To understand “DOGTOWN—IV,” we must first meet Typhon.
He appears late in Hesiod’s Theogony, a fiery final opponent, son of Earth (Gaia) and Tartarus, “conceived in an act of love” between matter and abyss. Hesiod calls him a “fearful dragon,” a hundred-headed monstrosity whose eyes flash flame, whose tongues flicker, whose voices shift wildly — sometimes intelligible, sometimes bull-roared, lion-lunged, or hissed in storm.
Typhon, in other words, is not a symbol. He is a polyvocal event. An insurgency of sound. A figure of ontological excess.
“And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable,” writes Hesiod; “for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing in proud, ungovernable fury… and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed.”
(Theogony, trans. Evelyn-White)
Typhon threatens not merely Olympus, but the very idea of divine order. He is chaos not as absence but as pluripotent potential. Fire and breath. Voice and unmaking.
And for Olson — poet of proprioception, initiand of the mushroom — this is the mythic substance most suitable to his altered state.
Let us pause, though, and ask with Olson: Why would Earth love Tartarus?
It’s a strange phrase in Hesiod. “Gaia from her love of Tartarus.” Tartarus is the deepest abyss, a pit beneath all pits. The Greeks imagined it not merely as punishment, but as anti-space — the unbounded, unstatistical underside of being. Olson, ever the etymologist of the unconscious, seizes on this.
In “DOGTOWN—IV,” he writes:
“Our father, who is also in / Tartaros chained in being…”
(Maximus IV, ll. 333–334)
This is Olson’s parody of the Lord’s Prayer. But unlike the Christian God above, Olson’s father is below — the primordial pit, the place before measure, the place of hunger, chaos, and unformed form. Tartarus is a womb. An inversion of heaven. And Typhon, its child, is the convulsed birth of multiplicity.
What Olson sees — and what most critics miss — is that Typhon is not simply a villain in this cosmology. He is a challenge. A necessary crisis. A daemon of disruption.
Gary Grieve-Carlson, one of Olson’s most careful readers, insists that Olson admired Hesiod for his “will to cohere” — his vision of cosmos arising out of chaos. But I suspect Olson’s attachment to Hesiod is more ambivalent. He sees in Hesiod both the first cosmology and the first repressions: the moment chaos is narrated as a threat, and order enthroned.
So Olson takes Hesiod’s Theogony and folds it — remixes it. He retains the sequence (Chaos, then Earth, then Tartarus, then Love), but recasts the power dynamics. Typhon becomes not the failed usurper but the dark mirror of Maximus himself: the one who would speak many voices, walk many lands, breathe from the bottom up.
And in choosing this myth to send to The Psychedelic Review, Olson makes his wager clear: the psychedelic does not simply uplift — it ungrounds. It returns us to Tartarus. To the chthonic, the unmetabolized, the monstrous within.
This is why Typhon matters now more than ever. He is climate chaos, algorithmic multiplicity, ecstatic polyphony. He is the real beneath the rational. The daemon of the Anthropocene.
And Olson, emerging from Dogtown with psilocybin still in his system, names him.
Not to celebrate him.
Not to slay him.
But to write with him.
Trance-Scripts 