Brion Gysin - The Process

While still only a spruce captain, detailed to the desert after World War I, he became by a singular stroke of luck Half the First Man across the Sahara , all because a very white American, name of Hopkins from Boston, had suddenly started up from a 1925 cocktail party or a café table in Paris with a wild blue stare around, looking for the last white spaces left on the map of Earth. It might just as well have been the Arctic but someone suggested the Sahara, which was very much in vogue with the French at the time. Kissing Scotty and Zelda good-by, he had flown due south in his own Gypsy Moth, armed with a handful of letters to military types in the desert, provided by a French buddy-pilot left over from World War I. Landing at Algol, Hopkins blurted out to the super-dapper captain: “Will you take me across the Sahara?” The captain screwed in his monocle: “When I saw how that Amerlou threw out his stale socks instead of having them washed, I knew he was rich. I proposed: ‘Half a million gold francs to cross the Sahara: you bring the trucks and equipment: I’ll bring you back.’” They made it, discovered a prehistoric skull and brought out a book, badly printed, with maps. Captain became colonel with enough money put aside to buy the oasis and build Buffalo Bordj. Houses are sepulchers for the living, the nomads say. It takes more than an Adept or two to set yourself up as an Old Man of the Sands.

I glanced with some amusement at fading photographs of Sudanese boys naked by a river with their cocks hanging down to their knees. That’s what we’re good for, I guess. Next to these hung a pre-World War I cabinet portrait photo, as I believe they were called, of the young officer in his first dress uniform, I judged. He wore pince-nez glasses and a sharp waxed mustache in those days. Beside this hung another from the same Parisian photographer showing him still with glasses and mustache but, astonishingly enough, dressed as a rich bourgeoise French lady of about 1910 in an evening gown with feathers and beads beneath a huge plumed hat. An armor-plated necklace covered his plunging décolleté. “My mother’s jewels,” the colonel breathed in my ear. I was taken aback to find he was pressing my hand. I snatched back my hand before he could kiss it as Ahmed Chaamba came in with the coffee. The colonel looked moved.

Barigou was clucking around the courtyard like a seminsane African comedy version of an imported French wife; his body presumably occupied by the ghost of the colonel’s mother, now playing Friday in the Sahara. We were served semi-French food in a curious underground room which had old Perrier bottles from France set into the low vaulted ceiling, pouring down on us a liquid green light. The Old Man expounded the rule of his house: “No eggs, no milk. I buy cheese from the nomads. I won’t let a female animal enter my house!” I nodded in sympathy: “The rule of Mount Athos.” I hate chickens, myself; cannot bear their cackle and feathers and get little enough pleasure out of smiling: “ Bismillah! ” while slitting their throats. “My house is my fortress!” boasted the colonel: “Will you give me a kiss?” I begged him to excuse me and, as Ahmed Chaamba came back at that moment to clear the table away, I asked: “Could I just lie down for a few hours in his room, perhaps? I am terribly tired.” I pulled out my pipe to turn on but the colonel snapped: “Please! Not in front of my Adepts!” Who the hell did he think he was, anyway?

Mister Barigou showed me into a bare little room with mud walls where I threw myself down on the iron army cot, rolling up in my own burnous. Barigou hung his black moon-face in the crack of the door, playing me his desert version of “Poor Mister Bones.” I can hear that sound, so I slipped him a bill as I told him to close the rough plank door. I was in a hurry to light up and, as soon as I did, I began to pick up the Chaamba boy’s low-frequency delta waves pulsing through the bed. The rhythms set up by such a young creature are just what I need. Here was a wild young postulant under a bad master who seemed to be learning the ropes by himself as any young Adept should. A bright shaft of sunlight fell through a chink in the door directly onto my closed lids. I fanned out my fingers, flickering them through the ray of light at something like the delta rate. Deep waves of migraine red, blue, purple and green pounded through my head in the heavy color-language in which Deltas talk to themselves.

My interior screen was swept by psychic static like a color 3-D TV screen in a blistering electrical storm. Some people, finding these visions as intolerable as real sandstorms in the desert, run screaming for a doctor at this point; for me, to know these wastes is to love them. Limitless bright pastures of light exploding on the never-to-be-numbered grains of sand flashed through my skull until, somewhere out there on a great burning beach, I picked up his tiny, cowering figure. Chaamba nomad herdsmen call such barrens a pasture when one spindly, rapidly-flowing plant every fifty paces springs up after a rain. And it did rain across my screen; rain like driven shards of glass under which the boy, Ahmed Chaamba, huddled against the goats of his mother’s tent. Then, as a tiny jeep raced like a maddened mechanical beetle across the scoured and polished floors of my visionary Sahara, the boy started up like a gazelle but in less than a minute they ran him down with the jeep. There he was, broken and panting; slung over the fender. Black Mister Barigou and the colonel, all in white including his ten-gallon hat, tied the boy up in a sack and threw him into the back of the jeep. “Caught me another one live!” the colonel exulted. I suppose these were the first words in French on the boy’s new sound track. That is the way I really like to see them; when they bring one in fresh. I wish I had been there. My ways are not this Old Man’s ways, of course; nor, I expect, are they yours.

There was a long period of mending and brooding in one of the colonel’s dark underground rooms. I thought I caught a glimpse of the boy’s astral pattern in the buzzing pinpoints of light; his path in the stars, learned since childhood through the seasonal migrations of his tent. When Mister Barigou pushed him up the ladder to the colonel’s iron army cot for the first time, the boy Ahmed saw by a glance at the stars that his tent had moved far away after fresh pastures, almost certainly counting him dead. The Old Man took him there night after night while he stared at the stars and, plotting the position of his tent, bided his time. As the tent moved back toward Algol with the returning season; nearer and nearer, from pasture to pasture known only to the Chaamba nomads, he counted the nights until his escape. Yet, when the time came, and the False Southern Cross rode high overhead as he lay under the stars with the colonel, he could not raise a finger nor move a limb but lay there impaled while the voice of the Old Man rumbled in his ear like the voice of Ghoul himself: “I can see you, Ahmed Chaamba! I can see you from here on the top of my tower through my telescope. You run in the wind.… I can see where you run … I follow wherever you go. You may run, Ahmed Chaamba, and leap from dune to dune like the tender gazelle I bring down with one crack out of my rifle but, now, you are falling … panting and sliding down a whirlpool of sand. There is nothing in front of you, Ahmed. You are falling, falling, falling.…”

If I am yours, you are mine. The boy began stealing into his Master’s head, now he saw how the thing was done. He lay there, taking it all in night after night as they linked under the stars. He slipped into a garden called “ Lafrance ”; garden after garden over the whole land with no Sahara between the gardens. He stole like a thief into cold rooms, schools, barracks and bars where Christians drank the forbidden Arab poison called Al Cohol in public while they stumbled about to music with their hands on almost naked women; held, unbelievably, to be their wives. He glided with a knowing smile through a world of shadows who pounce on boys in underground lava-tories and shabby Parisian hotels where the dapper young captain ogled them through his pince-nez as in a series of old curling yellow photos which faded when he took them in his arms. The Old Man’s life died as the Chaamba boy took it over. The Old Man’s life will soon all be mine, he gloated: when I have the very last gasp of him in me, he will be dead. He took the colonel with growing pleasure, starry night after starry night. I’ll soon be the colonel and all this will be mine, he thought, but Black Mister Barigou still ran the house.