British Writer TERRY WILSON on Johnny Dolphin

"There is a man who has made his dreams happen." Paris, circa 1980, and that was the way Brion Gysin introduced me to Johnny Dolphin. For a moment I had thought he was launching into an impromptu narrative, but then I realized he was pointing someone out across the salon, a sturdy-featured American in his middle years who seemed possessed of an immense and rugged energy, gleaming delighted dancing eyes looking like they may have seen their way through a sweat lodge or two and a lot more in their time. Brion said he was an important person.

A perpetual, goal-directed traveler through the leaking compartments of the extraordinary timespace we inhabit, Dolphin, Brion said, had invested a vast capital of experience of the energetic potential of every field of phenomena -- electromagnetic interaction, the red shifts of quasi-stellar radio sources, wheat acreage, systems theory, resolute imagination and the speed of chemical reaction as determined by solar activity special metals and special forces, gravitic strains, parabolic reflectors and dervish zikr - attractions of the planets and of railroads - meat packing, palaeontology, ecology - (before there was Eden there was Biosphere 2; Dolphin inventor and co-founder) - language, literature, social history and mythology, the respective qualities of ayahuasca and flame tea, the transcendental functions of the infinitesimal calculus and - STOP - (an ancient exercise).

My list is from the top of my head but if Dolphin does not know something about all of these things, I should be very much surprised. Consult Johnny and you may well, if he deems it appropriate, receive an instant and totally unexpected take on the entire situation and implications. Like Brion, he is preternaturally knowledgeable. An international savant adept in orthogenetic techniques of energy-redeployment designed to combat lemming fever, he recognized that one alters one's culture by altering oneself, coercing the human form beyond the limits with which it has become familiar. Making the perceptual shift possible. (Making dreams happen, as Brion expressed it.)

Fortunately Dolphin has written and published extensively, and all this is evident in his literary work, not in an upfront, obtrusive manner, but with the saturation and sensuous abandon quite obviously produced by someone in love with significance in experience, someone who has been there and brought back evidence.

Terry Wilson 2001