The Burning Secret– At the West End Gallery
As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.
—William Butler Yeats, Rosa Alchemica
In this passage from the beginning of Rosa Alchemica, Yeats describes the driving force behind his search for that driving force of alchemy that has not only the purported ability to transform lead into gold but can also in the same manner transform and elevate the human spirit above that of the ordinary and mortal. A search for the essence of the spirit. The alchemy within ourselves.
Though humans have searched diligently for such a thing since ancient times, I don’t know that such an ability truly exists. But as Yeats’ words indicate, one long look into the night sky makes it easy to see why one would want to believe that such a thing is possible.
With the sky filled with a universe of wonder and the promise from distant stars and worlds, why wouldn’t we think we had the ability to transform and elevate ourselves and our lives? Or our world?
Maybe that’s the driving force behind the creative arts, an attempt at some crude alchemical transformation of the ordinary into something more, something greatly enriched with the essence of the human spirit.
Maybe. I look out the window at the morning light beginning to filter through the trees and think to myself: Why not?
It’s time to get to work on my own small attempts to achieve an alchemy of some sort. Perhaps today is the day that unlocks the secret?
Who knows? Why not?
This morning, I am sharing a video of an acoustic instrumental cover of I’d Love to Change the World, originally from Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. This is from a musician, Johnny Thompson, busking with his guitar on the street in Costa Rica. His YouTube channel has covers as well as his own originals. Though there are a few spots of wind noise, I like this performance very much.
Redtree Times 