On academia

Or, The Glare of an Eye. I repost this, an old piece, in succinct articulation of doubt, and in lieu of immediate new material, which present business and sudden urgent thoughts prevent me from construing.

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Whan we been there as we shul exercise
Oure elvysshe craft, we semen wonder wise,
Oure termes been so clergial and so queynte.
I blowe the fir til that myn herte feynte.

— Geoffrey Chaucer, 'The Canon's Yeoman's Tale' (c. 1385-1400)

SURLY. Rather than I'll be brayed, sir, I'll believe
That Alchemy is a pretty kind of game,
Somewhat like tricks o' the cards, to cheat a man
With charming.

SUBTLE. Sir?

SURLY. What else are all your terms,
Whereon no one of your writers 'grees with other?

. . . SUBTLE. And all these named,
Intending but one thing; which art our writers
Used to obscure their art.

— Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1610), Act 2 Scene 1.

Each passage adjuts a long list of alchemical terminology. Chaucer mentions orpiment, sublimed mercury, litharge (lead monoxide), viols, crosslets, descensories, cucurbites and alembics, arsenic, sal armoniac, agrimony, valerian, calcination, albification, and so on; Jonson lists lac virginis, chrysosperm, mercury, 'oil of height', 'tree of life', marchesite, magnesia, tutty (zinc oxide), and the wonderful nonsense-sequence of 'lato, azoch, zernich, chibrit, heautarit'. Each, also, mentions candidates for the mysterious prima materia disputed by alchemists:

Unslekked lym, chalk, and gleyre of an ey,
Poudres diverse, asshes, donge, pisse, and cley (Chaucer)

With all your broths, your menstrues, and materials
Of piss and egg-shells, women's terms, man's blood,
Hair o' the head, burnt clouts, chalk, merds, and clay (Jonson)

We see here that Jonson follows Chaucer's list, with greater glee for the grotesque; he gives not eggwhite ('gleyre of an ey') but eggshells, not just donge (merds) but menstrues, also called 'women's terms'. That last word is interesting though, referring not just to the terms of the female period, and by metonymy the catamenia (OED sense 7b), but also playing on Surly's "What else are all your terms", the sense echoing the "termes. . . so clergial and so queynte" in Chaucer. The words and language of woman (as opposed to the jargon of the male alchemists themselves) are just like all the other filth and detritus postulated as the ultimate substance of the Philosopher's Stone. In both passages the search for gold remains fetishistic, gathering as materials the unwanted elements of the human body, like a man who retains women's fingernail-clippings for sexual arousal.

And all of this is just a 'pretty kind of game', a free play with signs—signs which are material (bodily refuse) and those which are verbal (terms). The alchemists' jargon makes them appear wise, as it is used to obscure what they are really doing; but even worse, even the professionals cannot agree on the meanings of these terms among themselves. They are left blowing at the athanor-fire until their hertes feynte with exhaustion, achieving nothing but the deception of others, and the accumulation of dross.