Brion Gysin - The Process

When I won a scholarship to Saskatchewan U., my majors were Chemistry and Cybernetic Psych. There in Saskatoon, a young Psych prof was the first to use mescaline to show his class what he thought schizophrenia might be like. “If that’s what it’s like to be crazy, what are we all waiting for?” I remember somebody saying. Our chem lab was churning out mescaline to such an extent that reports of our experiments attracted figures of international renown who were floating around Saskatoon on supervised mescaline experiences … people like Aldous Huxley. Huxley added tone to our trips by suggesting that we be given cultural stimulation, as well. As a part of my experience, I was taken to a concert given by Gieseking playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto … and did I ever have a strange contact with him! Years later, I read a profile on the pianist which quoted him as saying that, in any concert, he always looked around first for his “ receiver ” as soon as he walked out on stage. He went out of his way to say that he sincerely believed in magnetic emanations … ESP, mediums … all of it. Once he found his “ receiver ,” he played all the rest of the concert to that person … while the rest of the audience simply assisted. And was I ever his “ receiver ” that night!

Gieseking hopped out of the wings … smartly flipping and smoothing his tails as he flitted through the twittering orchestra perched on the edge of their chairs. Applause … a sudden sharp hail of applause crashed down so hard on my head that I thought all these blackbirds were rising to flap away offstage as they got to their feet to greet the maestro. A great billowing gale of applause … a wavelike ovation rolling up, nearly lifted me out of my seat in the balcony. Gieseking bowed … cocking his head as quick as a cockatoo and his brilliant black eye caught in mine. I felt like the Early Worm … practically plucked out of the sea of seats and people surrounding me … caught by the gills right away. If he’d pulled in his psychic line, right then and there I’d have flown over the heads of the audience to flounder flat on the stage in front of him at his feet. When he turned to the coffin-like grand piano, I noticed his hair was gray feathers fluttering about his head. The maestro was a bird!

Gieseking, the world-famous piano player, was a simply shameless gray cockatoo as big as a man dressed in a loose-fitting frock coat. When he flipped up his tails to sit down in front of the keyboard, it looked like a feeding-trough or a giant corncob of white and black pearls. Under his coattails, I caught a flash of his tail feathers … gray and bright red! When he did hit the keys, he didn’t play music … he talked . Gieseking began talking about a mile a minute without punctuation … and he was talking to me! He rambled on about his early childhood … all those hours of practicing, beginning at three … his debut at seven … his international triumphs at twelve … a worldwide celebrity before he was twenty-one and how very bad it all went on him, after … critics, audiences, himself with himself and the music. He was talking so much that I heard not one note he was playing until I noticed that the orchestra had disappeared. In its place, the maestro was conducting an atomic pile of precision machinery packed into the proscenium arch about and above him. “They down-graded me once for not playing all the notes!” he tossed at me over his shoulder as he prodded and pushed the machine into shape. I believe he went back to school … after fifty , I think he said … “and I taught myself to play it like THIS! ” He whammed the piano … plunging on into Brahms.

The great pianist and the orchestra receded a long way away from me … down the wrong end of the telescope. I had an exquisitely jeweled mechanical toy in my sights … a musical carousel … a pie-dish of platinum from which crystal canaries were escaping. The whole scene was darkening as the orchestra swelled up and burst like volcanoes in a land of lagoons, dissolving into puddles of power through which the fiddles sent up swarming clouds of golden bees. The bees were all numbered, flying to their appointed dots in a screen that was run through and rent by great golden pistons of fire every time the brasses rolled over in unison. Somehow, it came to an end. When Gieseking … still a gray cockatoo in elegant Italian tails … briskly hopped out in front to take his bow, there was a little old lady, all dressed in rusty-black with a Victorian widow’s bonnet on her head, who bobbed up and down under his elbow … his wing … for less than the sixtieth part of a second … for a mere n microseconds, sharing the applause. “I thank you!” he bowed deeply. “ We thank you! My old mother … I practiced for her! ” And, with that, he shot us all a real old show-business look … a long liquid-eyed look like Svengali … or Paganini … counting the house.

Aldous Huxley himself was next on my list of “ stimulations ” … and, with him, I got off on what looked at first like a very wrong foot by trying to tell him about what had just happened to me with Gieseking. I’m aggressive, I guess. I hadn’t learned yet that you don’t … simply don’t … talk about one “ star ” to another. Mr. Huxley looked at me blandly and blindly as he asked in his most English voice: “Do we really need mescaline?” I learned later that he had four hundred and fifty milligrams in him that night, himself. In the Saskatoon sitting room, the Northern Lights were playing about Mr. Huxley’s head. I gulped back a little wave of nausea and … when I looked again … he was my oldest great-granny … the mushroom one. She looked just as she used to look long ago by the campfire on Hog’s-back Ravine back home. There in the leaping shadows behind her was our old torn tepee sheltering our pine-bough beds. I caught the smell of earth through the sharper smell of the pine as I said: “No, Mr. Huxley … not if we’ve got mushrooms , instead!”

That shot him down, right out of his tree … that old British bear! As a matter of fact, he carried it off jolly well … when you consider that up until then he was sure that almost nobody else in the world knew about the Sacred Mushrooms, but him. A banker friend’s Russian wife had assured him that Siberian nomads partook of a hallucinatory mushroom as a part of their shamanistic religion. He had just received their first private report on the mushrooms in Mexico. I tried to come on … of course … like I was reading his mind. I told him a thing or two he never had heard about! How to make a Shaman … for example … that’s a woman’s secret, all right. Of course there was mushroom-magic, I assured him … right all the way across the North American steppe. He asked me to write him a paper on it and I did … for only his eyes: Sight Without Glasses you know … he practiced it but that meant he had to put my paper right up to his nose, poor man … but he did have another kind of sight, like my grandmother had. Later, he asked my permission to send on my report to another old friend of his: Dr. Forbach of Basel, the biggest chemical man in the game. LSD, you know … DMT, STP, BRB … that’s my Borbor in a very unsophisticated form. I’ve been all the way up to BRB 144, I think … or more! Permutations of the formula I first worked on with Dr. Forbach in Basel during my post-graduate year. That was all thanks to Huxley, I guess … and thanks to him, too, I suppose that I got a fat letter one day just before graduation … air mail from Basel, Switzerland … a rather business-looking envelope printed with the name of a famous pharmaceutical firm. There was no letter inside but a flat packet of very tiny pink pills marked: PSYLOCIBIN. I’d picked up a paper on psylocibin in the lab … “ extract of mushrooms .” It had been a long time. I could hardly wait to try them to see if theirs were as good as my old granny’s and mine.