appeared to perform its duty, covering page after page with swiftly written words, elsewhere it found ever more disturbing ways to misbehave.

Nor was it the mind alone. Her body had reached a climactic moment of its cycle, and felt famished and restless. Its clamourings against solitude were a constant distraction from the cooler processes of thought; yet even as her spirit chafed at this conflict between body and mind, Louisa understood that such stress was specific to her task and not to be avoided. Body and mind were among the contraries to be reconciled, and the true union of opposites was always preceded by bitter conflict. If her treatise was to fulfil the expectations raised by its prologue, she must make this difficult passage now – though it was, at times, an agony merely to remain seated at her desk.

The turns of the work became ever more perplexing as the themes she must address became ever more entangled with the tensions she endured. In former ages certain masters had solved the problem by avoiding words entirely and resorting to pictures alone. There had been nothing either prurient or arbitrary in their choice of frankly sexual emblems to embody the mystery of the Conjunction, but even in times less hypocritical than her own such pictures had proved subject to misinterpretation. How much greater then the difficulty of conveying the mystery in words, and to an age reluctant to contemplate those experiences where the pathos of our animal nature stands in greatest tension with the highest aspirations of the soul! Nor was she herself exempt from confusion. In the erotic landscape on which her thoughts now opened, the illusory and the actual were so intimately twinned that only the most cautious eye might distinguish between them, and at each passionate encounter the symbolic and the literal seemed to enfold their embrace more tightly. Day by day her bewilderment increased, and, such was the fascination exercised upon the mind by these anarchic powers, she might find herself at any step allured in folly, and dizzily unaware of her plight.

She had, in part, been prepared for this. After all, Mercurius was the tutelary deity of the Art, and it was of his very nature to beguile and confuse in this manner, but she could take no comfort from the knowledge, for she must pursue him as through a hall of mirrors, from one

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