review of
Peter Lamborn Wilson's ABECEDARIUM
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 22, 2013

This is brilliant. I always hesitate to give any bk a 5 star rating & I don't really like the rating system anyway but, nonetheless, 5 stars it is. This is scholarly, imaginative, stimulating, rebellious, funny, entertaining. It also reminds me that its publisher, Xexoxial Editions, is another one of my favorite publishers up there w/ Station Hill Press, Something Else Press, Encyclopedia Destructica, Atlas Press, Dalkey Archive, Grove Press, etc..

I'm most reminded of William S. Burroughs' The Book of Breeething ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1890912.The_Book_of_Breeething ), another bk I gave 5 stars to. In the early days of my GoodReads reviews, my reviews were short, just capsules, if even that much. In the one about the Burroughs bk I wrote: "It all ties together: visionary, magikal (&, yes, my spelling is deliberate). It's as if Burroughs achieved a highly disciplined penetrating vision & locked it in place."

In the section on the letter "M" he even references Burroughs:

"Wm Burroughs once demanded of the State that it return all the colors it stole to animate its symbolic imaginaire: give back the green from the dollar bill to trees & grass, etc. The alphabet has also "stolen" symbols in order to perpetuate itself as the framework of a certain social relation. M has stolen the moisture out of the baby's mouth. It should give back its waves to the sea & its breasts to the Goddess." (p 42)

By comparing Wilson to Burroughs I don't mean to belittle him as derivative - far from it. ABECEDARIUM is as rich in difference as it is in similarity. Wilson shares w/ Burroughs an anti-authoritarianism & a visionary speculative scholarliness uncowed by fear of looking foolish, secure in the audacity of his personality.

Peter gave me this bk when I visited him in December, 2010. It was a marvelous, albeit brief, visit. He ushered me straight into the entryway bedroom of his home & immediately spread out large ceremonial collages & explained their relations to recent rituals he'd been conducting. Rituals of sacrificing jewelry to rivers & such-like. It was SO Peter! So unique, so original.. &, yet, so tied into so many occult currents. & ABECEDARIUM is fertile w/ the same spirit:

"B

is for barn or byre or building or house -- perhaps cattle share it with humans like in old Ireland. Maybe the ox isn't so much coming forth as going in -- down into Egypt. Sounds have been enclosed in rigid sounds -- A is A, B is B. Beneath them the archaeographologue uncovers walls of old houses broken pottery bones. What did they bury with the dead & why? Surely the dead have provided these ruins with an immense gravity or suffocating heaviness -- almost suction. These mummies are dehydrated & they long for the blood of living words or even inarticulate sounds.

"Without letters there could be no machines; what letters do for sound the machine does for force. A machine is the sign of its own operation. Nothing ever melts into something else." (p 14)

"Each of the letters kills the thing it has replaced." (p 17)

"Cabalistic or hermeto-critical praxis precludes any pure negative approach to alphabetic symbolism -- even tho this ABC stresses spectral rather than formal aspects of alphabetism. No idyllic return to pre-literacy. There's nothing particularly "oral" about radio & TV since they could never have been invented without the machine of letters in the first place." (p 19)

The current coursing thru this is questioning, questioning not only the language being used to write the bk but also the concept of 'progress' that such language represents to some. &, yet, while almost everything is questioned, there's a deliberate ambiguity, a reveling in 'poetic' tangents:

"Palm of the Hand. Two fingers poked in the eye of three stooges. Take give bless, the Three Graces or anti-stooges. Spectre & Form.

"K the letter of Earth, X for Air, Z for Fire, Q for Water. Unspell these letters if you can. Disney characters have three fingers perhaps a hint of their demonic origin.

"Lines on the palm of the hand as a possible source of letters: reading the palm, crossing it with silver. Dreams are the thing but not the thing: images words memories but not the thing. A doubling has occurred -- a doppelgänger in the invisible world of words -- and eventually this displacement goes so far that writing must be invented to contain restrain fixate & even kill the dream images like so many maggots. Contraction of awareness as defense against too much sensation. Gods no longer speak to us, the selfish bastards." (p 34)

In drawings announcing each letter's section, the letter is shown & a history of its development from a hieroglyph to its current form is hypothesized. In almost every case, the hieroglyph is turned on its side. Wilson speculates that this is to hide the original magik.

"What does it mean to say that the Prophet was unlettered? literally illiterate? So that Gabriel using yet another variant of the old Ehypto-Sinaitic abecedarium had to fill him up with letters like an empty sack? there in the cave of the daemon of dreams? Or -- as certain sufis allege -- because he'd gotten rid of the letters in some way, transcended or absorbed them, erased them or washed them out in a howl of light? The Hurufiyya the original Lettrists created calligrammes of Mohammed & Ali in which their faces & bodies are made of letters. I have a behind-glass painting from Cirebon in Java in which the body of the shadow-puppet clown Semar (albino hunchback hermaphrodite dwarf) is composed of the Arabic letters ALLAH -- green and gold." (p 37)

All in all, GREAT! & where shd I file it in my library? Under poetry? Under literary studies? (I don't think I have such a section) Under occult? Perhaps all great works don't easily fit into any pre-existing categories. ( )