Brion Gysin - The Process

Now, how can this best be done? A frontal attack on Tam would be absurd. The only way for a restricted number of people to take an impregnable fortress is from inside. You will, therefore, gain admittance to the Steel Star by flying in and declaring yourselves a medical emergency. Voilá! International law obliges Tam to allow you to land. The hypocrite colonels do have an iron lung in there because they call it a hospital. Ergo! You do a judo on them and play Thay the Consort into the Trojan Lung. Princess Mya must follow with her Borbor in hand, which she will instill into the drinking water of, at least, Captain Mohamed. The captain, from all I hear, may well turn out to be some other color of horse in Thay Himmer’s psychic sweepstakes, but the princess herself is running this race, as you know. What she wants out of it, first and foremost, is freedom: she’ll tell you so herself. “I want all the freedom in the world!” She says so every day. Freedom, first of all, for Amos and the Fards because they are, if you like, full-fledged Players. Then, freedom for the entire cabinet of First Wave ex-ministers who are being held prisoner in Tam. Once their considerable, ah, human ability has been increased by GRAMMA and they have been properly, ah, secured by Mya’s Borbor, they will form an ideal super-government for Africa; for the world.

All that postulates Phase Five and Phase Five will link “Malamut” on the Atlantic to Tam in the center of the Sahara, its very umbilicus. This will be done through the atomic center — which very conveniently for us, lies abandoned by the French at Reggan, exactly midway between here and Tam. Since they pulled their rods out of the pile, the entire installation has been in the hands of the famous Belgian physicist Dr. Henri Feldzahler, who is an old friend of the Africanus family and a Player, too, in his way. Our contact with him has been through Amos’s sister, Freeky Fard: you see her importance, of course. We need Dr. Feldzahler and his atomic artifact to blow out a harbor right here below “Malamut.” The obstruction, here, is the famous offshore reef, the natural bar which has cut off this bump of Africa forever from outside contact and left this whole section of the Sahara so, ah, sensitive to our approach. We shall, ah, inherit this part of the earth. From Basel, I fly to New York to arrange with the UN our plebiscite, which we will hold here for the Foulba, who will be voting for the first time in their long cultural life. The necessary documents are in the hands of Dr. Fard, so you see why we must get to him right away. The Foulba will vote in a phalanx which we can airlift back and forth to wherever voting is to be set up. They are very mobile by, ah, nature — being nomads — and they have all been, ah, grammatized: “Hello Yes Hello.” They will vote as a man, of course, for you.

The Board has often discussed your, ah, image and I must say you fit it very, ah, adequately, indeed. I am completely, ah, cognizant of Mya’s judgment in men, having lived through all of her seven husbands, after all. You, on the other hand, are something quite else again. You were found by the Foundation for Fundamental Findings — you will recall our original interview in the Hotel Saint Georges of Algut. At the time, it was not possible to speak to you frankly in front of that man Knoblock, who represented the CIA. They were trying to infiltrate the Foundation. You can imagine how hopeless to offer us mere money but we needed them for the time being. We were casting for a man in a million; someone as unique as you yourself; someone, if you will excuse me, someone odd . Then, we had to garner, microfilm and destroy — utterly wipe out any documentary proof of that person’s previous existence. We needed the, ah, special services to get into the files in Albany, N.Y., for example. Beginning with your birth certificate, we have erased Ulys O. Hanson, III, “Hassan Merikani,” etc.; the infant, the child, the boy and the man.

In Present Time, you are the great-grandson of Ma el Ainin, the mahdi or miraculous leader who stirred up the Sahara a couple of generations ago. In his time of triumphs, your great-grandfather sent your grandfather to America to meet Marcus Garvey and the man called Elijah, a predestined name. In the time of his troubles, your father was smuggled out of the country to the States as a babe and the, ah, dynasty died out — or seemed to have done. You will not be asked to preach but your great-grandfather, old Ma el Ainin, was a fiery preacher, fulminating at the Foulba about what he called a “Desert Democracy,” with him as sole chief of state and, ah, immortal, of course. He turned out not to be, but, as no one dared prod him, and everyone around him was blind, they didn’t even know it until long after he was dead. In the heat of the desert, he dried up into a leathery mummy under which they staggered around and around through the sand with it on a palanquin, carrying it around on their shoulders for years. Your great-grandfather was called Ma el Ainin, which means: “Watery Eyes,” because he had very highly contagious trachoma all of his life. He could always manage to see out of one eye until the day that he died but he blinded everybody around him by sticking his dirty fingers into their eyes. You know the phrase: “ Le borgne est roi! In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!” It was a very efficient way to govern these people. It ensured him the utmost in love and fearful respect that the Sahara enjoys. Prince Pio would have liked to, ah, pull something like this but he was not a man of such caliber. The Sahara is a harsh and scurvy place, is it not?

Before I begin to go into what we envisage as your role in all this, let me break out this bottle of American Borbor — ah, excuse me: I meant American Bourbon, of course. Alas, we have nothing glamorous to offer you with it, like ice. No one around here seems to be able to keep the generator going … well, cheers! Now, the Board originally intended to have Mr. Himmer teach you faith-healing, as being more in the line of what the UN approves these days but, now that Thay has fallen silent, I really don’t know. The Board felt very strongly that your official title should be released immediately to the world press — a scoop for this Media woman, perhaps, but it may be more than she deserves. We’ll see. In any case, there is still the question of your title itself. The Board felt it should in-corporate all the singular strength of the Sahara. If you do not object to the word; its Soul. The natives all tell us that the spirit of the Sahara is named Ghoul. The Africans fear and respect Ghoul. Therefore, one suggestion was Great Ghoul or Grand Ghoul. Both voted down. You can imagine, perhaps, whose suggestion it was that, in order to impress the impact of immortality on your people, you should be called The Ghost of Ghoul. It has been decided that it will have the greatest possible impact everywhere and, above all, in the American States where the, ah, television culture and the Garveyite heritage of Black Power must be considered, if you were to be known quite simply as: The Ghoul. How does that strike you: powerful, is it not? I need hardly give you a detailed exposé of the latitude this title allows you. Everything is permitted to Ghoul, they say, and nothing is true. Nothing … well …

Ah, yes! Now, where was I? Living down here in the Sahara on this blank page of history, I have become a little mystical myself. Mysticals are much more common than you might think, in our Switzerland; despite our republican sentiments. My first mystical meeting was with Princess Mya — Madame PP Strangleblood, as she was then. I was utterly “grammatized” the minute she laid eyes on me. Then, later, “Hello Yes Hello,” gave me the ability to communicate with people like the naked Foulba out there where you see the lights of their camp-city; with your primary friend, Hamid; with you. I am a very down to earth Swiss person of business who can begin to grasp the amplitude of Madame Mya’s magnificent design. Madame knows how to take things: that’s Swiss! Quite apart from her stupendous advantages of beauty, intelligence, power, culture and wealth, she holds the final inestimable trump. “I am yellow!” she can proclaim, as she did to the huge Chinese delegation we received here and sent on their way. The Chinese offered to build her a solar-powered water-distillation chain-project to be strung right across the Sahara from “Malamut” to the Red Sea, but Mya just thanked them sweetly and said: “I am a poor Asiatic colonial victim of the whites.” Now, who else could say that and mean it; I ask you? The woman is colossal, immense!