Explicit alchemy
The strongest alchemical passage arrives astonishingly early. ADVENT 1.3: I DO describes a near-constant “ideasthetic FLOOD” that the narrator tries to transmute into “fool's gold,” while remaining attentive to legibility. The metaphor is exact: unstable internal material is processed into a transmissible but knowingly counterfeit precious substance.
ALLCAPS CODE HEADING ONE later makes the occult claim comic and grandiose: Cagliostro possesses enough “HATRED POWERS TO CONFORM THIS WORLD TO MY WHIMS ALCHEMICALLY.” Alchemy also appears as a genre/register term in Make It Sound Like Amphetamine Teeth.
Historical caution: alchemy is not one metaphor
Modern pop culture often reduces alchemy either to “turn lead into gold” or to a timeless doctrine of spiritual self-transformation. Historians complicate both shortcuts: premodern alchemy included material, artisanal and natural-philosophical practices, while the strongly spiritualized reading of alchemy was substantially developed by later occultists. Cambridge History of Science ↗
Transmutation as JQD operation
The useful JQD-specific observation is therefore narrower: transmutation recurs as an operating fantasy. Data becomes prose; mistake becomes ERRORISM; a fictional institution becomes a service; a name becomes a person; waste becomes style; psychic overload becomes “fool's gold”; commercial paratext becomes art material.
This sits beside Function / Defunction / Refunction but is not identical. Refunction asks what a thing can do after its old use fails. Alchemical language asks what a material might become under pressure.
Structural rhymes, not hidden alchemy
Cremation Diamonds literally connects death, carbon, luxury and transformed matter; EGOTERRORISM turns error into program; c. 23 LAAVE contains elixir, cauldron, chemical waste and fungi. These are powerful alchemical rhymes, but they are not treated as a classical alchemical sequence unless the source says so.