Brion Gysin: Dream Machine at the Institut D’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne / Rhone-Alpes. 16 October — 28 November 2010.

by Ian MacFadyen

Burroughs-Gysin Excursus: Magic Amulet / Silence to Say Goodbye, Brion Gysin / Hassan I Sabbah / Skywriting, I Give You — You Give Me — Me Give You I / Mirror Breathing, Hedonist of the Spirit / Gone to Persia

Magic Amulet / Silence to Say Goodbye

In The Ticket That Exploded there’s an acknowledgement from Burroughs: “The closing message is by Brion Gysin.” This message takes Burroughs’ cut-up phrase “silence to say goodbye” from the final paragraph of the text, and re-cuts and effectively permutates it vertically through five lines — “To say good silence by / Good to say by silence / By silence to say good / good good / Bye.” The phrases are handwritten versions of the printed phrase on the opposite page, and these lines in English are then alternated with lines of Gysin’s calligraphy — suggesting the transposition of alphabetical letters into pure script, as in a phrasebook guide to a foreign language, except here the calligraphy, though graphically it seems to echo parts of the English script, cannot itself be deciphered and so cannot be spoken — it is a silent writing which can only be “read” in silence, dematerializing the alphabetic and removing the phonetic. The original phrase taken from Burroughs’ text, and Gysin’s permutations of it, literally “say goodbye” — in accord with Burroughs’ preferred way of ending a book with a series of goodbyes from the characters, such as “Ladies and gentlemen, these our actors bid you a long last good night.” In Gysin’s calligraphic epilogue, the textual “goodbye” itself physically, graphically dematerializes, fading out, the script bidding adieu to the alphabetic / phonetic language of Burroughs’ book and by extension signalling an apparently terminal farewell to all referential, potentially spoken discourse. This single-page text embodies the idea of learning to read (and think) in silence, and its dual strategy of calligraphy and permutation is crucially combined with a third form of writing — that of the magical amulet, a protective written script worn by cabalists and mentioned by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It was believed that the evil spirits, thought to reside in certain words or letter permutations, like “ABRACADABRA,” could be ritually exorcised by systematically permuting the letters of the words. These permutations were configured in triangular and cross and diamond shapes, the symmetrical visual forms of the texts created by the systematic removal of letters, line by line — “ABRACADABRA / BRACADABR / RACADAB / ACADA / CAD / A.” Gysin wrote that

The permutations discovered me — because permutations of course have been around for a long time; in the whole magic world permutations are part of the Cabalistic secret . . . the Divine Tautology.

The amulet lies at the heart of Gysin’s permutations, it is the ancient magical device which Gysin and Ian Sommerville computerized — making the machine function magically, employing the binary system for a supernatural purpose. Gysin’s message at the end of The Ticket That Exploded is composed in the form of an X, a Hex sign, in which two triangular-shaped texts meet, point to point, in the center of the page — X. This visual geometric form is composed and delineated by script — that is, the image is created through the arrangement of written and calligraphic lines and letters. Gysin’s Hex X is an hermetic, cabbalistic image which traditionally represented the meeting of earth and spirit — “As above, so below.” A similar form was also used in Taoist magic charms to protect the body from evil (yin) influences — such graphic amulets were calligraphically composed on colored papers, and would subsequently be burned, the destruction of the calligraphic spell being part of the magical process. The lower, rising, aspirant triangle of Gysin’s X is clearly distinguished from the descending triangle — the decipherable words in the top triangle appear to become purely calligraphic in the inverted triangle below, the alphabetical words distorted in an inverted reflection. The inversion suggests an unreadable reversal — so that the X symbol may connote “As above, so not below,” distinguishing and separating the earthly and the spiritual, with the spiritual, dematerialized, non-referential part of the diagram in the lower, not the higher half of the equation. But on closer inspection it’s possible to make out parts of letters in the apparently abstract calligraphy below — we can make out approximations of the “g” and “y” of “goodbye,” the “b” and “y” of “bye” … But then we see the signature in the lower right, “BG,” and recognise that these implicit calligraphic letter-parts belong equally to the name “Brion Gysin” (or “gysin”) — morphed and distended through his calligraphic signature motif, suggestive manifestations of his “bean sprout” script, Gysin’s initials turning into script but also seemingly echoing elements of the original English phrases. Looking back at the higher triangle we can now re-read the lines in English in a different way: “To say good silence bg / Good to say bg silence / Bg silence to say good / good good / Bge.” In fact, we can transpose the two readings, and even superimpose and alternate them — now one, now the other. In addition to recognizing the equivocation between Gysin’s initials and the original words, and working with it, we can now look at the alternating calligraphic lines in the upper triangle which again reveal Gysin’s signature initials . . . but as in the lower triangle, these are fractured, inchoate, turn into lines which may be felt but not linguistically transposed. It is truly the “Silent Writing of Brion Gysin,” as Burroughs called it, and it is so in a triple sense — Gysin wrote it, his name is hidden “silently” in the script, and it is a primer for learning to read and think in silence, non-phonetically, without articulating the sounds of letters. We may still see and read and say aloud or voice internally that “Bee” of “B” and that “gee” of “g,” but these initials and their sounds are stages in a process of undoing and resisting alphabetic decipherment, scriptural referentiality, and phonetic signification — a calligraphic unravelling of linguistic constructs, a process of learning to see whilst unlearning the act of automatic reading.  

Brion Gysin / Hassan I Sabbah / Skywriting

The meaning of Gysin’s amulet message may be tracked further through examining an important description of Gysin’s writing by Burroughs, which links Gysin and Hassan I Sabbah, and connects Gysin’s linguistic dematerializations with Sabbah’s heretical message. Burroughs was indebted to Gysin for having told him about both Sabbah and Wu Tao-tzu, and in particular he linked Gysin and Sabbah because they had given him and taught him the meaning of the immortal razor, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” It is this shattering truth which is incarnated in the “silent writing” of Gysin / Sabbah, the writing which says “Goodbye” to imprisoning rationality, duality and the limitation of human consciousness. It is “silent writing” because those who know keep their silence, while beyond the words of the razor, no more need ever be written. In “CUT-UPS: A Project For Disastrous Success” (1964), Gysin quotes Burroughs’ words — “See the Silent Writing of Brion Gysin, Hassan I Sabbah, across all skies!” This makes an absolute link between Gysin and Sabbah, connecting them as the joint authors and co-practitioners (as well as co-conspirators) of “Silent Writing” — this is the writing of the terminal message in The Ticket That Exploded, in which phonetic, referential writing dematerializes, Gysin (and by extension Sabbah) bidding the reader of the conventional alphabetic text goodbye, leaving only silence, that is, a writing which cannot be spoken or internally articulated. At the end of Dead Fingers Talk the phrase “Silence to say goodbye” is actually spoken by / attributed to Hassan I Sabbah who transmitted his heretical Word via his assassins across vast distances not via books, despite the reputed mythic library at Alamut, but through the hashish visions of his neophytes, scorning death from his “windy bodiless rock” high up there in the sky . . . Burroughs insists that we “see” the silent writing of Gysin / Sabbah “across all skies” because it is the heretical Word, not written as indelible law, as holy writ, but written on the sky, and like sky-writing made from a small aircraft, the message is pictured as fading out like smoke against the blue, like one of those transitory aerial advertisements from the 1920s and ’30s, an aerobatic stunt pilot’s smoke slogan disappearing in billboard heaven. The silent writing of smoke is also the writing of the smoker’s art — kif words, the hashish visions of Sabbah’s sect communicated secretly, telepathically. In Burroughs’ lexicon, “the sky is thin as paper” and so the heavenly signboard of the sky is equated with Gysin’s paper ground, while his calligraphic writing vanishes like smoke as the ink leaves the brush — iki ga nagai / ik ga mijikai. Sabbah is seen by Burroughs as scornful of the material world, pursuing higher, esoteric pursuits in his eagle eyrie — he belongs to the sky not the earth, as in the phrase “The white Sabbah cancels this earth.” Burroughs also connects this silent, disappearing writing with Gysin’s invocation of the Chinese artist-sage — in the section of The Ticket That Exploded entitled “showed you your air,” the phrase “established this art along the Tang dynasty” appears, a phrase taken from Gysin which references Wu Tao-tzu disappearing into his painting, while in Burroughs’ cut-up text “The Last Post Danger Ahead” (1965), the “goodbye” of departure is specifically liked to the Chinese artist — “Goodbye, Mister. I have opened the gates / torn September sky.” The gates are the picture gates which Wu Tao-tzu opened by the act of painting them, while the linking of “goodbye” and “sky” pictures the artist as disappearing through a tear in the (painted) sky. Hassan I Sabbah’s historical and mythic disappearance into the fortress of Alamut, his withdrawal into secrecy and silence, his retreat from the world, is equated with Wu Tao-tzu’s creative vanishing act. Burroughs’ homage to Gysin/Sabbah is polemical, a manifesto statement, but it is linguistically linked to many other instances in which Burroughs employs the phrase “to say goodbye,” and connects this with “sky,” a combination which, through all its various appellations (“distant,” “torn,” “thin,” “silver” etc), is insistently melancholic and nostalgic, as in the closing line of the 1965 “Ore From Dream Mine Used To Make Palm Sunday Tape” — “fading streets to a distant sky . . Body sadness to say ‘goodbye.’” This is used repeatedly by Burroughs to connote a remembered brief encounter, a sexual tristesse, as in ‘Unfinished Cigarette’ (1963) — “Remember ‘Oh yes goodbye Meester?’” The cut-up, recycled, recombined phrases are essentially memento mori fragments themselves, they show their use through the layers worn through in places . . . like lines from an old song. In fact, the recurrence of “sky/goodbye” is in part a function of its rhyming connection, so often used in the popular songs Burroughs knew and references — in this way “sky/goodbye” pays homage to the potency of cheap music, the redolent rhymes of fleeting times, and the painful recognition of loss. This only hints at the great pleasure to be found in Burroughs’ recombination of phrases in different contexts, through which complex meanings and feelings accrue, so that his polemical, exclamatory advocacy of “Silent Writing” may take on the late afternoon hues of regret and the fragility and transitory nature of existence. He urges us to “See” the “Silent Writing” — what we may see is the word “Goodbye” fading out against a thin eggshell blue sky, as we look out at a windy intersection, a cobblestone street perspective moving to its vanishing point, smoke letters blurring in the wind, and we hear that old song going around on the Victrola . . . That is, we bring to a redeployed Burroughsian phrase the potent history of its multiple signification in his oeuvre . . . Moments of loss in Burroughs often invoke the wind which blows everything away in time (like Kerouac’s newspaper blowing down Bleeker Street) and appropriately he has the wind blowing away the word “goodbye” — “Wind wipes away ‘goodbye, Meester.’” One of the early 20th century pioneers of skywriting, Art Smith, always literally “signed off” his work with the paradoxical message “Good Night,” the words floating against the midway holiday blue sky — and the silent sky-written “signing off” of Burroughs, Gysin and Sabbah is a “Goodbye” counterpart, a farewell message which must dissolve high above and far away, an image of loss and regret despite its ostensible polemical purpose. It’s also possible that Burroughs and Gysin were thinking of this parting message as prophetic, an Exploded, no-return Ticket, at some level a recognition of the inevitable farewell to the Beat Hotel and the Third Mind — they would disappear like the extinct Karankawa Native American tribe who once lived in the Gulf Coast of Texas, who communicated by sending smoke messages through the sky . . . Well, they too, like Sabbah, made their own “silent writing across all skies,” and then they disappeared forever in time, like the smoke language they had made . . . Gysin is referenced and quoted by name in Burroughs’ work as well as appearing as the character Waring in Cities of the Red Night. But although he is specifically cited in the cut-up texts, stories and novels, in many instances the influence of Gysin, from conceptual ideas to particular phrases, is present but unacknowledged — this is not at all the result of oversight or negligence on Burroughs’ part — for example, he would correct Daniel Odier and say, “I did not write that. Mr Brion Gysin [did],” and he often introduced Gysin’s name into interviews, repeatedly crediting Gysin’s inventiveness — the cut-up technique, the Dreamachine (along with Sommerville), the use of arbitrary symbols in place of words, his “silent writing” and his paintings, and more. In fact, it was impossible, especially given the nature of the cut-up in all its aspects, to determine who had originated and developed or contributed most to certain ideas and texts and visuals, and it was also absolutely against the psychic creative imperative of the Third Mind process, in which it was precisely the symbiotic which was courted and embraced. “No one owns words,” or ideas, and although Burroughs would “put his brand on them,” as Gysin said, that was a testament to Burroughs’ talent and style — otherwise, this was “Operation Open Bank.” The two men worked on and from the same notebooks and scrapbooks, their work meshing to the point where their words and images became inseparably conjoined, indistinguishable, totally psychically attuned, testimony to the openness and intensity and free-flowing exchange of their working relationship and their bond of friendship. In the cut-up texts we find Burroughs and Gysin’s ongoing dialogue, not without its philosophic differences, recorded as an integral part of the created work published under Burroughs’ name, as in “Ancient Face Gone Out” (1964) where a character comments, “May I suggest that you opposed Mr. Gysin because you had no choice?” While in “Unfinished Cigarette” (1963), the “author himself” intervenes in order to state that “Here I would seem to disagree with Mr. Gysin . . .” These are testaments to a process, the psychic dialectic of their work, which would last both their lifetimes, which never truly ended, even many years after the great Beat Hotel days were over. They would continue to draw upon that body of work they’d created together, but there were also many ideas and ways of thinking and feeling which they’d shared, quite in addition to the physical source material, and these would stay with them and find new forms in their different oeuvres. Paradoxically, but appropriately, while their individual achievements are uniquely their own, and reveal their crucial differences of style and sensibility, yet in each man’s work there is the indelible collaborative hallmark — the ghost image of the other, the “silent writing” of the spiritual brother.  

I Give You — You Give Me — Me Give You I / Mirror Breathing  

The phrases “shift lingual . . . free doorways” and “shift lingual . . . vibrate tourists . . .free doorways . . .” appear in Minutes To Go, in Burroughs’ cut-up of a prose poem by Sinclair Beiles. The conjunction “shift lingual” would appear many times in Burroughs’ cut-up texts and novels, and it seems like a good description of the cut-up technique itself — the semantic and phonetic shifting of letters and words made by physically moving sections of texts to different positions, the cutting of texts into four squares or six rectangles or three columns and the transposition of their parts. In The Ticket That Exploded the phrases from Minutes To Go have been transformed into “Shift body halves — Vibrate flesh — Cut tourists,” and clearly and specifically relate to the splicing of photographic facial images of Burroughs and Gysin by Ian Sommerville in 1960, and to the body and facial superimpositions of Gysin’s projected slide performances, with Burroughs instructing: “Break photograph — Shift body halves [. . .] along the middle line of body — ” Not only does the word “shift” transfer a specifically linguistic application to a visual one, invoking the human form and its bisection, but the merging of two individuals, the essence of Third Mind psychic symbiosis, becomes the actual subject of the writing, and one that is thematically fertile for Burroughs — Gysin’s visual explorations of body image through what Burroughs calls “the divide line” and “the Other Half” become generative in Burroughs’ text, fuelling variations on a technological theme of ego loss and body loss, a sci-fi scenario of separation from the self and osmosis by “the other,” a writing of fiction which engages repeatedly with the material at descriptive, polemical and speculative levels, as if the critical explication of Third Mind techniques and the fictional scenarios to which they give rise cannot be separated — the motor engine of the Third Mind is both the driving force and the subject of the writing. If to “cut-up” was always implicitly the desire to “see through,” here the cut-up of language becomes the cut that separates the projected visual image of the body from its psychic recognition, severing and transposing psychic-physical identity by hybridizing the physical form — “half one half the other shifting back and forth speed-up slow-down line cutting the two halves apart . . .” In fact, this body makeover takes its place in an extrapolated “True History” of the Third Mind as actual public performances of the Third Mind made by Gysin, Burroughs and Sommerville in the early 1960s are remembered and recuperated and developed in mutated form throughout The Ticket That Exploded — “Plays on stage with permutating sections moved through each other Shakespeare, ancient Greek, ballet — Movies mix on screen half one half the other — plays in front of movie screen synchronized . . .” There are “Flicker cylinders,” paintings are “projected on screens [mixing] colour and image,” and “a battery of tape recorders” play back music intercut with the spoken cut-up word, and this “Exhibition” is described as “a vast amusement park” — a melange of music, image, light, and recordings. . . The multimedia technology of the Third Mind, including Dreamachines, tape recorders, slide projections, the cut-up technique of linguistic and visual transposition, Gysin’s calligraphic and hallucinatory art — all these are used as actual creative and technical tools, declaredly inspiring and creating the text, but also, and most importantly, generative of the thematics and scenarios which run through the work. Not only is it impossible in this context to isolate the particular influences of Burroughs on Gysin, and vice versa, fixing these textually, in relation, but it is, actually, utterly beside the point — the blinding of the boundaries of authorship and control is the desired and inevitable result of the spiraloid sender-receiver loop in which sender is receiver, undifferentiated and unidentifiable, while this process itself becomes central to the book’s variations on the theme of technological domination and the rerouting of the “sending” techniques of the control apparatus in order to achieve liberation from the cybernetic. The Third Mind cannot be dealt with by a materialist criticism dependent upon the citation of particular instances of linguistic quotation or the use or appropriation of a particular idea — in this case, Gysin’s splitting of the body was itself in early and absolute accord with Burroughs’ long fascination with ventriloquial possession and physical and psychic dissociation, and the confluence of the two men’s concerns then ranged through a multiplicity of ideas and written, visual, and written-visual forms to the point where their “respective positions” were atomized — on the page. But far beyond this, there are the inestimable “residual” effects of a process in which we can intuit yet never know the actual collaborative effects, feeling something linked which nevertheless cannot ever be precisely located. We might say that the Third Mind emerged from and was then systematized in order to explore a pre-existing state of potential connectedness between the two men, developing an innate, mutual desire to lose and discover themselves through the creative meshing of their different personalities — it was a real Performance, and Donald Cammell may well have picked up on it, as Peter Wollen and others did. It is unusual, even aberrant, for two people to be so attuned as Burroughs and Gysin were — though this may have ironically reinforced Burroughs’ exploration of the symbiotic theme in The Ticket That Exploded, in which Tin Pan Alley songs and advertising corn are segued in with the splicing of the “Other Half,” the vitriolic, engineered cut-up lambasting of the heterosexual and queer definitions of the lucrative, satisfying, and parasitic relationship. The Third Mind was a process which challenged and usurped claims that originality is synonymous with individuality — it was a desire to relish the impossibility of ever knowing or being able to say where one “author” or “artist” began and the other ended, the creative bliss of losing all boundaries. Critics have said that Gysin “gave” Scientology to Burroughs, that he gave him Hassan i Sabbah, and the cut-up technique, and the Islamic esoteric, and Wu Tao-tzu, and permutations, and his own visual art . . . Absolutely true, and yet totally wrong. What was “given” would have been useless unless there had been an understanding of the absolute receptivity and empathy and reciprocation of the other — the permutation cylinder-spinner meets the scholar of the Mayan codices, the mushroom taker greets the ayahuasca adventurer, the Herodotus expert and Norman Douglas afficianado swaps tales and anecdotes with the Great Collector of arcana and strange lore, the projected shape-shifter says “Hello Yes?” to the creator of the Talking Asshole routine . . . The cut-up had therapeutic potential for both Burroughs and Gysin, and its uncanny productions, allied to a systematically machinistic process, were also extraordinarly evocative and attractive to both men, but the psychic connection finally transcends the historical and material requirements of critics who wish to really know what happened — and the how and the why. They’re on the wrong track. Burroughs read from The Soft Machine by candlelight, and when he stopped, Gysin knelt and kissed his hand, while Burroughs venerated Gysin’s art, a visionary beauty which inspired him as no other artist’s work ever did — each regarded the other as a true Master. But when Burroughs famously reiterated that Gysin was “the only man I ever respected,” this respect, a profound deference to, and an awareness of the difference of another as other, acknowledges, paradoxically, the very individuality and recognition of mastery which actually predisposed Burroughs and Gysin to collaborate in the first place, and made the cross-pollination and hybridization of the Third Mind possible. Instead of “collaboration,” we should institute the true meaning of the word recognition. If the cut-up is practised alone rather than as part of a group activity (such as the Surrealists’ combinatory art parlour game, the exquisite corpse), this does not mitigate its collaborative authorship — simply because the practice is not physically collective, though we know that the Third Mind scrapbooks exactly and most emphatically exemplify just that, the ethos and the impetus and the results, and their discussions and reverberations, though not always apparent or registered or acknowledged indelibly in the resulting texts, does not mean that those texts are not in fact the results of collaboration — indeed, they may be so in ways quite beyond our current understanding of the term “collaboration.” One example: Burroughs’ quartering of a text by cut-up, cutting a page into four parts and rearranging them, is absolutely akin to Gysin’s quartering of his paintings in 1959, in which 4 sections were fitted together whilst suggesting their potential for interchange — one example can be seen in Loomis Dean’s photograph of Burroughs and Gysin in room 25 of the Beat Hotel taken for LIFE magazine in 1959. That image itself, significantly, was part of a 4-part photo owned by Tony Balch. 4 was the Sufi correspondence of the elements and the colours in Gysin’s cosmogony — Red Hot Dry Fire, Yellow Hot Wet Air, Blue Cold Dry Earth, Green Cold Wet Water. In this sense, the division of a text into 4 parts was not “originated by Burroughs” — it was part of the collaborative ethos of the Third Mind, whose practitioners were informed by an extraordinarily wide-ranging erudition and cultural and aesthetic and philosophic and scientific curiosity. In Islamic art it is necessary that the individual artist submit to a greater vision and design — a willed giving up of the self to a creative, transcendental process, and this spiritual abandonment of self is repeatedly invoked by both Burroughs and Gysin, in preference to technological ignominy and ideological oppression. Gysin’s art is indebted to the philosophy of breath in Japanese calligraphy, and he also drew, literally, on the page, from the magical squares of occult ritual, but his cross-fertilizing, pan-cultural work also pays a profound homage to Islamic art and to Sufism, so that his linguistic, graphic and material layering is a philosophic layering, too, and the X format of the closing message in The Ticket That Exploded is, among other things, a version of The Reflective Mirror in Sufi thought and its relation to the Breath of the Compassionate. The X is a diagram in Sufism of the process of spiritual reflection and the transmission of the Divine Word. The mirror is the point at which the two triangles meet in the X, the upper triangle representing the divine, spiritual light which is reflected downwards toward the phenomenal world, the triangle below. Each and every created form has its own particular Divine Name, as He made it so, and because these names are countless, their reflection must be unified through addressing their divine origin and original unity. It was particularly pertinent for Gysin that in this mirror, repeatedly polished and addressed by the postulant, the emptied self would perceive its true form and discover its True Name, would know itself through a revelation passed down from the realm of light and consciousness through the “dark mirror” of man’s limited vision — this would take the form of the Divine Word. The polishing of the mirror is achieved by blowing upon it and this breath is the transformative breath of the craftsman, the maker, homo faber, who chants the Divine Names throughout the creative process, so that through the act of application, dedication and supplication, the Divine Breath will issue and manifest itself — the recognition of a previously unknown Name. . . This Sufi breathing out in order to bring the True Name into existence, the act of creation as a transmission of the Divine Breath, was clearly at the spiritual heart of Gysin’s life and work — and in the closing message of The Ticket That Exploded we can see that it is indeed his “own,” his “divine” name which is reflected in the calligraffti of the lower triangle, his bean-sprout emblematic calligraphy embodying his own breathing, his very own, transmitted, unspeakable name. The one who seeks his “own secret name,” as Gysin surely did, can only do so through supplication, by disappearing into the Great Work, by breathing in and out through his own brief span and his own, reflective creative contribution to Creation. What the artist achieves in this quest for the Creator of the Divine necessarily comes from outside himself, from elsewhere, and that is where Gysin sought Him, always, in the place of the other . . . God is a cut-up artist. God loves the alien. God is a shape-shifter, a transducer. God is a projected interior vision, a Trip from Here to There. God is a practitioner of the Third Mind.

Hedonist of the Spirit / Gone to Persia

A Conversation with Terry Wilson about Hassan I Sabbah and the Psychic-Technological Techniques of the Beat Hotel

IM: In 1973 Gysin visited Alamut, Hassan I Sabbah’s ruined fortress on the edge of the Caspian Sea. Gysin would subsequently say that he knew less after the trip than he’d known before, but at the same time he claimed that “one knows a great deal from actually visiting such a place.” Is this one example of Gysin’s “method of contradiction,” contrasting a certain kind of intellectual knowledge with an actual experience of place? Like he advised you to visit the castle at Fontevrault where Genet wrote The Miracle of the Rose, because he said you’d “learn a great deal from just being at base itself . . .” 

TW: Well, there’s fast, fleeting knowledge as against silent knowledge which only works if the person is capable of shutting off his inner dialogue — the voice inside . . . One of Burroughs’ main themes, of course, is the importance of achieving inner silence — to wipe out the interior dialogue and open the floodgates of intuitive, special knowledge, to see the essence of something. . . And of course, there are various techniques, a whole number of techniques which may be used. 

IM: What happened to Gysin when he visited the Castle of Alamut? Obviously something very powerful and shocking totally freaked him out.

TW: Immediately after visiting Alamut, Brion began to get ill — possibly an illness which had its roots in that motorcycle accident he’d had with John Hopkins in Tangier, nearly slicing his foot off. Well, he’d gotten through to this area where it was very difficult to exist with this knowledge . . . He was fond of repeating, “To know these spaces is to love them,” but then he found he didn’t love them — or they didn’t love him. . . His feelings of psychic terror at Alamut were connected with an illness destroying his body, hence afterwards the body became important to him as something to maintain, as against Burroughs’ advocacy of non-body experience. Of course, Brion had always been a very strong man, a skin diver, and so on, and now he was being destroyed, he was falling apart . . . So he moved away from Burroughs’ position after Alamut, the separation of mind and body, leaving the body behind, all of that . . . What exactly happened to Brion at Alamut, no one can say — he certainly didn’t like to talk about it . . . Of course, Alamut is very high, there’s altitude sickness, and there’s vertigo . . . 

IM: Vertigo as in Hitchcock’s film — not just the fear of physical heights, but the terror of falling out of oneself, losing all psychic boundaries . . . Gysin told you that he felt “psychically attached to the place,” but at the same time he also said he felt “pushed over the precipice,” that he was “tumbling into the precipice” . . . 

TW: Yeah. The myth of Hassan I Sabbah may, as you say, have rebounded upon Gysin at Alamut. He didn’t like to talk about it afterwards, and likewise the motorcycle accident. . . The piece he wrote about Alamut for Rolling Stone was rather lighthearted and deceptive, and in any case they rejected it. He certainly didn’t deal with the psychic fear he’d experienced in that piece. Typical of Brion to keep it light and play it down in that way, and hide the psychic reality of that situation. He did make certain guarded public statements about how the thing had hit him . . . Soon after getting back from Alamut, he was sitting in Sanche de Gramont’s — Ted Morgan’s — house in Tangier and when he got up he was bleeding . . . I remember not long before he took that trip to Alamut, Brion was dreadfully preoccupied and very, very tense. And William’s attitude to the trip was, “Rather you than me!”. . . William had no intention of going there himself. 

IM: What was the fascination of Hassan I Sabbah for Gysin and Burroughs? Why this identification?

TW: Well, Brion identified William as Sabbah and vica versa, William describing Gysin as “the only authentic heir to Hassan I Sabbah” and of course, “See the Silent Writing of Brion Gysin, Hassan i Sabbah across all skies!” I guess there is a tendency to want an authority figure from the past, with magicians and sorcerers tracing their particular lineages of authenticity . . . Sabbah was a very good candidate, an ideal candidate one might say — after all, he was the most radical and the most elusive of spiritual leaders and as far as possible from one of Burroughs’ “Slave Gods.” Brion and William saw him as a figure outside the control system . . . The actual fascination with Sabbah is explained in Burroughs’ The Place of Dead Roads where Sabbah creates “actual beings, designed for space travel,” his Paradise Garden at Alamut is a “mutation center” where “the human artefact can evolve” — and Sabbah creates new beings, new creations from the adepts at his disposal. William’s talking there about the idea that man can only mutate through a change in consciousness, that evolution, other than in terms of consciousness, is a nonsense . . . So you create a new kind of consciousness in yourself, and pass it on to your followers . . . Well, any bunch of brujos with their groups of apprentices are trying to do this, to fundamentally revolutionize consciousness — there’s the Master who’s been through this process himself and now he’s doing the same with his own little group . . . There are many modern examples, but the aspect of extreme physical violence in the case of Sabbah was of course a lure for William, the Old Man sending out his Assassins to kill someone — very radical!

IM: Were they attracted because of the idea of Sabbah holing up in this totally remote place — that in effect he’d made himself invisible and bodiless, existing, if you like, out of Time? He made himself the Great Untouchable . . . 

TW: Well, Alamut was an inaccessible fortress where Sabbah’s special teachings lived on . . . “Outside Time”? The initiates were almost certainly being taught techniques to escape from Time and to live outside Time — outside earthly, linear Time . . . 

IM: Burroughs claims that they aspired to “freedom from rebirth and death”.

TW: “The stopping of the world,” as Casteneda put it, to stop the accustomed, habitual, material world . . . Well, you shut down that inner dialogue and the world is no longer the same, it’s utterly changed . . . The profundity of this silence can make the world terrifying and this is something no one wants to hear about . . . And this is what Gysin I think experienced in extreme form at Alamut . . . Yes, he had maybe used the Alamut scenario, conveniently so, to express this state of mind . . . Minutes before leaving on the trip he was so preoccupied and tense, not at all lighthearted, hardly said a word to me . . . Paul Bowles was forever saying that Brion pushed too far with substances and techniques to change his consciousness, that it was practically suicidal, like William’s comment that Brion’s “life and sanity are at stake when he paints” . . . Well, I would say that he was a hedonist of the spirit, and he went so far because he liked being frightened, he enjoyed being scared. 

IM: Scared to death . . . Except the terrors of Alamut finally scared him back into the body, hanging on for grim life, which is also dear life . . . The techniques which fascinated Burroughs and Gysin in the Alamut mythos, or in the scenario which they constructed, were telepathic control and same-sex practices . . . 

TW: William believed that Sabbah became a Ka for his adepts — communicating at any distance whatever . . . His theory is that Sabbah contacted the non-dominant brain area, his own and then his initiates’, which connected with Julian Jaynes’ ideas in his book on the Bicameral Mind . . . In South America you can still find this happening in a few places where the bulldozers haven’t moved in yet.

IM: Gysin and Burroughs identified with Sabbah’s situation maybe because they lived the whole thing out right there in the Beat Hotel in Paris, that was their fortress, their castle, their eagle eyrie . . . They sought to make Alamut and 9 rue Git-le-Coeur transposable sets . . . They saw themselves as Assassins of the Third Mind . . . 

TW: The Beat Alamut, sure . . . At the time of the cut-ups they felt under tremendous pressure, and the windows of the Commissariat of Police right across the Seine from their hotel . . . They felt under siege, beleagured, and yes, they identified with both Sabbah’s strategies as they understood them, and with his situation . . . Remember that both Brion and William were fascinated by military strategy, and they’d both read Clausewitz, Machiavelli, John von Neumann . . . So, yes, Sabbah as military strategist and heretical outsider provided the perfect model, hence Burroughs’ message to Brion, “Blitzkreig the Citadel of Enlightenment!” 

IM: They really did their homework on Sabbah, they’d read Barthold and Corbin, and Marshall Hodgson, everything they could find, and they knew Freya Stark’s book and Ridley’s book, both from the 1930s, and they knew about the Ismaeli lineage which of course they themselves would one day be written into by Hakim Bey . . . At the same time they were applying the military strategies of Sun Tzu and The Master of Demon Valley, and, as you say, Clausewitz and Machiavelli . . . And they were protective and possessive about it, they knew Guy Debord and the Lettrists and then the Situationists were into Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and Sabbah, too, and they resented it . . . They had no idea that one day all these business gurus would come along and follow the Japanese, implementing Sun Tzu’s teachings as core models in teaching marketing and selling techniques — like the art of haragei in Japan, which Gysin knew through his studies of Japanese philosophy, which is now understood and treated as primarily a set of psychological business tools in the West . . . But for them, back then, it was applying those warrior strategies to the psychic techniques they were developing, and using recording technology as weaponry, and composing these incendiary polemics aimed at the overthrow of so-called “reality” . . . Assassins incarnate, or reincarnate, centuries down the line . . . Heady stuff, to say the least. 

TW: The intention was the same as Sabbah, but the means different. Burroughs and Gysin were trying out magical techniques on technology, and this was something entirely new. For example, using tape recorders to cut up the Word and rub out the Word, using these devices in ways they really hadn’t been intended for, to learn to silence that inner voice and to think in silence . . . As I said, as William said to me, we’re talking here about an area which no one wants to know about. Brion and William together were working with tape recorders, and remember that tape recorders were not widely available at that time and, as you’ve said, maybe today we’ve become immune in some ways . . . But what they were doing was radical and of course William never did anything by half — and so there was bound to be resistance and downright hostility to what they were doing, and they operated on that basis . . . So that was the importance of the Sabbah myth, the idea of Blitzkreig, technological Blitzkreig in the face of this hostility . . . Naturally, people settle themselves into a system with a pedigree, like a young writer allying himself with Rimbaud — The Time of the Assassins, like that . . . It’s understandable and nothing wrong with it, but in the case of Brion and William and Sabbah — they were operating in the area of the secret and forbidden, and their message was one of total resistance . . . They re-invented Sabbah, sure, he gets a make-over. And they found the idea of an all-male community attractive, even though so-called experts in the field would dispute it. Also the use of hashish and other drugs, and the actual dispatching of one’s opponents — all this was attractive to them, certainly. But it wasn’t just repeating ideas and strategies, the conventional wisdom and platitudes, Burroughs as Sabbah and we are all programmed, etc . . . They were making their own . . . Even though the whole area is ineffable, and much of our own speculation derives from Burroughs and Gysin’s speculation, they were writing about their own area of expertise, an area which they explored rigorously . . .

IM: As you say, the whole area is ineffable. 

TW: Don Juan Tuesta, a well-known Central American practitioner, describes sorcery in general as “a deceit in the service of truth.” You can read about him in The Three Halves of Ino Moxo by Cesar Calvo, a very good book, incidentally. And that definition would certainly apply to such a lineage idea as Sabbah — a linear idea in a non-liner universe as far as the practitioner is concerned, but you have to give people an idea of solidity, and this would apply to the “product” as well. Bowles said to me, “One is trying to tell the truth which transcends mere fact.” Hassan is a story for people, to keep them afloat, you don’t want them to feel like everything solid has been pulled out from underneath them . . . My books are reportage, as close as I could get it to the experiences concerned, experiences which of course I was remembering, or trying to remember . . . In that sense, all my books are “a deceit in the service of truth,” and hopefully they transcend “mere fact” . . . Everyone keeps asking, “Did this really happen?”, like they’d be more comfortable if they were told, “Absolutely, it definitely happened.” But what do they mean by “this”? What’s their definition of an event? What do they think writing is in relation to whatever it is they’re imagining happened . . . in “the past,” whatever that might be . . . Always invoking some nebulous mental construct like “the past” and believing in it . . .  

IM: The tape techniques, the tape experiments, they were not at all metaphoric, they were to be applied literally — the Voice Inside isn’t “like” a tape recording, it most definitely is a recording, an original trace deep in the psyche, manifesting as interior jabber . . . So presumably one can externalise it through a machine, and play it all back, and speed it forward, chop it up at will, and then, perhaps, learn to erase it entirely, from within, at source . . . 

TW: Yeah. 

IM: So . . . They more than courted the Sabbah mantle, but then the consequences for The Third Mind were heavy. . . I mean, it turned out it really was a “Project For Disastrous Success,” and it all came down on them . . . As well as the terror he experienced at Alamut, Gysin had good reasons maybe to pull back, to distance himself from the whole scene. He’d proselytized and polemicized on behalf of their techniques, he’d opened the whole area up, “Operation Open Bank,” all of that, and then he went into retreat, and he was criticized, you know — black magic, damaging Burroughs’ career, jack of all trades, everything like that . . .  

TW: Brion was extraordinarily psychically adept, but he would always end up being resentful, feeling betrayed and exasperated with everything . . . ranting against ingratitude and disappointment . . . Of course, I’m talking about that period when he was ill, and getting iller, and how much that might, or must have had to do with it, who knows? 

IM: Sabbah was certainly of increasing interest and relevance in a number of quarters from the late 1950s onwards, and I think maybe that interest, that fascination was a premonition or even a kind of imaginative rehearsal for all the terror and the war on terror that we’re now stuck with, that’s going down everywhere . . . Sabbah and his Assassins were not only invoked by Burroughs and Gysin, and by Situationists, and even by Timothy Leary, but there was Bernard Lewis’ scholarly book in 1967, and increasing academic interest from historians and theologians and political strategists, and then there were these thriller novels in the 1960s and ’70s, like Paul Taboori’s The Invisible Eye and Ian Todd’s Ghosts of the Assassins, these potboilers or at least not particularly literary novels that were essentially written in the spy thriller genre, with the return of assassination as a political weapon, you know — international political intrigue and a secret sect dating back to the 12th century, James Bond and the Ismaeli Connection kind of thing . . . But of course, that’s just one more way for the myth to get around, and these appropriations now seem prophetic, or at least timely . . . But what’s also interesting is that Gysin and Burroughs’ fascination with Sabbah in turn influenced so many artists and writers, so that the myth of Sabbah, their myth, in effect, the twinning of Sabbah and their own lives and work, has now become an integral part of avant-garde pop culture — like the end of Cammell’s Performance, where Turner/Chas, the assassin, leaves a note, “Gone to Persia” and we see these Victorian slides of mountains and a castle in Persia, and it’s Alamut . . .There were these misunderstandings and difficulties between Cammell and Burroughs and Gysin, but Cammell was one of those artists who was really taken with the Sabbah story, as he got it directly from them, and he used it in his own way, like Turner’s place in Performance, it’s the Old Man’s Paradise Garden recreated in Powis Square in 1968 and decorated by Christopher Gibbs, the bath tiles modelled on a Persian carpet . . . And of course Cammell and Roeg had seen Balch’s The Cut-Ups in ’66, it’s an example of the influence Burroughs and Gysin and their collaborators had on other actual artworks which would not have existed in that form, and maybe not at all, if it hadn’t been for them.

Continue on to Gysin Homage Two

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine at the Institut D’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne / Rhone-Alpes. 16 October — 28 November 2010.

by Ian MacFadyen

“Everybody here comes from somewhere.” — Michael Stipe

“Everything was alive like me on this earth, everything was breathing.” — Brion Gysin

Gysin Homage One: Terminal Tourist, Manifestions, Show, Recuperation, Strange Powers, Reading Script, Euphonics, The Raising Of Abramelin In Marrakesh, The Magical Squares of Abramelin The Mage, I Am Ion That Ian Am I, O Canada / IO Pan!, ME Not Julian, Polysemic Polytheism, The Great Dance Of The Magic Mushrooms, Psychotropic Vision / A Smoker’s Art, Sweet Sister Seconal / No Good Baby, Artist Sells Himself / Whore Magic, A Thousand and One Performances, Performance, Three Hours Underground In New York, Marabouts / Wu Tao-Tzu / The Modern Delphic Oracle, The Razor’s Edge of Time, Madame Guillotine / What’s In A Femtosecond, What’s In A Name, The Torso Of 1960 And The Torso Of 1939.

Terminal Tourist

The Hotel La Residence in Lyon was the place where we gathered for the retrospective of Brion Gysin’s art works at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne. The show had transferred from the New Museum in New York and yet this was much more than a second run — it was absolutely appropriate that this important exhibition should take place in France, where Gysin had lived for so many years, and where he produced some of his greatest work. He had moved through the street life and high society of Paris, and had seen the city through all its changes, from his arrival in 1934, aged eighteen, with 15 dollars a month to live on, to his death in his apartment opposite the Beaubourg in 1986, at the age of seventy. There had been some wonderful, and also pretty terrible, times spent in Tangier and London, and many a “trip from here to there,” but there would always be Paris. For many years he felt ignored and dismissed by the art world, and this wasn’t so much because Paris was no longer the center of the art world, but because he was a progenitor post-modernist of the trans avant-garde, a traveller and internationalist, and an esotericist. He would always regard Tangier as his spiritual home, but he was, he said, a “terminal tourist.” The markets and institutions of the art world had shifted definitively to New York and London after the Second World War, but Gysin was always just passing through those cities where a profitable art career could have been developed. Instead, he was “unlocatable,” often when it most mattered, not leading “a painter’s life” at all, but pursuing other, magical interests. Because of the Beat Hotel years and his Paris exhibitions and his final years resident there after a definitive return in the mid 1970s, his life and work are inextricably tied to that city, that country. This show testified to both Gysin’s Francophile sympathies and to his love of North Africa, but it also validated his cultural and geographic marginality — a marginality now seen to be inextricably tied to his originality. The fated denizen of the Boho Zone had the vantage point of the visionary outsider.

Manifestations

Our group included friends of Brion Gysin — Terry Wilson, Udo Breger, Philippe Baumont — and fellow admirers of his art, including Axel Heil, Stephen Vassilakos, Jacki Ledevehat and myself. The manifestations were starting — the young people, enraged and engaged, walked down rue Victor Hugo past our hotel to the Place, followed by cops in their body armour, with their visored helmets and shields and batons — the confrontations were inevitable, Minutes To Go indeed. . . Within days an image of the riot-torn, tear-gassed streets of Lyon would appear on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, that essential touchstone of American ex-pats the world over — and source of key material for the cut-ups of Minutes To Go. On French TV we would see the same clips endlessly recycled to hammer home the idea not of nationwide protests and injustice but of “troublemakers” and “mindless thugs” — well, I’ve come across a few thugs in my time, but I never saw one with “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” painted on her face. Petrol stations were out of fuel or would very soon run out — “Workers cannot be deprived of gasoline,” said Sarkozy, as protesters brought traffic to a halt at energy “chokepoints,” truck drivers staged “escargot” protests on the motorways, railways were disrupted and the garbage piled up… 1,423 protesters, mostly young, would be arrested by the 21st… Could this be May in October? Clearly, Gysin’s retrospective was opening under “Riot Conditions”… At the vernissage, Gysin’s friend Catherine Thieck, who curated the 1987 Galerie de France show “Brion Gysin: Calligraphies, Permutations, Cut Ups,” said to Terry Wilson, “Isn’t it just like Brion to bring us all together in the suburbs of Lyon?” In fact, there was a direct correlation between those young people protesting against state legislation and the crowd of young people who appeared at the Gysin opening. Ramuntcho Matta, Francois Lagarde, Francois de Palaminy, Rosine Buhler, Terry and Udo and Philippe and many more were at the vernissage, and Gysin would have loved it that his old friends and admirers were joined by those young people, eager to see his work. Louise Landes Levi wrote to me, “Lyon scene sounds incredible, almost as if Brion made it happen, as a similar riot, the young & strong, broke out the last time I saw him read, at Beaubourg, he was attached to all kinds of tubes under his white robe, I panicked, feared for his life but I think he enjoyed himself, I am sure he was there for the riots.” We were just passing through, the riots and jams hardly touched us, but the media message was inescapable, and that ambience of things going askew, pressure building, we could feel it, and there was, too, a Gysin current coming through… We were talking about Gysin’s lack of recognition, how he was always himself passing through different cities and time zones, and a Bowie track suddenly blasted out from a boutique, an echo of the ambience of Brion Gysin’s later Paris nights, when he was hanging out at The Palace with Keith Richards and Iggy Pop and other rock-star art cognoscenti — it was the perfectly ironically titled, “A New Career In A New Town…” Already we were picking up on the “Gysin Level” as Burroughs dubbed it, and as Terry always refers to it, and it really felt like dub music, the reshaping and remixing of the existing recordings with echo, reverb, and delay, the rhythm and alliteration of Gysin’s work coming through from other sources, an audio and visual remix following us around Lyon and up to Paris and through the city streets, manifestations of a different order, jumping out of speakers and sprayed on city walls, breaking through TV monitors and leaking through newspaper formats and old photographs, and mirror apparitions and psychic photography — associations, connections, tracks we were helpless but to follow, it would have been foolish to do otherwise, a whole series of currents of meanings, political, personal, aesthetic, which we would track in the days following the show. We’d come to see the show, to look at the Gysins — and our trajectories did more than intersect, they radiated outwards and connected in ways which seemed premonitory and fateful, literally manifesting as the manifestations built in the streets and those riot clips were incessantly, ideologically recycled and reiterated. We would cut that media material up, intervening and disrupting the image flow, rewriting the script. In derives around Paris in the days and nights following the show’s opening we passed significant Gysin locations, and caught visual echoes of his calligraffiti on the walls, the past suddenly glimpsed, appearing in a new guise. Gysin’s work permeated the experience — but it was something more than art. I realized I was reviewing an exhibition, but also tracking the effects of an exhibition — something hardly ever acknowledged by art critics or reviewers. We were picking up on the show’s afterglow, tracing the psychic connections which Gysin’s work is all about… After all, that “immense revolutionary demonstration” which Gysin saw in his own painting, and those “street barriers” he discovered in his calligraphy, we’d seen them, too, in the retrospective at Villeurbanne, and now here they were “for real” on the streets of French cities and as a running script on continual replay through the 24 hour media (we switched the sound off, we knew what those commentators and politicians were saying). A couple of days after the Gysin show, strolling down the Rue du Bac in Paris, Terry said, “Well, the manifestations haven’t ruffled any feathers around here.” The next second a very small man walked past us in boots and knee socks and a Tyrolean hat with two one-foot high feathers sticking up in the air from his hat band. He patted Bouddha on the head and disappeared. Such Gysinian manifestations had occurred in New York, too, with the sudden miraculous appearance, shortly before the show, of the missing eighth painting in Gysin’s beautiful 1961 series of calligraphic acrylics, whereabouts previously unknown. And Laura Hoptman, curator of the retrospective, told Terry that a very impressive, regal figure, dressed entirely in white, walked back and forth in front of the New Museum in the days before the show, as if safeguarding proceedings, his very presence casting a mysterious protective radiance. He did not speak to anyone and he didn’t enter the museum. “Brion’s representative, clearly,” Terry said. 

Show

In the last twenty years there have been fine shows of Gysin’s work, in particular at the October Gallery in London, which supported his work while he was alive and has continued to do so, but this retrospective provided an unparalleled overview, despite certain curious omissions such as the renowned multiple-image Marrakesh paintings of the late 1950s, and his big late picture Calligraffiti of Fire. The absence of the Marrakesh pictures was particularly baffling and unfortunate since these have always exerted a powerful fascination on viewers and their conjuration of shifting, elusive images is one of Gysin’s most original achievements. For those who had never seen the originals, it was a real loss. Still, the exhibition was an opportunity to get a sense of the work over forty-five years, from the 1940s decalcomanias to the final photo-grids of the 1970s. Several Third Mind scrapbooks, made with Burroughs, were exhibited, along with notebooks and related written and published material, in cabinets — the scrapbook collage pages were reminders that Gysin was not principally a collage artist at all, and that in fact he had great reservations about making pictures with that technique. Collage was a tool for Burroughs and Gysin in their systems collaborations, but it wasn’t until the Beaubourg and photo-grid series of the 1970s that Gysin employed it whole-heartedly in his art. Rather, the show revealed Gysin as a draughtsman and painter whose work conjures evanescent, transient optical and psychic experiences, a vision which ranges from transcendent detachment to possessed, splenetic attack. His art uses his calligraphic touch and layered processes to communicate the scattering, shattering, and dematerialization of perceptual phenomena and the flux of states of consciousness — seeking the creation of exemplary embodiments of transcendent moments and their dispersal, an art of apprehension in every sense. They are not “illustrations” of drug experiences, surreal depictions or visually contrived approximations of the hallucinatory. The pictures create continually shifting, flickering apparitional fields, both suggesting and stimulating changing states of consciousness — optical phenomena inseperable from psychic conjuration. Those tiny dancing figures of light, the “little people” of psilocybin and kif can be seen in gestural flashes and twists, implosions and radiations of color. The skyscraper becomes a grid, the stroke of paint a flower pistil, and back again, the painted image emerging and disappearing through a ghosting figuration which pulsates through rhythmic brush strokes, while the speed, time intervals, internal rhythms and velocity peaks of Gysin’s calligraphy are breathtaking. It’s the work of a “psychic assassin,” for sure, pushing extreme states including the alienation effect of the disembodied and mechanistic, but beneficent, too — seductive, poignant and tender. The show included a room where Gysin’s “Expanded Cinema” of scratched color slides was projected, another with several spinning Dreamachines, and Balch’s film Towers Open Fire was also shown, so that Gysin’s paintings were placed, as they should be, in relation to his multimedia work. People rushed in to sit around the Dreamachines, and they knew exactly what to do. It was entrancing.  

Recuperation

The exhibition “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” was curated by Laura Hoptman who has also written an essay, “Disappearing Act: The Art of Brion Gysin,” for the accompanying book, which she has edited, Brion Gysin: Dream Machine. The book, like the show in its New York incarnation, attempts to situate Gysin’s work in contemporary art practice as well as in 20th century art history — though Hoptman is aware that Gysin’s art was a psychic, magical exploration that does not fit convenient formal and stylistic categories. The title of the retrospective and the book separates “Dreamachine” back into its two component parts, though that conjoining was more than a marketing ploy, a brand name for a device — it was itself part of Gysin’s hybridization technique. The beginning of one word is found in the end of another and in their seamless coming together a profound idea is given perfect verbal form — the merging of two apparently contradictory states of being which are linked by their bypassing of human control. The autonomous device operating outside the human body and beyond human control passes into the dream as psychic event which takes over the helpless sleeper. This is the meaning of the Dreamachine as Soft Machine — the giving up of control, becoming an agency for the transmission of images, the Dreamachine triggering the hidden genetic permutations of the psyche. Hoptman distinguishes Gysin’s work from the calligraphic and the grid artists of his time — he could not be categorized, he did not belong to those schools to which his own work bore only a surface resemblance. He was playing a game with certain stylistic and formal tendencies, including action painting and Tachisme and kinetic art — whilst subverting these, doing something quite different and working undercover. The book includes homages by today’s artists who have been directly influenced by aspects of Gysin’s diverse, complex oeuvre, and it is significant that Gysin’s subterranean, heretical influence now seems more vital than so many of his contemporaries. This retrospective and the accompanying book are admirable attempts to re-evaluate Gysin’s work, and to recontextualize it in regard to certain contemporary art practices, and this has been long overdue. Even so, there is the still misunderstood, largely uninvestigated work of Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind. A number of the scrapbooks were presented in display cases at the exhibition, and examples of the grid collages are reproduced in the book, but the Third Mind cannot be accessed or understood through this kind of presentation alone. Gysin and Burroughs’ project was determinedly ant-art, anti-literature, and also anti-collage-as-art, and those who seek out the political, technological, esoteric Third Mind techniques and strategies will do so in ways which bypass, necessarily, the obfuscation and misdirection of cultural analysis and specifically artistic readings. The Third Mind is absolutely not reducible to a collage text or artwork — it was very much more than that, and even at the textual level, the way the scrapbooks work goes beyond such reductive formalist description. Telepathy, scrying, machine production, drugs, magical invocation, cut-up and other techniques, along with strategies related to photographic illusion must be explored through experimental material practice — which has nothing to do with being shown in a gallery or recorded on film or selling a book, and not only because of the transitory, inchoate and risky nature of the phenomena and processes involved. The idea that Gysin’s artworks from the late 1950s onwards can be separated from his Beat Hotel experiments is unsustainable since their development was reciprocal, entirely enmeshed, and this symbiosis continued after Gysin and Burroughs left the Beat Hotel — the discoveries informed both men’s work for the rest of their lives. At the same time, the artefacts and working documents accrued in the process of Third Mind research may be exhibited, and studied as formats and procedures linked to Gysin’s artworks, and to the texts of both men, while Gysin’s beautiful paintings may themselves be recognized for their originality and their significance in art history, but this kind of critical activity will only take you so far because “theoretical understanding,” in the case of the Third Mind, is a complete contradiction in terms — the process is experiential, it is of the unknown. If this is a problem for criticism, it’s also an opportunity — to explore Gysin’s art by actually engaging with the processes and techniques of the Third Mind which made Gysin’s work possible. Terry Wilson has written about attempts “to neutralize and assimilate a lifetime of psychic power into three-dimensional financial manipulative areas… to neutralize, assimilate, destruct. . .,” and the “contextualization” of Third Mind artefacts as historical manuscripts or artworks by any other name risks losing the essential purpose of Gysin and Burroughs’ work. Their own book, The Third Mind, was not what they had hoped for, the outcome a perfect example of market forces at work, while the original blueprints and “field recordings,” and the teachings passed along to a few, call for further research and action rather than the promulgation of “ideas” or the validation of existing knowledge. Despite the fascination and beauty of certain Third Mind works, they are technical plans, resource materials, spin-offs of a way of thinking and being in the world which cannot be aesthetically or intellectually recuperated. 

Strange Powers

Laura Hoptman has created an excellent retrospective and homage to Brion Gysin, and she seems the perfect curator and critic to have put this show together. In 2006 she co-curated with Peter Eleey the show “Strange Powers” which dealt with the esoteric, supernatural potential of art, and the connections between the practices of art and the occult — something that is absolutely central to Gysin’s entire oeuvre. That show took place on the second floor of an East Village tenement in New York, reputedly haunted, and 23 artists and collaborators attempted to channel psychic energies and contact spirits from the Other Side. Artworks treated as power objects, the artist as medium, art practice as psychic divination and magical projection — Gysin and Burroughs both believed that this was the true purpose of art, the manifestation of Will, the conjuring of healing and diabolic forces, the exploration of other states of consciousness and being. Art should address the mysteries of life and death — or be worthless. If some critics found the “Strange Powers” show unconvincing, an “acting out” of the shamanic rather than the “real thing,” they forgot that art and shamanism both operate through artifice and the “acting out” of desire — the impersonation of other states of being in order to procure them, enter, and become immersed. Gysin and Burroughs and their collaborators explored these dark places and these mystical realms in the Beat Hotel, and while it was not all kept secret, behind closed doors, as the tape-projection-painting performances of 1960 and the promotion and polemicization of the cut-ups and the Dreamachine show, other things would certainly remain unspoken, unwritten… incommunicado. Still, they would have recognised the necessity and value of these contemporary artists risking the kind of public invocations and summonings which they had performed themselves at the ICA and the Domaine Poétique. They would also have recognized in the “Strange Powers” show some of the tools and techniques they’d employed themselves in the Beat Hotel — not only the crystal balls, the ouija board and automatic drawings, but the tapes of the Swedish artist Friedrich Jurgensen who operated in the area of Electric Voice Phenomena (EVP). Those voices of the dead, manifesting on factory fresh tape, described and analysed by Konstantin Raudive, fascinated both Burroughs and Gysin, exemplary as EVP was of the conjunction of the machine and the occult. They’d picked up weird voice effects on tape themselves, unaccountable sudden electronic signals, transmission glitches that sounded like fetches coming through the white noise, and then discovered Raudive’s book Breakthrough in 1971 — though they had known in the 1960s about Jurgenson’s book, Voices From Space, 1964, which had inspired Raudive. Gysin and Burroughs equated the rotations of the tape machine with the cycles of reincarnation and, by extension, they sought to transcend the desire and suffering inherent in the technological continuum — even if it was possible to make contact with a spirit otherworld, it was then necessary to walk away from the turning reels of endless machine rebirth… “Nothing here now but the recordings.” Gysin’s work featured in the “Strange Powers” show, including a drawing he made in 1965 on LSD, which combines word permutation and the calligraphic transposition and reversal of alphabetic letters — “I GIVE YOU / YOU GIVE ME / ME GIVE YOU I . . .” — it is a paean to hallucinogens, and to the inspired beneficence of being psychically open.

Reading Script

Laura Hoptman writes that “Magic, and its ability to conjure other worlds beyond conventional perception, was an abiding interest of Gysin, and also of Burroughs… Rather than creating a reflection of an already visible object, the artist wills into materiality something that has never existed before. Equally, the casting of spells is meant to conjure, but it is also meant to cause things to disappear.” Hoptman also emphasizes that Gysin’s “art” processes were “less beholden to the manipulation of formal conventions than to the occult.” In fact, his art is occultist but he used modern stylistic devices for his own ends, in ways prophetic of the post-modern and the new psychic artists. Hoptman understands that Gysin’s calligraphic script was not designed to be interpretable or transposable, but, as she says, “notwithstanding, many of Gysin’s paintings can in fact be read.” At the same time she disputes Burroughs’ reading of a painting in which he could make out the phrases “yes, crying” and “not crying” — because Gysin had “playfully” asked Burroughs to read the picture, and because the script was not ostensibly, alphabetically interpretable, Hoptman concludes that Burroughs’ interpretation can be credited to “fanciful enthusiasm.” Actually, if Burroughs said that he could see those phrases, then he did indeed see them — his experience cannot be mitigated or nullified in this way, especially as Gysin himself, on the same tape, proceeds to verify the readability of the text himself. Likewise, it’s true that Gysin’s “personal script,” developed 1958-9, is “based not on Arabic letters or Japanese kanji, but on two letters from the English alphabet, BG — the monogram of the artist repeated with some variation of letter shape and orientation.” However, this stops well short of tracking the complexity and potential generated by this script — the “BG” letters are stretched, broken, meshed, funnelled in scale, and reconfigured in ways that suggest bodies in motion, figures in combat, falling, bending, bowed. The script transcends those intitial ciphers of self and produces a permutated vocabulary of hybridized forms, fluidly moving from the alphabetic to the biomorphic and figuratve. The letters were generative as if the “me” of “BG” was the beginning of the “meme” of exponential creation — an infinity of variable signs of self. It is both a literal and coded version of the Renaissance maxim Ogni dipintore dipinge se (“Every painter paints himself”) but with this difference — the artist here felt he did not, could not know “himself.” His cipher “BG” is a multiplicity, a scattering, a running-through of proliferating, mutating referents, self-portraits of the “Man from Nowhere.” Gysin would see in his drawings and paintings scenes he had not deliberately put there but which were subsequently disclosed to him — which actually did not mean that “he” hadn’t put them there. Who else had done so? Gysin knew his script but he did not know what the script would create, and certain suggestive, evocative figurative scenes emerge from the supposedly abstract script in the eyes of the beholder — shapeshifting phenomena in mutational guise. In 1961 Gysin wrote to Burroughs of his work — “it looks like an immense revolutionary demonstration in a backward country with my stuff up as street barriers.” And he may have had in mind the important gouache and ink drawing “A Trip from Here to There” of 1958. This work, prophetic of his final painting “Calligraffiti of Fire,” also connects with George Mathieu’s calligraphic re-enactments of historical battle scenes — the gestural forces describing the topographics of warfare. It’s a reminder that Gysin’s iconoclasm and revolutionary zeal are not restricted to the Third Mind collages, but are discernible in his pictures — those riot conditions can be seen, incendiary letter figures trailing calligraphities of flame. 

Euphonics

“BG” is Gysin’s monogram, but as a sound poet and as an artist who used letter and calligraphic forms, he was aware of the symbolism of these two letters and their combinatory resonance, their euphonic expressive meaning. Gysin had read Plato’s Cratylus, a Socratic dialogue on the creation of words through appropriately sounded letters, and he would have paid close attention to the work’s subtitle, “On the Correctness of Names,” because he felt that his own name was not correct, and he would struggle for years to write it right. For example, he would sign his work “Brion” followed by a monogram or motif or ideograph for “von Listel,” signifying “from Listel,” in Switzerland, after his grandfather. Then he ditched the symbol, before signing himself “Brion Gysin,” only later, in many cases, to write simply “Brion” over the top of the previous signature. In 1958 he might sign a work “Brion Gysin,” but in 1959 this would be reduced to “Brion” with the von Listel motif returning, while in 1960 he signed a number of works with the minimal “BG.” Terry Wilson remembers seeing a 1940s copy of Harpers or Vogue in which, in the society pages, there was a picture of Gysin and Felicity Mason attending a party or reception for Beni Montessore, and Gysin was identified in the text as “Brion Gysin von Listel,” using what Burroughs would later mock as his “phoney ‘von’.” But Gysin’s confusion with his name went far beyond the imposture of the aristocratic. If his evident dissatisfaction and awkwardness with his own name seems surprising in an artist now known for placing his own name, as it were, center stage in his own creations, it testifies to a profound discomfiture that was at the heart of the process of questioning his “mistaken identity,” without which the script of his “true name” would never have been developed. His problem signature, with its continual variations, influenced the creation/discovery of his “signature script” of proliferating, calligraphic “BG”s — as if the sign for “self” that was self-consciously blocked on the quotidian level, could be unleashed and run rampant on another plane of signification. Gysin would sign works “BG” too, but this does not mean that his feelings for his own initials were unambiguous, or simply an expression of ego — on the contrary, it was precisely the undoing of these representations of identity, their physical mutability over their semiotic fixity, that he pursued. Even when his “signature script” was in place, it functioned both as a confirmation and a dispersal of the integrity of the name. Gysin explored the idea that a word resembles, indeed embodies, in its shape and sound, through alliteration and visual associations, what it describes — that meaning is influenced by the shape and sound of individual letters, and by their combinatory effects. Language was magical because, although a word is not the thing it names, it may have a visual and sound resemblance to it, and it is this euphony that is vital in poetry. Gysin deconstructed syntax through cut-up and permutation, he coined portmanteau words and he painted texts and wrote on paintings and he created his own personal script — in all these ways he attacked and played with language, both spoken and written, revealing meanings hiding in language and at the same time revelling in his mockery of the fixity of linguistic referents. In the case of his use of his own initial letters, this reaches a terminal paradox — he undoes his own name in the work, deconstructs and permutates and explodes it, and then signs it with those very same letters, in his own name. The one who signs himself with the singular “BG,” who authenticates an image of multiple “BG”s, is both related to and yet quite separate from the one who strews his emblematic initials through calligraphic script — that confirmatory signature is of a different written order to the swarming plethora of signs in the image, and not only because of the distinction between art and its validation, or between writing as image and writing as sign/ature. The “BG” of the picture is “open,” to use Gysin’s terms, open, that is, to interpretation and multiple readings, whereas the signatory “BG” is “closed” and functions as a legal and professional verification of authorship. The two exist and operate in different dimensions — though they seem to occupy the same plane, they function on quite different planes of reference. They testify to the gulf between an art of signing and the signature as artistic guarantee — in fact, it is the calligraphic script of the image which is the absolute artistic guarantee, not the appended lower right corner appellation. The calligraphic “BG” is the mark of the self-created, the notarised “BG” is the problematic identity of the woman-born. There is another fracture in Gysin’s sign: “B” and “G” rhyme, they are sound-related, but otherwise, the two letters are at permanent war, and Gysin, for whom these initials were of vital significance, surely knew this. To homage John Michell and his charming book Euphonics — “B” is the letter of the physical Body, the Blooming and Bucolic, it knows no Bounds, while the “G” is disGusted by this BiG Buffoon, it wants to cloG it, Grease it up, Gum it, and then Gash its Binary Bubbles with the savaGe horizontal pointed stroke of its Graver, its Greve, the Balloon of the “B” punctured by the Gravity of “G.” Further, even as Gysin brought the two letters together in a supposed singularity of identification, he knew that “B” opens and “G” closes “the B-eginnin-G” of his own existence, and his own signifying script as it repeatedly inscribes the brief trip from “B-irth” to the “G-rave”. 

The Raising of Abramelin in Marrakesh

It was at the Hotel Toulousain in Marrakesh in the 1960s that William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Mikey Portman attempted to raise the spirit of Abramelin the Mage. No record was left, and there are only a very few references to this episode — Christopher Gibbs, for example, mentions the invoking of “the Abramelan demon” by the three men, some time during the hippie “Marrakesh Express” years. Terry Wilson, a close friend of Brion Gysin, also knew Portman, and there is no doubt that the Magical Working took place. Was the operation successful? Well, they apparently raised something… The ritual was a continuation by other means of the Third Mind project and the “psychedelic summer” of 1961, reviving the “fighting spirits” and dangerous psychic currents which the three had experienced in the course of taking psilocybin in Morocco. The ceremonial invocation for the Raising of Abramelin requires an oil made from aromatic plants, adapted from the Jewish anointing oil of the Tanakh, and it was almost certainly an Aleister Crowley recipe which they used — Portman would become an absolute Crowley fanatic and it’s possible that the seeds of this fascination had been sown in his teens. Crowley’s recipe is in fact a corruption based upon MacGregor Mathers’ mistranslation of the medieval grimoire — in the mixture of Cinnamon, Myrrh, Galangal, and Olive Oil, the Galangal should actually have been Calamus. But no matter, other ingredients were certainly used — majoun, kif, hallucinogens, and alcohol — in an invocation designed to procure love and treasure, and to acquire extraordinary powers including the gifts of shapeshifting and invisibility, and the ability to raise an army of followers and to generate storms… Crowley wrote that if the oil is placed on the forehead “it should burn and thrill through the body with an intensity as of fire,” and Gysin may have had good reason to remember this when, desperately ill, he wrote his terrifying text “Fire” in 1977, and when he painted his great final work Calligraffiti of Fire in 1985, the year before his death. The rite requires a lengthy preparation and lasts for 18 months, but it may indeed have been understood by the three men as a continuation and attempted fulfilment of magical practices carried out in the Beat Hotel in the preceeding years. If Ian Sommerville was the “technical sergeant” of the Third Mind, Portman was almost certainly the medium for the Abremalin rite, and is referred to as such on a number of cut-up tapes. In 1961 Paul Bowles had expressed his disapproval of the supernatural obsessions of the “Tribe,” and the quest for magical, out-of-the body experiences, telling Burroughs “I am perfectly content to stay here with shit inside me” — words that would have resonance for Gysin 13 years later when he underwent a colostomy. Bowles insisted that he had “never had a psychic experience,” and Burroughs’ response is revealing of his own “supernatural superserious” attitude, his pragmatic view of the paranormal: “Nonsense, Paul, everyone has psychic experiences, it’s part of life.” A number of years after the “Marrakesh Working,” Terry Wilson visited Mikey Portman in Montague Square in London. Portman was whipping himself with a leather belt, shouting,”Victory to Aleister Crowley!” while decorators painted the walls and sashes, wearing ties beneath their overalls — they were, after all, decorators to the gentry… They regarded Portman’s antics with complete indifference. It’s the lesson eventually learned by all occult practitioners and takers of certain drugs — the results are one thing, the consequences quite another. . . What happened in the Beat Hotel? What was the Third Mind all about? Promulgation of the cut-up technique? Scissors? It was an occult operation — the conjuring of apparitions, the making and breaking of hermetic codes, the search for transcendence, alternate states of consciousness procured and explored through magical processes and hallucinogenic drugs, and through the systematic détournement of tape and film and stroboscope technology — treating the machine as a magical apparatus for the creation of new life out of chaos. It was a Dark Art Manifestation of psychic and psychotic manifestations — a throw of the bone dice, the weighing of words and the soul, negotiations in advance of the Great Devourer. 

The Magical Squares of Abramelin the Mage

The Abramelin ritual was based on Aleister Crowley’s interpretation of S.L. MacGregor Mathers’ translation of the 15th century grimoire The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage by Abraham of Wurzburg, a work including talismanic Magical Squares which Gysin must have perused with some interest. Unlike traditional magical squares which employ numbers, these contain letters which may be read acrostically and acronymically. In “MAIAM,” for example, from the Hebrew and Arabic for “water,” used in the Abramelin ritual for acquiring the power to breathe and walk underwater, Gysin would have seen a perfect symmetrical echo of his own permutation of the Divine Tautology, “I AM THAT I AM.” The word “MAIAM” may be read forwards or backwards, and from the central I to the left or to the right. Gysin’s letter and word permutations operate magically in this way — he would take the last three letters of his first name, “ION,” and link these with the first three letters of Ian Sommerville’s name, “IAN,” and permutate these through letter combinations at the heart of which lies “I/AM” — merging Gysin and Sommerville’s identities in a “joint singularity.” Gysin used “the ION” in his name to signify an atom or molecule with a negative or positive electrical charge, and its letter-by-letter permutation into “I/AM” signifies the contact and conduction, the manifestation and recognition, created by sign and referent in the act of writing, while his positive/negative sense of his own identity is equally “charged.” Crucially, variant spellings of “IAN” are “EION’, “EON” and, yes, “ION” — magical connections for Gysin, the letters dancing and flipping from word to word like a Saul Bass film title sequence, or the opening graphics of an episode of Sergeant Bilko in which an out-of-line sloppy soldier suddenly wakes up and jumps into his allotted place… It’s a shifting alphabetic flow of emerging meanings and reflections, and it has its fun side too. Ian Sommerville was the “Technical Sergeant” of the Third Mind, and much more besides — a key collaborator and inventor, and he was affectionately referred to by Burroughs and Gysin as “Electrical Ian,” “Electric Ian,” and “Electronic Ian,” while in his writing Gysin called him “ION MILLION WATTS,” which actually plays upon “IAN WILLIAM WATSON,” hermetically referencing Sommerville, Burroughs, and Alan Watson. One Million Watts is the Megawatt, or MW, used in generators, aircraft carriers, locomotives, and submarines, and the term “megawatt electrical” is employed in the electricity industry where it is written as “Mwe,” a neat condensation of “Me” and “We” in the Gysin/Sommerville symbiosis. In The Last Museum, 1986, Sommerville disappears from the “Watt/What?” image, gone into the white electric light of the Dreamachine and the white light death tunnel — a million becomes a billion, a “light like a billion-watt bulb floated up through the bars on my window. The Great White Light! The Ineffable Light the Tibetans were always talking about.” “ION” also connects both Gysin and Sommerville with the Ionosphere — Udo Breger gave Gysin an article on the Ionosphere in the early 1980s which Gysin fixed in one of his notebooks, acknowledging Udo’s gift. Gysin was interested in those electrically-charged atoms and molecules surrounding the earth. Sommerville, through his training, knew about the significance of radio propagation in the Ionosphere, and how it was affected by free electrons, and so “ION” homages “IAN,” but the ionosphere also seems to have suggested a model for Gysin’s approach in his art — the play of positive/negative in the electrically charged particles of his script, the dynamics of his art moving through propulsion / attraction / splitting / recombination. The 1960s term,”going stratospheric” is rewritten by Gysin — he was going into his own sphere, the IONosphere. He treated the letters of his own name as positive ions and negative electrons — as in the “Unitled (Roller Poem)” of 1977 in which the “I” is not a stencilled letter at all but indicated, inferred by a short vertical grid line. We read this as a repeated “I,” but it is not a letter like the other letter forms in the piece, it is rudimentary, a vestigial stand-in, a cut — the presence of the “I” is read into this mark of absence, and the negative becomes charged with meaning, through a writing which Gysin equated with both electromagnetism and magical “energy signs.” Gysin’s magical grids, crucial for the workings of the Third Mind scrapbooks, transcend their apparent modernist format — they are magical squares, mystical nets for occult conjuration and projection, like the Taoist Talismans and diagrams which Gysin had studied and understood as forms of practical magic. Laszlo Legeza wrote that these talismans reveal “not a succession of separate moments, or an infinite number of separate ‘things’, but a seamless web of eternal change,” and Gysin’s own talismanic squares are sectional cuts through the continuum.

I Am Ion That Ian Am I

Gysin told Terry Wilson that in The Ticket That Exploded, 1968, Burroughs misread or mistakenly transcribed “Iam” for “Ian,” but the repetition of the phrase shows that Burroughs decided to preserve and use the error — “in the beginning there was no Iam,” “stale smoke of dreams it was Iam” — because it so effectively merges and yet undermines the naming of existence. Gysin had already seen in 1961 that “IAN” was implicit in “I/AM,” and he used the insight in the slide projections he made with Ian Sommerville — “I/AM/IAN” accorded absolutely with the merging of the Third Mind collaborators’ identities. “I AM THAT I AM” becomes “IAN THAT ION” — a refutation of both the fixity of the singular Name and the identity it supposedly incarnates. Rather, “IAN/ION” and “BRION/ION” are linguistically shapeshifting in ways which are true to the beneficial friendship and creative linking of the two men, working through an “EON” — a time that cannot be measured, a process without limit. More than mere word games, these transformations of meaning lie at the heart of Gysin’s written art, and are embedded in the paradox of his personality dissociation — a paradox because he seemed so entirely, definitively realized as “himself” to those who knew him. Eliot’s question was omnipresent for Gysin — “But who is that on the other side of you?” His shapeshifting powers and invisibility tricks were also revealing of his sense of disconnection and separation — a body-mind dichotomy which promulgated a lifetime of out-of-the-body experiments and experiences. His birth certificate reads “Brian,” and though he would talk vaguely about some accidental mix-up with the spelling of his name on official documents, as if it had nothing to do with him, it just happened, he almost certainly changed it himself in 1944 when he was 29 years old and in the Canadian military. Biographer John Geiger calls this letter change an “affectation,” but it went far beyond any desire to impress others. Rather than being feigned or trivial, it had great personal significance for Gysin and would have a profound effect on his art — his letter acronyms and combinations clearly reveal this. In the mutation of Gysin’s own “ION” into Sommerville’s “IAN,” we can see that hidden in plain sight is the transformation of his chosen “BR/ION” from, and back into, the original “BR/IAN” of his birth certificate. The scratching of these names on images of Sommerville and himself are accompanied by permutations from the Divine Tautology — “AM I THAT I AM?” and “AM I THAT?” In this way both the original birth name and the self-chosen name of the self-elected and self-created are thrown into question, as is the relation between name and body image. Gysin would have appreciated the French hip hop group known as IAM, whose name stands, among other things, for “Invasion Arrivée de Mars,” Mars being a shorthand punning on the group’s city of origin, Marseilles — the “IAM” of an alien, immigrant other. He would have approved, too, of the title that the artist Irene Andessner gave to her 2003 retrospective of shapeshifting, multiple, fictional photographic identities — I AM… And he would have been delighted by the formulation of the name of the Black Eyed Peas singer — Will.I.am… For Gysin, “I AM” would always imply “I AM NOT,” except, significantly, when he wrote of himself as an artist and of his aims as an artist, for in that context he was most definitely and assuredly and revealingly “I AM” — the vocation of artist was the ultimate vouchsafing of his existence, the valedictory purpose of being here. At the same time, Gysin’s dissociation of self becomes not only the subject or apparent content of his visual “Machine Poetry,” but is submitted to the machinic process — he clearly enjoyed subjecting his image and name to electronic distress, splitting, splicing, superimposing his problematic image and the name of the impossible “self.” The letter and name scratchings are handmade, but are projected, and become white light — dematerialized signifiers, divine and discorporate. At another level, the inner dialogue, the gibbering “Voice Inside” of self-referential consciousness, profoundly bound up with projected notions of “self,” is détourned in these works, letting the machine do all the permutated talking — the dialogic voice inside becomes a projected written interrogation “out there,” or a tape recording in which the speaking subject recites computer permutations autonomously. Gysin spoke of the slide works as expelled breath, not dependent on the “in-breath” of human inspiration, and they are attempts to breathe out the problematic self and make it electronically operational, outside the body, outside the psyche, the artist watching illusory versions of “BRION GYSIN” come and go — his bodies, his names, but free of “self,” given up to an instrumental agency. At the same time, it’s usually ignored that in all the machine processes used by Gysin, Burroughs, Balch and Sommerville, apart perhaps from the computerised permutations, the intervention and redirection of the systems and their orderly functions was physiological — they treated the machine as both a cybernetic extension of man and as an autonomic apparatus, now one, now the other. The machine was a rotating respirator, transmuting the breath of inspiration, and a piece of total junk, both magical and degradable — a technological idiot savant to be systematically and perversely deranged and screwed up by hand. For Burroughs and Gysin, the machine was to be made to function as a means and a source of magical invocation. Professor of physics Richard Jones wrote earlier this year: “Sober scientists working in nanotechnology would argue that their work is as far away from magical thinking as one can get. But amongst those groups on the fringes of the science that cheer nanotechnology on — the singulatarians and transhumanists — I’m not sure that magic is so distant. Universal abundance through nanotechnology, universal wisdom through artificial intelligence, and immortal life through the defeat of aging — these sound very much like the traditional aims of magic… And in place of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (and no doubt without some of the OTO’s more colorful practices), transhumanists have their very own Order of Cosmic Engineers, to ‘engineer ‘magic’ into a universe presently devoid of God(s).’”

O Canada / Io Pan!

What does it mean to change your name, even by a single letter, having read and written that name for 29 years? Well, it certainly indicates dissatisfaction, a gap, a problematic, and the desire for a new beginning, as well as necessitating a certain period of practice in the writing of the new name — writing it over and over again, until the flow is seamless, and the name becomes second nature, a highly suggestive scenario for Gysin’s later scriptural art. Gysin changed the spelling of his name from “Brian” to “Brion” two years before he received American citizenship in December 1946, at which time the new spelling was officially recognized. But the change coincided with Gysin’s unhappiness at not having received American citizenship in 1944, and his subsequent requested honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in order to transfer to the Canadian Army. His father had fought with the 8th Canadians, the “little Black Devils,” and died at Thiepval Ridge at the Somme in 1916, eight months after his son’s birth. Gysin fabricated his father’s Swiss nationality (he was British, as Gysin later well knew) and was haunted by this absence which he expressed in visual terms — “He saw me once before I had my eyes open. I never saw him.” As Gysin made the letter change when he was in the Canadian military, like his father, and it was wartime, there is a possibility, however sentimental, that the national song of Canada (which would become the national anthem) may have played a part — “O Canada,” with “O” as a plea, a wish, an expression of wonderment and awe, and an invocation which he took within himself, as a sign of identity. “O Canada… True patriot love in all thy sons command.” The “O” would in this way show the transference of his allegiance from Britain and America to Canada, bound up with thoughts of his father and his father’s death. That “O” may be read as a circumscribed absence, it’s something Gysin felt he needed in his name, to be registered and recognized by himself and others as true to his name. It suggests his unknown, always missing father implanted in his Own spOken and written name as a signal character — the missing in actiOn resurrected in the fOrm of a vOid letter, remembrance instituted as a signifier of permanent lOss. This was not the first time he’d put his father into his own name, his own life. In 1942 when he worked as a welder at the East Coast Shipyard in New Jersey, his name appears on his ID and his bus pass as “John C.B.L. Gysin.” “Brian” was actually his third registered Christian name while that initial “L,” which Brion Gysin inserted into his own name, and is not on his birth certificate, stood for “Leonard,” his father’s name — the father whose body was never found. Leonard Gysin was awarded three medals posthumously, and Brion Gysin commented that “it would have been much better if his body had been found.” As a child, Gysin would pray for his father’s miraculous return, adding “whoever he may be,” and this sense of both loss and bewilderment was compounded by a comment which Leonard Gysin had written beneath a photograph of himself in a family album — “the one I knew least of all.” Clearly, the unknown father had felt that he did not, could not know himself — and this created a double unknowability for the young Brion Gysin. Gysin could not forget that photographic portrait, its essential identity undermined by the subject’s accompanying handwritten text, and it was the progenitor of Gysin’s 35 mm slide self-portrait projections with their scratched question marks and undoing of body-image and belief in a knowable self through palimpsest and palindrome — “AM I THAT I AM?” In The Process Gysin would write — “I considered enclosing a street photographer’s shot of me taken in the Socco Chico crush and scrawling across it, perhaps: ‘Which one is me?’” His own personality disassociation surely had its origins in the compensatory projections created in childhood around his father’s living absence — the person never seen who nevertheless disappeared, the body never found which prayer might resurrect, the life and the personhood reassembled through fragmented, embellished stories and through snapshot images in photograph albums, the invocation for the return of the unknown person thrown into question by that “posthumous” declaration of definitive inscrutability. The loss of the never-known, the permanent absence of the inscrutable other — Brion Gysin was fated to be born to mourn a phantom father, and his continually changing, fabulated, embellished stories and dissimulations about this ghostly figure were attempts to recreate his dead father for himself, to make him live, to bring him back from the abyss. These “fabrications” cannot be separated from Gysin’s story-telling prowess, nor from his meta-fictional writing which both helplessly and strategically mythologizes a life already experienced and lived and spoken of as “a tale I am telling myself.” “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” — Gysin knew Sabbah’s razor long before he discovered it. Later, Gysin would wryly quote sports commentator Jimmy Cannon’s philosophic and not entirely ironic invocation of the Father — “In nominee pater, kid, as Jimmy Cannon used to say.” Burroughs liked and used this too, but in Gysin’s case the word “kid” is especially telling, hidden in a casual, amusing aside — because that “kid” would always remain, in the name of the father. . . So, what’s in a letter? A vestigial presence as a reminder of intolerable, perpetual absence. There are wounds — there are words — which never heal. And there are names which must be summoned and recited as in a lullaby, a litany of the lost, to be restored through whispers and song. Henri Michaux — “It was enough for an Indian to pronounce the name of the god he worshipped, for the god, by order of the word, to appear. What we learn from demonology seems now quite clear: that the name is everything.” Michaux adds, significantly, that the god will appear, summoned and created by the name, “even if he does not exist” — the summoning process itself makes the “god” manifest. Relations between Gysin and Donald Cammell, director of Performance, were frosty, but they shared the pain of dissociation. Gysin spoke of the “Open” Brion Gysin, and the “Closed” Brion Gysin, while Cammell spoke of the “Uncensored Don” and the “Censored Don” — both felt that the liberated, free, open and uncensored personality was realized through creativity, through art, though Cammell’s condition would nevertheless become intolerable to him, and suicide would be the only possible release. It’s worth noting that both had been sexually abused when young. Brion Gysin may indeed have had complex reasons and feelings about the change of “Brian” to “Brion” which he did not try to unravel or analyse at the time, but that single letter switch made possible sequences of word permutations in his name which would become symbolically talismanic for his art — the “O,” not the original “A,” would become vital, generative in his developing sense of himself as an artist, making possible semantically what could be developed in his personality and through his personal mythology. The letter of loss would become the letter of difference and plenitude, for the Orphan and the hOmOsexual. There is one other connection which may have been both influential and prophetic. The “IO” is important in Gysin’s acronymic anagrams — the inserted “O” in conjunction with the “I” creates “IO,” one of the moons of Jupiter, and the mythological priestess of Hera, but it is a quite different “IO” which Gysin surely recognized in his new name — the invocation used by Aleister Crowley in his greatest, and once famous and much admired poem, “Hymn To Pan,” first published in 1913 — “O Pan! Io Pan! / Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Pan / I am a man: / Do as thou wilt as a great god can… ” This invocative “IO,” raising the spirit of the great goat god Pan, is prophetically, divinely appropriate for Gysin who would become fascinated by the rites of Bou Jeloud in Jajouka, and who would identify the spirit of Pan as psychically at the center of his own art and being, as the essence of visionary fertility. The placement of that “O” put Pan in Gysin’s name, and in his life. It’s also worth noting that Crowley, a real word spinner, also plays upon the possibilities of alliterative permutation, not only in the manner of Tennyson or Swinburne, but deriving from his own use of Magical Squares and the conjuration of the word hidden within the word – his “Hymn to Pan” includes “Mannikin, Maiden, Maenad, Man,” a series in which the lifeless model becomes a living virgin and then a wild, orgiastic Dionysian acolyte — the final term is the “Man of Pan” who is semantically and sexually active in the series, both the fertilizing principle and the “Man” who is sexually fulfilled through the spirit of Pan, validated by his possessed virility. It should be noted, however, that Gysin, in his later years, was certainly no fan of Crowley — he regarded him as an Old Queen Bee, and his devotees as drones. Portman he didn’t like particularly, either — but then Gysin was a very orderly person who performed even the most trivial act with care and precision, whilst Portman was a lover of chaos and always left an unholy mess in his wake. Kenneth Anger once opened up his briefcase of magic tricks for Gysin, and that’s exactly how Gysin saw it — a stage magician’s amusing music hall act. It was magic, of a kind, yes, but it wasn’t on the “Gysin Level.” Gysin said that magic was “one of the fruits of life,” it was part of the sensual relish of being alive and key to a continuing awareness of the mystery of existence. It was also a performance, as he himself often demonstrated, a form of mystical teaching which included his own humorous takes on freakish occurrences. But it was decidedly not an entertainment. 

Me Not Julian

Gysin’s tape-text “Dilaloo” was begun in the late ’60s as an attempt to convey the initiation process which he had undergone in Jajouka, circa 1955 — it’s a recapitulation of human existence from the primordial soup to his own tormented mortal span. It includes extracts from Burroughs’ writing which passed unnoticed and uncredited in the transcript made after his death, but this is actually a good thing — after all, “Who owns words?” Gysin asked, and he loved Burroughs’ cloacal writing so much he felt it in his own blood and guts. The Third Mind did not differentiate authorship and ownership of creativity and insight, it was symbiotic, and only later was it obliged to submit to the legal requirements of publishing copyright. “Dilaloo” ends — “Me I’m here / ME / Not Julian… ” “Julian” was Gysin’s other, his fictionalised, heterosexual stand-in, the name he gave himself in his 1946 story, “The Foundering Ship,” which gained him entry to the “spooky offices” of The New Yorker — what a different life and career he might have had if he’d accepted the magazine’s offer of a job as an editor, but that was one detour he just could not take. In the story, the character Tilda smooths a bed cover “with automatic hand,” itself a smooth reference to the “Fire Sermon” section of Eliot’s The Waste Land of 24 years earlier, and there are other knowing allusions and paraphrases, to Shakespeare’s Richard III and to Thomas Nashe, though the story is really a Fitzgerald homage, a brittle marriage breakup for New Yorker sophisticates. When Julian thinks of the “new, boundless freedom” of his life without Tilda, it seems a “useless freedom, a bare waste of time ahead; a desert as big as a house. His spirit sagged at the view of this Sahara.” New Yorker editor Howard Moss wrote to Gysin’s literary agent that Gysin did not explain the reason for the marriage crack-up — “its full implications he fails to justify.” That was because Gysin simply could not do so — the text is a set-piece, with no history and no future, the heterosexual marriage as a tragedy of manners, a psychological “screen story” for Gysin in every sense. One thing to note, however, is the “wildly dancing orange light” of the fire at the end of the story, with its tongues of flame and burning coals, the fire that ran through Gysin’s life and work, and which here culminates in the prophetic line — “The constant flicker began to hypnotize him,” suggesting the origin of the Dreamachine not in sunlight flickering through leaves, but in the ancient manifestation of alpha waves discovered through dancing flames. “Julian,” of course, is also a premonition — it is “JUL/IAN,” an encoding of “BR/IAN.” The name which an author gives himself as a character in his own fiction is certainly worth scrutinising and this “Julian” is as carefully and knowingly designed as the rest of the text — it refers to the Emperor Julian, Constantine’s nephew, who tried to bring back paganism as the official religion of the Roman Empire. It signifies that the Julian of the story is an apostate — in this case, someone who has renounced the true faith by sublimating his homosexuality. Likewise, in The Process, Gysin’s protagonist, who is both “Gysin” and his “other half,” is called “Ulysses O. Hanson.” That “O,” we are told, stands for “Othello” — but it also combines the reappearance of the letter “O” in a version of Gysin’s name, and the insertion, once again, of a significant initial, into the “unreal” name. The “O,” to quote John Michell, is, tautologically, “the shape of the mouth producing the round O sound,” and this is the key letter of the book since the different characters speak and tape record their stories, stories which are themselves eminently circular — it is the very image of an open mouth and a tape reel and an ouroboros tale which swallows its own tail. Michell –”O is old, a proto-sound, symbol of the original womb or of the oval world-egg (ovum, oeuf).” In this sense, the “O” is inter-uterine and its adoption in a name symbolically signifies birth, or re-birth — the desire to return to the mother. At the same time, Michell catches the polarization incarnated in the letter — “It dominates words meaning either the whole or the hole, totality or void.” The “O” of Ulysses O. Hanson and the “O” of “BRION” represent both the self-enclosed, autonomous world of the self, the ego cosmos, and the “O” through which the sand of time pours out, the Great Desert which, as Gysin/Hanson says, “gets us all in the end.” But meantime, “Let’s face the music and dance… ” Gysin was a profoundly serious man, but he also possessed the great gift of light-heartedness, and his name-change linked him, as he liked to point out, proudly and ironically, with Haut-Brion, the Premier Cru Classé from the Gironde — and that fine wine really cost. Gysin knew that to drink Haut-Brion is to toast the wine itself, and the earth and the sun, raising a glass to the pleasures of life. “I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop / But if, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top!”

Polysemic Polytheism

Gysin’s calligraphy was written to be read from right to left, and then he turned the picture in four 90 degree stages creating a multi-directional lattice, and so his script runs and reads across, up and down, and diagonally. Originally discovered by Gysin when he combined left-to-right Arabic calligraphy with vertical Japanese script, he would later associate it with the rotated, written curses of Moroccan magic, and it’s certain that this aspect fuelled his calligraphic grids and word permutation grids — they are spells because what is written is latticed, superimposed, and the message is hermetically hidden in rotated layers but cannot be entirely deciphered, decoded. It is a writing which symmetrically composes an essential unreadability — the graphic threat of the unknowable. Related to this are his rollered or stencilled letter forms which become anagrammatizing, acrostic, acronymic. In an untitled drawing from 1970, an ink on silver paper, Gysin’s name is stencilled in black but half the letters, whilst delineated, are not inked-in — they signify whilst revealing their own incompleteness. The letters run in four strips vertically, and several letters are upside down — they play upon presence and absence of sign and referent, readability and reversibility of meaning. Reading multi-directionally, we can see the jumping “ORGY BOYS” emerge from the scrabble conjunction of letters — the title of one of Gysin’s tapes. And the “SIN” in “GYSIN” and the “BRIO” in “BRION,” and the “GRIO(T)”… the poet, praise singer and wandering musician, while “GYS” is an acronym for “Graveyard Shift.” Gysin linguistically extrapolates and playfully cross-references his allusions, but it’s important to understand that the letter works invite the viewer to play along, to use personal associations and to go semantically deeper — whilst in many cases the possible permuted readings are laid down in the works themselves, and we follow those paths set out for us, we are also free to engage with the process and to read and to see what we can find for ourselves in the spilling and breaking of his name, like Timothy Leary’s “Don Juan Lord Brion of Git-le-Coeur.” “BR” is an abbreviation of “Brother,” “GY” is an abbreviation of “Gray,” and Burroughs was Gysin’s “Gray Brother” — he appears, “retroactively prophetic,” in Gysin’s name. The rescrambled “RNB” of “BRION” is the “RiBoNuclease” of “Rhythm and Blues” that breaks down DNA, it’s the musical rhythm that shakes the genes, the “Jean Genie/Jean Genet” semantic and phonetic shift… Gysin would take the last four letters of his first name, “RION” and write this as “NOIR” — then reading from right to left we see the black “RION” / “RIEN’, the “Nothing That Is,” the negation that appears in the “B”-headed name. It’s clear that Gysin’s calligraphic grids were designed to be read in ways comparable to the mystical teaching squares of Abramelin — they are magically “crossed” word puzzles, philosophic permutations of letters in layers, hermetically coded boxes… What’s in a name, a three-letter word? For Gysin, it was the infinite roll and scroll of permutated meanings, a process which undermines the “LAW” of “GOD.” In the beginning was the Word, and it was “THE” Word, the definite / definitive article of universal recognition, and the “GOD” word of Monotheism, as in “THE ONE.” Gysin’s permutations are heretical — their very polysemy is implicitly polytheistic, they explore the simultaneous existence of several different meanings created by moving a single letter, and transposing the words in phrases, and this infinite mutability and polysyllabic playfulness is antithetical to the “ONE GOD”, the forever-fixed meaning of “THE” Word and “THE” paternalistic “LAW” of language, logic and “THE” Godhead. The cut-up technique, and Korzybski’s attack on the definite article, come together in Gysin’s multi-signification, in the continual displacement of one signifier by another, shifting referents refuting that the word is “THE” Word — meaning is made through radiating sequences of interpolation and interpretation, it is always unstable, shifting, multiple, continually undone and remade. The letters are read as both mechanical and made by hand — they exist at an interface between a systems permutation and a human intelligence which interferes and manipulates, and the art lies in that gap where it is impossible to differentiate between human intentionality and linguistic permutation, that space where the qualitative terms may be reversed. There were many influences behind Gysin taking this direction in his work. One was his friend John Latouche’s speed and dexterity and wit at punning, as when he wounded Gysin by commenting on his friend’s work in 1947, “The Impotence of Being Ernst.” — changing a few letters to perfectly devastating, mortifying effect. Another was the cover of Nicolas Calas’ Confound The Wise, 1942, for which Gysin designed the cover, using one of his decalcomania paintings. The image was reversed on the back cover of the book, and so too was the title and author lettering — this means that the first example of Gysin’s work produced, effectively, by a right-to-left, backwards, or reversed reading, was not a calligraphic work at all, but a printed alphabetical text. Further, it has been assumed that Gysin’s alphabetic letter art works came later than his calligraphies, and that the permutated letter blocks were derived from the process of reverse reading in the calligraphy, but this is not the case. The Calas cover predates Gysin’s study of Japanese by many months, and though he had seen Arabic calligraphy in Algiers in 1938, his own calligraphic art was years away. The name “NICOLAS CALAS” reads as “SALAC SALOCIN” on the back of Confound The Wise, and 35 years later, in Gysin’s text Alarme, the letters of “SALOCIN” may be glimpsed in his calligraphic permutations of “SECONAL” — the past leaking through drug disorientation and pain, the letters shimmering in delirium. Alarme merges the two written forms of Gysin’s art — and we read both the alphabetic letter permutations and the calligraphy simultaneously, both forwards and backwards, and up and down, just as in his personal calligraphic script in which the alphabetic initials of his name are encoded and dissimulated through the “automatic hand.” Flip through Alarme, and read the flicker of the pages, and look at the text reflected and reversed in a mirror. There are people who have a natural ability to write and read in reverse, and this is because they have language centers in both halves of the brain, though the condition is most often related to dyslexia. Rather than an inherited gift, Gysin taught himself to read and write backwards, and this was bound up not only with Arabic writing, but with his knowledge of esoteric transmission, such as the Bektashi order of calligraphy in the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and other magical hermetic practices of passing on secret knowledge from “the other side” to the initiated. Gysin also pursued this other direction because it signified the reverse of the natural, of how he had been taught, and it shows his determination to create in reverse, to be as perverse as he believed himself to be, to make the image run backwards, inside out, back to front — never as told. He wanted to express states of consciousness which required the destruction and rerouting of predictable forms and conventions of visualization, and reversal and superimposition and cutting were vital to this, as his streams of splitting, shapeshifting signs challenge cognition and interpretation, embodying the rushes and intertwinings of hallucinogenic states, as with Michaux — “you find yourself in a situation that nothing less than fifty different, simultaneous, contradictory onomatopoeias, changing every half-second, could adequately convey.” 

The Great Dance of the Magic Mushrooms

Gysin’s work is genetically mapped by his drug experiences — with altered states of consciousness, psychic phenomena, and optic, hallucinogenic effects. This is not something happily dealt with by an art criticism which is still bound to formalist aesthetics and issues of the picture plane, or with ideological and material practices, and it is also extremely difficult to write about. There is, too, the risk of consigning Gysin’s works to the abused generic of the “psychedelic.” However, Gysin’s art simply cannot be understood without grasping its profound debt to psychedelic experiences, illusive and tangled as that history has become. Gysin’s important text “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” became the title for the influential collection of cut-up and permutated texts edited by Jan Herman in 1973, Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, a vital “companion” to Burroughs and Gysin’s Exterminator. However, it was this text’s appearance in 1975 in Peter Haining’s anthology The Hashish Club: An Anthology of Drug Literature, Volume Two that contextualised and defined what was ostensibly a “cut-up” work and an explanation and philosophic extrapolation of the artist’s work, as crucially inspired by, and evocative of, drugs. Haining’s anthology was republished in 1998 as The Walls Of Illusion: A Psychedelic Retro, and that last term literally spells out the danger of situating Gysin’s painting in a largely 1960s retrospective, retroactive trip of “brilliant colors and swirls of psychedelic art,” as the publishers sell it — words from the “stoned age.” At the same time, “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” may well be linked to the creative inspiration which Gysin found in drugs — Haining writes that it “brilliantly evokes memories of [Gysin's] kif-fuelled maze of adventures in North Africa,” and those “little blue hills” are certainly in the text. But then Haining inserts, as epigraph and introduction, before the text proper, a section from Gysin’s novel The Process (1969) in which the narrator, Ulysses O. Hanson, Gysin’s “other,” described by Haining as “a devotee of kif smoking” speaks not of kif but of psychotropics: “Of course there was mushroom-magic, I assured him… ,” and refers to LSD, DMT, STP, and “a flat packet of very tiny pink pills marked PSILOCYBIN. I picked up a paper on psilocybin in the lab… ‘extract of mushrooms’. It had been a long time. I could hardly wait to try them to see if theirs were as good as my old granny’s and mine.” This is a reminder that Gysin had taken magic mushrooms with Native Americans in Canada when he was young — and the phrase “I go back to childhood” and variants, are indeed repeated throughout “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In”, suggesting an evocation of those early mushroom experiences as well as the kif of the Moroccan Hills. This affixed “note” crucially determines the reading of the text that follows in ways that are historically wrong and contextually misleading, whilst by default opening up an area of importance for understanding Gysin’s art and its creative connection with drugs. 

Psychotropic Vision / A Smoker’s Art

“Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” was recorded and played at the ICA in London in December 1960 (“I talk a new laugh — the 1960″), and Gysin did not receive and take the psilocybin pills, sent by Timothy Leary, until 1961 — Gysin would remember this as “the mad summer of 1961″ but he had already been taking the pills, while Burroughs was away in Tangier, when Ginsberg arrived in Paris in the April of that year. So Haining effectively contextualises the text as psilocybin-related — though Gysin had taken mushrooms and mescaline in earlier decades, it is actually prophetic of what was to come only a few short months later. It is the quotation from The Process employed by Haining which draws upon Gysin’s 1961 psilocybin experiences, as Gysin himself confirmed in 1977. The 1961 psilocybin episodes reveal Gysin’s contradictory nature, the “veritable split” between his methodical, careful side and his desire to go further, and take risks — a conservative anarchism of personality which mirrored Burroughs’ own. The psilocybin tests were part of a Harvard University research project, formally sponsored, however unorthodox, and Gysin duly replied to Leary, documenting his experiences, which had been pleasant but not earth-shattering. — Gysin described his first experiences to Leary in a letter as “sneaky little out of the corner eye effects of covert awareness which went on for some hours.” But when a second package of pills arrived for Burroughs, who was away in Tangier, Gysin argued to himself that Burroughs was anti-mushrooms and unsure, even antipathetic about Leary and his intentions, and so he took the drugs himself — however, his professed and repeated justifications strongly suggest that he just couldn’t resist. Nothing quite reveals Gysin’s “Gemini Complex” so clearly as what he did next — he decided to arrange his room and order his paints and brushes and cards and materials so that he could record the experience and recline on his bed in security and relative comfort. He appears to have behaved, initially, according to the kind of advice he would give in his 1977 text “Psacré Psilocybin and Magic Mushrooms” in which he instructs prospective trippers to “arrange things so that you’ll be sheltered from any worry. Protect yourself against attack from outside. Avoid any untimely interference in your life that day.” But this sound advice is immediately compromised and undone by his admission that “the great journey in a bed never did much for me. In extreme conditions, I like to wander, seek out adventure and make it happen rather than endure it like a mollusk.” In fact, both attitudes were played off each other throughout Gysin’s life, as he demonstrated next when, having created the secure conditions and orderly ambience for the trip, he then proceeded to take 23 of the 24 pills — four times the maximum dose. Although this extreme act was accompanied by a note: “If anything happens to me cable [Harvard] for instructions,” it’s difficult to imagine what Leary might possibly have been able to do from back in Harvard… But if the note was a cavalier gesture, a pastiche of (ir)responsibility, and cocked a snook at fate, the experience was, we can say, decisive: “For more than three days and two nights, the psilocybin had complete hold over me and I did not sleep. I was out of commission except for three great flurries of artistic activity that shook me like hurricanes. Galaxies of mushrooms danced around my worktable leaving their traces upon my little cards. Spouts of mushrooms flowed from my fingers sketching mycologic forms over my Bristol boards in three orgasmic ejaculations.” These “mycologic forms” would carry and mutate Gysin’s signature initials and his “bean sprout” ideograph from that point onwards — his own signatory mark, the “BG” of “me,” would sprout from and turn into a plenitude of mushroom forms — the permutated signs of the self contained within, and emerging and shooting forth from the mycologic pods or embryonic vessels. The tiny pink pills from Sandoz Laboratories were genetically, psychically transformed into ideographic “B” caps and “G” stalks, mycological mutations of Gysin’s own calligraphic signature. The two signs, infinitely variable, of mushroom and “Brion Gysin,” become interlinked and intertwined, continually merging and then breaking and dispersing — manifestations of the immersion and dispersal of self, the discovery and loss of the “I” in the psilocybin experience. These can be seen in many works from 1961-63, and their origins glimpsed in works from 1959-60. One drawing, “Untitled (Psilocybine) 1961,” shows a different take — ideographs as jumping, spinning sprites in a cartoonish animation. . . These double markers, twinned sigils of psychotropic dissolution and the remaking of the psyche, lie at the heart of Gysin’s subsequent work and reveal its visionary sources and continuing impetus — the inspired rush of creation which Gysin experienced, the transformation of psychic upheaval into the extension of “tactile vision” with the artist as both creator and witness to the act of creation, suggest that the creative experience would become for Gysin an analogical extension and process of psilocybin’s transports . . Gysin wrote that although he was the artist who was sketching, what it was he was putting down in ink and watercolors — what, or who, was the subject, and likewise, the agency — was beyond him… He was witnessing, he later wrote, the mushrooms “leaving their traces” — through him, through his art. This is not to suggest that this was a eureka moment, but to recognize that it had brilliant consequences. Neither is it to say that Gysin hadn’t already developed the essential means and vocabulary of his art… No, it’s that the experience confirmed what he had already written in “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” — recognition of the artist possessed, and the artist’s desire to possess the eyes of the audience. His would be a shamanic art, with the artist as trickster, healer and prophet — this is not a hagiographic interpretation, but an accurate, literal and analytic reading of Gysin’s actual works and words. His mission statement was validated by that trip he took a few weeks later, and his art would be at the service of those “spaces” opened up by hallucinogenic drugs. What is seen doesn’t just enter the eye, it’s projected and returned in an endless loop of seeing in which the psyche and the nervous system are producing the visual in symbiosis with the light. The act of looking becomes awareness of one’s own creation of what is being seen, stimulating and triggering responses which in turn change, even transform the image and the perceptual field… “When you learn to look, you see that everything is alive,” in Burroughs’ words — and beyond that awareness of seeing, of receptivity and activation, there is losing oneself in the gaze, caught up and forgetful of self, immersed in the creation and receptivity of the seen. It’s mirror projection — we invest ourselves in the images Gysin incarnated, which we activate — we see his vision, and our own, merge and pull apart and recombine. Those dancing sigils of light lie always in wait, ready to be called forth — “spirits of the magic mushroom” as Gysin called them, recognized through psilocybin but also through kif and other drugs. Even though he would look back and see “all those drugs” as a fateful, disastrous thing, those trips elsewhere helped Gysin immeasurably to bring forth the living, hidden mind, what he had actually seen and experienced. His pictures are psychotropic — something other than the recycling of mycologic ciphers as connotative signifiers or stand-ins for the experience or some kind of shorthand flashback. Gysin’s text “Cut Me Up * Brion Gysin,” published in 1960, into the title of which he again strategically inserts the author’s name, begins with an explicit drug disclaimer: “Nothing here was written ‘under marijuana’ or ‘under’ anything else. Billie Holiday and Baudelaire have borne witness that nothing was ever written or sung better under any drug.” And Burroughs said “I have made cut-up highs without chemical assistants. [sic]” But the disappearing act of the cut-up self is bound up with the cutting of kif and its smoke rings, the losing of the boundaries and certainties of self… Just as Burroughs would croon an ayahuasca chant while cutting up, both he and Gysin understood very well the process and effects intertwining cut-up and drugs — a reminder that this most material of procedures was from the start a smoker’s art.

Sweet Sister Seconal / No Good Baby

Terry Wilson recalls Gysin, towards the end of his life, saying to Burroughs in the apartment in rue Martin, “Maybe to’ve opened ourselves up to all those dreadful spaces with all those drugs wasn’t such a good idea… ” Burroughs’ reply was unflinchingly pragmatic: “When it finally happens I expect to kick my habit in one concerted moment of excruciating withdrawal… ” If, for Burroughs, death was the terminal kicking of the life habit, Gysin wondered if taking drugs so as to explore out-of-body states and the spaces of alternate consciousness as a preparation for death, wasn’t misguided but just plain wrong. Maybe “it was a bad move to give ourselves the idea that such spaces actually existed.” This volte-face on Gysin’s part is explained by Wilson: “Fear of ultimately radical reality, fear of non-existence, trying to hold on and let go at the same time… ” It may be that Gysin was in fact warning Wilson not to follow where he was going, into the Duat, or into Oblivion, and that his disavowal that drugs provided access to the magical spaces was a dissimulation, testament to his distress that these anterior states were fascinating lures and enticing traps, the vortex of illusion funnelling into the absolute void. He wanted total non-being as a terminal release — and at the same time, he dreaded it, as only a very few do not. Burroughs may have found hallucinogens “instructive,” but he did not enjoy them, while Gysin had been favourably disposed, but certainly in his last years he felt obliged to make a pause and to consider the delusion and damage of these drugs. Gysin’s 1977 calligraphic text Alarme — Udo Breger published an extract in his journal Soft Need in 1977 — is a viscerally drawn poem of “agony, shame and despair.” And it’s a “flicker book” — rifling its pages produces calligraphic letter and word streams. It’s also a delirious version of the lexical games of word tennis and letter ping pong, in which French and English words permute in an ineluctable Dance of Death — noir / espoir / dortoir, adieu / tender / pendre, eine / seine / pleine, rats / rants / traps, bed / red / dead, heat / breath / death, hand / sand / end / send / rend / tender. The implications are complex — “NOIR” is “BRION” read backwards with the “B” chopped off — his beginning is both there and not there in his ending. As he looks back on his past, that blackness, black as his ink, is immediately, consonantly linked to a contradictory “ESPOIR” / “DESPAIR” in the monastic cell of the hospital — “DORTOIR.” The calligraphy and letter / word permutations are accompanied by a singularly appropriate musical homage — during Gysin’s mortal meditation, a song by Mick Jjagger, Keith Richards and Marianne Faithful runs through his head and Alarme plays upon “Sweet Sister Morphine” and its lyrics: “Here I lie in my hospital bed… turn my nightmare into dreams… I’m fading fast… clean white sheets stained red… ” In Gysin’s text the word “BED” becomes “RED,” “NEMBUTAL” becomes “NUMBUTAL,” and the “SECONS” tick by in “SECONAL,” culminating in a page which reads: “SWEET SISTER BREAT(H)/SWEAT SECONAL,” as if the song itself is fading in and out of Gysin’s numbed consciousness, the psychedelics and kif of careless psychic exploration now replaced by barbiturates depressing his nervous system, and by sedative hypnotics unable to calm the surgically cut-up patient. Welcome to drugs as pain control, and the cocooning of alarme — while that rock blues echoes down the years, a 1969 prophecy of his distress, his fear of his own consciousness of death. Gysin’s usual playfulness and delight in the use of synonyms, transpositions and permutations, his exploitation of the resources and richness of language, turns deathly here, and expresses his anguished helplessness — black ink runs down the page like rain, and pulsates across the page like a time sequence on an electrocardiogram as he tries to convey an anguish beyond all word play, beyond calligraphic art. “BRUTAL NEMBUTAL” can be read, but only through the merging and reading across of calligraphic strokes and letter forms — line becomes letter and letter passes into line without referent, a graphic morphing and pulling-apart of sign and gesture. The puns of Alarme are painful, in every sense, and Gysin’s recourse to the resource of words testifies to a terminal linguistic dispersal. “LIFE IN THE DEATH” reads one page, and one can make out the letter forms of “LIFE” strategically hidden in the word “DEATH” — but this is a written word-illusion and surely signifies quite otherwise, because the Death that once lay hidden in Life is now omnipresent. Likewise, none of the synonyms of “Alarme” — frayer, inquiétude, angoisse, panique, anxieté, tocsin, effroi, appel — can help the one in danger, as death approaches. Terry Wilson once quoted part of a key line from one of Gysin’s own permutated poems back to Gysin. “Junk is no good,” said Wilson. Gysin instantly snapped back, “Drugs are no good, baby” — significantly changing one word, and supplying another that was missing. One permutation would read, “NO DRUGS ARE GOOD BABY.” Before the life runs out, the words run out. And then, at last, the morphine drip is disconnected. 

Artist Sells Himself / Whore Magic

“Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” is crucial in Gysin’s career — a paradoxical manifesto of the disembodied self, it was psychologically acute in ways not understood at the time. It insistently declares that Gysin’s art and his words operate on the one who looks and reads his works in ways akin to the effects of drugs — “Your own interior spaced out,” “You-time I rub out,” “My own Interior Space music own your head,” “Your own Interior Spaced the Word in you.” To inhabit, to transform — this is art manifesto as magical enlightenment, turning the possessor of the pupil, the center of the iris, into a pupil of psychic possession. It is also a knowing, parodic routine, and Gysin’s promotion of his own artistic wares and abilities in his own version of Burroughs’ “How To” style in the prefatory “Deposition” and the concluding “Atrophied Preface” of Naked Lunch — an instructive ironic enticing carnee sales pitch, step right up, now listen to me sell you this once-in-a-lifetime guaranteed good thing — promising, seducing, (“Come out: you can.”), whilst at the same time warning of the dangers — “There will be harrowing in my magic picture.” Like Burroughs, Gysin casts himself as salesman, but what he is selling, like Burroughs, is enlightenment itself — this is hucksterism of the real thing, self-declared chicanery in earnest. Gysin reiterates his own name — “Gysin is not dead,” just as Burroughs had done — their names are on the products, the books, the manifestos, the pictures, theirs, branded. It’s called selling yourself, by any other name. This text, allied to Gysin’s cut-up explanations and promos, is the art polemic as personal manifesto, and it was risky back then in the art world to write your own blurb, however protectively ironic. This is the man who would write in 1977 of how during an experience of datura, “The force of my gaze as an illuminated man had struck him down.” This sense of the artist who knows his own visionary power — that’s all very well, my dear, but did you really have to say so? Gysin did say so, though this was at odds with the man who so worried and suffered for the fate and value of his art — it’s the shaman who declares his powers, and then wonders if he’ll be remembered at all. Gysin’s entire oeuvre and its processes are evoked and prophesied in this cut-up — mirror-gazing, painting, projecting images, spoken word, permutation… “Mirror magic and the writing that is you,” “Projected demon-wreck pictures” and “Projected demons,” words as “locks” and “spells” and invocations, words rubbed out, the “I” rubbed out, images disappearing, the artist himself disappearing, words as pictures, pictures in words… The cut-up process of the text reveals that Gysin’s art is “visual magic” but it is also “whore magic” because it gets around, makes no distinction about who gets inside it. The text invokes the “Interior Space” and the “Transducer” and the breathing of Inspiration, that breath which would become the “BREATH/DEATH” of his emphysema agony. “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” may seem addressed by Gysin to the reader and viewer of his work, but it is also Gysin addressing himself, cutting himself up, cutting up his declaration of inspiration to see what it really might mean, and telling himself that this is who the artist “Brion Gysin” is, or must be, the artist’s role revealed through the process of declamation. The text actually predates by several years “CUT-UPS: A Project For Disastrous Success” and yet is a much more significant document of his total vision and artistic purpose. 

A Thousand and One Performances

The calligraphic art is a special form of that ritualized performance which was clearly essential in Gysin’s art and life — creation was a physical act, both knowing and casual, requiring grace of movement, a learned and practiced skill rising to a level where it became effortlessly stylish, and then quite miraculous. The cut-up technique was described in detail by its creator as a form of performance, insisting upon the physical act and its ritual stages, and though no audience was required in this case, in other areas it was precisely an audience which Gysin desired in order to demonstrate the process of creation, the manifesting performance of art, rather than the objects created — art as literally a way of being in the world, in which Gysin’s body and mind, image and spirit, could be harmoniously resolved. A Dreamachine may be used by several people simultaneously, and Gysin enjoined others to make their own and see the whirl, just as he encouraged them to practice cut-ups, while akin to this were his collaborations with Burroughs and Ian Sommerville and Ramuntcho Matta, among others — participatory and collaborative projects were embraced by Gysin, they were extensions of his philosophy of creativity, in which the mystique and power of the individual artist were not compromised but enhanced through processes of the Third Mind. The spectacle combining music and dance and light which Gysin produced in his restaurant in Tangier, the Thousand and One Nights, is especially revealing of his view of art as the sensual, aesthetic exercise of skill, the creative act as a bravura demonstration of prowess, and a contribution to a group enterprise. For Gysin, the restaurant was a theater, with a specially created and decorated environment and ambience — a dream palace for the pleasure of the senses. But he also found himself in an ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable role — as the proprietor he was at a social disadvantage with the wealthy, aristocratic elements of the clientele. Extremely sensitive to the nuances of class and social standing, his own aspirations to be in society, including his phoney “von Listel” imposture, were compromised by his commercial, functionary status and the stigma of “trade.” The Tangerine social scene was Proustian in the extreme, and Gysin was respected and admired and yet dismissed as declassé by those who patronized his restaurant, while for the diehard bluebloods Burroughs would be absolutely persona non grata. Even Yvonne and Isabelle Gérofi of the Librairie des Colonnes, 54 Boulevard Pasteur, saw Burroughs as an invisible man defined by a ratty old raincoat rigid with filth — “Burroughs était sale à un point inoui . . . Son imper se serait debout de crasse . . .” This is an exemplary case of the social elite literally looking down their noses — and they didn’t like Genet’s leather jacket much either . . . By comparison, Gysin’s was a suitably class act in Tangier, in every sense, but nevertheless he was a businessman, a manager and a majordomo, and despite his erudition and perfect manners, and his talent for intrigue, he would never be entirely “socially acceptable.” He was mentioned in the Tangier Gazette, for example, but as a restaurateur supplying pastries to a cocktail party. He hobnobbed with the great and the good, he was known in high society and to the nouveau riche Hollywood types, but his market value was in fluctuation, his style impeccable but his background and credentials somewhat murky or a little too fantastic . . . In fact, he found himself caught between a class and a culture, to neither of which he belonged by birthright, although he aspired to be accepted by both — he really was the Man From Nowhere, the one who put on a show for the aristo expats and wealthy travellers, the paid facilitator holding aside the velvet curtain, providing entry to the magical world of another culture and time, whilst feeling a biological trick had been perpetrated on him, a screw-up in the birth lottery. The dancing boys and musicians performed in true Moroccan style, but this was a theater of illusion and deception in every sense, and could be seen as merely a costume cabaret of cultural otherness put on for the wealthy white social set — the procured spectacle could not be separated from its colonialist and economic context, while Gysin would be characterized as a “purveyor of Moroccan exotica.” Although Gysin was the impresario, he was also inamorata about the nightly performances, and for him the Thousand and One Nights was always more than a commercial venture, it was artistic, inspired, transporting — which may explain how he came to lose the business. For Gysin, this was a lesson to learn for his future art career — the artist discovers the magic, presents the most captivating show, welcomes his wealthy patrons . . . and gets out with the shirt on his back. Nevertheless, the musicians and dancers created a brilliant experience which reinforced his appreciation of art as physicality, sensuality, dexterity, illusionism, excitement, pleasure and laughter. In November 1955 Christopher Isherwood visited the restaurant and wrote in his diary:

The boys were very interesting to watch — their negligent grace, their vague yet exact gestures, their delicately mocking salutes, when you gave them money, which they tucked in their turbans. Their hip movements and flirtatious play with their scarves is exquisitely campy and yet essentially masculine: this is in no sense a drag show. In the most beautiful of the dances, the boy carries a whole tray of glasses and lights on his head. Later the boys sang with one of the musicians, and I felt they were really enjoying themselves.

(Burroughs’ negative description of the dancing boys refers to a later incarnation of the place, when Hamri and the original musicians and dancers had quit.) The impresario enjoyed himself, too, though his creative investment was doomed. It may be that Gysin’s performances with Sommerville at the Domaine Poétique and the ICA and elsewhere were sublimated homages to the Thousand and One Nights — movement, art, music, color and light combined in the creation of a magical environment, where one could forget oneself and be lifted up, moved and fired through all the senses. The restaurant had been a disaster, financially and emotionally, it was a place where “some unforeseen, complex, cataclysmic catastrophe” occurred practically every night, Gysin said — well, of course it did, and he loved it, the chaos and the intrigue, the rising and falling waves of the Pipes of Pan, the pirouettes and floor-rolls of the dancers, the cloakroom full of mink coats, the thin beams of light streaming from the perforations of Moroccan brass lanterns retroactively prophetic of the Dreamachine, the fated beauty of it all . . . When he was expelled from his Eden, the true magic of the Thousand and One Nights disappeared before the “Under New Management” sign went up. But here’s the trick: he took it with him, he never lost that feeling, and the rapture stayed with him, long after the lights went out. . 

Performance

When the tape of “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” was played at the ICA in December, 1960, Gysin “painted a picture 6 X 6 feet,” he later noted, in front of the audience, and then, paying homage to “the ancient Chinese precedent” that recurs in his text, he “quietly disappeared,” leaving his picture behind. Did he “bow an aural bow?” Well, he did so in a contemporary performance at the Domaine Poétique in Paris — Lawrence Lacina wrote that “Brion finished his painting/performance, took a bow… ” Certainly, the execution of the picture was in accord with the text’s specifications — “Painting a picture re time and 6 X 6 during the act of an invocation.” In fact, the text and the act of painting were part of a performance which is revealing of Gysin and Burroughs’ desire at this time to extend the Third Mind into the public domain — to put at least some of their techniques and theories into operation. Gysin would later simply note that the text “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” was “Recorded & played” at the event, but Barry Miles would recall in his book London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945, “a cut-up tape by Burroughs called ‘Brion Gysin Let The Mice In,’ featuring, in addition to Burroughs’s flat Midwestern voice, radio static and distorted Arab drumming.” This poses a significant question: is “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” a text by Gysin, or “a cut-up tape by Burroughs?” The answer is — both. The tape was a cut-up by Burroughs of the words that had been written / hand cut-up and arranged by Gysin, and it was treated, like the performance itself, as a manifestation of the Third Mind. The text as it appears in Haining’s anthology is titled “Let The Mice In,” without the preceding “Brion Gysin,” and Haining also writes that the text was “written for Evergreen Review in 1969,” which is also incorrect. It is possible that Gysin edited and rewrote parts of the text between its aural performance and its later publication, but it is essentially a work from 1960. Its equivocal status as a text — written / cut-up / recorded / cut-up / performed / published, and including treatments and words by Burroughs — is also testament to its singular importance as a key example of the Third Mind combinatory process, personal and technological. The alternation of first and third person viewpoints in the text perfectly embodies the symbiotic fluidity of mediated authorship — “Gysin paint Me, too,” “edited voice of Wm. Burro him,” “Gysin in forever audible home-sprint” — with Gysin writing of himself as another through the spoken voice of Burroughs. The text was created specifically for public performance and for edited tape playback, and is a statement of artistic inspiration and intent, a performance piece, produced in order to be spoken and heard in public. It includes a description — again, recorded in advance of the event in which it would feature — “There will be projections in all dimensions while the recorded voice of Wm. Burroughs reads an incantation spelled out by him.” That is, this “manifesto” is a “program” in both senses. Careful study of the published text shows that although it is attributed to Gysin, whose “voice” and style are evident throughout, it includes elements by Burroughs in the final two pages. Miles appears somewhat dismissive of the actual performance, writing that Gysin “pranced about the stage, painting a vigorous sloppy abstract on a huge sheet of paper,” but he has explained to me that what he intended to convey was the splashing of the paint medium through the air, while Gysin’s physical actions were shamanically pantomimic. Certainly, the photograph of Gysin in action at the Domaine Poétique at the Paris Biennale, taken only a few months later, reveals a brilliant calligraphic painting in process. Miles writes of a performance at the Heretics Club at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, before the ICA show: “This was an attempt by Gysin — the principal organizer — to produce the ‘derangement of the senses’ that he and Burroughs had spent long hours discussing, by combining painting with sound poetry and light projections in a theatrical performance.” This was one of a series of collective manifestations of the Third Mind and Ian Sommerville’s contribution was significant — his light projections involved slide projectors and an epidiascope he’d made to project 35-mm double exposure slides. As with the performances at the Domaine Poétique in Paris that year, the Heretics event was an attempt at sensory overload which would culminate five years later at a second ICA show with Ian Sommerville ecstatic that a Burroughs tape of “pneumatic drills, radio static and wailing Moroccan flutes” drove half the audience out of the building, in the venerable tradition of the succès de scandale. But the performance was also a method of creating Rimbaudian correspondences, the synesthetic merging of word, image, action, recording, light and sound, as well as dissociative states and alienation effects. These performances demonstrated the processes of created illusion — the written word was spoken and cut-up on tape and played back, the solitary act of creating a painting became a public demonstration, while the slide images blurred the distinction between the living and the projected — a homage to Man Ray and Lee Miller’s projection of a hand-tinted Méliès film onto guests at the 1930 White Ball of Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt, an event Gysin would have known about and which he may even have talked about with Man Ray himself. These performances made the invisible, static art of painting dramatic, and turned recitation, the publicly spoken word, into a spliced multi-layered recording, while the face and body of Gysin, the performer, became a screen for the projection of images of himself — “I played into my own image, and out of it.” In these ways, Gysin pushed the contradictory nature of live and recorded, spontaneous and manipulated art processes and experiences, so that the audience “could no longer be sure what was real and what was not.” Not only does the text promote Gysin the painter, it links his visual art with the spoken word, with the light and image projections, and with the machine processes of the actual performance — and this is why the text features phrases such as “I will make an audience” and “The audience, too, appear into the picture.” Both at the ICA in 1965 and at earlier shows in Paris, under the rubric of the Domaine Poétique at the Galerie de Fleuve and at the American Center on Boulevard Raspail, Gysin dedicated his invocations to the Goddess Kali, and ended performances by slashing and tearing his paintings into pieces — acts which never failed to upset and appal the audiences. “There’s no creation without destruction,” said Gysin, “there’s no destruction without creation.” This destruction was certainly in keeping with the Third Mind’s concern with processes and states of being, rather than with finished “artworks” — the painting, however beautiful, was absolutely not the object of the exercise, though the torn fragments of one such work from 1961 would be reconstituted in 1968. It would not be the only example of “auto-destructive” art to be recuperated and framed and hung on a wall — the distressed, dark age ex voto of the Kali Yuga. 

Marabouts / Wu Tao-Tzu / The Modern Delphic Oracle 

Those magical powers promised by the rites of Abramelin were recognized by Gysin as quite attainable — he’d witnessed and studied comparable powers in the 1950s, extraordinary feats demonstrated with great élan by those marabouts venerated by the Berbers. These inspired performances included fire walking, levitation, healing through trance, as well as the swallowing of a real Naked Lunch of living, wriggling snakes, scorpions and lizards. What was the Crowley invocation but another method for acquiring baraka, the mystical power of those dervishes, those holy marabouts whose self-mutilations and disappearing acts, whose scorning of the physical body and dissolution of the human image would be invoked in Gysin’s lacerated slides, the disfiguring and cutting up of his own human image . . . Gysin and Burroughs and Portman would have seen, in the Djeemaa el Fna in Marrakesh, the professional penmen with their calligraphic samples along with the herbalists chanting their mantras and spells, summoning the Word and imbuing their papers and powders and potions with healing powers, as they performed their ordinary miracles side by side with magicians eating fire and floating through the air and becoming invisible . . . In Gysin’s philosophy, magic is a material practice which really works, the staged illusion which is actually a cover for the true exercise of mind over matter, of divine will over cause and effect. For Gysin the artist was a magician and this was more than a role to be acted out — the artist’s powers were supernatural because the created work could not be explained by skill, talent, or aesthetic value . . . Something other, inexplicable and marvellous, emerged from the creative process, manifesting the psyche in material form. When, in “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In,” Gysin invokes those Chinese artist-sages disappearing into their paintings, he is specifically referring to Wu Tao-tzu, a painter of the Tang dynasty, who, according to legend, looked at a mural he had just finished painting, clapped his hands, and then entered through the temple gates which he himself had conjured — the gates then closed behind him and he was never seen again. This famous story encapsulates the idea of art as an entrance to another world — through his work the artist creates an illusion into which he willingly enters, so that his own divine creation engulfs him, eclipses his earthly being. This myth, beloved of Borges, is not merely paid lip service by Gysin — it epitomizes his magical philosophy of art, in which the creative act is absolutely concomitant upon the willed giving up and erasure of self. Burroughs originally intended Cities of the Red Night to actually end with Gysin vanishing in just this way, disappearing — “disprairie”, to use Gysin’s cut-up term — into his own painting, and, in effect, into the book which his pictures had inspired. Different versions and interpretations of the Wu Tao-tzu story exist — painting a door on a mountain, or painting the mouth of a cave, and “sadly the door shut and he was lost forever,” or “the cave entrance closed and the whole mural faded away and only the wall remained.” It is not Renaissance perspective or trompe l’oeil optical illusionism which leads the artist into the picture — it is the creative act itself which makes transcendence possible. The meaning of the tale is that the artist is consumed by the process of creation, and becomes so entranced by his own powers of evocation that he cannot return to the quotidian realm of existence. Wu Tao-tzu’s life seems archetypal, an Eastern progenitor of the romantic, bohemian artist of the West — he used alcohol as a stimulus, painted his exquisite calligraphy “with the force of a whirlwind,” broke all the social and artistic rules, was inspired, possessed, and doomed — there was no magical disappearance to end his life, rather he died penniless and delirious, of cirrhosis of the liver . . . This is the painter Gysin paid homage to in his Third Mind performances, and he would have appreciated one story about Wu Tao-tzu which links the skill of painting with the art of swordsmanship. When Wu Tao-tzu portrayed General P’ei Min, he did so not by arranging his “sitter” in a pose, but by painting the General as he danced his famous sword dance, capturing at speed the flashing movements of the sword, equating the brushstroke with the potentially lethal cut of the blade . . . Not all of Gysin’s magical invocations are so rarefied, in fact in life and in his art he sometimes played upon the more lowly idea of “the Magician’s role” which he’d recognized as his destiny in the 1930s — he’d come on like a stage illusionist or mere theatrical entertainer, a knowing dissimulation of his profound belief in magic, employing, in effect, the professional conjurer’s “distraction technique” to deflect from his true purpose. Gysin was knowledgeable about the history of stage magic and the floating head seen in his slide works and in the torso photograph he had taken in Greece, were versions and variations on the theme of the mirror trick created by Thomas William Tobin in 1865 — advertised as “The Modern Delphic Oracle,” this illusion derived in turn from “The Sphinx” illusion, and it appeared to produce a bloody, decapitated head, rolling its eyes and whispering its last words to the horrified, paying audience. It was a macabre play on the fascination and fear induced by the guillotine, and significantly, this memorable production was performed not in a theater but in a Parisian wax museum — it was theater as side show, a dungeon entertainment for sensation seekers, part of a tradition that the surrealists would draw upon in the 1920s and ’30s (and witnessed by Gysin), turning the modern art show into a tunnel of horrors, a carny cabaret, a gothic grotto, a hellfire cavern. Likewise, the Domaine Poétique and Gysin and Burroughs and Sommerville’s multimedia shows a hundred years after “The Modern Delphic Oracle,” were strategically sensational events, invoking and summoning spirits, projecting apparitional bodies, scrambling voices from the ether, while the slide shows, like the Dreamachine, drew upon the prehistory of the cinema, its origins in magic lantern shows and séances . . . Gysin’s recorded text, “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In,” was itself a modern version of the Delphic Oracle, a series of rhythmic chants and pronouncements of possession and secret knowledge, as disembodied cut-up riddles issued not from a fissure in the earth but from a tape recorder — the voice as the ghost in the machine, prophecy on rewind and playback, technology as a spirit trap. The spoken text was insistent, declamatory in its delivery, the voice of an adept addressing initiates and neophytes, assuring them that he would penetrate and transform their spiritual, psychic, “Interior Space,” continually repeating the phrases, “I demonstrate,” “I talk new,” “I summon,” “I bow,” a liturgical litany as in a religious rite, assuring those addressed that “You will understand,” that the spark of divine creation would be transmitted through the power of the Word, through white light, sound overload, sensory disorientation. In fact, it isn’t Apollo at his shrine at Delphi on Mount Parnassus that Gysin invokes in this text, it’s Pan running free on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, while winter (Pan’s time in the Greek legend of the Oracle, when Apollo was in Delos) becomes spring and Parnassus becomes the Little Green Hills of Morocco . . The Third Mind performances were attempts to create psychic communion through a pandemonium shadow show, prophesying a coming age of expanded consciousness, subjecting the nervous system to sensory overload, a multimedia onslaught drowning out and cutting up habitual patterns of perception. As with Klein and Mathieu, the dramatic entertainment, however blatant or kitsch or ad hoc, was a good cover act — the shaman, as ever, is a showman, while the mystery is strategically disguised, the ritual invocation hidden beneath all the hoopla. The essential truth of magic resides in secrecy, and the magician, as Gysin knew so well, is an actor who must go masked — Larvatus prodeo . . . 

Three Hours Underground in New York

The Third Mind performance at the Heretics Club was titled Action Painting and Poetry Projection. The appellation “Action” seems both convenient and strategic, referencing and playing upon Harold Rosenberg’s 1952 term for the New York School’s gestural style and the performative, public nature of the event — it was “Action Painting” painted “in action.” Gysin was in part paying homage to Yves Klein’s “Anthropometry” performances in Paris, February-March 1960, but he was also clearly indebted to Georges Mathieu, who was already renowned and castigated for his public displays of Tachisme in action during the late 1950s. Mathieu would actually paint one of his greatest works, “The Victory of Denain,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, on the eve of the opening of his 1963 retrospective — a demonstration of his skill, speed and prowess. But by then he had painted in public on many occasions, and this performativity became synonymous with his name and integral to his artistic practice. He would dress up for the public painting of a picture — in Tokyo in 1957 he wore traditional Japanese Samurai costume for the painting of his picture “The Battle of Hakata.” Dominique Quignon-Fleuret wrote of Mathieu’s gesture that it was “like the flash of the razor in the opening of the cut,” and in the Third Mind performances the calligraphic gesture and the cut-up technique were equated as magical invocations, and as methods of making, as Miles puts it, “a giant tear in conventional reality.” Gysin’s destruction of the pictures which he created during his performances, may have been inspired in part by descriptions of Mathieu “executing his work in public.” Mathieu studied the history and topographics of the battles he painted, and the seemingly spontaneous creation of these paintings was actually based on a reconstruction of military strategy, battle formations and troop movements. Likewise, Gysin knew the format and process and structure of the painting he would perform — one photograph shows an underlying grid over which his calligraphic signature script is fluently unfolding. Further, “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” actually describes the process of painting within a multimedia performance, indicating the crucial sources, themes, imagery and aims of the work — the painting, however inspired the process and the resulting image, followed a structured and iconographic programme. Gysin liked Mathieu and his work, and Gysin’s calligraphic paintings may seem superficially allied to Mathieu’s in their energy and élan, and in their distribution and layering of gestural strokes on a colored ground, but the two artists are quite distinct. Despite his successful performances in Japan, Mathieu was not interested in Japanese calligraphy and always claimed that it had no influence on his art — Oriental calligraphy was symbolic and meaningful, and imbued with the mystical, whereas his own gestural art, which he termed “Lyrical Abstraction,” was based entirely upon speed of execution, and on his abstracted renderings and evocations of historic battles and the lives of military and aristocratic personages. Gysin’s art, on the contrary, was personally iconographic, issued from the study of Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and, above all, did not record or transmute events of the past, but sought to fix the fluidity of transient moments of consciousness. Gysin learned something about Mathieu in the late 1950s which may have had a bearing on his reluctance ever to relocate to New York from Paris in order to push his career as an artist. It’s a story which would sum up the art world “in action” for Gysin, and it was both an amusing and a cautionary tale. On the 27th of August, 1957, Mathieu flew to Japan where he painted, in public, 27 canvasses, and a screen, as well as making a number of drawings and gouaches. He was in New York in October, ready for action, but his dealer, Samuel M. Kootz, knew that a public demonstration of Mathieu’s virtuosity, and the resulting stacks of wet canvases, would not go down well with either critics or with prospective purchasers in the United States, despite the American admiration for speed and efficiency. How could the high prices of Mathieu’s pictures be justified, given the very few minutes required for their execution? It would look like printing money. The image of “Action Painting” in America was that of the tortured soul labouring and agonizing for months and years over a single encrusted canvas — seeing Georges in impeccable Nineteenth Century dandy dress exponentially knocking his stuff out with barely a pause would have sunk his market value for sure. So… on October 9th, a Wednesday, the artist was taken to the fourth basement level below the former Ritz-Carlton Hotel at 400 Madison Avenue, where Kootz had rented a space so that Mathieu could paint the pictures for his imminent New York show in the utmost privacy. Surely, there must have been studios available in New York, with windows and light? Apparently not. Mathieu would have to work underground, literally — 45 feet underground, absolutely alone, in a room reached, remembered Mathieu, “at the end of long prison corridors… the most Kafkaesque experience of my life.” This was about as far from the public performance of painting as one could get, and absolutely no one would be able to say — “But it only took him five minutes to paint that!” Except later, when Mathieu, typically, couldn’t help confessing proudly — “I painted 14 canvasses in three hours.” Clearly, he’d wanted to get out of that place at speed. Gysin would stay in Paris, where the pace was slower and the art could be as fast as it liked. 

The Razor’s Edge of Time

On June 17th 1939 Brion Gysin witnessed the public execution of the multiple murderer Eugene Weidmann in the Paris suburb of Versailles, 10 miles from the center of the capital. Shortly after 4 a.m. Weidmann was guillotined in front of a crowd of one thousand people outside the prison Saint Pierre, rue Georges Clémenceau 5. Reports that the guillotine had not been correctly adjusted — the bascule on which the condemned man was strapped was set at the wrong height and so his neck did not lie correctly in the lunette — and descriptions of drunken, joking spectators jostling for a good view lead to public outrage. But what really brought an end to the spectacle of the public execution were the photographs taken clandestinely of the decapitation — the widespread publication of these images in newspapers outraged the authorities, as if it was the image, and its reproduction, rather than the act itself that was obscene, a public incitement. These furtively taken photographs appeared in newspapers alongside descriptions of the crowd’s scandalous behaviour, which included eyewitness accounts of women breaking through the police cordons and rushing forward to soak their handkerchiefs in Weidmann’s arterial blood, mixing modern fandom and ancient fertility rite, before officials hosed the bloody cobbles and threw down sand — Gysin would dryly cite the women’s behaviour as a perfect example of hysterical aberration. A fellow member of that crowd was the 17-year-old Christopher Lee, the now celebrated actor, who found himself accidentally but literally on the set of a real horror film — because, in addition to the photographs taken by onlookers, cameramen filmed the execution from apartments overlooking the scene. We have become progressively immune to the mediated spectacle of killing, but the very idea of filming an execution was viewed at the time as utterly repugnant. Gysin would never forget this event, nor the irony that the executioner’s assistant, who was obliged to try and pull Weidmann’s head into the correct position for decapitation, was popularly known by the nom-de-plume le photographe — that is, the one who shadows and witnesses the executioner. Gysin was aware of the power of photography through media, and its historical importance, but his own work with photographic images over 40 years shows above all his awareness of the ways in which death is inscribed in the image — the photo as memento mori, as relic, testament to the world’s vanishing act. It’s the great truth of photography, that the image is always necessarily the record of something which once happened, of someone who once existed, now gone forever — caught and lost as time slid definitively over the razor’s edge, and lopped off another precious living moment. Gysin also recognized that pictures of Weidmann could be imbued with a profound, fetishistic significance, as was the case with Jean Genet. Gysin and Genet met in 1968 in Tangier — Genet had been given a letter of introduction from Burroughs in Chicago. Actually, Gysin remembered having met Genet before, in the 1930s and again in 1949, but Genet professed no memory of these meetings. However, together they recalled a number of mutual friends, and enemies, from those dim doomed decades, including a boy they had both known who went by the name of Fatalitas — so-called because he’d had that word tattooed around his neck. According to Gysin, the tattooed word indicated “where the chopper was gonna fall when his head was put under the guillotine.” There was a limited but understandable fashion for this kind of nihilistic decoration among sailors and convicts — both Gysin and Genet had also known the sinister Marcel, a protégé of Jean Cocteau, and later a manservant to Christian Bérard and Boris Kochno, a young man who’d had “Pas de chance” (“no luck”) tattooed around his neck at a naval prison in Corsica, and lived his life accordingly, in a condition of perpetual expectancy of imminent catastrophe, with little breaks of spite and vengefulness. When, in 1969, Genet took to visiting Gysin’s apartment at 59 bis Musa ben Nusair in Tangier, the two men were already linked by the stories of these “unfortunate ones” who were marked by “the necklace of doom,” but Gysin and Genet were also connected by their appreciation of the photograph as a mystical talisman, its power as an erotic icon, and as a source of magical and aesthetic self-projection — and by the fact that the man who Gysin had seen beheaded thirty years before, had become, through photography, Genet’s revered muse. On the 16th June 1939, the day before Weidmann’s execution, Genet had been apprehended for vagrancy and locked up, but he followed Weidmann’s case in the papers and the executed man would haunt his novel Our Lady of the Flowers, written in jail in 1941-2, a book which would become seminal for the Beats — in fact, the very first word of the book names the victim, and the opening passage crucially invokes his photographic image and the power of its reproduction and dissemination: “Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded aviator… His handsome face, multiplied by the presses, swept down upon all of France… Beneath his picture broke the dawn of his crimes… ” Genet is referring to a photograph of Weidmann, head swathed in bloodied bandages — he’d been subdued by a seventeen stone policeman who gave him three head blows with a carpet-laying hammer as he resisted arrest. The photograph had first appeared on the cover of Détective magazine on 16 December 1937. This photograph became the definitive icon of Genet’s spiritual pantheon, an image of enchantment and adoration which he carried with him for the rest of his life. Whatever fleabag hotel room he fetched up in, the photo of “a bloodied archangel,” as he described Weidmann, was ceremoniously fixed to the wall — the criminal spirit incarnated as household god. Genet gave copies of the photo to Cocteau and to Olga Kechelievitch — the image had become his most precious possession, and he’d so invested it with a sense of outlaw fraternity and shared martyrdom, that to give a copy to a friend was to give profoundly of himself, his mystic core. That Gysin had actually seen Weidmann decapitated constituted an intense, personal and historical bond between Genet and Gysin. Gysin himself was in no doubt about Genet’s genius and the sublime beauty of Our Lady Of The Flowers — and he had seen with his own eyes the terrible, bloody termination of its incandescent source. Genet would rescue the corpse from those “earthly policemen,” as he called them, and make Weidmann immortal through the greatest art, deifying the excoriated one, turning the foreign “liar, pervert and monster” described by the prosecution into a criminal saint… Writing this, I think of my friend, the late Donald Harris, who worked at the Royal Court in London in the 1960s and was involved in the production of Genet’s play The Blacks. He danced with Genet in a club in Earl’s Court and told me that Genet smelled “very clean,” but he couldn’t remember the record that was playing, the song they’d moved around to on that tiny, basement dance floor. The scene is distressed footage, hand held in black and white, images from someone else’s memory, the soundtrack missing.  

Madame Guillotine / What’s in a Femtosecond

Gysin was fated to be haunted by “Madame Guillotine,” also known as “The National Razor,” and acts of decapitation and cutting would become central to his oeuvre. An ill-advised remark by Dr Guillotine — “With my machine, I’ll cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you won’t feel it!” inspired a popular song of the 1790s, the joking morbidity of which greatly appealed to Gysin whose own songs are similarly savage, comic elegies, paradoxical celebrations of loss and death. Images of the guillotine, the razor, the scimitar, the blade that definitely severs, run throughout Gysin’s writing. In The Last Museum — “Look, there is the guillotine and some young lady is having her head cut off by the executioner. Do you all see what I see? He is holding her head up for everyone to see.” One femme “whips out an old-fashioned straight razor… a cut-throat,” while another is skinned “with a double-edged Blue Gillette razor blade held between thumb and middle finger.” A bull has a “razor-sharp horn,” but the bullfighter thrusts his own blade into the animal “up to the hilt.” The blade is an instrument of threatened castration in these scenarios, but Gysin’s writing also invokes the guillotine blade as the mechanical tool of the spectacle of death, and he cuts seamlessly from an old Arab in a hamam smoking three sebsis of kif and shaving his genitals with “an open razor” to Dr. Guillotine “testing his device” on bleating sheep in a courtyard of Le Quartier Latin. What appalled and fascinated Gysin was the idea that the brain lived on after decapitation, the victim conscious for eternal seconds, aware of being a bodiless, severed head, mute testament to a condition of being which definitively mocks Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” The report of Doctor Beaurieux, examining the corpse of the executed Henri Languille in 1905, had suggested that the victim might remain sentient for an unspecified period of time after the blade cut him in two, and it is this horrific idea of the living, severed head that lies beneath Gysin’s choice of a passage from Othello for the epigraph to his novel The Process, lines which refer to the Anthropophagi, the headless cannibals “whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” A few years before the execution, when he was in Greece, Gysin had himself photographed with a skull positioned on his right shoulder and with his left hand resting on a second skull. His torso is naked, and there are discs drawn on his closed eyelids – the image homages Jean Cocteau, in particular photographs taken of Cocteau in 1927 by Berenice Abbott. But there is something else in this image — the deep, extensive shadow cast by the head entirely separates the head from body, obliterates the neck, so that Gysin’s “living” head floats free of his body, and takes on the severed status of the skulls attached to the abandoned torso. It is indisputably an image of headlessness — decapitation designed and posed for the camera. Gysin’s decalcomania paintings were made in 1941, two years after Weidmann’s execution, and one example, in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, an ink on paper, shows, at the top of the picture, the chapiteau, or top crossbar of the guillotine, and the mouton, or weight, with the diagonal blade, while below these, at the bottom of the picture, there is a bleeding, skull-socketed, grimacing, severed Janus head — a mockery of Janus, since both knowledge of the past and the future are definitively separated by the fraction of a second required by the blade. The decalcomania technique involves the impressing of paint or ink from one surface onto another, and Oscar Dominguez proselytized the process as “having no preconceived object,” but both he and Gysin worked on the results of their compresses, delineating and highlighting the manifesting, suggestive images, and so the guillotine’s appearance in Gysin’s painting at this time seems both spontaneous and apparitional, and yet recognized and drawn out. It is hard not to see this work as a reverberation of Weidmann’s death, shudders and smears and blotches of ink revealing a double death’s head, a ghastly memorial to that festive early morning when, as onlooker Tennyson Jesse recalled, “the great blade crashed down and rebounded from its own force and weight.” The crescent of the lunette and the shape of the crossbar or chapiteau of the guillotine apparatus appear repeatedly throughout Gysin’s roller grids, made by the lifting of the roller from the paper. Again, this might be seen as accidental, a mere resemblance, but its sheer recurrence and Gysin’s study of the latent meanings in his own mark-making, suggest quite otherwise, as does an examination of the context and operations of the grid works themselves — the effect may have been fortuitous, but its meaning cannot have escaped Gysin who employed it repeatedly by design. In the mid-thirties Gysin had lived close to rue Git-le-Coeur, just round the corner from the future Beat Hotel where he would live in the ’50s and ’60s, and from his window he’d had a “perfect view” of the place where, he believed, between 1789 and 1792, Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotine’s proposed “beheading machine” was tested on live sheep and on human corpses procured from L’Ecole de Médicine — so for Gysin that area of the quartier was itself bound up with the history of the death machine. In the grids we see images of rooms in the Beat Hotel, severed with scissors or cut out on an artist’s guillotine, so that the Beat Hotel itself, the very place of cutting, is represented through the process of cutting — the images so produced take up their occupancy in a grid structure that suggests the floors and rooms of the hotel, a structure that may also be read as a series of guillotines with the vertical squares as stages in the descent of both the decapitator and the cut-up blade. This is clearly seen in Third Mind collage prints of 1965 — in “23 Die In Saigon,” for example, the lunette appears with a photograph of corpses placed directly above it, a cut-up homage to the guillotine. In Gysin’s “Self Portrait Jumping” of 1974, the severed image of Gysin is frozen in mid-air, and contained within a vertical armature, the image bright against a dark ground with runs and drips of blood-like ink — the descent of the silvery cut-out image mimics the blade about to fall. The hotel plan and the diagrammatic guillotine structure merge and move back and forth in the grids — they are parts of the scaffolding of the Paris set, on which the collagist hangs his paper, those textual and visual distressed materials removed from their original published contexts, but they also signify the material operations and the actual sites of chopping up and cutting through the human body-image, the Beat Hotel and the good doctor’s death machine both hiding in plain sight in Gysin’s “bright scaffolding.” He slices through texts, severing the referent “head” from the “body” of the sign, he cuts up tape and contact sheets and removes the fragments from chronological time and linear coherence, he turns his permutations of “I AM THAT AM I” into bodiless oracular recordings, and projects images onto his torso, from which his own head emerges in a “veritable split” — these are guillotine procedures, severing language and logic, body and mind, and demarcating the organic and the technological. Gerard Reve wrote in his inimitable style, “you can never decapitate him another time again,” but in his work Gysin did just that, in words and images, in coded and dissimulated and inchoate forms, he re-staged that decapitation. In The Last Museum, the guillotining turns out to be a “Deceptual Art Show,” like the staged hangings on a film loop in Naked Lunch, while photography was seen by Gysin as just such a serial reenactment, providing millions and millions of chopped-out death images — nothing less than decapitated life, courtesy of the camera shutter as guillotine blade, each image a little death, an orgasm for Thanatos, as another fraction of a second slides over the razor’s edge of time. Gysin projects the “time out” of an orgasm as a femtosecond, or one quadrillionth of a second, or one millionth of one billionth of a second, a femtosecond being to a second what a second is to around 31.7 billion years… The notion is frightening, ludicrous, unimaginable, and a good way to turn your brain inside out… This “little death,” described by Burroughs as the “flash bulb of orgasm,” is an escape from time, a fractional “out of Time” of non-being, but you return only having “lost the time you were ‘out’” — that moment out of time is the godhead for Gysin, is immortality itself, and in his metaphysics the trick is to enter that moment and stay there… “not to be born back into the same Time, not to be born back at all,” avoiding the rebirth “out of Time and back into Time again.” In this metaphysical scenario, photography is Black Ops, a deadly Black Art — it removes a fraction of a second from time, but that immortal moment, taken out of time and “frozen,” is the negative, in both senses, of immortality because it puts back into time a preserved, fixed ghost image which stands in relation to immortality as 1 : 1,000,000,000,000,000. In the photo grid works of the 1970s, Gysin arranges the cut-out contact images in vertical shafts, the figures descending in successive stages to the chopping-off point — each image has been cut “out of Time,” but has been rearranged and reinserted “back into Time again,” so that these people who once existed are reborn, but as the living dead, as ghosts of the terminal image apparatus. Incidentally, operated by an expert, someone who really knows what he’s doing, the guillotine blade will slice through a human neck in 0.005 of a second. The executioner and his assistant, le photographe, got just one shot at Weidmann, but film of the decapitation, taken from a seat in the balcony, may now be viewed on YouTube.

What’s in a Name

Gysin had certainly read the coverage of Weidmann’s trial before the execution, and knew that the extremely good-looking, masculine Weidmann was homosexual, or “versatile in his choice of sexual partners.” The press coverage was unprecedented, not only because Weidmann had strangled a young dancer and shot five people in the nape of the neck, (there were almost certainly other victims), but because Weidmann’s evident confusion, solitariness, charm and beauty were appealing, and suggested a martyred alien, “a fallen creature of another race,” one who had “committed the crime of being born.” Colette covered the trial for Paris-Soir and Maurice Chevalier, never slow on the uptake, managed to get himself photographed in court with a woman barrister — there were celebrities in court every day, and Weidmann himself was now a celebrity, a progenitor of our own times, a poète maudit by default, a surrealist manqué, an existential icon before the fact. Intellectuals and Roman Catholic novelists wrote letters and signed petitions for clemency, while Colette commented, with the sympathetic unflinchingness of the truly adopted Parisian, “Pity he’s got to be guillotined. He’s a good-looking kid.” This was France, and the French language played a crucial part, though no one picked up on it at the time, despite Weidmann’s own inchoate testimony that his name was mutable, and that he could assume the identity of a young woman by learning to sign her name. The French press gallicised Weidmann’s Christian name, replacing “Eugene” with “Eugène,” changing the pronunciation. In fact, Weidmann’s name “Eugene” was pronounced to rhyme with “Gene,” and so was homophonous with “Jean,” the name of his first victim, Jean de Koven. Weidmann claimed that he killed Jean for her passport so that he could cash travellers’ cheques, because “Jean” was also a man’s name in France, and he was called “(Eu)Gene,” so no one would question him, especially as he had applied himself to imitating her signature . . . But this, and other stories he told, simply did not stand up to scrutiny (he did not cash those checks, by the way). It’s possible, as Rayner Happenstall believed, that the homophony of names was enough to unleash Weidmann’s psychosis. He was self-destructive, he was suicidal, so he killed “Jean” — but it was the wrong “Gene.” Gysin may have recognized in the personality enigma of Weidmann, in both the murderer’s explanations of his crimes and in psychological profiles of the time, an extreme version of the kind of disassociation of identity, bound up with linguistic ambiguity, that he felt within himself. The writer Georges Bernanos described Weidmann as “the very image of supernatural abandonment,” and it became apparent that Weidmann’s father had been “permanently missing” from his life, something which Gysin would surely have noted. Throughout the trial Weidmann was described as a mythomaniac, for whom every truth was a fiction, and every fiction true, and perhaps the title of Gysin’s lost manuscript of the early 1940s unconsciously echoed that repeated phrase, the diagnosis of a terminal storyteller — Memoirs of a Mythomaniac. No matter, what Gysin did know was that immediately after the blade fell, “a geyser of blood” shot out of the neck, as Marcel Montarron reported, and Weidmann made his last sound on earth. Tennyson Jesse — “The voice that had been so beautiful, so soft, so gentle in the courtroom, was stilled for ever. There only came a last exclamation from Weidmann — and that was involuntary — the whistling that always sounds when a head is cut off. For the neck gives a snap as the last breath of air leaves the lungs, though the head be already in the basket.” For Gysin, breathing would become the very art of living, not just the automatic process of staying alive, although hooked up to oxygen cylinders he would get to know all about that — it would become the In-breath of Inspiration and the Out-breath of Creation in his philosophy, the very breath of awareness of existence pulsating through the mortal body. This mindfulness could only make the memory of Weidmann’s expiry, his final expiratory gasp, the physiological whistle of extinction, truly abominable, atrocious, a crime against the human spirit. But then, as now, outrage is useless, fury futile. As Tennyson Jesse wrote at the time, “It is the man’s windpipe and not his tongue that protests.”  

The Torso Of 1960 and the Torso of 1939

Gysin’s first one-man show had opened in Paris at the Aux Quatre Chemins gallery on May 19, 1939. Weidmann, a German national, was executed on June 17, 1939. Ten weeks later, on September 1, Germany invaded Poland and two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. Gysin had already left Paris and at the time of the declaration of war he was living off his wits, style, and flair with a group of aristocrats in exile, in a luxury hotel on the lakefront at Laussane. His Paris career seemed over, and in June the following year he would arrive in New York with $22 to his name. In one of his 1939 sketchbooks he had drawn a nude male torso, and this headless body was prophetic — his own torso would be the site and screen for the projections at the Domaine Poétique and the ICA in the early ’60s, photographs of which call attention to the clear demarcation of head and body. In one image, taken by Nikolas Tikhomiroff, Gysin holds a sheet from his neck, while the projected image on the sheet shows his arms hanging at his sides — it creates the illusion that someone is standing behind him, holding a shroud around his neck, pulling it back from the neck, or a shadowy magician is holding the sheet from which a disembodied head is about to float up into the air… The section of Gysin and Wilson’s Here To Go dealing with these projections is titled, “The Torso of 1960,” but through the projected images and through all the years we may glimpse the torso of 1939 — Weidmann’s headless corpse, his white shirt pulled down over his back and shoulders, released from the bascule and rolled off the death machine with superb timing into the waiting coffin.  

Continue on to Burroughs-Gysin Excursus

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Yugen 8
Front

Yugen 8
Table of Contents

Yugen 8
Poems by George Stanley

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Poems by George Stanley

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Poems by George Stanley

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Reviews of Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer by Gilbert Sorrentino

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Reviews of Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer by Gilbert Sorrentino

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Reviews of Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer by Gilbert Sorrentino

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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Poems by Steve Jonas

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“The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” by William Burroughs

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“The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” by William Burroughs

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Poems by Gilbert Sorrentino

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“Notes about Working” by Edward Dorn

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“Notes about Working” by Edward Dorn

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“Notes about Working” by Edward Dorn

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“Notes about Working” by Edward Dorn

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“Notes about Working” by Edward Dorn

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“Some Notes on Olson’s Maximus” by Robert Creeley

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“Some Notes on Olson’s Maximus” by Robert Creeley

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“Some Notes on Olson’s Maximus” by Robert Creeley

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Poems by Edward Marshall

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“The Largest Ocean in the World” by Leroi Jones

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Poems by Charles Olson

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Letters to the Editor and Contributor Notes

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Artwork by Aaron Rosen and ad for Kulchur

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Back matter

Yugen 8
Back

by Charles Gatewood

Adapted from Dirty Old Man, a Memoir

In January 1972, Rolling Stone magazine sent Robert Palmer (writer) and yours truly (photographer) from New York to London to do a feature story on William S. Burroughs. The iconic Beat writer greeted us warmly, and showed us into his modest two-room flat on Duke Street, St. James, near Piccadilly. He was was a tall, thin man with a sad face — long nose, thin lips, steely blue-gray eyes. Impeccably dressed in slacks, turtleneck, and tweed sport coat, Burroughs looked a hundred percent straight. Maybe that’s why the world’s most notorious literary outlaw was called El Hombre Invisible.

Jack Kerouac called William Burroughs “the most intelligent man in America.” Norman Mailer described Burroughs as “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Wildly experimental, Burroughs sought to discover “intersection points” where words, characters, images and dreams met to reveal important new meanings. “A writer,” said Burroughs, “is an artist with antennae tuned into certain cosmic wavelengths.”

William Burroughs came from a distinguished St. Louis family and attended America’s finest schools. After graduating from Harvard, he showed a strong affinity for junkie, queer, and criminal subcultures. His epic misadventures ultimately led Burroughs to believe he was “possessed by an ugly spirit.”

In 1951, at an apartment above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City, Burroughs shot and killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing a drunken game of William Tell. After spending two weeks in a Mexican jail, Burroughs made bail and fled the country. His subsequent visits to the Amazon in search of the psychoactive drug yage attracted interest from Allen Ginsberg and other “astronauts of inner space.”

In 1954, Burroughs moved to Tangier, an international free zone and a refuge for criminals and drug smugglers. He took a room in the Hotel Muniria adjoining a male brothel, stayed stoned on Eukodol (a synthetic opioid), indulged himself with Moroccan boys, and subsequently wrote the comic nightmares that became the book Naked Lunch.

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Burroughs moved to London in 1965. Despite the success of Junky (over 100,000 copies were sold) and the notoriety of Naked Lunch (banned in Boston), Burroughs was not especially well known in America. His “cut-up” novels — including The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded — were non-linear in structure and difficult to understand. Bob Palmer hoped our Rolling Stone story would “give Burroughs the mainstream exposure he deserved.”

Our first surprise was Burroughs’ modest one-bedroom apartment. The walls were almost bare, and the place looked way too neat and clean. The only hint of weirdness was the life-size cut-out of Mick Jagger standing next to a Uher tape recorder (and the faint smell of hash smoke perfuming the room).

Burroughs and Palmer hit it off. Bob was a true-believer and long-time Burroughs fan. His interview questions were sharp, witty, and insightful. A pipe of hash was passed. Hssssssp. The hashish electrified my brain, big-time. Everything seemed so magical, so enchanted. I couldn’t believe I was in London, on assignment for Rolling Stone with one of America’s hippest journalists, smoking hash with Old Bull Lee. It was fucking awesome.

Bob Palmer began by asking music questions. Did William invent the term Heavy Metal? (Yes). Did Steely Dan ask permission to name their band after the sex machine in Naked Lunch? (No.) What about the band Soft Machine? Did they ask to use the name? (Yes.) What kind of music did Burroughs most enjoy? (Old-time jazz, 1930s “reefer songs” like “When I Get Low I Get High”), and Moroccan trance music.

Burroughs chain-smoked English Oval cigarettes as he talked about misogyny (“Love is a virus — a con put down by the female sex” ), infra-sound used for crowd control (“Everyone in Yankee Stadium would shit his seat”), and the evils of money (“Money eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and creativity.”). 

What was the best drug? (“Cannabis, no question. I have a Doctor Feelgood who writes me scripts for tincture of cannabis — for my paranoia, heh heh”). What about LSD? (“Horrible stuff. I had two nightmare trips. I find mescaline and yage much more interesting.”) William also feared that LSD might be used by the establishment to control antisocial behavior. He showed us a passage in Nova Express:

Listen: Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer… Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit… flush their drug kicks down the drain — They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugs — learn to make it without any chemical corn.

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We were joined by Brion Gysin, William’s close friend and long-time collaborator. Brion was a handsome, energetic man with wise blue eyes and curly reddish hair. He wore a Moroccan skullcap, a striped wool djellaba, and embroidered slippers. Very cool guy.

Bob told me that Gysin, an artistic prodigy, had exhibited with the French Surrealists at the tender age of nineteen. Brion’s friends included many international superstars — Salvador Dali, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Billie Holiday, Jackson Pollock, Charles Henri Ford, Barbara Hutton, Sylvia Beach, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, and more. Brion Gysin knew everyone.

In 1950, Brion went to Tangier to visit writer Paul Bowles — and stayed 23 years. In 1954, he opened a restaurant called 1001 Nights and invited the Master Musicians of Jajouka (“the world’s first psychedelic rock-and-roll band”) to be the house orchestra. Visitors could experience deep-trance music that Brion traced back to the Rites of Pan (which later led to the Roman festival Lupercalia.)

“I went to Morocco for magic,” said Brion, “and stayed for the music. There are many mystical brotherhoods in Morocco, and they can truly possess you. You hear your music, you fall in line. That’s exactly what happened to me.”

At five o’clock, Dewars Scotch was served — chilled, no ice. Burroughs became more relaxed after a few drinks. “Brion Gysin,” he said, “is the only man I truly respect. Our collaborations have been amazing. Outstanding, really.”

“We met in Tangier,” said Brion. “We weren’t friends at first. Bill was all junked out, and very cranky. He called me ‘a paranoid bitch on wheels.’”

“Oh Brion,” scoffed Bill.

Brion puffed more hash, and said, “It was in 1958, at the Beat Hotel in Paris, that we recognized each other as creative soulmates.”

Brion showed us the layout boards of The Third Mind, their unpublished collaborative book. Using tape recordings, photo montage, film clips, flicker machines, crystal balls, lie detectors, and other vision-inducing gizmos, they had channeled True Magick, making important third-mind discoveries in a process they called “psychic symbiosis.” The illustrated book was a stunning montage of words and pictures, including fold-ins, cut-ups, news items, dream fragments, and a selection of Gysin’s permutated poems, like “Junk is No Good Baby,” “Kick That Habit, Man,” and “Rub Out the Word.”

“This book is such a sad story, said William. “So much creative work down the drain.”

“We had a publishing deal with Grove Press,” said Brion. “But Grove dropped the book because of the permission and production requirements. It was just too expensive to print.” (A smaller version of The Third Mind, with fewer illustrations, was published by Viking Press in 1978).

Our chat turned to mugwumps, talking assholes, and giant centipedes. Gysin said he had finished a screenplay of Naked Lunch and was showing it around. “The shooting script is finalized and budgeted. Eartha Kitt has agreed to play the purple-ass baboon, and Mick Jagger said he might play Burroughs. Can you imagine?”

+++

In his dry midwestern drawl, Burroughs told tales of wild boys, pornographic lynchings, and unspeakable nightmares involving soul-sucking freaks and monstrous insects. As more vodka loosened his tongue, Burroughs described a party trick he’d once seen performed by artist Jean Cocteau.

“Cocteau would strip naked, lie down, get hard, and ejaculate without touching himself.”

“How did he do it?” asked Bob Palmer.

“Thought power,” said William. “I’ve done it myself, but never at parties. I do it in my orgone accumulator.” 

I didn’t know if I believed William. He was quite drunk now, slurring his words, staring at my crotch. The Old Lizard King might be off hard drugs and living in a tidy London flat, but he was still a pervy old con. The truth well told.

+++

The next day, William looked pale and shaky. At a Chinese restaurant, he chain-smoked English Ovals while eating his fried rice. After lunch, we went to see Ian Sommerville, a Cambridge University mathematics student who was Burroughs’ boyfriend during most of the 1960s. Ian was a slender intellectual in his late twenties, who lived in an opulent Kensington Square flat filled with tasteful oil paintings and beautiful antiques.

After serving tea and cakes, Ian showed us Brion Gysin’s flicker device. The “Dream Machine” was a three-foot slotted cardboard cylinder, spinning on a phonographic turntable with a 100-watt bulb inside.

“The Dream Machine is revolutionary,” said Brion. “It’s the first art object ever made to be looked at with your eyes closed. At 78 rpm, it produces 8 to 13 stroboscopic flickers per second. The flashes of light synch with alpha rhythms in your brain. The Dream Machine has really changed my seeing. I see dream images — kaleidoscopic colors, glowing jewels, pulsing lights. I see patterns, grids, zig-zags, spirals. Sometimes tiny elves appear, and ‘little folk’ dance by. It’s quite a unique experience. Would you like to try it?”

I sat down, closed my eyes. The Dream Machine spun flick-flick-flick patterns of light on my eyelids. Before long, geometric shapes throbbed in my brain. I saw shining stars, dancing patterns, shifting balls of energy.

“You’re looking at the raw material of creation,” said Brion. “Awesome, isn’t it?”

You want the truth? I saw flashing patterns, yes. I saw bright colors too, especially hemoglobin red and psychedelic purple. And when I opened my eyes, everything looked fresh and new. But I did not experience any soul-shaking transcendental peaks, or meet my Maker face-to-face. I did not see the raw material of creation, or encounter any of the “little folk.” I wanted to see the raw material of creation, believe me. The Dream Machine gave me a fascinating peek at a world “beyond the veil.” It also gave me a headache.

+++

The next day, Brion told us he was the guy who gave Alice B. Toklas her famous recipe for hashish fudge. That amazing claim alone was enough to give Brion Gysin a permanent seat in the Hipster Hall of Fame.

“Brion’s a prankster,” said Burroughs. “That majoun fudge — it really fucked Gertrude up. Fucked her up good. Now, Brion’s pulling pranks on me. He’s got me cutting up my text, rearranging the words. He also got me hooked on Scientology, nasty man. Should I thank Brion — or should I kill him? Let’s ask the E-meter.”

William gripped the hollow steel cylinders of a Scientology E-meter. Burroughs called the contraption “a cross between a lie detector and a mind-reading device.” After turning on the E-meter and taking several deep breaths, Burroughs began asking himself questions.

“Am I me?”

The needle fell.

“Am I that I am?”

The needle reached a neutral position and stayed. “A floating needle,” said William. “Excellent.”

When I asked to photograph Burroughs using the E-meter, he said sure. I posed him in profile against soft window light — a very fine shot. When I asked to take some straight-on portraits, William began to look uncomfortable. I asked him to sit at a table near the window, and shot a quick roll of black-and-white portraits. Burroughs seemed very relieved when I finished.

+++

On the last day of our visit, I showed William Burroughs my Sidetripping bookdummy. He liked my bizarre photos, especially the naked “St. Sebastian” boy being led away by uniformed cops at Mardi Gras. He also liked my photo of a drunk fraternity boy pissing on Bourbon Street. “Wild boys,” said William. “Fine work.”

I knew Burroughs believed in verbal sorcery and the power of word-magic. Certain word combinations could be deadly, he said. Words had power. Words could kill.

“I want to make photographs that kill,” I told him. 

“When Sidetripping is published,” said Burroughs, “viewers will die, for sure.”

My palms got all sweaty. “Would you write an introduction to the book?”

“Why certainly,” said William. “I’ll be delighted.”

Oh my! William S. Burroughs would introduce my book! Never mind that I didn’t have a publisher — I would certainly find one now!

+++

In April, 1972, Burroughs sent me his three-page introduction to Sidetripping. I read the text with great excitement. It began splendidly, with a sly carny come-on:

Step right up for the greatest show on earth. The biologic show. Any being you ever imagined in your wildest and dirtiest dreams is here and yours for a price. The biologic price you understand money has no value here…

After quoting from New Scientist magazine (a piece about brain research), Burroughs continued:

Charles Gatewood the sidetripping photographer takes what the walker didn’t quite see, something or somebody he may have looked quickly away from and the photo reminds him of something deja vu back in front of his eyes. 

Burroughs went on to compare photographers to thieves — a nice touch. He also told how a writer named Dunne in his 1924 book An Experiment With Time found that some incidents in his dreams referred to future time:  

Point is he discovered that his dream referred not to the dream itself but to the account and photos in newspaper.

This was a cool observation — I’ve experienced pre-cognitive dreams too, many times.

William’s comments about my photo of a gallery crowd watching a woman masturbate were also dead-on:

What do the expressions on the faces of the spectators express? Substitute a car wreck, an epileptic convulsion, a lynching and the expressions would be equally appropriate…

Other parts of William’s text were more problematic. To accompany my photo of a sad-faced man holding a smile-face balloon, William quoted a long passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yikes. Was this a copyright issue? There were other problems too. Describing my photo of a dead-eyed leather boy with clothespins on his nipples, Burroughs wrote:

Is he a slave or victim who might turn up as a body in some Houston sex murder?

Oh dear. I didn’t have a single model release. Was this libel, slander, invasion of privacy — or all of the above?

Sidetripping ends with a frat boy pissing in the street as his drunken friends watch:

Look at the boy’s face. Smiling in the ruins. Dying? So what? We shall overcome. Ambiguous familiar in his face death child with a wide grin ambiguous familiar. AH POOK PISSED HERE. 

What kind of ending was that? And who the hell was Ah Pook?

I really couldn’t criticize William’s text — could I? After all, he’d written it as a courtesy, for free. It was all I had. It would have to do.

I cut the Burroughs text into sections, and plugged the text into my Sidetripping book dummy. There were gaps, for sure, plus that weird ending — but the surreal text did bounce off my raw photos in some powerful ways. At any rate, William Burroughs’ name now graced the cover of my book, and that was a big step forward.

+++

It took two more years to find a publisher. Most editors who saw Sidetripping were fascinated — but no one would publish such a strange book. Photography books were expensive to produce, and Sidetripping was loaded with potential legal problems.

“Thanks for showing us your work,” they would say, “and good luck. You have a good eye.”

A good eye, my ass — who would publish my book?

In October, 1974, good fortune smiled. After my book was rejected by over thirty publishers, Richard Kasak, owner of Strawberry Hill Books, agreed to publish it. Joy!

Kasak didn’t care so much about model releases — most of the photos were taken in public and had “redeeming social value.” Kasak considered it an important book, and agreed to print the pictures in quality duotone. He did have one request: Could I ask William for more text so we could run his words throughout the book?

“I’ll ask him,” I said.

+++

Burroughs was living in Manhattan now, renting a spacious loft at 77 Franklin street. The loft was neat, clean, and toasty-warm. I saw a rocking chair by the window, an orgone box in the corner, a pile of manuscripts on the kitchen counter. Nice digs.

William wore a single-breasted blazer, pressed slacks, and polished leather boots — and he seemed in good health. He was thrilled to hear I’d found a publisher, but not so happy to hear I wanted more text.

“I’m pretty busy right now…”

“I can get you a thousand bucks,” I said. “All we need is a few more pages, and permission to use a few short sections from Exterminator!, Ticket That Exploded, and Wild Boys.”

“That sounds all right,” said William. “Have your publisher call me.”

I danced out the door, and flew down the rickety wooden stairs. Hooray!!!

+++

Sidetripping was printed in August, 1975, by Metropolitan Printing, just a few blocks from my Chelsea loft. They did a fantastic job — the reproductions looked even better than my prints. Excellent!

The publication of Sidetripping changed my life, big-time. The Village Voice:

Sidetripping is for today what Robert Frank’s The Americans was for the fifties — a satirical, hard-hitting, uncannily perceptive profile.

The New York Times:   

Gatewood’s world is freakish, earthy, blunt, erotic — most of all, terribly and beautifully alive.

Cornell Capa offered me a teaching job at the International Center of Photography, critic Bill Pierce called Sidetripping “One of the best 100 photography books ever printed,” and filmmaker Mark Jury wrote, offering a documentary film deal. Wow!

Postscript

Last Gasp Publishing has printed a new expanded edition of Sidetripping, and first editions can be found online.

In 2011, I am producing a deluxe William Burroughs book with Dana Dana Dana editions in San Francisco. It will be a handmade artist’s book containing all the best photos from our 1972 shoot, plus previously unpublished photos of William Buroughs with Jimmy Page in 1975. The book will be similar to A Complete Unknown, my limited edition artist’s book about Bob Dylan. Only 23 copies of Burroughs will be produced. You can check out ACompleteUnknown.com to see the format and reserve your copy.

By Dave Teeuwen

Graham Masterton is the amazingly prolific author of over a hundred horror and thriller novels, as well as self-help / how-to guides about sex. He has been publishing steadily since the mid-1970s. Earlier in his career, however, he was the editor for Mayfair magazine and later the editor of Penthouse and Penthouse Letters in England.

During this period he was able to develop what would become the Mayfair Academy articles with William Burroughs. The articles appeared monthly over a period of two years from October 1967 to November 1969. Some of Burroughs’ most precisely stated essays and stories, they were distributed to a much different audience than the one that had experienced his writing in smaller press journals and underground newspapers. Even though Burroughs appeared regularly in magazines such as Evergreen Review, which did have a large distribution, Mayfair introduced him to a readership who was probably not buying the magazine for the chance to read his work.

The Mayfair articles were not just a great forum for Burroughs to expound on any subject he liked; they were a steady paycheck. Given the nature of his work, money was generally short, and as Masterton points out, the Mayfair articles were two years of guaranteed income. Much like Jack Kerouac’s column in Escapade in the late 1950s, Burroughs was now given the headmaster’s position of his own academy, simultaneously writing much of the work that would become The Wild Boys, The Job and Exterminator!

The following interview helps fill in some areas that are currently missing from the official story about Burroughs’ work and his life in London.

As an intro to the first Academy Series piece, “The Future of Sex and Drugs”, there is a short interview between Burroughs and Ginsberg and the editors of Mayfair, of which you were one. Was this interview more of a device to introduce the Academy Series or was this actually how it happened? Was the series Burroughs’ idea or Mayfair‘s?

I had been corresponding with William when he was living in Tangiers. At that time I was a newspaper reporter in Crawley, West Sussex. By the time he came to London I had landed the job of deputy editor of Mayfair, which wasn’t as grand as it sounds, because the entire magazine was put out by the editor and me and Brian Fisk’s dog. I went to meet William when he moved into his top-floor apartment in Duke Street, St James’s, and after a couple of meetings I asked him if he had any articles or excerpts from his forthcoming novels which we could publish. He had long had the concept of an academy at which he could expound and discuss his ideas on government repression and big business and the future of social control, so I suggested that he write a series of articles which we would call The Burroughs Academy. So I suppose you can accurately say that we thought of the idea between us. The interview was absolutely as it happened, although edited of course to make it rather more comprehensible than it actually was.

Including a literary figure like William Burroughs in Mayfair would be considered an odd choice for most pornographic or men’s-magazine equivalents of today. What was the philosophical approach behind the magazine?

Within its very limited budget, Mayfair was modelled closely on Playboy, which had always used prestigious authors and artists to give the magazine a veneer of respectability. We used to call it “excuse material”… in other words, readers would justify purchasing Mayfair by saying that they only bought it for the articles… and, good gracious, I hardly noticed that it’s full of pictures of naked girls. Brian Fisk, the founder of Mayfair, liked the idea of a magazine that had the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club. It sounds very dated now, but in the mid-1960s there was a big resurgence in interest in Edwardian-style men’s fashion, as well as wine and cigars and all the trappings of luxury living which of course had been missing in the 1950s. This veneer of respectability meant that we were accepted by WH Smith wholesalers while Penthouse was not.

The Academy Series is some of Burroughs’ most realized, precisely stated work of the 1960s. How did audiences react to the articles over the two years he contributed them?

In actual fact we received very little reaction from the readership and I suspect that few of our hardcore readers actually bothered to read his articles… or, indeed, any of the features and stories that we published. Most of the letters we received were about glimpses of girls’ panties as they went upstairs in double-decker buses. Or the lack thereof. The rest of the letters we invented. But there is no doubt that word got around about the series and eventually it became a kind of secret classic for Burroughs aficionados. Much of it ended up in his novel The Wild Boys. These days you can read it on the internet, and I have seen some snarky comments about the rather simplistic introductions that I wrote for each article. But you have to remember that William was never easy to read and his thinking was way ahead of his time, so I make no apologies for having tried to explain to Mayfair‘s readers what he was saying. If I could get them to read even half a page before they turned over to ogle Millie (of My Boy Lollipop fame) with not much on, or even Shakira Baksh (now Lady Michael Caine) wearing only a pair of pantyhose, then I counted that as a success for the counter-culture.

How did pornography and/or men’s magazines fit into the counter-culture in those days?

There had been one or two avant-garde stories and articles in Playboy but in those days girlie magazines were not really perceived to be part of the counter-culture, if by that you mean the Beats and the hippie and the satirists of the time (such as Screw and Oz magazines and TW3 on television.) So when we included William’s Academy Series in Mayfair, it was really the first time that a sex-oriented consumer magazine had featured articles that seriously questioned the Establishment.

While the Mayfair pieces were pivotal pieces in Burroughs career, especially in terms of stating his views on the world, for some reason they do not figure very largely in any of the biographies of Burroughs. Why do you think that is?

Mayfair‘s circulation was not enormous and it was not published in the United States, so the Burroughs Academy did not reach a very wide audience at the time. I don’t think that many of William’s followers would have been natural Mayfair buyers, either. I think there is a certain literary snobbishness about it, too, from what I have seen from several biographies. Those biographers fail to realize how important the Mayfair articles were to William as a writer and a thinker, and how they also helped him to pay the rent.

The Academy Series in Mayfair introduced William Burroughs to a much different audience than before. How was his homosexuality viewed by this new audience, since he was writing for a decidedly heterosexual publication?

William’s homosexuality was never an issue either with me or the readers of Mayfair. I suppose if we had published the articles today we might have included more arguments about the status and treatment of homosexuals in society, but most of the articles were concerned with thought control and political issues.

The tenor of the Mayfair pieces is very different from the work Burroughs began doing once he moved to NYC later in the 1970s. Do you think it was just a symptom of the times that he was so focused on political issues / control in the late 1960s? Why do you think he moved on to the more reflective work we see in The Cities of the Red Night and the novels that followed?

William did not like London and he was deeply suspicious of the politics of the 1960s. Not only that, I think that when he was writing for Mayfair he was feeling not only culturally displaced but politically and socially and even physically claustrophobic (his apartment was very small and confining, with sloping ceilings because it was on the top floor.) I lost touch with him when he moved back to NYC, partly because I was now newly married with a child and partly because of the geographical distance and partly because times had radically changed. His work always had a sentimental / nostalgic element to it… “last boat whistling in the last harbor” … “dim faded far away” and I think when he returned to the United States he felt able to wallow in his historical interests like the Johnson family and the myths and legends of the Old West.

What was the main demographic for Mayfair? I’m assuming it was 18 – 45 year old men from all backgrounds, but did you find that there was a much wider audience than that?

I think the audience ranged from 16 to 96, and included any man who liked looking at girls with no clothes on.

What do you feel Burroughs’ views on pornography and the world of avante-garde art were?

William hated censorship of any kind. As a homosexual he obviously preferred the stimulus of gay pornography (although I never saw him look at any, and there was never any overt gay activity in his apartment while I was there, apart from Ian Sommerville bursting into tears because his boyfriend had left him). But William never expressed any adverse opinions about the pictures or sexual articles in Mayfair. As far as avant-garde art was concerned, he was right at the leading edge. He and the artist Brion Gysin were working on a way of turning words into art.

As a noted writer of manuals and self-help guides on sex, what is your opinion of Burroughs’ view that Christian attitudes towards sex were the main thing holding back Science at that time, as he expressed in the interview you did with him in Penthouse in 1972?

I believe that narrow-mindedness of all kinds was holding back sexual and scientific progress, not necessarily Christian repressiveness. William wrote about sex openly, which is why The Naked Lunch was considered to be obscene when it was first published, and one of the main themes of my sex manuals was that sex should be discussed openly, especially between sex partners. I even wrote a Christian sex manual Love Thy Lover, Love Thy God which was commissioned by the American inspirational publishing house Pillar Books, but never published (although to be fair they paid me for it.) In those days, people did not have the vocabulary, either in words or emotions, to talk openly about sex, or to explain to their partners what they wanted and what they didn’t want. Teaching people to be articulate about their sexual needs and anxieties is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

Do you feel that this is still true in the present day?

Less so, obviously, than in 1972. I like to think that the sex books I wrote were instrumental in helping society to be less repressed about sex. They certainly did so in Poland when they were first published there after the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989… I still get blushing Polish ladies coming up to me today to tell me that I taught them everything they know, but of course the great explosion in sexual communication came with the internet, when people could freely see images of sexual activities that excited them and aroused them, and could instantly and confidentially look up anything about which they were unsure.

You have said in interviews that Burroughs taught you to “pick up your typewriter and walk.” How did he influence you most as a writer?

He taught me most of all to live the story rather than write it… to be there as the action unfolds, and to forget about the sheet of paper in front of me (or the screen, these days.) William’s novels are full of smells and sounds and weather and all kinds of sensations that make the narrative feel real. I work very hard even now to make sure that I am El Hombre Invisible, the Invisible Man, and that once readers start one of my novels they forget that they are reading words on a page, and think that they are actually living the story. The other thing that always impressed me about William was his dialog, which is actually highly stylized but “sounds” when you read it as if it is how people really speak. He brings over an enormous amount of character in his dialog and I always try to do the same. In fact I work on my dialog relentlessly, rewriting it again and again until it hits exactly the right note.

In what ways is your early novel Rules of Duel influenced by Burroughs?

Rules of Duel is written in the style that William and Brion devised called “intersection writing”. This means that the writer follows factual coincidences and synonyms as if they are a kind of code. It is an entertainment more than a mystical way of expressing yourself. I also used William’s method of cutting up sentences so that they are more than a mystical kind of code. This means that William hits exactly the right note.

Could you summarize the method you used to write Rules of Duel and the overall story for those who have not been able to read it yet?

I wrote most of Rules of Duel in the evenings after work, but I would take pages around to William’s apartment for him to read and comment on. It is set in London in the late 1960s and the hero is a newspaper reporter who suspects that central government is trying to introduce some repressive plan to control everybody in the capital. When it was finished I showed it to Wolf Mankowitz the film director and he loved it, and (if you don’t mind me being big-headed) called it a “psychedelic masterpiece.” “Psychedelic” — how’s that for dating it? Unfortunately he thought that it was probably unfilmable. William used one or two sentences from Rules of Duel in Nova Express, and he also said that he had used some in The Ticket That Exploded but I have never been able to find any in that particular book of his.

How close would you say you and William became during his time in London? It sounds as if you saw him pretty regularly.

I suppose I went round to see him about two or three times a month. We would either have a meal in his apartment or else we would go out to a restaurant in Knightsbridge or Covent Garden, usually with other friends of his such as the film director Antony Balch and Allen Ginsberg and Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin. We talked about all kinds of stuff, some of it totally inconsequential, like how much he hated Jacques Tati movies because he couldn’t stand clumsiness and incompetence — some of it serious like the politics of mind control or Scientology (which was a great new interest of his at the time.) He had a dry, droning voice and the appearance of a bank manager from the mid-West, but he could be incredibly funny and irreverent and we had some really good evenings and days together.

I drove him and Antony Balch down to the Scientology Center at Saint Hill in East Grinstead so that he could have a snoop around. We adopted the names of William Lee and Graham Thomas, and Antony made an 8mm movie of our visit which he later intercut with old black-and-white movies. I don’t know who has a copy of this film now but I would love to see it again.

Somewhere I have a photograph taken by Antony that day but it was temporarily buried during my move to Ireland. William and I talked a lot about the whole Rules of Duel concept, which was to educate young people, help them to become literate — but, more than literate, to give them their own language which would not only give them more control of their own lives in an increasingly technological world, but free them from the baneful influence of politicians and old farts. In some ways, much of that has come to pass in the internet age.

I have a picture in my mind’s eye of the evening at Duke Street when Alex Trocchi came to visit and brought William a swordstick. Nobody who has seen movies and photographs of William looking less than animated can imagine what it was like to see him dancing around his apartment with this sword, swinging it dangerously from side to side and shouting, “Ho, there, you ruffians!”

You have said that you have been reading Gysin’s book The Process for the last 25 years. Burroughs also made a point of calling it one of his favorite books of all time. What is it about The Process that keeps you coming back to it?

The Process is magical. The writing is so visual and so tactile that sometimes I have to re-read a sentence twice to work out how it was done. It is far too druggy and plotless to read all the way through. The first two chapters are enough. To quote: “I joggle the miniature matchbox I hold in my hand and these masterpiece matches in here chuckle back what always has sounded to me like a word but a word which I cannot quite catch. It could be a rattling Arabic word but my grasp of Arabic is not all that good and no one, not even Hamid, will tell me what the matches say to the box.” Technically, “chuckle” is such a brilliant word to use for matches in a box. And there are dozens of passages like that.

What was it about Brion Gysin do you think so fascinated Burroughs? At one point he said that Gysin was the only man he ever really respected.

Brion was probably the laziest man in the world but he had abundant talent as a writer and an artist and he was prepared to consider anything to express how he felt. No conceptual boundaries.

How close were you with Brion Gysin?

Not very. I met him a few times and he signed his book for me, and we got on well. We had a hilarious evening at a restaurant full of Middle Eastern gentlemen when William got very drunk and started shouting that we should bomb the Ay-rabs. Brion and I had to remove him with apologies to our fellow diners and take him home.

Is there anything about Burroughs and his work that you think people, even fans, misunderstand?

Maybe this is apparent to other people, too, but William told me one evening that he felt as if he had never lived the life he was supposed to live, and that somehow he had ended up as an outsider on the edge of his own existence. This could well have been brought on by the displaced feeling he had when he was living in London, but throughout his work there is always an underlying sense of lives that never worked out… of opportunities missed or squandered. There is such strong nostalgia, too, even for places that he never visited. Overall, I think he felt that nobody else could see the world the way he saw it, or think the thoughts that he was capable of thinking, and sometimes I think that made him feel desperately detached. That is what Rules of Duel is all about, that feeling of alienation in London in the late 1960s, that feeling that officialdom is always watching you and out to get you. That’s why I thought it so appropriate to see it published today, when we are back to heavy-handed state control and surveillance.

Timothy Leary interview, Pataphysics, October 17, 1989

From INTO-GAL, 2006, Editors: Leo Edelstein, Judith Elliston

We heard this tape of you with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Anton Wilson.

Oh yeah, that was a recording from the Nova Convention. I’m a great admirer of William Burroughs, who’s one of my real heroes.

When did you first meet him?

I met him in June of 1961, in Tangier, Morocco. And we became friends and we’ve been friends ever since. 

What brought you to Morocco?

I came there to meet William Burroughs.

And you were interested in the experiments Burroughs was doing?

Yes, I was very interested in the experiments he was doing with Brion Gysin. You’ve read Burroughs?

Yeah, The Soft Machine and the earlier work. I’m also interested in the later work — Cities of the Red Night —

Oh, I love Cities of the Red Night, that’s his last trilogy — Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. I think that’s his finest work.

It’s interesting how his technique has developed — the cut-up style has now become almost polished. 

Yeah, well, he’s mellowed out.

Have you spoken with him recently?

Yeah, he just wrote the introduction to a reissue of my book, Flashbacks.

He’s painting now.

Yeah, he doesn’t even want to write anymore — he likes to paint.

Do you think that’s the influence of Gysin?

Well, he and Gysin were very close friends. Gysin was a very strong personality and I think he influenced Burroughs tremendously, Burroughs says that too. Gysin was a very profound thinker and a prophetic guy. It was Brion Gysin who said that writing is fifty years behind modern painting — because modern painting, from expressionism and cubism and surrealism, smashed through all of the representational structures, whereas writers were still trapped in the grammatical form. That was a very profound statement that Gysin made. He was one of these very seminal figures. Gysin’s Dream Machine is a very early, wonderfully creative and primitive psychedelic machine. 

Gysin spoke of the Dream Machine making immaterial artworks inside the viewer’s mind. And with the cut-ups there was the idea of escaping this time-frame by breaking up the conscious flow of language. Did you have any interest in that at the time?

During my research at Harvard we were running psychedelic sessions, and we were interested in describing them. We were experimenting with various forms of video, and cellular movement and overlaps and sensory overload and multiple energy interactions to try to duplicate in a rather feeble way the experiences that you have in a visionary trance. Burroughs was actually in exile from America in the late ’50s. As a matter of fact, I was the one who brought Burroughs back to America after maybe six or eight years out of the country. I invited him to come to Harvard, and he is a Harvard graduate, so he was very glad to accept the chance to come back into the country.

Was he interested in what you were doing at Harvard when he came back?

He thought we were a bunch of dumb bozos running around and trying to save the world with these drugs and he was very uh, rightfully cynical about what we were doing. He’s a very scientific person. The only psychedelic he likes is marijuana. He never really liked other psychedelic drugs. Burroughs has forgotten more about drugs in his life than I’ve learned. Burroughs is in charge of his life, he knows what he’s doing. I think heroin is probably the best anesthetic there is. I’ve taken heroin maybe ten or fifteen times in my life, just for curiosity. It’s not a social drug at all. You take it to go within. The same thing’s true of ketamine. Ketamine is another anesthetic that gives you very powerful inner experiences, but you’re not very social, you can’t even carry out a conversation so it’s not my kind of drug. But Burroughs, he’s not the guy that goes around with a grin on his face saying peace and love. He’s a very crusty, introverted guy with a very deep sense of humor. He’s one of the funniest persons alive — it’s a very laid-back kind of humor, and that’s the way he is, and he’s magnificent [pause] yah.

Did you ever meet Genet?

I was supposed to meet Genet — I was supposed to meet him at Amman, Jordan, in September of 1970. I was in exile in Algeria and I’d been running around about people who said I should go to Amman to meet Jean Genet. But on the way there I was intercepted — the Americans located me in Beirut, and there was such a big stink that the people who were protecting me at the time, the Arabs, said you better get your ass back to Algeria because there’s too much heat. I was also traveling on a false passport, so I went back from Beirut to Egypt and then to Algeria. I never did get to meet him — my appointment with Genet in Jordan fell through, which I regretted.

Were you taking psychedelics at that time?

Well, I had a lot of, yeah, a lot Afghani hash around — it didn’t help! Eat a little of that and I’d get very paranoid, and all my paranoias were right, unfortunately. I did go take psychedelics in Algeria, went out into the desert with my wife and had some very powerful experiences in the Sahara Desert, which is of course the kind of place to get into other levels.

There’s the book by Aleister Crowley out there in the desert –

As a matter of fact, yes, I’m glad you brought that up. There’s a place outside Algeria — you go up the Rif Mountains and you come down to the desert, there’s a place called Bou Saada, which is known as the City of Happiness, and that’s where Aleister Crowley had one of his great mystical experiences, wandering around there — freaking out or getting some vision, I don’t know what it was. It’s a very sacred city. I didn’t realize that at the time. It’s a very logical place, if you’re in Algiers, and you go over the mountain, the first town of Bou Saada was an oasis town, and all the caravans for thousands of years have come, winding their way up through the Sahara, and that would be the first populated place. It’s a big center of interacting cultures — a very magical place. And there were oases outside of Bou Saada which had been used in many movies. I also met some good magicians there. I had a guide, and I kept telling the guide what I wanted. I wanted a place — I wanted to find someone that knew a place where I could go into the desert and meditate — amazing, cab drivers all over the world want to hustle girls and boys or whatever, but this guy finally got on to what I was saying and he put me in touch with some old Arab guy, who went out with me and showed me where to go. That’s kind of interesting, because you couldn’t find a cab driver in the city, like saying yeah, I want to find a place where I can go out and meditate. But that’s part of the special quality of Bou Saada…

Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire

by Ian MacFadyen

The exhibition of Brion Gysin’s Calligraffiti of Fire at the October Gallery in London is a major event. This is the first time the artist’s legendary final work, executed in 1985, has been shown in Britain and the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to experience the painting in the context of the artist’s small calligraphies and grid works whose fusion — the integration of order and chaos, the mechanical and the free-form — is absolutely crucial to the main painting. Curated by Kathelin Gray, a friend of Gysin”s, the show reveals the originality, power and beauty of Gysin’s art, and also includes photographs of William Burroughs taken by Gysin on the launch day of Naked Lunch in Paris, and versions of the Dreamachine which the artist developed with Ian Sommerville — reminders of the key collaborations and radical explorations of different media which would inform Gysin’s visual art. 

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, Exhibit Postcard

Calligraffiti is based upon the Japanese foldout makemono, and the hanging of the work at the October Gallery is a perfect solution to the painting’s length and “concertina” format — the beginning and end panels (Gysin intended the picture be “read” from right to left in the manner of Arabic writing) have been angled to suggest the opening up and closing of the whole, while leaving the rest of the sequence flush with the wall. The structure of the makemono had a philosophical significance for the artist — “I Am the Artist when I Am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.” — and this process of unfolding is effectively captured in the display. The painting was previously shown in Paris at the Sammy Kinge Gallery, and in Edmonton, and has also been exhibited in the context of Islamic art, but for fans and afficianados, and for those who truly care about painting, this is a very special celebration of Brion Gysin hosted by a unique gallery which has supported his work over many years.  

The Big Picture

Gysin had made a very few large works before Calligraffiti, including the great paper roll of gridded skyscrapers which he is seen painting in Antony Balch’s film Cut-Ups — Burroughs left this painting in his apartment and it subsequently disappeared. There had also been the meter-long A Trip From Here To There, “my first Big Picture with stone-ground Japanese ink and British watercolours”, painted in Morocco, as well as the “performance” painting which he made at the Domaine Poetique in the early sixties, a calligraphy executed with three wide Japanese brushes and an engraved roller on a large roll of photographer’s background paper. Lawrence Lacina recalled the denouement of this event: “Brion . . . took a bow, then cut the painting off the frame, letting it curl up on the stage floor. He then picked it up, unrolled it and tore it into pieces (loud groans from the audience) and left the stage.”  

Calligraffiti Of Fire was based upon a small ten-panel fold-out makemono, upon which Gysin had drawn with Japanese oil pastels. Both the form and the theme of this work, Summer Fires 1965, were decisive, but in attempting to make a final large work — “I had always wanted to paint a big picture” — Gysin was seeking to transcend the earlier picture and to leave a definitive statement of his vision and his powers, a permanent, lasting work in paint on canvas which would make up for the exigencies and vagaries of fate, and his own auto-destructive proclivities. This time, the work would remain, as evidence and validation. It would be the artist’s final work, a summa which would stand as testament to a visual art which had been an illustrious vocation rather than a glittering career. Gysin’s lack of a studio and his financial problems had made the painting and storing of large works impossible and Calligraffiti of Fire is inevitably a form of redress — see what might have been, if life had been less arbitrary, and fate more kind. The painting would exemplify everything which prosaic, cruel circumstance had denied — big enough to fill a gallery, large enough to encapsulate a life. 

The Late Brion Gysin

Terry Wilson recalls the atmosphere of secrecy which surrounded the execution of the work in 1985 and Gysin’s reluctance to discuss the painting apart from his admitted uncertainty about whether he had the strength and energy to realize his intentions. Gysin’s great friend and supporter James McCann made the painting possible, generously providing the artist with materials and assistants and, for the first time in his life, a proper studio in Paris. This was the place and the space where a boundless vision and the physical limits of the body would meet. It would be absolutely the last possible work, and its very scale would challenge the suffering of the body, the fear of death, and the judgement of posterity. Gysin was known to a cognoscenti as an exquisite miniaturist, but his desire to create a big painting was inevitably a way of taking on the large-scale works of the Abstract Expressionists and calligraphic tachistes such as George Mathieu. Despite his disdain and defensive hauteur, Gysin wanted to be in that arena, if not of that company, although it is the length of Calligraffiti of Fire (1640 cm), rather than its height (130 cm) which is so striking — the work cannot be visually encompassed from a single viewpoint and must be traversed and “read” through space and time as an unfolding sequence, like walking down the corridor of a moving train. Gysin was aware of the contradictions inherent in the project — after all, imagining a future mankind in space, free of earthbound objets d”art, he had noted, “I can”t see anyone taking any huge museum-size canvases along.” Well, he himself was going into space, and he would leave both his body and a museum-size canvas behind — the mortal and immortal remains of the late Brion Gysin. 

Kali Graffiti

Calligraffiti of Fire is much more than the form and theme of Summer Fires 1965 rendered on a large scale. When Burroughs looked at a Gysin painting and glimpsed, “a lot of people on fire . . . streaming with gasoline on fire across the whole picture . . . “, he was divining a paradoxical theme which runs throughout Gysin’s life and work: fire as incendiary liberation, symbolic of creative powers, and fire as immolation and obliteration — now one, now the other, and finally the same: the spirit of life and its nemesis, gathered and burned out in the same flame. Crucially, Lacina describes the painting and destruction of the image at the Domaine Poetique as a homage to the Goddess Kali, observing: “There’s no creation without destruction; there’s no destruction without creation — Kali.” In Tantra it is imperative to confront one’s fear of death and the curse of chaos and discorporation — and by his creative and auto-destructive act, Gysin was attempting to placate the Great Devourer by taking upon himself the obliteration of his own work, eviscerating his own striving for transcendence and his pride in his own accomplishments. Although Lacina had rescued the dismembered picture and with Gysin’s help restored it, it would nevertheless remain an essentially eviscerated work — the sutured body parts of a sacrificial rite, memento mori of an act of artistic suicide.

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, Painting, 1985

Bring Me My Arrows of Desire

Kali was very definitely not the Divine Mother as far as Gysin was concerned, but a fearful and ferocious consumer of time. In his auto-destructive act, Gysin casts himself as Shiva who throws himself at Kali’s feet in order to pacify her and halt destruction by simulating self-sacrifice — Kaligraffiti. Lord Shiva is often depicted as an archer destroying the Tripura fortresses of the Asuras. Gysin knew Eugen Herrigel’s 1948 Zen In the Art of Archery and in his work he incarnated the zen philosophy of bypassing conscious control in the execution of the artistic act. But there is another specific and profound connection between Calligraffiti and archery. In the 1930s Gysin and Denham Fouts had fired burning arrows from a Tibetan bow from a hotel window down the Champs Elysées — a performance which terrified the extremely cautious Paul Bowles. This symbolic, mystical act — which was also a thoughtless piece of high jinx and youthful stoned anarchism — would resonate for Gysin in unsuspected ways: the trail of fire and smoke left in the air by the blazing arrow was in itself a perfectly self-destructive calligraphic gesture, as inspired as it was doomed, as memorable as it was transitory. “Art is the tail of a comet”, Gysin would later claim, suggesting a creative act which burns itself out in space, and those flaming arrows of desire would become the trajectories of brushes and paint through space, leaving glowing traces of the actions which had fired them, concentration and effort unleashed at hazard. This analogy between calligraphy and fire, and between the flame of inspiration and the dangerous creative act, is present in the tradition of Taoist fire paintings, in which the character for a blaze, made with four strokes of the brush, may be exploded in the act of painting, creating an “Enbu” (dance of flames), embodying a fire running out of control, expressing the idea of fire through the destruction of the signifying radical or name, and projecting the feeling and experience beyond the conceptual understanding or referential signification . . . The word or emblem for “fire” is consumed by the very act of its own writing, which paradoxically conveys its meaning with extraordinary intensity, with power and heat. Likewise, Gysin’s own personal ideogram, his calligraphic signature, is torn apart in Calligraffiti of Fire — the “radical” or character of his own “personal fire” is fired, time and again, across the ten canvases, distorted, sundered, obliterated, leaving trail flames blown down the boulevard of time. 

The Great God Pan Is Dead

Gysin’s sign takes the form of a phallic bow, as if echoing the instrument with has impelled it — the arc of the brush through space before it shoots — fires — ejaculates its prima materia. Like Francis Bacon, Gysin even includes in the Calligraffiti a long thin flick and trail of white paint terminating in a strategically accidental drip, a petrified spermatozoa, the tail of a falling comet, and an onanistic offering to the fertility of vision. James Hillman has described Pan, the great Goat God, as the archetype of masturbation, an act which has creative significance “regressively far from consciousness”, and Gysin’s homage to Kali was also understood by Lawrence Lacina as significantly bound up with the music and rites of Pan in JouJouka: “The brush with yellow paint made sunny dancing glyphs; the orange brush splashed hairy swaths like Bou Jeloud in all his fury, brandishing his branch wand.” It is this ancient Moroccan dance of Pan which Calligraffiti commemorates, a ritual which Gysin connected to the Roman Lupercalia, when boys in goatskins ran down the Palatine Hill, lit by flaming torches. Gysin was psychologically steeped in the myths and magic of Pan, and as well as a procession of torches, the Roman phantasmagoria, Calligraffiti may be read as conjuring Pan’s true time of day, the blaze of noon, when the fields of grain shimmer and ripple in the heat and the air becomes a hot, flickering mirage, and yet time itself seems to stand still. This is the uncanny moment out-of-time which, as Hillman says, exemplifies nature at its most spontaneous and unaccountable, “headlong, heedless, brutal and direct, whether in terror or desire . . . all life at the moment of propagation or all death in the panic of the herd . . . Spontaneity remains an experience . . . outside ordering systems of explanation.” Gysin and Burroughs both mourned the passing of Pan and “The Great God Pan is Dead!” was for them the exemplary elegiac of the extinction of nature and the eradication of the ecstatic feeling that everything in the world is alive, a single self-devouring, but self-recreating nervous system. In his last visual apotheosis Gysin links the spontaneity of calligraphy with the risk and riot of Pan on the run. Hillman: “The spontaneous panic out of noon’s stillness reappears in the kobold, or little demon . . . said to cause panic and nightmare. This being too has a sexual connotation: it is phallic, dwarf-like, fertile, both lucky and fearful.” In Calligraffiti it is Gysin’s calligraphic personal sign which becomes the kobold, jumping and leaping through the picture space, the demonic essence of the psyche stretched and broken and transmogrified. These “creatures of the secret name” emerge in the bright light of day, monstrances derived from those secretive, miniature sprites who had danced through his drawings, his “jungle gyms”, and the little creatures he once tried to point out to Terry Wilson as actually existing in the world, but who are so terribly hard to see. Gysin saw them, they were as “real” to “him” as “you” and “I”. But like the little people of the desert encountered through hallucinogens, in Calligraffiti they are also fleeing the psyche, escaping the human domain, “fading out with demoniacal grimaces, shaking their fists. A great blast of sand sweeps down from the dune and envelops us all.” In this sense, the exuberant Pan dance of Calligraffiti is also, necessarily, a funeral march. it commemorates as it celebrates a vanishing spiritual dimension. Gysin wrote, “Music, little Pan, not dead . . . It proven Pan not dead.” But he also admitted, “There will be harrowing in my magic picture.” 

Incendiary

In his writing Gysin often evoked the heat and blaze of the desert and the Moroccan mountains in summer, the mythic Mediterranean and the islands of Greece, light flashing through the window of a bus, a field of burning grain seen from a darkened doorway, and transcendent visual hallucinations triggered in the nervous system by apocalyptic heat and light — “a swarming sting of the sun . . . burning bright to a fiery rose on the dunes running like molten orange gold. The day tortured eye.” And: ”the sun wrenched itself from the sky and fell sickeningly over the edge of the world . . . a rattle of fire across the Sahara.” Hypnagogic heat visions, optical flares, summer landscapes on fire and running past the eyes like a burning film, a match head igniting, exploding white and blinding the eyes — these may all be glimpsed and felt in Calligraffiti of Fire with its hot, searing palette. An irregular grid of small yellow and orange squares is broken by a central void through which the calligraphy runs, a series of flames jumping from canvas to canvas, burning through the emptiness of space left by the fragmented grid patterns. The grid was used by Gysin to suggest the appearance of buildings and structures, the creation of a world of solidity and matter, while the illusory nature of this dimensionality is continually emphasised in his work — it is a game of Maya, of illusion, revealing mistaken perception and the deception of appearances, an endless process of undoing what has been created. In Calligraffiti parts of the calligraphic strokes show roller patterns of superimposed yellow grid lines, emphasizing the surface and facture of the painting, declaring its illusory construction, as if the desire to create and build appearances will continue after the destruction by fire. . . Or perhaps this is terminal, and these are the glowing ghosts, the last vestiges of Gysin’s “jungle gyms” caught in the furnace at the final moment before they are extinguished. Calligraffiti is indebted to the 1950s and early 1960s Gold Paintings and Fire Paintings of Yves Klein, an artist Gysin admired greatly at a time when many in the art world considered Klein a charlatan and a buffoon. The two artists had a shared fascination with different esoteric traditions, from zen to alchemy and Taoism, and they both combined regular grid structures with the directed yet random act of the gestural mark. Calligraffiti suggests a summation of Gysin’s own merging of the grid and the calligraphic, and a hybrid homage to Klein’s brilliant grids of gold leaf and to his calligraphic strokes literally burned into boards with an acetylene torch — the transmutation of art into gold, and the human body recorded as a burn mark.  

Sabbah

Calligraffiti embodies heat in a different sense — calligraphy as subversive act, the gesture as embodiment of revolutionary fire and fervour, the art of incendiarism, of inflammatory writing. Burroughs identified Gysin’s calligraphy with the “silent writing” of Hassan i Sabbah — that is, writing which may be ‘read’ but cannot be decoded or spoken, a vehicle for the transmission of an esoteric knowledge for initiates and adepts. The connection with Sabbah is crucial because Gysin’s calligraphy, existing between painting and writing, is interpreted by Burroughs as a secret weapon, an incendiary instrument which carries a radical, heretical message, and this would actually become part of the work’s intent. Like the mysterious transmissions sent out from Alamout to the Assassins, a renegade “telegraph” system inspiring acts of subversion and revolt, Gysin’s “silent writing” would be understood as the magical communication of political subversion, inspiring the overthrow of the orthodox and the status quo. It may be read as a form of invective, like the language which blazes forth from Gysin’s Uher and the written page, a splenetic outpouring, lacerating, vituperative, an unleashing of rhetoric — language impelled by the desire to attack, a version of the scurrilous Roman psogoi. Gysin and Burroughs’ use of the Sabbah model was both metaphoric and literal but what is certain is that the notion of polemical power became an inextricable component of Gysin’s visual art, and in Calligraffiti the Old Master sends out his final heresy, his terminal call-to-arms: “Towers Open Fire!” The picture, full of attack and abandon in its fiery gestures, its forms coiling and unleashed, incarnates the spirit of the Hash Heads of Alamout as they sally forth on a suicidal murder mission. 

Ian MacFadyen and Dreamachine, 2008 (Photograph by Jonathan Greet)

Flicker

Nik Sheehan’s excellent documentary film FLicKeR has been shown as part of the October Gallery’s Gysin exhibition and visitors also have the opportunity to view two new versions of the Dreamachine. It’s clear that Gysin’s flaming calligraphy is symbiotically connected to the unfolding patterns created by flicker, a phenomenon which may be experienced as flames shooting out of the rotating cylinder, while the form of Calligraffiti, with its calligraphy running on continuously from panel to panel, is itself suggestive of the continuum of the Dreamachine. In Sheehan’s film Kenneth Anger speculates that hallucinatiory vision and the creation of art both originated in the contemplation of fire and in the receptive dreaming state produced by the inexhaustible flicker of flames in which no flame repeats itself — the plenitude of fire, as described by Gaston Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Certainly, to view Calligraffiti after using a dreamachine is to gain insight into the genetic links between Gysin’s art forms and in particular the absolute primacy of rhythm throughout his work. In calligraphy, prose, poetry, song and the Dreamachine, it is the experience of variety and permutation through a continual run-on and runaway measure which is so striking, an endless turning and unfolding, repetition and superimposition, the creation of a self-engendering, self-perpetuating experience of flux which is implicit in the form of the work and mirrored in the firing neural patterns of the brain. The cut-up too is part of this matrix in which art works appear to become autonomous and escape fixity — and the razor’s cuts, too, create a rhythm, a mechanical staccato like a train running over tracks or a film reel rattling around and around on a spool. Gysin’s greatest achievement was not in the disembodied creation of machine art, but in the setting free of the work, the pleasure and fascination inherent in seeing and feeling patterns and words and images take on lives of their own. His procedures both make the observer and reader conscious of the acts of looking and reading, and allow them to become immersed and lost in the experience, caught up and mesmerized. Such is the process — the sundering of boundaries and categories, the privileging of the play and metamorphosis of form, and the intuition of limitlessness wonder beyond grasp and meaning. 

Seed Pod

“. . . the sprout is the spring of green life . . . From the centre of ME within the grain, I shoot up one bursting letter written in that air which is nothing till I write it.” Gysin’s calligraphy derives from the cursive grass script, and he pursued this botanical and aesthetic analogy as he searched for his own, unique, talismanic, calligraphic signature, finding it in the bean sprout, the soya “whose explosive power can overturn monuments.” He understood the calligraphic gestures which emerged from this seed pod, an emblematic device transforming his written name into an image of contained explosive power, as the shooting and burgeoning tendrils of an uncontainable life force linked to the hallucinatory properties of plants. Describing the datura plant, he wrote: “. . . that flower had just bloomed and was still full of its rocketing strength. When I plucked it, it emitted a cry! . . . I appreciate plants quite differently since then. Immediately all around me I saw the entire garden alive. Everything, everything, all the flowers and plants and even each blade of grass was turning toward the setting sun by small sudden clicks. Everything was alive like me on this earth, everything was breathing.” His discovery and adoption of the seed pod motif which bursts and rockets with flowering arabesques of life, crystallized the equation between plant life and sound: the smoking of kif would evoke the music of JouJouka, cannabis synaesthetically conjuring the rhyhms of the riata, gimbri and lyre, while the the smoking of hashish suggested visions of the lush Paradise Garden of Hassan i Sabbah. The calligraphic script, the rites of Pan, hallucination, riot and music are all connected through the myth of Pan who made a pipe from a split weed in order to woo Syrinx. The calligraphic sign, the music, the dope — all derive from the plant world and so lead Gysin to make correspondences between myth and the natural world, art and botany, sound and visual hallucination, and to systematically explore their synaesthetic relations. The musical analogy is fraught with contradiction — as ever with Gysin: he believed music was a war machine and the music of joujouka was at some level for him not only a healing music, an invitation to trance, but a call to arms, the inspiration of usurpation, the very rhythm of revolt.  

Guillotine

The calligraphic gesture is a cut through space and time, and Gysin would recall witnessing the last public execution by guillotine in Paris, the definitive act of slicing through life. The ‘Way of the Brush’ was also for Gysin a form of shamanic dismemberment — the magical passes of the brush cut through space, leaving slashes and wounds and deep cuts through which the ink or paint bleeds into the surface of the reliquary paper or canvas, and the very gestures made by arm and wrist and fingers are ‘immortalized’ by these fatal, fateful lesions. Tony Balch’s film Cut-Ups shows Gysin literally attacking the picture surface as well as coaxing and caressing it — it is an erotic physical act, as violent as it is tender, as percussive as it is a series of brief or lingering strokes. The brush hits and strikes and is then dragged and twisted or lifted in a long carress, tapering away or cast off before resuming a different course, a variation, a permutation — always unique, but part of an eternal sequence of possible strokes and flicks, dashes and flourishes. Rhythm is all — and Gysin’s calligraphy inviting a ‘reading’ beyond literal decipherment, is linked to his incantatory but broken, improvisatory yet metred song raps and word plays. It is the visceral rush of inspiration, the physical body in action, and the play of variation which Gysin relished in all its forms — visual, lexical, aural, and their libidinal congress and synaesthetic communion. 

Infamy Infamy They’ve All Got It Infamy!

All those great stories about bad luck and hexes, personal disasters and losses — Gysin broadcast these as a litany of lamentation. Fleeced of his restaurant 1001 Nights, out with just the shirt on his back — that was his story. Kicked out of the Surrealist movement, his article on Alamout rejected by Rolling Stone Magazine, the failure of the Dreamachine to sell a million . . . Burroughs’ “Project For Disastrous Success” perfectly captures Gysin’s martyrdom and woe, athough this was done almost always with great style and gusto, an enjoyable immolation, yes, and of course there was always some truth to it, a real case to be answered. Perhaps the truly splenetic is always at some level self-lacerating, and Gysin was a master of both self-abnegation and the terminal put-down. Rubbing out the word was a way of rubbing out the self, erasing his own name and sign, and necessarily a masochistic act of self-subversion at some level, a confusion about his own identity and very being. If, as Terry Wilson has said, “Contradiction was their Method,” then in Gysin’s case this included the undermining of his own reputation. Burroughs told me, “There was a step which Brion would not take . . . ” Perhaps the default mechanism was a kind of perverse self-preservation, never to relinquish the special domain of outsiderhood, invention and playfulness. Reputation and status weigh heavy on the shoulders of born mischief-makers and though Gysin’s reputation is assured, it’s always, as ever, only just so far, and then never, ever enough. He will remain a painter’s painter, as we used to say, way back when, before the art was on the money, and the serious money was on the less-than-serious art. He is fated, as he certainly knew, to appeal to a certain esoteric constituency, forever branded the man who did too many things, and did them all too well. His attacks on the vulgar market place were too true not to rebound upon him with a vengeance, and if his refusal to be co-opted went hand-in-hand with the desire for fame and fortune, in the end he was reconciled to having done what he could — and a lot more besides! In this sense, Calligraffiti is the double consummation of Gysin’s name — a consummate act, and one consumed by fire, the name rubbed out, and the name immortalized. The name will be remembered because he did indeed erase it — the double act of a true master of paradox. 

Francesco Rimondi, Terry Wilson and Ian MacFadyen with Dreamachine, 2008 (Photograph by Jonathan Greet)

Celebration of an Auto Da Fe

With a big brush Gysin stabbed the canvas, pulled and twisted his magic wand in space, catching desire by the tail, shooting forth the phallic sign of sexuality for its own sake, an erotic Pandemic beyond procreation, the pleasure principle above the biological imperative. But this painting is as elegiac as it is festive, a paradoxical work of profound mourning which is carnivalesque in its exuberance and brightness. These inspired, dancing, bold calligraphic strokes are literally the final traces, the Last Words and Testament, the Dance of Fire performed as a death rite, a real Bonfire of the Vanities, taking us from primordial chaos to a great and terminal immolation . . . Everything in the artist’s creative life is subliminally referenced in this painting which travels horizontally through the Bardo and consigns the body and the body of work alike to the fire. “A death trip?”, Gysin liked to ask, “what other kind of trip are we on?” Calligraffiti of Fire was the last dream of a dying mythomaniac, the seduction of Pan and the destruction of Kali become one, and cancer at the door with a singing telegram. This should be heard as a Blues rendition of Really Bad News — Gysin’s favourite music was the duende of black culture, jubilant and broken-hearted, hot and sexy, soulful and full of suffering and protest, playful, direct, moving and extraordinarily sophisticated. He incarnated the same qualities of celebration and despair and artfulness in his own songs and art and writing, he recognized himself in that culture of otherness which he also heard in the swirls and blasts of the Moroccan riata. It really was Everything or Nothing for Gysin — to become other, and to disown one’s self, whoever or whatever that might be, to confound race and sex and genes and nationality, that was the impossible death-in-life process which he pursued through work which reverses the accepted idea of art as self-realization — his aim was the erasure of personal identity, to disappear entirely into the creation, the illusion, especially when playing and punning on his own given Christian name and the name of the Father. However often he proselytized the heretical in all its variations, or employed it as creed or manifesto, it is as if Gysin could not access the true meaning or purpose of his perverse desire to unmake and undo himself — as if the process of deconstruction was a pure form of transcendence and free from any psychopathological motivation, a detached experiment devoid of causal contamination. It is significant that Gysin diagnosed Burroughs as suffering from possession by an Ugly Spirit, the malign entity of a traumatized past, but was unwilling or unable to discover any such comparable daemon in his own psyche. But his desire to become another was more than a homage to Rimbaud and his own declared program of spiritual demolition is suggestive of nothing less than a fated, pre-emptive strategy for outwitting death, an abnegation which rebounded in his long drawn-out, pain-filled demise. As ever, the final acceptance of mortality always leaves a space for denial, a remaining, absolute, biological incomprehension. If not to survive, then to leave a trace of having existed. And at some level, that is what the grand gesture of Calligraffiti is all about. By his mark shall you know him, and thereby remember him. Graffiti on a wall: Brion Gysin Was Here. 

Inferno

At the same time, naturally: total annihilation of the individual, a terminal disappearing act. “I mean to get out of here and come back again never!” Radical dispersal: gestures as magical passes caught at the critical moment between implosion and explosion. Oblivion, as big as he could paint it, as he stared right into it. A testament of despair, written in letters of fire. “A story like this can have no happy ending. Or can it?” Gysin loved Dante’s Inferno and if he found his own transcendent Sahara transformed by Dante into a Hell, then he recognized that it had always been that way — ring doves and snakes, beauty and terror, life and art created and consumed in the same inner spiritual flame. Calligraffiti of Fire is the celebration of an Auto Da Fe, a long last sweeping look at the blazing summer panorama, fields rippling with light and life, that moment of awareness and arousal and acceptance when everything is just waiting to begin, the spinning, ecstatic, disoriented view from a darkened but sun-dazzled doorway of the plenitude and possibility and mystery of life opening out like a makemono, blinding white page upon page — and then the sun goes out and eyes close forever. It was all a kif dream, after all, wasn’t it? Yes, a beautiful illusion, a Paradise Garden now reduced to the stone ruins of a renegade fortress. Archers, prepare your arrows of fire! The Golden Elixir is acrylic paint on a picture which could be worth a truly considerable sum one of these days, though then again, don’t bank on it — as Brion Gysin knew only too well, and as we’re finding out right now, money is the greatest illusion of all, the one we are helplessly invested in. Gysin painted and wrote illusion, because that was both the key and lock of his philosophy : All is Maya, and long may Maya reign, and here’s Brion Gysin’s version of the whirl . . . He had written and painted as he had lived — flamboyant and careful, classical and revolutionary, narcissistic and self-loathing. Calligraffiti is the contradictory bittersweet farewell of a misanthropist who loved life, an artist who recognized beauty and suffered the anguish of the abyss, doomed to live and love, and blessed to die. It is a paean and a conflagration, a hymn to the fire of inspiration sung with ashes on the lips:

And slowly, slowly dropping over all
The sand, there drifted down huge flakes of fire . . . 
Even so rained down the everlasting heat,
And, as steel kindles tinder, kindled the sands,
Redoubling pain . . .

Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire
11 December 2008 — 7 February 2009

October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street
London WC1N 3AL

Review by Graham Rae

FLicKeR, Written and Directed by Nik Sheehan (2008, 75 Minutes, Not Rated), Alive Mind Media

“We must storm the citadels of enlightenment. The means are at hand.”

Dreams. Let’s face it, nobody truly fully knows what they really are. We spend a third of our lives asleep, inscrutable calcium fortress skulls encasing reality-drained mammalian brains in energy-conservation-mode lockdown, being carried along a constant unintelligible river of tattered neon headswimages, safely drowning in cryptic riptides of brief-flare neuronic-and-synaptic mosaics of our daily lives.

Historically, dreams have been charged with everything from curing health problems to prophesying upcoming world events, bearing the weightless weight of would-could-should-be future human evolution and revelation. Musings on our nocturnal cranial emissions moved from prophetic to psychological study mode with Freud’s 1900 volume The Interpretation of Dreams. This book spawned a pop-pseudoscience-fiction literary subgenre about the supposed “meaning” behind various symbols and subjects encountered in dreams, and what they “meant” for the dreamer. More recently, however, hard science has tackled our sleeping dreaming wondering selves with excellent volumes like An Evolutionary Psychology of Sleep And Dreams, which attempt to unravel the evolutionary physiological reasoning behind our everynight internal flickershows.

One man, however, who was not so much interested in what dreams “meant” as with recreating them at will by means of electronic stimulus was artist Brion Gysin, the only man William S. Burroughs ever respected (always wondered what that meant with regards to Allen Ginsberg, who basically got WSB his literary career, but that’s beside the point). The far-traveled secret agent provocateur agenda artist was in France in December 1958, when he experienced a lightshow-and-tell that would change his life forever. As he put it in a diary entry for 12/21/58:

Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseilles. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling through space. I was swept out of time. I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?

New documentary FLicKer, based on the John Geiger book Chapel of Extreme Experience, attempts to explain this very question. The puzzled man’s bemused musings on his tripping-the-light-fantastic experience were only sort-of solved when the ever-cutting-edge reader Burroughs passed him the then-new neuroscience volume The Living Brain by W. Grey Walter, the man widely credited with inventing artificial intelligence. Gysin was fascinated to learn of the hypnotic stereopticon stroboscopic effects of certain light-and-dark alternating patterns on stimulating the brain’s alpha waves, and how the headspinspiration produced could synthetically generate something pretty much akin to dreams or visions.

Gysin wanted to harness the prophetic power of lightwaves for visionary fun and for profit. Pondering synthetic vision-inducing methods, the nomadic artistic-truth-seeker came up with the idea for a dream machine, an eccentric device basically incorporating a 100-watt bulb, a turntable, and a cut-up cylinder of cardboard, to create a strobelight effect on the viewer’s closed eyelids. This in turn approximated the effect Gysin had experienced on his revelationary French bus trip, and the awed viewer could sit and experience a drugless high to his or her heart’s content.

In theory, if not in practice. Gysin took his baby to brilliant English mathematician Ian Sommerville and got him to construct a prototype, realizing that mass manufacturing of this device could lift him from his shabby garret-dwelling existence and into far richer realms than he inhabited. He tried to sell his invention to electrical company Phillips, but noted ruefully that they wanted a device to put people to sleep whereas he wanted quite the reverse. Nobody quite knew what to make of the dream machine, whether it was an art piece or a toy or an entertainment. Or was it the End of Art (to be looked at with the eyes closed, as was sagely noted) and something that would make artists outdated? This contradictory classification conundrum was never solved and Gysin died broke in 1986 in Paris, to sleep eternally perchance to machine-dream of a mainstream artistic breakthrough he never achieved during his lifetime.

This sad, fascinating, quixotic quest is comprehensively covered in this excellent documentary, running parallel with a brief, tantalizing discussion of Gysin’s artwork and his undervalued place in the art world in general. This whole aspect of the man could be doing with a whole movie itself, because by necessity the filmmakers are concentrating on Gysin’s lightflight invention. What is contained, however, is as illuminating as the machine whose evolution it documents, and when a contemporary dream machine is constructed and used by various artists and musicians past and present, it certainly made me want to build one of my own.

Various surviving 60s countercultural heroes like Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull and Kenneth Anger are interviewed about their meetings with the artist, and it makes for entertaining stuff, especially as most of the old crew in the doc seem a bit drugfried; Terry Wilson, Gysin’s one-time sorcerer’s apprentice, seems particularly, eh, short of a reality check or two. But that’s fine. When you’re dealing with dabblers in drugs and the occult you have to expect a braincrash or two. Special passing mention here must go to Psychic TV singer / all-round far-out artistic malcontent Genesis P-Orridge, who gives off an unpleasant and unsettling aura of pain and depression and deep mental imbalance as he discusses at length his friendship with the film’s subject.

With a set of implanted breasts (he believes he is the male-female incarnation of himself and his now-deceased wife) and blonde wig he looks uncannily like Andy Warhol after bad plastic surgery, and I felt a mixture of pity and revulsion and boredom watching him and his bad 60s-psychedelia-meets-Joy-Division band playing along to dream machine-like strobelights. Much better and more interesting footage is stuff like a British Channel 4 interview with Gysin and Wilson from 1983, or footage of the artist’s “soulmate” Burroughs shooting up, or the mad experimental films they made together during the 50s and 60s. There’s some great animation explaining who Hassan I Sabbah (Gysin believed he was channeling the 10th century King of The Assassins) is, and, in a rare moment or two of levity, some hilarious footage of a tortoise-robot from the 1950s when W. Grey Walter and his pioneering cybernetic work is being discussed.

Gysin was obsessed with writing and rewriting his signature graphomaniac-style-after-different-new-style, changing and arranging and rearranging and deranging the letters of it into every configuration possible to see which would look better, obviously obsessed with, and confused by, identity. He believed by eliminating the name you could eliminate the body; his art was magical in basis, with a lot of this gleaned from living in Tangier in the 50s, where he met Burroughs in 1954. The two men’s thinking was an odd admixture of scientific and magical, with them seemingly able to believe in utterly worthless garbage sometimes and do stuff like try to put spells on astronauts in space. This pathological paralogic surrounding Burroughs is never something I’ve been able to understand or accept, except as a consequence of rampant hardcore drug abuse and constantly-altered realities, and I guess linear logical thinking (which the two artists would probably have said was overrated anyway) was always going to be a casualty of the eternal internal drug war in these two fascinating individuals.

It’s funny though. Musing on how Gysin (described as “the conjuror swallowed up by his own spell”), who was penniless and mostly unknown (even today) when he died, Marcus Boon, author of The Road to Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, says of Gysin in the film:

He somehow disappeared as the agent of the forces he was setting in motion, and that in some sense was actually a success, it actually proved that he was able to do something or other. And again, that’s why we’re talking about him 20 years after his death. Some kind of force was unleashed and made its way into all these different channels of culture. But he himself seems to have disappeared in the process.

Which, judging by what he was trying to do with eradicating his name, is more than a little ironic. This superb documentary (to which there is much more than I have discussed here) is wholeheartedly recommended to both Burroughs / Gysin aficionados or newcomers to Gysin’s oeuvre, like myself. I personally learned a lot, and realized how much I had devalued Gysin’s role in Burroughs’ life and work and worldview. A fundamentally stupid error, of course, as is Gysin’s still relatively unknown status, but hopefully this educational and inspirational work will go some way to rectifying that. That would be a magical act indeed.

PS: Feel like making a dream machine for fun and no profit? Go have at it!

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Published by Auerhahn Press in 1960, The Exterminator is one of the forgotten texts of Burroughs’ bibliography. Roughly 1000 copies were printed in the first edition, and I would gather that few of even the most dedicated Burroughs fans have ever read it. Many people get this slim volume confused with the more common Exterminator! Readers who go beyond Naked Lunch and Junkie are probably familiar with Exterminator! as the book is currently in print and often turns up at chain stores such as Borders. This makes sense as Exterminator! heralded Burroughs’ tentative steps into the world of mainstream publishing. The book was issued by Viking in 1973. Not surprisingly, this title is rather conservative in form, content, and packaging when compared to the radical experimentation in independent publishing venues of the preceding decade. It is basically a short story collection.

If The Exterminator is a forgotten text, Dave Haselwood is something of a forgotten publisher. His Auerhahn Press aspired to join high-quality printing with experimental writing. Building on the solid foundations of Circle, Ark and the printing work of the refugees from the Waldport Camp, like William Everson, printing in San Francisco exploded after the so-called San Francisco Renaissance of the mid-1950s. Joe Dunn and later Graham Mackintosh ran White Rabbit Press. Robert Hawley began Oyez Press in 1963. A year later, Donald Allen started the Four Seasons Foundation. Little magazines, like Semina, Open Space and J Magazine flourished. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Haselwood’s press was a shining light in this vibrant San Francisco publishing scene. His books were beautifully done and according to some expensive. Andrew Hoyem cut his teeth working with Haselwood on Auerhahn Press titles in 1961. Yet time has dimmed the glimmer of Auerhahn Press. Somehow printers, like Hoyem and Mackintosh, have become household names in printing circles, and the legacy of Haselwood gets relegated to the shadows, rarely to be seen or heard from, like the bird from which the press takes its name.

How can this be possible when you take into consideration the titles and authors Haselwood published? Auerhahn began with John Wieners’ The Hotel Wentley Poems in 1958. Right off the bat the press printed a landmark work in post-WWII avant poetry. In addition, from the beginning Auerhahn had a signature look and feel. I love the cover photograph by Jerry Burchard. It reminds me of Charles Rotmil‘s cover of Bob Thompson for Kulchur 2. In fact, Haselwood had a way of publishing what became iconic cover images. This might be because Haselwood had the good sense to utilize the talents of Wallace Berman, Robert LaVigne and Bruce Conner. The covers of Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras and Philip Lamantia’s Narcotica are amazing. These are some of the most recognizable photos by Berman. If you didn’t get it for Christmas, get Wallace Berman’s Photographs. It came out late last year on the heels of the excellent Wallace Berman and his Circle. Do yourself a favor and get both. They are fantastic.

In addition to multiple works by McClure and Lamantia, Haselwood also published books by Philip Whalen, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Jack Spicer, and William Everson. After Auerhahn folded, Haselwood continued to publish wonderful titles under his own imprint, Dave Haselwood Books, including Apocalypse Rose by Charles Plymell and Indian Journals by Allen Ginsberg.

Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press has singlehandedly attempted to keep Haselwood and his incredible backlist in the spotlight. Johnston published a bibliography of Auerhahn Press in a beautiful edition. The look of the volume really does Haselwood and Johnston proud. The accompanying text is a treasure trove of information on Auerhahn. Go out and get a copy. While you are at it, pick up Poltroon’s White Rabbit Bibliography and the Zephyrus Image Bibliography as well. These are essential reference works on the San Francisco small press scene in the post-WWII era. If you can dig up a copy, get a hold of Ampersand Volume 16 Number 1 as well. In this issue entitled Beat: A Dead Horse, Johnston interviews the reclusive Haselwood. The quotes from interviews and letters that follow come from the bibliography and Ampersand.

Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up volume was the eighth book published by Auerhahn Press. Haselwood put a little extra into it. The Exterminator can be considered Burroughs’ first fine press edition. In fact a limited edition of the book contained original artwork by Gysin. Roughly octavo-size but thin (only 51 pages) the book has a slight, ethereal quality. This is highlighted by the beautiful wrappers inscribed with Brion Gysin calligraphy in light green on front and back. The white and green covers are delicate, subject to staining and fading. Finding a copy in fine condition is a challenge.

As an object, I feel that The Exterminator is one of Burroughs’ most beautiful publications. Johnston remarks on the book’s typography: “Artistically a minor production Wobbly Rock… was followed by a typographic lapsus: The Exterminator by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose innovations in prose have seldom been paralleled in the typography of their books. Haselwood does approach the coranto immediacy of the later Brion Gysin Let the Mice In… though Exterminator strikes out towards an oversize Olympia paperback. The running commentary in Grotesque points up the blackness of the text, however the unletter spaced Cloister capitals detract from the appearance; the murky Venetians indicate Haselwood’s Kelmscott tendency.” I find the book to be visually arresting. I am reminded of Kyle Schlesinger’s essay on Creeley’s Typography. A similar essay on Burroughs might be in order, particularly about the mimeo publications of the 1960s, despite Johnston’s downplaying of the importance of typography in Burroughs’ work. Not all agree on the beauty of The Exterminator. Haselwood has some reservations about the typography. He states, “The little headlines at the top are all handset but the rest of it was set on a Linotype machine. But you can’t keep track of what is going on anywhere, it just keeps… like diarrhea.” But in his interview, Haselwood draws special attention to the Gysin drawings at the back of the book and admits “it’s worth getting for this part.”

Like many, Haselwood was quite fascinated by Burroughs. Unfortunately, this interest did not extend to the manuscript he received from Burroughs and Gysin. He states, “To tell you the truth I was pissed off that he sent me this manuscript, because I was a great admirer, and wrote to him — because I’d seen Naked Lunch in manuscript — I wrote to him and said I’m a great admirer, I’d met him many years before, and I thought I was going to get something really wonderful, and I got this and I’m afraid I don’t think it’s wonderful, even to this day.”

On the other hand, Burroughs and Gysin were giddy with excitement about the possibilities of the cut-up. The collaborators saw nothing but opportunity and even dollar signs. Haselwood states, “[T]hey thought they would be very rich and famous. Can you imagine, from a cut-up book. God, he must have really been out on smack somewhere at that point. These are almost impossible to read. It was impossible to typeset.” I always find it funny that Burroughs thought his least commercial writing was a potential moneymaker. Burroughs believed The Exterminator would “catch on commercially” and wondered if Auerhahn could handle it. Burroughs writes, “Do you have any connections with recording? Brion and I have both made tape recordings of material in Exterminator I and II. In fact, the repetitive poems could be jukebox sensation.” He thought they would be great on the radio.

As evidenced from the collected letters, Burroughs early on desired to be a bestselling author. He craved acceptance from an audience, be it the general public or, as Oliver Harris demonstrated, Ginsberg or Lewis Marker. This early need for affirmation and the desire to make it big never left Burroughs. These attitudes make Burroughs’ decision to do a Nike ad in 1994 perfectly understandable to me. From the beginning, Burroughs sought to sell out. On one level he never had the opportunity early on. On another level, no matter how hard he tried (and the letters show he tried repeatedly); he just could not write bestseller material. The Ugly Spirit kept getting in the way, as did his faith in the cut-ups. But like his grandfather, Burroughs was an entrepreneur. He wanted to make a buck. It was in his blood. Exterminator fever did not sweep the country although Burroughs received a small royalty check from Haselwood in 1961.

Yet the book must have been something of a success, because Haselwood reissued it in 1967 with much less beautiful wrappers. Missing are the white and green, replaced by a dark blue and red. In my opinion, the color change makes all the difference. Like the 1960 edition, there were 1000 copies in the second edition.

So what does this forgotten text tell us? The Exterminator presents Burroughs at the dawn of his most radically experimental period. The idea of Burroughs as a poet has largely gone unnoticed. This may be due to the rarity of the two key texts in question: Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. But in the time between the Olympia Naked Lunch and the Olympia Soft Machine (late 1959 to mid 1961), Burroughs appeared before the public as much as a poet then as a novelist. Remember Naked Lunch was unavailable in the United States as a complete novel. It remained in essence a short story published in little magazines like Big Table. In fact, The Exterminator was Burroughs’ first book in the United States since the 1953 Ace edition of Junkie. In the little magazine scene, Burroughs the poet is most obviously present in Semina IV, Locus Solus II, and Floating Bear 24. These publications had few readers, but those who received them were probably writers and artists. The Burroughs they would be familiar with would be as much a poet as a novelist. This may helps explain his appeal to, and presence in the publications by, First and Second Generation New Yorkers such as John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan. Of course, the poetic elements of Burroughs are beautifully apparent in Naked Lunch, and Burroughs’ interest and mastery of poetry continues into the visual (scrapbooks, three columns) and textual (the novels and shorter prose poems) cut-ups of the mid-1960s.

The Exterminator is a mixture of fiction, essay and poetry. Burroughs described it as a “cosmic opera. Like Gotterdamerung” with themes of junk, viruses and Caryl Chessman. To put a spin on Haselwood’s view, it is a glorious mess of several genres. The Exterminator serves as a transitional work from the poetic experiments of Minutes to Go to the form of the novel in the Soft Machine. It is also the foundation for the more ambitious cut-up works like APO-33, Time, The Third Mind, and The Dead Star. I feel that Burroughs and Gysin’s contributions really mesh well together in The Exterminator. I am reminded of the tagline to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch — “Exterminate all rational thought.” This thin book seeks to shatter the control of the Word. The book opens, “The Human Being are strung lines of word associates that control ‘thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions.’ Quote from Encephalographic Research Chicago Written in TIME. See Page 156 Naked Lunch Burroughs. See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines keep Thee in Slots..” Gysin’s permutation poems “Rub Out the Words” and “In the Beginning was the Word” fit in beautifully here as do his drawings that close the book. Burroughs’ interest in the possibilities of glyphs and hieroglyphics (like Pound’s with ideograms or Olson with the Mayans) as alternative forms of communication and representation becomes apparent here. Burroughs would return to this effect at the end of Olympia Press edition of The Ticket That Exploded where that book ends in silence represented by Gysin’s poem morphing into calligraphy (“Silence to say Goodbye”).

From the instant of its rediscovery by Gysin in September 1959, the cut-up technique was in a state of constant flux and rapid development. The work of Minutes to Go quickly overflowed and morphed into the work collected in The Exterminator. Like mercury, the material in The Exterminator refused to remain under Burroughs’ authorial control. The material kept coming and spilled into a possible second volume. Despite Burroughs’ optimism, The Exterminator was destined to be a one-shot deal.

Burroughs described The Exterminator as “Pure abstract literature.” Reading it now, the book feels remarkably current and fresh, like some of the experimental writing published today in the small press scene. Not surprisingly the cut-up technique is a major tool in the avant poet’s toolbox. Oliver Harris points out or suggests much of this in an article in Edinburgh Review Issue 114: “Burroughs is a poet too, really’: The Poetics of Minutes to Go. “ The quote on Burroughs as a poet comes from the 1966 Paris Review interview with Allen Ginsberg. Interestingly, Harris barely mentions The Exterminator. Not too surprising given the confusingly hybrid nature of the book and the more traditionally “poetic” sources, form, and content of Minutes to Go. Clearly, The Exterminator is in danger of becoming a lost work. Too bad in my opinion.

1962 Auerhahn Press Catalog

Auerhahn Press Catalog
Front
1962

Auerhahn Press Catalog
The Exterminator
1962

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

RealityStudio bills itself as a digital community, a gathering place for fans, friends, collectors, and scholars of William Burroughs. In recent weeks, we have received some emails that testify to the international nature of that community as well as to the potential of building and sustaining that community online. In the forum, there is a running thread on The Third Mind. Isome23 attended The Third Mind exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She mentioned that she took lots of pictures and here they are.

This may be your best opportunity to view the visual and textual collaborations of Burroughs and Gysin that were completed mostly in New York City in 1965. My timeline on Burroughs in New York provides some sense of the atmosphere surrounding these works of art. The Third Mind images should be viewed in connection with the complete My Own Mag, particularly The Dutch Schultz Issue (#13), also available on RealityStudio. I hope in the next few weeks to have the complete Time, a Burroughs scrapbook published by Ted Berrigan’s C Press, uploaded as well. This collection of images provides just a glimpse into the incredible artistic output of Burroughs in the mid 1960s. They highlight the visual development of the cut-up that would continue into the 1970′s and lead to the collaboration with Malcolm Mc Neill in the never completed Ah Puch is Here.

The Third Mind manuscript resides in the Los Angeles County Museum with bits and pieces located in a private collection in Paris. Before RealityStudio, the best place to view selections of The Third Mind was Robert Sobieszek’s Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts. The book is out of print, but copies can be purchased from $10.99 to $120 on Amazon. Get a copy. In the past decade, Oliver Harris has completely revolutionized the textual history of Burroughs with his archival research of the early manuscripts. Sobieszek performed a similar service with Burroughs in the visual arts. Ports of Entry is essential reading (and viewing) for anyone interested in Burroughs. The chapter on The Third Mind is the best account of this material available providing literary history and critical analysis.

Until 1970, Grove Press planned to publish The Third Mind in all its glory. The book was to be marketed as an art book costing from $10-$30. According to Ports of Entry, Grove abandoned the project due to high production costs or due to a sense of bewilderment on how to market Burroughs and Gysin’s instruction manual / art book / experimental poetry / textbook. “In his introductory text to the Viking edition of 1978, Gerard-Georges Lemaire… pointed to the work’s complexity and lack of definition: ‘It eludes definition just as it eludes itself; a prey to unfathomable anamorphosis, it rubs itself out and rewrites itself; it allows itself to be read, only to slip away. The Third Mind jumbles the linguistic network, simultaneously revealing and antagonizing it. It is a strange device for confronting semiotic assaults” (quoting from Ports of Entry). Sobieszek continues, “The Viking edition reproduces twenty-six of the collages (reproduced it would seem, from the French edition or the printer’s plates and not the originals), and one of these reproductions does not appear among the originals in the LACMA collection. Not all of the chapters or parts of the original manuscript are included in the Viking edition, nor do the plates in it appear in the precise sequence laid out in the late 1960s.” The published version fails to capture the magnificence of the manuscript as evidenced by the images on RealityStudio. The LACMA holds “70 unique works of art and original visual texts.” Apparently the original manuscript switched hands and locales often so who knows what is still out there or lost forever. As noted in Ports of Entry, “the total number of artworks made for The Third Mind is unknown.” Clearly, the published version of The Third Mind provides only a glimpse, and a black and white one at that, of the original manuscript.

As discussed in the forum, The Third Mind is difficult to get a hold of and expensive. The book was first published by Viking in 1978 under the editorship of Richard Seaver. Seaver began his editing career with Alexander Trocchi’s Merlin Group in Paris in the early 1950s. He continued on with Grove in its formative years. By the 1970s, Seaver went mainstream taking Burroughs along with him. John Calder published The Third Mind in hardcover and softcover in 1979. Seaver, under his own imprint, reissued The Third Mind in 1982. Finally, in 1998, Flammarion printed the book in France. There may be other printings, but these are the ones listed in Shoaf’s Bibliography.

The images of The Third Mind available on RealityStudio provide only a small piece of the available manuscript. Yet coupled with My Own Mag and Time, the jigsaw puzzle of Burroughs’ development and exploration of the cut-up technique can begin to be pieced together. The picture is incomplete and many of the missing pieces reside in libraries, like the NYPL or Ohio State. Slowly, these collections are being made available to scholars and the public. Hard copy publications are not the only outlet. The digital archives on RealityStudio provide another alternative and, in the minds of many commentators, a window into the future.

(Readers interested particularly in Brion Gysin’s contribution the Third Mind may want to consult Brion Gysin: Tuning In to the Multimedia Age, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, and Brion Gysin: Here To Go.)

Photos of the Works Displayed at the Third Mind Exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Fall 2007