Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting 

Bio:
Palisades Poet Laureate Michelle Bitting is a fourth generation Palisadian and mother of two. Married to actor Phil Abrams she has published extensively in national journals including The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, the L.A. Weekly, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and as the Weekly Feature on Verse Daily. Her book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award and Notes to the Beloved, won the 2011 Sacramento Poetry Center Award and received a starred Kirkus Review. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine and is an active California Poet in the Schools. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon and recently commenced work on a PhD in Mythological Studies. She is pursuing her PhD at Pacifica Graduate Institute.Visit her at: www.michellebitting.com

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            Whenever I lead poetry workshops, whether it be with seasoned writers or absolute beginners, inevitably, the word transformation enters into any discussion of the creative process. This applies to both the poet’s experience in writing a poem and the collective group’s appreciation of it. There is no denying that the artist’s act of manipulating the raw material of the world as manifest in perceived and remembered symbol and allowing the mind to dismember, heat, cool and reconfigure what’s sparked into consciousness, directly relates to the ancient art of alchemy. So, too, this act or process involves a dynamic tension of opposites: conflict and drama in varying degrees as mirrored in the alchemical stages. This applies to the tensions within matter itself, between the poet and the work, and between the work and the unconscious--deliberations that are the transmutation of primary matter into the Great Pearl of art. I’d like to explore these concepts in several poetic works including Shakespeare’s Tempest, John Donne’s “The Ecstasy” and two modern poems by D.A. Powell and Anna Akhmatova, recognizing both the alchemical properties within each work as well as the work itself as a golden resolution that never entirely solves conflict, but according to Jung, “means an evolution” (von Franz 235).

            Before weighing actual poetic examples for their alchemical attributes, I want to briefly analyze the origin and nature of the Hermetic Tradition itself, beginning with the father of Alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus and The Emerald Table. Believed to have passed through Syria into the Arab world circa 800 CE and originally written in Greek, it contains thirteen precepts and I am particularly interested in the second which states: “What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracle of one thing” (Linden 28). This assertion would seem to imply that the physical world works in a way that mirrors what occurs in the heavens. Thus, understanding the immediate world would allow the practitioner to connect with and comprehend the universe and the divine. It also beautifully describes the primary function of alchemy as an engagement, and in the hands of trained practitioners, of opposite substances: hot and cold, dry and wet--the co-mingling of spirit, soul and body in the elemental forms of mercury, sulphur and salt with the intention of turning base materials into gold. In marrying two opposites, something new and precious is created in the transition to a higher, more refined or rarified state. In the case of The Emerald Table, this becomes “the miracle of one thing.”

            As time went on, it was more clearly understood that these physical operations, done in seclusion over long stretches of time, that is, the meddling with metals and concrete matter (in much the same way a writer does imaginatively), was bound up with the engagement of psychological material for the purpose of inner transformation: “All of late Alexandrian-Greek alchemy used the transmutation of base metals into gold as a symbol of human regeneration and transformation” (Henderson-Sherwood 9). Later on, in the Renaissance and Middle Ages, the idea of an animated spirit contained in all manner of nature was made “conscious and explicit” (20) by alchemists like Paracelsus who “believed that everything in the universe was alive and that there was an intermediate state between the material and immaterial consisting of entities that have a body and spirit but not a soul. [...] he acknowledged what we might call the imaginal world as a third alternative to the world of literalism or the world of abstraction” (20).     Thus, the concept of spirit in the matter of the natural world that may be examined and tampered with in a desire to project and animate vital forces from below and not just above becomes more overt. This intermediary imaginal place between above and below, between prima materia and alchemist, between the unconscious and the poet is, to my mind, the space that allows for the transcendent to materialize. The poet’s psyche, like the alchemist’s alembic, provides the crucible, the contained close quarters, for various stages of transformation to operate: negredo, albedo and rubedo, mashing oppositional forces in order to affect change through heat, distillation and pressure. This includes a delving down into the sparking dark, rough matter in order to find new threads of light, the white wings, the philosopher’s stone or, in the case of poiesis and the generation of writing, new metaphors and the completed master work itself. In doing so, the individual cum alchemist cum artist nears the vast unconscious or Self in service of psychological individuation and the production of a work of ineffable quality and great force that may then affect subsequent viewers. The closer the poet nears this mysterious well, the more spontaneous and ingenious the creative work produced by the mind. Marie von Franz elaborates:

                        The individuation process leads to unique creativeness in each moment and the shut chamber alludes to this secret centre of the personality, the secret source of life. It is the shut chamber of the heart, the unique creativeness in each moment of life. Where the others can no longer guess about you, for they cannot see into the shut chamber of your heart from where the unexpected creative reactions spring. (159)

            This marriage or union of opposites is necessarily fraught with struggle and conflict. There is no other way to achieve the Great Pearl, unleash Sophia on the path to the numinous. Just as the oyster needs its irritant in the cold, mucous-lined dark of the shell, the psyche wrestles with the oppositional realms of matter and the unconscious, projecting and thereby manifesting symbol to better understand the unknowable: “Usually they are interwoven, having something in common and being only two aspects of the same thing, namely the fundamental paradoxical duality of all psychological phenomena” (148). This is the hermetic domain, the place of unlimited possibility, of multiplicity, where the coniunctio initiates something wondrous in the densest dark in order to illuminate the repartee between soul, spirit and matter and the eternal question of what is real. Again, from von Franz:

                        In the final analysis it is consciousness that makes the conflict between the inner and the outer by projecting the one as materially real and the other as psychologically real, because we do not really know the difference between material reality and the psyche. Actually, if we look at it honestly, we are   confronted with something unknown which appears sometimes as matter and sometimes as psyche, and how the two are linked we do not know as yet. The   alchemists did not know and we do not know either. It is a life mystery which seems to manifest both psychologically and materially. If we describe it from the outside with an extraverted statistical approach it appears as matter, and if we approach it from within it appears as what we like to call the unconscious. (147)

            For the artist, allowing the space for grappling with tensions and suffering becomes the playground for Poiesis---the reconciliation of thought with matter and time, the begetting of the beautiful. Something divine happens as the threshold of opposites is approached and passed through. The poetic work becomes the stone that holds the tensions of the universe and creates a kind of transitory peace in the artist who has managed to place a symbol outside herself. Once again, we witness the duality of inner and outer worlds that is then activated in the audience perceiving the work. Thus, the alchemist, the artist, becomes a kind of grand magician.

            This presents an interesting point of entry to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, specifically, Prospero’s final monologue at the end of the play. Throughout the drama, there are numerous allusions to alchemy and these come as no surprise considering how widely discussed such magical arts were during the Renaissance, both for their esoteric as well as exoteric uses. Alchemical processes might serve as metaphor for romantic, political, and religious transformation as well as for “the transforming art of poetry itself” (Simonds 538). Prospero, ex-duke of Milan is sequestered like a hermit or Magus on a mysterious island rife with magical properties and embodied in various characters. Ariel and Caliban represent fiery air and watery earth while Sycorax, the witch, symbolizes the dark, original forces, the neglected and suppressed mother goddess, in the collective unconscious; all are imprisoned, all must be released. Prospero’s task is to work with the elements the island provides and transform himself in order to help restore balance to the creatures and world around him. It was a great upheaval of ocean, and by extension, psychological disruption, that set the alchemical wheels in motion, and through the interactions of the characters in this dreamlike pageant of events, power and wholeness are returned to their proper keepers and Prospero’s psyche is liberated from its own bondage. Nowhere is the alchemical link more brilliantly described than in the final moments of the play, specifically Act V Scene I, when Prospero dons his sorcerer’s robe, his secret book and staff, drawing a magic circle to announce his Great Opus of undertakings. Not only do we learn of his personal interior transformation from deep-seated anger to a state of nobler, patient virtue, but that this has been done through manipulation of the basic natural elements with the aid of servant spirits:

                                                                        I have bedimmed

                        The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

                        And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault

                        Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder

                        Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

                        With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

                        Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

                        The pine and cedar: graves at my command

                        Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth

                        By my so potent Art. (Act V, Scene I, 41-50)

            Here we have “mutinous winds,” “green seas” (green being a key alchemical color referring back to The Emerald Table perhaps?), “roaring war,” “rattling thunder,” the earth made to shake and ghosts called forth from the grave. Pretty wild arts, indeed and furthermore, conjured by “moonshine” and the “solemn curfew” (499): the night we know to be the generative alchemical landscape. In addition, the final line “By my so potent Art” evokes such wonderful double play of imagery and symbolism. Not only does Prospero reference the manipulations of actual matter, but the end product of his operations to be no less than Art--the unified work of transmutation that alters and improves the living situation around him with the shift to a higher gear of his own psyche. Finally, we can’t help but hear Shakespeare the artist-alchemist commenting on his own role as scribe-provocateur-magician through the character of Prospero. The artist turns within and goes down, making the essential night sea journey in seclusion--in this case, on an island of mystical locale--eventually resurfacing with a work of force and integrity, the One Art that contains worlds within it. Then he is able to step back and view it as separate from the self. Truly, the levels of soul-spirit-matter braided within this single passage are stunningly multiple.

            We can be pretty sure that Shakespeare had extensive knowledge of alchemy, along with other great poets and philosophers of his time, including the great but often unappreciated John Donne. It’s interesting to note that W.B.Yeats and T.S. Eliot would come to be huge fans several hundred years later, and certainly their own work is rife with allusions to the hermetic traditions. “Although previous studies of his alchemical imagery have not displayed an awareness of the complex implications of alchemical ideas, Donne was nevertheless acquainted with alchemy in its broader aspects since many of his figures refer to the philosophical, occult, and mystical doctrines associated with alchemical practices and theories” (Mazzeo 103).  Alchemy constantly, both overtly and more subtly, shows up in Donne’s metaphysical pieces, woven into his lyrical meditations as symbol. Metaphor illuminates his deliberations on love, sex and in his poem “The Ecstasy,” the transmutations taking place in the minds and physical bodies of the lovers. Physical contact is required for the union of souls; Donne’s message seems to be that a greater sum effect can resonate even after the bodies are gone as well as in the mind of the perceiver: us. Allusions to alchemy manifest in the images of hands, water, perspiration, alloys, celestial spheres, violets, blood and air (to name but a few)--the physical matter of the world that is worked upon to create something other and beyond its original state.

            For instance, the opening image in “The Ecstasy” depicts the lovers sitting in the “violets reclining head” (Hollander-Kermode 539), their hands securely sealed with a “fast balm” (539). This immediately conjures images from the Rosarium Philosophorum, where the king and queen are depicted in different stages of sexual union. The balm on their hands is wetness, necessary for chemical reaction. There are astronomical allusions in the reference to the lovers’ eyes that are likened to beads on a double string of light.

            Similarly, the words “cement” and “balm” stand out, the notion of being embalmed feeding the grave associations that come later in the fifth stanza with “we like sepulchral statues lay” (540), confirming the feeling of the lovers’ entanglement and alchemical conflict as taking place in the tomblike shadows, the depressed state where coniunctio begins. “Love refined” alludes to refinement, certainly an alchemical term and then the statement “Might thence a new concoction take/And part far purer than he came” further alludes to the idea of two separate elements wrangling for the purpose of resolving into a oneness of higher state. Again and again, Donne wrestles with the idea of separation, the tension between body and soul and seems to lean towards physical experience, the mingling of flesh or, by extension, primal sphere, as venue to soul perfection which can then be gazed at separately by the lovers and by us, the reader. In other words, the spirit angels must descend to earth, and the soul interact in the physical body in its desire for perfection. In the final stanzas, there is a somewhat comical trafficking going on between earth and the celestial, air being the venue of angels and stars. Again, Donne seems to encourage the affectionate co-mingling of bodies as necessary to the animation and liberation of the imprisoned “great prince”(541) of the soul. On several levels “The Ecstasy”demonstrates the “drama” played out between matter and matter, spirit and matter, soul and practitioner.

            Leaping ahead several hundred years, I’d like to look at two modern poems: D.A. Powell’s “The Artist’s Hand” from the 21st century and Anna Akhmatova’s “As a White Stone in the Well’s Cool Deepness” from the 20th. While alchemical allusions may be less obvious and veiled in more mundane situations and modern language, it is still fascinating to connect the symbolic crumbs that lead back to the woods of the hermetic tradition as the principles of poiesis and creative innovation absolutely transcend epoch and genre. Irrespective of time, place or medium, the poet’s job is to break open the matter of the world, much like Prospero, in order to divine the creative intelligence embodied within, projecting her own wild psyche into the base materials in the quest for a superior metaphor of heroic influence. This idea ties back to the Arabic philosopher Avicenna and before him, Aristotle. I appreciate how Marie-Louise von Franz elaborates on this subject:

                        Avicenna--the famous Arabic philosopher Ibn Sina, who was known in European literature as Avicenna--developed an Aristotelian idea about the so-called nous poietikos, which is the following: Within the cosmic reality of the world is a  creative intelligence which exists in things themselves; it exists in the cosmos, it  is created by God. God created the world and in it He created a creative spirit or, as generally interpreted, a creative intelligence which is responsible for the meaningfulness of cosmic events. This meaningfulness--the fact that the cosmos  is neither chaos nor an engine which just continues in accordance with causal laws, but also a mystery in which meaningful synchronicities take place--was attributed to the nous poietikos. (186)

            Mystery and meaning are never more abundant than in a great piece of poetry and in D.A. Powell’s poem “The Artist’s Hand” we watch the almost supernatural gaze of the author examine, penetrate, decipher, reconfigure and elevate the simple, all-powerful creative hand of the artist. The hand becomes the simple thing, the cosmic matter of the world, that holds creative spirit and intelligence, both as an object of appreciation, in the same way the entity, the poem itself is, as well as its function as a creative tool, capable of breaking down matter and transmuting it to a state of separate and “higher” meaning. Here is the poem in its entirety:

                        The Artist’s Hand

                        Nailbeds pink, deeper pink toward the cuticles,

                         cuticles a little rough, but clean.

                                                Obsessively clean.

                        A little yellowing under the edges of the nails,

                                                the fingers boney, bowing, and large knuckles

                        where skin bunches like roses puckered on fabric.

                                                A hand in need of moisturizer.

                        A sanitized hand. A worried hand? Hands don’t worry.

                        Spots that change. One that elongates into a question mark.

                                                Well, hasn’t that hand done something?

                                                            It is a form of making when it makes.

                        But mostly the hand is an idle thing

                        & therefore available for scrutiny

                        unlike the artist himself, his stillness a form of motion,

                                                intent upon a subject so close to his heart

                                                that he must hold it out, away from all other limbs

                                                and parts of the body, to see it as itself, a hand,

                        agent of the mind and yet separate from all thought.

                                                All his effort goes into the hand, and through the hand

                                                            makes visible the scale of imagination, so that

                                                what’s left is not the hand

                                                            but its testament.

                        We aren’t told anything about the “owner” of the hand. The piece begins with a zoomed in close-up on the cuticles and nailbeds, described as “rough,” “rosy” and “obsessively clean.” The fingers are “boney” and the skin bunches at the knuckles like “roses puckered on fabric.” There is yellowing under the tips of the nails. So interesting how Powell begins with such precise details. While the poet may be unaware of it, the red and yellow colors mentioned could be alchemical colors associated with the rubedo stage of transmutation. Nailbeds and bones conjure death or negredo, but there is also the cleansed whiteness that ties to the albedo phase. Then he makes the statement: “A hand in need of moisturizer”--so interesting! Once again, I think of opposition: wet and dry associated with operations within the alembic. Change and mutation are alluded to and the idea of questioning or the intense investigation of something.     In Addition, Powell describes a scene of intense scrutiny, of a solitary contemplation, where some force quickens within the stillness of an object, in this case, the sculptor’s hand that is an “agent of the mind and yet separate from all thought.” The hand is the body, separate and yet one with the psyche that “makes visible the scale of imagination.” Finally, the poet equates the creative end-product, the symbol, the new and greater manifestation, to “testament.” When the artist’s work is complete, the flesh falls away and something divine and everlasting in the form of the work of art lives on. The obvious biblical association of “testament” hardly needs pointing out.

            Lastly, I want to take a look at the exquisite poem “As a white stone in the well’s cool deepness” by Anna Akhmatova:

                        As a white stone in the well's cool deepness,

                        There lays in me one wonderful remembrance.

                        I am not able and don't want to miss this:

                        It is my torture and my utter gladness.



                        I think, that he whose look will be directed

                        Into my eyes, at once will see it whole.

                        He will become more thoughtful and dejected

                        Than someone, hearing a story of a dole.



                        I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness,

                        Men into things, not killing humane senses.

                        You've been turned in to my reminiscences

                        To make eternal the unearthly sadness.

            There is a blurring of who and what exactly is the matter being worked upon. It is as if the poet herself is the alembic, with all the internal, oppositional remembrances that are both her “torture” and her “utter gladness” holding the prima materia from which the eternal pearl is formed. The eyes wash the white stone and it is through the soul lenses of the physical eyes that one “will see it whole.” This comes after the suffering, we could say the albedo following the negredo, that is both impossible for the poet to look at as well as impossible to ignore. Also interesting is the reference to antiquity: ancient gods--and the disordered chaos of their mad justice. Again, an exquisite rendering of the drama and conflict that feeds on life, driving it to realms of creativity and mysterious resolution: the pearl, that is both part of the earth and unearthly at once, but ultimately the artist’s treasure and star-crossed purpose.

                                                            Works Cited:

Akhmatova, Anna. The Complete Works of Anna Akhmatova. Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer. Ed.   Roberta Reeder. Brookline: Zephyr, 2000.

Henderson, Joseph L. and Dyane N. Sherwood. The Transformation of the Psyche. New York:     Brunner-Routledge, 2003.

Linden, Stanton J, ed. The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton.             Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Mazzeo, Joseph A. “Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery.” Isis. Vol. 48, No.2. U of          Chicago P, June, 1957, pp. 103-123.

Powell, D.A. “The Artist’s Hand.” Poem-A-Day. Poets.Org/Academy of American Poets,            October 8, 2013.

Simonds, Peggy Munoz. “‘My charms crack not’: The Alchemical Structure of The Tempest.”      Comparative Drama. Vol. 31, No.4, Winter 1997-98, pp.538-70.

Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest.” The Literature of Renaissance England. Eds. John Hollander and Frank Kermode. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

von Franz, Marie-Louise Alchemy. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.