a review of
Gothick Institutions by Peter Lamborn Wilson. Xexoxial Editions. Dreamtime Village, 2005. 76 pages, $10. http://www.xexoxial.org. Available from the Barn.
A new Peter Wilson book is already a cause for celebration, but this lush collaboration exceeds even my already high expectations. Made beautiful by the production team of Miekal And Zon Wakest team at Dreamtime Village, our wise and playful rebel wields his waking fantasy to distill wild speculation in a dense and delirious brew of brave meditation.
Ostensibly a volume of poems, this dense glossary packs the deep gratification of his best prose. But at its best, Gothick Institutions is neither poetry nor prose while obviously both–because buried in these pages we find wrinkled love letters from our spiritual ancestors reincarnated as the crinkly cartography of our future utopia.
In this collection, Wilson digs in your great-grandmother’s backyard with a giant shovel made of peppermint candy and a psychedelic microscope framed in gold. Looking in places that time and history have forgotten, he uncovers mystery and recovers madness–these pagan pathways pry open imaginal possibilities, hints for further reading and radical fantasy.
Of course, since Wilson is a colleague and frequent collaborator with this magazine, since Dreamtime offered a model a decade ago when we founded Pumpkin Hollow, this review revels in its own disclaimer dance, bridled with a brazen and incestuous hope for more volumes by Wilson coming from that Wisconsin enclave of autonomous art.