Brion Gysin - The Process

But I won’t forget you, Hassan Merikani. Oh, no! not for a long time, yet. I gave you the Key and I taught you the Lock. I let you walk in without having to knock. I taught you to eat like a Muslim, putting none but your right hand in the dish and keeping the left hand for things counted unclean, like wiping yourself without paper because paper is sacred, a bit. When Nazarenes go to the closet, they don’t wipe themselves with Holy Writ, now do they? Well, any scrap of paper could have the Name of Allah written on it, couldn’t it? Even a newspaper might have, “ Allah ” in print, in a piece about politics, no? How do I know? I can’t read, so I’m careful — I use the left hand God gave me and I know how to wash. I taught you how to wash yourself, too. I taught you to shave all your body-hair so I’d not be polluted by living with someone unclean. It was good you were circumcised because I could show you to Muslims and not be ashamed. Muslims like the alike. All Muslims are Brothers and, therefore, are Even, you see. But, God is Odd and loves the odd — that’s why He loves me. You, too, are odd and that’s why I never pressed you about God. Maybe, that’s been my sin, this letting you in without your submitting, but me, I’m a little wild man from the hills and I know what it is to be free.

When I told my uncles up in the hills, the Master Musicians, that you knew who Bou Jeloud was the first time you saw him, they said: “Bring your Black Merikani up here, so we can get a good look at him.” When I was too small to remember, my uncles tucked me into the hollow of their knees under their tickling beards, as they smoked while they talked Holy Things. “Can’t you remember?” you always were teasing me, filling a pipe the way I had taught you to fill it and light it for me. “Can’t you remember the Secret Name? Say the Word!” you insisted. “Tell me just the beginning Word.”

There you were, already inside of my head, so I laughed. Time passed. When I was ready, at last, you asked me to look a long time in the bright silver ball you hang on your keychain. I saw nothing at all. “Look!” you insisted; “they’re tiny, they’re small. Can’t you see the Master Musicians in there?” My eyes filled up a moment with water and, when it ran down my cheeks, I saw them. I saw them all sitting against a wall in Jajouka, talking. Now I understand television. “If that’s television.” you insisted, “you can hear what they’re saying.” Well, I listened a while and, I guess, I said what I said. I didn’t drop dead. The skies didn’t open up, even, or crack when I told the Secret Name we still know in the hills. You’re the one who almost jumped out of his skin. “Why, that’s Punic!” you cried, or something like that. “That’s pre-Roman!” Did you take us for tourists, perhaps? We’ve been here forever, a very long time. Light me a pipe and I’ll tell you some more but the Name, now that you have it, Hassan, you can’t write. The Name, Burning Name — it would set the paper to flame!

“And Aissha,” you’d ask me, “whose daughter is she?” You find her by springs and by wells and by brooks but she came from the sea. She’s Aissha the Moon, who dances on water. I never heard she was anyone’s daughter. “Do she and Bou Jeloud have any children?” Children from her? She’s a harlot who ruts with the ram in the sun. She’s silver. He’s gold. Leave me alone, now, I’m cold. No! Don’t bother me. Get out of my head, Merikani! Get out of my life! These are secrets you don’t tell a wife!

What we both have in common is this: you and I, Hassan, are kaffirs —Outsiders. That’s the truth of it and I don’t know why. Maybe we both strayed too far from our houses, if ever we had them. I don’t know what sent you out from your home, Hassan, but I was born under a bush. My mother ran out of the big house in Kebir in the middle of the night when she felt her pains coming on. She ran barefoot in the dust out of the town of Kebir, on up through the gardens and the orchards in the moonlight, through the blue valleys toward the Little Hills and home. Beneath the giant blue cactus palisade around Jajouka, my mother fell and bore me in a herd of goats. I am Bou Jeloud. I know all that and I know Tanja, too, because Tanja was always my city-girl, lying down there on her rock by the beach with her legs wide open to the sea. She’s not just a sailor’s slut: she’s been like a mother to me. From our side, from the hills, we have always run down to the sea and the city and back like a trail of ants with packs on our backs. Time and time again, giants and generals and sultans have tried stamping on us as we scurry along in our race to escape all their taxes. My blood is hot every time I make a run into Tanja to swarm up her old legs. I mount from the train at her feet, up her knees to the Grand Socco Market, spread like the belly of food on her lap. She used to wear a money-belt of booths where you could buy and sell cash all night and all day, as she dangled her other leg down the American Stairs by the port, enticing rich sailors to visit the girls. But all that, the girls and the money-changers and the money, have all gone since the day the whole city of Tanja was swallowed alive by the Whale.

I used to run that whole city by ear. I could sit in my favorite café, just sipping my mint tea and smoking my keef, and you may not believe it was true but I truly could hear almost every last thing that went on in the town. Not the Boulevard up on the hill in the New Town with its skyscrapers six-stories tall and its six hundred banks, but our Old Town inside its own walls was my house I had rented for life. When the maid breaks a plate out in the kitchen, don’t you see, in a flash, just which plate it is? When you hear the taps in the bathroom, don’t you know who’s taking a bath? The World is a River. If a Fountain shoots up in a River, don’t you know there’s a Whale? Well, one day in Tanja when you were away in the Sahara, we caught a real Whale.

In my little café, I heard Radio Cairo saying our sultan was the prisoner, now, of Madamegascar. Through the keef in my head, I could see this Madame Gascar with her yellow hair and her little yapping white dog she had trained to bite Arabs. If any real French madame had passed through the market right then, I’d have spat on her. And at that very moment, I heard the Whale blow, down below in the Old Town. Oh, I can tell you that’s a sound you know the first time you hear it! No other sound in the world but Bou Jeloud can match it for fright. Your short hairs crawl right up the back of your neck and, before you can breathe, your heels are kicking your ass to get out of that place. The Whale gave a roar like a beast eating buildings, crunching up little houses in one single bite. A voice in my head said; “This Whale is the Whale that’s going to eat Tanja!” And it did. It flushed up from the port, flooding into the Socco, our little plaza framed with cafés, where it began flailing the flukes of its tail in a spray of plate-glass. It tossed tables and chairs through the fronts of cafés and blew in the doors of the Indian bazaars every time it took a deep breath. The waiters and patrons were skidding inside as the owners slammed down their steel shutters; Clang Clang Clang! Jewelers were jumping inside their own safes when the Whale tasted blood. A Swiss tourist went down, his head bashed in with his camera. His blood and his brains washed over a shoal of Swiss watches that slid down the sidewalk like the guts of a shop streaming out in the gutter. The Whale, too wide for this steep narrow street up to the market, ripped down all the signs and the shutters on both sides as it came, sliding along on gold bracelets and rings rolling in rivulets under its centipede feet. If you stopped to pick up a thing, you were lost. Money-changers tossed their bills into baskets and were still scooping up change in their hats when they burst into flames from the blast from a hundred, a thousand! hot Arab faces all bellowing: O!