Alchymic Journals

Connell’s Alchymic Journals is the perfect ventriloquism he achieves in channeling the distinctive voice and genius of Paracelsus from the sixteenth century to the present. Connell’s curiosity, art, and stylistic restlessness have established him as one of the great individualists of contemporary literature. Now, in a book that combines sumptuous language, startling historical clarity, and a visionary investigation of folly and the hope for healing, Connell uses the framework of Paracelsus’s alchemy (and the reactions to it) to portray humanity’s bullishness and great moments of grace. Connell’s voices transform and mock, announce dire news and imagine great harmonies, ferment and redeem.
Alchymic Journals comprises seven sections, narrated in turn by Paracelsus, a devout novice, an elderly skeptic, a conscientious physician, a Christian historian, a revolutionary, and, finally, a philosopher. A tour de force of tonal recreation, the book resembles an alchemical puzzle—secretive, suggestive—while also being a genuinely modern “wisdom book”—attending to knowledge, ignorance, imperfection, sex, emotions, morals, history, mysteries, disaster, and, ultimately, harmony.

FROM MY FATHER I LEARNED ASTROLOGY and medicine. Aged sixteen I entered the university at Basel but went away dissatisfied. I traveled to Würzburg yet there again I could not find what I wanted, nor at the metallurgic school of Sigismund Fugger. In the Savon valley at the convent of St. Andrew dutifully I listened to august bishops—to Mathias Schacht of Freisingen, Mathias Scheydt of Rottgach, and to Eberhardt Baumgartner. Yet all for what? I have traveled to Munich, Regensburg, Noerdlingen, Amberg, Hongary, Meran, Krain, Maehren, St. Gall and Kaernthen, encountering emptiness everywhere. Out of Germany I wandered through Italy and France to the gloomy Netherlands, to England, Scandinavia and Russia, but what did I gain? Aged twenty-three I returned to Basel, there to be crowned Professor! Hah! Like some mud-plastered Swiss boar reeking dung I pretended to wallow among obsequious compliments while plucking feathers from the tails of malt-worm pseudologues in blue velvet that strutted, preened and croaked from the dais like pigeons on a ledge. Now look at my reward! Say that I clutched a plough, greased wheels, served cabbage or played the lute—all would understand my trade. I would be welcome in any province. But for challenging dead doctrine and seeking the universal catholicon I am reviled by medicasters lost at the back of the world rammy and wet, blaring like goats to prank up themselves—gowned vultures, cock-chafers jumbling on the bed, temple thieves boasting more toes than teeth, maskers with legs aspew like arches under a bridge and tails more noteworthy than their heads. Oily saltimbanks! Brangling knaves! Fabulists! Strokers and scrapers with the eyes of blood-letting Saldanian chymists that prescribe a dying man twenty poisons for one. Mewling advocates of Greek sophistry. Red-brindled Hungarian pigs that mistake the Danube for the sea. What confounds them they curse as Beelzebub’s work! Curs barking after genius that think to bite my shoe! Hah! What are their names in the street? Sycophants vomiting yellowed lies, sons of cuckolds that grope toward paradise in a milk-maid’s crotch. Indentured almond-pickers prescribing slough water and sow-piss, brewing emetics of rinsings. I hear better medicine whistle from a cheesemonger’s bung. So they cry out how I inveigh upon Doctors, Councillors, Chirugeons, green-pizzle Pantologists. And this is true. But why? Because I know what they are made of because Nature has put her autograph on them. I despise the house which is faulty and lets in rain. Jiggish imposters! Rogues jabbering dead prayers! And there are others so numerous I do not name them. I have met plenty.
I AM CALLED Heretic for asserting truth, called Luther’s Ass—impious—since I look to causes instead of gaping with disbelief like inhabitants of asylums that misjudge reality. I was not born Geber’s cook—my mouth a passport, ormolu my fortune. Neither was I ordained to be a fiddler nor iniquitous privy-rat. I am no silver-sucking roach or pocky Quean. Neither would I be strangled by any woman’s garter. So how would I accept the argument of lesser men with brains as blank as slates that ratify what others dictate? I hear the east wind blow through their souls. Scabby lechers on rattly shanks, atheists, flea-sprung wits, sons of potters, whoremasters scraped out of sheep, fleering grinning moldy mountebanks, liverish prostitutes hawking greasy nostrums with fingers that twitch and jerk to see a bulging leather purse, servile boasting quacks in shit-stained breeches, malsters, sodomites fornicating upon rear stoops with spaniels or kitchen help—how many mumble and glory at the title of Physician? Doctor Slop! Puppets skipping on a showman’s wire with brains delivered to them backward like a clyster, drips from a waning moon, thoughts scattered like nails in a peddler’s pack, emptying wormy cups while attending Egyptian athanors, hop-whistling rancid quarreling puking disciples, meat-shop philosophers ignorant of true medicine’s requisite—Sapientia! Tetrick bloat-herrings waxed fat with deceit that set up practice among hedgerows from Prague to Geneva and market vermifuge less salubrious than frog guts in a wine glass, all spouting windy proverbs for love of a florin! Summer breeds not half so many mosquitoes as those accursed horse pintles ripped with lice! The severity of their offences I will transcribe on their foreheads because I know their balance-sheet.
THEY SAY I am full of knots. This is true. Like a bear cub was I suckled among pine forests. Like damp moss do I cling to what I knew best early in the morning. How could I wear gossamer? Why would I go prancing through female apartments? What man is sweetly turned if in the province of his birth they do not weave or spin silk? And I was born Theophrastus! I am the Prince of Physicians—monarcha medicorum. Aureolus I am called and so be it. Was a tongue endowed with speech? No. It is the presiding spirit grown impatient with vacuity since every creature is compacted of elements. Therefore I condemn all those that distil by prescription as Chymists. Are they like a good tailor that carefully cuts a cloak? No. I