Brion Gysin - The Process

There, how is that catheter, dear? Amos, just let me take a look at your dressings.

At this point, Amos exploded. There is a noise on the tape unlike words; impossible to transcribe. The varnish peeled off the tape at one point .

Presuming this to be the voice of Amos Africanus, I have given it a separate section. I hope this is all right with you. UOH .

You! Woman! Mother, Madame! Sister, Nurse! Get your paws off my penis and out of my mouth! Let me up, let me out of here! Elijah Feldzahler, the Burning Bush! Of course, he is right. Let me go get the Emerald. I have a date with a Chinese Dissident leader. “ Seek knowledge even as far as China! ” The Great Work!

( There is a good deal of noise like this. Amos seemed not to be in full command of his words. I have done what I can with all this. UOH .)

Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: “What are we here for?” is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I’ll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!

So, what are we waiting for, sister soul? Pack up your emeralds, Freeky: you and I have a date out beyond Deadline and we’ve got it together, as you said very well. This is Gemini, taking off! This is the way we came, you and I; one soul split into two bodies of compatible sexes and this is the way we shall go, taking them with us! Mya Himmer’s Ace in Space is Love-All. It still takes a pair to beat old terrestrial Death and roll out replicas all over the universe. Let it be the perfect pair. Who could reproduce accurate replicas better than Pharaonic twins! Come, Cleopatra, all we need is the Emerald and the Emerald is not Egyptian at all but Chinese!

( At this point, Amos let out a terrible shrill wavering yell that turned into a strangled cough, a hysterical laugh and, then, a chuckle. UOH .)

So, laughter is refusal, eh? Well, maybe so. I was just trying to see if I could yodel again the way I did for the captain when he hit me with the high voltage. I find I can’t. While he was torturing me, I could hear myself very well: it sounded like a dog taking a long time to die after being hit by a car. On and on the dog trills: won’t he ever stop? This dying dog is shocking all the other well-fed dogs in the universe who are barking abruptly and clearing their throats, as much as to say: Why won’t he stop? Why won’t he die and get done with it? We don’t like to hear that. I didn’t either and, then, I was horrified to see that the bastard was burning my body but, strangely enough, when I took a good look at him, I saw that Mohamed was as deeply involved in the torture as I. What does he think he is doing? I said to myself. That’s what saved me: I was no longer just one person but two. I was you, if you like; perhaps, your sort of Universal YOU.

Well, from that point of view, I was watching an Egyptian priest preparing a mummy into whose fist he slipped the Emerald to send the prone man off on his trip. The mummy was then set spinning, in order to wrap it in an infinite length of magnetized tape on which had been recorded the words, all the words. Current pulsed through the bundle to plate it. The mummy glowed and became perfectly transparent, white-hot. In the green and purple shallows, shimmered a white body which was both you and was me. I thought, at first, that the left-hand side was you and the right-hand me but we kept slipping in and out of each other, changing place.

What a fool that Thay Himmer has been. “ The answer to the existence of a fool is silence .” No one ever told him to play the Emerald onto Black. Mya knows better than that; or she should. But the Himmers are tourists, not to be trusted. There can be no question whatever of taking this whole menagerie into Space. I have a date with the Chinese Dissident Delegate, Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee knows what to do with the Emerald. Thay Himmer foolishly showed it around like a watch fob at a party we gave the China Committee when they came through “Malamut.” I caught Mr. Lee taking a print of it on a paper napkin. Back in Pekin, they know how to read. They know, now, what we have. They have the ship but we have the chart. Where are we going? We are going OUT.

The Emerald seal prints in reverse an astral conjuncture, a cosmic crack which opens only once every so many millennia. That is the Way Out through which it is possible to slip in and out of the universe; just as I was slipping in and out of my body under torture, today. This stainless-steel star in which we are sitting, crimped down onto the basalt base, is not, as everyone knows, a psychiatric hospital, at all. But, neither is it a fort! Star Citadel is the base for a rocket and capsule, built in China and delivered by satellite, which can and will be fired from here to Eternity, today or tomorrow. You and I will be fired on a trajectory that knows no return unless the Traveler holds the Emerald as a map in Space and Time to get back.

Now, my pal Mr. Lee knows as well as you and I do that he who leaves an open door behind him, when he goes off on a trip, invites burglars and squatters into his house. When Mr. Lee’s hordes of young Chinese technicians with bats’ ears and bristly hair standing up all over their heads arrive, any minute now, to fit the capsule into place above us, you must be ready to leave. You won’t need any baggage. So that there will be no squatters solidly ensconced in our property when we come back, Mister Lee intends to burn down the Old Homestead of Earth behind us as we take off.

I forget to tell you that we have to take Lee along. We’ll be shipping nobody else. You see, on this sort of flight, one man must steer by the Emerald while his co-pilot keeps an eye on the chart made from a reverse print. It’s because of the symmetry, you see. The Universe is spinning and what spins must appear symmetrical whether it is or not. That is the essential illusion but we are symmetrical, ourselves; ambivalent, too. This is a split universe, run between the Image and the Real Thing; one is the mirror-image of the other but the point is to tell which is which. You see that, of course; or, rather, you don’t.

Now, Freeky, what you must do is get hold of the Emerald for me, at once. If Mya lays her hands on that Emerald, we’ve had it: Mya is the one who will be leaving with Mr. Lee. The other great danger is that Black American of theirs. “ I am Black and I am Wise .” If he knows what to do with his UHER, we could all be rubbed out!

They can all be rubbed out by the zikr , of course! Wow! The minute I typed those last words to YOU, I knew what had to be done: Wow! Anything to get myself out of that trap in Tam. I paid the lady gladly; the Emerald for my UHER, cheap at any price. It was a simple matter, then, to record the zikr on a loop of spliced tape; playing endlessly over and over, again and again and again.

I press the old button to give it a whirl; double speed and, then, double that:

Rub out the word … Out-word rub Thee … The Rub-out word … Word out-rub Thee … Word rub Thee out … Out the Rub-word … Rub out the Word …

Such is the process.

The word-process in reverse sounds less like blank verse than it does like a garbage-disposal unit built into a kitchen sink. Be as careful about inserting your finger in the running loop of words as you would be about plunging your finger down your own throat. Abrupt word-withdrawal can be a shattering experience. Taken cold-turkey, it can cramp you with chills of panic as the seasick words swirl around in a long ring-a-rosy like a vomit of alphabet soup. The nymph Nausea grabs you by the gullet, throwing you into severe anti-orgasmic spasm while Pan, the dumb little brute-god, attacks you along with his goats: