learning alchemy | Bertram's Blog

Acquiring Knowledge

August 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it can thus drive out useless things and retain the good, for nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I certainly need to acquire more knowledge to drive out the useless things I’ve learned about how so many people are trying to destroy this country — not just the globalists and other international groups, but groups of citizens and non-citizens, politicians and judges, fraudsters and lawbreakers within our own country. Useless knowledge indeed since there’s nothing I can do so long as the elections in Colorado are pre-determined as they have been for the past couple of decades.

I’m not sure how to acquire more knowledge except by reading, and for the most part, I’ve read all the non-fiction I intend to, at least for now, anyway. I do have a small collection of alchemy books I inherited that I started to read, but they aren’t so much a history of alchemy as self-teaching books. The exercises all start the same: visualize something (that something varies from book to book). In one book, they explained how to change things: visualize your immediate surroundings down to the merest detail, change what you need, then merge the visualized world with the real world, and voila! Or presto! Or ta-da! Or whatever your preferred word is, and the world has changed.

The problem is, I can’t visualize anything. I am mentally blind. (The word for that is aphantasia.) So much for my becoming an alchemist.

There are, of course, real world ways to acquire more knowledge, mostly just by living. Recently I’ve learned that one needs a certain ruthlessness to be a gardener. For example, my petunias were getting long and leggy and producing few flowers, so I trimmed the plants way back and now they are blooming again. And I wacked the branches off an overgrown bush, so now I have an unattractive stump with lots of arms sticking out, but I can see green where new sprouts are coming up, so in another year, that bush will be small and attractive and evergreen.

Another real-life bit of knowledge I acquired (or rather reacquired) is that no matter how careful you are, there will always be some weird accident that brings you low. In my case, I had just pulled a cup of tea out of the microwave and carefully set it on the counter, but my fingers must have been entangled in the string of the tea bag because as I pulled my hand away, the bag sloshed out of the cup and onto the back of my hand. 200 degrees of heat is painful!!

I did what I always did with burns — slather it with natural vitamin E from a capsule, and when I still felt that excruciating burn, I iced it. That took away the heat enough that I felt fine. Whew! The weird thing is that it actually charred the skin. Turned it brown. Luckily, it’s healing well, even the bits that blistered, and I haven’t had any pain since those first few minutes. Even now that the charred skin is flaking off, there’s no problem. (And yes, I do know that brewing tea in a microwave is not the way it’s supposed to be brewed, but it’s a lot easier to brew one cup that way than with a kettle.)

Frankly, I can do without that sort of learning. Perhaps I ought to dig out my alchemy books again and try to see what I will never be able to see. That has to be easier than to damage oneself, however accidentally, in the name of knowledge.