The myth we stay-at-homes perpetuate about working in our pajamas all day is not too far from the truth. Even though I have a standing desk now, and barely sit during working hours, I am getting less exercise. I’m eating less well–most meals have devolved back to the ‘cram carbs and protein in the pie-hole’ methodology. I might be reading more, though I’m not convinced; I think I am simply getting more frustrated about the ever-present pile of books around my desk because I see them all the time now.

There has been a perpetually unfinished document on my desktop called “blog.rtf” and it contains two quotes. The first is a tweet from Jeremy Keith, back on Nov 5, 2010 where he says, “First Law of Blogodynamics: a blog post in draft tends to stay in draft.” The second is a quote from Charles Dickens. “The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

The hardest road is the one that lies between creation to construction.

Entropy is, well, entropic, and I have a decidedly difficult time dealing with exercise. I do not like ‘going for a walk,’ because the whole point is to walk and not to have a destination, and I struggle with the essential pointlessness of doing the upright biped version of the hamster wheel. As you can imagine, exercise, in general, is just like going for a walk, but with different scenery. I am constantly searching for a way to trick my brain into regarding the ’round and round’ activities as something other than they are.

Which, round and round, brings me to alchemy.

Alchemical research, both metaphysical and analytical, is the medieval version of the exercise regime: you embark upon lenghty experiments that require rigorous observation and endless repetition of specific steps, ad infinitum. If you are lucky, you produce a few drops of aqua vita, and may then undertake the next step, which is even more complicated, convoluted, and rife with the looming promise of utter failure if your attention wavers in the slightest. The discipline, if you will, taught you discipline.

I am hesitant to have another blog post be about the concept of alchemy, which is short-hand for saying ‘oh, look, I want to talk about the occult, but I haven’t actually done my reading or spent any time thinking.’ And so, I will leave this one with the above idea. Discipline. We afford it less time and practice than we should.

I’ll come back in six months and see if I’ve actually acted on this notion or if i”m still falling asleep on the couch after dinner and let life flow past me.

I recently acquired a copy of Blair MacKenzie Blake’s The Wickedest Books in the World (Confesssions of an Aleister Crowley Bibliophile), and while I don’t suffer from the same desire to aquire first editions like Blake does, I found the book to an engaging and entertaining read. Especially the section near the end where he described his vision of turning Boleskine House into “Crowleyland.”

(Blake, as he notes more than once in the book, is still under the influence of his desire, needing on a copy of The Book of Thoth, one of 200 copies produced in 1944, right at the height of British wartime restrictions on making such extravagances. It’s printed on Arnold unbleached handmade paper (from the Chiswick Press), bound in half-russet morocco leather, raised bands and gold-blocking on the spine, Egyptian-themed boards, and illustrated throughout with both colored and black and white images of the tarot deck as designed by Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris. In case you have a copy lying around, and are wondering what to do with it.)

The Wickedest Books in the World is an oversized volume filled with gorgeous pictures of the first editions (photographed by Duncan Blake), and Blake’s fervent enthusiasm for his bibliophilic condition becomes infectious. By the end of his confessions, I was looking dismissively at the two shelves of Crowley books I have. All reprints. Nothing remotely close to a first edition up there. I was such a dilletante.

Blake clearly recognizes the allure that collecting something that is quantifiable rare, and he doesn’t dwell overmuch on the psychology of the collector. Though he does touch on the myth that Crowley firsts—because of the exacting publication specifications on some of them—still bear an imprint of the Great Beast himself on them, making them more like talismans than bunch of pages stuck together with glue and possibly more unsavory things. Blake’s focus is more on the linguistic fever and mania that comes over those who obsess over Crowley’s output. It becomes so easy to slip into a world populated by esoteric symbols.

Although the proprieter didn’t wear a Phrygian cap, Sanka, and a tourmaline ring seemed promising. Let’s have a look at those worm-eaten grimoires and dusty alchemical tracts—their moldering pages copiously illustrated with a mythic zoology, abtruse glyphs, and occult heraldry. Where were the peacock tails, emblematic paintings of the mystic marriage/conjunctio, and resplendent phoenixes? Further exploration of the place revealed no alchemical menagerie. Not even a tiny back room containing the revolving wheel of the zodiac, celestial-astral liquid in copper vessles, flaming athanors, curcurbites, or the prism of sorcerer’s bottles filled with the frozen flow of silver. Our pockets were filled with francs and bezants, and we damn near had the effluvium of Babalon tucked in our wallets. If nothing else, that ought to put us in a priveleged position in the multiverse.
    —(Blake, reminiscing about Parisian bookstores, p. 42)

I wish my local bookstores were more like this.