Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
Western alchemy arose in Hellenistic Egypt—Land of the Black Earth—within a rich mélange of classical philosophy, Eastern rebirth myths, and the dualistic heresies of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism. [1] Unraveling alchemy’s origins and sources within this intellectual alembic is a difficult process. There are hints of its first stirrings when classical philosophers describe the world’s creation as a metallic transformation or when religious prophets suggest that God was boiling and evaporating the cosmos. Likewise, it is a difficult task to unwind the glittering threads of dreams, magic, legends, alchemy, Gnostic philosophy and children’s fairy tales woven within the novels, short fiction, essays and poetry of Rikki Ducornet. Yet alchemy is there—like a deep oceanic current that tugs and sways at the lucid surface of her writing.
Central to the alchemical quest is the union of opposites, the refinement of the feminine Mercury and the masculine Sulphur into silver and gold. Once cleansed of all base matter, they consummate their romance within the alembic and produce a child—The Philosopher’s Stone—an enigmatic substance that enables the alchemist to perform further transmutations. The fusion of these two archetypes is often represented by the alchemical Androgyne, a single figure divided vertically into two halves, equally male and female, a symbol of their sexual union and of their physical and spiritual perfection.
The Gnostic vision on the other hand is one of battle and conflict, the eternal dueling forces of good and evil, light and darkness. Gnosticism is a religious and mythic system that evolved to explain the apparent absence of God and the presence of Evil in the world. According to Gnostic texts, the physical world was created as a demonic joke by a hybrid monster of darkness who stole bits of animating light from his horrified mother, Pistis Sophia. [2] The decay that Time eventually inflicts on all matter is a lethal tide that cannot be stemmed, for life is a cycle of birth and growth that eventually ends in decay and death. As a legacy of classical philosophy and early Christianity, this inevitability of disintegration became fused to women and to the female body, and thus the feminine power of giving life was transformed into an evil archetype of destruction.
These two mythic systems, so different in their approaches to the physical and spiritual realms share an essential feature—the eternal dance of masculine and feminine forces. As Ducornet draws from both Gnostic and alchemical legends, she reveals these “dual forks” of history and dualistic mythology—roots doubled or twinned, like the alchemical Androgyne, the legs of the mandrake or the prongs of the serpent’s tongue—male and female, light and darkness, good and evil are inextricably linked.
While acknowledging the close alignment of these two symbolic systems in her work, this essay will attempt to unearth her alchemical imagery, focusing on her novels and her drawings. Alchemical references are seeded throughout Ducornet’s novels, particularly the first four, which form a tetralogy of the four ancient elements: The Stain (earth), [3] Entering Fire (fire), [4] The Fountains of Neptune (water) [5] and The Jade Cabinet (air). [6] Her fifth novel Phosphor in Dreamland (light), [7] can be compared to the alchemical quintessence. [8] These novels are not related to each other internally. There are few overlaps of time or space; characters are not shared from story to story. [9] Some parallels between characters are intentional, however, as with The Exorcist, Septimus, Toujours-Là, Tubbs and Fogginius, who are all mutations of the same crazed maliciousness. The alchemical references in these novels reverberate among many recurring themes. Ducornet grapples with crucial questions of human experience—the pervasiveness of evil in the world, the weight of history on the present, the dilemma of how to capture time and retain memory, the impossibility of describing the beauty and diversity of the world, and the challenge of understanding and conveying the complexity of a single individual. Perhaps most important is discovering the way that a single individual comes to know and assert the self within. Among her characters many are murderous, some are simply fools and only a few achieve Gnosis—a knowledge of the world’s mysteries and of themselves.
Ducornet’s background reveals a rich fusion of her own cultural heritage and world travels, having lived in New York, Cuba, Egypt, Chile, Algeria, Canada, France and now Colorado. [10] Even as a child, the magic of language and the power of visual imagery made a strong impression on her. Opening an alphabet book, she was stung by a “B,” one that represented a bumble bee buzzing over a blossom. Her later studies into the Kabala increased her understanding of the symbolic weight of the word—the dueling and dualistic forces of active and passive letters and the words they create though coupling. [11] The literature and visual imagery of the surrealists made an early and lasting impression and appreciation grew as she read their works and those of their literary favorites—Lewis Carroll, Jarry, and Sade. She discovered the art of Tanguy and Arp and with great delight she discovered art and poetry linked, in Max Ernst’s and Paul Eluard’s Les Malheurs des immortels, with its juxtaposition of collages and poetry created collaboratively in 1922. Over the years her love of fiction and poetry broadened to encompass the best in world literature—Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Nabokov, García-Márquez, and many contemporary metafictionalists.
