This night

“SIR EPICURE MAMMON: This night, I’ll change
All that is metal, in my house, to gold:
And, early in the morning, will I send
To all the plumbers and the pewterers,
and buy their tin and lead up; and to Lothbury
For all the copper.

PERTINAX SURLY: What, and turn that too?

SIR EPICURE MAMMON: Yes, and I’ll purchase Devonshire, and Cornwall,
And make them perfect Indies!”

—Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1610.

the sanguis agni

“SIR EPICURE MAMMON: How now!
Do we succeed? Is our day come? and holds it?

FACE: The evening will set red upon you sir;
You have colour for it, crimson: the red ferment
Has done his office; three hours hence prepare you
to see projection. . . .

I have blown, sir,
Hard for your worship; thrown by many a coal,
When ’twas not beech; weigh’d those I put in, just,
To keep your heat still even; these blear’d eyes
Have wak’d to read your several colours, sir,
Of the pale citron, the green lion, the crow,
The peacock’s tail, the plumed swan.

SIR EPICURE MAMMON: And lastly,
Thou has descry’d the flower, the sanguis agni’

FACE: Yes, sir.”

—Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1610.

an autumn wood

“He sat there in silence, without moving a muscle.

Then something very odd began to happen to Noboru Wataya’s face. Little by little, it started to turn red. But it did this in the strangest way. Certain patches turned a deep red, while others reddened only slightly, and the rest appeared to have become weirdly pale. This made me think of an autumn wood of blotchy colors where deciduous and evergreen trees grew in a chaotic mix.”

—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

the phenomenon of clothing

“The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill-formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing.”

—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

The making of pictures

“The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to Asian influenza.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Fates Worse than Death, 1991.

I am finding this to be true. For years, maybe even decades, I have been envisioning a film, a movie, that I might one day make. It’s not as odd an idea as you might think: I do have an undergraduate degree in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures, from the University of North Carolina!

But at this point in my life (I recently turned 49) the movie does not seem to be as inevitable as it once was. So, I am turning it into a novel, the comic science-fiction novel I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. There are some great advantages to the novel format. For instance, to conjure up my friend Chuck’s fantasy of a room papered entirely with the classic Herb Albert album cover Whipped Cream And Other Delights in a FILM, a room would have to be covered with Whipped Cream And Other Delights albums, and this would required great effort and expense. Over the last decade or so I have only collected about 20 copies of this record at thrift stores and yard sales . . . so it would have to be a special effects job, and you can see that the situation is now sprawling out of control. But, in writing a novel, all I have to do is put a few words in the right order. Easy peasy! Easy as pie.

But, to get back to Kurt Vonnegut’s point, the thought process that takes place behind a movie or a novel is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! I am in the process of reconsidering my whole story, with alien concepts like “character” and “motivation” in mind. It’s another world, it’s taking a while, it might take all summer, but at least now it’s within my budget.

STEREO

this amazing variety of grays

“I pulled up my feet, bent my knees, and rested my chin on my hand. Then I closed my eyes. . . . The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray—one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.”

—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

unfathomable fire

“I thought it best . . . to throw out two five-pound pieces of ballast. . . . In a few seconds after my leaving the cloud, a flash of vivid lightning shot from one end of it to the other, and caused it to kindle up, throughout its vast extent, like a mass of ignited and glowing charcoal. This, it must be remembered, was in the broad light of day. No fancy may picture the sublimity which might have been exhibited by a similar phenomenon taking place amid the darkness of the night. Hell itself might have been found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of the hideous and unfathomable fire. I had indeed made a narrow escape.”

—Edgar Allen Poe, The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall, 1840.

philosopher’s gold

“Alchemy is the science the object of which is the production of the philosopher’s stone, or the philosopher’s gold. . . .

There are seven stages, or processes, in the production of gold: calcination, putrefaction, solution, distillation, sublimation, conjunction and finally fixation. They produce, during the processes, and in their correct progression, the various colours which are proof that the experiment is proceeding satisfactorily. There are three main colours. First the black—the indication of dissolution and putrefaction—and when it appears it is a sign that the experiment is going well, that the calcination has had its proper effect of breaking down the various substances. Next comes the white, the colour of purification; and the third is the red, the colour of complete success. There are intermediary colours as well, passing through all the shades of the rainbow. Grey is the passage from black to white, yellow from wihte to red. Sometimes the gold is not produced even when the red appears, then . . . it moves on to green, remains there for a time and turns blue. Care must be taken at this point that it does not return to black, for then the process would have to be begun all over again. If success comes then the gold should appear after the blue, grains of philosopher’s gold. Sometimes the gold is in grains, but sometimes in liquid form, aurum potabile it is called, the elixir of long life. The whole process is sometimes described as the four ages, or the four seasons.”

—Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, 1961.

Vowels

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!

—Arthur Rimabuad, Vowels (Voyelles), 1871, translated by Oliver Bernard, 1962.