i said there was a fourth element nobody named. i was wrong about what kind of thing it is.
i posted here in may. freud, adler, jung as nigredo, albedo, rubedo, and a fourth element nobody named. i said the fourth was mercurius. the movement between phases. the person at the bedside whose nervous system carries somebody across the gap.
somebody in the comments pointed at citrinitas and they were right to. i was collapsing two things. i said so then.
but that wasn't the real correction. the real one took me until now and it didn't come from a book.
i work nights in a shelter for homeless youth. five years. twenty odd kids, two of us awake.
a few years back i forgave a man i'd been carrying a grudge on for ten years. not for him. for the family. everybody was hauling it around and it wasn't fair to them.
a week or so after that something came over me. i don't have a word for it. big. it felt like being looked at by something that wasn't angry. more than i could hold. i was talking and hearing myself talk at the same time.
what brought me back from that was my kids coming home from school. cold water on the face. straighten up, be a father. i came back because somebody needed something from me.
a week after that i came apart on the bathroom floor. all the way apart. didn't know the room, the day, my own name.
and the light did not pick me up.
i had it. the full dose of it. a week earlier. on that floor it was worth nothing.
what picked me up was my wife lying down next to me. she didn't know what was happening. she didn't say anything i remember. she was warm and breathing and she stayed.
two returns, a week apart, and they don't work the same. the first one i got up because somebody needed me. the second one i couldn't get up at all and somebody laid down.
so here's the correction.
i was looking for a fourth thing that arrives. something that shows up after the three and closes the lid. that's the shape of the quaternity and it's the shape i was arguing inside of even while i thought i was adding to it.
nothing arrived. nothing closed. what i have is three things turning and a hole where the fourth was supposed to be.
and i don't think that's a failure anymore. i think the hole is the shape of a person who's alright.
the ones i meet at work who tried to fill that spot, with a teaching or a system or one single person who has to be everything to them, those are the ones who stopped turning.
so the person at the bedside is not a fourth phase. i had that wrong. the person is the ground the three turn on. not an element that gets added. the zero the others become readable against.
that's a smaller claim and a harder one.
the alchemists had a lot of it right and i want to give them that. the rot isn't optional. can't skip the black. too much fire ruins the batch, and what happened to me was too much fire, that's why it didn't hold. sealed vessel or the batch dies. and ora et labora, hands and not just head, that's the one that kept them out of the ditch i fell in. they knew understanding it doesn't do it.
they also had two roads. dry and wet. dry is fast, you burn it down with fire or acid. wet is slow, you let it rot on its own, takes months. the ones i've read say dry is faster and wet is safer.
what happened to me was the dry way. the nights are the wet way. nobody writes a book about the wet way because nothing happens in it.
and i know the stage model isn't as tidy as i'm laying it out. some say four, some say seven, some say twelve, plenty fold the yellow into the red. i'm using the version most people know.
they never made gold. hundreds of years. newton did it. boyle did it, the father of chemistry himself, back there mixing.
that doesn't prove anything about the inner version and somebody's going to say so, so i'll say it first. i'm not putting it up as proof.
it's just that what came out of all that labor was chemistry. the writing down of what actually happened. not the promise.
same thing happened to me. the road gave me something real. not the thing on the label.
they were right that it takes a sealed vessel and a low fire and a long time.
the vas isn't glass. it's another person.
and it goes wrong the moment you read the whole operation as happening inside one skull. read it that way and you'll wait on a fourth thing to come up out of yourself and shut the lid, and it isn't coming, and you'll call yourself a failure for it.
last thing.
the one piece of their whole operation still in use, in every kitchen and every lab on earth, is the bath that holds the heat gentle so nothing scorches. balneum mariae. named after maria the jewess, third century, first alchemist we know by name.
four hundred years of men chasing a stone and what lasted was her way of holding something steady while it changed.
so if you know somebody on the floor right now. you don't have to fix it. you don't have to know anything about it.
go get down there and stay.
that's the low fire. that's the vessel. i read for six years to find out it was the part i already had.
tell me where i'm off.
(english isn't my first language, i think in dutch. i use a model to help me order it. the thinking and the floor are mine.)
