Brion Gysin - The Process

GRAMMA initiates … and I use the verb very thoughtfully … initiates anybody and everybody into an area where communication is clear … and very often for the very first time in their lives. The results are usually spectacular yet it’s really quite simple:

You sit like this … face to face, toe to toe … no creaky old Freudian couch in the corner … I ask you to situate yourself spatially … to look around and see just where you are sitting right now. You’ve done that? Good! Now make yourself aware of the two corners of the cave above and behind your head. Take a look around, if you like. You’ve got them? Good! Now, we start in with “Hello Yes Hello,” and we’ll run it back and forth for the next twenty minutes … half an hour. When I first tried this on Peter Paul Strangleblood, he screamed right away: “I can’t take this! I can’t take any more of this! Stop!” Now, just from reading the book, I realized Peter Paul had coughed up one of his “ingrams” … the ingrown word-clots which made it impossible for him to take anything out of life … and, partly, because he put so little into it, he was simply not in communication with life at all. That therapeutical side of the business is what first got GRAMMA in trouble with the AMA … and then they had a rumble from Internal Revenue so they incorporated as a church: The First Grammatic Church, practicing Grammatology. That’s when Thay walked in. He saw right away what brand of word-magic they were up to … and he laughed. He laughed to himself just like one Farout magician laughs when he meets another Farout magician coming down the Farout jungle path. They both sit down … facing each other … and have a contest to see which one can make the more horrible scary face. When Thay began showing them their own business at GRAMMA, they sat back simply stunned. It was like a bunch of businessmen watching someone spread out a million-dollar invention with no possible patent protection. Thay assured them he couldn’t teach them to walk on water in a week but he could and would teach anyone in Grammatology who wanted to know, how to walk over fire … they did it all the time in the Farouts as the very first lap of any initiation, he said.

GRAMMA was claiming to create human ability? Well, fire-walking and faith-healing and a few other things he knew how to do might qualify as unusual human abilities. They agreed to see fire-walking first. Their publisher had a place down on Long Island … Locust Valley, I think … and they all moved down there for a weekend with lots more people to follow on Sunday afternoon … to lay on the media. Thay went to work or, rather, Thay had a gang of workmen he’d found … all handsome brutes, I’m sure … who moved onto the poor publisher’s lawn like a butch ballet or some nightmare machine which hewed a hole … a long trench … right through his croquet lawn! Thay filled in the trench with I don’t know how many hundreds of little bags of barbecue charcoal which he laid down in a bed and sprinkled with gasoline. Then he set it off with one tremendous great whoosh which nearly set fire to the publisher’s home. By the time the crowd had assembled, Thay tells me, he had a nice stretch of satiny braze about fifty feet long. He’d been soaking his feet in a bucket of alum as he sat in a deck chair ordering his workmen about. He says it doesn’t help much. He put back on his running-shoes over heavy woolen socks and ran a bit to get up a good protective sweat, then he went barefoot to meet the press. Everything went off just fine. There were pictures in the papers … all that sort of thing. Thay’s full identity came out, of course. He might no longer be a white rajah but he still was a bishop! Neither the Japanese invasion nor the new Farout Federal State could take his hereditary bishopric away. The very idea made GRAMMA greedy. In the peculiar branch of the game they got themselves into when they incorporated as a church, only a bishop can roll you out replicas in order to make you more bishops. The Grammatological Church had it made … if Thay would only start smearing them with his chrism and his unction and I don’t know what all! At that point, I dropped out of the sky crying: “No! Don’t do it, Thay! NO! ” … and I swept him off to Switzerland with me to treat my poor husband, PP. Thus, at one single swoop, by snatching their bishop I won the whole GRAMMA game in my very first move. … Are you following me?

I got onto Grammatology, first, by attempting to absorb their sacred best-seller in Switzerland. The book’s as thick as a pillow, I might as well warn you … and just about as digestible. It’s got kapok in there instead of prose! It was first thrust upon me with almost psychotic intensity by a slightly psychic Swiss fraulein stenographer I had in the house in Basel … doing some tri-lingual work for me. “You’ll find it worthwhile, Madame,” she kept insisting. … and, believe me, I did! In the end, I simply devoured this dreary word-paste because it was the only book in the house in English … if that’s English it’s written in. I was living in Basel with my first husband, Peter Paul Strangleblood. We’d been married less than a year … straight out of college … but PP and I weren’t even on speaking terms, at that point in the game. PP was suffering from an acute case of what I call “Dollar Disease.” In his case, it came from too many oil wells, too early in childhood. PP had oil wells like other people have boils. What communication there had been between us had completely dried up over money. I knew Peter Paul was so sick on the subject that the mere mention of the word “money” could make him actually throw up, so … I went out without saying a word and started making a few million dollars of my own with something called mutual funds.

Oh, I didn’t invest in one. No … I started a fund of my own … Fundamental Funds … and the money rolled in at our good Swiss address. I’d taken this magnificent old house overhanging the Rhine with big grounds all around it … we were living in style! A young Swiss lawyer named Rolf Ritterolf came by our house one day, selling mutual funds. That drove PP out of the raftered room right away but I held onto Rolf … picking his brains. He’s still with me, today. … In the end, I hired him to run my own fund. In the meantime, if you please, PP had gone down to the banks of the River Rhine with his air rifle … taking pot shots at the plastic sacks Swiss workers from Basel stuff their clothes in as … swimming in groups … they drift down the Rhine-current, home from work. Daily , I had to fear scandal from PP … and just at a moment when I needed some respectable Swiss names on my Board of Directors! I had some trouble about that. Without securing his written permission, I put down my own Herr Professor, Dr. Karl Forbach … you know: the LSD, DMT, STP and mushroom-man … with whom I was working on the structure of hallucinogenic alkaloids in his lab on the out-skirts of Basel. I’m a very cunning chemist, too , you realize … that’s why I was there. I could see Dr. Forbach needed the money … he was building a house in the country. When I told him more or less what I was doing one day in the lab, he said: “Go right ahead, my dear … anything you say!” He’d had quite a crush on me until this money thing came up but … and I’m not trying to be vulgar … when I walked into the lab that day with those shares all printed up and bearing his name on the Board of Directors … why, the shit … as the vulgar really say … hit the fan. For the first time I understood what the Freudians meant with their equation: money equals merde! Here, I was giving the man money and he was giving me back merde! I realized that my communication with everybody was completely fouled up!