Masks of Origin

"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." Brian George's debut collection invites the reader on a journey beyond the normal categories of space, time, and narrative structure, and guides them toward a further shore of multidimensional experience. These are "essays" in the sense of attempts or explorations 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 writes, "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 socio-political critique, or an attempt to formulate a contemporary mythology-although it has elements of all of these." To read Masks of Origin, and re-read it, and live with all it reveals, conceals, and implies, is to risk an unfathomable sanity. As George recursively unravels the contours of his peculiar spiritual landscape, we begin to see aspects of our own world history and mythological pre-existence reflected-as in a psychedelic mirror-in a startling new light. Yet the only drug administered here is the notropic 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 in the reader, and with a metaphysical bravado that any smiling dead surrealist would envy, there is also-how to say this?-a down-to-earthness about George. We come to see him not only as a cosmic traveler and esoteric yogi, but also as a schoolboy, son, rebel, lover, teacher, friend/enemy, husband, and dad-in short, as person with adventurous goals but few pretenses. As we follow George in his probing of his origins, we may find that we have suddenly drawn much closer to our own.