Brion Gysin - The Process

Two or three bare-faced girls of the kind they call “students,” and the first we ever had seen, came screaming like Aissha Amoka out front with some half-naked boys who tore off their shirts, to make flags. People in rags and people in gowns were spewed up in one belch by the town and vomited out onto the broad Grand Market square right under the stare of two dozen policemen who pushed their way out of the commissariat with their buttons undone. They just stood there, rubbing their eyes with surprise. Those girls without veils and the half-naked boys with banners flew up toward the Boulevard with its six hundred banks. The policemen popped in and popped out again but, this time, with guns. Their captain screamed: “ Fire! ” In one minute, there were so many people kicking and twitching or dead on the ground that it looked like a movie. Up on the Boulevard, was there a panic! Rich Christians and Jews ran out of hotels with their hair in the air, screaming for taxis to take them out to the airport. Other men and even some women with pistols ran to the banks, backing up trucks, station-wagons, taxis, anything on wheels. They loaded the gold onto handcarts and pushcarts and go-carts and baby buggies, to run with it out to the airport where planes swarmed out of the skies like bees to suck all the honey from Tanja and never come back.

Up in the hills, my uncles the Master Magicians had only one thing to say to me: “Get your Merikani back!” I smoked a lot of keef for a week and I saw they were right. Night after night, we sat talking of you in the house of my Uncle Mohand, whose second wife can make you see what people are doing far away by looking into a tray covered with sand. We could see you in a truck crossing the tray and every day we saw you getting closer and closer to a red pebble where a captain in a white tunic was holding trouble for you in his hand. I was out there with you crossing the sands, every night for weeks. Once, we saw you were dead. Once we saw somebody we didn’t know it was you because you had turned blue and there were two of you. When you reached the edge of the tray, the wife of Mohand would reach out with her hand to shake it like a sieve. When I leaned over the tray one night, it turned into a well and I saw you way down there beckoning to me from the far away bottom and I fell and I fell and I fell. I got well when they made me drink water in which they had washed out a spell written on paper with rust. You may not think they know anything much but my Uncle Mohand said: “That Merikani must come back soon!” And, isn’t it true, Hassan Merikani, you were up here in Jajouka dancing with us under the next full moon!

It was written: “ Mektoub! ”

It was written, indeed! But does that mean I am supposed to believe on some level that Hamid actually brought me back from my trip, magically? I ought to be downright mad at him if he did it but, instead, I have spent all this time translating, transcribing and, yes, transposing the Hamid I captured on tape. When I read back what is written, I hear how very far it is from Hamid’s real speech and I ponder on how much I betray him each time I correct or rewrite. Only this morning, I found myself switching still more of his so-called sentences around, trying to catch at some of the unconsciously rhyming effects he manages to ring from the voluble but wildly incorrect Spanish he still uses with me; although my own bed-and-kitchen Arabic is already good enough to get by. Fact is, the man in the marketplace here in North Africa takes me automatically for a fellow Moroccan as soon as I slip on a striped silk jellaba and slap a red tarboosh on my head. Everyone calls me Brother: “ Hai .”

Not up on the Boulevard in the New Town of Tanja, though, where I wear my American threads. When I sit out on the terrace of the Café de Paris, every last hustler who ever guided an American gob still slobbers and hovers around but they keep their distance, these days. Not one of them would dare, any longer, to call me: American Joe. I guess I owe Hamid that, too. I am Hassan only with him up on his mountain or down below the Socco Chico in the underground keef cafés. Up on this Boulevard-level of town, Alcohol is King. It is not the cool thing to smoke pot in public; at least, not in a pipe. Instead, I take a deep drag on the Casa Sport cigarette I gutted and refilled with great grass I got from Hamid before I pulled my poor self together and struggled up here in the European town for a change of elevation and air. The tangle of traffic, out there in front of me somewhere in the Place de France, looks a bit distant and glassy, I have to admit, but everything is bright, bright, bright! Every last little dancing blob out there is all jazzy-bedazzled with candy-colored light. I adjust my shades with distinction, puffed up with pride at how well the taste of Tanja suits someone like me and, then, I carefully drop my eyes to the pen and paper on the table in front of me but my gaze never gets there because I break into a loud laugh. I laugh like a lunatic to think that a year of sea and sand has burned up behind me since I first dropped into Tanja for what I thought might be, at most, a couple of weeks.

Now, I think I have got Hamid safely tied up with his family and flocks on their Pan mountain and here I am back at the Crossroads again. “ Do something! ” I keep telling myself, but what, really, do I want to do? If I dared, I would ring my last dime on this marble-topped table and get on my feet and then … and then, with bowed head, just shuffle off into the crowd, known to no one, with the wind whistling behind me as I shuffle off into the Sahara again. If I had the nerve, I could launch myself like a leaf on that sea of life, flowing by me out there. If I really wanted to catch up with that tide, I could mutate into just one more mad marabout like the Marvelous Major of Merzouk who was both revered and kicked about by the natives for years until the day the Marines landed, when he threw off his rags and stood there revealed with, tattooed all over his white ass: CIA! Nay! Very well, then I will have to become a saint of the so-called absurd, a man without a country, wrapped in a pied cloak sewn of nothing but flags. I’ve seen some of those cats — Bouhali Brothers — and they really look great — like they really have got it made. There they go, their bare feet deep in the dust but their heads, man! their heads touch heaven: loser take all! Just the mere thought of that fate makes a shiver run through me. I feel my scalp tingle and tighten on the roof of my skull. My hairs stand on end, one by one; all frizzling out slowly in a fuzzy electric halo that comes down around my ears. My ears are becoming the ears of the fennec who hunts the jerboa; bristly antennae that pick up and tingle with the silky sound of the sand sighing across the Sahara. It crackles like static inside of my head. Grains of sand, more numerous than the stars, are slipping and sliding and I am startled to hear in the roar of traffic on the Place de France, abruptly, the rumbling voice of Ghoul! I could easily blast so much keef night and day I become a bouhali ; a real-gone crazy, a holy untouchable madman unto whom everything is permitted, nothing is true.

I was thinking along these lines this morning, if you can call that thinking, as I sat at a round marble-topped table on the terrace of the Café de Paris, today about noon. It was hot and I wanted to be alone so I propped this Moroccan leather briefcase I have, full of this manuscript, on the chair beside me, reserving the seat. On the table in front of me, I had my pad of letter-paper over which my pen has been hanging fire, now, for over a month. I hate writing letters but, if I was going to go on, or so I told myself in order to whip my penhand into action: “ You better write this .” This was my letter to the Foundation, from whom I had heard nothing since I sent them a copy of my desert diary; pretty heavily varnished, I have to admit. I want my follow-up letter to be more business-like, maybe. After all, I have to brazen the whole thing out; my failure to cross the Sahara in less than a lifetime; my failure to find myself in Black Africa, floating down the bosom of its broad rivers through the jungle to the sea and, then, to return to the world around its hump. I mean to say to the Foundation: Frankly, I am fresh out of bread. In your service, O mighty Foundation, I have experienced extreme experience and been taken for an Adept along the Way. Extreme experience is, naturally, extremely expensive and so it should be. I have given of my person. I intended to add, rather insolently: “Now, pay me!” I considered enclosing a street photographer’s shot of me taken in the thick of the Socco Chico crush and scrawling across it, perhaps: “ Which one is me? ” To a man who has little or nothing to lose, after all, everything is surely permitted when dealing with these powerful abstract entities like Fundamental, for whom, equally surely, after dealing with hordes of applicants like me, nothing is true.