Brion Gysin - The Process

At the time, I was living in an off-campus rooming house run by a terrible old woman who called herself Mrs. Murphy. Whatever she was, she wasn’t Irish. … I’ve always thought she must have been a fence. She lurked in her kitchen like a fat old spider with crippled legs, brewing coffee in a blue enamel pot day and night because she slept in her chair … from where she could reach the key in the back door and the key in the door to the basement. People came in and out down there all night. She never got up to my room and that just suited me fine. … I liked it that way. Up there, I knew I always could be alone. I had the place pretty shipshape. … I’ve always liked building. I’d made all the shelves and the work surfaces on weekends myself. I had my own little world up there and no one had even the right to come knocking on my door except Peter Paul … who wasn’t even attending classes any more but just darting in and out. When the reporters came around, after PP and I got married, Mrs. Murphy told them that I’d always been known as “Hamburger Mary,” because I slung hash in a hamburger joint … an absolute lie! Nobody ever called me that. Thay Himmer first called me Maya and I changed it to spell it my way: M Y A … but in all those damned newspapers, that dreadful nickname has stuck to me: “Hamburger Mary,” well …

Automatically, I took off my dress to put on my work shirt and work pants. Sitting in front of my broad black desk, I stared at the tiny pink mushroom pills … as tiny as seeds. There was no posology … no dose prescribed … the whole packet must be the dose. By accident … by some very strange accident except that there aren’t any accidents … the pharmaceutical firm in faraway Switzerland seemed to have duplicated the dose. I mean … the first envelope came air mail, unopened by Customs … no letter attached, as I’ve said … it looked as though they were merely filling an order at someone’s request … it didn’t say who. But , on the following day, another identical letter had come. I had the two packets of pretty pink pills in front of me on the top of my black-painted desk. What did I do? I decided to change my clothes, first … put on something more suited to mushrooms, a gown. I picked up one single tiny pill … touched it with glue and stuck it on a card on which I wrote: “I’ve taken this. In case of trouble, the phone number of the maker in Basel is on the envelope. Call them collect.” I know my mushrooms, I thought. I took the rest … the other twenty-three milligram pills at one gulp. I put out a tube of barbiturates as a possible antidote and turned to make some herb tea I always had with me from home. A knock on the door: One One-Two! Peter Paul the Coyote in his old rotten Mackinaw was already inside of the room. “Whzzat?” he asked, pointing to the pills. I told him. He picked up the other full packet and pinched them. “Can I take some? How many d’ja take?”

I was already so far gone by that time that I merely waved permissively at the psylocibin as I lay back on my bed and just floated away. With his coyote cunning, Peter Paul took just six pills the first time. … That was the proper dose as it turned out later. As soon as he’d dropped the pills, he cut out the door and out of my mind for the next couple of light-years through which I took off. As I went, I noticed that all the familiar fixtures of the mushroom world were flying past me much faster than I’d ever remembered them from child-hood. I reached out through space for the notebook on my night-table to mark something down and I never got there because so many other things were happening simultaneously that got in the way. I wasn’t able to make much of my notes, later … after all, I’d taken four times the maximum dose, as it turned out. That thrust me quickly into a very tricky world of prickly magic … magic-tricksters … mountebanks … Roger Bacon, Cagliostro … I saw them all and they all wanted something from me … maybe only my approbation, perhaps. I saw coffins and candles … I was in a crystal coffin with a sharp stake held to my heart … but no one was holding it there in the dark and, at once, the lights flashed up as monumental doors of polished black granite soundlessly turned on invisible pivots and whirled … twirling. They were trying to frighten me … trying to win me … to scare or to buy me with a pageant of paltry magical tricks! So I ran from them … whoever They were … down endless corridors of some old hotel whose wallpaper pattern of leaves was swaying and rustling an arm’s length away … while from behind every identical leaf was peering an eye … an identical eye to infinity spying on me . I ran on through the hotel hallway screaming: “The Management! I want to see the Management, right here and now! ” I wasn’t afraid … I was furious! Besides, I could see They were worried back there … behind the scenery. There was rustling … anxious whispering in the wings. The houselights went down … the audience sat like a jury on the edge of its seats. I heard three loud thumps of wood onto wood flooring … the Divine Sarah stamping the stage with her famous peg leg. I almost saw her! The curtain was just about to go up … parting and lifting … when Peter Paul Strangleblood came bursting in through my door, which I’d forgotten to lock.

Peter Paul was as naked as an Ancient Egyptian wearing the jackal’s head of Anubis. “I’m down off my head … my high, I mean,” he said. He snatched six more psylocibin pills and ran out again. I got up without any difficulty although my bedclothes were on fire and the room had turned into a tank full of green and purple algae. I wobbled through them toward my gas ring … intending to boil some water in order to put out the fire but the whole scene changed in an instant … the moment I cracked a match and lit that little blue flame, I realized all my grannies were sitting around me in a circle so big that, in the brilliant blue starlight, our circle reached out until we might have been all the women in the world … ever! … guardians of the fireside … tenders of the flame. I was standing on a silver sickle of moon. A snake slid from my hand. The women were putting out bowls of blue milk for my snake. I looked up-out and over their crowd of bowed heads to where I saw the rounding horizon of Earth as a satellite sees it … all Earth seen as great muskeg of water and land … a few rocks in relief but all the rest steppe … prairie … desert … until suddenly everywhere a pattern of pinpoints of light began to sparkle up through the dark that had dropped again … whole constellations … a firmament of tiny lights toward which I hurtled out with no effort at all to a point where I could see that each little light was a fireside where a woman was offering a blue bowl of milk to a man turning his back on me. I reached out to tap at the back of his head … psychically … and the man turned around. He turned around, Hassan … with one identical lift of the chin and a flutter of nostrils, Hassan … I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you, Hassan: All those men turned around simultaneously, Hassan … and all of those men were the image of you!

All around and beyond you … all of you … was prairie or desert, I couldn’t really tell which … a primeval desert of stones like the Sahara, perhaps, with a skyful of stars tied down tight like a tent, to fit the rounding horizon. Campfires were extinguished … blotted out by a great storm of mushrooms blowing up like sudsy detergent … or a hail of pale pumice stones hurting me horribly as they hurtled through me. Nameless nomads went streaming past on the edge of the dark … starving. They flapped by like rags in the wind smeared over with blurry vague features which ran in the rain of mushrooms bleeding like ink. Doll-like dead pot-bellied children blew past like overripe puff-balls whose spores exploded in dust. Survivors struggled up to collapse at my feet like a muttering pile of old rotten sacks. The air was so sudsy and thick with transparent mushrooms dancing like jellyfish that it was getting harder to breathe. I sniffed the back of my own hand and … with horror, my armpits. My flesh was raw mushroom! When I tried to spew out the smell I saw I was all mushroom … even my lungs. I reeked from inside! In despair, I threw myself down on a bed of moss … mossy muskeg of North Manitoba … I was all sewn up in sour-smelling furs. I had all the flat places of Earth in my memory … snow fields behind me … Asian steppe … chains of deserts ringing the planet all the way to the south Saharan sands. From as far away as all that, a jackal came loping straight at me like a mistimed missile … from a long way off still, I knew who it was … Peter Paul. It took him so long just crossing that steppe that he had the time to grow up before he could get to me. You could see he was destined for me. He was lost out there, the last of his tribe but coming on fast … determined to hang onto life by all of his teeth … so deprived in his singular struggle to survive that it was costing him quite literally everything to get there! I was all for him … he had no other choice … but I did, I thought. There he was scrambling up that last cliff on which I was standing and, as I thought for a minute of kicking his head in, like a “punkin,” he suddenly came sliding down cascades of mirrors at me … on me … something was breaking.… We were together in bed.