Brion Gysin - The Process

Olav, you are crazy! Olav you are mad!

Why do you want to go back with that man

Who treated you so bad!

That may be because they have had to file so many of my dreams about the time Thay hit me over the head with a pail in a sauna: some of them still think I should have called the police. It was a big local scandal at the time because I am not altogether unknown in my little Finland as an artist and, certainly, Thay Himmer the Seventh, White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Isles, was the most exotic celebrity anyone in Finland had ever brought back from his travels. (Like a tourist trophy: was I still that naïve? Perhaps.) Only Ingating understood and she understood perfectly. Ingating is very intelligent for a Finnish girl because she has read special books. “Did you experience satori when Mr. Himmer hit you in the hot room,” Ingating asked me, “like the adepts of a Japanese master of Zen?” She is a very good girl but I was still under sedation or I would never have blabbed out to her that I am, now and forever, Himmer’s Little White Reindeer. I must say for her that she did not blink a blond eyelash. She kept comimg back to the clinic to see me and, when my head healed, offered to let me move in with her when I was released because, she said, we could all live very well on her state allowance as the unmarried mother of twins. That’s Finnish finesse, for you. She was informing me delicately that I had lost my state-studio over the Himmer scandal and had no place to live. Luckily, the clinic has a Sleep & Dream Research Lab. run by our great oneirologist, Doktor Erno Aalto. He became so interested in my Saharan desert dreams that he invited me to sleep-in at the clinic, five nights a week, and offered me a big bare white room facing north as a studio. Weekends all last year, I slept over at Ingating’s and, when she had twins again this last summer, I simply stayed on in the clinic but, on weekends, I treated myself to a slumber without attaching the old electroencephalograph or the loop for penis-erectile control which is wired to the videometer all other nights of the week. I am going to miss that.

Finland is a little country but in some ways we are well advanced. Actually, Finland is a country without too much excitement because the weather is no good for it. The arrival of someone like Thay Himmer in Helsinki can change the lives of many people in Finland. There were pictures of him in all the papers and magazines, waving at the camera. Only I in all of Finland knew that Thay was warding off image-spells with counter-spells from the Farout Islands. Wearing his funny cut fringe of red Arab beard and his big bright blue eyes, he became a popular figure in Finland. He always smiled at everybody with his more than American teeth and they loved him, at first. When I took him up north with me to see the herds, the whole Finnish nation followed him on television. Thay Himmer grinned out of the screen in every home in Finland like a jack-o’-lantern in a fur parka. While he was standing beside our Finnish President judging the reindeer races, a disgraceful technical accident occurred on the television but, as Thay always said: there are no accidents. Everyone knows who would do a filthy thing in Finland! A ghostly pair of antlers appeared behind Thay’s head for several minutes on all the screens in the land and pictures like that ran in the newspapers, too. I was terribly ashamed as a Finn. However, although it may have been meant as a joke in very poor taste, state television pollsters announced that many country people in outlying districts had identified Bishop Himmer as the Norse hunting god.

It is true: Thay can look almost supernatural at times to very provincial people. Also, he did go around talking in a slightly eerie way about anything from astrology to Grammatology, whether they understood all that much English or not. Rumors ran around that he was the head of a new sect or a secret religion: other tongues clacked that he was an agent. “An agent for what?” I once had the occasion to storm at one fellow Finn, who was just flustered enough to blurt back: “International, I suppose.” I had to laugh back into that Finn’s face for not having the courage to say what he really thought: “ Interplanetary! of course .” That is the only possible word for Thay Himmer. Ingating saw right away how interplanetary Mr. Himmer was, so, when I told her I was his Little White Reindeer, she just sighed and replied: “Yes, Olav, I know. If there’s something afoot, you must put your foot in it and you’re always pawing away at the clouds.” Ingating is twenty-two months older than I am and very wise for her age.

When Thay’s cable came, Ingating agreed at once that I should leave for Cape Noon as soon as we found out where it was on my map of Africa, published by Kummerly & Frey; scale: 1/12,000,000, printed in Berne . But, at the clinic this morning, Doktor Aalto drew me aside: “Do I understand you correctly, Olav? Are you really so brave and so brash as to be dashing off to some place in the Sahara which is calling itself, brazenly: ‘Malamut’? You know what it means, of course: Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Grand Assassin and Old Man of the Mountain, called his castle: ‘Alamut’! Is this something worse? Malamut means: The Bad Way, the Way of no Return. Are you ready to risk that, Olav? Are you properly prepared? I hope you have your return fare, Olav. We shall all miss you here at Sleep & Dreams. By the way, I thought your friend Thay, Bishop Himmer, came from the Pacific, the Farout Islands. You met him in the Sahara, I believe: can’t he go home? What is he doing in still another part of the desert? Is this place ‘Malamut’ what he calls his home? ”

“I understand it’s a castle built by his wife.”

“His wife , Olav? In the picture we have of him in our dream files, built up out of your dreams, Olav, there is no trace of a wife!”

“Here’s a picture I cut out of a magazine; taken at Orly airport, right after their marriage. It says here she was previously married to the richest boy in the world. She looks bigger than Thay but maybe she was standing on a step.”

“I knew there must be someone behind him; a woman, of course. Olav, I warn you: ‘Malamut’ is a challenge. By giving this name to their house, the Himmers unfurl a banner by far more cynical than any pirate’s Skull and Crossbones. I am utterly taken aback by such audacity. They flaunt an attachment to old heresies kept alive in dark corners of the world, hidden out of the way of modern communication systems so successfully that they might well one day prove to be the springs of human nature if they were revived in a modern form by utterly unscrupulous people. Is that what your friends are up to, Olav?” Professor Aalto sounded me, his glasses glittering: “Keep in touch.” And I will call him, too, every night. We have our dream-code. Dear old Dr. Aalto, he’s such a well-known anti-feminist alarmist, but I guess I had better watch my step.

Helsinki, Nov. 3

The banks were open today but no money came through for me. Why does one always have to wait for money? Ingating is more nervous than I am but she will calm down.

Helsinki, Nov. 4

Still no money but I did find out about airlines and visas. No one here ever heard of Cape Noon, let alone how to get down there but, when I show them where it is on the big bump of Africa, they suggest flying to Casablanca or Dakar. All Thay’s cable says is: JOIN US IN MALAMUT ON CAPE NOON IMMEDIATELY MONEY FORTHCOMING LOVE THAY but it is dated Tanja so I’ll think I’ll fly there. No luggage: this is the way I came and this is the way I shall return. Life is too soft in Finland, I can’t wait to get back to the desert. Ingating understands.