Hermes sez: As long as you are trying to make gold, you will never make gold.
I’m anxious to get into the actual act of working with metals, and I’ve begun to shoot photos to use in an article explaining how to use a jeweler’s saw (which should be the next topic), but right now I am waiting for my daughter to get out of dance class, I have time to kill, and so I’m going to ramble on about something else.
I want to introduce you to my friend, my teacher, and my animal familiar - Old Mr. Jenkins, the official studio cat of Splendid Fish Studio!
Alchemists, like a lot of other magical folk, tend to have animal familiars. As a general rule, my esoteric cohorts prefer toads. The toad represents the point at which inanimate matter begins to turn animate (because the toad is cold and looks like a clod of dirt, but isn’t), kind of like Frankenstein’s monster, but in a good way.
So, to apply the symbol, the point at which your idea begins to take shape, when it moves from being a vague, formless thing in your head and turns into something you can actually visualize, is the toad. Then, you’ve got a toad in your head. Or, if you are working on a complicated project where you need to make several parts individually, the point at which you begin to put them together and can see the thing you are making take shape right there in your hands, is the toad. You’re holding a toad.
But I, Corbin, have never been very good at following the rules, and I thumb my nose at tradition, so I have a cat. My familiar has turned out to be a very good teacher. I don’t mean that he whispers secrets in my ear at night, or that he has some deep knowledge from the edge of time which he has revealed to me through a series of signs and wonders. He’s taught me things in a very mundane way.
To understand what and how Old Mr. Jenkins has taught, I have to tell you something about his life story.
I live out in the country. It sometimes comes to pass that people who decide they do not want a pet will take the animal out into my neighborhood and dump it. When this happens, the animal sometimes ends up in my garage. We’ve acquired more than one cat this way.
There was a black female cat living in the garage a few years ago, and she ended up pregnant, had a litter and eventually got hit by a car. Four of the litter got promotions to the inside of the house, the rest found homes with friends.
After mom cat’s demise and our adoption of the kittens, her paramour moved into the garage. He was an old tomcat who had seen better years. His fur was rank and matted, he had a voice that could only be described as “God freakin’ awful,” his ears were tattered, torn, and ragged from frostbite, and he had cataracts on his eyes which gave a look much like Satan on acid.
Every time we went outside, he’d come racing toward us, screeching like a homeless schizophrenic, glaring at us with those terrible eyes (did you ever read “The Telltale Heart”?). My kids would run in terror. My wife and I avoided him, not wanting to admit that we were afraid, but also not wanting to get close enough to be touched.
It got so bad that I decided (actually, my wife decided for me) he’d have to go. I grabbed a box, collected what little courage I could find, and headed out to, hopefully, grab him quickly, stuff him in the box, and take him to the animal shelter where they’d find some way to get rid of him while I wasn’t watching.
So out I went… As I went to grab him, he attacked…
It was terrifying. There I was, already keyed up, and this monstrous demon of a cat threw itself at my legs and began to rub and purr vigorously.
Hey, wait a minute… That hardly qualifies as an attack…
Or, if it is, it must have been a love attack.
It turns out that Jenkies (he’s stone deaf and doesn’t mind being called Jenkies) has, aside from his looks, sound, and disabilities, had only one problem. He was desperately lonely. And he had a terrible need for human company.
Well, this changed everything, obviously.
How would it be possible for me to take a living thing to the pound once I’ve realized that the living thing’s greatest pleasure in life comes from loving me? How does a person do that? I know it happens, but the “how” of it escapes me entirely.
So Jenkies suddenly became a favorite of, not only me, but my wife as well. He got a nice, soft chair out in the garage to sleep on (he’s so old that he sleeps most of the time), good food every day - as much as he wants, and clean water. And when the cold weather set in, and we realized he was far too old to survive another Northern Michigan winter outdoors (three feet of snow and below zero temperatures are common), he came inside.
Jenkies is an unneutered male, and all our indoor cats are unspayed females (they all live indoors, so no kittens), so Jenkies can’t mix with the general household population (they’re all his daughters, anyways). And he’s too old to be neutered. We checked into eye surgery to fix the cataracts, but, even if we could afford it, he too old to handle the aenesthetic and would never survive. So the only place we could put him was in my basement studio, and that’s how Old Mr. Jenkins became my studio cat.
Well, Mr. Jenkins in the studio is a bit of a problem. First, he’s annoying. When I turn on the light, he usually wakes up, and instantly wants me to pick him up and pet him, for as long as he can get me to do it. He rewards me by purring like a Ferrari, and by shedding huge gobs of fur all over me (which makes my face itch, and gets in my coffee, and on everything I touch). He won’t eat until he’s been petted as much as I’m willing to do it.
And when I stop before he’s satisfied, he rubs against my legs while I’m trying to work. I constantly trip over him, or, when I’m working at the drawing board, he struggles up the chair, uses the shirt I’m wearing as a support, and gets on whatever I’m trying to work on. The studio isn’t really big enough for him and me, and sometimes I get the urge to just kick him out of the way. Instead, I waste 15, 20, 30 minutes scratching his head or brushing him…. Several times each work session (which, considering that I can only spend about 4 hours a night in the studio - when I’m lucky - is a big chunk of time).
He’s old, sometimes he misses the litter box, and I have to waste more time cleaning up. His favorite chair got moved from the garage into the studio, which meant that I had to move my soldering table in front of my accounting desk (which I can no longer use) and away from my quench bucket, which means that I have to carry red hot pieces of metal from one side of the room to the other, being careful not to drop them on Jenkens while he’s sleeping.
All in all, it makes everything I do less efficient, and more time consuming… but he’s an old cat…
This cat might be a hundred years old, for all I know. I think he once belonged to Schrodinger because, until I turn on the studio light, I’m never sure if he’s alive or dead. So far, he’s always been alive. One day the probability wave will collapse in such a way that he will be dead.
When that happens, I guess I’ll take out the chair and the litter box, and move everything in the studio back into the original design I had intended - a much more effective work environment, giving me a perfect set up for efficient work flow. I won’t be wasting time anymore, so I will be able to finish jobs quickly, and make a greater profit. I’ll be able to focus on what I’m doing without the need to push a cat out of my way constantly, so I’ll do better work. Splendid Fish Studio will become a much more efficient work environment.
But I don’t think it will be a better one. I’m going to get lonely down there on my own…
There always comes a time when the student must leave the teacher. This has to happen - it’s part of the natural order, just as every bird must leave the nest, and every child must leave the parents - but it’s still a sad time. I will miss Mr. Jenkins, my favorite teacher.
By the way, I forgot to tell you what he has taught me so far…
1. The nature of reality isn’t what you think it is. It is what it is, and the only way to know for sure what it really, really is to stop thinking you know it until you have tested it. This is why the first step in learning is to become ignorant.
2. Sometimes things are really, really bad, even for the best of us. If you are lucky, you might get through it. But don’t let it make you mean, because that might kill your future good fortune - and you.
3. Sometimes you get lucky. When that happens, take advantage of it, and enjoy it - never question your good luck. Act like it’s natural, because good luck is just as natural as is bad luck - and just as common (yesterday I found a dime in the sink!).
4. Everything which is true is learned through the study of nature. The place most people make a mistake is imagining that nature is somewhere “out there where the trees are,” but not “in here where the people are.” Everything is nature, even a cat living in a basement room, and me, and the interactions between the cat and I.
5. It is not at all uncommon for the very best things to be exactly the thing which somebody has thrown away out of ignorance of it’s true value, or in a moment of laziness, or of anger.
6. Focus, single minded determination, and efficiency are important in creating good art, but not the most important things. If it were, machines would be the consummate artists, since they have nothing going for them other than focus, single minded determination, and efficiency. In order to make good art, you have to have what, in humans, is called “humanity,” but, in animals, is called “love.”
This is why Hermes sez: As long as you are trying to make gold, you will never make gold.
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