Brion Gysin - The Process

On the great night, when the engagement was to be publicly announced to all the foregathered families and friends, young Ana Lyse was supposed, as usual, to be up there in bed. At a couple of minutes to twelve midnight, the fiancé perchance was nowhere to be found. Everyone set about looking for him everywhere, calling his name all over the house. Someone ran up to look in the nursery but Ana Lyse had slipped out of bed and run down into the garden, spying on the party from the dark. Did he see her? Did she signal to him? That one doesn’t know, but Freeky — followed by a bevy of darting maidens, alas! who screamed, spreading the news — Freeky found them both in an arbor of jasmine; Ana Lyse on her knees in a nightie, giving the fiancé a blow-job. Freeky shrieked and was carried to bed where she managed to stay for the best part of the ensuing seven years, insisting she couldn’t get up because her legs were made of glass; imperiously demanding that her whole room be made pink and nothing but pink down to the very last object she could bear to have in her sight. Even all the food she ate had to be pink or tinted pink with cochineal before she would look at it on a pink tray. “Freeky analyzes all the analysts and baffles the doctors!” her mother would proudly explain to the other ladies for years.

Ana Lyse grew up utterly devoted to Freeky. For weeks at a time, Freeky would allow no one in her room but Ana Lyse and one Moroccan servant all dressed in pink caftans down to the floor and a big pink bandanna handkerchief bound around her head. Ana Lyse had a photographer’s developing tray in which she dipped all the newspapers in pink cochineal solution every morning and then ironed them out dry. Freeky always read Le Monde flown down from Paris, the London Financial Times because it prints on pink paper, the old Herald Trib from Paris and all the local papers, of course, like España from Tangier; La Vigie Marocaine, Le Petit Marocain and the little semi-legal flyers that used to float around in those days before Independence. Ana Lyse got Freeky passionately involved in nationalist politics, psychoanalysis and all the fashionable paraphernalia of the day. She even dragged in some young Moroccan student rebels, who, like all visitors including members of the family, had to sit behind a pink silk folding-screen because Freeky insisted she was too old and ugly to be seen. They gave her Fard’s books, which she took like sacraments administered directly to her: Awake Mother Africa! Obviously she thought he meant her. Then she read, Fate and Fetishism and, of course, Paleface and Ebony Mask with Fard’s famous analysis of the Othello legend: The Moor and the Maiden . That was pure Freeky, too. I don’t know whether the books were dyed pink for her or not but she found it such heady stuff she started writing to Dr. Francis-Xavier Fard, care of Gallimard, his publisher in Paris.

I’ll leave it to Freeky to tell you one day how she eventually got him, because, in those days, he couldn’t have been further away from her world. Dr. Fard had an ultra-fashionable practice in Paris as permanent psychiatrist to a group of dazzling celebrities, who all called him God; Docteur Dieu . The fact he was Black had everything going all for him in that milieu and besides he was so overwhelmingly good-looking that it hurt. Over the years, he had a series of seven icy-blond wives, many of them quite well-known women: a Danish countess, a Polish woman writer, a French bombshell-type movie star, the racing-pilot daughter of a well-known political figure and a couple of other wives I seem to forget. And throughout all the wives, he had a Black mistress called Catherine de Saint Kitt, whom a lot of people claimed was really his sister or half-sister from Guadaloupe. People said, too, they slept three in a bed. I don’t know about that: never saw it, myself. Catherine ran a dance group called “ La Chapelle de Sainte Catherine ,” giving Black Mass cocktails in the garden of Fard’s hotel particulier in Neuilly; absolutely the most chic thing in Paris. Everybody was there. Authentic voodoo initiation ceremonies were performed for the fashionable ethnologists and the social anthropologists and all their publishers who came with the literary lions of the day and their ladies. There were always lots of well-dressed women about and plenty of starlets ready to drop all their threads as soon as the fashionable beatniks present led the way into the fray with the members of Sainte Catherine’s choir. Even middle-aged intellectual French Protestant pederasts plunged into the fun. Photographers were barred. Dr. Fard, always dressed all in white, moved through this scene like the Master with his current cool blond wife on his arm. Fard could whip it up, freeze the action or cool it all into slow motion with just one nod to Kitty de Saint Kitt, who stood there black and bare-assed in the bushes with a knife in her hand ready to sacrifice a kid or a cock.

Fard picked up a lot of politically powerful friends at his parties or got through to them through their wives on the analytic couch. Right from the start, he gave it to them straight and he gave it to them hard: “ Pour Voir Noir! ” “To See Black!” and a cunning pun on Black Power! They loved it. That was the title of his long poem he read to Malraux and the rest of them when he won his first prize. Along with Senghor and Césaire, Fard is certainly one of the Nabobs of Negritude. Aragon has him in his anthology — had to have him in there because Francis won the prize, too, from his old pal Chou En-lai in the East. His psychiatric practice took him all over the French-speaking world; consulted by a sterile empress in one Moslem land, he was immediately called to handle an outbreak of hysteria in the harems right after premature political emancipation in another. Contacts made that way eventually took him to the Casablanca Conference, where Ana Lyse waylaid him in the lobby of the Anfah Hotel , begging him to cross the street with her to the Villa Africanus, where Freeky was lying, after seven long years still in bed. Dr. Fard was on his way to the airport where he was to enplane with Ben Baraka and the other members of the First Revolutionary Government in Exile but he remembered her letters forwarded to him by Gallimard, so he agreed to see her for a few minutes. As they tell it, Francis simply walked in kicking over the pink silk folding-screen and snapped his fingers at Freeky to get out of bed. She would have followed him to the airplane if he’d let her, still wrapped up in her pink sheets.

You remember what happened to that plane? How it got off course over the International airlanes over the Mediterranean and was scouted into Algiers by French military planes? ’Way back in the fifties I’m talking of. Well, that was his first contact with the boys he eventually threw in his lot with politically. After the revolution, he became naturalized in order to enter the government; what they now call the First Wave. He was still a First Wave minister when I first knew him. Both he and Freeky were trying to persuade me to fly down to Tam to stay with the younger Africanus sister, Ana Lyse, who was down there married at the time to a young Polish deep-strata geologist on contract to the government to look into their subsoil for them. He would provide transportation to take me to see Pigeon Gorge, the name the French had given to the great canyon that splits the Tibesti.

Pigeon Gorge is a cleft running nearly one hundred and fifty miles through the mountains, entirely covered on both sides of the rock face with prehistoric paintings infinitely bigger than any billboard in America; hundreds of feet high; advertising the Foulba Way of Life: pastoral, peaceful and moderately prolific for the past ten, fifteen or twenty thousand years. The Foulbas first got the Word. Needless to say, this is news to the Foulba, at this point. After all, the last Foulba of the day pulled out of there at least a couple or more thousand years ago, as the Sahara dried up behind them. Few Foulba, if any, have even ventured back there ever since. Nor would they ever have dreamed of claiming it back, as they do, or demanding precedence in the UN, even, as the First on Earth with the Word, if Fard hadn’t put them up to it first. Fard first demanded the limits of pre-history be moved back to accommodate them: that’s Fardism at work.