Dexter Barker-Glenn at Espace Maurice, Montreal

In the Garden of Saint Anthony

Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost futures, tends to his garden of earthly delights. Leaves once green are now the colours of re. Summer is over.

Raking up all that has been lost, Anthony sets a bon re for all vanities, and in the ames, sees visions of kaleidoscopic cornucopias, the reddest of plenties.

There is nothing to fear. Let us break bread. Let us drink to get drunk. Our sheaves of rye will grow again, from Europe to the Levant; now is the time of a counter-agriculture.

As a monk of the Franciscan order, Anthony sought the construction of a new form-of-life; a new form, a new con guration, for the multitude: a living-in-common, a love without possession, a monastic communism – the highest poverty.

But in the garden, Saint Anthony’s Fire soon spreads. It is a disease that takes its name from those most adept at curing it. It is the pharmakon, both remedy and poison. It is the mould that breaks moulds; the rhizome that ravages structure; the pathology that breaks the paradigm; the brightest blight.

In the Middle Ages, the fungus ravaged the peasantry. Its e ects were double-edged. First, the peasants fell out of their minds, beset by carnivalesque convulsions, raving madly; before long, they were oedipalized, as the poison reduced every limb to a club. Endeavouring to heal all those su ering, the Order of Saint Anthony burns out the ery rot. Fire meets re. The circle closes.

Centuries pass. The circle is perforated. Saint Anthony swaps the garden for the lab, and in his petri dish, regrows lost futures. Magic is extracted from the material. Ergot revelations are separated from its oedipal devastations. The psychosis of old gives ways to a new psychedelia.

Text by Matt Colquhoun, 2024

MATT COLQUHOUN is a writer and photographer from Hull, UK. They are the author of two books, Egress and Narcissus in Bloom, and the editor of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire. Currently a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Newcastle University, they blog at xenogothic.com.