Transmutation

A divine language. A dreamlike state where real and imagined elements are blurred together. A home for living things. A mixture of King and Queen, Sun and Moon, Sulfur and Mercury. A name? A place of darkness in which a Paracelsian secrecy cloaked his efforts to fathom the harmonies that link the behavior of the lower world to the movements of the upper. A shifting series or succession of phantasms or imaginary figures, as seen in a dream or fevered condition, as called up by the imagination, or as created by literary description. A story about the world as told by human observers rooted in time and place. An animal suspended in webs of significance.

But I also can’t help feeling like I end up imperfectly mimicking her. But you’re not a woman, are you?

Divine presence imagined as an exceptional event. Don’t let them tell us stories. Dreams as heralds, as omens of things to come, as messengers of the gods.

Events for which I had been numb on the first go-around. Every moment of your life is an isolated incident until you make it a story by binding it to a web of moments, by contextualizing it into existence as something with meaning.

Feeling like an imposter among men and women.

Gender as narrative. Gods as narratives, as symbols; Black Dog as symbol of the hunt, of the hero, of the one who slays monsters.

He has bright eyes and broad shoulders. He is five foot ten and somewhat chubby, but has a tendency to sneak up on people by accident because she has so little presence. He is his parents’ daughter, his siblings’ sister. He looks back at me in the mirror as she shaves her face and ties her hair in a ponytail and brushes her teeth. He tries not to think in concrete, reifying terms as much as he used to. Her fingernails were yellowed and cracked, graveyard dirt beneath them. His death and his reincarnation as a woman. How do we determine truth? How much is colored by my own feelings?

I begin looking for a new name around this time. I breathe in; hold it; breathe out. I ended up eating a lot of her food, since that was the first time I learned what a picky eater she is, and it turned out the place I’d picked was less than stellar. I have always been fond of nature, at least in the abstract. I held her hand for the first time. I know that it is life, and therefore far more fascinating than I realize now. I look in the mirror and she is radiant in her beauty but it is hard to reconcile her face with mine. I love her very dearly. I swear I’m not horribly depressed anymore. I think about when I used to be them. I think, and to stop myself from thinking, I write. I think I’ve been really lonely this week and hadn’t quite realized, and I’m not sure why. I think maybe he just isn’t interested in being friends anymore but doesn’t want to say it. I trust her deeply, and I know she trusts me deeply. I walk down the street in the pouring rain that beats mercilessly against the earth and the roofs and the pavement. I walk in the chilly autumn air in a light jacket that does very little but look nice on me. I walk past people who might hate me if they knew what I was.

Language as tool of control. Like losing the world was just a natural extension of things. Living is impermanence. Living on campus, with my family, with Sophia’s family.

Magical thinking makes narrative out of fragmentary by use of symbol. Maslow’s idea that the drive for self-actualization comes only after your material needs are met, as though it isn’t in the nature of everyone to want to be whole. Multivalent terms, where each individual thing is connected to many others by webs of analogy and metaphor. My own grief for the time before.

Narrative as exploration of conflict. Narrative as structure of events. Narrative as tool of control.

One of my last memories of the time before is: I am sitting on a bleacher in my high school auditorium.

Paracelsus endeavored to create a system that embraced the whole of theology and natural philosophy. Parataxis; we create or co-create narrative even where it is implied or nonexistent. Psychoanalysis is the process of making dreams into reality by making symbolic things that may not be.

Reifying: making things.

She is a boy with soft, curly, brownish-blonde hair and hazel eyes. She passes by the streetlamps that look down at her like silent divinities. She walks down the street and gets complimented on her dress. She walks into the bathroom, trying not to make a sound. She was a boy, then a girl who never should’ve been a boy, then whatever this is; these things don’t have to contradict. Solidity is death. Some doors opened; others have closed. Something about it eludes me. Something about “the girl with the mousy hair” sparks a strange feeling that sticks with me as we drive through McDonald’s and get Shamrock Shakes. Something is starting, and something has ended.

The birth of alchemy required the union of two traditions. The boys in the locker room talk constantly and call everything gay as an insult. The compulsion to answer one’s questions about oneself. The dark green vines, with their dark green leaves, growing on a dark green trellis on the side of the building, parts of the greenery snaking away from their metal confines and onto the reddish-brown brickwork. The divinely created cosmic harmony that linked the products of his furnaces with the shining bodies of the heavens that he gazed at from the decks of his observatory in the darkness of night. The greenery of lawns and carefully trimmed hedges, a shorthand for nature that breaks down as soon as you think about it. The greenish tinge taken on by certain trees, as though the green moss has infected them, has seeped into their tough bark and made them soft and growing. The mysteries of the Emerald Tablet. The operation of spiritual processes connecting the macrocosm and the microcosm. The serpent continuously consumes itself and produces itself from itself. The sky is gray, and the trees are bare. The sun is warm, and the breeze is cool. Thinking has been an armor against living, against the world, myself, my instincts, God, other people. This was the cosmos so tersely and mysteriously described in the Emerald Tablet. To think that I’m a person at all and not a collective of cells is technically inaccurate, but then so is everything a collection of particles bound together by inscrutable laws. Tycho was pursuing a Paracelsian dream of a world united by occult sympathies.

Unity that is mysterious, provided by the reader.

What are the Sun and Moon? What happens when we choose not to tell ourselves a story? When did I first start to be her? Who is the protagonist? Who spins the webs? Who tells the stories?

You are a story, not a bundle of cells.