There is a book written in 1982 about a nameless man who “hires” a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea.  While the woman is skilled in sexual matters, he has another motive: he wants to learn to love. “It isn’t a matter of will,” she tells him.  A review in the French newspaper Le Monde stated, “the whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to [the author’s] unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning.” The book is entitled Malady of Death, its author, Marguerite Duras.

Jon Leon’s debut collection differs in tone and genre, yet the reverberation from Duras’s novel is echoed, most obviously, in the title of Leon’s work, The Malady of the Century, which traces the sexual and intellectual escapades of an unnamed narrator, and embodies the collective angst and wonder of a generation reared by the Internet and mass media.  Like the nouveau roman, Leon writes of banalities and streaks them with disarming clichés. The action is described with cinematic gleam, snapshots in prose which describe sexual and social encounters with a pictorial sophistication often tinged by voyeurism and violence:

                                                         DEL RIO

    In Chinatown we were wild heart.  The dumb sickness of a death.  Janácek.
    Life was so senseless in the boring time.  Mostly I was in a labyrinth of
    icicle pills.  The sheepish breasts I pressed my cock between.  The way it
    spurted languidly toward the Tenderloin.  I was so crack. 

Leon is at once a prolific and penurious.  The author of  Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta (Content, 2011), The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar, 2009), Hit Wave (Kitchen Press, 2008), Alexandra (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008), he also self-published The Artists Editions: 2006-2010, which include a number of limited edition chapbooks.  Yet in an 2011 interview in a Swiss magazine, Novembre, he stated that he quit writing.  When the interviewer asked him “Can an ex-poet still write poetry?” He answered, “Sure.” Characters, the titles of his previous collections (Hit Wave, Drain You), locations (California, New York, North Carolina) and hotel rooms recur consistently in Leon’s work and generate an aura of autobiography while adding an ephemeral patina to the poems.  Yet the works seem only tangentially autobiographical, as if the author is deliberately attempting to create a fictive image of himself through his protagonist by interspersing public and private narratives.  This complexity of representation works best in the aptly titled section of the book “Mirage” and the last portion of the collection, “White Girls,” where the narrator describes his experiences in a liberated explosion of brilliant technicolour:

    To meet you at the place in the city when we haven’t eaten in many days and        are suddenly aware that the light is changing and the world is changing and         ever our own faces seem to have changed.  Looking at each other looking
    in the mirror thinking about how we look when we are looking at each other.          Doing nothing because we want to do everything.  Like we are in biographies      of great artists.  Like you just died in my arms tonight.  (from “Lisbons”)

Like Duras, Leon’s poems are often narcissistic meditations on erotic love, yet beneath the surface lies a devotion to the female body which borders on objectification.  The section “Right Now the Music and the Life Rule” features fifteen prose blocks which mostly begin with a woman’s name and a description: “Kelly’s tits look very natural when she is wearing only a necklace and a heart panty,” “Darla is wearing blue lipstick,” “Mischa Barton is for bebe.”  This heated mix of portraits explore aspects of a world increasingly experienced by images.  Reading these works reminded me of artists such as Richard Prince or Sanja Ivekovic, who use magazines and photography to dissect conceptions ingrained in society, especially by consumerism and the media.  In a similar manner, Leon juxtaposes his gaze(through writing) on photos culled from fashion magazines or the Internet.   These poems are not about women; they are about pictures of women and the men who look at them.  Yet this does not detract from the sensuality of the writing; the poems often elicit equal repulsion and seduction, in much the same vein as a glossy soft porn full page ad in Purple Magazine:

    Anonymous Missoni girl is attractive and looks like Vitti or someone. 
    Her hair is garage.  The ruby backdrop coalesces with the auto vehicles
    below my window.  Pretty much this one is another 10.  She is like
    Antonioni at his best and is only wearing one item of clothing... 
                                        (from "Right Now the Music and the Life Rule")

Though Leon’s characters are sopping in drug-fueled soirées, champagne and penny stocks, there is an inherent aura of breakability in the men and women, an incessant longing that is often manifested in voyeurism and exaggerating depictions of virility:

Two girls I knew, one a painted and one an obese seductress, began fingering one another in my bedroom the night of the Southcoast Soiree.  I had Keystone remove them from the premises.  From the boudoir I could hear my name. I allowed them   back into the pool party under the condition they perform atop a float in the water for all to view and possibly participate. Several of my distinguished guests penetrated the couple.  I stood by and watched with benign curiosity.   (from "Hit Wave")

The poems often have the home-alone quality of glorified nostalgia, sometimes switching back and forth between tenses, personas and roles as liquidly as a call girl in costume.  The literary manner of these suave, concatenated poems is straightforward; the scenes are like quickies, intense and evanescent.  At his best, Leon is an elegant and dirty provocateur; at his worst, like an ad writer for Urban Outfitters.  He is skilled in summoning up scenes that could take place in Château Marmont or the Standard Hotel or in anybody’s fantasies: a sultry evening in a tub with five girls, smoking Cubans on the piazza, “driving around in a red car through a bunch of palm trees.”  His poems, which massage the lyric form until they become creatures which are difficult to imitate, open up a space in contemporary poetry which caters to the media-fed, fashion-fueled intelligentsia, which to a certain extent, includes us all.  The demands of consciousness which Leon places on his readers is high. His fidelity to high fashion and high art is one of the hallmarks of a Twenty-first century artist, contrasting with the narcissism and dazed numbness which dance simultaneously, yet elegantly, on the same page. ~JMB

“Partyknife” exists as an amalgamation of unspecific bands relevant to that pre-famous, party-playing, hipster city scene. Yes, there is sex: “I ejaculate into a sock and give it to Chinese people to wash”.  Yes, there is urinating: “Right now I have to pee. We are not in crisis mode yet, / but it infuses my every thought”. Yes, there is drinking: “I’m the Jesus of making out with girls drunk”; and drugs: “Adderall is doing such amazing work in me, / I have little time to figure it out”.  And, of course, there are the writers: “There were three writers at a Christmas party / in Brooklyn, and they were talking about / another writer.”

It may be difficult for the reader to see through the appearances of sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll, but the background din of emotional toil that emanates from the poems’ more rewarding lines supplies the reader with an exceptional incentive: a remastered or remixed social fatalism that possesses hinted-at determination for self-preservation. Regarding the aftermath of love-lost at the heart of the volume, Magers writes, “Welling up in my hands are emotions, / and I awakened in her wake, / and I almost saw heaven then.” Conclusively determining whether the “heaven” is ironic or not broadens the poem’s reading by denying a clear reckoning of severity. And it’s something for which Magers should be thanked, for art shouldn’t be pandering, it should take risks, and only through close inspection should a work of art’s rewards be afforded those willing. The oscillating tonalities and dictions fashioned in Partyknife make for a beautifully complex work of emotion and relevance and take to task contemporary poetry’s uncertain direction. With so much weak irony and self-reference establishing poetry’s new foundations, Magers’s work demonstrates that there can be more if done so with a social intelligence and a deep understanding of poetry’s aesthetics.

There is an air to Dan Magers’s first collection that many will relate to but few will have experienced. The subject matter shouldn’t be read superficially, which would exclude the deep intelligence throughout the lyrics. New apogees of anxiety, excess, loss, and nihilism are pursued in Partyknife, conveyed artfully by the author for the sake of Art’s—and by proxy, society’s—vitality. What threads the superficial abstracts together is a very particular desire. By the laws of nature, society and the individual are in a constant struggle or desire against disorder; the universe dwindles to the endgame of entropy, and nothing can be done to stop it. In the twentieth-century, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, Artaud, et al explored what that endgame might look like when experienced from within its vacuum, a kind of cenophobia. Their art not only tackled it as subject matter but as parameters for aesthetics, regardless the attempts made to wiggle away from Aristotle’s edicts without falling into the nothingness of Dadaism. It can be done and done successfully as they proved, yet their successes also proved nihilism difficult to refashion in new generations, and society has yet to see the nihilism—in subject and aesthetics—exemplified by mid-twentieth century artists. The nihilism of Partyknife may be translated as a deepening angst relative to the new century for all intents, and in rupturing the gentle balance between order and disorder.  The art of Partyknife exemplifies an aesthetically complete and humanly flawed persona lowered into the limbo where, “Everything I hated has become my life now. / By which I mean how happy I am.”

The persona in these poems owns its (his) existential illiteracy, which is to say Magers’s control over the tone and poetic line is consistent and dramatic, and a great imbalance persists not in the poetry itself, but as a byproduct within the persona’s temporary inability to reconcile his changing self with the pace of the life he’s living. Juxtaposing high lyricism with relative confessionalism, the poems feel at once free flowing but exceedingly crafted and tonally never fall by way of melodrama, unless it is a self-pitying of the persona’s choosing: “I don’t want to be remembered / except as what the worst person thought of me then.”  Thus, the nature of tone in contemporary poetry, what Carl Phillips has deemed a “prevailing age of cool irony where we deny we even have woundable feelings”, as one may interpret in Magers’s poetry actually ascribes a hoodwinked seriousness about the milieu of drinking, mixtapes, and hooking-up. It should be of little surprise that certain subject matter rarely yields great works of art, and Magers’s tackling of what may be considered off-limits content—material too pedestrian or too “low-brow”, stuff that’s already been rendered by the likes of the New York School—belies such assumptions because he is able to create a stark motivation for the content’s exploration. These are not only objective correlatives; this is also reality.

Bidart—by way of Catallus (“I hate and I love”)—is the contemporary master of versifying contradiction in one single breath: “Wanting to cease to feel—; / …my romance with Orgasm” and continues overtly: “the NO which is YES, the YES which is NO.” Whether under the influence of Bidart and other contemporaries, or the shifting attention patterns of the writers, many poets now depend too much on the grammatical construct of abrupt contradiction, which comes across as lethargic associative logic or the non sequitor. Much of the overreliance or overuse is the product of poems’ lack of apparent crafting; the usage runs the risk of feeling slapdash or too insular. But like Bidart’s, the non sequitor in Magers’s poems is validated by the strength of his poetic line, which rummages through the diction to manifest highly rhythmic meters:

                        Checking every LES building’s door

                        to smuggle in for some rooftop drinking.

                        Rob, will you be my dad?

                        I’ve lived in New Orleans, I’ve KNOWN vampires.

                        If I leapt back, do you think I could fly?

                        New Year’s Eve fireworks…an uphill run along the campus,

                        the dorm way out above, the frozen lake below.

 

                        Hip-checking girls along 3rd Avenue,

                        and I laughed at your rape jokes until I got the hiccups;

                        asked by paramedics what my name is

                        in a bagel place, tiny as shit, busy as fuck.

The integrity of this poem’s cohesion is not only in the indirect rhythm but in how the poem’s context is established by the italicized lines, which act to emulate the shaky foundation of reality and perception. The image of fireworks, exploding in the sky as the observer runs, is at the poem’s heart; the moment in the poem at which the poem pivots and descends into memory and contingent thinking.  Something about the experience of drunkenly walking a late and bustling New York City has evoked the past. Then, the writing erupts back into the sensual world, which is jarring and sudden and uncomfortably physical, much like the writing itself. Equilibrium is refused the narrator as well as the reader. Caesuras are manipulated to better offset a smooth reading. At these abrupt pauses, the poem sidesteps, only to sidestep again in subsequent clauses, both pushing and pulling the reader away from and into its world. In a nutshell, this tactic should always be the purpose of the non sequitor, and it’s employed masterfully over and over and in varying degrees in Partyknife. Earlier in the book, the persona is with a girl he’s “fucking” and she’s introducing him to her friends:

                        I have no idea what these kids are talking about.

                        Lacan and baby food.

Disequilibrium is manifested in the content of the characters’ speech. Magers creates the purpose for his aesthetic, and his aesthetic creates his purpose for his voice. Like the Cubists, the aesthetic principles must adhere to the changing perceptions of a fracturing world in some attempt to overlay order about the chaos. It all culminates in Partyknife in a moment of wayward Hegelian dialectic, the persona reaching for a defining meaning inherent in such schizophrenic unbalancing:

                        And when does I’m doing it for experience

                        become the experience itself?

                        I take all of it, and I really can’t have any of it.

                        From nothing to something to nothing is a soul.

                        And everything else is matter.

It takes intelligence and bravery to infuse such audacious lyrics with a bedridden existential anxiety and to have it mean something as a work of art, ultimately. The antipodal natures of lyricism and super-contemporary idioms (crass language, internet-speak, for example) may not mix well for every reader, but the authenticity of voice and emotional resonance hold the poems in Partyknife together inventively. They are in that Goldilocks Zone—not too poetic, not too coarse; not too coy, not too fearless. Rosanna Warren wrote of Melville, “perhaps it is in meeting one’s native sorrow that one ultimately wrests one’s own being into shape.” It’s the shaping into being that can be translated into art. To this notion should be added Hayden’s ars poetica: “All art is pain / suffered and outlived.” For however much the content may appear to detract from the overall arc of Magers’s ars poetica, the voice he has created acts as a perfect counterbalance to the anxious self-appraisals and literal screamings which cycle through the persona’s experiences on a minute-to-minute basis. The unnamed Everyman of Partyknife lives a life of few, if any, heroics, and he is only human, at this particular moment in this particular age. Magers’s work deftly embodies the time in which it is written and at the same time refracts the collective cynicism of a well-worn society aloof and indifferent to its own inability to question the complexities of ontology, and maybe even indifferent collectively to the great utility of art. Not only is Magers capable of questioning such complexities without moralizing or denouncing, he is capable of answering them with the “being-into-shape” of Partyknife, which is the endurance of the art and artist in the face of the transitory, of fragile history—personal or otherwise.

                        Lucid dreams and near-death experiences

                        become so serious. A night

                        I wanted changed will have forgotten

                        how to, leaving only that I wanted something else.
~RS

In “Blind Contour,” a poem toward the middle of Handiwork, Amaranth Borsuk’s first collection of poems, the author addresses the hand as its own entity, detached from the body; she discusses its limitations, both emotional and physical. Set in three stanzas with lines that overrun, “Blind Contour” is the on in the series, separated by poems in between them, all focused on the disembodied hand. These hand poems share a similar form, set in prose blocks but slightly offset from each other; they show off Borsuk’s sensitivity to positioning poems on the page.  There is a fourth poem entitled “Show Of Hands,” a wonderful work in which Borsuk arranges words in an alphabetical list of phrases that use the word “hand” or “hands,” leaving space for where the word fits, i.e. “got her         dirty,” and a fifth, "Two Rams And Goat With Torso And Sheaves Of Wheat," both of which address the issue of body and the separation of the hand. The series of hand poems features an exacting, matter-of-fact language and tone, wonderfully and weirdly moving. She begins "Blind Contour" with:

            “The hand can send no messages. Cut off from its
            operator,
            it squirrels sensation away, trusts surface, recalls
            training.”

Thus isolated, the poem continues as the second stanza begins:

            “The Hand has its own phobias to exploit: undesired
            touching,
            short shackling, dogs.”

Emotionally exposed, the third and final stanza begins:

            “The hand knows all about manipulation. mainly, it’s
            pained
            by the sight of its tools in less skilled arms.”

“Blind Contour” and its sister works stand out within a collection of poems that are for the most part explicitly personal, intuitive and looser;  perhaps these surprisingly touching, subtly violent poems are meant to be a parable for the collection as a whole. In the third hand poem, “Character Anatomy,” Borsuk writes: “words so readily betray things they’re meant/ to represent.// Arms broken, tissue mangled, the hand was ready to try the body’s cant: a disappearing text, past and future pressed until skin’s plies. Grammar’s ultimate loss// Take take take take take--that’s how the body ensures its own survival.”

                                                                *

“It’s going/ to take me/ a while to get through/ all this salt.”

In the notes to the collection, Borsuk mentions that the book is dedicated to her grandmother, “whose unpublished autobiographical stories illuminate it. The bracketed poems attempt to write through, and into, the gaps of this history.” These few lines are aptly reflective of the spirit of the whole book - they are  included to explain, to offer a background.  But upon further examination, they broach more questions than the ones they answer. When Borsuk describes her grandmother’s stories as “unpublished,” what is the implication behind the inclusion of that word? Perhaps Borsuk is investigating the distance between “unpublished” and “published” works, something like the distance between the storytelling as written word and storytelling as oral tradition. Is there more weight given to something that has been published? Which belongs to us more within the context of history?  The ownership of history seems intriguing in its vagueness.

For a reader, encountering excessive notes or explanations can become burdensome. Some notes are, of course, ethical and necessary—attributions, for example. Some are flourishes, where a reader can be privy to insight behind the creation or production of the poem, and open a direct line to the author himself. Borsuk’s notes are succinct and quiet, certainly not overwhelming the poems, and in the best way, not necessary to enjoying Handiwork.  Borsuk’s notes do not have a sense of hand-holding because she manages, through her poetry, to create the sense of writing with and through history. The poems themselves evoke the conversation across generations and culture; the notes simply give a proper noun, a name, for the reader to recognize.

                                                                *

Borsuk’s poems are extremely attractive.  Almost every poem is visually satisfying—stimulating but balanced, and never frantic despite its movement across the page. Borsuk clearly exerts a careful hand in organizing her poems. As much as the collection is brought together thematically by the metaphor and recurring image of salt, it is also brought together by the recurring forms of the poems within it. Loosely, Borsuk’s poems (excluding the long poem at the end of the book) fall within the following forms:

In his introduction, Hoover spends time discussing the “salt gemetria” form, a six-line form that Borsuk invents through combining “the Jewish practice of gemetria, which assigns numerical value to a letter, word, or phrase,” and the numbers behind the salt’s value on the periodic table. Hoover likens the salt gemetria to Sapphic fragments, and from Borsuk’s pair of lovely phrased hyphenations, ”wine-orchid” and “bone-orchid,” of two different titles, to her extensive use of brackets, it is difficult not to draw a lineage between the poems in Handiwork and epic poetry. (In particular, after Anne Carson’s translations of Sapphic fragments in which she used [brackets] to indicate absence, or where the pages broke.) There are poems entitled “History of Myth,” “History of Song,” “History of Sand.” This nod toward Greek poetic storytelling lends the collection a cohesiveness, a sense of storytelling and tradition, an engagement of history both personal and cultural.

The success of the salt gemetrias as a form within the context of the collection is that it possesses, in parts, aspects of the other forms that Borsuk utilizes. Its movement across the page are echoed in the bracket poems and the works with shifting lines, its opening within lines are echoed with the poems that have the “spine of white space,” its six-line compactness are like the relief of the prose blocks.

“Such structures,” Hoover writes, “constitute ‘secret’ formal and thematic knowledge and seem to work on both a horizontal level of literary consciousness and a vertical level of cultural or deep, consciousness.” It’s true that Handiwork maintains a mysterious secretiveness in its highly structured formulation. In Handiwork, Borsuk gives her readers image-rich but sparsely lyrical language imbued with the lightness of possibility. With just the poem titles like, “In Which Things That Hurt Us Are Stored For Winter,” “The Smell of Rain On Surfaces,” “Lay Your Gaping Switchblade Back,” she lays out stories without telling them explicitly, giving the reader the sense of having access but not complete access, leaving it up to the reader how much and what he or she wants to discover in each reading, but ensuring that each time, something new will be unearthed, showing that when it comes to language, the secrets can be endless. ~AVW

“…entre ces deux abîmes de l'infini et du néant…”

                                                —Pascal

The Modernists earned their right to break tradition first by evoking tradition, then finding it unsatisfactory for the age in which they were writing. Postmodernists stretched the compulsion back onto themselves and bore the confession. Traversing the schizophrenia of styles and movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, a dominant attention has been paid to varying the incarnations of language for the writer to convey a more subjective impression of reality. For many writers, good writing is not just showing, but the telling as well, all of which crystallizes only in hindsight. Approaching Ariana Reines’s poetry requires a willing sympathy for her forbears. If the reader understands the catalogue of histories and canons that goes into her writing, it is obvious she has earned her language. Her pronouncements on excrement and blatant sexuality are wonderfully French and Symbolist, and she has appropriated such variances on this particular vocabulary and theme better than most American poets writing today. The limits of language should not be withheld for the sanctity of what constitutes a poem or Poetry, thus far a notion which represents the backbone to her linguistic approaches. A great and confident intelligence excites the work of Ariana Reines. Turning to Baudelaire, she finds a voice decrying a strain of decadence that overshadows Democracy, Capitalism, Love, Desire; in the French theorists of the twentieth-century, she finds distrust in what an author really is and the semblances between art and reality. On a fundamental level, her work gratifyingly and aggressively scrutinizes what the art of writing ultimately is. Reines has extended Confessionalism into a new realm.

 But the aesthetic struggles between an all or a nothing—infinity and nothingness—symbolically bear the drawbacks inherent in Mercury. An opportunistic compulsion to overextend allows Reines the room to manufacture a poetic tome regardless the necessity in relation to the subject of poetry’s mystical properties. As the logic goes: if anything can be art, then a nothing can be art; therefore, as mathematics may be applied to logic, anything equaling art is mathematically unsound. This all-inclusiveness is ultimately unrealized for the purposes of the poetry in Mercury, if for no other reason than the outdated idea of the alchemical processes that may resound within Poetry’s aesthetic (Rimbaud’s aesthetic comes to mind).  She has the knack of extending a dominating metaphor over the course of long works in order to establish a frame of reference, and the idea only reinforces a desire in Mercury to have the poetry viewed as this mystical reaching. It is a noble attempt however unrealized, for statements themselves do not stand in for artistic merit, as Reines writes in the section “Save the World”: “Poetry’s not made of words.” May it be as such; may it even be irony on the poet’s part within these pages to say so, yet the latter assumption will come as interpretation only through a subjective reading. Overall, the reader will see attempts at poetry made up of words rather than the intended objective.

Some places throughout the volume fall flat due to a sense of incompletion or, conversely, excess. The excessive poems dilute a compelling reading. Much of the work in this book could have been left out, and a slimmer volume of definitive lyrics would have made for a stronger volume. Reines is trusted as a writer thanks to her previous writing; her previous work, especially in The Cow, is remarkable for illustrating a deep understanding of the workings of language and how linguistic perception is appropriated by the conscious mind. Yet in Mercury, a little poem like “Gold,” which states in its entirety, “I want the gold / shimmer shimmer shimmer shimmer shimmer,” denies the reader a sense of necessity however potentially humorous its reach. Whenever one reads a line of repetitious dactylic pentameter as this, maybe King Lear comes to mind (“Never, never, never, never, never”), but little evidence supports the allusion. Without proper support, such an example distracts the poetry away from a central arc of the book’s aesthetic especially since the work tends to encompass many styles (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Lyric, Spoken, Dada, Narrative, Confession) and sources (email, chat, conscious writing, stream-of-conscious writing).

The impulse of Mercury is a logical and welcomed progression from her two previous works, The Cow and Coeur de Lion. Quite a few lyrics in Mercury exude the excellence represented in her other books. In “Arena,” Reines writes:

                        I’ve swept the floor
                        I’ve shaven

                        All the wood and leaves off the bed
                        Brackish semen fills the sky

                        And dazed bees browse my drooping
                        Curls

Though the poem takes a jarring turn in the subsequent lines (“Look asshole. I know exactly who you are…”), the ability to convert commonplace occurrences as simple as cleaning to a pastoral quality, with conscious attention to a beautifully rearguard vocabulary, assonance and alliteration, proves Reines’s capabilities. Considering the book’s epigraph which quotes Thomas Vaughan (“…the Chaos is generated out of a certain water”), and the understanding that the “certain water” is the element of Mercury, the conclusions drawn from such tension between the pastoral and the more urban/technological elements of contemporary society (emails, movies, music, etc.) help to augment the supposition between infinity and nothingness. The poem progresses in a healthy direction, furthering the tension between alchemy and empiricism by way of poetry and language. In a poem concerning a grandmother, “Bain Marie,” Reines writes:

                       Wind hisses through her boxwood

                       And all the white and all the black
                       Cherries are twins on her trees.

                       Fat carp fill her pond and bullfrogs
                       Groan around it all night long.

                        When she says the word
                        Cherry I see

                        The red bunions on her two feet describing
                        Every angle of her body in my mind’s eye.

Again, here the reader is afforded a glimpse of one of Reines’s best poems. Whereas in her previous volumes, such divergent qualities of the lyric proved successful due to the condensation of the final product, in a nearly 250-page collection of verse the “chaos” of which Thomas Vaughan wrote becomes too prevailing and slipshod of an occurrence. Vaughan’s epigraph continues: “The water [mercury] hath all in it that is necessarie to the perfection of the work, without any Extrinsecall Addition.” Implicit in his closing statement is that no additions are necessary, but subtractions and dissections may be. Otherwise, the formlessness of such a mysterious element as mercury, and alchemy or the spiritual as a whole, will yield incomplete results. ~RS