Masks of Origin

<blockquote><em>We are I believe as supernatural as we are natural. Our home is the sum-total of all possible realities. When we act we act both in this world and the next.<span></span></em></blockquote><p>Brian George's debut collection of personal essays invites the reader on a journey beyond the normal categories of space time and narrative structure toward a further shore of multidimensional and more-than-human experience. These are essays in the sense of <em>attempts</em> or <em>explorations</em> of a subject which is too vast and too profound yet also paradoxically too familiar (to some deepest part of us) to be exhausted by any one expression or approach. As George puts it The book is not quite a collection of essays or the fragments of an autobiography or a record of inter-dimensional journeys or a work of metaphysics or a sociopolitical critique or an attempt to formulate a contemporary mythology-although it has elements of all of these. To read <em>Masks of Origin</em> and to re-read it perhaps and to live with all that it reveals conceals and intimates is to risk encountering the unfathomable within ourselves as much as in the art. As George recursively unravels the contours of his peculiar spiritual landscape we begin to see aspects our own world history and generational trauma transfigured-as in a psychedelic mirror-in a startling new light. Yet the only drug administered here is the noötropic of poetic language. (You may still wish to avoid operating heavy machinery while under the influence of this book.) With penetrating insight into the soul of post-industrial America and a rare ability to invoke transpersonal states of knowing (even accompanying the thrill of the <em>unknown</em>) in the reader and with a metaphysical bravado that any dada surrealist might envy there is also-how to say this?-a <em>down-to-earthness</em> about George that softens our defenses. In <em>Masks of Origin</em> we meet the artist not only as a cosmic traveler and esoteric yogi but also as a schoolboy a son a rebel a lover a teacher a friend/enemy and a family man-in short as a person with adventurous goals but few pretenses. As we follow George in the probing of his origins we may find that we have suddenly drawn much closer to our own.</p>