Brion Gysin - The Process

The Aissaoua were hissing and kissing their snakes on the snout when a woman broke into their circle with a couple of live frogs or toads in her grip. She waved the poor things wildly about by their legs, showing them off to the crowd before she crammed one into her mouth and half-swallowed it, gagging on it a while. One long-fingered webbed-foot still kicked, trailing out of the corner of her mouth. With another big gulp she got the thing down but the frog in her stomach set her jumping and screaming more than ever before. While trying to cram the second frog down, she vomited up the first one and was ignominiously dismissed as a charlatan. For a moment I thought they might tear her to pieces for wasting their time. I watched her trying to fight her way back into the circle of trance-dancers but her place was taken by some other wild women with eyes revulsed back into their skulls. Their long wild black hair was lengthened by ankle-length ponytails of braided black wool, which whipped the faces of nearby spectators who began clapping along in unison to the hysterical beat of the music. When this whirlwind moved on away from the foot of the tree against which I was resting, I noticed crowds of young country yokels and boys a few feet away, packed tight around several pitchmen under rusty umbrellas running three-card games or the old shell and pea game on flimsy little portable tables which they could collapse and clear out when their lookout man called the Arab equivalent of “Hey Rube!” But, of course, at this sort of a feast there were no policemen about and no trouble. The locals apparently loved to be robbed for they threw their poor pennies away with more frenzy than I ever have seen around the expensive green tables of Monte. I got up painfully and staggered over to look closer at what they were playing. The charlatan running the deal squinted up with a grin: “Hi, Hakim!” he wheezed.

It was the same little old geezer with one eye to whom I had passed on my asthma. I began to show him my teeth as politeness and self-preservation demanded but before I could gasp out: “Isoprenaline Bronchomister Inhalator,” he picked up the board made of a worm-eaten plank over two thousand years old as dated later by carbon 14 at Cambridge in England and cracked it over my head. I would like to claim I had satori at this point but I don’t remember a thing until I woke up under my tree again with my half the board still firmly in my grip. A half dozen Hamadcha Brothers were intently watching me as they hunkered down in a circle a few safe paces away. I realized I was still under my blasted cedar tree looking out over the factories of distant Meknes. When I put up my hand to my head, my hand came away from my shaved skull covered with blood. My scalp had been split open as the first step of the initiation demands.

The Brothers got to their feet, picking up our silk banners whose tall gold-knobbed poles were leaning against my tree. Other Brothers helped me to my feet, making me totter over to join in the pilgrim crowd. Adepts all over were beginning to jump to our music as the Hamadcha cut loose. Groups formed on the narrow paved causeway leading down the worn stone steps cut into the side of the gorge; leading further down into the tomb of the saint. Somehow, I knew just what to do without being told but my feet hurt so much that it took me some time to get swinging along with the gang. The honky-tonk side of the fair had picked up and was going full blast under the temporary tents which were a straggling line of ragged restaurants belching out greasy smoke from the lamb kebabs roasting over open fires. Smoke trailed through the wailing music. The Adepts swirled about their drummers, hopping and whirling as they moved slowly down the narrow defile. The air thickened and apostolic fires sprang from the tops of our poor broken polls, I could swear it. Wide-eyed youngsters lined the walls, dangling their feet over our bloody heads. Now and then, apparently tranquil people who had been merely milling about in the crowd, simply sailed into trance as suddenly as if they had not expected to be swept up in it. We wound down the causeway past a battery of young Arab candy-butchers who were crying: “ Grass Green! Paris Green! Pluperfect Pink and Ultra Mellow Yellow! ” They were hawking bright-colored country candy from trays swarming with mountain bees out after quick honey. Rather like me with my Instant Enlightenment, I thought wryly, as I flapped even harder to beat off the bees.

Dancers around me began splitting their heads with big earthen pots which they broke on their skulls with a sound like coconuts cracking. One spinning woman kept wheeling until her long hair stood out like spokes stiff with blood, splashing everyone around like a lawn-sprinkler. We kept leaping and whirling, jumping to the music as we made it down two or three broad steps every hour. It took us from just before sunset until well after midnight to get down to the tomb illuminated by flaming torches. I had long lost all contact with my feet; they were just bloody stumps by that time. I started slipping in and out of my body to cut down the pain but I went on hopping more madly than ever. Suddenly, someone dressed in white seemed to step out of the stone wall right beside me. A glow of light blazed up behind him. His eye caught in mine and I felt that my soul had been grabbed in its gut by a long-shoreman’s steel hook. No need to tell me that this was the Living Saint of the place, the descendant of Sidi Hassan buried below. He materialized in the arch of a shrine halfway down the stone conduit, as if he’d stepped out to inspect me. He glanced sharply at my bloody board with which I’d been beating my brains out and shot me a look of approval. I was so sure I had heard him say to me: “Later!” that I hopped away beating it out on my brain with my board. “ Later, later! Initiator! ” I banged away on my head.

A big woman, whose broad face was all wrapped and wimpled up like some medieval nun’s, abruptly shot me a keen look over the Initiator’s shoulder. I tagged her for the head of the local Ladies Auxiliary but, for a long second it was Mya who looked at me out of her eyes. As it turned out later, Mya and Pio Labesse at that very moment were already steaming around the mountain in Mya’s new Bentley, determined to rescue me from myself. By that time I was practically out of my skull from bashing my brains with my board and then— Whoosh! — and I was really out of my skull but just for the pico-second it took me to slide into what seemed to be quite another skull. I was now sitting quite calmly, high on the hillside with a group of young Moroccan students who were telling me about their exams in faulty French. Ordinarily, I don’t know French well enough to tell the difference. We were so precariously seated on a pinnacle of rock overhanging the ravine that I looked down about a hundred feet and fifty, directly onto the cortege of torch-waving, howling and hopping Adepts cascading down to the tomb of the saint right below me. The courtyard of the tomb was lying brightly lit and open to the night sky, like a box of rubies between my knees. A skinny brown cow as agile as any mountain goat suddenly crashed out of a thicket and crossed over in front of me, blocking my view and nearly smothering me in her soft smell of sweet grass and manure. I almost pushed her down the precipice in my frenzy not to lose sight of the dancers below. “Dancing is only for people who don’t know any better,” one of the Moroccan students was assuring me. “None of us ever dances. No. Of course not.”

Lights twinkled and torches were flashing red and green amongst the branches in the dark canyon below me. For some seconds of super-sensibility, I felt I could read the message written in the landscape, spelled out in every little nervure and veining of every last leaf breathing beside me. My very own juices were pouring in torrents through the infinite hydraulic maze of green life-tubes linking the vines over the valley, tying down the dusty red-brown face of the earth. The dancers below me were running down the stone stairs into the sanctuary like a rope of ants which I confused with a migration of “real” ants apparently scurrying hurriedly somewhere under my feet. I was aware that the young students were bored with the scene and anxious to distract me away from it by inviting me into the big whitewashed windowless block of a house immediately behind us on top of the rock. They were practically dragging me away by force. Regretfully, over my shoulder, I caught a last glimpse of Sidi Hassan down below me, looking like a bright box full of tiny toys come magically to life.