The Fool's Gold

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. - Carl Jung, Psychiatry & Alchemy

Salomon used to have an electric slot racer set, the kind with a plastic groove through a track and two metal inlays on either side that serve to feed current to the tiny and beautiful little electric motor by contacts on the undercarriage of the cars. When he was 20 or so he was riding in a car up the New Jersey Turnpike with Rob, a young man who has his own strange ways. Rob's car was like a Yugo or something, and he called it a slot racer. Rob's ways inspired and amused Salomon. He gripped the wheel and gritted his teeth; it was going to be a full-throttle Yugo slotrace up the Turnpike. And it was.

He was a natural artist, and Salomon held him in a very high regard. As they were driving, Rob asked Salomon about his nervous tics, "How come you have nervous tics?" "I don't," said Salomon. "I have them too, but I've learned to deal with them." "That's nice, but I don't have nervous tics." "Your jaw is moving strangely and your head is making a nervous twitch." "That's not a tic, is it?" "Yes, it is." "I don't think it is." "It is." Salomon lit a cigarette.

When Salomon was young and filled his time playing with his slot racers and reading about reptiles or O. Henry or the first volume of a set of encyclopedias that only cost 9 cents and shooting cans of spray paint with his recurve bow & arrow, or loading a .22 round into the tip of the hollow aluminum shaft of an arrow and launching it at the sky and achieving phenomenal joy as it sailed up and back down again, struck the asphalt, discharged, and sent the arrow flying back into the sky safely, very safely, his family became friends with another family in which the father was a scientist for DuPont. Salomon told Roger that he loved science. Roger told him about the electrolysis of water with submersed metals as probes that are or can be used in the same method of electroplating used for deceptive jewelry. He demonstrated with an electric train power adapter and they collected enough hydrogen from the water to make a thumb-sized Hindenburg.

Salomon felt like there was more to this. He had encountered the idea of alchemy in some sort of book, and had stolen all of the occult books in the library since they were "secret" knowledge and he wanted to preserve the hermetica. He understood alchemy as only the transmutation of base metals like lead into gold. Lead seemed a likely candidate because it was heavy, and gold is a very dense element, nearly twice as heavy as lead. This was as much metaphysical science as anything else, and there were principles that he had gleaned including one that gold could not be manufactured for one's own material benefit, or by extension anyone else's benefit. The notion that alchemy could be interpreted as a profound symbol was beyond him yet, but he had a young obsession.

Electrolysis would not make something into gold. It would potentially cover it, but it would not make it gold. Pyrite, "fool's gold", would be more valuable materially. But there was some symbolism in electroplating. Salomon perceived that the beauty of a roofing nail after copper electroplating was its own beauty, and copper was third in his chart of valuable metals. One logical problem is that he had to start with more copper than he really ended up with, losing some in the solution. There was no literal alchemy here, but there was some result.

He abandoned the alchemical research for a while. One day he found himself in a university library in the summer and it was cold and fantastic. He had learned how to make the payphones work for him for free so he would call people and he had found archives of microfilm of all of many years of newspapers. He would meander through the unixy library catalogue, playing a game of finding materials on five floors of media by Dewey decimal or whatever they were using, each piece using its number as a call sign, a beacon, a radio transmission of "warmer, cooler" until he found it. Yes, this actually engaged him. He liked the idea of psychiatry so he found academically-bound copies of the American Journal of Psychiatry. One article was on antisocial disorder. He hadn't slept in two days and he was very emotionally vulnerable. So he diagnosed himself as anti-social. This upset him. He sat in a library chair and looked out the window at the clouds sliding by.

Later that evening, he was sitting on a granite ledge of a wall around a small post office when a good Dr. he knew walked by. He stopped him, and in all sincerity explained his predicament, that he was antisocial, potentially sociopathic. Dr. Manuel asked him, "Have you slept recently?" "No. Well, two nights ago." Manuel had a look of sympathy or of difficulty or frustration. He told him, "Get some sleep. You will feel better. And consider that the fact that you are worried about this indicates that you aren't in fact one of them." This shifted Salomon's point of view, but did not alleviate his self-centered malaise.

Some time later, Salomon asked a night-working poet & activist about alchemy. Jay told him that the best Salomon could do with alchemy is apply is as a symbol, a metaphor for refining his psyche and constitution to one pure & close to divine. Again, Salomon hadn't slept. Jay also suggested that he read what he could of Jung's works, and so he found some, including Man & His Symbols and Psychology & Alchemy on a bookshelf where he lived. He did not read them, but he scanned them and grabbed the most accessible aphorisms and quotes. From this he gained an idea, one which he could not cite but he attributed to Jung and that was the idea of man's 4th instinct. The divine / magical / spiritual instinct. This instinct, though perhaps 4th in order of definition, seemed to be where one must find their alchemical answers, and find their peace in satisfying it. Salomon chose to drink & medicate this snafu away. The problem there was that it was symbolically like hitting his head with a hammer to remedy a headache.

The nervous tics were a manifestation of something. He was a primate, generally, and not all of his species had this behavior. Good and bad were at war. It was the army of considerations taking the hill in his head, the amphibious ethical / logical charge onto a beach on psychiatric d-day and his psyche was both armies. The tics exploded like artillery shells raining on him while he lay in the muddy ditches worrying about clean socks. Why should he wear a helmet? To keep the war in? The casualties were his comfort, his ease, his sense of peace. But like a war, this had gone on for so long that he didn't know anything but the war.

There is an expression: "There are no atheists in foxholes." Perhaps there aren't. And perhaps when one is a fair weather friend to the Universe and its principles, when one only considers the human condition constantly because it removes them from personal accountability in a war that is at once for nothing and everything, perhaps then do our bodies stack up. Maybe when the dawn, the gold of the sun lights up the battlefield and everyone is more interested in their socks and cigarettes than killing one another, when it looks even more perverse and wrong and bloody than ever, maybe then does one begin to find their gold. And maybe the echoes of the shells exploding will always remain in the cathedral of the psyche, but maybe they should be drowned out by the oceanic silence of divinity.