Brion Gysin - The Process

“You may not pass this way again in a lifetime,” he says.

All the people I ever have seen in this lifetime are melded and jelled into some sort of red-hot honeycomb the old cat keeps in his closet. Outraged that we should all find ourselves, still, on this subway under the Great Desert called Life, I explode with all the conviction of a man who has found himself, finally:

“Let me in there again, goddammit!” I cry. “Whether I like it or not, I guess, I’m a Teacher and it’s just because all you donkeys are so goddammed dumb that a Teacher has to go over the same old lesson, again and again. So, one lifetime isn’t enough, eh? Well, give me more! No! More!”

The windows are streaming with gold. I look out to see we are spinning through the Sahara faster than the speed of light, escaping the clutch of the great hairy magnet of the Sun. From behind my back, this little old gink with one eye is asking me:

“Why were you in such a hurry to get here, when the desert gets us all in the end?”

Campoamor

Tanger, Morocco

1965–1968

They have all spoken.

As the dervishes desired, I have set down first the voice of one and, then, the voice of the others. In this book, I have not set down my own point of view because I am a man and a man does not know everything. In any case, it is not fitting for him to say everything he knows nor to write everything he says. Of one hundred thousand men, there may be one who knows and, of a hundred thousand things he knows, there may be one he should utter. Of the one hundred thousand things he utters there may be one he should write. If my own opinion had been set down in this book, both friend and foe might learn of it; both the competent and the incompetent might read it.

In other days, the initiate confided their secrets only to those they considered competent; swearing them to the secret. The incompetent, happily, are unable to pierce the thoughts of the initiate who, since the time of Adam, have obtained their knowledge of the essence of things through personal association with those who knew. Therefore, he who seeks the mysteries and the realities, must seek out someone who knows for, from the book alone, nothing emerges.

“ The Unveiling of Realities .”

Kashf Ul-Haqa’iq,

Persia, 13th century.