Brion Gysin - The Process

Nobody loves Sister Cassandra, I know. That’s what Francis and I have been calling the queen, as a matter of fact. That poor queen! She has nothing at all but those tattered blue robes she’s wearing; while she was unconscious, I went through her things. We found her clutching a roll of red rawhide, which was all that was left of the right royal leather tent around which the Tuareg used to assemble from all over the Sahara to the sound of the royal drum. When we took her in here we had no place for her, really, but a corner of the kitchen which we divided by hanging up her redskin curtains on the clothesline to give her some privacy. However, we both have to do our cooking in there so it’s gotten to be more than a bit of a strain on the both of us. I thought Francis might have eyes for the queen but have you noticed the goat-smell of untanned leather in here? That’s it. It ought to be nice to keep a queen in the kitchen but not when her leatherwork stinks!

Then, we had this odd English couple, mother and son, who came through here on foot. We called them Senior and Junior because they both had exactly the same name: Windfred Something-Something, I think. Senior knows every last blasted plant in the Sahara by name in both Latin and Arabic: the British used to train their people really well, didn’t they? I feel sure she was sent to track down something like Mya’s Borbor, don’t you? Junior is a man in his middle fifties; so Senior must be getting on for eighty, at least, but she’s as spry as a cricket and keeps the accounts. Junior, with a medical certificate from Medina and Mecca and a very sharp straight razor, does antiseptic circumcisions for money in the villages along the way. They get to places where the circumciser hasn’t made his rounds in years. By the time they come along, so she tells me, there are often large groups to be circumcised, including boys grown so big they get an erection at the sight of the knife and ejaculate all over your hands; sperm and blood. Would you like a job like that? No, don’t try to talk!

I became so impressed by the old woman’s knowledge of plants that I wrote this in my journal after the Windfreds left. May I read it to you?

Maybe I would get out of myself more if I knew something about botany. As it is, the Sahara is here at my throat. Sometimes I almost go crazy inside this place that wears as thin as a sheet of paper in the whine of the wind while that very real monster, Ghoul, growls around right outside, forbidding me to open up. He’s forever snuffling along the windowsill behind me or crawling along the crack under the door. I know, if I open up, he’ll be bounding around in the room like a fist. My refuge is here in this journal between whose pages I cower as though I were between the covers of a cardboard castle and I try to lie as flat as ink on the paper or, at most, bodied out no more than the dried desert flowers I press between these same pages.

There, isn’t that rather good? By the way, I think it a very bad magic for the Himmers to call their ruler Ghoul. That’s really tempting the desert itself, don’t you think? I say that’s going too far. Well, listen to this:

When I can get out of this starfish fortress, this hospital jail, this loony-bin which the clever Chinese anchored down to this rock of the Hoggar, I go botanizing. I don’t learn much, naturally, not knowing enough to begin. It’s as simple as that, but, at the same time, I feel sure that no botany book anywhere reproduces these ferociously ambitious plants I come across out in the Sahara. I observe them from a safe distance on some of my walks. These plants are at war, both with the Sahara, the sand and each other but, also, they are on the eternal lookout for any intruder who happens to put one foot out in front of the other through the desert.

There are plants out here with spined tendrils like elaborate steel traps and humanoid plants like silently screaming witches staked into the ground. I wouldn’t trust the plants out here with as little as one drop of water. It’s as plain as the Sahara itself that they don’t mean us any good; any more than Captain Mohamed does the last gazelles he guns down from his jeep. If the plants had their way, they would tear us to shreds and butcher every last one of us for casual manure if they could. If you take this ten-power reading glass of mine to get a closer look at these so-called plants, you will see that they are out there adding hook to handle; one saber joint to the next and all that on top of sawteeth, prickles, darts, barbs and every angle of thorn. The wind is their ally and is always behind them to give a push in order to slash at each other or you or any intruder; animal, human or plant. They would contend, I suppose, that they fight for water but I see their innate hostility as just one more example of the extreme nature of the Sahara; of the world.

You see what I’m getting at, don’t you? We are, all of us here, today and every day, in an extreme situation — between birth and death; you agree? Is there some still more extreme situation in which we can imagine ourselves? Yes; the extreme situation of leaving here willingly; do you follow me? Can you follow me if we go? Just nod your head: you don’t have to talk. I don’t mean just silly old Death, either; I mean sneaking past him. Oh, I don’t mean necessarily bodily but maybe so; maybe even physically; maybe as if we were just thinking-crystals in some other state, imagine. Well, it’s a lot less unthinkable since Space, isn’t it? Anyway, our Dr. Feldzahler says: “There is no Place in Space!” No hope of heaven or home out there, either, but, maybe, a hope of my I being You everywhere, do you see? Otherwise, a rather grim prospect for us space creatures, isn’t it; caught like astronauts dependent on their bodies like Thay inside his iron lung? No, don’t talk!

Francis and I were out in the jeep with the top down one day. We drove over to a place called Tit where there is what might be a Roman ruin and, on the way back, a sudden curtain of sand blew up and encircled us with the oddest green light. On the inside of this funnel, Francis and I saw huge but hardly distorted images of ourselves hanging there, hovering ahead of us, upside down. When we got back, the Queen told us the Tuareg say that is the last vision of those about to drown in the sand. Typical rubbish, isn’t it; how would she know? I do know, of course, as does anyone else whose name has been writ in sand, that the Sahara could breathe and cover us all forever like a book, closing on us, right now, but I wasn’t frightened when I saw my vision. I threw out my arms to throw them around myself but I faded in front of myself as I went. Wasn’t that sad? I’d like to walk into my own image as if it was you. Just imagine, you and I are on opposite sides of some shiny surface like a two-way mirror but thinner than paper; dividing two mirror-identical worlds, yours and mine. We stand as naked as you are now on my bed but without the bandages, of course. It’s so hot in here without the air-conditioning, I wish Thay would go back to his Imsak with Mya. So, I strip off all my clothes: like this! There, light flickers and ripples equally over my naked body and yours; shimmering between us. Light rushes up like a curtain or drops like a guillotine, pulsing between your side of the mirror and mine. Now, I am the bold one, of course, with nothing to lose and a penis to gain, so I leap to embrace the image of me which is, brother, you! And, brother, that’s what I really want; to be with the boys. I want to be able to turn over— Click! — the switch that made me a woman and you a man. I want to be both of us, Amos! No, don’t even try to talk back!

There, do you hear it? The air-conditioning is going again. That means Thay is at Imsak with Mya. Do you want to know, Amos; that makes my flesh creep! That woman’s an addict; no, don’t attempt to talk! I know she has been giving all of you her Borbor, for years. I know the whole lot of you have been borborized over and over again by her until all your value-judgments have been wiped out. I’ve had Borbor from Mya’s hands, too; don’t forget, she really sprinkles it around. Borbor has no effect on women except to make them a little lascivious; that’s the whole point. I’m not against vice, heaven forbid! and, besides, who am I to throw the first little stone? I used to make Mohamed take me “botanizing in his military jeep because it excited me so to think of what he might do to me when he machine-gunned down the gazelles. He’s a horrible racist, of course, but not as far as women are concerned.