I just got back from “Alchemy” a poetry reading in English which happens once a month. I am a regular attendee. It’s what keeps me writing.
Edward Kelly: He also claimed he could communicate with angels
There was one poet who introduced himself by saying he wasn’t primarily a poet, more of a historian, and he was in Prague to work on a biography of the alchemist Edward Kelly, and in particular his possible connection to William Shakespeare. I don’t know much about Edward Kelly, I first heard of him just a couple of weeks ago in a History Channel documentary about the Voinich Document, which I found fascinating. (The Voinich document is a medieval book which is written in a language that nobody has ever been able to identify – strange stuff). Anyway, Kelly worked at the court of King Rudolph II, who is one of the more interesting, and generally likeable, characters in Czech history. At a time of economic crisis, he had a huge wall built across a park in Prague just to provide employment, predating the CCC by about 350 years. He was a great patron of the arts and sciences, but he considered alchemy to be a serious science, and hired Kelly to produce gold – and threw his butt in the slammer when he couldn’t. Sexually, he was very much in the Michael Jackson/Liberace/Lewis Carroll/J.M. Barrie mold, and threw lavish parties where he would have nearly naked young boys, bodies painted silver or gold, posing on pedestals. There are plenty of pubs throughout the Czech Republic named after him.
So, I approached this gentleman, who was the very prototype of the aging hippie, and talked with him after the show. Now, there is a particular kind of conversation I love having and don’t have often enough, but tonight’s was one. It’s not just a question of intelligence, although that’s a prerequisite. No, I mean the kind of conversation that goes off on tangents, that ranges across a broad range of topics, that brings in new ideas and topics and has you looking up stuff on the internet afterwards.
We were soon joined by a couple of other people, and we talked about Kelly, John Dee, Shakespeare’s lost years, handwriting analysis,the possible beginnings of the Rosicrucians, 16th century methods of espionage, the Lunar society, James Watt and Matthew Bolt, Erasmus Darwin, the American revolution, the 30 years war, things which have been lost to history, alternative energy(particularly geothermal, one of my favorites), the life span of jokes, how the internet has changed the art of conversation, overpopulation, pollution, the prescience of science fiction and the future of the human race.
I came home feeling smarter than when I went. I wish I had conversations like that every day.
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