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"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 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 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 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 Masks of Origin, 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 no�tropic 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 unknown) in the reader, and with a metaphysical bravado that any dada surrealist might envy, there is also-how to say this?-a down-to-earthness about George that softens our defenses. In Masks of Origin, 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."

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George's work is precisely its own thing: an archaic genre the western world has long forgotten it possessed, a genre I suspect was already defunct to the Western imagination even at the time of Homer. George is a phenomenal pagan, thrown forwards or backwards in time to this era. I will hesitate to call his work poetry, not that it does not more than serve the function of poetry, but his method is one that predates the definitions we have given poetry in modern literary theory. It is primal incantation, a spell, dreaming as vital action. In Yorubaland, the part of Nigeria where I grew up, one of the praise epithets of Aziza (a supernatural being who travels in a tornado) is, 'He is the one for whom thought and action are one and the same.' I read recently that in Holland they have perfected a method that enables their asphalt roads to automatically discover their potholes and repair themselves. I believe the incantation genre, as explored by George in Masks of Origin, is a technology that assists the earth in her attempts to heal herself, after centuries of our having feasted recklessly on her flesh. George's work harks back to a moment in time or dreamtime memory in which to speak is to act, powerfully, with cosmic stealth, and at times with purgative violence. Its aim is less to inform-though it informs aplenty-than to widen the reader's gaze in a fundamental way, almost akin to giving the reader the gift of a new tongue.Olujide Adebayo-Begun, author of The Book of Supreme Happiness The universe had no beginning. Reality always existed. The earliest tradition of poetry, carried from Sun to Sun, is carried by Brian George.Don Burgy, artist, writer, teacher Steeped in myth while staying grounded in day-to-day reality, George ushers forth a contemplative surreality. His writing takes you on a journey through a labyrinth, revealing cryptic truths and exposing the long and treacherous shadow of history. Round and round the labyrinth you go, George's words leading you like Theseus in search of the Minotaur. And when you have reached the center of the labyrinth, you find God as a detonating atomic bomb-truth as monstrosity, a darkness that illuminates.Brandan Styles, artist and weirdo spirit The writing of Brian George is built upon personal experience, which he translates into a universal algorithm. Each verse reads as geometrical sequence, keys that unlock pieces of consciousness. This is where poetry becomes music. The poet lives in the center of the vortex, memories flooding his vision, being assigned symbols in the matrix. Brian weaves his way through a hall of mirrors, travelling to emptiness, where the faceted diamond of knowledge is forged and brought to the surface in his writing. His words are clues; one's understanding shifts and expands the more one reads. There are lingering questions, and passages that come into clarity over time. This only serves to enhance for the reader the incredible fortune of not-knowing, and thus, discovery.Marjorie Kaye, artist

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