Associations

Since the post at reference 1, I have started to read reference 2.

So far I have finished the first three chapters covering the Southsea Bubble, a French version called the Mississippi Scheme and a Dutch version called Tulipomania, three testimonies to human greed and stupidity. I was interested to see that in all three cases various kinds of middle men rode the waves of fortune and managed to suck a good deal of real money out of it all - which it was their business to stoke up to profitable proportions. While all kinds of other men and women lost their landed estates - or at least their shirts.

Now into the rather lengthy chapter about alchemy, in some large part the quest to extract gold from baser materials. With some people worrying about what the success of the alchemists might do to the price of gold, do the value of their hoard.

From where I associate to the evergreen fascination with the way that cooking up the right kind of ores in crucibles, one is able to extract shiny metal from the most unlikely looking ingredients. A business which was strongly and understandably linked to magic.

It seems that the early moderns went from there to our own crucibles, our stomachs, where all kinds of similarly unlikely looking ingredients are turned into our flesh and blood. With stomachs thought by many to be the seat of our intelligence, rather than our brains. Reflecting in part the fact that, at that time, most people went hungry most of the time. Hunger was much more important than thought, deep or otherwise.

From where this morning, in the course of kneading up batch 488, I associated to the parallel of pouring flour into me with pouring petrol into a car. In my case, at the rate of between half a pound and a pound of flour a day.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/getting-it-wrong.html.

Reference 2: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841.