Brion Gysin - The Process

Just let me brief you on some of the, ah, shape of our projects; going through them alphabetically.

A: stands for: Ability, the Creation of (see GRAMMA ), then: Affrica, Mrs. Francis-Xavier Fard (see AFRICANUS, family ). All the headings in capital letters refer you to the very complete electronic library we have here; those panels over there and that screen. Alas, as I have already said, the generator …

B: stands for: BIO-KEY . Bio-Key is the name of our pharmaceutical combine based on Mexico, producing steroids for the Pill. Fundamental Funds won the patents to the thirty-two-stage process for extracting steroids from the Mexican giant yam. Weight for weight, steroids are worth about seventeen times the value of gold; some ninety-one million pre-devaluation dollars a ton. Today? Pull any figure you like out of the air. Right here directly below us, Madame Mya is sitting on the biggest steroid bank in the world. Unfortunately, steroids have to be refrigerated. Every time I become aware that our generator is not pounding away, I shudder to think of our steroid stock. After all, that’s a good many yams. Mya is always complaining, too, that changes in temperature are not good for her Charles Heidsieck champagne.

There is no file for Borbor, you will notice: maybe she keeps the bubbles of that in her head.

C: stands for: Chemicals: (Private File ). This file contains all her work on the hallucinogens in Basel. You might find the Borbor formula in here but only Mya knows which one it is.

D: stands for: DOMINGUEZ ( Lindissima Reuther y Dominguez, deceased ). Poor Lindissima, she was really a very foolish woman. “All attraction and then no traction,” Mya once said of her. It was a bit cruel because Lindissima was no match for her. This file contains all the transfers, the property transfers by which this little corner of the hump of Africa became ours. There is a rumor, put out by the Spaniards, that Mya did away with Lindissima but that is as absurd as the story that she killed Prince Pio, Dr. Labesse. La Reuther had a terrible barbiturate problem and she tried to keep up with Mya, drink for drink. She was found on the floor with a broken glass in her hand. Pio died from sheer megalomania: he thought he was Hakim, Caliph of Bagdad, and walked off in the desert alone; trailing his gold encrusted burnous to wipe out his footsteps. He shouted: “I’ll be back in no time!” as he disappeared over a dune. Mya ran him down in her jeep but he died in her arms, whispering: “ Assassinate everybody! ”

This little file must not fall into the hands of the Spanish authorities, who claim that the entire ex-Reuther estate, including Cape Noon and “Malamut” is still under their authority and jurisdiction. The UN has still not yet set a date for the last of the Spaniards to leave but we are asking for a plebiscite, the day that they do.

E: stands for: Emerald Seal . That is, the so-called Scarab of the Sahara which is now in your possession. The name was given to this artifact by Mr. Himmer, who likes to live under the impression that he got it for nothing. Here are the documents. This is the result of the assay done at Hatton Gardens in London: Green stone: 45.7 carats. Specific gravity, 2.70: emerald . Here we have the report from the British Museum: “ No ancient artifact of Egyptian provenance was made out of emerald .” And, here, you have a record of the sum paid by our agent to a certain Mohamed Imsak of Cairo: quite staggering, as you can see.

F: stands for: 1. FARD (see files). 2. Farout Islands (Himmer estate ). As he may have told you, Mr. Himmer chooses to own nothing; nothing at all. What little money he had when they married — it could not have come to a million predevaluation dollars, at the most — he handed over to the Board. This file, therefore, is empty. That brings us to: 3. FUNDAMENTAL FUNDS , my own particular preoccupation and, then: 4. FOULBA , which will be yours. Here are some pictures of the boys during one of their annual orgies. I am not entirely in sympathy with these people. In fact, I think it might be said that we have had an, ah, floop with the Foulba. The Himmers may like to think they got them for nothing but the Foulba cost us a fortune, daily, in fodder alone. Just to keep them and their cows on this idle desert around “Malamut” means that we fly tons of hay in from Switzerland, three times a week. We call it the “Milk Run” and that is what I will be catching to Basel, tonight, if we ever get any lights on the field.

As you may know, the Foulba have lived for many a millennia in a state approaching symbiosis with their lovely lyre-horned cattle. As a Swiss, I love cows and of all cows these antique animals are the most beautiful. When we introduced the Foulba to “Hello Yes Hello,” it swept the Sahara as soon as we had paired off a few. Previously, there had been no real communication between them: “Never trust a fellow Foulba,” they say about themselves, ingenuously. A Foulba’s best friends were always his four-footed ones into whose soft furry ears the Foulba used to confide their infantile fantasies. They lived off their cattle without ever killing them, drinking their milk and enough of their salty blood for both man and beast to keep going together. Now, they have suddenly stopped; now, for the first time in their long history, they have become Assassins to their animals, killers of cows, cannibals. I don’t mean that they slaughter them; if only they did! Out there where you see the flickering lights of their campfires on the mainland, even now, they are feasting on raw, still-living beef. They hack quivering steaks out of the flanks of their bellowing, bleeding animals, who stumble and stagger away to die in the dark while their former lovers, the Foulba, cram their mouths with the meat. I have been a vegetarian all my life: I cannot pretend to judge these people, but I do know why it happened. They cut into their cattle, you understand, when the cattle could not communicate. “Hello Yes Hello,” said into a long silky ear got only: “Moo!” in reply and that is why those cattle are dying so atrociously out there tonight that you can hear their pitiful bellowing over the cry of the sea when the wind is right. For me, the lesson has been that we must communicate that the other may not devour us, but the Himmers insist there is much more to it than that and, no doubt, they are right.

Now, we come to the letter, H.

H: stands for: HANSON, Ulys Othello of Ithaca, New York : I think you will be amazed by our documentation on this person. If ever they get the generator going, you must project all the material on the screen over there. As I said, the original documents have been destroyed and all this file will be demagnetized and, ah, disintegrated the day you actually become the Ghoul.

H: also stands for: HORMONE (see BIO-KEY ). You may find this horrid or endlessly, ah, fascinating. Some of the ramifications are, at present, quite distasteful; such as our dealings with Brazilian sources through Recife, where we have managed to tap a pituitary supply in the Amazonian jungle which looks as though it may be drying up. Amos has been concerned with the, ah, practical aspects of this business. It grew out of Mya’s determination to get her money out of, ah, money; long before the dollar was devaluated, as a matter of fact. Mya, today, is the world’s richest woman because she holds the key to the future in hormones: she’s got a grip on the Life Force, itself. The financing of “Malamut” has devolved on me. The, ah, philosophic, ah, theory, behind “Malamut,” we owe to Thay in his role as Bishop Himmer when he proposes the stockpiling of human pituitary glands as a sort of, ah, religious principle of, ah, Eternal Life. All our problems may be said to be genetic: it all depends who you like to have around. Race, color, creed, crime, cramps in the belly and death can be controlled only by hormones and hormones are horribly hard to come by. Each one of us has only one pituitary so, to prepare a thimble-sized stockpile of these hormones, we need five thousand cadavers. Your pituitary is a gland the size of a pea; right here at the base of your skull.