Brion Gysin - The Process

“Who tastes knows,” nodded Hamid. What makes him so wise?

“Oh, I got beyond Barbary thanks to your passport of keef but, when once you hear the Sahara, Hamid, when you’re actually in it, why, the desert’s in you! You know that song the Sahara is singing right now this minute, down there on its long windy flute? ‘ Oh, you’ll cross the Sahara and never come back! ’ it sings. But I did, Hamid! I came back and I still haven’t seen what I seek: my Black Africa!”

“ Mektoub ,” he shrugs. Hamid could hardly care less about anything Black. “It was written,” he drones in his pat Moslem way.

“The next time around, I’ll write my own ticket!” I hotly reply. “The Sahara still owes me a lot. The next time that I’m down there, I’ll take the place over from Ghoul! I’ll whip over the desert in my jet and I’ll piss on Ghoul’s head from thirty thousand feet up!”

“ Inch’ Allah! ” Hamid nags after me nervously: “If God wills.”

Hamid is, after all, my Baba, my Bab, my little back door into Islam through which the hue of my hide helps me slip in disguise when once I slough off my American cultural color.

“I’m an accidental Occidental, Hamid,” I assure him. “I’m an African: same-same, like you. You say so, yourself,” I insist, slipping into the loose Arab robes I brought back from the desert. Naturally enough, I have never been able to pull my Occidental mind along inside Islam after me but Hamid knows that and makes all sorts of allowances. After all, it was he who first brought me up here into these gamboling Little Hills where I am both a trespasser and forever at home. I remember, I once asked the caïd up here just how far his authority runs and he swung me around the grand circle of mountain and valley with an expansive gesture of welcoming pride as he stated, quite simply:

“You see that line where it is very very blue?”

The Master Musicians, all dressed in immaculate white woolen jellabas with their hoods up over their turbans, are grazing their flocks on the green and gold mantle of the hills. They are playing their flutes and the crystal-clear current of piping runs in rills down into the lush valleys below, watering and fructifying the crops. Yet, however much I may love their music, the only windy tune I can hear them play is “ Over the hills and far away across the Sahara and back! ” Once found, the words run around in my head with all the maddening reproach of a needle caught in my memory-track. Hot green tears spurt into my eyes and, when I clench them, the desert burns forever on the back of my lowered lids. For one haunted moment, I bathe again in the great Sea of Solitude, for whose barren shores any man who has once not only sighted but surveyed them must sigh forevermore.

“I’ve got to go back to the Sahara again,” I tell Hamid. “There’s so much to see and so much to learn. That’s why I’ve got to finish this copy of my Sahara notes and send all these papers off to the people in Switzerland who gave me the money to go on my trip. It’s what they call a sort of report: where I went, what I saw. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t break through the roadblock at Tam. Tam is a very magnetic, mysterious place. What you see there is one thing and what really goes on is another, You know very well what I mean. I seriously suspect Tam must be the enchanted castle of Ghoul. When the Foundation for Fundamental Findings gets wind of this, they’ll send me more money, maybe, to make another trip.”

“Thass good!” Hamid states firmly, instead of muttering: “ Inch’ Allah .” He firmly approves of my having money when I spend so much of it with him. “Next time, I go too. No man should travel alone. Thass no good.”

Hamid, happily, has not yet got a passport and passports are hard to get. So far, he travels only on the magic carpet woven of his imagination and mine. How many times have we sat here sharing his sebsi , his keef-pipe, sailing to the States in the ship of Hamid’s head. Sure as shooting, that is one trip I am in no hurry to take in cold blood, so I tell Hamid I have no money.

“Thass all right!” he assures me. “You sell me to someone as soon as we get to New York. When you get the money from the bank, I run away and come back. I don’t care: you can sell me whenever you like but I’ll always come back.”

“But you can’t do that any more in the States,” I weakly insist. “Slavery is dead.”

“‘ Burn baby burn! ’” quoted Hamid, lighting a sebsi of keef. “Thass what the matches say to the box.”

The day after that, I went down to Tanja alone and took the ferry across the Straits of Gibraltar to Gib to send off my manuscript from there for security reasons. Right opposite Her Majesty’s Post Office on Main Street, I saw in the window of an Indian shop just the very tape recorder I have been wanting all of my life — a UHER! An end to all this painstaking writing and rewriting of words. When the bearded Indian sage in the shop demonstrated to me how well the UHER both records and wipes out the words, my heart went out to the machine and I bought it with what was left out of my Fundamental funds. Now, I am never without my UHER wherever I go. Up in Jajouka, I sling my UHER over my shoulder like a mountaineer’s purse. There is so much wild music running through Hamid’s Little Hills that I am as anxious to tape it as a tripper is to slaughter wild flowers. Here, for example, I have a recording I made almost by accident on one of those occasions when Hamid, maudlin with keef, mumbled away as he does about how I am ruining or have already ruined his young life:

Thou art the crossroads of my life, Hassan Merikani!

You know what that means in the language we speak. We say about people like you: He can walk in the souk of my head, the marketplace all Arabs live in. More than that, you stepped into my head without even knocking or calling out: “ Trek! Make way!” and you made your home there like my head was your very own house where you walked up and down teaching me school without as much as taking off your big Nazarene shoes. Christian or not, you’re an African, Hassan, belonging to us. American passport or not, we know people like you. I may be God’s Little Burro or Allan’s Ass, like I always say, and I may be a square-headed Berber just down from my own Little Hills, like they call me in Tanja but I was Hamid the King of the Train before I ever knew you. When I see a prize, I know how to take it. You never do.

I swung into Tanja one day about noon on the back of the train from Kebir and I dropped from the still-moving cars as we glided along by the beach before we got into the station: no money, no ticket; I travel free! I tumbled head over heels six times in the sand and when I got to my feet, there were you. Playing Ping-pong with beachboys in the smallest bikinislip ever seen on the beach, you were leaping about like a naked Afreet , one of King Solomon’s magical Blacks. My flesh crawled at the sight of your flesh, the cool hue of your skin. “There goes my Abid —my slave!” I swore to myself. “I’ve bought me a Black.” I was a newly ruined man of nearly sixteen who felt he had nothing to lose. How could I know you would cost me so much before we were through?

That midnight, alone, you sat drinking mint tea on the terrace of Fuente’s café in the Socco and there, not a full arm’s length away from your chair on the other side of the iron grill they took down more than ten years ago now — there hunkered Hamid, ex-King of the Train, hidden under the hood of his ragged jellaba. You slapped at your neck, like my black eye was a tickling fly, because I was trying to peer deep in your ear, drilling to see what you had inside of your head. Now, all these years later, I know. When I’ll be dead, Hassan, I still will remember some things that you said. I always remember the first time you turned and your eyes caught in mine — so do you. You jumped up like something had bit you, calling the waiter as you dropped some loose change on the table, and ran up the Street of the Christians, heading for home. I chuckled and ducked through the shortcuts, just watching you dash up that flight of steep steps and into your house, double-bolting the doors without catching your breath. Were you spying on me from out of some little slit of a window high in the wall? Why didn’t you turn on a light? I had nothing to do, so I could hang about all that night and all the next day and all the next night until you got over your fright and came out, or until I climbed into your house with you — somehow. I didn’t know how.