Georgiana Peacher – Language under slef-hypnosis: the osmosis of the patterns of the history and the desires of a present voice

Georgiana Peacher, Mary Stuart's Ravishment Descending Time: Prose Symphony, TriQuarterly, 1976. / Pearl Shedding Press, 1992.

«When Georgiana Peacher uses on the spot self-hypnosis to compose the «historical» fiction of Mary Stuart's Ravishment Descending Time in a Scottish castle, she makes possible the osmosis of the underlying patterns of the history and the desires of a present voice at the same time as she makes it perceptible by means of the strange Joycean text that gives it shape.» - Marc Chénetier

«Georgiana Peacher in Mary Stuart’s Ravishment Descending Time may well have given us the greatest passage on yellow eyes ever written.» - Alexander Theroux

This book feels as if it were a series of riveting sunspots, stunning one’s cognitive properties, paradoxically expanding consciousness by means of its enigmatic anti-narrative. Entering its spontaneous field is like a jolt of interior insulin for me. A photomantic pulse, an overwhelming conduction with an accuracy wrought by minutiae, which are not unlike canyons.
I liken her psychic scape to the impastos of Pollock or Soutine, her gnarly emission erupts as  as a plasma of imbroglio all the while tilted inside the odyssey of a susurrant Mary Stuart. When she speaks of “Mary’s eyes” syncopating “spectrums” it is not unlike her language alive with  spectral eddies and spinnings. It seems that Peacher conveys Stuart’s odyssey through the reverse dimension of sound, that conveys an eloquence which whirls throughout this compound verbal maze. Peacher hypnotically transmits the gist of Stuart’s danger always pre-figuring her looming execution. The book being poetically balanced, is organically shaped by oneiric punctuation. Make no mistake, this is writing seared by the genius of vertigo, the book at its core being scribbled biography as trance. Indeed, the opening bout of the book is entitled “Mesmerisis” as she oneirically meanders across estranged botulism acres speaking of “warm bodied boys killed in battle.” The language respires with the uncanny, with an intensity speeding across inflammatory meters, across “crevices of mountain rock,” with Peacher all the while maintaining her poise inside its historical cauldron.
Peacher remains anomalous. Well into her 94th year she remains unseasonably productive, remaining in creative contact with poet Jonathan Skinner who I thank for putting me in contact with her work. Her writing, fully rooted in its depth before the E-mail era, partakes of the unbuffered process of pencil in scorching contact with paper. As regards persuasion via ancillary promotion via Facebook or other forms of cloned connection, none exists. Instead, she harvests her inner lingual field. She trusts herself. Thus her metier remains unhalted. As she stated, “In the Spring of 1966 I decide to give up everything, fly to Paris, begin a new life of writing.” What an example, for the hoards of writers stifled by the crippling need for safety nets. They have lost the power to gamble, to swallow doubt when no one is looking. In contradistinction, Georgiana slips as an innominate cipher across the ravine of primordial intensity. Having as her energy the power which enkindles serpents and owls. At this level she is nudged by hunches and gut feelings, thus, she is privy to human misunderstanding and heartbreak, thus, she possesses the existential criteria to creatively chronicle the throes of Mary Stuart. The text is woven as if her gaze burned with 4 or 5 hyper eyes wandering up a gyral staircase  with “lacrimal nerves, touched by the needle of emotion.” Indeed, she couples creative impulse with emotion.
Having gathered this capability after many years as a leading speech therapist, she refused to die from failure of explosion, from suppression by academic treatise, from the theoretical writing wrought by sequential thinking. She would not die sequestered away in some academic outpost her writing squandered by “laryngeal stress.” As she stated in 2005, “…I avow I would have been dead years ago had I not allowed my demiurge to flourish.” Inspired by Anais Nin at a critical juncture in 1966, her writing continues to flourish unbowed by time constantly surmounting quotidian register. She continues to creatively unfold “finding old age to be a beautiful new experience, writing and painting artist books, having museum and college art shows,”as well as a new book of poems published in ’05 entitled “Skryabin Mysterium.”
Great imaginary power does not in itself guarantee notoriety. I’ve mentioned her name over the past few months to a selected number of beings only to be greeted by expressions of blankness. This non-response is no criticism and never staunches my excitement for her writing. Powerful writing does not erupt from facile recognition. Many are drugged by careerist opportunity which translates to nothing more than competence within the pre-set standards of a lingual safety net. A safety net which in turn, both suffocates and devours one’s imaginary radiance in return for institutional recognition.
Having made her acquaintance not far back, I am heartened by the fact that we’ve had no conveyance other than by phone call and letter. And I remain convinced that great writing will continue to be read not because of the way it’s technically conveyed, but because of the manner by which it burns, and courses through our psychic nerves as would an invisible scorpion fish. It hypnotizes, and casts a sidewards glance which pierces, which annuls by organic charisma pedestrian memoranda. As the French critic, Marc Chenetier so aptly put it, “…she makes possible the osmosis of the underlying patterns of history…”And partially quoting the late memoirist, Deborah Digges, Peacher writes a language which “begins before language” with “qualities” that “tap bedrock in some dangerous primordial slide…”  - Will Alexander


Georgiana Peacher, Skryabin Mysterium, Xlibris Corporation, 2004.

read it at Google Books

«Georgiana Peacher’s SKRYABIN MYSTERIUM is a work that begins before language. Its qualities tap bedrock in some dangerous, thrilling primordial slide out from under birdsong, clay flute, wind through foliage like the sound of fire like rain. These are poems born through suffering into words so spare they startle. The story they chart, the psychic marriage they intuit-the story of a young boy and a poet who greet each other at the door of time-is so imaginative and stunning that the reader is changed by its power, its griefs and joys, and the music, at times tragic, at others ecstatic, lingers now inside each of us. Peacher convinces that for the artist there is a stillness at the center of being, currents in the air around us, currents that pass through us here at the threshold of the present, the possible, where “pussywillow gray spirits charcoal sky” - Deborah Digges