Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole: a Modern-Day Alchemy Book

Working for corporate America is a miserable experience. Can you escape with your soul intact? Is it possible to live a creatively realized life in corporate America? This book explores these questions with wit, insight and dazzling literary effect. Presented in the style of an illustrated modern-day alchemy book, "Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole" examines the creative process in the context of modern corporate living. Creativity, the book makes plain, is a complex alchemy of ideas and impulses rooted in the individual's unique spirit and experience, a reality fundamentally in conflict with the purposes and operational demands of corporate life. This book makes it clear that living and dying at your job every day in the corporate workplace is a problem. The only way to live a creatively realized life in corporate America, in fact, is to get out of corporate America! If you're creative but you're still working for corporate America, then you have to read this book!

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

(From the first parable of the first treatise.) I bought my copy of the Splendor Solis on the cheap from a bargain bin at a used-book store in the Midwest. No longer in school anymore, I was now a school teacher myself -- it was my first job, and I was living far from home, living as an adult for the first time. I lived an hour from the capitol city, and every weekend, I would drive along Midwestern haygrass highways and head into the capitol, where I would shop in stores which sold old remaindered books. Hermetic books, Tarot books, alchemy books, books of any exotic esoterica. I was especially attracted to books with illustrated plates, grayscale woodcut illustrations of elemental alchemical subjects like the sun & the moon, or the day & the night. Subjects at once simple and complex, iconography at once esoteric and ordinary, like life itself, when you re living as an adult for the first time. I taught myself how to do Tarot readings, and I would do readings for my girlfriend. We would go to a Chinese restaurant which served really crispy deep-fried egg-rolls, and in a shady backtable at the rear, I explained the hidden meanings of the Tarot cards. A minor alchemist who held court over a shady backtable with its deep-fried egg-rolls, I presided over my stack of alchemy books, I explained the iconography of the sun & the moon & the Hermetic haygrass highways, symbols at once simple and complex. I believed I was the heir to hidden secrets; informed by bargain-bin books on Hermeticism and alchemy, I was heir to deep knowledge about the chaotic fury of molten fire roiling below us, as if the Midwest with all its highways and used-book stores was just a thin crust above an ancient source of power which I could tap into, relic residual energy from the eggsap afterbirth of creation. I believed that here, in the Midwest of all places, at a shady backtable of a Chinese restaurant, accompanied by red lacquer dragons and esoteric alchemy books, I was able to tap into an ancient power, the legacy of ancient Hermeticists. Well, or at least it felt that way. And so, what is the legacy of ancient Hermeticists? The legacy of ancient Hermeticists? No, wait, I mean creativity. And so, what is creativity? Creativity is when you preside as an alchemical magician over symbols at once simple and complex, when you feel like you re the heir to a deep knowledge. Creativity is when your soaring mind s mind can tap into the power of the day & the night & at the very least, all the crusty crispy deep-fried egg-rolls you can eat.

About the Author

Jason Murk is an alchemical force of nature who lives in New Mexico. Though he has a degree in higher mathematics from MIT and years of consulting experience in corporate America, he prefers authoring fictions instead of expense reports.

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