Brion Gysin - The Process

So, I went back down to the Hotel Africanus , had two stiff whiskies, and told Amos I intended going through with this Hakim thing. When he saw I meant what I said, he agreed to go along with me as a guide. He just dropped his hotel like an old overcoat to show me the ropes in Morocco, so, at first, I offered to take over the whole hotel as our headquarters; but when the Hamadcha, looking much less magical and even a bit shady by daylight, came trooping in to claim me next day I could see That Look on Amos’s face. When Arabs appear on his very-near horizon, Amos’s faculties are inclined to fog over in front of your eyes. Amos sees all Arabs through a glass darkly or through the wrong end of the telescope down which he can snap at them in perfect Arabic if you ask him to translate but he doesn’t necessarily hear what they say back; not real communication, you see. For example, I tried to find out from the Hamadcha about the old man who’d cried out: “ Ha houwa! ” at me, calling me Hakim. Nobody seemed to want to know what anyone else was talking about until I suddenly remembered the microphone dangling from the balcony. “Lenny must have a recording of his voice!” I cried. So we all went looping back over there to Lenny’s house and banged on his door. Lorna opened the door just a crack, fearfully at first, looking more beautiful than ever when she revealed herself dressed like one of those girls from Dogpatch in a pair of tight blue jeans sawed off at the knee. She was, obviously, not quite awake yet and the sight of us all in broad daylight seemed to paralyze her. “Lenny’s not back from the port,” she murmured in hopeless protest as we all swept inside. I thought she was going to faint at the mere mention of the microphone because it seems that they had been making a recording unbeknownst to the Hamadcha. “They’re acting kind of funny on us,” she muttered. “We thought maybe we should split.” The upshot of that was that Lenny came in with two tickets for New York on a Yugoslav boat leaving immediately and somehow, in the shuffle, I found myself the new tenant of the house in Dar Baroud with a full company of Hamadcha Brothers ready to sit around eating and smoking and dancing until Lenny got back. I never did get hold of that tape, by the way, and it had some pretty potent words on it.

Anyhow, I plunged into my new life and, as my trance-dancing improved, my asthma cleared up. I thought it had disappeared entirely by itself, until one day the little old one-eyed man showed up wheezing at me about money so I accused him of stealing my asthma, gave him my inhalator and sent him away. I could see that such an act of authority on my part was much appreciated by the Hamadcha. As their hopes of Lenny coming back from America vaporized in less than forty-eight hours, the Hamadcha Brothers came to look on me more and more as their leader, proposing to make me meet the grand chiefs of various different brotherhoods in Morocco. I began to learn Arabic, counting out money: “Food for four is food for six is food for eight …” More than twenty people and sometimes as many as fifty sat down to food twice a day in my new house. Allah was providing in the person of Thay Himmer and as I was just as delighted with the arrangement as they were, there were no complaints in the household. Instead, there was music running like a river through the house all day and all night as the Hamadcha practiced their peculiar beat to which I danced like a doll on a string — not that I didn’t know what I was doing all the time, of course, and loving every minute of it, too. I’ve been through every branch of Eastern mysticism, always finding it rather glum. I came to the conclusion, finally, that its meager telepathic fundament is only the result of centuries of overpopulation and overcrowding. Everyone knows just what everyone else is doing and thinking all the time, of course. Even as a child, I had felt suffocated by it. All the women in my family, for the last three generations in the Farouts 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. Even Grandfather, who was the last Rajah-Bishop to officiate in the Farouts, used to meditate in the lotus position wearing only a G-string. So you see, I knew both the practical and the theoretical side of the business, since childhood you might say, and in Eastern philosophy I found no hilarity. For a while, I almost let myself become interested in Saint Teresa of Avila because I heard she kicked up her heels and went into long peals of ecstatic laughter, but when I found out she took deep whiffs of the incense pot into which she had probably thrown a handful of hemp, I left her flat. My asthma had always turned me against smoking but with the Hamadcha I ventured, now and then, to take a little whiff of a tiny pipe and after one particularly insane session I proclaimed to one and all that Morocco was the Wild West of the Spirit. I think that just about hits it on the head, don’t you? Every day — every minute — we did something hilarious.

The Hamadcha saw to it that I danced until my feet were raw and every bone in my body so sore that when I finally fell in front of the flutes I thought I’d never get up again. But just let me hear one long sobbing tremolo blown hoarse and husky on the long bamboo chebaba , and my soul kindled, caught fire and leaped up in me to send me hopping and whirling out there again in front of the music. It was all pretty tiring, I have to admit, and I was very glad I had kept on my room at the Hotel Africanus to which I used to creep away when I could, to toss down a swift Scotch or two at the bar with Amos, who kept his back door locked in case the Brothers came calling after me. Amos was and is a real darling, you’ll see; although he has a quite different world-view than we do, naturally. Deep down in his heart somewhere, he thinks we’re just Tourists. He lectured me, gave me books to read, was helpful and kind but he always disapproved utterly of what I was doing. To study anthropology was one thing, to practice it quite another. But I was constantly calling him in to translate, so, sooner or later, he got mixed up in everything we’re doing and he’s really invaluable, you’ll see! However, don’t be fooled for a minute, Amos simply doesn’t get the message that comes from Beyond — either he thinks it’s sinful or just not practical and he honestly doesn’t feel that he needs to make any spiritual progress other than that involved in protecting himself from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Lest this sound too harsh let me add that I, at least, think Amos can be brought to see a bit of Beyond. Mya denies it. Oddly enough, Amos dearly loves me, but Mya he admires, fears and respects.

She, by this time, had begun shacking up with Pio Labesse on the Boulevard. I phoned her up there from the depths of the Socco Chico, once or twice a day, to see how she was getting on, but it was such an almost unthinkable effort to haul myself out of that hole in the Medina that I didn’t see much of her. Over the phone, Mya was a bit snippy about Amos, pretending to think I must be having an affair with him but nothing could have been further from my mind. I was all wrapped up in the Hamadcha, with whom I was advancing step by step into their labyrinth of initiation, or, so I thought. When I tried to tell Mya this, she said she was coming down to see for herself but I said No, I’d go up to her at the Mingih . When I got there, her room was still unmade but there was no sign of the cardboard box in which we’d been carrying PP’s million dollars in greenbacks. We never gave it to the hotels to take care of because the box was too big for most vaults and besides nobody looking at it ever would think it was money because we had EXPLOSIVE written on it in big red letters with a big exploding pop-art bomb for people who can’t read. It frightened the hell out of hall porters and Customs men, too. As I bent down to kiss Mya on the bed, the communicating door opened into the next suite and there was Labesse in a gold brocade Arab caftan down to the floor. In his room, I could see the box torn wide open with green bricks of hundred dollar bills spread like a mattress over the bed he’d been lying on. Somehow, before I knew it, just out of habit I guess, I’d invited them both to my party, which I hadn’t known until that minute I was giving. It was a catastrophe, of course.