Alchemy is a sacred process that requires more than attention and talent. It requires religious reverence, the desire to sacrifice everything for an inner vision, and sufficient power to achieve transformation. It requires the ability and courage to completely surrender to the world without submitting to the world. Not everyone is called and, among those called, not many respond. Of those who respond, not all succeed. Hopefully there is an alchemist per generation. We all knew that Rosalía transforms. That she was everything we hadn’t believed until now. Lux proves that she is the alchemist of our age.
Rosalía has no time to hate Lucifer, her exes or her critics. She’s busy talking to Leonard Cohen, whose healing meditation on wounds gives the album its name, and David Bowie, whose dolphins leap out of the Spree to swim Lux. He hears the voices of the saints, but responds only to those who are capable of transforming the world with eyes of love and fire. To Hildegard of Bingen who writes “I am the burning life of the essence of God; I am the flame on the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the Sun, the Moon and the stars”. To Saint Olga of Kiev, who mourns her husband and then avenges him with a bloody wedding from whose blood the first great Eastern Slavic state will be born. “All the stars in the sky are reflected in my hair,” sings Rosalía Early morning. “I carry a thousand tongues of fire / All in my hair.”
Julian of Norwich is the mystic who holds in the palm of her hand a small thing, no bigger than a hazelnut, which symbolizes all creation. Rosalía speaks with her voice when she says: “I adapt to the world / And the world enters me / I occupy the world / And the world occupies me”. Lux’s Angel is the gypsy sister of Ziggy Stardust, the messenger sent to bring hope to Earth before the Apocalypse and who was seduced by power and fame, before dying a success. In the end the two return to the stars where they belong, but death is not the end but the final act of the process. To be light you must first give up the ego. Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi. I am nothing, I am the light.
Simon Critchley writes in his essential essay recently published by Sexto Piso that mysticism is an ecstatic experience that arises only from a profound connection with the world, a transformation that leads from sin to salvation, from restlessness to rest, from misery to fullness. “Let everything happen to you,” Rilke writes in his Letters to a young poet, “beauty and terror”. Rosalía has no time to hate anyone because she is busy living, letting the world pass through her to transform its lead into beauty. She is the mirror and catalyst of that sacred process, exactly opposite to the automatic machine that squeezes it, digests it and replicates it with sinister rigidity. Artificial intelligence does not have the power to transform the world; just to reduce it. It converts human experience into a collection of statistically appropriate materials for commercial exploitation. Rosalía can make you fall in love, she can inspire you, she can poison you and she can make you angry, but she is in the world and has the power to transform it. I just want to know who was the Dementor who decided to delete a line from the best song on the album. The one that says: “I am a meadow made of morphine. / When you want you will walk for me.”
