A Recirculation of the Philosopher's Stone (Molloy's Problem) Winton

8/9/2019 A Recirculation of the Philosopher's Stone (Molloy's Problem) Winton

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What was YOllr originalface, the face yOIl had before yOIl were bam?

;'has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain andnervous syslem.What comesout at theother eod is a measly trickleof the kind of consciousness which will help us to s tay alive onthe surface of this particularplancL To fonnulate and expres theCOOlents oflhis reduced awareness, man has invented and endlesslyelaborated thosesymbol-syslems and implicit philosophieswhichwe call languages.'"

I. SCISSORS

A RECIRCULATION OFTHE PHILOSOPHERS' STONE

Memory is a matterof spirit. Our bodies retain physicaltraces of a memory reaching back to their evolutionarybeginnings, evident in the growth of embryos, Similarly,the development of the p yche, a process of coming toconsciousness, has left indelible imprints in the memoryof the collective unconscious mind, The histories of the'mind' and 'body' are sympathetically interwoven,

(Molloy's Problem.)

Philibert De rOnne, De rArchitecture,

The fUflClion of editing sensory infonnation is ato both underManding Iheenigmatjc paradox of

and how useless products of culture are10 the cosmogonic impulse and the

of memory.Dr. C. D. Brood. cited in Huxley, The Doors oj

and HeMe" and HeJ/. London:Penguin

Huxley, op. cit.See Jnmes Joyce's FimJt!gans Wake, 1939. The

of Joyce's language ex.ists in lhe fluid dreamcreated by ambiguous signification. Al thetime, the collapse of archetypal imagery and

cyclical temporaJity of myth onto [he world oflife demonstrates the unity of matter

history through (he world spirit.Sig.mund Freud, The Imerprrtalion of D ~ o m s .

Penguin 1976.y simplified, the drt:amworlc. is primarily

mposed according to the folloWing processes ofcondensation. in which twoor more

ficant images are overlaid so as to become unid i s p f o a m ~ n l . in which an element isdivorcedilS conte.'(t and transformed. withon emphasisin the values or significance of elements; and

re\'ision. in which a ref lect ive processthose mysterious images into a coher

narrative. "This funclion behaves in themannerthe poetmaliciouslyascribes to philosophers:

fills up the gaps inthe dream structurewith shredspatches. As a result of itsefforts. Lhedream losesappear'Jnce of absurdily :md disconnectednessapproximales to the model of an intelligible

The psychical process of constructingimages in dreams is the same as the

of monsters in the waking imagination.Freud nOLes mot. uThe processes of the [uncon

are limeless. i.e. they are not ordered temare not altered by the passage of time: they

no reJercncc 10 limeat aU:' in MelOps)'cholog)':'fh.oryo!P,ychoanatysis, London: Penguin 1987,

The memory of an individual person, as an integratedfacet of conscious perception, has its roots in the residualimages of a collective, as history is grounded inmythology, Were this not true, we would not be buildersand dwellers of cities,Memory eliminates concrete duration. For this reason,memories, collective or personal, never relinqui h theirsignificance, Environments are transfigured through thesenses into memory, and become the foundation stonesof the individual, while also being the common groundof shared inhabitation,As poetic makers acting through imagination, we recyclethe clay of ourmemories into the bricks which build ourmulti-layered archetypes, We are society's culturebearers; we alone are responsible for the tran mis ion ofembodied knowledge, We are the makers of history,Memory itself i such a poetic construct; it is both adestructuring and a reconstruction: it pre-exists ourconsciousness and is fonned by it.

"[W}e should do well to consider much more seriously than wehave been hithertoinclined 10do the typeof tbeory which Bergsonput forth in connection with memory and sense perception. TIlesuggestion is that the function of thebrain and the nervous systemand sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. I"Each personis al each mOlnenl capable of remembering all thaihas ever happened to h im and of perceiving everything that ishappening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brainand nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed andconfused bythis mass oflurgely useless and irrelevant knowledge,by shutting out most of what we should otherwise pen::eive orremember at any moment. and leaving only that very small andslX-'CiaJ selection which is likely 10 be practically useful:' 2

Universal consciousness, however, is obstructive to theselect needs of biological survival, and

The problem ofmemory is thus explicitly reproducedthe understanding of representation as the expressionexternalization of memory,Memory can be triggered by association both whenobject itself is absent, and is indicated by anotherobjeand when the ob ject is wholly o r pa rtially prese(recognition or reconstruction), In the latter, mnemorepresentation is through the things themselvcollections, museums and assemblages. This associatiis with the sacred referenceof the symbol, groundedtranscendent experience, In the fonner, it operateslanguage through the tropes of rhetoric: by contigu(metonymy), by comparison (metaphor), and soon,Tcorrelation operates through the worldly tracvariations on the imprint or impression, suggestingits signification that meaning is transferred or creaby physical association,The enigmatic psyche is able to render images layerin space and t ime, superimposing a diversityimpressions in one locus, In this way, memory is closrelated to the linguistic faculty, for its atemporal potento condense several images into one.' Sigmund Freugreat contribution to the interpretation of meaning whis work on dreams,' in which he expounds a critihermeneutic system predicated on linguistic principlfor reading complex unconscious imagery,'Dreams, likeotherexplicit modes of creative expressiexclude naturalized temporality, and with it, that aspof perception related to duration, 7 It may be for treason that dreams have always been associated wthe divine, for their mortal content has been routleaving only the eternal.C.G, lung, the unwillinggnosheir to Freud's categorical henneneutics, understoodsignificance of this dissociation of time, It meant tthe imagery present in dreams represented the archetyfigures of mythological imagination translated intolanguage of the everyday world,

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It is something like the alchemy of the visual image. THE MIRACLE OF THETOTAL TRANSFIGURATION OF BEINGS AND OBJECTS WITH OR W ITHOUTMODIFICATION OF THEIR PHYSICAL OR ANATOMICAL ASPECT.*

A Recirculation of the Philosophers' Stone Tracey Eve Wimon

8 Evola. La tradivone ermetica, Bari. 1931inC. G. Jung. Psychologyalld Alchemy. PrinBollingen 1980.9 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Thing aN alUral Worl d" in The PhenomenoloPerception. London: Routledge 1992.10Collage. trnditionaJlya t \ \ ' ~ i m e n s i o n a J mand a commonly threedimensional countb ri co la ge . a re med ia t ha t p la ce emphasituational strategy theresourcefulability toand create on any basis . Bricolage deri\"csword suggest ing 'extraneous movementClaude LeviStrauss notes that the bricoleurverse of resources is a nuclUating collectiontheobjectscollide ina project. Collage. beC:the prevalence of mech.mical reproductionvisual sphere. draws on a wealth of visualwhich qualifies as excess assoonas it is proRelated to these are assemblage, describingdimensional works assembled additively: andtage. a filmic technique based onjuxtapositi11 In the Copr;cciand II Campo Mort;odell'Romtl, Piranesi. working in the Enlightenmeengaged in a fonn of collage renccling earlaissance treatisesin which the assembly of fragand ruins ofAntiquitywas the well-springofkedge for the current philosophy. In the Baroqriod J. B. Fischer von Erlach assembled arcture in the illustrations to his EnrwlIr/H;storiSc/lell Arch;lektllr. Among this cenmany stellar collllgc-alchemislS are Amoni TPablo Picasso, Georges BrJque. Kun SchwMax E rns t, J os eph Cor ne ll and RRauschcnbcrg. Schwiuersdemonstrates theple of recirculation in association with his iin the grotesque. (The grotesque refers to a spcondition,the grotto: a cavern or under-groundwhere th ings li e concealed - the sparecirculation.) Ernst hints at. and Cornell.whinspired. further synthesizes in his ubject mthe hcnnelic aspects of this creathe p r ~ Lheir source in childhood fan1.3Sy and play.assembled the fragment" of his collages to scantlymake uscofthediswnce in meaningbethe pieces whileunifying them ina cohereut iWhereothers hadfonnally emphasized thedist ion between pieces, he saw the potentialmeaningful communication between the difelements: a common ground. It is tbis deliJoycean irony - at once affirming and challe(he work's unity and multiplicity * which c the broad speclrum of meaning in his worh

"In children memory is most vigorous. and imagination istherefore excessively vivid, for imagination is nothing butextended or compounded memory." 12

.. J ' ~ " , ( ) r i a being the Latin tenn for plllJlltasia. or imaginatioo..: 13

(linguistic). This type of representation isa locus whereimagination and memory are hinged through the fabricof the work. '0

Max Ernst, The Pleiades.

Implicit in collage is the idea of transformation or reorientation of material: the ability to abstract fabric ofthe world from its context and resolve it to become anexpression of something other. Acollage bridges 'life'and 'art'; the fragments constituting it are both literaland figurative - similarity through experience( symbol ic ) and s imilar ity out ide of experience

Collageworks by the selectionof certain materials fromthe environment for their fecundity in expression. ln acollage, theelements mayoperate synthetically towardsthe expression of a principal i dea ; tbey may actmetonymically. eacb part potentially referring to something outside of i tself - a previous context, or metaphorically. Theoretically, a collage may be an allegorical edifice or a complex of symbolic traces linked by aspecific narrative. Besides all this, an element is itself. II

This is part architecture,part memoi r, par t reverence for an old hOllse.

Bead:EVERETTJohn Quynn McDonaldSan Diego, May 1994

II . PAPER

'1"he spiritual constitution of Il lan in the pre-modem cycles ofculture wassuch that each physical perception had simultaneouslya psychic component which 'animated' it, addinga 'significance'to the bare image. and at the same t ime a special and polen!emotional tone. Thus ancient physics was both a theology and atranscendental psychology, by reason of the illuminating nashesfrom OlCltlphysical essences which penetrated through the matlerof the bodily senses. Natural sciencewas at once a spiritual science.and the many meanings of the symbols united the various aspectsof a single knowledge:' 8

Representation makes use of the world in order to showtheworld. In representation, theworld demonstrates itself.Given an incamateconsciousnes . material representationinvolves a situation in which a part of the world becomesself-conscious: aware of itselfas an Other, recognizing the'selfness' in its 'otherness' and vice versa - simultaneous

That aspects of the divine or the mythological shouldstill shine through the surface of a 'post-metaphysicalworld' is an untidy inconsistency for Western positivism.In any situation, however, a theory stands or falls on itspolential for ethical action. How, then, can these thoughtsbe productive in making immanent forms of representation that resist the loss of the human dimension?

unity and multiplicity. It becomes multiple in order to relateto itself, as two hands of a body may touch. alternatelyfeeling and being felt.' At stake is the possibi li ty fortranslating mnemonic impressions back into sensiblemalter, requiring an analogous proce that cou ld reembody sen ation,depth and time in representation, usingthe power of the imagination.


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12 Giambat l is ta Vico, The New Sciellce ofGiamlxm;s'a VieD, hhaca: Cornell University Press1988.13 Vico. op. cit.14 5t B o n a v e n t u r e ~ l,inerar;um Memis in Del/tn.15 In his essay, "The Ques t ion Concern ingTechnology:' Martin I-Ieidegger describes the'esseoce oftcchnology' as an en!rol1l;llg.This idea,imminent in gnostk and neoplatonic innuence,suggcsts that thegiven natural world be 'processed'or consumed. and thus recycled, throUgh Olan: aprocess clearly implicit in the Enlightenment'sdtstioction between 'NalUre' and 'Human Nature.'16 H. J. Sheppard . "Chinese and WesternAlchemy: The Link through Definition:' in AmbixlL No. 1.J7 Ostanes, cited in 10.ng. Psychologyond Alchemy,IS Michael Sendivogius. "Novum Lumen " i nVolume II of me Musaeum Hermel;cum, 1893, A,E. Waite's English lranslalion of a selection ofalchemiclli texts of the Renaissance.19 Vieo, QP, cit.

The creativeenterprises of production and reproductionwere investigated through the symbolic imagery of thealchemists. These philosophers of the material worldbased their work in experiment and experience. Theyrepresented their arcane notions of material and spiritualtransformation in the artistry of poetry, prose andengravings, in which the process of becoming is indicatedon the surface of the work through the prevalence ofmonstrous imagery.The psychic metaphor for the creative process is thetransformation of the he ro via a journey to theunderworld. The pilgrimage necessitates a strangedescent into the primal matter of the earth, the sublimeunknown darkness and the terrible melancholy ofcontempla tion , before a return to the light of selfconsciousness and the completion of the work."You wilt be ' lbleto see God throughyourselfas through an image:and this indeed is to see through a glass darkly:' H

The Gnostics conceived of a corporeal world fashionedby the mischiefof an inferiordemiurge. After thedivinecreation, man was fashioned by this lessergod, but wasgiven the breath of life (pnellma) by the true deity.Matter, in this way was associated with debasement,while spirit wasdiscretely good. The aim of gnosticismwas to achieve redemption of the eternal spirit throughthe medium of the flesh. As inheritors of the strategiesof Gnostic thought, alchemists sought a revelation of'pure' spiri t (guided by the soul) through the act oftransmutation of 'impure' flesh Or maner."

Alchemy is "the ar t of Iiber:uing pans of the Cosmos fromlemporol existence and achieving perfection which for met.1lsis gold, and for man longevity: then immonality and. finally.redemption." I

III. STONEhGo to the w:llers of the Nile and there you wil l f ind a stone thathas a spirit" 17

The current semiotic division of form and content canbe traced historically to a production of surplus.Something which had previously displayed an integritybetween ils symbolic function and its mundane use wastaken out of play, and displayed. no longer essential toits world.While retaining all of ils physical attributes and history,its meaningbad been altered by the disengagement from

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerolomachia Poliphili.

its sphere of activity. The value thus lost by an objecthe implicit signification of its ritual (temporal) usaExcrement is an unnecessaryexcess ofmaller. Begiwith an excremental body of stuff, calledprima maor original matter, the aim of alchemy was to eftransmutation of matter, to achieve allmm nOli vlluncommon gold, also known as the lapisphilosophothe philosophers' stone. Western alchemy strovphysical and spiritual transformation. In alchemyfour elemeDlS which constitute the cosmos museparated and purified, before being recombinbalance: solve et coagula.

"The three Principles of things are produced ou t of t he felements in the following manner: Nature,whose power is inobedience to the wil l of God. ordained from the very beginnthat the four elements should incessantly act on one another,in obedience 10 her behest. fire began toact on air, and pnxtusulphur; ai r acted on water and produced mercury: water. byaction on earth. produced salt. Earth alone, having nothing toupon, did not produce anything, butbecame the nurse, or woof these three Principles.Whoever would bea Sludelllof this sacscience must know the marks whereby these three Principlesproduced out of four, so they, in their tum, muSt produce twmaleand a female; and these two must produce an incorruptone, in which are exhibited the four elements in a highlypuriand digestedcondilion.... Inevery natumJcompositionthese threpresent the body. the spirit, and the hidden soul. Without ththree Principles, the Artist. can do nothing, since even Naturpowerless without them....Lllt i s f rom these , by an imitatioNature, that you mustproducethe Mercury ohhe Philosophes

An important groundwhich Alchemy sharedwith Gticism understood the female principle as the metfor creative potential. The great fertile matrix in wall things become joined was a parallel to the uworld or the unconscious mind, and a space of reration. The traditional inspirational role of thearises from reflection of the Logos through the femaspect ofmythos, (as in the final unification of the o

"With reason, then. did the theological poets call Memorymother of !he Muses; thai is, of the arts of humanity." 19

In Greek mythology, Hermes was the guide of sothe underworld. In alchemy, his Roman counteMercury played the principleof transformation. Tof interpretation, named hermenewics for him, cunderstood in terms of the role of transformation osubject, in substance and in spirit, through refleconsciousness.

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The mechanism of co llage , i t seems to me, is revealedthis very s imple example. The comp le te transmutatfolloW'ed by a pure act, as that of love, W'ill make i tknoW'n natural ly every t ime the conditions are rendefavorable by the given facts: the coupling of tW'o realiti rr e conci lab le i n appearance , upon a plane W'happarently does not suit them.*

"Mercurius stands at !.he beginning and endof the work: he is theprimamateria, ... as dragon he devours himself and as dragon hedies. to r ise again as the lapis. He is the play of colours in thecalida pawmis and the division into four elements. lie is thehennaphroditc thai was in the beginning. thai splits into the classicalbrolhcr-sister dualjly and is reunited in the COII;Ullctio, to appearonce again at theend in lhe radiant fann of lhe lume" "ovum. thestone. He is ... matter yet pirit... a symbol uniting all opposites:' 20

''The imagi"ario, or the act of imagining, was lhus a physicalactivity that could be filled into the cycle of material changes,that broughlthese about andwas brought about by them in tum.In th is way the alchemist related himself not only to theunconscious but directly to the very substance which he hoped10 trnnsfonn through thepower of the imagination:' 22

The production of meaning through collage returns tothing their value as significant pieces, and by givingthem a linguistic dimension captures a concretedurationof time. It demonstrates the possibility of recognitionthrough everyday things - the making-present ofmemory. It i a form of representa.tion grounded in thepoetic sensibility of metamorphosis.The possibility of making architectural represemationwhich manifests this dynamic quality may be clarifiedby comparing Paul Ricoeur's definition of fiction withthe alchemical monster.

20 Jung, op. cit.2 J 'The hieros gal1ws. or chymical weddinprinciple force propelting the cycle. 1be fcounterpart awakens the soul in the mascuthis symbolic sexuality of mailer" tandscreative impulse of the adult man to find adifferentiation from the chaotic promiscuitworld by founding a family, so that havingson, he may become a father." (Linda Ficr.The Dream of Poliphilo: The Soul in Lo\'e.Spring Publications 1987.) Lt is this cocosmogonic impulse in Lhe soul of mattemaintains the momentum of reproduction.22 Jung, op. ciL

The incarnate memory of the prima materia persists inthe philosopher 's stone, and vice versa. A commonsymbol for this coincidence of opposites, indicating thecyclical nature of thing ,was theOuroboros, the serpentswallowing its own tail.

A collage is created by recycling the useless excess ofeveryday life. This excess is made up of the traces orremains of cultural decay, ruins, or artifacts understoodliterally as the excrement borne of human nature orculture, things that have not yet re-entered the cycle ofdeath and rebinh. 2I

Adoublecosmogony - a di vinecreation byGod (Nature),and a subsequent transformation of the matter by ourbricoleur-demiurge (Culture) - reflected the remakingof myth (symbolic memory deriving from the senses)through history (reflection). History frozen at a particularmoment might be understood as a project of bricolage,an assemblage of ascertainable souvenirs in recombination, although the earth's mortal inhabitantswork against the clock to reconcile and organize an everincreasing flow of fragments in a world as heterogeneousas Babel was incomprehensible. The mediumof collageengages both the cyc le of t ime and the process ofmaking through its foundalion in alchemical principles.

Giambattista Piranesi,del Castello de''Acqua Giulia

A Recirculation of the Philosophers' Stone Tracey ,'e Wlmon

The title, Bead: Everett, isa reference to beads on astring, with the string be-ing life and beads beingplaces we've lived. Bead:Everett is pan of a largerwork which the author iscurrently d e v e l o p i n ~ .


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Max Ernst, Stratified Rocks, Nature's Giff of Gneiss Lava Iceland Moss 2Kinds of Lungwort 2 KindRuptures of the Perineum Growth of the Heart (bi The Same Thing in a Well Polished Box SomeMore ExpenSIVe.

/ranfois:

discute Ie pmbleme de Molloy, WI personnageSamuel Beckell. Sur 10 plage, Molloy rassemble

seiZt!Cflillous, qu'jf nom",e pierrt>s lJ sucer.les dislribue entre les quatre pochn de SOli

ct de ses palllalolls,p r c m j ~ r e solution qu 'j f trouve est: E" prellantcail/oll de la pochedroilc de sml malltcau, et en

1 ~ / U l I I t dalls $0 bouche, jf en tram/en lUI de IIItlroile de ses/){1nlafons d la poche droile de

momeau. Puis, jf en trans/en un de la pochede ses ptmtalOtls a la poche droile de ses

Puis, iI en trllJu/en un de IIIpochegauchi'son IMlIleau d la poche garlche de ses ptlflUllofl.f.

il resson Ie comou qu'il S14{:ail t!-t Iedans /a poche gOlIche de son mOnJi!all.

c)uJ({Jle lOUr. quoIn pierres traversent la bouche.ar ho


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[TJhc world is full of the most unrivaled objects for childisha tt en tion and use . And the mos t specific. For children areparticularly fond of haunting any site where thingsarebeing visiblyworked upon.They are irresistibly drawn by the deuiLUs gener.lIedby building.gardening. housework. tailoring. orcarpenlJ'y. In wasteprodUClS they recognize the face that the world of things turnsdireclly and sole.ly to them. In using these things lhcy do not somuch imiuue the works of aduhs as bring together. in the anifactproduced in play, malerials of widely differing kinds in a newintuitive relationship. Children thus produce lheirown sl11all worldof things within the greater one. 29

Today every work of building is not a template for thecosmos, but every architectural work can both rememberand imagine a possible world.Habit is the bodily memory of ritual. Haptic skills arehoned through constant practice, the way maintainingnuency in a languagedepend on its daily usage. Beforebeginning construction of a building, it is stronglyrecommended that an architect play at building thingsfor several months ahead of time. Practice-building canbe done anywhere, under almost any circumstances,using whatever materials and techniques are at hand.Habit is the extension of the body's rhythms to includeritual activities,just as inhabitation is the full engagementof the body with its lived environment. The meaning ofbuilding is revealed in inhabitation.In the re-use of society's disjecta, considered taboo because it is excessive, excremental, or out-of-use, object-fragments transform as they engage in new cycles of life.According to alchemical notions of the reciprocal playbetween us and what we make, that which in tum makesus whoweare,the process of the artifex is a spiritual odyssey to purify or elevate the self (beyond a primary alienation) through the ritual ofmaking: theobjective ofGnosis.The thoughts expressed in this essay consecrate a groundwhich should be of interest to us as architects, whetherwe are making representations of architecture representations, one hopes , in which memory andinvention are awakened in the process of creating - orwhether we are laying new foundat ions in the earth.Architecture might once more have the po tenti al tobecome a poetic medium for revealing the mysterious.11,e architect who thinks through his whole body is boundto the recollection of the philosophers' stone. Themessage of alchemy, the mystery of the material world,rings through the ages in collage, which is the act ofremaking. whose fund is identical to theconcrete universe.Architecture: surrenderyour dead.

29 Waller Benjamin, "Construction SReflections. New York: Schock-en Books 1* Quotations frOlnMlU' EnlS1: Beyond Paimiotller Writings by 'he Artist and his FriendYork: Willcnbom. Schultz. Inc. 1948.

Joseph Cornell, Aher Gicffo #2.

Thomas Aquinas (pseud.), De A/chimia

Trace)' E \ ' ~ Wincon has a professional deAn:llitf!CIlITe f ro m t he Unb'usity of Water;s curremly p j ~ r s u i n g graduale sludiu aIUniversity ;n lite History and TheArclJiteclure. SIlt! s ha re s a birlhday wil"Joyce.

The Tortoise: an alchemical instrumen

* * *lohn Quynn McDonaldstudied design and architecture and i currentlycamp/elin/l a post-graduatedegree in astronomy at SanDie/lo State University. Hewas born in the cold of aNew En/l/and Novemberand raised steep d in thefog of San Francisco.

One day in the summer of 1929 a painter I knew asked me: "What aredoing these days? Are you working? ''I replied: "Yes, I'm making gluinI'm preparing a book that will be called La Femme 100 Tites." Thenwhispered in my ear: "And what sortofglue do you use?"With thatmodair that my contemporaries admire in me I was obliged to confess to hthat in most ofmy collages there wasn't any glue at all.*A Recirculation ofthe Philosophers' Stone Tracey Eve Wima"

A Recirculation of the Philosopher's Stone (Molloy's Problem) Winton

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