The Alchemy of the Kitchen Sink

I left work on Wednesday at 6:00 pm. Riding the W train home to Brooklyn, I was reading part 4 of a 7 part lecture by Terence McKenna on the subject of Alchemy. Mckenna starts the lecture by telling the audience that he sometimes grows tired of talking just about psychedelics. But really, when he starts his lecture about Alchemy, there's really only surface difference from his talks about psychedelics. The essence of his talks are about neither alchemy nor psychedelics. The fundamental topic is about an underlining script in the universe. Mckenna is the archetypal fool gesturing wildly at something unimaginably profound...nudging the boundaries of our imaginations about the very nature of reality.

Alchemy is about the transmutation of material reality. Changing lead into gold becomes the popular image of the alchemist....the mad wizard at work in a mad dash for the keys to eternity. How similar this metaphor is to Mckenna himself. For the past week, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and then back again in the evening, I was immersed in this world of alchemy that McKenna was painting. A world of Gnostic sects in 2nd century Alexandria, chemical weddings, past dreams of creating magical European kingdoms and ancient texts on undecipherable scripts that have miraculously come to life.

I burned some incense and prepared to return to my studio to finish some music begun earlier. Listening to Marvin Gaye's "What's goin on", I walked into the kitchen to get some apple drink. It was there that I had a startling revelation. Something occurred to me that I had never noticed before. Something deep and profound and specific and it started small and continued to spread until it consumed the entire world. It was the silver-colored kitchen sink. The shape of it. The design of it. The material it was made out of.

It occurred to me that this object did not remotely appear anywhere in nature. But still, it had come from nature. These were nature's elements that were harvested and smelt and shaped and designed. This kitchen sink was the result of the sorcerer's hand. Here was the conjured result of 25,000 years of human imaginative. Here was the human equivalent of the manipulative evolution of nature brought to form by stages and evolutions and creations and realizations. And then it began to spread. The cabinets. The woven floor rug in front of the kitchen sink. And it continued until it ate the floor around me and the table and the walls and finally the ceiling until it rang out through the windows. I stood in awe and immersed in alchemical manifestation. We are surrounded by a world that is a physical metaphor of the forward movement of the human imagination. Freed from moral qualifications, the world of men's creations resonates out like a symphonic act rising in crescendo in reflection to God's creation, nature.

The alchemy of the kitchen sink is poetry come to shape. At the same time beautiful and quietly saddening in it's yearning towards the sublime. Our modern brains are fooled into thinking that it's fairly simple for a society to smelt it's stones, dirt and trees into computers, cars, aeroplanes and rocket ships. But it remains the physical document of the evolution of the alchemical mindset in our species. Over a period of 25,000 years, it is the closest thing we have to proof of divine grace.

Todd Amodeo

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