Prague, late 16th century
Rudolf II’s Prague was a city organized around the belief that the world’s hidden laws could be discovered through sustained, systematic investigation of matter. The alchemists were wrong about the chemistry: base metal cannot be transmuted into gold by any process available to them. But they were right about something more important: that the world has laws, that those laws can be investigated, that investigation produces knowledge, and that knowledge can be used.
I spent time in Prague during this period and what I found there was the most concentrated community of genuine investigators I had encountered since the Medici library in Florence. They were investigating the wrong things with the wrong tools, but the spirit of investigation, the willingness to be wrong, the commitment to checking their conclusions against observation, was real and valuable.
What the alchemists understood, and what I have carried from that period forward, is that transformation requires fire. Not metaphorically: literally. The process of changing one thing into another requires heat, dissolution, the reduction of the original form to its components before the recombination into something new can happen. The Geometry of Ruin documents both the fire and what it makes possible. The collapse is not the end. It is the dissolution that precedes recombination. What emerges from the ashes will not be what went in. That is the promise. May 22.