Brion Gysin - The Process

There was no more electricity in the clinic and the house began to crack apart in earnest. One day, while I was lying there looking at the ceiling, a plant poked its head in through a crevice and unfurled a green leaf. I thought it might be time to leave the clinic before the plants took over but my nurse, the night watchman, merely shook his head: No. By day, he took me for walks through the overgrown jungle of the garden or I would lie for hours in his little bamboo hut while he cooked delicious food for us both over charcoal. It was quite an idyllic time because we never had to speak a word. There was the language-barrier between us, that’s true, but we didn’t need words. At night, he sat at the foot of my bed with a candle at which he made me stare until I saw visions like a few feet of film, flickering on and off. One I kept getting showed me a vision of myself getting on a plane for Cairo, I didn’t know why. Finally, because he was so persistent, I realized that I was supposed to go there and bring something back for him. These people always want presents, you know. Frankly, he ended up by being as much of a pest with his visions as a shoeshine boy is with his shoeshine box on the Boulevard.

Mya and Pio came back from their first trip to the Sahara looking tanned and fit. They were still flying that old DC-4 that poor PP had picked up off the airport in Basel, the day we first set out for Africa. When I began to get around again, I managed to catch Mya in the bar of the Mingih . I let her persuade me that I needed a short trip to Cairo to catch up on myself. She cashed a check for me, passing me a packet of money just before they took off for Villa Cisneros on the Tropic of Cancer, where they had an eye on this extraordinary piece of property they could buy on Cape Noon. That was — or is—“Malamut.” Strangely enough, it was Amos Africanus who gave it the name.

To get to Egypt, I had to take Air France by Madrid, Rome, Athens before I got hung up for six hours in the airport in Beirut along with Mr. Moise Tshombe, who never did have much luck with planes. I sank into deep meditation, staring at him through a hole in my newspaper from where I sat in a very comfortable airport lounge chair. This bugged him so much he got up and ordered a taxi to drive him around the city until plane-time. I sat on there awhile, savoring my little triumph as I said to myself: “No! That’s not the man!” Finally, I was picked up by the local Lebanese postal clerk in the airport who came sidling up talking of hashish, in which I’m less interested than you, dear Hassan! I couldn’t care less! You can imagine my utterly unfeigned boredom when I realized he thought he was leading me on, if you please, with his tales of postal sacks full of hashish in cubes, spilled out on the floor behind his high desk everytime there was a police seizure in a plane. Then he began expounding on the utter ineptitude of all Egyptian pilots when I told him I was flying United Arab Airlines to Cairo. The plane was finally called long after midnight and we got into Cairo airport about 4 A.M.

I managed to knife my way through their panicky, practically wartime customs, grab the only cab into town and check in at the old Hotel Semiramis down on the Nile by dawn. That creaky old caravanserai is on its last legs. When I threw back the fitted mahogany shutters of my non-air-conditioned room in which Lawrence of Arabia might have caught forty winks between missions, I was hit by an eyeful of pharaonic Horus hawks swimming like tea leaves in an amber sky through which scudded little gold and mauve, turd-turreted clouds like scrambled eggs with ketchup which kept spilling over the old British Embassy down on the banks of the gray-green greasy Nile. In my young days there, Cairo was the Garden of Allah with a coating of Turkish Delight but what I looked out on now was, apart from the Embassy, whose front lawns to the water had been sliced away by a very necessary new boulevard, simply a stack of new skyscraper-slums standing like a wall to cut off the Nile breeze from the city. I could barely bring myself to look at the new streamlined Shepheard’s next door. I slammed back my shutters to get a few more hours of sleep before I shaved, showered and slid down the old marble staircase into the lobby as I had first done when I was thirteen years old. Anyway, the old elevator in the form of an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus still hangs out its sign in seven languages: Out of Order . The lobby looked like a stripped tomb in which a couple of very old and creaky Greeks were still shuffling around waiting to be buried. I tiptoed across the marble floor, feeling like a ghost of myself, too. Then I braced myself just inside the curtained swinging door beyond which I knew was the blazing street and the raging rabble of dragomen, the all-too-famous Cairo guides.

Pausing to button down my inside pocket over my passport and my Express checks, I put one paw on my wad of Egyptian pounds in my left pants pocket and pushed through the door. I fully expected to be overwhelmed, as always; simply bowled over by a howling pack of the most ferocious guides on earth. Nothing happened: nothing at all. A few fine old men, their deeply-lined faces refined by the wisdom which comes from having manhandled many a generation of tourists, were quietly sitting or standing against the wall, looking like magnificently well-costumed and made-up extras from Central Casting waiting for their cue. Some of them even nodded almost like old friends, as if they remembered me only too well from the old days. Hailing a taxi out of the rank and not one of those touristtrap limousines, they just let me slip through their clutches but, as I got into the cab, a little man not much bigger than a wizened fourteen-year-old, with a toothpick mustache, opened the opposite door and slid in with me. In two seconds flat, as I gave the street address of the Arab Museum in Arabic, I guessed he was the Little Man the Austerity Egypt regime details off to foreigners these days. He and I got talking, and, in the time it took us to get across Cairo, he was well launched into the story of his life with a wife whom he had divorced when he got home one day to find she had clipped all his twenty-four suits into scraps with a pair of nail-scissors. He was still with this tale when I led him into the Arab Museum, which, I felt sure, was the one place in Cairo where he had never been before. I was right: I managed to lose him in the Fatimid fretwork. Pretending I had to go take a leak behind one of the screens, I slipped out through the side door into Nasrudin Street, where I hopped onto the running-board of a crowded tram bound for the Citadel section, feeling just like James Bond. I had one person to see in Austerity Cairo and that was my old Ismaïli Imsak instructor. I meant to make that visit alone.

My mother first pricked up her ears at the mere mention of Imsak when she heard Aly’s mother talking about it years ago, in the old days at teatime on the terrace of the Hotel Semiramis when I was still in short pants. Aly’s mother said that Aly’s father had sent him to a venerable old sheik who ran a school near the Citadel of Cairo, where he taught Imsak . She said the word meant “withholding” and my mother thought that meant continence, which it has nothing to do with, and asked if I could be sent. Now, Imsak is the art of love as an art and, eventually, a spiritual exercise for getting out of the body, right past the possessive demon of the flesh. At that age, the demon between my legs did not have to be provoked or, even, evoked. With training, this demon can be forged into a precision tool to satisty every last woman on earth. Love as lust can be icy-cool or used cruelly, eventually destroying the lover himself. The great Don Juans, like Casanova or my friend who could take a woman in a carriage or a taxi while running between two other dates, have been the matter of much reflection in Western society whose verdict, apart from dissensions, has been that theirs is not an entirely enviable fate. Their trouble is that they, the Don Juans, all left before the end of the course and, because of the war, so had I. I felt I simply had to go back and attain the degree of the Permanent Peak. We hope to be able to arrange a full course for you one day, Hassan, although after twenty it is usually thought to be too late.