Virgil wrote Eclogues, and these are contemporary equivalents (published in 2011). They are meditations on the pastoral, which is not – in Peter’s view – geographic so much as temperamental. A farmer nowadays can easily be more “urban” than a Brooklyn copy editor – thanks to TV, Soundcloud and Internet blogs. The pastoral is a style of laziness, forgetfulness, dreaminess – the first stages of personal erasure.
All art, Peter explains – at least successful art – is a key to the Hidden Method. A Romantic etching teaches us alchemy. That faint sense of dislocation one feels gazing at an etching by Samuel Palmer (to give one of his examples) is homeopathic samadhi*.
How much of this book is a hoax? For example, here’s the beginning of “Ten Golden Apples”:
Go to botanica & buy
a cauldron – red wool – barley grains –
laurel – wax – vervain & masculine
frankincense
circumambulate the altar three times –
gods love uneven numbers.
Is all wisdom a hoax?
*the yogic state of ecstasy