Alchemy is a sacred process that requires more than attentiveness and talent. It requires religious respect, a desire to sacrifice everything for an inner vision, and enough strength to achieve transformation. It requires the ability and courage to surrender completely to the world without submitting to it. Not everyone will be called, and even if they are called, not many will respond. Of those who respond, not all will be successful. Hopefully, there will be at least one alchemist in each generation. Everyone knew Rosalia would transform. That she was everything we could never have believed. lux Prove that she is a modern alchemist.
Rosalía has no time to hate Lucifer, her ex-lover, or her critics. She’s busy talking to Leonard Cohen, whose wound-healing meditation gave the album its name, and David Bowie, whose dolphin jumps and swims from the River Spree. lux. He hears the voices of saints, but only responds to those who can change the world with love and fiery eyes. To Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote, “I am the burning life of the divine essence. I am the flame of beauty in the fields. I shine in the waters. I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars.” Addressed to Saint Olga of Kyiv. She mourns her husband and avenges him in a bloody wedding ceremony, from which the first great East Slavic state is born. “All the stars in the sky are reflected in my hair,” Rosalía sings. early morning. “I have a thousand tongues of fire / All in my hair.”
Juliana of Norwich is a mystic who holds in her palm a small object the size of a hazelnut, symbolizing all creation. Rosalía speaks in her voice, “I fit into the world / And the world fits into me / I occupy the world / And the world occupies me.” Angel of Lux is Ziggy Stardust’s gypsy sister, an emissary sent to bring hope to Earth before the apocalypse, seduced by power and fame, and then dies in success. In the end, the two return to their planet, but death is not the end, but the final act of the process. To become lighter, you must first give up your ego. Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi. I am nothing, I am light.
In an important essay recently published in Sexto Piso, Simon Critchley writes that mysticism is an ecstatic experience that can only arise from a deep connection with the world, a transformation that leads from sin to salvation, from restlessness to rest, from misery to abundance. “Let everything happen to you,” Rilke wrote in his book. A letter to a young poet, “Beauty and Horror.” Rosalia has no time to hate anyone, because she is busy living, and gives herself to traveling the world and turning its heads into beauty. She is the mirror and catalyst of that divine process, the opposite of the automaton that milks it, digests it, and reproduces it with sinister rigidity. Artificial intelligence does not have the power to change the world. Just reduce it. Translating human experience into a collection of materials that are statistically suitable for commercial use. Rosalia can make you fall in love, she can inspire you, she can poison you, she can infuriate you, but she is in the world and has the power to change it. All I want to know is who the dementor was that decided to remove a line from the most beautiful song on the album. The one who says, “I’m a meadow made of morphine./You walk for me whenever you want.”
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