Alchemy, stationery and curious overlaps

Every passion borders on the chaotic,
but the collector's passion
borders on the chaos of memories.

- Walter Benjamin

The full moon and port last night: my brain's having a ball. I'm just trying to keep up, and follow the synapses with a notebook.

A series of overlaps in the past week seems hinged on alchemy (run through with Eco and the mysterious masons), which recalls cabinets of curiosities and the roaming imaginations of earlier times, which ties into the Terry Gilliam medieval-ish animations in Holy Grail (we watched Friday), which reminds me of Alexander Gorlizski's Riyaz magritte-gone-Indian miniature pieces,

which took me to ABC Home this afternoon where I discovered the brilliant stationery of Sesame Letterpress ,



which made me look up alchemy on the web having happened on Taschen's, Alchemy & Mysticism this weekend in Hudson, for which I wouldn't perhaps have been excited by at all if I hadn't bought a trove of loose prints - illustrated with potions, hermaphrodites and celestial cross sections and remarked and notated in Latin, Hebrew and German - in Bombay's Chor bazaar, in the late '90s.



Couldn't make heads or tales of the pieces then, but framed and had for sale in Circa Trade Pune. Where, mostly, they sat/hung (customers couldn't fathom appeal or meaning).

In 2001 we returned to the US.

And so they came to hang around the mirror in my bedroom - me still with no idea what they signified, what country or school had wrought such a strange vocabulary of imagery...

Until a friend's architect's recommended contractor Ian (to build a closet + demolish a wall), happened to say:

"Court, where'd you get the alchemy prints?"

And one small part of the brain that had always liked mysticism, joined hands with the visual part that liked ladders and cryptic illustrations,

and lived happily...

C - alchemically oriented

"The white sulphur.
Our sun having been changed into a green colour,
passes into white sulphur,
which is the body animated by the incorruptible soul."

From Cabala Mineralis Manuscript, First Book.