Ec(o)logues

Peter Lam­born Wilson

“It is my hope that this book by Peter Lam­born Wil­son will come as some­thing of a rev­e­la­tion to the world of poetry: a rev­e­la­tion that poetry this good and good in this way can be pro­duced in our times; good as rhyth­mi­cally and sonorously excit­ing, expres­sive, intu­itive, intel­li­gent, well-measured, suit­ably bar­baric, his­tor­i­cally redo­lent, polit­i­cally, meta­phys­i­cally, even sote­ri­o­log­i­cally astute. A rev­e­la­tion because we are unac­cus­tomed to poetry that is not pre­dom­i­nately iron­i­cal in state­ment, exces­sively self-reflective in atti­tude, nor com­mit­ted to the demo­li­tion of its own means, that is at once so extra­or­di­nar­ily urbane in spirit and down-home, down­right funky in expres­sive spon­tane­ity, not to men­tion intel­lec­tu­ally com­plex, with a gen­er­ous salt­ing of wit and cog­ni­tive play. All this, too, with­out, through naiveté, igno­rance, or obtuse­ness, expos­ing itself to crit­i­cal mis­siles poised like ICBMs to be deployed against work that attempts just what these poems actu­ally achieve.

And I would haz­ard a rea­son why: that the stance of the poetry—and Peter Lam­born Wil­son has earned his stance through decades of com­mit­ted prose—that the stance of this poetry, in the com­plex­ity of its reflec­tion, the rad­i­cal speci­ficity of its atten­tions, and the inten­sity of its care—is in every breath a com­mit­ted poetry, and com­mit­ted in a sin­gu­lar, highly indi­vid­u­ated, unpre­dictable way.
The verse may take its cue from Allen Gins­berg and William Blake, but its intel­lec­tual purview shows inti­macy with Kropotkin, Proud­hon, Engels, Swe­den­borg, Paracel­sus, Agrippa, Eras­mus Dar­win, Pierre Clas­tres, Henry Corbin, Charles Fourier, and many oth­ers of an equally august if uncon­ven­tion­ally ref­er­enced notoriety.

Wil­son weaves a vision­ary poet­ics through an explicit pol­i­tics, an explicit pol­i­tics through an exu­ber­ant sense of imag­i­na­tive free­dom. Wil­son names his polit­i­cal and spir­i­tual agenda “neo-pastoralism” and mines the pas­toral tra­di­tion of the ven­er­a­ble ancients—Theocritus, Vir­gil, Edmund Spencer—for mate­r­ial that reprises and expands themes from his pre­vi­ous pro­nun­ci­a­men­tos: Green Her­meti­cism, “Escape from the Nine­teenth Cen­tury,” “The Shamanic Trace,” Pirate Utopias, Tem­po­rary Autonomous Zones, to name but a few of his titles.

The poetry is mod­er­ated by prose inter­ludes in a vari­ety of gen­res that develop thoughts in a man­ner appro­pri­ate to the energy of the poetry, not so much by pro­vid­ing con­cep­tual bases for its con­tents (in a way it does that too), but by the sheer apt­ness of con­ti­gu­ity and mul­ti­plic­i­tous res­o­nance, worked out and placed with an intel­li­gence whose lucid­ity is as dis­rup­tive as the ram­pant audac­ity of the verse.

A per­sis­tent orga­niz­ing theme is the hypoth­e­sis (due to the late Pierre Clas­tres) that the his­tor­i­cal arrival of “civ­i­liza­tion” with its lit­er­acy, col­lec­tively orga­nized agri­cul­ture, divi­sion of labor into rulers, admin­is­tra­tors, and drones, its author­i­tar­ian reli­gion, pri­vate prop­erty, and mas­sive armies—in short, the advent of The State—came about through the fail­ure of pre­cise social for­ma­tions that for tens of thou­sands of years had func­tioned to ward off and dis­si­pate the agglom­er­a­tion and cen­tral­iza­tion of polit­i­cal power. Mod­ern human­ity (since 4000 BCE) has invented its own igno­rance of the deep human past—and called only what superceded and sup­pressed it—History. Wil­son sets off in search of the traces of social prac­tices now long eclipsed and finds them can­nily in the most unlikely places.

The meta­phys­i­cal pos­ture is pan­the­ism or “pagan monothe­ism,” aligned with anar­chism. The work: to con­jure an aggres­sive pan­the­ism through a veil, haze, or prism of pas­toral idealism—the lure of nature real­ized through the dan­ger­ous, bottom-feeding numi­nos­ity demon­stra­bly intrin­sic to it.

Ortho­dox (Abra­hamic) monothe­ists rou­tinely slan­der pan­the­ism, aver­ring that it entails, in prac­tice, a sloth­ful relax­ation of the spirit and a gen­eral abne­ga­tion of con­science: if God is All, what need for moral dis­ci­pline, intel­lec­tual rigor, or the restraint of native delinquency?

But if moral rigor as prac­ticed until now proves to be the absolute repres­sion of the divine in the world and the vas­sal of Sta­tist dis­ci­pline, even relax­ation and license become tac­tics for the recov­ery of nat­ural and divine val­ues. It turns out, how­ever, as any reader of Ec(o)logues may very well attest, that the atten­tions and affir­ma­tions demanded by pantheist-anarchism may prove any­thing but eas­ily achieved. The affir­ma­tion of every­thing will test the stom­ach of any of us. It is the dis­ci­pline and con­science of such an onto­log­i­cal per­spec­tive and the trans­gres­sive sacral­ity it entails, that there, where one can­not imag­ine the sacred, is pre­cisely where one’s prac­tice must seek it out. In that sense Ec(o)logues is itself spir­i­tual praxis, for reader and poet alike.”

— Charles Stein