163 The Iron Sings

Every atom of iron in your blood was made in a star that could not burn it.

Why does the fire end at iron? Why is blood bright while it lives and dark when it is spent? What did the old stories know about the smith, the bow in the cloud, and the brother whose blood cried out of the ground? And is it possible that the science of our own time has been answering them all along?

The Iron Sings follows a single metal through its whole biography. It is made on the last day of a dying star, thrown through the dark, and sunk into the young earth. It is rusted, struck by lightning, dug up, burned, beaten and quenched, and at this moment it is carried round your body about once a minute. At every station the physics is checked and the old images are allowed to speak, until the two begin to sound like one voice.

Inside you will find:

• why a star dies at iron, and why the metal sits at the very bottom of the well

• the experiment with iron filings that every textbook photograph gets wrong, and what one light tap reveals

• the smith's three heats, and why hardness is "carbon that could not get out in time"

• Cain's fire that never fell, and the lightning that has fed his fields for four billion years

• the many colours of a single blood, read with nothing but the eye

• two flutes in a quiet room, and why being perfectly in tune is silent

• the conductor who touches nothing, and the hand that has no muscles in its fingers

Written in what the author calls science poetry, this is a book that asks more than it asserts. It offers no cures, promises or secrets. It offers a way of seeing in which a star, a forge and a pulse turn out to be one story, and the reader finds that he has been standing inside it all along.

For readers of esoteric Christianity and the Rosicrucian tradition, for students of Goethe's way of seeing nature, for musicians and makers, and for anyone who has ever wondered what their own blood is made of.

The iron does not sing until it is sounded.