Brion Gysin - The Process

He even stopped passing remarks about Professor Feldzahler when the old man showed up here with his new assistant over there in Reggan. She claims her name is Chungalorn Patticheki and she’s a Loatian who studied physics in France but I’d swear she was some sort of Chinese. No point in warning the professor, though. He calls her his “Pattycake,” and he’s a completely changed man. She comes on like a Dragon Lady in a black leather flying jacket and handles his helicopter like a man. I wonder where Thay Himmer would fit her into the game. That Thay Himmer, his games will be the death of all of us, yet. Well, that’s not entirely fair, I admit: the professor’s problems are equally apocalyptic, I suppose. He’s been having terrible troubles over there on his atomic pile, facing outright revolt on the part of his young crew of mercenary mathematicians with long bristly hair standing straight up all over their heads. They’re all in their twenties and pretty pent-up in the middle of nowhere, you bet! With nothing better to do, a gang of them have been feeding the computers with a calculation designed to predict when the next terrestrial magnetic-switch will take place; when the North Pole becomes the South Pole— click! — just like that!

The maddest of all these mathematicians worked on Telstar before he came out here and he insists on using a Chinese method called the Shortest Path. He claims to have already come up with an approximate calculation which practically throws the switch into Present Time — now! He goes around with a button he made for himself, reading: BOMB NOW, pinned to his atomic smock. Feldzahler insists the whole thing be double-checked, of course, just to give them something to do, but even he has to admit that the very calculations in which they are engaged are a danger in themselves. The Shortest Path, he claims, cuts swathes like cycles of light-years through the sea, the electro-magnetic sea which surrounds us. These very calculations are capable of pushing time further back than Fardism ever dreamed of and, therefore, they are building up an electronic tidal wave capable of sweeping down and over-whelming the lot of us; switching our current. What happens then? The professor, in his role of Elijah, suggests that all floods have their Ararat and, therefore, this time, because of the peculiar magnetic fields which are swirling around us, here right now, the Hoggar may prove to be it. Of all those in Present Time, we alone may be saved. No, don’t say a word!

That’s what I said: there’s no point in trying to leave here right now. We might just as well, for the moment, sit back and wait for the end of the world. We’re all waiting for someone or something, always, so why not wait for that? In the meantime, just let me read you something I wrote:

Professor Feldzahler says that, from his helicopter, he can see new sorts of erosion eating into the Sahara surrounding us; much more every trip. We notice it, too. Great gashes have sliced themselves into the hills between here and Tit, making crevasses which have cut off the road north. Feldzahler says that, from the air, he can see that all the trails which lead up to the Hoggar, here, have been broken off as if the Sahara were ebbing away from us, loosening the sand which took so long, so many eons, to gather in this volcanic cup. Those tremendous flash floods which sweep over the Sahara like a great floor mop, drowning countries bigger than France in an hour, are pulling the Sahara out from underneath us. Enormous flying dunes as big as provinces have suddenly marched out of the Great Sandy Erg to “colonize” broad expanses of flat reg over which trucks used to run. Professor Feldzahler saw with his own eyes a stretch of hammada cliff many miles long abruptly declare itself crystalline under some invisible stress. The whole red range stretching off into the endless horizon, suddenly shattered and fell like a curtain. A serpentine cloud of dust as long as a frontier slowly rose in the air like a dragon who had just laid a glittering trail of smashed polygonal spars, each one as tall as a fallen cathedral spire.…

That’s what I was writing when the professor called on the shortwave to say; we still don’t know what. You see, he and I had agreed to discuss things over the air in the language we both knew which was the least likely to be understood. It so happens that we both speak Swiss Romanch; me from the years I spent in that school in Rikon in Switzerland when I was interned there during the war. I don’t know where he picked up his but that’s what tore it. That evil eavesdropping spy, Mohamed, how would he know? He was sure it was Hebrew, of course. I barely had time to put a call in to you at “Malamut” before he was after me, waving a pistol. The key was open: you heard what he called me: “Jezebel! Spy! Bitch!” It was wonderful of you to come to the rescue like that. We simply couldn’t have survived another day in this place together but you had to pay so dearly for the help you brought me; you poor thing. No, don’t try to talk!

Just listen to the Sahara out there for a moment. You know how they always say they are going to the Sahara even when they just take a step out of doors? Mohamed does. Well, there it is whining to be let in; the Sahara, do you hear it? I swear, if you could look out and see it, it would be lying out there with its chin in its hands, grinning. Sometimes, when I am alone, reading or writing and not paying any attention to it, why, it’s suddenly there; here alongside of me or, even, inside of me, breathing along with me but just out of time until, in a moment, I’m breathless; the Sahara is smothering me. I’ve been lying there where you are, Amos, when it has come down on me like a lover trying to get into me and I panic like a fish with its mouth open so, like: O!

Then, at other times, I know the desert’s a void like the thin air outside of the cabin at thirty thousand feet up and we’re all ready to explode out into it when, suddenly, there is this babble of voices outside like a whole tribe of Arabs riding by in the night. The wind marches right up and knocks on the door like a master proclaiming his right to get in. When you don’t open up, the wind takes a few paces back and runs at the door, knocking more loudly again. Then, it gives up with a whoop and goes swooping away just to fool you. All the time, it’s right out there waiting for you. Intent as a cat, it tries to push one silky sand-paw under the door to catch at some one little thing in the room, as a cat will; chasing it around in one tight little swirl while all the rest of the room watches, perfectly still. The Sahara is out there, always, pleading and teasing to please be let in. When it does get in and I fight with it, it snarls back at me until I pick it up by the scruff of the neck and throw it back outdoors. Through this very window, sometimes, I can see the Sahara march off with its great bushy tail stiff in the air as it strides down the dead-end avenues of the star-shaped fort where the barbed-wire thickens in the sand.

Here’s a note I wrote on one of those days:

Spoons rasp horribly over the bottoms of our soup plates. Impossible to keep the sand out of the food. Chewing, one fears for one’s teeth. Sand seems to sift through concrete walls and to abrade the surfaces of even stainless steel. Sand hangs glittering in the dry air; glassy, metallic and dangerous. I am afraid to breathe for fear of tearing my lungs. No filter is fine enough to keep the sand out because, diamond cut diamond, the sand crystals are filing each other down into scarcely palpable dust. My pen squeals over this paper. Behind the gritty whisper of the sand, I hear a rasping silence like white-sound feedback.

There, Amos, you see; it would take words ground into gravel to get that down. These aren’t just my fantasies, either. Professor Feldzahler has seen from his helicopter an entire geological skin of the earth peeling off like a scab around the base of this volcanic carbuncle we live on. The bare cheek of the Sahara on this side of the planet is getting some sort of solar burn. Every day, you can notice, you can feel the sand slipping away from under our feet, ever-so slowly, a grain at a time, as it drains out of this big basalt cup our particular spar of stone stands in. Those chinese geomancers knew what they were doing when they pinned Star Citadel here. They picked out spots like this all over Africa as if they were playing a game. Everyone, everywhere, feels that the game is just about up. We feel it even more hauntingly here. Present Time is draining away from this point like the sand in an hourglass.