The Process

BRION GYSIN 1916–1986 by Robert Palmer

A philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation; a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray.

— Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’rabi.

[T]he past remains present to the future … the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus form a phrase.

— Ibid.

I understand that the late Henry Corbin was, in recent years, given access to books in Bombay belonging to the present Aga Khan, whose position as head of the Ismaili sect of Islam derives from his presumed descent from Mohammed’s daughter Fatima through the last Old Man of the Mountain. … Corbin and many others know infinitely more than I do about the Ismailis. I know next to nothing: read Marco Polo in my child-hood, became a hashishin in Greece at 19, read my Baudelaire, got syphilis like he did long before penicillin, smoked a lot in the Algerian Sahara and Morocco where I spent what is still more than a third of my lifetime. I did not become an Assassin.

— Brion Gysin, Points of Order, in Here To Go: Planet R-101, Brion Gysin interviewed by Terry Wilson.

I rub out the word. … I the Man from Nowhere negotiated like a Tangier Space Draft on a Swiss bank.

— Brion Gysin, Minutes To Go

“But, Hamid,” I laughed, “I am not an Assassin at all!”

“We are Assassins, all of us,” he gravely replied.

— The Process

The Process is a funny, picaresque, provocative magic carpet ride, a careening good read. Like its central character, a pot-smoking professor who has forsworn teaching in order to learn, it ranges widely, and travels light: “No baggage. This is the way I came and — Inch’ Allah! (God willing) — this is the way I shall return.”

It may be of interest that the city of Tanja (Tangier), the village of Jajouka with its Master Musicians, the desert out-posts, the trance rituals of the dervish brotherhoods, and many of the characters of this novel are drawn directly from life. Though timeless in mood (or transtemporal, in the Corbin/Ismaili sense), the book is also time-specific to a sixties Gysin knew from the inside, the sixties defined by the good doctors Hoffman (inventor of LSD) and Fanon, who figure herein.

But as equipment for appreciating The Process, information like this is probably marginal. My suggestion is that you abandon this preface and read the book. By the time you have finished it and doubled back here, you will probably want to read the novel all again anyway. For as William Burroughs observed, “You will find that it reads itself.”

The Process comes bracketed between Shakespeare’s pledge to deliver “a round, unvarnished tale” and a thirteenth-century Persian mystic’s insistence that “from the book alone, nothing emerges.” The book is an entertainment, an education, and an enigma, and in this respect getting to know it can be a little like getting to know the author himself. “He who seeks the mysteries and the realities, must seek out someone who knows”—words quoted at the end of The Process—and Gysin’s offer in Minutes To Go: “If you want to disappear, come around for private lessons” were all the encouragement I needed to seek him out in Tangier in the early seventies. The recent publication of The Process in America had generated little media attention; my admiring review in Rolling Stone had been a singular exception and was more than sufficient to get me in the door.

Before leaving New York, I had managed to hear tapes of Gysin’s beloved Pan music from the Moroccan village of Jajouka, recorded by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, when Gysin took him there. I was enthralled; Moroccan music, especially the “music as psychic hygiene” of the dervish brotherhoods, provided the common ground for my first encounters with Gysin’s adventuring spirit and formidable intelligence. Accidentally (“as if there were any accidents,” Brion would have said), I had begun at the beginning.

“I never was much immersed truly into Islam. … It was most particularly the music that interested me,” Gysin told interviewer Terry Wilson. “I went with Paul Bowles, who was a composer long before he was a writer, and … had very, very extraordinary ears, and, uh, he taught me a lot of things. I owe him a tremendous amount, I owe him my years in Morocco really.”

When I met him, Brion was in his mid-fifties. He lived in a European-style apartment building in Tangier’s “new town,” in a balconied flat from which he feasted his painterly eye on the patterned light and shade of the city’s whitewashed buildings, spread out across a series of low, gently rounded hills on the shore of the indigo blue Mediterranean. On a clear day, and most days were, he could examine through his powerful binoculars the pitted detail of the rock of Gibraltar, facing Tangier across the Pillars of Hercules.

Photographs of Brion as a youth reveal an almost arrogantly handsome young Adonis, the happy result of his mixed Celtic and Swiss genes. In his fifties he was still striking and trim, keeping in shape with the help of regular visits from a Moroccan master of exercise and massage. He went striding through Tangier as if he owned it, finding time for everyone from the expatriate crowd at Lily the Lion-tamer’s Parade bar to the budding Moroccan painters he enthusiastically and generously encouraged, from visiting hipsters to the Casbah’s canniest con men to the monied exiles who surveyed Tangier from their elegant walled villas on the higher outlying hills. He even found a renegade European audio technician down by the port to make a patch cord linking our two Uher tape recorders, so that he was able to download onto my bagfull of blank tapes some of the hours of recordings of dervish ceremonies he had made over the years. While the reels turned, conversation flowed. At times, it raged.

Brion was a living reproach to the sort of thinking that confuses category with reality and demands, “Yes, but what is it that you do?” It is easy enough to compile a laundry list of some of the things he did. He painted, for example. There were astonishing panoramas of the Sahara’s “wordless wastes,” and studies of the D’jemaa el F’na, or Great Square, of Marrakesh, crowded with hundreds of shadowy yet indisputably alive figures playing music, buying and selling, riding bicycles, and, always, hustling. Other canvases overlaid calligraphy, “as if one took a page and wrote Japanese from top to bottom and Arabic across it from right to left,” in a pictorial space suggested by the cabalistic gridwork of Moroccan magic squares.

The writing Gysin left us includes, in addition to The Process, a second novel called The Last Museum; he was working on it when I first met him in Tangier (but not finally published until shortly after his death in 1986). This second book is a re-imagining of the period in Brion’s life when he accomplished his most influential work with words, the early sixties, when he was living in a rundown Paris hotel that William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other seminal Beat figures also called home at the time — thus the nameless hotel’s nickname, the Beat Hotel. When Maurice Girodias agreed to publish a volume of Burroughs’ visionary written “routines,” it was Gysin who collected the scattered pages and independent episodes, intuited a larger pattern, and was primarily responsible for assembling the manuscript published as Naked Lunch.

While at the Beat Hotel, Gysin was working on a collage when he “accidentally” sliced through some pages of newspaper with his Stanley blade. He typed out the cut-up prose, read the results, and found himself rolling on the floor, convulsed in laughter like a man high on nitrous oxide. A period of extensive experimentation with the cutting-up and random reassembly of diverse combinations of texts followed, involving Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, and others in addition to Gysin and Burroughs. Some early results were published in the seminal small-press chapbooks Minutes To Go and Exterminator! “We began to find out a whole lot of things about the real nature of words and writing,” Brion recalled one night when I had my Uher running. “What are words and what are they doing? Where are they going? The cut-up method treats words as the painter treats his paint, raw material with rules and reasons of its own.… Painters and writers of the kind I respect want to be heroes, challenging fate in their lives and in their art. What is fate? Fate is written: Mektoub, in the Arab world, where art has always been nothing but abstract. Mektoub means ‘It is written.’ So … if you want to challenge and change fate …, cut up words. Make them a new world.”

Burroughs’ extensive use of cut-ups in Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and other books made the method highly controversial in the literary world. There was some talk to the effect that Brion was a bad influence, a keef-crazed, razor-wielding, dada-spouting anarchist whose high-art theorizing was corrupting an authentic American voice. In time, cut-ups became enshrined as an alternative strategy for dealing with words, studied and employed by poets and novelists and even playing a part in pop music, as a lyric-writing aid or inspiration for, among others, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards. But Brion wanted no part of any movement or school. From the beginning, he privately urged Burroughs to make more use of his gift for narrative or “representational” prose writing, and while the cut-up experiments form part of the context from which The Process and The Last Museum emerged, neither of Gysin’s novels is a work of abstract or experimental fiction: “I will a round, unvarnished tale deliver.”

What else did Brion do? He was, he liked to point out with amused irony, one of the fathers of sound poetry, among the first artists doing serious work with the tape recorder and the human voice. But Brion did much more with his Uher than that. For him, the tape recorder was as much an artistic medium as painting and writing. He used it to overlay and orchestrate, as a musical composer would, a series of works utilizing the spoken word and permutative techniques, a method of word-manipulation quite distinct from cut-ups. From “I Am that I Am” came “I Am That Am I? Am I That? I Am!” and so on. “Junk is no good baby. No junk is good baby. Is baby good? No junk! No junk baby is good. Junk is goooood, baby … No!” Invited by the BBC to realize these and other works on audio tape, using their studios, he turned his “permutated poems” into symphonies. Another work in this series used as its source material pistol shots recorded at several volume levels and distances from the microphone. Permutating his pistol shot readings like the words in a sentence, using his acute musical ear to divine an appropriate rhythmic context, he came up with a piece that sounds uncannily like the precisely percussive drumming and handclapping of Berbers from the High Atlas of Southern Morocco.

This “Pistol Poem,” far from being an intriguing anomaly, has more to say about who Brion Gysin was, and what it was he did, than any laundry list, however extensive. Looking back over my list, I find that it somehow misses the point. My description of his magic square paintings, for example, omits perhaps the most important detail: the genesis of the idea. Brion’s study of Japanese while in the U.S. Army during World War II, his later study and appreciation of Arabic calligraphy, and his lifelong interest in magic as the “Other Method” for exercising control of matter and knowing space were contributing factors. But here is what happened.

In 1950 Gysin was present at a religious festival outside Tangier, held in what had been in Phoenician times a sacred grove, and very probably a cult center. There he heard strangely riveting music, related to the ecstatic trance music of the Sufi brotherhoods but different; it had a luminous, hieratic quality all its own.

“You know your music when you hear it, one day,” he later wrote of the experience. “You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.” Later, with the help of the Moroccan painter Hamri, he traced this music back to the village of Jajouka, which perches high on a hilltop in the Rif, just as The Process describes it. What he heard there confirmed his initial impression: “I knew I wanted to hear that music every day for the rest of my life.” What he saw, as the first “foreigner” to visit the village since anyone could remember, utterly astonished him.

In Jajouka, rites and myths from the dawn of Western civilization are preserved, not as faintly remembered traditions, but as a living, integral reality. There Gysin witnessed a ritual he immediately recognized as the Lupercalia, the Rites of Pan, which in Jajouka are not celebrated as folklore but employed as a technology if you will, for bringing the male and female forces in nature into a positive and fruitful equilibrium. In The Process Hansen persuades Hamid to pronounce words from the village’s ritual language and discovers that they are Punic in origin. “Jajouka,” Gysin would say with a gleam in his eye, “that’s a very old scene.”

If the village astonished Gysin, so did the circumstance of its “discovery” by someone so well-equipped to understand what was going on there. Gysin was passionately immerged in the literature and lore of antiquity, and particularly fascinated by the esoteric traditions and Gnosis of early times. He was well-versed in original Greek, Latin and Arabic sources, having built on a first rate education at the Sorbonne and other European universities with a lifetime of reading and study. The fact that he had found a place where the Old Gods still walked the hills and music and magic were still synonymous was, for him, a magical event in itself.

Brion insisted that cut-ups actually cut through the word lines and association lines that moor us in present time, and that sometimes the future leaked through. Sentences formed by cut-ups often prove to be about future events, he said — or perhaps in some cases to determine future events, a rather unsettling proposition, which led Burroughs to postulate that “Writing, when it’s successful, is Making Things Happen.” Well, Jajouka was a similar proposition, though in reverse: the past leaking through into the present. For Jajouka, which has no electricity or running water, is on no map and at the end of no road, exists somehow in its own time, not in our media-saturated century. It constitutes living proof that what we call reality is a perceptual and, socially speaking, a consensual phenomenon. Jajouka’s reality is the magical reality of antiquity. Whether the visitor “believes in” magic or not, in Jajouka he sees magic as method, magic that works.

And here we return to the genesis of Gysin’s magic square paintings. At the urging of Jajouka’s Master Musicians, Brion opened a lavish restaurant in Tangier, with a troupe from Jajouka providing the music. This was in the days before Moroccan independence, when Tangier was a free port, an International Zone — the Interzone of Naked Lunch and of Joy Division’s rock classic Unknown Pleasures. “There were a hundred banks on the Boulevard,” Brion recalled; the restaurant did well. Living in such proximity to the Jajouka musicians, Brion was inevitably curious about their magical practices. “I kept some notes and drawings,” he wrote in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, “meaning to write a recipe book of magic. My Pan people were furious when they found this out.” There was also a minor falling out over money.

The result was that one day in the restaurant, Brion discovered “a magic object, which was an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each, and a little package in which there was a piece of writing, and the writing when deciphered by friends who didn’t even want to handle it, because of its magic qualities, which even educated Moroccans were not anxious to get in touch with, but it said something like, an appeal to one of the devils of fire, the devil of smoke — to take Brion away from this house: as the smoke leaves this chimney may Brion leave this house and never return. … And within a very short time I indeed lost the restaurant and everything else. But I realized that this was a very interesting traditional example … of a cabalistic square, which I then began to apply … to my own painting when I returned to Paris in 1958.” (from Here to Go: Planet R-101)

Perhaps this snatching of an artistic victory from the jaws of a magical defeat was the sort of thing Gysin had in mind when he talked about artists as heroes “challenging fate in their lives and in their art.” For me, he was precisely that. Painter, writer, sound poet, scholar, philosopher, traveler, explorer, metaphysician — the labels are so many words. Cut up, isolated, each word cutting away from the big picture, they bounce off Brion the Irreducible like so many rubber bullets. No painting without the magic. No magic without the words. No words without the sound. No sound without the music. “If you want to disappear, come around for private lessons.” He was slippery, Brion. You had to learn to see him whole before you could see him at all.

If there is a “key” to The Process, this is it. By no means should one confuse Brion Gysin with his central character, the fun-loving black pothead professor. Not that there isn’t a lot of the one in the other. The work that won Gysin one of the first Fulbright Fellowships included two books: To Master A Long Goodnight, (the biography of Josiah Henson, whose life was the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and The History of Slavery in Canada. Like Hanson, Gysin used his Fulbright as a one-way ticket out. As for Hanson’s Blackness, “I was slipped into the wrong colored package and delivered to the wrong address,” Brion wrote in a piece included in the “Brion Gysin Special” issue of Soft Need. “Just look at all this lousy oatmealy skin. Not enough melanin. I’ve lived the best years of my life in Morocco and it can’t take the sun. When I’m with Africans, I forget that I’m white. But they can’t forget it. I stick out like a sore thumb.” Nevertheless, Ulysses O. Hanson isn’t Brion Gysin. The Process itself is Brion Gysin.

When Hamid tells what it’s like to experience the Rites of Pan in Jajouka, it’s Brion talking. Then there’s Thay Himmer, on his family’s mystical inclinations: “All the women in my family, for the last three generations … at least, have been ardent Theosophists, followers of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, in close contact with Swami Vivekenanda and Krishnamurti; aunts, great-aunts, always talking about Gurdjieff, pranna, and the hallucinatory effects of superaeration — and all that sort of thing — or trailing around in trances at home.” That’s Brion, talking about his own family. When Maya Himmer remembers a childhood spent partly in Canada’s open spaces, when the Himmers’ lawyer talks about what it means to be Swiss, it’s Brion again, with more fractured auto-biography. Similarly, the evocations of Sufi ceremonies, from the marvelous Zikr in a desert compound early on to the almost unbearably vivid descent into the collective unconscious of the massed Hamadcha near the book’s halfway point, are either reportage or composites, transformed, in any case, into poetry. By the time I met him, Brion had infiltrated the ceremonies and recorded the trance rhythms of every major dervish brotherhood in North Africa. Often he went incognito, his Uher hanging on a strap under his flapping jellaba; if he’d been discovered, he would probably have been torn apart. The artist as hero, challenging fate again, living to the hilt in his chosen milieu, “the wild west of the spirit.”

Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain, Ismaili Gnostic, founder of the Order of Assassins — is he Brion Gysin too? Not to hear Brion tell it, but doesn’t he protest rather strenuously? Certainly the Old Man of the Mountain, who reportedly used hashish to vouchsafe his Adepts their visions of Paradise, intrigued Brion greatly, for a long time. His first reference to the subject in print was in Minutes To Go:

Yesterday a thousand years ago, Hassan i Sabbah, a Persian by birth and school chum of Omar Khayyam, walked by accident (as if there were any accidents) into the studios of Radio Cairo to find all the cats bombed. He realized like a flash that he could SEND, TOO. He took the mike to an unheathed (sic) pent-house called Alamut near the Caspian.… His original station nearly a thousand years ago could broadcast from Alamut to Paris with Charlemagne on the house phone and as far as Xanadu East. Today the same lines have been proliferating machine-wise and a stray wire into the room I am in. …

Apparently able to dispatch his Assassins (a word from the same root as hashish) from Alamut and then direct them at a distance, Hassan i Sabbah forged a monastic order and some practical applications of a venerable mystical tradition into an organization, feared throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. The comparison to present-day organizations like the CIA, which use science and pervert enlightenment in the service of a sinisterly shadowy Grand Design, was for Brion an obvious one. Yet he felt such a compelling connection to the Old Man and to Alamut that finally, some years after that first reference in Minutes To Go, he made a special trip in order to climb up to the ruins of the fortress, which had been leveled by Mongol invaders in 1256.

“I found it very disturbing when I was at Alamut to … find myself under strong psychic attack,” he told Terry Wilson. “I suddenly was attacked with vertigo, which I hadn’t ever experienced before in my life, and altitude fever.… But I also felt psychically attached to the place as I have never felt before in any other spot in my travels.… I felt that I was somebody that’d been pushed over the precipice, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to be a victim to such an old scene.…”

The only weapon that ever proved effective against Hassan i Sabbah, according to Gysin, was cut-ups. Before he founded his Order, the story goes, Hassan was director of finances at a Persian court. From the Wilson interviews: “He found when he came to deliver his speech on the exchequer that his manuscripts had been cut in such a way that he didn’t at first realize that they had been sliced right down the middle and repasted.… All of his material had been cut up by some unknown enemy and his speech from the Woolsack was greeted with howls of laughter and utter disgrace and he was thrown out of the administration.”

For Brion, the Old Man of the Mountain represented Control, a principle now embodied by other Old Men who sit in their electronic Alamuts with their long, bony fingers on the nuclear detonator button. Cut-ups were a useful tool because they sprung the trap of language, enabling the spirit to soar free from Control’s prison of words. Getting Out — out of that prison, out of the body, and ultimately out of this world entirely and into space — was for Brion the Great Work. The purpose of his art, from paintings to The Process, was Liberation.

Sometimes his preoccupation with this purpose can leave an unpleasant aftertaste. In particular, there is an apparent misogyny in The Process and in Gysin’s other writings that shouldn’t be glossed over. His tendency, shaped both by sexual preference and by years spent in the sexually-segregated Arab world, was to be with the boys. Yet women were always among his closest friends. “There are no Brothers,” he would say; yet he called his lifelong chum Felicity Mason his pseudo-sister.

“Don’t go calling me a misogynist … a mere misogynist,” he railed in Here To Go: Planet R-101. “I am a monumental misanthropist. Man is a bad animal, maybe the only bad animal.… No one but man threatens the survival of the planet. Space Man may well blow up the planet Earth behind him. When ya gotta go.… Now we know what we are here for. We are not here to love fear and serve any old bearded but invisible thunder god. We are here to go.”

Pardon me if I snicker just a bit at the idea of a self-styled misanthropist who had uncountable hordes of friends and was gregarious and giving in his personal relationships, a philosophical posthumanist who seemed to want to know all there was to know about the whole history and thought and experience and dreams of humankind. But don’t get the idea that I’m not taking the man seriously. He was Here to Go, all right. He streaked across Present Time like a runaway rocket, and then he was Gone. And I don’t think I’ll ever get over missing him.

New York City

March 1987