What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

7
Steplessness
IN THE BEGINNING there is the formless lump, the rotting
slime in a dusky swamp. The flood recedes, the swamp is
drained, and the excrement is lovingly conserved, and placed in a
warm bath. It has two natures, a sulfurous male side and a
silvery lunar side. The two find themselves together, sealed away
from the outside world. The moist menstruum circulates around
them. It is time for love. They fall on each other, they make love,
and a child is born. As the heat continues, the child grows, he
becomes sexually aware, he merges with his parents. The energy
of continued incest makes them rot, and they are again reduced
to dung. A toad, living in the muck, vomits the four elements
that were once their bodies. He is distilled, and his fiery blood
drips down as milk drops. The toad vomits its milk, its body
coalesces and hardens into a white egg. The egg hatches: it is a
green lion gnawing on the sun, cutting himself and bleeding.
These are moments in Johann Conrad Barchusen’s exhaustive
emblematic sequence of alchemy. There are many more episodes,
but most of them could not be explained well in words. The great
work is finally concluded in eighty-four steps. 1 In another account,
the work is only one step long: secret ingredients, a secret vessel,
and the work is completed all at once. Gabrielle Falloppio (more
famous for describing the Fallopian tubes) tells how to make gold
from lead in one short paragraph, as part of an all-purpose set of
chemical recipes. 2 John Dee hides the one-step work in a brief
Hebrew passage contained within a parenthesis, buried in the
middle of his Hieroglyphical Monad. The Hebrew may be a
Kabbalistic cipher, quintuply protected by its language, its
inaccurate printing, its esoteric Jewish doctrine, its encipherment,
and the dense undergrowth of the surrounding text. But for those
who know how to read, the magnum opus is there—the dream of