Brion Gysin - The Process

As Amos was telling me all this, he piloted me through a maze of dark corridors to the back door of the hotel, which opens, as you know, right onto the gate into the teeming Arab alley that leads to Dar Baroud. As I slid off the narrow step, I was almost sliced in two by a bicycle-boy flying past like a steel bat with a knife-edged tray of bread balanced on his head. Underfoot was slippery with veiled women and litters of nearly naked children everywhere even at midnight. I remember feeling that one false step might send me slithering into a roaring bake-oven fire, wide-open on one side of the narrow lane, or into a medieval urinal on the other. I looked up to see Amos was knocking on a handsomely studded door in the blank wall of a sordid cul de sac. A tall dark young man as handsome as a Hindu god in a nightshirt splashed us with light as he opened the door inviting us in. That was Lenny. Amos tried to wriggle away from the invitation, insisting he’d come only to introduce me but I could see he was fascinated by what the Levines were up to so, when Lorna came up behind Lenny in a flame-colored Moroccan caftan of silk, looking exactly like the beautiful Rebecca in Ivanhoe , we all went inside; almost pushed in, as a matter of fact, by the growing crowd of little snotty-nosed Arab kids in the street behind us.

The house itself was enchantment. Maybe you know the house I mean or have been in one like it: until then, I never had. The colored tiles in the patio and the lights and the flowers and, above all, the people in their gorgeous robes! People furnish a house in Morocco, I could see that at a glance. There were over fifty Moroccans present, including more than ten musicians in spotless white robes and turbans who sat apart on a golden straw mat to one side of the marble patio, looking peculiarly picturesque and what I call “historical”—as if they were floating there in some sort of golden jelly of the past through which one could really reach into the past and touch them. I guess some of the effect was produced by clouds of keef smoke and gum-Arabic incense, which they kept tossing into the pots of red charcoal over which the musicians warmed and tightened the skins of their drums.

Everyone was grinning at me as if I’d just come home. I grinned and bowed back at them as I took out my little asthma inhaler, my Bronchomister of isoprenaline, which I get from France. You’d think it was the trick of the century, the way they all reacted. Applause! “They think you’ve got pranna in there!” Amos hissed in my ear as he drew me aside to give me an extramural lecture on what the Paris school of social anthropology led by his Professor Levy-Levant thinks of ecstatic practices. I know quite a lot about all that myself but I’m always ready to listen if there isn’t some simply great music going on at the same time. When the beat picked up, I began joggling and jiggling, much to the annoyance of Amos. When they began swinging in earnest, four or five barefooted men and one woman, whose long mane of black hair fell over her eyes, began hopping and flapping their arms to the beat of the drums, swaying and bowing to the long shuddery raucous railing of the big bamboo flutes. I began jerking myself, losing Amos completely except for the supercilious sneer on his face, full of sheer disapproval. My elbows were thumping up into my armpits while my calves began pumping something into my knees to give them a little more jump. Before I knew what was happening to me, I was up in the air and over the heads of some fat Arab ladies all wrapped up in white on the floor like a row of bundles of laundry and I was clearing them all. I looked down at them from my orbit to catch their broad smiles of approval as I hurtled past over their heads toward the drums. When I landed, I landed in a new world: I was out there front and center, leaping and twisting for the Hamadcha music along with the best of them. A break eventually came when someone beside me fell to the floor with froth on his lips and had to be carried up close to the drummers for shock treatment. I went back to slump down on the floor beside Amos and the Levines. I could feel Amos beginning to bristle as some old gink with one eye leaped up in the orchestra and started apostrophizing us. When all the Moroccans began swaying and bowing and chorusing back: “ AAAAAmen! Aaaaaamen! ” I knew right where I was in the service, I’m a bishop after all, so I brayed: “ AAAAAAmen! ” along with the rest of them. For, did not the Prophet say: “He who does not cry aamin with the Sufi is recorded as one of the Heedless”?

Out of the corner of one eye, I did begin to notice that my hosts, who understood a good bit of Arabic, were looking less comfortable by the minute, while even my ear could catch an ominous edge on all these invocations of “ Allah! ” which swelled up in almost hysterical chorus around us. I got to my feet. They didn’t have to urge me to edge along around the outside of the crowd along with them toward the door but before we got there the old gink in the long gown and turban fixed me with his one good eye and suddenly shot a long skinny finger right under my nose as he shouted or screamed rather: “ Ha houwa! There he is!” You don’t need the language to understand that: There he goes! That’s the man! That’s the one! and you expect the whole pack to be launched in full cry: “After him! After him! Don’t let him go!” I just stood there with my shoes in my hands and a sickly white grin on my face as the old man pushed his way through the crowd to throw himself at my feet, calling me “Hakim!” When I caught his eye, Amos translated: “Hakim’s a common name for a magician. Let’s go!” A whole lot more people were suddenly slobbering over my hands and my feet, so I gave them my most solemn Episcopal blessing until I remembered I shouldn’t be making the sign of the cross. Lenny and Lorna were delighted by the drama but Amos wanted to leave. Lenny insisted on walking us back to the hotel, pestering Amos all the way to tell us who Hakim was. “He must have looked just like Mr. Himmer, don’t you think?”

“Well, he may have at that,” Amos allowed. “Hakim was the caliph of Cairo about the time of Charlemagne and history says he was a blue-eyed Berber or, even, a descendant of Vandals with red hair. Hakim was a ferocious puritan who slaughtered so many thousands of his subjects by his own righteous right hand that he is said to have reduced the population of Cairo by nearly nine-tenths. The survivors revered him, of course, swearing that Hakim was the embodiment of divine justice on earth: the caliph became a cult in his lifetime, inevitably one might say. In the end he got tired of it: simply walked out. He got so disgusted with all these spineless Cairoites that he walked away alone out of an empty street into the desert one moonlit night, dragging his cloak behind him to efface his footsteps as he went. He never was seen again from that day until, maybe, this.”

“Oh, no, Amos!” I cried. “I am not Hakim nor was meant to be. Maybe the first rajah-bishops of the Farouts behaved a bit like that with the early islanders but I’ve always thought of myself as someone out of Russian rather than Arab literature — Aloysha the bore or the idiot prince Myshkin.”

“You know what that means in Arabic, don’t you?” laughed Amos. “ Meskeen means ‘poor thing.’”

When we got back to the hotel we found that Mya had moved out in the middle of the night, leaving word that because the noise was too much for her she had gone bag and baggage up to the Hotel Mingih , on the Boulevard. Crawling up out of the Medina next day to get up there was like leaving one world for another. In her hotel, the desk sent me right up to her room without ringing and I found Mya in bed, with the doctor. She hadn’t been feeling well so she told them to send up a doctor. Dr. Pio Labesse was this Catalan specialist who ran his clinic in the bar of the Mingih where he could keep a close tab on his drinking patients; among them, some of the richest women in Tanja until Mya blew in. Mya may still have been just a backwoods Canadian girl in those days but she had a lot of other things besides several hundred million dollars and about thirty years on those other babes. Pio psyched Mya out immediately: in a way they were really twin souls. When Mya divorced PP, who had just turned twenty-one and come into his money, she walked out with everything he had in Africa, just for a start, and Pio knew exactly what to do with it. But that’s Mya’s tale and I know she expects to audit it all directly with you tonight at the picnic. By the way, I’ll not be there in person.