Brion Gysin - The Process

That’s when I really got onto GRAMMA. I’d suspected that even Peter Paul had picked up the book and was fumbling through it when I wasn’t around … “Hello Yes Hello” might be just the right way to get back into communication with him . I was hardly surprised when he agreed. Yes, he’d try a little, “Hello Yes Hello.” He’d been trying to do it with the gardener’s boy but it hadn’t worked out. When the two of us tried it … golly … it really worked! In a minute or two … it couldn’t have been more … Peter Paul broke out with: “I can’t take it! I can’t take any more of this shit!” I caught his “ingram” … the operative word was take! I decided to run that word “take” on Peter Paul, again and again … as the book suggested, thus: I pushed him gently back into position with a big friendly smile, saying firmly: “Good, Peter Paul; good! Now, what can you take from this room?” and PP … of course … snapped back automatically: “Nothing!” I pressed on gently but firmly with “Good! and what else can you take from this room?” For a long time, he made nothing but negative noises but … finally … as I went on softly insisting: “Good! Peter Paul; good . And what else can you take from this room?” … thus running his “havingness’ over and over again … he had to admitted … he had to admit that even his “Nothing” was very much something … a thing! That flipped Peter Paul … he literally, flipped! Before even I realized what it was doing to him, there he was flat on the floor … in some kind of a fit! It was two o’clock in the morning, besides, so I called in a Swiss doctor who gave him a suppository, natch! Those European doctors! Well, maybe it’s not exactly lady-like of me to joke about it but … poor PP could be a bit of a pain … in the ass!

You see, PP turned out to be suffering from money-poisoning , in just about the worst way there is! He had money-mold growing all over him, that boy. I noted it the very first time I ever laid eyes on him on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Sask., but I didn’t know what ailed him, at first. I guess I thought it was just dirt. … PPS Blood, as he called himself there, was disguised as a beatnik in those days. He had a hangdog look and I saw at a glance he was Indian so I felt sorry for him … you know, Hassan, what I mean . PP looks like a Redskin while people take me for, oh, just about anything … Italian, Greek, Arab, anything … any nationality at all. PP’s features are … well, rather marked. His people were Athabasca Barter Indians in the Northwest Territories, who were just stubborn enough never to sign any treaties with anybody . They just stayed out of sight in the wilds throughout the first half of the twentieth century, so … when their time came, right after the war, they found they still owned all their subsoil and mineral rights which all other Indians … like my people … had long since signed away! Overnight, the Athabascan Bloods became as rich as Croesus on pitchblende, petroleum, platinum, uranium … the works! It didn’t do them much good. By the time he was six … picked up by the red-coated Mounties, half-starving and covered with lice … PP was the only member of his tribe left alive. All the rest of the Bloods had frozen to death in their cabins … been eaten by their own sled-dogs … mangled by their own bear traps … or they killed each other with axes as Peter Paul’s parents did, over a bottle of whisky in a motel.

You simply must have seen somewhere a picture of wee Peter Paul when they found him. It’s been trotted out for reproduction time and again … every time they do a story on him. There is this pathetic little pot-bellied wolf-child in rags on the prairies, with the subtitle: Peter Paul Strangle-blood, the Richest Little Boy in the World . Poor little tyke, he lost even his name in the deal … it still makes him sick. His real name was Strange Blood but it became Strangleblood by somebody’s typographical error somewhere along the line and that’s how it went into the books and the courts where he was declared a public ward. Peter Paul … as they called him … was put into what looked to him like a series of gilded jails … with guardians named by the court to administer his almost incalculable fortune. When Peter Paul was fifteen, he had an allowance of one dollar and twenty-five cents a week! “Home” was a huge big old house and garden where he simply skulked around in the basement or drew himself up through a trapdoor in a bathroom ceiling … into the empty attic where he spent most of his days … doing nothing , he claims. In my day, as I said, he turned up at Saskatchewan U. disguised as a beatnik by the name of PPS Blood. All you could see of him … winter or summer … was an old red-and-black-checked Mackinaw with the collar turned up so that only a tall bristle of shiny black hair showed above it. When you got a good look at his face you were actually sorry he smiled … when he smiled. The whole campus called him: “Coyote” because he had a full double set of much too-white teeth. I’ve seen lots of other Indian boys with maybe six or eight extra teeth like that … or even just four upper canines instead of two … but Peter Paul looked much better when I persuaded him to have the one set pulled out. He looked actually quite handsome, then … but no one else in Saskatoon thought PPS Blood was a catch!

You see … my people were Bounty Indians who had signed away everything forever … about the year my youngest great-grandmother was born … all in exchange for one bright red Hudson Bay blanket a year and two one-hundred-pound bags of flour. We had to scramble for the rest … a houseful of women without men, living in Edmonton, Alberta … on the Flats! We used to make money by wandering along the banks of the Saskatchewan River picking wild berries to sell. Clear bright-red chokecherry jelly and plump-purple ripe Saskatoons! We could put them up only if we already had money for sugar and Mason jars. One old granny of mine and I used to toddle out in our moccasins culling herbs which she taught me. With my eldest granny nearing ninety, I went hunting mushrooms and edible puff-balls we sliced to fry in butter. You had to be sure to be right about them … and even more sure about the other mushrooms we took home and dried and made into a tea which we drank on an empty stomach … all of us generations of women … on late Saturday afternoons. No one else but us ever came to our house … I found out when I grew up that the neighbors all called us witches and it’s true, in a way. In winter, it could be sixty degrees below zero … Fahrenheit, of course … and we’d all sit in the kitchen in front of the fire … all my grannies and me … and we’d wait for the mushroom tea to work and, when it did, why, it was true! … we used simply fly away to another land that all those poor white people outside … those palefaces, never knew. As I sat on the worn rag rug like an island in a sea of cold linoleum, looking into the eye of the fire with my head on a granny’s knee … a pair of hands as soft as old doeskin would reach around to pick up the reins of my eyes and gentle me easy down along a long trail that all young Redskin-Indian ponies should know.… Oh, I’ve been on trips in my childhood … such trips!

I was “other-directed,” I think … from the start. Thay thinks I was poisoned once by some mushrooms and I’ve let him go on believing that story because he’s really rather hostile to drugs … did you notice? … Right from the start of high school, when I first took chemistry, I knew at once that chemistry would always be my love! I had a hard time in school … oh, I don’t mean scholastically: I was brilliant … I mean with the kids. My maiden name was Jackie Mae Bear Foot. That became Barefoot and … on the way from school … Jackie Mae Bare-ass! You can imagine! I was always a big girl and grew breasts before anyone else did, so … when all the boys ran after me … I became the Bad Girl of the neighborhood, I guess. I’d have been asked to leave school if my grades hadn’t been good … always the best! Home was another world. We were seven generations of women … believe it or not … the night my daughter was born and died, the summer I was twelve and passed out of Grade Eight … I didn’t lose a day of school, either. My mother had me when she was thirteen and my first grandmother was only fifteen years older than her … about forty … and there were three more generations of great-grannies in the kitchen, going back to the oldest gallant old gal of them all … going on ninety and not seeing so well. There were no men of any kind around our house … ever . Greatest Granny, as I called her, insisted that men were bad for the mushrooms … and she knew all about them . Dream-mushrooms always came up out of the ground when she called them by name, she said. She called them.… I picked them. I learned about mushrooms from her but later I learned their lovely Latin names.… Candida Albicans , for example … wouldn’t that be a lovely name for the heroine of a novel? I learned Latin at school and I tracked down the mushrooms in the Carnegie Free Public Library in Edmonton but I never read anything in those days that told about the Great Dance of the Mushrooms … constellations of dancing mushrooms filling the whole interior universe. As a mere child , I’d already seen that … before I was into my teens!