Deed Of Stone

On today’s run around the top of the hill, I see the word ‘alchemy’ staked to the ground on a stick. It’s a real estate sign. Why would a real estate company give itself the name of ‘alchemy’? What connection exists between the practice of alchemy and the practice of real estate? “Real estate is the practice of law regardless of jurisdiction dealing with matters relating to ownership and rights in real property including but not limited to the examination of titles, real estate conveyances and other transfers, leases, sales and other transactions involving real estate, condominiums, cooperatives, property owners associations and planned developments, internal ownership and external ownership.” Alchemy is “the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metals into gold or to find a universal elixir.” I’m trying to see some relationship here. I’m not seeing it. Real estate is essentially concerned with ownership, and there is little, if any, mention of ownership in the annals and alembics of alchemy. House flipping – “property that a real estate investor buys, fixes up, and then sells too another buyer at a higher price than they paid for it,” is a form of transmutation. But this would be a very shallow analogy, if I were to try in earnest to assemble one. Alchemy is transcendent. Real estate is not. Alchemists seek the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance with the power to change any metal into gold or silver, cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely. Its discovery was the supreme object of alchemy. A Jungian interpretation would cast the philosopher’s stone more symbolically, as representing the transformation of the psyche, a guide to the depths of the unknown. The Philosopher’s Stone is the alchemist’s grail, a quest for self-realization, for becoming whole or holy. It is difficult to look for a similar symbology in real estate. Ownership is exclusion. You exclude others from the private enjoyment of what you own. You can share it if you choose, but the principle is the same. It is exclusionary. Alchemy is a holistic perspective, an ongoing process of synthesis, of bringing opposites together and achieving a state of equilibrium. It is a private journey, but there is no intent to exclude for the sake of exclusion, for enjoying the exclusive use of things. This is an unnatural position to take in a universe whose dynamic is one of constant interplay. So why would someone choose to name a real estate company with a term that has grown somewhat antiquated? It’s curious. Facts have a way of compelling recognition of themselves and may also contain a perception of contraries such as precipitates a fomenting agitation, and bubbles frantically, seeking distillation. It’s unlikely I’ll find the right solution, but it doesn’t matter. The fun is in bringing two unlike things together in a way that might make sense, or grow into an endless reverie of incongruous vocabularies, hoping something might emerge, an emulsion in which every sort of confusion is revealed within us, having an effect on us like magic.