Brion Gysin - The Process

I run up to my village, Jajouka, whenever I can and that’s often. Whenever I want to touch earth, I go up there. No hills on earth are more blue than our own Little Hills and that’s true. I was born up there under a hedge and I’m related to all of the village, the Master Musicians who never have done anything else in their lives but make music since the first man danced with his goats on the hills in the moonlight, a long time ago. Once a year, for eight nights, we go dancing in memory of him. My uncles stand fifty abreast in front of a wall on one side of our broad village green, blowing their oboe-like raïtas into the sky until sheet-lightning flashes and snaps in your head. My hundred young cousins in white drum out thunder like oak trees playing football with boulders and, up on the hill, the olive trees playing football with boulders and, up on the hill, the olive trees thrash their long silver hair like dance-crazy maidens who tear at their veils. In the middle of that, with the whole village leaping and howling, children bawling, dogs barking under the moon, leaps one single figure in goatskins, lashing about him with flails. Bou Jeloud! All the villagers, dressed in best white, swirl in great whorls and circles around one masked man. Me! I danced Bou Jeloud. Maybe, that’s why I act a little crazy, sometimes. Up there in Jajouka, there is no wheeled traffic, no running water other than rills and no electricity. Electric light scares Bou Jeloud away and one day soon, when it gets to my village, it will.

Bou Jeloud is Fear and Fucking; running wild, chasing, beating, catching, biting, tearing and fucking; again and again and again. Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air with the music to fall out of the sky on top of the women, beating them with switches so they can go on having the kids. The women all scatter, like marabout birds in a pasture, to light in a huddle. on top of a hillock in one quivering lump. Then, they throw back their pretty heads to the moon and let out a long lulliloo! They flutter their gullets, lolling their tongues around in their empty heads like the clapper rolls around in a bell. Hot, narrow black eyes brim over their veils, sparkling with dangerous baby. Every mouth is round-open, so, yodeling: O!

Bou Jeloud is after you, chasing you! You’re run down, overrun, screaming with laughter and tears. You’re trampling children while wild dogs snap at your heels. Everything, suddenly, is swirling around in a great ring-a-rosy, around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More! and: No more! and: No! … More! Pipes crack in your head and you can’t hear a thing. You’re deaf! Or, you’re dead! Dead in cold moonlight, surrounded by madmen and ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you … frisking you, fucking you … beating you, butting you … taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great wind drops out of your head and you begin to hear our heavenly pipes, again. Someone is whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing right there beside you. Who is it? Why, my friend; that is You!

Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? My uncles killed two goats, saying: “ Bismillah ,” as they drew a knife over their throats and flayed them in a cave where they stripped me naked to sew me up in the reeking, hot skins. When they blackened my face, darkness swirled down like the beating of drums. As they put the flails in my hands and began to play our music, I fell to the ground. When Hamid fell, Bou Jeloud jumped into him. Even now, I’m afraid. Bou Jeloud is the Father of Fear: he is, also, the Father of Flocks. The Good Shepherd works for him. When the goats, gently grazing, brusquely frisk and skitter away, he is counting his herd. When you shiver like someone just walked on your grave, that’s him! That’s Pan, the Father of Skins. Did you almost jump out of your skin, just then, Hassan Merikani? I’ve still got you under my skin.

How did you like it up there? I know it got under your skin — and I don’t mean the fleas. We let you sleep late, so breakfast was goat cheese and honey on fresh golden platters of bread from my sister’s mud-oven out in the yard where our dinner, the rooster, was crowing to his last morning sun. My uncles, the Master Musicians, were lolling about in their big woolen jellabas and white turbans, sipping mint tea, their keef-pipes and their flutes. They never work in their lives so they loll about easy. They cop a tithe of one-tenth of the crops in the lush valley below. It’s always been so. They’re musicians and play for the king. Every sultan who ever lived in his palace in Fez, signed a dahir or order-in-council, giving us the full power of our right to play to the king in the morning to wake him and, on Fridays, to pipe him down from his throne to his knees in the mosque. We have privileges, rights.

Late in August, each Master Musician slips away up to the borders of Rif country, in the blue mountains miles up, over, beyond and above our own Little Hills. High above those keef meadows of Ketama, where I’ve never been, hangs the ruin of an old fortified monastery from which, so they say, the Old Man of the Mountain once ruled the world. His Adepts were called the Assassins because of the hashish they smoke — Hashishins were monks who ran naked in August, ran naked and mad through the meadows of keef. When they fell in their cells like a stone, the Old Man scraped off their skins with a knife because their shaved bodies were covered with gum from the keef flowers. That gum is hashish. They spread out the gum on great marble slabs where they pressed it and cut it in cubes which the Master sent out all over the world to Marseille and to Hollywood, even. That trade is finished, now, too.

Now, we just run into the valley to snatch up a bundle of grass to take home. We have privileges, rights but, yes, we’re afraid of that valley and glad in our hearts that the castle above is a ruin and the Old Man is not there any more; for, they say, he could point a long skinny finger like that , at any one Adept of his standing sentry up there on the tower and that Adept would leap, would throw himself down to smash on the rocks in the valley below because he knew that his moment had come. We don’t like to be told. Hamdullah! we still have plenty of keef.

There is so much keef smoked in my village you can see it rise over the hedges of prickly pear and the thatched roofs of our houses. You can see the keef smoke rising blue, like a veil for the winds to catch up and drop back on this village of mine like a blessing. We’re invisible, here in our hills. The music picks up like a current turned on and the kids are all out in the leafy green lanes, bawling:

Ha! Bou Jeloud!

Bou Jeloud the Piper met Aissha Amoka!

Ha! Bou Jeloud!

My uncles, the Master Musicians, know all the music but our women know the words to tease Bou Jeloud. When night falls, they sit with their drums in some place apart from the men and they sing over the fire:

O Brother Bou Jeloud, come up in our hills

As God is our guide, you can have all the girls

Allah, allalai i lalli

Allah, alla lai wai wa!

O Brother Bou Jeloud, don’t hide in the melons

Eyes blacker than pips, false eyebrows like felons

O Brother Bou Jeloud; good-by, good-by

Your rotten straw hat cocked over one eye .

Women tease Bou Jeloud just to make him run after them. That’s all women want. Bou Jeloud wants Aissha Amoka; that means Crazy Aissha. He’s crazy for Aissha. She drifts around after dark, cool and casual, near springs and running water with a silvery-blue face in the moonlight where she pulls back her veils like a wanton to show you her twinkling tits. Her face and her breasts are a beautiful blue, all starry with sparkling lights. She coos at you in the husky voice of a dove: “Young man, can you tell me the time?” If you answer her one single word you are lost. From that day forever, you are her slave!