The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  I was left breathless by this brisk dismissal of the century’s intellectual giants. “And the Agnews had?” I interjected.

  Edward narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I believe they did.”

  “And you don’t find it strange that nobody’s heard of them?”

  “All right,” Edward said after a moment, “in historical terms, their endeavours to blow on the divine spark in man may have been hopeless. Just as we too – Laura and I – may be whistling in the wind. But at least they were determined to try. For God’s sake, man, they knew that the battle for the human soul was joined, that the world was teetering towards desecration and despair. Look around you – consider this appalling century – were they right or not? We have seen where materialism has led. Oh yes, it freed us to do many ingenious things, but now the bill is presented. Apart from the manifold horrors we perpetrate upon ourselves, forests die, even the seas are fouled, we can no longer trust the air. As bills go, it is, I think you will agree, quite staggering.” Edward stared into my silent face, shaking his head. “Infatuated by our own clever minds, we turned our backs on the old redeeming symbols. We forgot that the symbolic is that which holds together – it is the very meaning of the word. In our blindness we have preferred its exact etymological opposite – the diabolic – that which tears apart. For again, in that strict sense, materialism is a diabolic attitude. By its careful inventory of the multiplicity of things it has succeeded only in creating a schizophrenic world, powerful but fissive. It should be no surprise, therefore, that – unless we wake up – its most characteristic achievement may soon tear the planet apart in a final clash of unreconciled opposites. Think about it, man. Do you really believe that such atrocity is inevitable as anything other than a direct consequence of human blindness… of the collective madness spawned by countless failures of individual responsibility? In any case” – he lifted his eyes to hold me in an unremitting stare – “is not this what has been happening to you?”

  I was shocked by this abrupt return from the general to the particular. It stunned the reservations at my lips, for suddenly I glimpsed that there might indeed be a connection. Almost against my will I had heard his argument drawing together the fears I had felt alone in The Pightle listening to the drone of aircraft out of Thrandeston – the dread of, the perverse appetite for annihilation – and the obscure, fragile hope embodied in my dream. His case had been more assertion than argument; I was dubious of its logic; but now, at the feeling level, I was placed by his last question at the very cockpit of processes I did not understand.

  “You have engaged with life blindly,” he insisted. “You have suffered a little cataclysm. Your tower has been shattered and you have perhaps begun to see that what you took for your integrity was a sham. If you are honest, you will acknowledge that you are a man in pieces, with few of the pieces in their proper place. You have just begun to sort the fragments out… at a much deeper level than you know. And now, it seems, the tutelary spirits of the Hermetic Art have appeared in your dream, announcing their willingness to help. If you are wise, you will listen. For if the best of us refuse to understand ourselves, what hope is there? I say that our very survival depends on such knowledge. I mean, our survival as coherent human individuals grounded in the real. I mean our collective survival as a species. That, my friend, is the wider import of your dream. That is the real name of the game.”

  I looked across at Laura, who had sat for some time in silence. She held my gaze a moment and then, almost as if in embarrassment, looked away. Most of this she had heard before – had it become no more than noise to her? Was it any more than that to me?

  At least two voices argued inside my head, scepticism warring with a half-mesmerized desire to believe. It was precisely this sort of secret promise that had excited me in Edward’s work when I was young. It was precisely his weakness for inflated rhetoric I had come, later, to reject. And this emphasis on secrets – I shared Bob Crossley’s distrust of “perfect masters” with their claims to knowledge from which we ordinary mortals were, for our own good, shut out. Whatever else, I wasn’t buying that.

  I might have rejected the whole thing out of hand, but behind it all I recalled the emblems of my dream – the old man and the young woman over the shimmering retorts; Jess and Martin, the female and the male, celebrating their own chymical wedding while I – voyeur, outsider – watched and knew – God help me, how I knew – what I was missing.

  But that was dream. In the real world the bombs were still targeted, the doom-watch prophecies pressing close, my life a wreck. Over against all that where did this high talk get us? Where did any of it lead?

  I looked back at Edward, remembering Bob’s intuition that he was a man obsessed. He studied my dark frown. “No,” he answered the unspoken demand, “it is not futile. The vision is still accessible. Your dream insists on it. It is immanent within our very being. We are the case for hope as well as the authors of our own despair. This is what the Agnews understood. They had the guts to work at the problem. They devoted their lives to it – Henry in his library; Louisa here, in this very room.”

  I looked around me, grateful for the moment’s remission. I tried to imagine the place as it had been more than a century before. The room couldn’t have changed that much. It was a weird sensation – the continuing presence of the past; of a figure who, like those of my dream, stepped out of time in fancy dress to insist that she was my contemporary. I saw myself half-hypnotized by Edward’s voice, by Laura’s diffident claim that the past was contactable, and shook my head to clear it. Then an obvious objection presented itself. If Henry and Louisa Agnew had possessed the answers, why didn’t they share them? Why were they not public knowledge?

  “So what went wrong?”

  Edward closed his eyes, leant his head so far back I saw the tendons stretching in his neck. The question might have punched him there. “Disaster,” he said. “Totally unanticipated disaster.”

  I sensed shaky ground. “Well?”

  For the first time he avoided my eyes as he answered. “They were working on two separate books, you see. Henry was composing a verse epic of the Hermetic Mystery – honouring the ancient tradition of alchemist as poet, like Norton in his Ordinall, like Ripley of Bridlington. Louisa was working on a prose treatise – it was to be an introduction, clearing ground for her father’s greater work.”

  “He was a poet then?”

  “He was a Hermetic philosopher working in verse.”

  I sensed Edward’s unease at the distinction. I guessed at a bad poet. A poetaster. Doggerel.

  “The point is,” Edward continued, “that Henry had barely finished the first canto of his epic when Louisa brought her treatise to completion. She called it An Open Invitation to the Chymical Wedding. It was supposed to be no more than a modest prologue to her father’s work, but…”

  Whether he was growing tired, or seized by recurring doubts about sharing such matters with a still sceptical intruder, I don’t know, but at this point in his narrative Edward sighed and seemed to lose heart. He reached for my packet of cigarettes, took one, and drew on it with closed eyes. Then he looked across at Laura. “You started this,” he said. “Tell him. Tell him what happened.” Then he slumped in his chair, apparently indifferent now whether I was interested or not.

  Laura looked from him to me. Her voice was quieter, less passionate than Edward’s, though the gaze was searching. “You have to understand that Henry had complete confidence in Louisa’s abilities. He’d taught her himself. I guess he thought of her as his creature almost. Anyway, he was probably too caught up in his own work to take more than a passing interest in hers. The fact is he didn’t even read it when it was written.” Laura shook her head. “Can you believe that? All those years she’d worked for him – secretary, handmaid, muse, housekeeper even – keeping his mind clear of all domestic responsibilities. And then when she brought her own work to show him, he simply told her to send it off to the printers. Sure,
he’d pick up the tab and take a look at the book when he had time… but, I mean, can you imagine how she must have felt?”

  “He trusted her,” Edward interjected. “You said it yourself.”

  Laura drew in her breath. “Am I telling this or you?”

  Edward made no answer, simply shook his head and withdrew. Laura looked back at me. “You’ll gather we don’t always see eye to eye on this. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t till the first copy came back from the publisher that Henry bothered to read what Louisa had written. That was when the storm broke. Edward claims he was seized by a sort of moral panic. I’m not so sure – there could be other explanations. But Henry decided that Louisa’s book was too explicit, that she’d said too much. According to him, secrets that had been preserved for generations were written there in black and white for all the world to read.”

  “She neglected the first premise of the alchemical writer,” Edward interrupted fiercely again. Laura sighed impatiently, turned away.

  I said quickly, “But I thought that’s what they were trying to do – share the secret?”

  “God damn,” Edward snapped, “have you understood nothing? The secrets are dangerous. The alchemists were investigating the structure of matter – not for crude purposes of exploitation, not from mere intellectual curiosity, but as the very stuff of life itself. They knew that terrible energies lay sleeping in matter as in our minds – gunpowder was a direct result of their experiments with sulphur and saltpetre. They knew the dangers of waking those energies because they experienced and contained them. Within their own being they strove to make of themselves a vessel strong enough to hold together all the warring forces that might otherwise be released – inwardly, in the form of monstrous psychic inflation, or outwardly, with massively destructive power. They knew that in the wrong hands their knowledge could have appalling consequences – which is why, unlike the brilliant fools who tinkered with matter this century, they would have no truck with princes. Secrecy was of the essence. It has always been so:

  So this science must ever secret be,

  The cause whereof is this, as ye may see,

  If one evil man had hereof all his will

  All Christian peace he might easily spill.”

  I said, “Is that an example of Agnew’s verse?” My tone implied that, if so, I was not impressed.

  “No, it’s damn well not. That’s fifteenth-century verse from Norton’s Ordinall of Alchemy, and you can keep your Cambridge lit-crit standards to yourself. They’re irrelevant. The point is, the girl wasn’t careful enough. She said too much.”

  “Or so her father said,” Laura retorted.

  “She said it herself. She agreed.”

  “She loved him.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “It’s the whole point. Why won’t you see it?”

  This hot exchange ended in silence. After a moment I said, “So what happened?”

  Laura looked fiercely across at me. I too was male, and she was on her own between Edward and me, representative suddenly of all women in their struggle to make their voice heard in the oppressive din of male debate. “I’ll tell you what happened,” she said coldly. “He burned her book – that’s what happened. He went to the printers and called in the whole edition. The publishers made a stink about it. Agnew had to pay over the odds to make up for their lost profits, but he got the whole lot back and made a bonfire of them – right here at the Decoy Lodge. On top of that he burned his own work too. Never wrote another word. He died of a stroke a few months later.”

  Edward had relapsed back into his chair, shaking his head – either at the tone of Laura’s account or at an unrightable wrong. It was unclear which, but Laura seemed to assume the former and withdrew into cold silence. I was left at an impasse, more aware of the immediate conflict than concerned about the fate of the Agnews.

  It was a curious story certainly, but I couldn’t share their agitation over it. The nineteenth century had produced other fish quite as queer as Agnew and his daughter, and – for all Edward’s assertions – I failed to see the critical relevance of these odd events to our contemporary predicament. He could hardly be suggesting that some naive Victorian bluestocking might have let slip the secret of nuclear fission, or that her indiscretions had altered the course of European history. By his own admission the Agnews’ enterprise was hopeless. Marx, Darwin and Freud were not to be out-trumped by a quixotic country squire and his daughter. When I thought about Henry Agnew, I could see little more than a private psychological crisis in the mind of a man obsessed.

  And when I looked back where Edward frowned down into space, it occurred to me that I might be witnessing a re-enactment of that crisis in contemporary terms – that Edward was more haunted by the past of this place than he knew… That both of them were.

  I said carefully, “It’s an extraordinary story, but I still don’t see what you hope to do with it?”

  Edward looked up fiercely from his abstraction. “But it’s all here, somewhere. It has to be. Don’t you see? Agnew and his daughter were the last links in a living chain. They had generations of the oral tradition behind them. They knew what we desperately need to know. It’s vitally important that I reconstruct their knowledge.”

  I recalled what he had said about the risk of psychic inflation – perhaps he was hankering after “perfect master” status after all. But the pathos of his words disturbed me more than their vehemence. I looked to Laura and met no response. She was dealing with frustrations of her own. For the moment I would have to handle this directly, alone.

  “You’re absolutely sure that the whole edition was destroyed?”

  “Of course I am,” Edward snapped. “Do you think I would waste my days…” But neither was he prepared to waste his breath.

  Throughout the evening, power had been shifting around the room in unpredictable ways, and for much of it I’d been the butt of Edward’s condescension. But it was clear now: I held the sane, objective ground. The last time we met, Edward had been direct enough with me about my own troubles and, however obliquely, I had learnt from him. It would have felt a dereliction of both reason and responsibility if I ducked this moment now.

  “Isn’t it possible that Agnew destroyed his daughter’s work from some other motive – one that even he may not have recognized?”

  “You mean envy?”

  “You said the girl was brilliant. She had finished her work… Perhaps it was done too well for him to accept – that it made his own work seem redundant? It could have been a hard thing for him to face. And the fact that he burned his own manuscript – doesn’t that raise questions?” I looked to Laura for support. She was icily remote, aware perhaps that I was hedging a deeper question – one that she did not share.

  “I’ve looked at that,” Edward answered. “I’m no fool, Darken. Whatever other faults he may have had, Agnew was not a mean-spirited man. There was more to it than that.”

  “There is another possibility,” I risked, “that once he’d read Louisa’s book he realized that they were both labouring under a delusion. That it was nonsense.”

  “No.” Edward’s reply was instant and absolute.

  “Then you think he did the right thing?”

  He was caught on the question. I saw the skin at his temples tauten. “By his lights,” he said at last. “I don’t know. What I do know is that the subsequent demoralization was a tragedy. Something vital and specific to the health of western man got lost with it. Something that should have been preserved – in secret if need be, but nonetheless preserved. I know that the mainstream view of reality is corrupt and corrupting. It drives us out of our minds and arrests the feelings. It leaves us helpless. We can’t live that way, not for much longer. And the world can’t live with us – not like this. We have to change. We have to find a vision that will help us to change – that will restore dignity and meaning by altering our relationship to the delicate web that supports our life. Everyone knows it deep down,
but we’re lost, confused, complicit in our own bad dreams. The Agnews were part of another tradition – one that has always seen life whole, however painful the process of holding its contradictions together. They knew that matter and spirit are indivisible – that everything is translucent, permeable, infinite in its marvellous covenant of meaning. The Hermetic tradition has always offered a vision whereby men and women might recover their experience in its wholeness. It offers a technique for achieving that vision – and we need to know how to know it now, for that is how things deeply are, and not only human life depends on it…”

  I pondered the old man across from me for a long time. He looked intolerably forlorn, as a man must who has a truth to speak and no language but an archaic dialect ridiculed by his times in which to speak it. Haggard as he was, I saw suddenly why Laura must first have found him attractive. He had fire, vision, a compelling certainty that the surface of life had been barely scratched, that there remained enormous opportunity for visionary invention, and urgent need for it. No, it wasn’t power for himself he wanted – he had that already. His ambitions were at once larger and more modest.

  My doubts about his sanity felt suddenly shabby – symptoms of an intellectual vanity so unsure of itself that it could thrive only by diminishing other less palpable but richer ways of seeing and feeling the world. In his preoccupation with alchemy Edward might be misguided – there was every possibility of that – but there was no way he was crazy, unless craziness in an uncaring world is another word for care. I found that I very much wanted to believe him.