Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
Her writing begins with a similar intuitive process.
...What triggers words remains mysterious. So much of writing is intuition. And rhythm. I get drawn there. Often I have the impression that I am boating without oars on some swift, uncharted image-river. It flows. I’m a medium. Later I rewrite. Enormously. Like the human body, a work of literature may simply be a molded river. There are rapids in that river, whirlpools and snakes. [22]
She understands that automatic writing requires enormous discipline and rigor, as André Breton described. [23] The editing process is equally demanding and essential. She begins her stories armed with dictionaries from many languages, notes from her journals, fragments of conversations, and memories of dreams. These words are then harnessed and crafted into the final product.
Alchemy of the Word
Ducornet’s knowledge of alchemy stems from reading the same French authors, Fucanelli and Canseliet, that inspired the surrealists. [24] Fulcanelli, the mysterious adept of the 1920s, wrote two books on alchemical symbolism and architecture that inspired the surrealists’ walking tours of the alchemical sites of Paris. [25] His disciple, Eugène Canseliet, spoke highly of André Breton’s understanding of alchemical symbolism. She was also influenced by Carl Jung’s interpretation of alchemy symbolism as a model for human psychological development. Using texts and images from alchemical manuscripts, Jung compared alchemical operations to psychological individuation. Primal matter (or the individual’s chaotic psychological quagmire) is purified through a series of distillations and sublimations that parallel the psychoanalytic engagement in excavation and discovery.
She has stated “dreams precipitate my fiction.” [26] In the dream that inspired her short story, “The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi,” she was a small boy during the late Renaissance. [27] His father led him into a palace where artisans were dusting with gold the geometric pieces of a beautiful painted ceiling. Alchemical symbols filled these images of Eden, including snakes, green lions, a scarlet siren, the sun, the moon and a human eye within a blue oval the color of a puffin’s egg. S/he also saw an albino ape, whose heart had been pierced by an arrow, falling from a tropical tree while grasping for the bloody ropes that spurted from his wound. As the gold dust from a sower’s bag filled her eyes, she awakened to find the sunlight streaming into the room. Later in 1994, when Ducornet and Nancy Joyce Peters visited Federigo II Gonzaga’s Palazzo del Te in Mantua, they were amazed to find the alchemical ceiling of her dream, painted by Giulio Romano. Equally surprising to Ducornet was the discovery that the portrait of Gonzaga mirrored exactly the face of her own father. [28]
In the short story, the narrator is Baron Munodi’s descendent. He is fascinated by the appearance of black and white colors in nature, as in the patterns of piebald crows. These two colors symbolize two major alchemical stages of Nigredo, and Albedo, which represent the putrefaction (blackness) and purification (whiteness) of primal matter. The night after a young albino boy Gustavo’s first glimpse of the miraculous ceiling, his father is murdered and the arsonist monks of the Inquisition incinerate the ceiling and its artists. The narrator deciphers the ape’s death as a symbol of the loss of Eden. The lost alchemical mysteries may have held the only key to its regeneration.
All of her novels and much of her short fiction [29] contain alchemical imagery, including the Great Work’s planetary rulers: suns, moons and planets, referenced often by their related metals: quicksilver (Mercury), lead (Saturn), tin (Jupiter), copper (Venus) iron (Mars), silver (Moon), and gold (Sun). There are references to alchemy’s masculine and feminine polarities—sulphur and mercury, the sun and the moon—and to the many variations of their sexual fusion within the alembic vessel. The colors of alchemy’s major stages often appear—a black armoire, white milk and red stones (Nigredo, Albedo and Rubedo, (redness), the stage of passion, sexuality and fusion. Like the glass alembic, there are glass spheres, glass photographic plates and broken glass. Reptiles of all sorts, and the color green, symbolize primal matter and they appear as turtles, frogs, serpents, lizards and iguanas. The Cosmic Egg, or the Philosopher’s Egg, is the vessel in which the work of creation begins. Eggs are everywhere: dragonflies laying eggs in a dish of water, Cosima cooking a six egg flan, or the imagined eggs of a million birds. One character, Cûcla from Entering Fire (33), draws on her thigh the alchemical Ouroboros, a snake or dragon biting its tail to symbolize eternity and the cyclic nature of the work. There are also many stones because the initiate must learn that the “Stone of the Philosopher” (primal matter) and the “Philosopher’s Stone” (the goal of the work) are one. The process begins with primal matter and lead, the dense chaotic metal of Saturn: “’We are creatures of lead,’ Fogginius repeated more often than necessary, ‘and drunk on it.’” [30] In these narratives, characters often undertake a journey to understand the mysteries of creation and to find the lost path back to Paradise. She has stated, “Gold and Enlightenment are a simultaneous phenomenon; the philosopher’s stone and the Grail are one.” [31] Only a few achieve enlightenment in a process of evolution that begins with the earth. So, perhaps it was appropriate that when Ducornet began her first novel, she was working as a studio potter to support her writing, and it was with the Earth, the Adamic clay, that the series began.
