Prima Materia

What We Bring to the Vessel

Slow conversations, without agenda have been a central part of my practice for so long now I had almost forgotten they were deliberate choice made during a difficult time when we did not know what was happening. Not slow in the sense of being short of pace, but slow in the sense that the people in them have taken the time to do the reading, taken the walks, and sat with their unease for long enough that what they bring is not raw material but already partly worked.

We do not have to have a goal when we think, thinking is an exercise in autopoiesis; an exercise worth doing for its own sake. The best conversations are ones that surface, and help complete “ideas in progress”

I have been turning this over for a while. The Athanor, as I have been using the word, is the slow furnace of alchemical practice, the kind of fire that holds at temperature for as long as the work requires. Inside the vessel sits the crucible that holds what is being prepared, the vas hermeticum, sometimes called the philosophical egg which holds the prima materia, the material being transformed. Around the athanor sit the participants.

What comes out depends, more than anything else, on what went in.

The quality of the prima materia determines what the work can become. No tool, no ally, no clever process recovers inferior material. You can run a degraded conversation through the most sophisticated machinery in the world and the answer at the end of it will still be a degraded answer, only delivered faster, with more confidence, dressed in the shape of a finished thing.

What counts as material? Three things, layered. The first is the qualities of the people in the conversation: what they have read, how long they have thought, what they care enough about to argue with. The second is the relationships between those people, and the conversational habits they have built together over time. The third is the quality of the material being drawn upon. The books, notes. and the half-formed ideas in the margins. The working papers nobody has yet finished, containing ideas that have not yet found a home.

Each of these is upstream of anything we might call a strategy, a philosophy, or an analysis. None of them is automatic, and none of them can be outsourced. We have to do the work. Thinking is a craft in itself. 

The reason this needs saying now is that we are at a moment when the temptation to skip the thinking has never been stronger. The tools have arrived that make it possible to begin with the deliverable. Type the prompt, get the document. The machinery is becoming ever better, and markets hungry for efficiency and productivity reward speed.The incentives run entirely in one direction.

The argument of this post is the opposite. The arrival of these tools is, for the practitioner who notices, an opportunity to do the work of thinking more deliberately, not less. What follows below the line is an account of what that looks like when I try it: the new old skill of stream before structure, with the inner critic out of the room, when curiosity more than profit fuels the fire and what this changes for those of us who advise.