Brion Gysin - The Process

The result was that one day in the restaurant, Brion discovered “a magic object, which was an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each, and a little package in which there was a piece of writing, and the writing when deciphered by friends who didn’t even want to handle it, because of its magic qualities, which even educated Moroccans were not anxious to get in touch with, but it said something like, an appeal to one of the devils of fire, the devil of smoke — to take Brion away from this house: as the smoke leaves this chimney may Brion leave this house and never return. … And within a very short time I indeed lost the restaurant and everything else. But I realized that this was a very interesting traditional example … of a cabalistic square, which I then began to apply … to my own painting when I returned to Paris in 1958.” (from Here to Go: Planet R-101 )

Perhaps this snatching of an artistic victory from the jaws of a magical defeat was the sort of thing Gysin had in mind when he talked about artists as heroes “challenging fate in their lives and in their art.” For me, he was precisely that. Painter, writer, sound poet, scholar, philosopher, traveler, explorer, metaphysician — the labels are so many words. Cut up, isolated, each word cutting away from the big picture, they bounce off Brion the Irreducible like so many rubber bullets. No painting without the magic. No magic without the words. No words without the sound. No sound without the music. “If you want to disappear, come around for private lessons.” He was slippery, Brion. You had to learn to see him whole before you could see him at all.

If there is a “key” to The Process , this is it. By no means should one confuse Brion Gysin with his central character, the fun-loving black pothead professor. Not that there isn’t a lot of the one in the other. The work that won Gysin one of the first Fulbright Fellowships included two books: To Master A Long Goodnight , (the biography of Josiah Henson, whose life was the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin ) and The History of Slavery in Canada . Like Hanson, Gysin used his Fulbright as a one-way ticket out. As for Hanson’s Blackness, “I was slipped into the wrong colored package and delivered to the wrong address,” Brion wrote in a piece included in the “Brion Gysin Special” issue of Soft Need . “Just look at all this lousy oatmealy skin. Not enough melanin. I’ve lived the best years of my life in Morocco and it can’t take the sun. When I’m with Africans, I forget that I’m white. But they can’t forget it. I stick out like a sore thumb.” Nevertheless, Ulysses O. Hanson isn’t Brion Gysin. The Process itself is Brion Gysin.

When Hamid tells what it’s like to experience the Rites of Pan in Jajouka, it’s Brion talking. Then there’s Thay Himmer, on his family’s mystical inclinations: “All the women in my family, for the last three generations … at least, have been ardent Theosophists, followers of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, in close contact with Swami Vivekenanda and Krishnamurti; aunts, great-aunts, always talking about Gurdjieff, pranna , and the hallucinatory effects of superaeration — and all that sort of thing — or trailing around in trances at home.” That’s Brion, talking about his own family. When Maya Himmer remembers a childhood spent partly in Canada’s open spaces, when the Himmers’ lawyer talks about what it means to be Swiss, it’s Brion again, with more fractured auto-biography. Similarly, the evocations of Sufi ceremonies, from the marvelous Zikr in a desert compound early on to the almost unbearably vivid descent into the collective unconscious of the massed Hamadcha near the book’s halfway point, are either reportage or composites, transformed, in any case, into poetry. By the time I met him, Brion had infiltrated the ceremonies and recorded the trance rhythms of every major dervish brotherhood in North Africa. Often he went incognito, his Uher hanging on a strap under his flapping jellaba; if he’d been discovered, he would probably have been torn apart. The artist as hero, challenging fate again, living to the hilt in his chosen milieu, “the wild west of the spirit.”

Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain, Ismaili Gnostic, founder of the Order of Assassins — is he Brion Gysin too? Not to hear Brion tell it, but doesn’t he protest rather strenuously? Certainly the Old Man of the Mountain, who reportedly used hashish to vouchsafe his Adepts their visions of Paradise, intrigued Brion greatly, for a long time. His first reference to the subject in print was in Minutes To Go :

Yesterday a thousand years ago, Hassan i Sabbah, a Persian by birth and school chum of Omar Khayyam, walked by accident (as if there were any accidents) into the studios of Radio Cairo to find all the cats bombed. He realized like a flash that he could SEND, TOO. He took the mike to an unheathed (sic) pent-house called Alamut near the Caspian.… His original station nearly a thousand years ago could broadcast from Alamut to Paris with Charlemagne on the house phone and as far as Xanadu East. Today the same lines have been proliferating machine-wise and a stray wire into the room I am in. …

Apparently able to dispatch his Assassins (a word from the same root as hashish) from Alamut and then direct them at a distance, Hassan i Sabbah forged a monastic order and some practical applications of a venerable mystical tradition into an organization, feared throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. The comparison to present-day organizations like the CIA, which use science and pervert enlightenment in the service of a sinisterly shadowy Grand Design, was for Brion an obvious one. Yet he felt such a compelling connection to the Old Man and to Alamut that finally, some years after that first reference in Minutes To Go , he made a special trip in order to climb up to the ruins of the fortress, which had been leveled by Mongol invaders in 1256.

“I found it very disturbing when I was at Alamut to … find myself under strong psychic attack,” he told Terry Wilson. “I suddenly was attacked with vertigo, which I hadn’t ever experienced before in my life, and altitude fever.… But I also felt psychically attached to the place as I have never felt before in any other spot in my travels.… I felt that I was somebody that’d been pushed over the precipice, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to be a victim to such an old scene.…”

The only weapon that ever proved effective against Hassan i Sabbah, according to Gysin, was cut-ups. Before he founded his Order, the story goes, Hassan was director of finances at a Persian court. From the Wilson interviews: “He found when he came to deliver his speech on the exchequer that his manuscripts had been cut in such a way that he didn’t at first realize that they had been sliced right down the middle and repasted.… All of his material had been cut up by some unknown enemy and his speech from the Woolsack was greeted with howls of laughter and utter disgrace and he was thrown out of the administration.”

For Brion, the Old Man of the Mountain represented Control, a principle now embodied by other Old Men who sit in their electronic Alamuts with their long, bony fingers on the nuclear detonator button. Cut-ups were a useful tool because they sprung the trap of language, enabling the spirit to soar free from Control’s prison of words. Getting Out — out of that prison, out of the body, and ultimately out of this world entirely and into space — was for Brion the Great Work. The purpose of his art, from paintings to The Process , was Liberation.

Sometimes his preoccupation with this purpose can leave an unpleasant aftertaste. In particular, there is an apparent misogyny in The Process and in Gysin’s other writings that shouldn’t be glossed over. His tendency, shaped both by sexual preference and by years spent in the sexually-segregated Arab world, was to be with the boys. Yet women were always among his closest friends. “There are no Brothers,” he would say; yet he called his lifelong chum Felicity Mason his pseudo-sister.