complete idiot’s guide to alchemy — 1 thorough investigation

complete idiot’s guide to alchemy, without the article, is the variant my mother prefers, despite never having said the words aloud. a hot dog is a sandwich, the phone battery reads 23 percent, and nine transmutations occurred today between cereal and the bowl, none of them clean.

the bookstore on 4th had a whole shelf of these, once. the orange spines, the cartoon dunce cap, the promise that a non-expert could become semi-fluent in any subject by chapter twelve. they are, by the count i keep running, almost entirely out of print. the shelf is now self-help, which is a different kind of alchemy with a worse hit rate.

i’m writing this from the desk at 9:18am on a thursday. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor, which is the one where someone reads the slides aloud and someone else nods at the slides being read. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning. i’m using it to reckon with a book i never owned, on a topic the book promised i could understand, that i still don’t.

1. complete idiot’s guide to alchemy, the article-less version

the version without the definite article is the one i prefer for a reason i’m going to defend. the complete idiot’s guide implies a specific book, a single canonical paperback you can hold up at a register. the version without “the” is a genre. it’s the whole orange-spine library. it’s the idea of the book more than the object.

the genre, properly, was a publishing line. the word i investigate professionally on this site got attached to a brand of explainer that ran from the mid-nineties through the late aughts, with a sister series that used yellow spines and a different cartoon. the books promised access. the books delivered, mostly, a confident summary plus a glossary. the books did not produce experts. they produced people who could carry a conversation about a topic for nine minutes before someone with actual knowledge spoiled it.

nine minutes. that’s the figure i keep coming back to. nine minutes of competence is, in many rooms, enough.

2. nine things real alchemists know that the idiot doesn’t

i made a list. i made the list because lists are how i pretend to research without doing research. the kitchen counter has the post-it. the kitchen has the seventh microwave, which is a transmutation device of its own, and the spare key dave perdió, which is somewhere in the kitchen.

1. that the goal was never gold. the books on the orange shelf put gold on the cover because gold sells covers. the working alchemists, by all accounts i can find without crossing into territory the editorial line forbids, were after a process. the gold was the metaphor. the metaphor was the point. i learned this from a documentary, half-watched, on a tuesday night.
2. that the lab was the practitioner. the alchemist worked on himself while pretending to work on the materials. nobody told the marketing department this, which is why the books look like cookbooks. they were closer to journals.
3. that mercury was the problem. a lot of people who studied this died from the studying. the orange paperback, mercifully, leaves this part for the appendix.
4. that there were stages with names. nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo. four colors, four phases, four stages of a process that took, depending on who you asked, decades or a lifetime or never. the idiot’s guide, page eighty-three, gives you all four in a chart.
5. that the texts were deliberately encoded. alchemists wrote in symbols, allegories, and outright misdirection. the orange spine simplifies this into “they were secretive”. the secrets weren’t the recipes. the secrets were the entire reason for the recipes.
6. that newton, yes, that one, did this for years. isaac, on the side, while doing the gravity work, kept a notebook full of transmutation experiments. the idiot’s guide loves this fact because it lets the reader feel both smart and absolved.
7. that “chemistry” emerged from this, which is the whole arc, and which the orange paperback compresses into a chapter. the smart move, historically, was to keep the lab and drop the mysticism. that move took several centuries. nobody in any meeting i have attended would survive that timeline.
8. that the philosopher’s stone is, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists, less an object than a state. the books need it to be an object because objects sell. movies need it to be an object because plots need objects. harry potter and the sorcerer’s stone needs it to be a literal red rock you can hold in a hand. the literature, going back, needs it to be the alchemist himself, finally finished. you can see why the orange paperback went with the rock.
9. that the work, real or fake, took longer than a paperback can summarize. the genre was time-compression as a service. you bought the book to skip the years. the years, of course, did not get skipped. they happened to someone else.

nine. that is, by the count i keep running, the number i set out to write. the post-it has eleven. i removed two for length, which is a kind of editorial alchemy, the cheap kind.

3. hank from 1B, briefly relevant

the lady in 1B travels too much. the dog is hank. hank is a beagle with a worldview. when the lady is gone i, against all of my own judgment, walk hank. hank pulls. hank stops. hank stares at a piece of trash on the curb for so long that traffic lights cycle. the walk is, by the time we return, two hours long for a route that should take twenty minutes.

hank, in his patience with garbage, is more of an alchemist than i am. he sees something in the receipt outside the deli that the rest of us do not. he stares at it with intent. he sniffs it as if it were the manuscript. he moves on, eventually, having transmuted nothing, having understood something. i keep a quarter of an eye on him while pretending to look at my phone. the phone battery, at this point in the walk, is at twenty-three percent. it’s always twenty-three percent. i’m not sure how the math works.

none of this is in the orange paperback. the orange paperback does not address dogs. that, in itself, is a flaw.

4. closing pulpit, a hot dog is a sandwich, fight me

i’m going to finish on a hot take that has nothing to do with alchemy and everything to do with definitions, which is, on closer inspection, what alchemy was about anyway. a hot dog IS a sandwich. fight me. the bun is bread on two sides of a filling. the filling is meat. the geometry is settled. the only argument against is aesthetic, and aesthetic arguments lose to geometry every time.

this is the same argument as the philosopher’s stone. someone, in the seventeenth century, decided the stone was a literal rock. someone else, more correctly, said it was a state. we have been arguing about whether categories describe objects or states for about as long as we have had categories. i fall on the state side. i fall on the sandwich side. the consistency is the point.

the orange paperback never asked which side i was on. that’s why i miss it. the orange paperback gave you a chart, told you four words in latin, and let you go on with your life. it didn’t ask you to take a position on whether bread on two sides constituted enclosure. it knew its lane. it stayed in it.

complete idiot’s guide to alchemy, the book, would have explained nigredo to me without making me feel watched. the internet, which replaced it, is a different animal. the internet would have given me nigredo and then asked me to subscribe.

the orange paperback’s slow disappearance is, in its own way, a transmutation. paper to pulp. pulp to landfill. landfill to soil. soil to whatever grows next. the alchemists would have approved of the process if not the cause. the broader genre i looked at last week is the same shape, scaled up. the shelf is shrinking. the shelf, eventually, is gone. the books are not coming back.

two films worth your time on the broader question, neither of them about alchemy proper but both about the same thing under a different paint job: the prestige, which is about a process disguised as a trick, and the imitation game, which is about a man building a machine to read minds without admitting that’s what he’s building. both are alchemy. both are not in the orange paperback, because the orange paperback was published before they came out.

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