Brion Gysin - The Process

Just before leaving the house, I grabbed up a handful of mail to go through in the plane.… I had things to sign so, luckily, I took along my Swiss lawyer, Rolf Ritterolf, with the idea of sending him back from Algut. He carries around a dispatch case like a cabinet minister with a portfolio of all my affairs. Among other things was a letter from you to the Fundamental Foundation saying you were on your way to Algut. I had really … excuse me, it was true … I had picked you because of your photograph. It and your project: “The Future of Slavery,” both pleased me … but nothing was official, yet, nor had the Foundation informed you of anything. I happen to know! As I say … I laughed. I remember, Thay looked up from a crossword puzzle and remarked: “Laughter is refusal.” But I shook my head.… “Not in this case,” I said, and told Rolf to meet you in the Hotel Saint Georges and give you the money for your trip. He and the American Vice-Consul Knoblock met you, I know, or we wouldn’t … would we? … be here.

I’ve heard poor Thay tell such a different version … at times … of everything that went on after that! I won’t bore you with my version … except, perhaps, to insist that it was no fault of mine that your mission failed. Thay … he’s a darling but most unreliable, really, and at times an absolute liar … he’ll admit as much to you himself. Except … I forgot … Thay is not going to talk any more! I wonder how long that’s going to last? He’s gone through dozens of other self-imposed disciplines before. Well, Thay … who is quite capable of telling you that his Amos Africanus … and mine, too, don’t get me wrong … but Amos was never in Algut in his life as far as I know. We didn’t even meet him until much later on in our trip. We had hoped to meet you somewhere along the way but you took so long crawling across the Sahara just to get to Tam … that our plane had long ago left. What did happen … most unfortunate, really, for you … is that Thay interfered when he had really no right to … telling the captains in Tam to look out for you. As you saw, it had quite the opposite effect from what was intended … at least, so I hope … by Thay.

So.… really to make this up to you … we would both be happy if you would accept to come with us to “Malamut” … where we have some great plans under way … for Africa … for the world … for you. We feel you fit in. Thay … always excessive … says that you were heaven-sent. I always go along with his games. Besides, we’re a team and together we hold … as they say … a handful of trumps. When we get down there … let’s say we get down there tomorrow afternoon for a late Spanish lunch … I’ll have Rolf Ritterolf run through the whole portfolio with you and explain all the things we are up to. Hassan, you’ll come, won’t you? You have only to say it … you know … the word!

Man, what a wild change of scene: last night in Tanja town and here we are back in the Sahara again! I guess I must have said: “Hello,” all right, to the lady; how could I resist? “Hello Yes Hello,” in fact. Here I have in my hand a big green carved stone, obviously ancient and said to be an emerald unless it’s jadite or glass. I have, also, a gold chain of linked letter H’s, presumably for Hapsburg, but it could be for Hassan, why not? The man whose name is not Hassan, I certainly am. So, what should I have said to the lady: “Good-by No Good-by”? Hamid says he always knows how to take a prize when he sees one but I never do. This time, we’ll see. I’m writing this painfully by candlelight in the big electronic library of “Malamut”—“my brain,” she calls it — surrounded by the consoles of the computers and the wired stacks of the communications system through which she intends to run this whole African scene of hers. Tonight, the generators are out of order, they tell me: for the moment, none of this works. The flickering light of my candle is lost in the shadows which race around this round room whose dome, high above me, represents Mya’s head on the top of the bulk of this building when you see this whole block of rocks on Cape Noon from a distance. As big as the Capitol building, Mya sits on the immense sweep of the Saharan coast of the Atlantic on the big bulge of Africa; massive, unique and alone.

Very impressive, I guess, but my first sight of all this from the air simply sickened me and might have killed all of us. Mya’s seven-passenger, two-million-dollar Lear jet nearly blew inside out, right overhead here luckily, but at thirty thousand feet up! Mya was sitting in her cockpit, like a throne under the plastic sky-dome, looking so luminous; looking so enormous; looking so like a whole galaxy of goddesses that I knew I was still under the effects of her Borbor, you bet! The Victory of Samothrace flying her jet with her classic bare blue feet set square on the pedals; solid marble arms reaching out for the power controls. Then, for a millionth of a second, she just flipped into the cabin; into Mya and out again, so quick I don’t suppose I was supposed to see her at all: a Medusa with a head full of snakes. Everything I looked at had a bright fuzzy halo around it; orange to indigo but dimmer than the prism you catch in the bevel of good-grade plate glass.

Wow! I said to myself: Someone is fucking my everyday clean-cut, crystal-clear keef-connection with the visible world and, also, my go-ahead-green perception of same. What is more, all this bamboozle is being laid on me by means of a paltry veil of illusion drawn over my eyes; and, drawn chemically , no less! I also reckon that this glassy veil is producing prismatic effects because it is imperfectly adjusted, or else — and worse! — the product has been adulterated along the way. Wow! So, the lady can commit a fault, can she! That’s all I needed to know but, like it or not, I have to go along with the ride.

I wouldn’t take a Nembie on a trip if the hostess forced one down my throat. Besides, I sit looking down on the desert I love from nearly a satellite’s point of view and I see, I can clearly perceive that the Sahara is Man, all Man. How could I ever have thought anything else! The sand is his shimmering silicone shirt stamped in a uniform pattern of dunes like the scales on a suit of chain mail worn by Ghoul. Ghoul lies down to rest on his desert as polished and bare as a shield, and he slumbers until he hears the hammering of the white north wind on the doors of his desert and, then, he stirs; he rumbles, he raises his voice. A sinister sound like the gritting and grinding of all the grains of sand in the Sahara furls out over the idle desert in a great wave, like a command to arise. A tremor runs under the sands and, then, the whole Sahara stands to attention for one breathless moment before it throws itself like a great sea of sand on the foe.

Ghoul, Defender of Africa, I hear your clarion call! In one pico-second I parachute down thirty thousand feet and I am back, living again in the guerrilla conditions I know. I know them for sure: Them or Us . My comrades-in-arms, Terror and Hunger and Cold, shuffle along like Shakespearean supers or huddle over the fire I made, first, of my arrows and, then, of my bow. Terror, forever behind me, drags Hunger along by a knot in his gut but that coward, Cold, has deserted us, gliding away like the vipers who dance on these black fields of clinkers, white-hot in the sun. The air melts to liquid. It ripples and runs like the seething of water when it roils to a boil. I flounder on through the swell of the sand with the rags of my black burnous for a sail. Know that I am the Captain of Patience whose heart is the heart of the hyena, whose sandals are shod with flint!