Brion Gysin - The Process

Thay Himmer was brought up helpless, like royalty … until Japan overran the Farouts when Thay was just six. The Himmers had founded the Farouts when the first Bishop Himmer of Hyannisport, Mass., got himself there first on a Clipper … and waded ashore with his Bible and his wife. I’m sure you think you know the rest of the story. … “Stop the music, stop the dancing, wear Mother Hubbards and get down to work. …” but, no! The Himmers were different. In the next generation, the family went native to conform with some local prophecy which allowed them to crown themselves rajahs with full native pomp. They introduced sugar-planting, built a refinery … a bakery, a brewery … and grew very rich. Always under the American flag, of course, and … while they married no native girls … the Himmers were always very much of the East. They shopped in Singapore instead of San Francisco, for example … things like that. Black sheep of the family, like Thay’s queer Uncle Willy, fled to Hong Kong and Macao before settling down on a remittance in some super-civilized place like Peking. Girls of the family were rather more spartan. They ran away to spin in an ashram in India with Gandhi … or took vows as Buddhist nuns at the court of the Queen of Siam. Thay found himself in the ashram of Sri Auribindo in Pondicherry with his grandmother, the old Ranee, when the war broke out. He had to burn the old lady with his own hands, eventually, on a funeral pyre by the banks of the Ganges … very bad for his asthma, he said.

Thay’s mother, the young Ranee, was prisoner for a couple of years in Japan and then … after V-J Day … Thay joined her at a Brain-breathing establishment in Carmel, California, where she was killed by a hitchhiker, eventually. Thay was terribly upset. He was madly in love, at the time, with a middle-aged Hindu Swami … in a purely spiritual sense. I never laid eyes on his guru, myself. … But I’ve seen photos in which the Swami seems to be smiling sardonically at some sinister private joke as he chews away on the end of his own long hooked nose. You can picture him selling you … and for a whole lot of money! … a very wrong rug. After some silly old stock-market crash swept away the Swami’s first fortune, the Swami snapped: “Money talks! I don’t need to talk!” Whereupon he took a vow of total silence which he’s kept to this day. I think that’s influenced Thay, too. From his Shrine of Silence, the Swami launched his “Ten Million Dollar Nirvana Fund” … which was to “Build the Invisible Temple of Love in Everybody’s Heart.” Thay tried to give his entire inheritance to the Swami but his brother-in-law, Renfrew … he’s a big lawyer in San Francisco and one of Thay’s trustees … called in the cops. Thay fought them tooth and nail on it but the family finally got the Swami deported before they actually had to fork over any property. Thereupon , Thay refused to have anything more to do with the family or his money and took off alone for New York … on his own for the first time in his life.

Wandering about New York the first day, like a tourist from another planet, you can imagine! … Thay thought he heard the … to him … all too familiar droning of monks mumbling mantras on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. Like a man in a trance, Thay made straight for this old rotten building … 563 Madison, I think it was … it’s since been torn down. What Thay really was hearing was the first murmurings of GRAMMA. You’ve heard of them … No? Well, if Thay Himmer and I hadn’t put a spoke in their prayer wheel, GRAMMA might have swept the U.S. with its simple techniques for creating human ability out of … so to speak … nothing, nothing at all. Any two humans you put into communication can create this increased ability to a measurable extent! Human ability could put the atom back in its place … if we harness it … and the fact that GRAMMA techniques really do work. I’ll have occasion to show you, Hassan, GRAMMA really had something going … so I took it from them. That’s one of the power factors I’m depending on right now in Africa. Empires are taken … not given. Nobody ever gives you or even sells you power or special knowledge in this world … or the next, I suspect. You have to take it … steal it to make it your own. That’s how the Masters play the Game. Real Players don’t need any Guides. You grab what you want in the Big Bazaar: if you’re feeling good you toss out a buck, saying: “Keep the change, my good man! Keep the change.” Thay didn’t do that: instead he joined up with GRAMMA and was playing their game, until I came along and snatched him up out of there … out of the marketplace of Madison Avenue where Thay Himmer the Seventh simply didn’t belong!

GRAMMA was a splinter-group of something called “Logosophy” … a do-it-yourself psychology system put together by a group of more or less anonymous professors working for the Ford Foundation … who later disowned it. Essentially, it was … is , rather … a compilation of simple-sounding communication techniques which can be exercised by any two people willing to play. You can do “Gramma-calls” … reciprocal word combinations batted back and forth, even over the telephone, for hours. You can do “Gramma-rubs” … two people touching each other in turn … at home or even in the office. As a weapon of wordsmanship, too, Gramma is great! You can “grammatize” people in business … at home in your family … or out at the beach. GRAMMA founded itself as an organization when a group of go-getters on Madison Avenue read the book. They tried the techniques out on each other … and were absolutely overwhelmed … as I was to be later in Switzerland where I first came across it. In New York, they rented this condemned building and … by the time Thay Himmer happened along … they had the entire office-space humming like a Tibetan lamasery. They needed competent new operators to handle the hundreds of people who came in at fifty dollars a head for a twenty-minute half hour of chanting back and forth at each other: “Hello Yes Hello!”

It’s so simple, it sounds almost simpleminded but “Hello Yes Hello” is the ineluctable law of all verbal communication which most people fumble just as your Moroccan did with me on the phone, tonight: “Halloo Yass Halloo!” … he said it so loud and so often he couldn’t hear one single word I was saying. Just think how often that happens! Haven’t you noticed how often the people you talk to don’t even hear a word that you’re saying … really hear you: take it in? People just rattle on about themselves like squirrels in a cage … and you know it. Most people communicate very imperfectly and some not at all … like my first husband, Peter Paul Strangleblood. How do you get them into communication? Well, it’s so simple, it’s almost … sinister! No … I’m only joking. You do it like this:

First , I say to you, “Hello” … that’s to initiate this particular communication. What I do is I offer to communicate.

Now , you must answer back to me: “Yes” … a signal which shows you’ve accepted my offer. This move … in our discipline, Hassan … constitutes the first half of a Link.

Then , you say back to me: “Hello” … to show me you are willing to communicate … to go on communicating with me .

Therefore , I accept your fine offer very positively with: “Yes.” The First Link, Hassan, has been made in a chain a lot longer than from here into any next week. All Eastern philosophies are hung up on the Word … “In the Beginning was the Word.” Well … I’ll tell you the Word, Emperor Hassan! The Word which created the world is Hello!