Gold in the ore

Into the metallic universe

I’ve had metal on the brain for weeks. Hephaestus hunched over his workbench, striking iron with iron; gel capsules of alkaline earth, a remedy for sleep; silver threads woven through a men’s shirt, flimsy for February, seems to be the only thing he owns. At home I watch videos about Das Rheingold, try to catch the river magic. There’s a shimmer that opens a story that ends with a rainbow.

Now the shirt is a leitmotif. I make these observations on Thursdays and Saturdays. Sallow skin, limp hair, cat grin, that button-down, thin lines of light that offset the general impression. The threads fold into shadows that hide his body’s proper expanse. The grin is what lasts, it travels further than the rest of him. Into some unswept corner of my thoughts.

Joshua Ramey says the nonorganic life of life is metal. Metal means chromaticity: variation without biological agency, a confound to insemination and flowering. It’s a higher form of difference. Mostly we render it in art, and most people need tools for it. I can play “Lilac Wine” on the piano but I can’t sing it, my throat’s too tight. I only draw with gray pencils and I can’t wear color comfortably. These things make me east coast, but the songs I really love — the ones that mean so much to me that I can barely stand to hear them — those draw my mind west, where monochrome doesn’t look especially smart. According to the Chinese elemental system, west is metal’s cardinal direction.

The sterling rendition belongs to Nina Simone. She really gives you the scent. Lilac wine is aromatic, blended notes, illicit exploits in sweating hothouses. When she says “heady,” she means it sends you out of your human head. It speaks of something incommensurate with natural life, the spirit-husband incarnate in herbal alloys, the taste that tricks the tongue, a love that circles the void. Lilac wine is metallic.

Once he told me about a certain antique thermometer. His cat knocked it off the fireplace mantle, mercury spilled onto the floor, shattered glass everywhere. In the twentieth century, we learned how to protect ourselves from dangerous metals. Today we inhale ketamine for the healing power of nothingness, to forget our names. Some people call that a party.

Metallurgy was Byung-Chul Han’s first job. This was before he left Seoul for Berlin. His childhood home nearly killed him, there was a chemical explosion. Philosophy won’t end your earthly life, but it is a commitment to psychic exile. Once he was in Germany, he lied to his father, said he was still on the technician’s path.

Metal lends tone and lambency to the organs of perception. It gives them a celestial body, makes them ring. In the Chinese elemental system (basically cosmology), metal is associated with grief. This is not the same thing as depression. Grief is virtuous, it’s got an object, it’s a metabolic process. As a matter of definition, it doesn’t stagnate.

Metal orients sadness. It clears a path so that the feelings can move. You must believe that something’s on the other side. Reflective surfaces don’t hold onto anything, and if you want to be metal, you have to make the tradeoff: blood for silver, the receiving earth for mercury’s endless travels. That’s how you start to change.