IV. THE MATERIA PRIMA AND THE ALCHEMY OF THE I

The Child’s Second Birth

The return to infancy initiates the renaissance of the human.

The malformation that withers people away comes from the fate handed to children — they are born with a nature, and they grow up with a character. The freeness of love gives them life, and society strips them of it; it is thus that the poison of business and numbers strip their trees of their leaves and their passions of their attraction.

Infancy, wealth of being impoverished by having, the morning of desire darkened by the boredom of the factories, history abridged by a civilization that substitutes mercantile efficiency for the art of being human.

Death triumphs in the planetary triumph of the economy, and everything that it destroys the hopes of works to perfect it. Enough of these revolutions that rot like the corpses of their dead! Only the creation of the living is revolutionary. The most expert profiteers of politics and commerce, who have a seismographic sense of social mutations are trying to wrap their last commodities in the last ideological packaging — they make them look alive.

They know that tenderness makes things sell — they don’t realize that tenderness can’t be sold, since they know nothing but economic truths. The reality of desires will bite them in the ass. Though they mix in with the deathknells of this moribund society the fanfare of interest shown to the children, they never perceive the song of the earth that will drown out their voices, nor the new harmonies of a life that is coming back to life.

The greatest danger that the irresistible rise of the living faces is not the assault of lucrative recuperations, but rather it is to be found in the reflex of fear and death, with which the ensemble of secular prohibitions weigh down enjoyment. That’s why it still happens that when faced with a more and more common understanding of ecology, a furious determination suddenly arises in people to pillage nature — as the counterpoint to a growing and everywhere highlighted affection, a blind violence strikes children while they are in the embrace of the family and of society.

Assuredly, it is not by adding fear of punishment to this fear of life which incites killing that we will finish off the murderous vocations that proliferate in this society. A society never suffers any crimes but the ones it gives rise to. It’s too late for this society to try to militate in defense of children now that new human relations, which call for a radically different society, have begun being born from a reconciliation of nature and infancy.

To Rediscover a Blooming Childhood, and Not a Wounded Childhood, Within Oneself

Psychoanalysis is a charitable organization which gives aid to the emotionally mutilated; it facilitates their reinsertion into the same society which mutilated them in the first place. Psychoanalysts are paid to explain how trauma gradually makes good on a debt we all apparently incurred just by being born, and to encourage us to die to ourselves.

Now the devaluation of all payment plans invites us to the freeness of nature. There’s nothing but the light of present enjoyments to dissipate the obsessive specters of the past. The happiest moments of childhood come back to the surface as soon as the great breath of fullness enlivens the body like a living eternity — a strong emotion, one that most often surges forth from all the things that the utilitarian spirit judges futile: a tender gesture, a landscape, a word, a look, a tone of voice, an odor, an encounter, a taste.

No more should we accept our traumas — now we must begin to desire a state of grace. Guided by emotion, the passions will no longer flay themselves in this long scream of death which has been their history. So many crushed dreams and memories, so many lives that seek themselves out endlessly — it seems to me that there’s nothing more to wish for in this world than that they find themselves and rediscover those dreams and memories.

The time has come for children to enjoy enough love that they might learn to become what they never had the chance to be while they’re growing up — full men and women. The free use of creativity will guarantee a growing autonomy, emancipating children from parental and state tutelage. At last they will find the privilege of approaching the shores of love without the ridiculous detours and distortions that adults give themselves over to so ardently that the most beautiful islands become places of anguish, malady, and insanity.

Only love, reestablished in its natural freeness, will return desires to their original simplicity, to an animalness that education should refine, initiating children into their destiny — being unique in the world, in solidarity with the omnipresence of Life.

The humanization of desires forms the basis of a new education, the principles of which, however, have always been those of the simplest desires. For example, the art that gradually turns the raw, unclear sensation of a first sip of wine drunk at a young age into a development of taste and palate and a search for finer plants.

The Time Torn from the Living

The exploitation of nature has denatured even time allocated to living organisms. The contamination by the commodity has subjected the existence of algae, trees and seals to their law of universal species extinction. Add to that the ozone layer, soil and atmosphere, and you can accurately measure the speed at which the economy is realized and life is extinguished.

The universal death that we see taking place like some Ragnarök, apocalypse, or final judgment of the religious legends — what is it if not time pulled from the eternity of life by History, wherein the existence of the economy preprograms the nonexistence of human beings? The era of the expansion of life has become the era of the expansion of commodities, subjugating biological rhythms, vacillations between excitation and repose, and the succession of systole and diastole to durations marked off by profit and loss, progress and regression, fortune and misfortune, to this “time”, which is money, evolving and losing value accordingly as the market runs its course.

The main characteristic of these times, which, for better or for worse, the producers have created, is that the times wear themselves out in the routine rhythms of business, and wear out those who business has taken the majority of the humanity out of.

The End of Age As Power and Representation

The present has no age.

The Anglo-Americans, who are typically the most taken in by the neuroses of a mercantile existence, use the word “stress” to designate the state of agitation required for the progress of business.

This frenzy is such a poor compensation for the dilapidation of nerves and of spirits that, tired of the fatigue of mechanized time, some of them have rediscovered, as if it were a privilege, an unexpected enjoyment of the present moment. They get back a little bit of themselves, they accept it, and then beg for more.

In the debacle of power, age has lost its military stripes of prestige. The conflict between generations, which for so long opposed the insolent stupidity of the young by the arrogant idiocy of the old, is starting to lack credible combatants. So it is with the collapse of all values; now archaism no longer waits until a certain age to initiate people into its miserable “mysteries”. Having set fire to all the old-growth already, the declining markets have thrown themselves pell mell into the decrepit old men, of 16 to 80 years, to try to find support. But the same weight of an annulled life equalizes young bosses and old truckers, fashionably dressed in money. The acceleration of the mechanized body makes a good market for elderliness at any and every age.

It is, on the other hand, a new phenomenon that love is taking on a greater importance for both children and aged persons; as if life was straining so greatly to be reborn that it pops up the instant work no longer exercises the full force of its authority, for some because they are full of regrets, and for others because they are thankfully escaping regrets. The happiest people are those who, whether they are too young or too old to produce and consume, discover the sensuality of present life, which is never young nor old. Aside from them, there are the men of economy, for whom age continues to be measured according to their degree of fatigue, at least for as long as love and pleasures don’t make them childlike again.

The New Era Will Be That of the Children

For centuries, children’s mentality has not meaningfully changed. It has remained the reflection of a struggle for power: become an adult in order to escape bullying, and then one day bully the weak themselves. That’s what used to be called the cruelty of children.

In the course of a few years, though, it has suddenly started evolving. It was at first a certain confusion, a refusal to grow up and get integrated into the absurd and odious world of the adults. Since this world presented itself unilaterally as the only possible world, a certain taste for death became the expression of a general disenchantment with this journey without a specific goal. Then, the resolve to grow up a different way started to become concretized; to become a real man or woman, to carry inside oneself the fruits of a happy infancy, and not the sterile wood of its negation. Excluded from a history which was only the product of contempt for nature and for the human, children are now turning the last page on that history, and shutting the door on this archaic civilization, which interests no one anymore.

The presence of this new eventuality was enough for new banalities to be brought to the mill of public opinion and made into flour. Children aren’t born to produce, but to recreate the life that created them. They are born out of the freeness of love, and the freeness of love is the only functioning basis for their education, since it is no longer true that, in order to ably make use of a tool, a hand must unlearn how to caress and play — since it is no longer true that to learn to live must mean learning to suffer, to mutilate oneself, to sacrifice oneself, to take oneself out of one’s body; emotions must no longer be prostituted as commodities by the family, the school, by society, and no one should be surprised anymore that children that are raised in that old way become miserable adults.

Those who today are putting themselves to studying this paradoxical novelty should probably be reminded that children don’t come from some other planet, they just carry inside themselves a radically different planet.

To study the behavior of the embryo and of the baby will never take on its true importance until that becomes part of a vaster project, a will to restore the specificity of the child, to prevent the further raging of this enterprise of denaturation that destroys children like it destroys the whole earth.

In children, as in the people and animals that live off flora and fauna, beats the heart of a life without constraints. It’s for the good of everyone’s health, in this world that pulsates to the rhythm of death and is rolling towards a definitive economization, that we become totally enchanted and taken in by the music of life.

The Birth of an Alchemical Relationship

The first experiences of life occur in the discoveries of early childhood, and we know today that everything must be redone and remade, since the brutal interruption of that evolution has cut short the hopes of humanity.

These experiences begin in the maternal athanor. The body is its alchemical hearth and its materia prima. The child is created there just as much as it creates itself, the fruit of a magistery to which the woman gives a nourishment with an affective and nutritive value, wherein the embryo is formed as it learns to draw its resources from the abundance of its natural surroundings.

A more lucid look at such things established a little while ago that there is a possibility of communication with the developing infant, and that it understands when you speak to it in the language of emotional effusion, and not, obviously, in the language of business transactions.

By an enchantment that has come into its prime in our time, an alchemical relationship has elaborated itself, timidly, between these two beings, taken over by the radically new state of being they enter together, a relationship where the transmutation of a primal nature implies the simultaneous transformation of the operator of that transmutation. The adults who have been able to see clearly into the world of the newborn and truly understand the child and the new world that it contains within it have also been able to see their peers in the same regard. They are guided by the light of beings, following the sparks of life they see in them, and do not encumber themselves anymore by keeping company with the dead.

In the forms it takes on after birth has taken place, the experience of life moves away from the alchemical quest accordingly as children’s social education is being imposed. In the growth of the little ones, the stubbornness of plants in drawing their life from their surroundings reappears; they try to avoid hostile terrain, and bypass it to plunge their roots in a life-giving soil. At the same time as the little beasts are getting “educated”, they discover an environment that is hot and cold, full of caresses and aggression, solicitude and rejection. And already the human and inhuman presence molds a landscape into which nature only enters artificially; the decor of a bedroom, a house, a garden, a family — one must take one’s place therein and move towards an unknown destiny. It’s a landscape plagued by the changes in emotional climate, storms of anger and impatience, hailstorms of attention and inattention, the tensions of guilt, the springtimes of tenderness and the ardors of love, the neurotic tornadoes, the sun-rays of plenitude, the trembling of desire and the peaceful glow of pleasure.

The signs that one can make out little by little indicate the condition of its progress. Sometimes a sweet attention encourages children to go forwards, and sometimes solitude teaches them to take initiative, to confront alone the risks of the unknown, to perfect their autonomy. Sometimes, on this quest, which people have quite often forgotten is a quest for happiness, the children cry, get frustrated, and lose hope as they become conscious of the obstacles and difficulties facing them. And it is precisely at those moments that things spoil, at the very point at which the adults, tormented by the order that governs them, resign their hearts away and make it manifest that the road of enjoyments is not the same as the road of knowledge.

If there is a mutation coming, it will be in the new communication that is being established between people, conscious of their incompleteness, and the children, sensitive to the life-potential they have within them. The Great Work, the orphic poetry which pierces the secret of beings and things and tames the most frightful furies of repressed life with the remaining liveliness they have, resides in the feeling that only the search for pleasure nourishes and stimulates the creation of the self and of the world.

There is no other framework for destiny besides the thread that weaves the tapestries of living pleasure, open to the humanization of the natural surroundings, a weaving which is recommenced every morning. The only people that ever truly begin to live are those who take the time to look upon things and beings with the marveling gaze of the pleasures which might be drawn from them — like the children who have still not forgotten how to live — no longer merely contemplating things and beings, but including them in a project of immediate and endless creation.

Brutal nature will become human nature by means of the development sensual intelligence, an intelligence not separate from life, one which has the privilege of occupying more and more the empty space left behind by the disappearance of the patriarchal family and the education of economic obedience.

Age, hardened in its hierarchy of functions and roles, has followed in the panic of time measurable by money and power. The only quality time is that of present happiness, which is the time of eternity. The future, it is clear, was nothing but a past held back hastily by a parodic sale, one which is in deficit now. What is anchored here and now has no installments to pay on the coming days.

The absolute weapon that the child has at its disposal is the affection that it believes in and proliferates around itself. There’s nothing like the feeling of being loved to help one love oneself, like, inversely, respect and contempt forge the chains of smugness and self-hate. It is in this very precise sense that it is useful to understand the old adage, “Love has no age.”