The Writing of Perilous Passage

Terry Wilson in Conversation with Ian MacFadyen

As his book Perilous Passage is published by Synergetic Press, Terry Wilson talks with Ian MacFadyen about the 15 years he spent creating this unique work which embodies and develops the radical Third Mind techniques of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Wilson was a friend of Gysin and Burroughs, both of whom appear as characters in the “true fiction” of Perilous Passage. Wilson’s collaboration with Gysin, Here To Go, is now recognized as a seminal work. Perilous Passage was critically acclaimed on its first publication, in a limited edition, in 2005. In this extract from a tape made in December 2011 by Ian MacFadyen, Terry Wilson talks about the psychic techniques of The Third Mind, adventures on the road with Jim McCann, Brion Gysin’s special methods of teaching, William Burroughs and Charles Fort, ayahuasca, and the relation of memory and fiction.

“According to Brion Gysin, I was an Apprentice to an Apprentice and I have never claimed otherwise. In my work I have always done absolutely what I wanted to do at the time. I have been fortunate and privileged to encounter and become friends with some incredible people.” — Terry Wilson

William S. Burroughs and Terry Wilson, 1980s (photo by Udo Breger)

IM: Could we talk about your book Perilous Passage, first published in a limited edition in 2005, and now being published by Synergetic Press? It was written over many years, between 1986 and 2000, and took some time to appear in print.  

TW: Soon after Brion Gysin died in 1986, until near the end of the ’80s, I was writing Perilous Passage. . . I stopped in ’89 when I went to Tangier and that’s when I wrote a piece for that book, Paul Bowles by His Friends, the book edited by Gary Pulsifer, which came out in ’92. So I wrote that short text, called “Tangier 90,” and that was one of the additions that fell into place in Perilous Passage, and the book was extended. . . In ’89 I’d thought the book was finished, at the point where the character KJ and I clink our glasses of Irish coffee and toast “the beginning of a new age.” Because I was interviewed at the time and asked how the book ended, and that’s what I’d told the interviewer, in ’89.

IM: In fact, you said to him, “That’s where I’m heading for!” In other words, you thought you’d finished Perilous Passage and you were heading for that “new age” announced by the toast with Jim, but it turned out that the book would have its own momentum and before you were finished fate would have quite a few surprises and difficulties lying in wait for you.

TW: You can say that again.  

IM: So you wrote “Tangier 90″ for the Bowles book and then that took its place in the third main section of Perilous Passage, the section called “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.” “Tangier 90″ appears in the opening part of that section, a chapter called “THE FLAW (Inevitable Cops).” The chapter begins with you and “KJ,” the infamous entrepreneur James Kennedy McCann, driving on the autobahn out of Berlin and witnessing a horrific car accident, and it moves through this mystical Islamic system into the time you were in Tangier, 1990 — “It really hit the fan in Tangier. Inevitably. It’s the place for it.” And so you managed to flood the hotel room there, even though there were “only four hours of running water in Tangier so you have to remember to turn the taps off but we were in no condition. . .” And you also recall your visit at that time to Genet’s clifftop grave in the Spanish cemetery at Larache. . . Mohammed Mrabet, Ira Cohen, David Herbert, Paul Bowles and others appear, but the Tangier scene at that time is mixed with flashbacks to the character Bedaya, based upon Gysin, in Paris years before, and his ashes scattered at the Cave of Hercules. And then, again, there’s your European travels with the cultural impresario KJ, based upon Jim McCann, and scenes from the London period and your visit to La Roche-Guyon with Philippe Baumont, who’s called Vogue Etiquette in the book, immediately after Gysin’s death in 1986. . . So Tangier in 1990 is a crucible around which all these past and future events and these characters swirl phantasmagorically, as Gysin/Bedaya’s legacy is fought over and engenders all these disparate strategies and conspiracies and power plays. . . Perilous Passage would have been quite different if you hadn’t written and extended the book with “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,” the third section of the book, and the final chapter of the entire work, “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS,” set in Peru in 2000 when you took ayahuasca. 

TW: I wasn’t worried so much about the book in ’89 and ’90 because I had three other books out at the time, Dreams of Green Base, Here To Go, “D” Train, and also Brion’s The Process had been reprinted, and then everything changed when Brion died, like the power had gone out of the whole thing. . . I mean, I seemed to be at the height of success, the way these things go, and I’d got an advance from Quartet, the publishers, a considerable sum back then when you’re living on practically nothing, and yet nobody was interested in Perilous Passage at that time. I submitted it to Peter Owen, but they rejected it, and Black Spring Press, too. You know the routine — they couldn’t think of anything else quite like it, it was quite unique, they really admired it, and so on, but they didn’t know how they could possibly sell it. . . 

Terry Wilson, Lancaster Road, London, 1986 (photo by Alexis Bisticas)

IM: That’s always the thing, they need to follow something they recognize as a success, a model they can adapt and hitch their star to. When they say, “nothing else quite like it,” it isn’t praise at all, it’s actually a lament — “We don’t know what it is, we can’t figure out what to do with it.”  

TW: Yes, of course, that’s it. So then a lot of extensive travels with Jim McCann followed, a period when I didn’t do too much writing at all. Jim was working his way up to allegedly setting up an exhibition of Brion Gysin’s big painting the Makemono in Morocco, which was why Philippe Baumont and I were in Tangier in 1990, though Jim said, in an interview, very shortly before we arrived, that he was sending his special team to Morocco to organise tribesmen in the Rif Mountains to overthrow the King! Great! Thank you, Jim, and this perhaps explains the kind of hospitality we received from Gavin Young, among others. . . Gavin was staying up the road from David Herbert’s place on the Old Mountain, and he was very eager to hear the news and find out about our “mission.” . . And the American Legation, too, well, you can imagine, and it was out there on the jungle telegraph. . . Really, it was a devilish thing for Jim to have done, so we arrived blazing all this “arranging an exhibition” stuff, and it just came over as an unbelievable cover story. . . Then Ira Cohen and his son Raphael arrived, and Jim was paying for it all, and Ira was filming and writing everything down in his notebooks, and we were plunged into this crazy scenario, though it was fascinating, sure, and everyone opened their doors to us, not to mention their ears. . . Now all these old characters have left us, so being back in Tangier this year with Philippe, we didn’t know anybody. . . 

IM: And after Tangier in 1990 you travelled through Europe with Jim?

TW: Yes, a lot of travelling, from the late ’80s actually, with trips to Berlin and Dusseldorf and Strasbourg, and hair-raising points in between. Like, I’d had these extraordinary, magical times with Brion, and now I was with Jim and it was equally powerful and disturbing, but in a different way, and I had no idea what was going on. . . So that third part of Perilous Passage, “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,” was written out of what happened with Jim, hours and hours and hours of driving with him across Europe at amazing speeds, he is the most incredible driver, and I had to keep awake to keep rolling him joints, and I didn’t feel nervous when he was at the wheel because, as I say, he’s a genius driver. . . So Jim, as “KJ,” appears in “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,” the third part of the book, but also in the second part, “CHATEAU-ROUGE,” bringing along the usual chaos in his wake.  

IM: And you felt that your experiences with him were an extension, on another level, of what you had gone through with Brion Gysin?

TW: Well, Jim’s behaviour was shamanic. There’s no other word for it. I mean, you’d arrive in Paris at midnight and he’d decide to drive to Strasbourg to get a haircut! [laughter] He’d help you and then he’d just disappear, like he’d book several hotels in one city, and you had no idea which hotel he was actually in, or whether he was in any of them. One time he abandoned me in Berlin and I had to sneak into another hotel where I thought he’d gone, and I had no money, no German, and it was nerve wracking. That’s the way he was. Brion gave me a sort of preparation and Jim followed this with his theatre of total bullshit, but it worked, of course, and no end of crazy scenarios lived out for real, as they say. . . After the illusion trickster identities of Brion Gysin with his magical happenings, it was the sheer shamanic madness of Jim, going out into the world and drawing the heat and facing the music, the trickster guru inexplicability of his behaviour. . . Because after Brion’s death, it really was that time, all these power groups and nefarious businesses and fabulistic intrigues, never knowing what was going on. . . And Jim, KJ, he was so brilliant and funny and mercurial and fearless, an outlaw of his own making, and so I had this crash course into the power groups of this world, and he really stood everything on its head and played the crazy wisdom card to the maximum. . . Brion had been like a father to me and Jim was like. . . The Godfather! [laughter] Everything was a cover story to Jim, he just brilliantly made it all up as he went along, acting out his own “KJ” character, our loveable international practical joker, with a serious identity habit, which fitted in its way with Gysin’s masks, the playing with identity, and his own mythomaniacal fabulations. . . So, yes, they both played games, but those games can rebound on you, like being ostracized by the Paris artworld or kidnapped by the mafia or a bullet through the window or locked up in a high security prison. . . So, yes, those were crazy times, dangerous days, and “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” section of Perilous Passage emerged out of that period of uproar. The material accrued from the late ’80s and was written from 1990 onwards. . . 

James McCann and Terry Wilson (photos by Philippe Baumont)

IM: Jim was arrested in Paris in 1991, so “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” was written after that?

TW: Yes, and it still took many years for the book to be completed because ten years after all the madness with Jim, I went to Peru with Philippe and took ayahuasca and out of that experience I wrote “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS” which is the final chapter of Perilous Passage. So, I started the book in ’86 and finished it in 2000, and Synergetic Press decided they wanted to do it in 2001. John Allen was very enthusiastic, and he wrote me about it. He really got it.  

IM: Perilous Passage works perfectly as a book with the addition of that material — it’s not actually “additional,” it was essential to the book as it now exists. The book came together through a complex process, and it drew upon crucial, but diverse experiences you had over about 15 years. 

TW: I wanted to open up out of the claustrophobic situation of “D” Train, my previous book, to escape the intensity of the relationship between Whelme and Vogue which I’d described there. And then I found myself in West End, in Southampton, and I just became extremely receptive, as if everything I read or heard or saw on T.V. was streaming right through me. Like those sections of “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” called “THE DARKNESS CURSE (Playing For Time)” and “THE CALL OF AURAL BEECH (Remote Viewing),” they draw upon lots of old black-and-white films I was watching on T.V. in the afternoon, these old melodramas and thrillers, and books I was reading, and things I just came across, and these characters and plots and phrases just started to strike me, some of it very funny but also with this power and urgency, like there’s these references to organophosphates which I hadn’t planned on and I didn’t think originally that it was going to be part of the book. . . It takes the reader into this area of toxic poisoning, and ME and MS and AIDS, the entire viral maelstrom. . . Because that’s what was coming through. . . 

IM: And so you were picking up on these things, however bizarre or disparate, and recording them, and seeing how they might connect, following them though their association tracks, figuring out the story, and this would be a kind of mosaic of receptivity, of your own psyche during that time, a process akin to the Third Mind initiative of tracking through different media and making a map of consciousness, which Gysin and Burroughs explored through their scrapbooks and tapes at the Beat Hotel. . . You mention and draw upon John Buchan’s The Power House, a text very well known by Burroughs and Gysin, and also Dickens’ The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, but also Captain C.T. Arbuthnot, CDM, DFN, and his magisterial work My Battle Against Athlete’s Foot, a work I’m afraid I’m not familiar with. [laughter]

Terry Wilson with scissor tie, late 1960s-early 1970s

TW: Which really did exist, of course, unbelievably — and that was just the first volume, apparently. Yes, all this material began to come through, insistently, and I was in a condition of extreme receptivity, and as well as cutting-up a few things, I was incorporating and switching phrases as they struck me, like “The Great Itself,” “The Only No One.” . . Actually, both those phrases came from something you’d written about Brion at that time, it was typed on this now yellowing paper, and you’d written about “The Great Desert,” and I recombined a few of your phrases. . . The section in “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” called “ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT (The Lone Rider)” is like Charles Fort incorporating himself into his own notes via a short story. I could see this section as an extension of Fort’s technique, though I didn’t know at the time that Fort had tried to do that until you sent me the story he’d written. . . Of course, there are quotations and cut-ups of Fort in every book I’ve written. Fort was turning supposedly factual reports and scientific materials into fiction, or rather showing their eminent fictionality, treating facts and history as fiction. . . And I said to Burroughs, in regard to his statement “All history is fiction,” which is in Nova Express, that it came from Fort in his book Wild Talents, and William kind of grumbled something about how those farmers were lying about fish coming out of the sky, that kind of dismissive thing, but then he said, “Well, yes, that is one of the founder statements.” Actually, he’d nicked it verbatim for Nova Express. Like “Sir William Barroon” in Brion’s Beat Museum / Bardo Hotel, saying “the germ theory is a nonsense,” echoing Doc Schaffer in Naked Lunch, well, Burroughs said that Fort had said that, but he hadn’t, because Fort said, “I’m not saying that the germ theory is a nonsense,” although, in fact, that’s exactly what he was saying! . . . Well, Burroughs was very influenced by Fort, but he hid it. You know, psychic assailants, defenestration, spontaneous combustion, the Mary Celeste — William and Brion were fascinated by all this, and by Fort’s sorcery in Wild Talents. . . I think William just shied away from Fort because there were, for example, later associations with Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning Of The Magicians, and William and Brion did not want to be linked by default to Gurdjieff or Fort or anyone those people were into. . .  

IM: As well as the fiction of history, these parts of the book introduce special techniques like “remote viewing” and “scattering,” both of which would play an important part in your next book, Days Lane, techniques which are crucially bound up with the special meaning of tandra “Day-Dreaming,” the concept and practice at the heart of that work. And these sections of Perilous Passage are produced by techniques which are psychic, not literary, techniques related to Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind. These sections of the book seem to deal with suppressed and unaccountable memories. 

TW: Yes, like the reference to Mr Oak, the strange shaven-headed character I’d encountered many years before, in a gay pub in Notting Hill, The Champion, who looked at my fingers and told me that my days were numbered. And he was telling me that all these rare diseases were making a comeback, like kuru, this fatal degenerative disease supposed to have died off with the cannibals in Papua, New Guinea. And he’d come up with this “Virus X” which was apparently triggering all these unrelated diseases like TB and encephalitis. . .

IM: And he had the antidote.

TW: You bet he did! Some guck to cure an illness which he himself had invented. But there have been larger operators in that area. 

IM: And in Perilous Passage there are all these intelligence agents like “Marshall Peck,” Ivor Powell, the friend of Gerald Hamilton and Tom Driberg, and your fictional creation “Mr Green,” and the connections between Intelligence operatives and the esoteric world is crucial, like the “cadre of Indo-Celtic fifth columnist bolshies. . . Same crowd described by Doug Marshall in his book Mysticism.” Because the hermetic is precisely the area of secret information, and so we get all those ex-Etonians in the Foreign Office, ex-Guardsmen and diplomats with their Masonic connections and their affiliations to various magical brotherhoods, and the secret societies and the security services overlap and the elite move smoothly from one world to another. . . Politics, after all, like magic, is the realm of secrecy, the profession of non-disclosure, the transmission of secret knowledge. And this is something both Gysin and Burroughs knew, and had experience of — the symbiosis of the intelligence agencies and these esoteric organisations. The history of that is indisputable. Like Ira [Cohen] told me about these faux hippies who found their way to his door in Nepal, they were just looking for a bong, of course, a bang of a bong, apparently, but actually they were the Yale brotherhood, young CIA recruits sent out on a testing mission, and putting their gap year to some use before taking up their positions in aeronautics and academic think tanks and the burgeoning computer and electronics companies. . . Even Ira knew he had to keep his mouth shut around those types. It was the perfect work experience for aspiring agents in the field, penetrating the esoteric networks, getting their stars before going back to Washington and Dallas and Seattle. . .  

John Michell, Terry Wilson, and Ira Cohen (photo from the Wise Monkey Triptych by Ira Landgarten)

TW: Sure, sure. And you have these racist strands running through esotericism, you know, the supposed fascist connections of Evola, the Great White Brotherhood, and all that is the tip of the iceberg. You step into murky waters here. . . Western esotericsm based upon these “root races” as in Blavatsky, and the Nazis really took that to heart. . . And Brion and William thought that Pauwels and Bergier were reactionaries. Their book, The Morning Of The Magicians, had a considerable impact, and they were really onto Hassan-I-Sabbah, but also fascinated by Nazi occultism, that was the big lure. So Brion in Here To Go, he refers to their magazine Planète as that “pseudo-scientific magazine.” . . I mean, it’s inevitable, all these esoteric groups claim the true lineage and wage their magical wars, and it gets bound up with these notions of ideology and purity. . . 

IM: The true elect, the one and only, the divinely chosen. . . Could you say something about the technique referred to in Perilous Passage which is called “remote viewing” — in the book you have a footnote: “Another old technique, much practised by Intelligence agencies. Far away places and far away names. . . “

TW: The term comes from the Second World War, and although Brion didn’t use this term when I knew him, it’s impossible that he wasn’t familiar with it, given his wartime experiences, and the circles he travelled in, like the psychic Eileen Garrett. . . “Remote viewing” refers to the development of psychic abilities, a form of shamanism essentially, which was directed towards spotting subs in the Atlantic, or reading a document at a distance, gaining entry to some place when you’re miles away, accessing material and experiences without having to go through them physically. . . Like “Bi-Location” today. . . And this was related to learning a language just incredibly fast, as Brion had learned Japanese very fast, and he was in Intelligence during the Second World War and picked out by people in Intelligence to work in this area, developing the potential to project oneself through space and time. . . It was all very top secret, and we only have rumours, and cryptic suggestions, like with anyone who was in Intelligence, until the documents come out, the doctored non-evidence. . . But Brion had psychic abilities as well as linguistic abilities, that’s for sure. . . Actually, ayahuasca is related to this because the drug, like remote viewing, takes you “everywhere in space,” projecting you beyond the accepted limits of space and time. In that sense, the section “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” prepares the reader of Perilous Passage for the final short section of the book, “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS (Ayahuasca).”

IM: Perilous Passage is an account of an avant-garde, shamanic apprenticeship, but it’s also an esoteric guide, taking the reader from cut-up and receptivity to remote viewing and “scattering” techniques for the radical opening up of consciousness. Scattering, I think, might be defined to some degree as the picking up of hints and clues, these riddles left hidden by a teacher or previous initiates, an esoteric form of teaching in which a certain process must be engaged with and developed in order to access the strategically hidden. . . So in the context of the book, this, if you like, “recruits” the reader, turns him or her on to a different way of reading, of experiencing the power of words and certain signs and connections to reveal a radically different way of thinking, of experiencing. . . It’s very much akin to what Burroughs says about Gysin’s painting, which you quote towards the end of the book — “a certain path like a row or series of patterns. . . a series of neural patterns which already exist. . .” What I mean is that the scattering of clues is a trail that already exists, in potential form, in the brain, and the process of engaging with cut-up and other Third Mind techniques, opening up your receptivity, engaging with remote viewing, taking ayahuasca, and so on, all these are part of a creative process which both triggers and mirrors those neural patterns. Because Perilous Passage is more than an account of that process, it takes that very form, it’s produced by it, using the loaded, trigger phrases of cut-up, but also these techniques of rerouting fictions and so-called memories, to try and create a Third Mind consciousness in the reader, in effect to transport the reader along those lines. . . Which involves destroying established “time lines,” the linear, historical constructs which hold quotidian consciousness in place. And the experience which the text procures in the reader, it isn’t available to conventional analysis, intellectual criteria, literary interpretation, so there’s a very real, even visceral, psychic effect, but this cannot be transposed or reduced by critics to something else, put on to some other plane of reference and so categorised, analysed according to current literary theory and so assimilated, nullified.  

TW: Yes, that’s a very accurate way of putting it, I think, though just try and stop certain critics from doing exactly what you just described. Because if they don’t get it, and they won’t, I assure you, because they’ve already decided what it is and how to go about deconstructing it and explaining it away, then they’ll just dismiss it and say it’s a “collage” or something, and then write whatever they think or have been taught to think about that. . . Much good will it do them, of course. Well, the book hopefully works on the ideal reader as a preparation for the out-of-the-body consciousness of ayahuasca, and it reprises the kind of preparation which I’d gone through myself, though at the time I didn’t know that it would lead to my experience of ayahuasca in Peru.  

IM: And that “scattering,” again, it’s the clues you pick up on and trace in the book, it’s very much like Brion Gysin has left this trail for you, it’s like he has set these tests and traps for you to pass through, and left indicators in future time for you to follow and unravel. 

TW: An esoteric method of teaching, sure.

IM: How could he do that? By predicting the course you would take, or by setting you on that path, and planting signs along the way for you to encounter, a psychic paper chase. . . Or beyond that, the projection of his own spirit through your own life, so that you were making his presence manifest. . . And this would be an example of the “living experiment” and “experiment in living” of Burroughs and Gysin’s Third Mind work. . . You’ve said that Gysin was this great Teacher who was absolutely reluctant and disinclined to teach anyone, but this is a kind of teaching, as you say, which he has left you, a hermetic process you have to engage with in order, in effect, to teach yourself and become self-sufficient, and also go further, to continue The Third Mind. . . Gysin, as Bedaya, appears at key points in the text, his spirit manifests through unaccountable memories and apparitions and his loaded words come through — it’s the transmission of his “special knowledge” which nobody wants to know about, which has been dropped after his death, but however difficult the conditions, you feel you have to take up this great experiment, The Third Mind, “an experiment that failed but which is still going on. . .” Because this very definitely isn’t The Third Mind as scrapbooks, as artworks or artefacts in museum vitrines, it’s a process of psychic exploration, of deconditioning habitual behaviour, usurping fixed notions of identity — an extreme emotional and spiritual reorientation. The book homages Brion Gysin and his spirit inhabits the book. You were clearly haunted by his loss, and possessed by the desire to undo or overcome that loss — a recognized stage in the process of mourning, along with denial, and anger, and the rest. 

TW: Absolutely. But when I was writing “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” in West End, I didn’t want to languish in my own emotions, and I became more textually and source creative, I was doing what I wanted, bringing anything in, because everything was a propos, an advantageous state for an artist to be in but exhausting, too. . . It was like a release, total freedom, freedom of access, just nothing was too weird or stupid or too recondite, because at one level I didn’t know what something might mean and how it might work, and yes, I do think this kind of receptivity could be understood as a form of remote viewing, because you can see the scenarios appear and develop as if you’re witnessing it happening. . . In those years in the country, in West End, I was getting into these extraordinary states of mind, very little internal dialogue, a quieting down of all that in order to become more receptive, and receptivity clears out all that taking of your own pulse. . . I could sit still for extended periods with nothing going on in my conscious mind, I was going into samadhi quite easily, which I lost when I came back to London in 2009. Taking ayahuasca in 2000 increased that ability, made it much deeper, and it was at that time, in that kind of condition that I finished Perilous Passage, the final section, “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS (Ayahuasca),” and I couldn’t wait to write ayahuasca descriptions and cut them up, because I knew that was the way to go, to use the cut-up technique in that way, on those experiences, that was what I wanted to do and I knew it would work. It was the ideal subject matter for cut-up, and cut-up was the ideal method. . . Like Burroughs had the ayahuasca experience before he experienced cut-ups. 

IM: Yes, so ayahuasca is the psychic experience which laid the ground for Burroughs’ reaction to and reception of cut-ups, and cut-ups are prefigured in certain ayahuasca-inspired sections of Naked Lunch. 

Terry Wilson, Notebook for final section of Perilous Passage

TW: It was a relation between the two, between ayahuasca and cut-up, which I really had been waiting for, to put cut-up at the disposal of the drug. . . And it makes a real tour-de-force ending for Perilous Passage, you know, ayahuasca and cut-ups — an incredible combination. And that was the way to end it and make a great finale. . . Then I stopped writing and the receptivity went into another area, it wasn’t any longer about the desire or necessity of writing, of using words and creating images, all that stopped, and it was like these meditations went “clear,” went deeper than the receptivity related to the creative process, and I could sit in the sun or the shade for hours and I had all these classical types of chakra experiences, with all the colours, like a succession of colours from the gentials to the solar plexus, to the heart and the crown, behind the eyes, and I opened my eyes and it was like it was raining, like I was sitting under a fountain, drops of coloured spray, and I felt wonderful, a very Kundalini yogic kind of thing. . . I wasn’t in the lotus, I was in a chair in the garden with Penny, the cat, and all these colours were going all the way up, the way the brain works, colours clicking on in succession. . . I can’t remember the colours and the parts of the body, but I could feel it, it was spectacular. . . And the lawn looked like it was under frost. . . 

IM: The first part of Perilous Passage is called “MAN FROM NOWHERE” and that is more directly about what happened to you both before and after Gysin’s death, the situation in Paris and these various spooks and culture collectors who were on the scene, or behind the scenes. Actually, I’m stepping into that trap, because Gysin is not “Gysin” in the book, he’s “Bedaya,” and you’re not “Terry Wilson,” you’re “Toller Whelme.” But this isn’t merely the use of pseudonyms to protect or hide the innocent, or the guilty, it’s a deliberate confrontation and contradiction of any possible objective, biographical account, and it questions the projection of identity through naming, the gap between “identity” and “identification.”  

TW: Again, I wasn’t writing an official history because there is and can be no such thing. It’s fiction, “as ‘real’ as I can make it,” and when I’m asked to write my so-called “life story,” as if that would be the “real thing,” I can only point to Perilous Passage and my other books and say, “There it is.” If someone can’t get that, they’re holding onto this distinction between fiction and a “true and proper account” of “something which really happened.” It’s absurd! At the same time, the “real names” of these characters, dead or alive, apparently, do creep in later in the book, so that “Mr Green” is revealed to be Murray Smith, and “Vogue” is Philippe, and so on, because actually that makes the point — that all you have to do is use someone’s official name rather than a pseudonym, and some readers then take it as biographical, true and proper, but in fact the supposed biographical account is as written, as subjective, and unreliable as any fiction. Again, it’s Burroughs’ appropriation of Charles Fort’s maxim, “All history is fiction.” And William and Brion, they absolutely understood the significance of that statement, and it was crucial in their work and radically informed how they saw and experienced their lives, because otherwise you’re an automatic believer, you read something, whoever wrote it, whatever it might be, and you accept it at face value or you argue that it’s not correct, you believe the opposite, which is just as bad, if not even worse.

IM: So to accept a fictional universe is to stop being, as you say, an “automatic believer?” Like you read something like, “In 1954 the Mongol-Turk Khazers liquidated the white Adamic race in the name of the Soviet Anti-Christ,” and you just refuse to buy it.

TW: No, come on, that’s so obviously a fiction!. . . Isn’t it? [laughter] No, I mean you hear or read something like we’re being overwhelmed by immigrants, or the stock market is collapsing, or the weather’s going to be awful tomorrow, and instead of raving about it and getting incensed and crazy and yes, believing in it, you just stop! It seems like a simple thing to do, to just stop all that, but it’s not easy. And Brion and William deal with that in The Third Mind procedures. . . Read the Herald Trib, really read it, look at the way it’s all put together, look at how it’s written and composed, and don’t believe it!

IM: A lot of the news, of course, is pure prophecy and wish fulfilment. Still, I have that problem, I have this veneration of the word, I have a real word habit. 

TW: You’re over-intellectualized, Ian, and you know it. And you’re conditioned to be reactive to words. But you can stop it, because you understand the problem and it comes from you.

IM: I practically live in a library. Actually, thinking about it, I do live in a library.

TW: Get rid of the library!

IM: Like in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. 

TW: There you go again. 

Ian MacFadyen and Terry Wilson, London, November 2010 (photo by Eric Andersen)

IM: OK, so Perilous Passage plays upon what is supposedly “true” and what is fiction, it explores authenticity and belief. And you’ve said to me that by writing your “memoirs,” so to speak, as fiction, that turns your life into a fiction, or affirms its essential fictionality. 

TW: Yes, but there’s no deliberate falsification in the way I approached this, despite my quoting the Amazonian shaman Don Juan Tuesta, affirming what he calls “a deceit in the service of truth.” The book is about games of deception, ulterior motives, the shadow realm, power plays, all of that, but also how people deceive themselves, how easy it is to believe in these supposedly rational, accepted ways of thinking and behaving, to believe without even questioning where these beliefs come from. . . No, however irrational and crazy the book might seem, it’s a “true deceit,” the best possible account I could give of my experiences. . . It’s the case that I had some grievances when I was writing it, like Friends of Bedaya and this shaman on the make in the jungle, but I didn’t go out to misrepresent, precisely because I was not making that distinction between “true” and “false. . .” I was questioning the “reality” of people and events via memory, and playing upon the reader’s belief in what is, or was, “real” or invented, and making clear that the “truth of fiction” is an important consideration in regard to how each of us thinks and speaks and writes, what we think we know, what we believe did or did not happen. . . Whatever the confusion it generates, this whole area is vital, as William and Brion knew, it isn’t some philosophical talking shop, it’s the great imperative of “a new and different knowledge.” . . It’s a paradox, of course, because to insist upon fictionality, that all history is fiction, is actually to refuse to subscribe to Maya, the whole illusion world that we are born into, educated into, and supposed to spend our lives subscribing to. . .  

IM: Playing around with literary genres and pushing these fantastic scenarios, you’re stretching the reader’s credulity while simultaneously the pseudonyms give way to the real names, you’re challenging the reader’s ability or desire to accept the validity of the text or treat it as a fantastic subversion. . .

TW: I was playing with literary genres and scenarios, sure, mixing and pushing them to the point of craziness, but this was the process, an extraordinary receptivity taking over to a certain extent. . .That material had its own volition and it was also entirely a propos the circumstances I found myself in, those scenarios and that mayhem and confusion, it was all going on, in and out of the book itself. Like there were all these “Old School” Intelligence agents, so I let loose with my own Sapper-Bulldog Drummond-John Buchan, obtuse, over-the-top kind of Doctor Benway creation. . . And the names of the characters emerged from the receptivity of the writing experience. Like Burroughs is “The Old Man,” a play, of course, on Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. . . Brion connected William with Sabbah, and vice versa, but I also saw in a newspaper the phrase “the old man and I drew in the nets,” and it caught my attention, and I thought immediately of William and Brion in the Beat Hotel and later in London and Paris, attracting acolytes and pulling in the nets, drawing in people like myself and Udo Breger and others. . . So in Perilous Passage “Burroughs” is historically located while the “The Old Man” is fictionally, mythically at large, but it’s the same character, created through words. People will bring to it what they think they know about Burroughs, and project that, but where do their ideas of “William Burroughs” come from? So I guess one aspect of this approach is to affirm that “William Burroughs” is a fictional character, a fictional creation — as are we all. 

IM: And Brion Gysin is “Bedaya.”

TW: A bedaya is a traditional Moroccan waistcoat, maybe originally it was Persian, the kind which Brion and William both wore, and as I’ve said, Brion gave me Antony’s, in Paris, after Antony’s death and William commented, “He has every right to wear it.” So it had a symbolic, fraternal function. . . But also, I asked Brion what the name of a garment like the waistcoat was, what a Moroccan would call it, and instead of answering me aloud, he wrote it down — “Bedaya.” And it was odd, as if he didn’t want to repeat the word, he didn’t want to speak or pronounce the word out loud for some reason, so I spoke it aloud, pronouncing it, and he confirmed this as correct. So that was maybe some kind of ritual, because I never heard the word from his mouth. . . I thought it might well have been an esoteric name, even his Secret Name, or related to that, but when he wrote it down that time, I thought he was writing his signature, and it looked like his signature, curiously, like a name, or like he was writing his own name. . . But there it was, “Bedaya,” so I took it for his name in my writing, and that’s where it came from, and he’s referred to as Bedaya all the way through “D” Train. . . For many years Brion wasn’t seen without that kind of waistcoat, he had a couple at least, until the last couple of years when he stopped, I think. “Bedaya” means “covering the heart” I believe, or “heart contact,” a Sufi connotation . . . Well, Philippe used a Ouija board to come up with his own fictional alter ego, “Vogue Etiquette. . .” And my name in my books, “Toller Whelme,” it was the name of a house in the country in Southampton, and it struck me that it had my initials and of course Whelme is overwhelmed from the beginning of Dreams Of Green Base to the end of Perilous Passage. . . “Mr. Green” is based on Murray Smith and the name relates to another Green, Gerald Green, who was associated with J G Bennett. It’s like Brion in Here To Go, he says that he didn’t know his “true name,” or so he claims . . . 

Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson, London, 1981 (photo by Ulrich Hillebrand)

IM: Because Gysin was fascinated by his own name, the letters and their combinations, and he kept changing it, looking for the right fit, and the way he signed his paintings and drawings changed — “Brion Gysin,” “Brion,” “Gysin,” “BG,” writing over and correcting his own signature, and using this apparently aristocratic Swiss family emblem, which is actually more like a Sufi glyph, so that the name and the signature are unstable and they mutate, signalling and embodying the problematics of his own image and sense of identity. . . And he roller-painted his name, and deconstructed it, and developed his own “bean sprout” calligraphic signature, and played upon other people’s names, turning them into these funny monikers based upon sound play, these sobriquets with a real scorpion sting. Like Angus MacLise was “Angus MacFangus,” playing upon MacLise’s fascination with Jaguar Cults and his wearing a tooth on a leather thong around his neck. Ira told me about MacLise and his Jaguar obsession. . . Well, Gysin’s joke names were loaded with meaning, it was a game but it related to his profound disturbance about his own identity, and how to be born is to be named, and the birth and the name are both fated and imposed. And it’s like every person is turned into a fictional character, or a representative type. You’re born, not asked, and you’re named in the process, and most people suffer their given name or vaunt it for all their days. 

TW: Susan Sontag was “Susan Snotrag. . .” Kate Millet was “Mate Killit. . .” Evelyn Waugh was “Evilin Wog. . .” Aleister Crowley was “Aleister Growley. . .” and so on.

IM: Sort of childish, I suppose, but very funny and extremely acute. “What’s in a name?” It’s like Robert Hughes in his debunking of the art world in the ’80s, he has “Julian Snorkel,” “Jean-Michel Basketcase,” “David Silly,” and so on. 

TW: Well, there may be true names, official names, pseudonyms in fiction, or someone like Jim with his incredible multiple aliases and proliferating passports. . . I’d been out there in the world with Jim and he had so many aliases, all these different cover stories, and Brion, as you say, he made all these changes to his name. . . I blow the pseudonyms at the end of Perilous Passage, and also in the book’s Introduction, and then there are the photographs of Brion and myself and Udo Breger’s photograph of William and Brion with Jim, and these will be taken to document the text, however unbelievable. . . In the case of that picture of Jim, a very good picture by Udo, it unbelievably confirms that Jim apparently really exists, or existed, and isn’t, or wasn’t, my own deranged invention. . . Because I needed a big change, to pull right out of the claustrophobic and incestuous scene, to get out of there and have an overview, to open up and widen the scope, so it’s like I leave “Whelme” and all those characters and their “real life” counterparts behind. . . The book had achieved its purpose, for me. 

IM: Could you say something about the second part of Perilous Passage, called “CHATEAU-ROUGE?”

TW: Well, the first section “MAN FROM NOWHERE” continues on from my previous book “D” Train, and it delineates what happened subsequently, and Brion’s death, but when I got to the second section, “CHATEAU-ROUGE,” I really was trying to find my way out of this situation, the doldrums I’d been plunged into. Brion had died in ’86 and it took a while to get onto a different track and this section really takes the reader into what happened when Jim, or “KJ,” began to increasingly take over the scene in his own unique way. . . Because Brion had left this “area of total conflict” between different factions and vested interests and of course Jim liked nothing better than a situation like that, and he decided to push his Academia Foundation and exhibit Brion’s Makemono painting, which he owned, and had financed, and to make a film and all these other great plans and ideas which naturally never came to anything and caused all kinds of mayhem and grief, while having a great deal of fun and thrills in the process. . . So there’s KJ getting his whole show on the road and the beginnings of my times with him, but it’s in this section that something very different happens that begins to set the scene for the rest of the book and for my later work Days Lane, because Philippe’s apartment in the late 80s was in Barbes, next to the metro station Chateau-Rouge, and there was a lowlife bar there on the corner, called Chateau-Rouge. Well, I began to go into these memories, these tandra “Day-Dreaming” type messages or visions, which were tandra recapitulation-type episodes, memories which I apparently had which appeared in my consciousness but which I couldn’t account for. . . So I went into these memories of training establishments, “little factories” in different locations, and one of them was the Chateau, and for some reason that name, “Chateau-Rouge” just seemed to fit, transposed to a chateau in the French countryside, like taking a piece of Gysin’s Paris with me into the countryide after his death, and this was activated by the process of writing the book. 

IM: So the book, to some extent, helped to produce those memories, which I think helps show how the book was reciprocal, and it generated and embodied the very Third Mind emanations which stimulated it and which it recounts. Writing makes it happen — Mektoub: It Is Written. Writing as an active shamanic agent in the entire process, which you were trying to use in that way. . . And that act of writing is foregrounded at different points in the text, like “I sat back from the typewriter” and “He sits back from the typewriter,” and there are photographs of you writing at the typewriter, so that the creation of the book is an essential part of the story being told, which is still being written as the reader reads it, and the writing of the text is a key element in the psychic process . . . So the book is happening, it’s being written as you read it. . . The writer in the first person and in the second. . . You start by describing something which apparently happened, and then you enter the scene and it’s happening in real time, and it’s being written. . . And that pronoun switch is telling, too, showing the disjunction and also the merging of author and alter ego, the split between the character as “real life protagonist” and the writer as a fictional creation, the “I” and the “He” of self-recreation. . . The Chateau scenario seems related to Burroughs’ Academy 23 project in The Job and his Mayfair articles, the all-male training establishment which Burroughs dreamed of setting up, maybe at Boleskine, Aleister Crowley’s place on Loch Lomond, which Jimmy Page acquired. It was an extension of the idea of the psychic group in the Beat Hotel, but looking to the future, the necessity of having initiates rather than acolytes and to train them and deprogram them, to create a new school of practical enlightenment. . .  

TW: Yes, sure, there’s that connection but I wasn’t emulating that or playing with a version of it, I was remembering these episodes, these unaccountable but vivid memories. . . Memories arising, which I couldn’t account for, but which were no less “true” than so-called “real” memories. 

IM: Those “memories” do suggest that idea of the enclave with initiates as another key part of The Third Mind, not only as a kind of version of the Beat Hotel itself, but as a necessary psychic accompaniment to the project of re-educating the self, that one cannot do this without others. Pascal was right, we die alone, but we don’t live alone. Hell may well be other people, but other people, they are life itself, like it or not, and we can at least choose our friends. . . Actually, Perilous Passage is so much about you feeling alone and isolated and lost, and so this could be read as a projection, a reaching out for continuation of everything you’d loved about Brion, inseperable from his teaching — even though he refused to teach! [laughter] So what you were remembering was maybe a projection at some level of that vital part of the process, the essential need for brotherhood. . . To some degree a recognition of that area of recruitment and transmission, and those strange memories of this training Chateau, they recur later in the “NERVOUS SYSTEM” section of the book where they’re connected to memories of La Roche-Guyon where you went with Philippe after Gysin’s death, “the white stone village” outside Paris, and this is like the Third Mind technique which continually transposes written material and scenarios and memories, changing them and re-contextualising them, moving them around in space and time, a technique related to echo edits and Donald Cammell’s flash cuts in film, so you get these déjà vu glimpses and fragmented replays moving back and forth in the text and in the mind — it’s a way of developing memory in a different way, not to remember and preserve memories but to shift and concatenate and fracture and reassemble them. 

TW: I’d say it’s both a conscious decision in the writing process and the emergence of those ideas through the process. . . It’s not a literary technique, it’s true to the experiences involved, and that’s the most important thing. 

IM: So it’s not a literary technique, as critics would have it, it’s a way of altering consciousness and the experience of temporality, it’s absolutely a method, one that takes a number of different forms, and utilizes cut-up and tape layering and transposition, using the printed word to alter the brain itself and confute habitual responses, to make the reader aware of the processes of connectivity and the multiple levels of meaning — that’s the transmission from the writer to the reader, and it’s so complex that the effects cannot be predicted or controlled by the writer. 

TW: That’s it, you can try to express these states of consciousness, but at some point it really is transmission. Which isn’t to say that finally, as a writer, you don’t select and edit and decide upon what does this best, what works and doesn’t work. 

IM: Of course, very importantly, Burroughs’ techniques of cut-up and fold-in and scrapbook orientations and dreaming, these make the writer his own reader in a very special sense, because the writer discovers what he has apparently written by reading the results of the processes used. At one level what Burroughs is doing is mind screwing, that’s the only way to put it, I think, and that’s something the critics fail to notice or refuse to say, along with the sheer beauty of the writing. And Burroughs’ writing works on the reader’s memory and not just by creating memories of reading. . . It’s a tool of rapid connectivity, a “neural shuttle,” and triggers the synaptic flashing of images from different time locations in the brain, it impacts on the psyche and it’s carried on by the reader, quite helplessly. The effects will emerge not only in dreams but in waking life, I mean so-called waking life, and as you’ve said, this visceral possession is not something critics wish to talk about or consider at all, it doesn’t fit their literary and theoretical templates.

TW: That’s their form of protection. They have a certain theoretical understanding, but even that is hopeless, it just means they’re writing and talking about something they have no experience of, but they have their articles and lectures to prove otherwise, naturally. To “understand” cut-up, you have to do it. And that goes for everything else in The Third Mind. They really ought to try “rubbing out the word” — their own! You have to engage, you have to go through these processes and learn, and then you might write, because you might have something to say, or be in a situation to transmit something. 

IM: Actually, to deal with this writing as “literature,” it’s a category error. . . I mean, no one can deny Burroughs’ effect on “American Literature,” and this is fine as far as it goes, but that’s the point, that’s absolutely as far as it goes — for the trained exegetists. I think the inability to get Burroughs carries on to the reception of your own work — you’re seen as creating this complex, rarefied, difficult or perplexing form of “literature,” or it’s a “cut-up autobiography” that’s also somehow invented, maybe, and they just wish you’d just write your story exactly as it happened. . . or on the other hand, a recognizable narrative fiction, something that could be called “a novel. . .”

TW: My books do tell my story and I’m not interested in whatever these self-elected scholars and critics are so busy explaining to one another in their colloques and symposiums, I’m out of all that, definitively, and always have been.

IM: Surely the psychic impact of Burroughs’ writing is the most important thing. It’s writing as the teleporting of the reader from one place and time to another, not the escapist seduction of the reader into a particular story or period, and the old suspension of disbelief, but something quite different from that immersion in another world, on the contrary, it’s the vertiginous jumping from one setup to another, from one fictional scenario to another and back again, and the vivid awareness of that experience of transition, which shatters perceptual and mental concurrence and fixity. . . It’s commonly said that this is the result of cut-up, but it also comes from the other techniques which Burroughs and Gysin explored including journeys out of the body, the teleporting of consciousness, the projection of other lives, so-called “false memory syndrome. . .” There’s no doubt that Burroughs rewrote his own memories through textual and psychic processes which altered the written material in order to change the brain’s formatting of these memories, and memory patterns. . . And so memories can be textually generated in variant form, a cyclical process which is actually in accord with what we now know about the storing and activation and re-contextualization of memories. . .But the point is that Burroughs actually recreates and develops his “own” memories, and at this point, of course, you could bring in psychoanalysis and start writing about manifest versus latent memories, and screen memories, insisting upon the “real” episodes which Burroughs is supposedly exorcising, or attempting either to locate or obfuscate, but his methodology actually invalidates that hunt for “what really happened.” Burroughs is just too fast for that, in every sense, beyond even the “space age” of the ’60s in which he located his practice. Because cut-up smashed commonplace notions of cause and effect, and Sigmund Freud will never read The Soft Machine. [laughter]

TW: Again, and I guess it can’t be said too often, because nobody will listen — “All history is fiction!” 

IM: You’re trying to express these experiences of other states of consciousness in writing, and to procure and transmit something of those experiences, so it’s not an account but psychically generative. Burroughs said that a writer needs his readers, and that’s the key — the Sender needs the Receiver. The software, the anti-program, must be installed — to use a contemporary, commonplace version of the cybernetic imagery which was not metaphoric but literal for Gysin and Burroughs when they employed it in the Beat Hotel. The key is that the Word is understood as being transmitted as a virus — because it replicates, because it spreads. . . 

TW: Yes, that’s it, you want to have an effect which conveys the dynamics of consciousness. In London in ’86, after Brion’s death, I had this onslaught of spectacular fireworks, a psychic experience, what Krishnamurti called “The Process,” which of course has some relevance to the title of Brion’s novel and others have used this term in regard to initiatory experiences. Well, for about six months after Brion’s death I was seeing with my eyes closed, I had this rush of psychic experiences which is conveyed hopefully to some extent in Perilous Passage, a real psychedelic fandango, and it felt as if momentarily all this power was passing through me, the way he had felt throughout his life, that’s what I felt, producing the most extraordinary psychic fireworks, quite different from the receptivity and deep meditations which I experienced later, and different from ayahuasca, too. . . 

IM: In the book you describe seeing a blue sea and then you’re projected onto a movie screen before being swept away by “some uncontrollable volitionary force from one infinitely inconceivable metamorphosis to another. . .” You pass through a cavern of mirrors and you’re attacked by all these “quasi-human creatures,” and what I find so interesting is that you get out of this psychic pit by actually conjuring another kind of fear, your own fear of heights, by inducing vertigo, and by doing this you escape the “psychic fireworks” — it’s a method of overcoming a state of terror by invoking an inculcated psychic and physical fear. And significantly, your vertigo itself disappears during this process. It’s a lesson in learning to combat one terror with another, to induce a further terror and to pass through both. 

TW: But at the time, when you’re going through something like that, it’s not like you can think it through, or employ some strategy. . . There was this electrical energy crackling through me, and cracking me up physically and mentally, to the point where I thought I would die, overloaded with the voltage, as if that was what Brion had lived with. . . It was enormously debilitating and I felt I was being rewired. Such experiences seem impossible to describe, but that’s something I felt I had to try and do in Perilous Passage, it’s one of the functions of the book to see just how far I could go, to find ways to express these states, and not just provide an account, as you say. . . Writing as a method, one among others, to procure access to that kind of state, or communicate how it felt . . . And of course cut-up would seem to be the perfect method to use for expressing these states, as with ayahuasca. . .  

Terry Wilson, notebook and photos for Perilous Passage

IM: The time gap between the first parts of Perilous Passage and the last two sections shows how the book was written out of unexpected, unforeseen experiences which actually entered the book and changed it. And it was not “recollected in tranquillity,” it wasn’t written after the fact, looking back — it was lived. 

TW: My approach was not systematic, though I kept it strictly in the order in which it was written. Within that you have all these flashbacks and episodes moving back and forth in time, but there’s a chronology of writing. . . I wasn’t writing what had happened, I was writing it as it happened. The book was part of what happened during the years in which it was written, it was inextricably bound up with those experiences which created it. 

IM: And which in turn it helped to create. Even when you weren’t writing during this period, you were still a writer, and that is a crucial thing. Does a writer, can a writer, stop being a writer? If not, then that impulse, desire, necessity always plays a part. How do you feel about your own role, or profession of writer, the compulsion, or curse, of being a writer?

TW: I like writing, I enjoy it, but I distrust the artistic process. I don’t like the idea of being addicted to it. Sartre in his book on Genet, I think, he says that you show him someone who calls himself a writer, he’ll show you a slave, someone in chains. . . So I said, after Dreams Of Green Base, and after Perilous Passage, and other times, that I wasn’t going to write anymore, at those times I felt I’d said all I wanted to say. Then with Days Lane, I wanted to explain “The Gysin Level,” and tandra “Day-Dreaming,” to get at the quintessence of The Third Mind, so it’s a small book, very concentrated, like that, focusing on all the experiences I’d gone through in that area, a kind of summation, the final statement, if you like.  

IM: Burroughs wrote so much, he wrote all the time, and the material he generated overflowed the published books. . . It was for many years an extraordinary, astonishing process of writing, an organic, Amazonian flood of writing without end, this “orchidaceous splendor” flowing in all these directions. . . Totally uncontainable, a real river of writing in total flood. . . An absolutely unparalleled practise of writing — writing as addiction, out of addiction. . .And Gysin’s written and published oeuvre is comparatively small compared with that, and was directed to a few distinct projects, realized or otherwise. I think your own writing went through these years of experiences and experimentation, and each book developed so as to incarnate a particular stage in your development, I mean, your psychic development and what you were learning. . . So each book incarnates a particular period but also a crucial stage of initiation, from Dreams Of Green Base to “D” Train to Perilous Passage and then Days Lane. 

TW: Yes, like Days Lane. After the experiences in West End I found it impossible to believe in a hostile, predatory universe. And the experience of ayahuasca didn’t contradict this, even though the experience was terrifying. . . I went through it, but it didn’t contradict those experiences, no, it was beneficial but you have to integrate it, because once you’ve taken it, it’s inside you. . . Some people benefit enormously from ayahuasca, others seem unaffected. It depends entirely upon who’s taking it, the psycho-physical setup. . . At the very end of Days Lane, I wrote about seeing and accepting “that the beauty of existence is never exhausted and is ultimately invulnerable, and that Entire Being — the universe, in other words — is total elation.” 

IM: Perilous Passage is very much the account of a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but the Sorcerer has gone, the Apprentice has to navigate alone, contacting the Master through these strewn clues and psychic manifestations. Or he’s helpless, a conduit for these transmissions, set on the “shattering course.”  

TW: You know that Brion didn’t want to be my teacher, but one of the last things he said to me was, “You have only been an Apprentice to an Apprentice.” So there was someone, something, behind him, and what happened to me after his death was something which he could not show me when he was alive. . . Well, I’ve spent time with artists and practitioners, shall we say, and some of these were involved in those shifting worlds of intrigue and psychic power, and I learned that an artist is a self-conscious shaman and not a public entertainer. . . For William and for Brion, art wasn’t a religion and it wasn’t art for art’s sake, it was intended to have some effect, it was an instrument in the transformation of consciousness, directed at changing the circumstances of living, the experience of human existence. . . It wasn’t party politics but a disenfranchised electorate attacking existing ideologies, recruiting the disaffected and the rebellious. . . William and Brion were serious practitioners of a revolution in awareness, they were researching “a new and different knowledge,” creating an esoteric factory, going back to the roots of magical artistic practice and developing these shattering techniques through technology, surprising “the springs and traps of inspiration,” all of that and more besides. . . And that attitude has been essential for me and for my work, because these notions of so-called “art” and “literature,” all of that is quite beside the point. . . Brion taught by example, through allegory and incredibly intricate, complex story-telling. He taught elliptically, and through demonstration — he would show you something and leave the rest up to you. It was the opposite of didacticism, even though Brion had his own very pronounced views on things. I remember one time, someone ran out the room when Brion was telling this story because it just drove him crazy. . . It was at the time of the publication of Queer, or it was just about to be published, and we were there in Brion’s apartment in rue St Martin and William was in one room talking about the shooting of Joan, he was in Brion’s bedroom, actually, that’s where he’d installed himself or found himself with this audience listening to him, and, of course, they were rapt. . . And William was talking about possession, the version given in the introduction to Queer, no doubt. . . But I stayed in the main room with Brion and he was talking to me about looking after Bet, saying you have to look after your mother, you know, that was axiomatic, you had to do that, even though Brion had not done so with his own mother and felt considerable guilt about it. . . Well, this conversation took place while William was in the next room talking about the shooting of Joan, and maybe that misogyny theme arose, like the two were in conjunction — the shooting of the wife, the apparent desertion of the mother, and the terrible guilt involved. . . I was feeling very uneasy about what was happening, like some kind of double act they would put on, but this was actually very distressing and weird, and then Brion went into this incredible tale about some unbelievable character who went to vernissages and openings and salons where he proceeded to stamp on women’s feet! [laughter] This was Brion as a Fortean “Wild Talents” operator, telling me apparently out of the blue about this phantom foot stomper, some guy who just appeared and did this crazy thing and then ran off until the next time and how he became the curse of fashionable society. It was hilarious, incredible, and I had no idea why Brion was suddenly expounding upon this, and then he said that this man was his hero, he was the man he admired most in the world, you know, really lauding this character and enthusing about him and laying it all on, and as he described all these crazy incidents, I couldn’t stop laughing, but of course, I thought he was making it all up, but then he opened this drawer and came out with a whole load of press cuttings about this guy, like in seven languages, all of which Brion could read and proceeded to do so. . . The Phantom Foot Stomper, going around all the society hot spots and jumping on women’s feet before fleeing into the night. . . And meanwhile William is talking about the tragic killing of Joan, and the guilt he feels, and the “Ugly Spirit,” and we’re howling uncouthly with laughter in the next room, or at least I was, about this society foot fetishist . . I mean, what did that mean? Why did he suddenly come out with all that stuff and show it to me? I know it’s connected to his mother and to Joan through this idea about stepping on women, but at the same time it was so bizarre and freakish and unaccountable. It certainly wasn’t happenstance, because Brion wasn’t like that. It was teaching. . . it meant something that could not have been said in any other way. And he was the devil who made me react in the way I did, and I really couldn’t help myself — it was hysterically funny, and it was teaching, teaching through overturn, to shatter all your preconceptions and totally turn you around, like that. . . He made me laugh like crazy till I suddenly stopped and thought, “What just happened?” That was his way — something hidden in the telling, and you’d never forget it, though its meaning is ineffable. . . 

IM: Perilous Passage is very funny indeed, as well as scary and disorienting. Burroughs and Gysin could also be naturally very funny, but humor, like in your work, it had a strategic purpose for them, too — laughter, laughing out loud, the un-containable explosion of laughter, like, “you’re killing me.” . . It has a vital function in shamanism and in overturning self-control and the imposition of social control. Gysin and Burroughs were profoundly serious men, but they knew the value of wit and delight and fun, as well as the weapon of humor — the satiric, scatological sketch that ridicules some divine tyrant and turns him into a laughing stock forever. And how great is that. . . But what a lot of people think of first and foremost about Burroughs’ work, I’m sure, is the grotesquerie, the satire and scathing polemic, the caricature and the one-liners. That’s just one reason why the cut-up trilogy is less popular than some of his other works, though I think it’s his greatest achievement after Naked Lunch. Quite apart from the intensive cut-up employed, which is so incredibly heavy and like being machine-gunned, it’s far less pantomimic.  

TW: It might seem crazy or totally misguided that in a book which deals with very serious issues, the Third Mind and the death of Brion Gysin, that I have this insane slapstick with references to some retired General’s magnum opus on athlete’s foot and so on. . . But yes, you’re right, it’s a very necessary corrective to some “imparting the wisdom” setup. . . I owe much of that to Jim, I mean he was such a great performer and a perfect character for the book too, but it was more than that, it was an education, really — a terrifying education, sure, but I guess I learned a lot, and I realized that that was part of the process, which had begun with William and Brion, and now here I was with Jim and his antics and all this mayhem. . . When you’re with someone like that, even though there is no one else like that, you certainly see and experience things differently. And of course, Jim was the opposition, I mean he was against all these vested interests, he represented Brion’s interests, as far as I was concerned, because he’d financially supported Brion when Brion was ill and dying, and he’d financed and arranged for Brion to be able to paint his big Makemono, the multiple panels of the painting Calligraffiti of Fire, which he wanted to exhibit, and then he wanted to make a film of Perilous Passage, based upon the book I was writing, and this was 1990, and it seemed absolutely the way to go, because Jim was really pushing Brion’s work and my own work, and he believed in it.

Perilous Passage film poster (design by Philippe Baumont)

IM: The big advertisement for the proposed film, it appeared in that big issue of Screen International promoting the Cannes Film Festival, it was in May 1990. And Jim believed in Perilous Passage and the techniques employed, he saw it as the true continuation of The Third Mind. I have a copy of that big one-page poster here, it reads, “Who Is The Man From Nowhere? Perilous Passage by Terry Wilson. The Legacy of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. A Mind-bending Mega Trip Into Interior Space.” And then the whole project unravelled and fell apart, which isn’t unusual in the film world, it happened with Burroughs and Gysin and Tony Balch when they tried to make a film of Naked Lunch, though that took years and years before they finally gave up on it, or rather, accepted that they were being struck down with illness and it just wasn’t going to happen. But even though it all fell apart, Jim had seen the film potential of Perilous Passage, and he picked up on the filmic scenarios and film setups in the book. . . He saw the possibility of bringing Third Mind techniques to the big screen. 

TW: And then someone fires a gun through the window, just one of the things that went down at that time, as I mention in Perilous Passage. 

IM: The sound of breaking glass seems to have been a feature of the shenanigans, psychic and otherwise. And flickering lights. . . 

TW: Well, it all came to an end in any case when Jim was arrested and locked up, and that was the end of the idea of any movie. But that craziness which Jim brought along with him, it went into the book along with all this slapstick material that I was picking up on from various sources, and I’d chuck it in, and in a way it was like Brion taking a sci-fi chapter from some novel and sticking it in The Process, and Burroughs writing to Ginsberg about putting Junkie and Queer together, one written in the first person and one in the second person, because that kind of disjunction seems crazy but it was entirely appropriate. . . It’s the juxtaposition of different kinds of knowledge which was part of that process, and the humor is very much in the ludicrousness of this very disparate material dragged in. . . And it was complex, like the quotation from The Last Buffalo Of The Black Hills, it isn’t a quotation at all, it’s actually a cut-up I made, but it doesn’t appear to be a cut-up or read like a cut-up! But a reader might assume it’s a genuine quotation since I mention that book earlier on in the text. The reader may be puzzled, or elsewhere feel derailed by this Marx Brothers riot, but it’s not written for readers who might define it as “postmodernist,” it’s not some kind of “anti-novel,” no, not at all, my book is a spell, it’s intended to have a quite magical effect and in that way it’s closer to Brion’s The Process, as well as deriving technically to some extent from William’s The Job. . . And, as I say, I was entering the Tom Ripley world, and even these quite odd personalities Brion knew couldn’t compare with Jim’s antics and this whole dangerous scene I was introduced to, and then with Jim there were all these different people in one, the deranged motormouth suddenly switches into a description of the stars as we drive through the night, and then not saying a word. . .  

IM: Like Europe in the rain, travelling through a film of ruins, it comes over in the book and it encapsulates that feeling of the early ’90s. I liked the idea of Jim’s proposed film, from what I could make out of what Jim told me at the time. I imagined it would be a kind of homage to Donald Cammell’s great Performance, this mixing and merging of the artistic and criminal worlds, but with Third Mind techniques actually employed in the shooting. . . I’ve worked on even more nebulous film projects, and I thought this project was unlikely but it was at least quite promising compared with what I’d been through, like the one about the closeted gay cop who works at night in a massage parlour and inserts needles into his scrotum. [laughter] Well, that went straight into the video dungeon, but I imagined this film Jim had in mind as a black and white art house film, shot through with colour, a kind of New Wave homage in some ways. . . And the film would make the image of Brion Gysin appear, and that whole Maya illusion world, the great Beat Hotel melange, with all its sound and vision projectors, it would all be there, on screen and soundtrack . . . And then Jim drove me crazy, getting me to write all these treatments and synopses and articles, referring to your work and Gysin’s and Burrough’, and he appeared to be in Cannes, but maybe he was actually in Paris, and he was apparently meeting Bertolucci and David Lynch and even the Adorno Group, or was it the New Frankfurt School or something — and his demands and requests changed every night, depending upon whoever he was going to meet to sell this idea to, or whatever he was up to. I was writing all these things at a moment’s notice, and I remember once saying to him, “No one, and I mean no one, can write a screenplay in five hours, Jim,” and he said, “Cut out the dialogue.” [laughter] I mean, incredible! And there were these incredibly long phone calls, and Jim was brilliant, very inspired and inspiring, and he was very much someone who loved the work of Burroughs and Gysin and your own writing and he really wanted to do something and he thought film was the way to go, a Burroughsian, Gysinian vision on the screen, dealing with your situation at the time, trying to keep The Third Mind going somehow. And he was very funny. He made me laugh, and I mean, I was in pain. [laughter] 

TW: It was shamanic foolery, and that was vital for the book, I thought, or otherwise you’d be entering Beckettland, though Brion once told me that William actually found Beckett funny! [laughter] 

IM: You mean he really thought Beckett was funny?

TW: That’s what Brion told me.

IM: Well, actually, I can see that, I think, maybe, in the novels. There’s this absurd repetition of certain meaningless actions. Was that it, do you think?  

TW: I really wouldn’t worry about it.

IM: Jim treated the phone as an instrument of shamanic transmission. I found it impossible to break the call or hang up — he had me hooked. He phoned and claimed that David Lynch had called whatever I’d written “an insult to the profession” or something, and that Lynch had ripped it up and thrown it in the waste basket in an apoplectic rage, but this didn’t chime at all with what I knew about Lynch. The Adorno Group, or whatever they were, they promptly denounced me as a “class traitor” and “art parasite,” and Jim said, “How could you write such drivel? How could you do this to me?,” you know, emotionally prostrating himself, but then the next moment it was, “Forward, comrade!” and jubilantly triumphant before all obstacles. . . [laughter] Then I’d be up all night writing and burning up the fax machine. Jim phoned at one point and said that you and Philippe had gone AWOL in the Atlas Mountains and I should fly out to Morocco immediately and find you, but I should go “in mufti” . . . I mean, really, he made my head spin, and in those days I didn’t know if it was lunch or breakfast, but he was spellbinding, and unlike some, he did actually pay me for my work. Jim had honor, though Duncan Campbell, in his book The Underworld, he writes that Jim was “eccentric and devious. . . a man who has scruples like a hen has teeth, who lived in a netherworld between reality and fantasy.” 

Philippe Baumont and Terry Wilson, Tangier 1990 (photo by Oliver Harris)

TW: I don’t think Joseph Beuys, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin were wrong about Jim, and I know whose opinion I’d value. They appreciated Jim, they recognized him. He was the true revolutionary spirit, incarnate. 

IM: They were men of the world, they were great artists, and they’d been around — and they knew a crazy wisdom guru when they met one. And Jim supported Gysin, and yourself, he really did put his money down on the table. We must thank him for Gysin’s Calligraffiti of Fire and for helping Gysin through those dark times when he was so terribly ill. Jim picked up the tab, and he never questioned doing so. Certain others were unaccountably unavailable at the time, or occupied elsewhere. “By their deeds shall ye know them.”

TW: Absolutely. Yes, Jim came through for Brion, that is the truth of that time. . . He made things better for Brion than they would otherwise have been, and he never claimed credit or bragged about it, he just did it. . . So, yes, absolutely, you’re right. A trickster, for sure, but as you say, he had his own integrity.

IM: There’s so much more, but I think we can leave it there for now. Thanks, we’ll save the rest for another time. 

TW: My pleasure.  

Written by Ian MacFadyen and published by RealityStudio on 20 February 2012. Many thanks to Terry Wilson for his help and for the use of materials from the Terry Wilson Archive. Many thanks to Di Vincent for her invaluable assistance.

Perilous Passage is published by Synergetic Press. (Paperback, 189 pages, 11 illustrations, ISBN 978-0-907791-42-3)

Days Lane by Terry Wilson was published by Richard Livermore of Chanticleer Press, Edinburgh, in 2009.

Extracts from two interviews of Terry Wilson by Ian MacFadyen, including material on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, have recently been published in the new issue of the journal Pataphysics: Program, edited by Leo Edelstein and Judith Elliston. (ISSN 103-5197)

“Cutting Up For Real” is an extract from extensive interviews of Terry Wilson made by Ian MacFadyen over several years. Some of this material will be included in the book on The Third Mind which Ian MacFadyen is working on with Amsterdam-based painter Phil Wood. Further extracts will appear on RealityStudio.

A Profile of William S. Burroughs (1965)

By Bill Butler

Bill Butler was an American poet who served as one of the influential managers of London’s independent bookstore Better Books. In 1967 he moved to Brighton and founded Unicorn Books, which was subject the following year to a nasty obscenity trial involving its edition of J.G. Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan and other works of the underground that were being offered for sale. Butler was friendly with William Burroughs and interviewed him for this previously uncollected profile, first published in the Guardian newspaper on 27 November 1965.

Voice dry as the voice of T.S. Eliot droning from a recording, accent still American after years away from America. Appearance as anonymous as a bank clerk’s, forgettable as a bank robber. Writer of books compared with Kafka, Joyce, and dirty postcards. His bruised readers nurse a sense of outrage and assault after trips through the Burroughs landscape, a desert of screams.

All the time he talks he moves around the room, or groping for cigarettes, or gesturing with nervous hands. He lines the cigarette pack up with invisible parallels, rearranges the ash pattern in the ash tray. His work is sentences from newspapers, conversations, other authors, the title of something he is reading, things he hears, what is happening around him; it all makes a sort of collage. “Brion Gysin first suggested the collage technique to me in 1960. I had been working toward something like the cut-up method on my own. Naked Lunch is partially a cut-up. Gysin said that writing was fifty years behind painting and why shouldn’t something else be done.”

“He had started something he called ‘permutating points.’ When you start moving ‘time,’ the word, around, you get many different meanings. We have quite a few different words in the English language such as ‘Two – to – too,’ ‘I – aye – eye,’ ‘there – they’re – their. Once you move them around, change the word order slightly, meanings change, new things come out. Just by changing the punctuation you can have: ‘We are there. Two know,’ or ‘We are their two. No,’ or ‘We are there to know.’ Words intersect in unfamiliar ways. Change the word order and ‘We are too there. No.’ You can’t do that with French — the whole effort of the academy has been to make a language with no permutations, no interest in it.”

From a pile of newspapers on the bed he picked up and waved the Daily Express: “The English papers are amazing. Lok at the variations in headlines, here in the Daily Express it says: ’2 A.M. ANXIETY GROWS FOR IKE,’ right here on the front page, the top story. But in this other paper they’ve put it way over on the back page, down at the bottom. Just not the same story.”

He reads a lot of newspapers. For information: “I once knew a junkie that would hold [sic] up with the newspapers, a couple of packages of cigarettes, and some candy bars and read them through from first to last page. Everything. And remembered it too. If he got the chance he’d reel the whole thing back at you, every word of it. I spend most of my time editing and filing. Some of the files are here with me, but not all of them. I couldn’t travel everywhere with them.”

“For ten published pages there are fifty pages of notes on file and more on tape. I use a tape recorder, camera, typewriter, scissors, scrapbooks. From the newspapers and from items people send me I get intersections between all sorts of things. Plane crashes, for example. They come in sequence. A plane piloted by a Captain Clark crashed in California. Now the crash was caused by a crazed passenger, Frankie Gonzales, who shot Captain Clark. The next major plane crash was at Clark Air Force Base in Manila, no survivors. Frankie Gonzales came from Manila. On the plane once, on the Gibraltar-to-Tangier run, the pilot was Captain Clark. Over the loudspeaker came, ‘Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.’ Things like that. They all tie up, there are connections, intersections.”

“If people keep their eyes open they’ll notice these peripheral things around them. Newsweek magazine some time ago ran an advertisement which said: ‘Read by 1,700,000 families in 186 lands.’ Two weeks later the ad came out: ‘Read by 1,600,000 families in 166 lands.’ Why? I’d like to know what happened to those 100,000 families and twenty countries.”

Word Falling, Photo Falling

In his books William Burroughs constantly repeats: “Word falling, photo falling.” He explains it: “I expect to see the formation of an ideographic language. You know Marshall McLuhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy says that a syllabic language conditions thought. Words and photographs are used by vested interests as a control machine to manipulate humanity. But their manipulation depends on people being able to read; so we have universal literacy promulgated. Theocracies, on the other hand, such as the Mayans and the Egyptians, were dependent on an illiterate population where knowledge of even such information as seasonal times for planting rested only with the priesthood. Their control was through ignorance, whereas we today are controlled through the word which we can read.”

“We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not the image of the thing itself. Try reading something silently without saying the words subvocally. It’s hard to do. Gertrude Stein’s statement: ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,’ is true only if written down; but as Korzbyski says, a rose (flower) is, whatever is it, not a rose (word). So a rose (word) is a rose (word) is a rose (word) is a rose (word). No flower.”

Burroughs’ only published books in England so far are Naked Lunch and Dead Fingers Talk, both published by John Calder. When it came out Naked Lunch was greeted in the English press with a near-total retch of disgust. Those critics who actually read the book are answered in this passage from Nova Express, to be published in February by Jonathan Cape:

Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer — I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so-called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine. Their drugs are poison to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens — Stay out of the Garden of Delights…

Asked who his “they” are, he answers, “The vested interests. Time / Life / Fortune is one. The Luce magazines are nothing but control mechanisms. They’re about as human as a computer. Henry Luce, himself, has no control over the thing now, it’s grown so large. Yet all it would take to bring it down is one technical sergeant fouling up the works, just one technical sergeant. That’s why the ‘Word falling, photo falling’ image. We’ve got to break down the police organization of words and images. I haven’t had time to do it yet but one possibility would be a color alphabet — using colored dots. Obviously it would be impossible to use 26 colors; but a combination using nine colors and a series of dots, based on the syllable and not on the letter — colored dot symbol for ‘ing,’ ‘ed,’ ‘ch,’ ‘wh,’ and so forth would be an improvement. Or an ideographic language like the Mayan or Chinese systems used in addition to the spoken language.

Unlike most authors, whose personae in books and in flesh are different, Burroughs is completely consonant with his writing, quoting from it occasionally; but more generally he simply uses similar wording to express ideas which he is working out in the books. He regards the weapons of the “machine” as varied: “They use sex as an addiction for control, just as they use alcohol and drugs — a program of systematic frustration in order to sell this crock of sewage as immortality, a garden of delights, and love. In our civilization alcohol is the other accepted narcotic since it also induces sleep. And as a crime-producing ‘drug’ it has no rival. This is the world they want to make us live in and like, where they can use the word, the photo, sex, narcotics, and alcohol. And power addiction, many policemen are addicts for power, if it got taken away from them they’d go through agony. Those are their weapons. And the monopoly has records pertaining to anybody that they feel could be of use to them or who might endanger them.”

In Soft Machine, to be published next year by Calder and Boyars, William Burroughs summed himself up with pretty fair accuracy… “So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers, and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air…”

The Lost Tapes of Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, 1967-1969

by Edward S. Robinson

For academics and fans alike, the archives of the pivotal beat triumvir of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac have long been a source of fascination and a continued wealth of lost texts. Despite the excavation of a large number of letters and minor works, alongside significant manuscripts such as the Burroughs / Kerouac collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (written in 1945, but not published until 2010) there is nevertheless a sense that the well may be beginning to run dry. 

It is perhaps for this reason that interest in the extended “Beat family tree” which has branches that extend far and wide is finally beginning to grow. While largely (and unjustly) neglected thus far, the so-called “European Beats” made a substantial contribution to the dissemination of the cut-up method. Many of these writers were introduced to the technique by Burroughs himself through his many contributions to underground zines in the 1960s, when his project had been specifically to “recruit” practitioners far and wide in order to “spread the virus” and spearhead an assault against linguistic programming and rational thought. Amongst these, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach stand out for their contributions to the cut-up canon. Many of their works were produced with Burroughs’ direct involvement in some capacity: for example the “Counterscripts” which preface Pélieu’s 1967 novel With Revolvers Aimed… Finger Bowls, and Weissner’s The Braille Film (1970) and the “Tickertape” introduction to the three-way collaboration between Weissner, Jürgen Ploog and Jan Herman, Cut Up Or Shut Up (1969), and not forgetting the Weissner / Pélieu / Burroughs pamphlet So Who Owns Death TV? (1967). These publications are relatively sought after and are commanding increasingly high prices on the collectors” market. However, to date, the archives of these authors remain largely unexplored. 

A few months ago, I received an email from Gary Lee-Nova. Aware of my research into these writers, he wondered if I might be interested in hearing a tape he had in his possession, the details of which he explained as follows:

Since the early 1970s, I have had a five-inch reel, ¼” audiotape recording in my collection. I obtained the tape from Richard Aaron of AM HERE BOOKS which at the time, was based in Switzerland.¹

Gary reported that the tape was well-preserved, had been carefully stored and played only once while in his collection, but the recording quality very much reflected the technology of the time, noting:

To my ear, it sounds like it was recorded in a small shed made of sheet metal; a bit tinny. I’ve heard other old tape recordings that sound like they were recorded in a wet, cardboard box.

His intention was, then, to convert the audio to digital files and re-equalize the recording in order to render it as listenable as possible and to “bring about as pleasant a sound of the reading voices as possible.”²

Naturally, I was extremely interested. I knew that Weissner had been heavily involved in a number of recording projects in the late 1960s, as he recalled in a 1988 interview with Jay Dougherty, recounting,

I documented a good part of the New York poetry scene on tape for the German Avantgarde Archive, which is run by an old friend of mine. I think I wound up with about a hundred hours of tape. It was a good cross-section: Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, Ray Bremser, Jack MacLow, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles. Ron Tavel. Jack Micheline. John Wieners. Ed Sanders.³

In the same interview he also remembers being “totally fascinated with William Burroughs’ cut-up thing” which led him to “all these cut-up collaborations with Burroughs, Nuttall, Pélieu, Mary Beach. Tape experiments and whatnot.”⁴ However, I had never actually heard any of Weissner’s recordings myself. What’s more, here was a bone fide rarity, compiling a number of recordings catalogued as being in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in the Northwestern University Library, Illinois, and others that appear to be unlisted.⁵

I did not have to wait long before the suspense was over and I received not only a digital copy of this rare tape, but also photographic evidence of the source, including a high-resolution reproduction of the sheet attached to the box, which contained the full track listing that Gary had provided in his email.

The Contributors and the Material Facts

The facts: the tape contains four separate recordings. There is a gummed piece of paper attached to the box bearing the typed details of the recordings, which read as follows:

CARL WEISSNER reading from THE BRAILLE FILM (San Francisco, 1970) followed by tape experiments (New York / San Francisco 1967/68).

MARY BEACH reading from ELECTRIC BANANA (Darmstadt 1969) followed by

CLAUDE PELIEU, MARY BEACH and CARL WEISSNER reading from their resp. notebooks & works in progress – a spontaneous cutup experiment – recorded by Carl W., Honolulu, 12 Dec. 1968 60 min.

Beneath this track listing is Weissner’s signature.

The Recordings, Side 1: Carl Weissner

The first three tracks or sections in the digital reproduction represent the first side of the tape, and all feature Weissner reading from The Braille Film. The sound quality varies across the three parts, suggesting that they were recorded in different locations and / or at different times, perhaps using different equipment.

The first track — in its digital form — has a duration of two minutes and twenty-nine seconds and features a straight recording of Weissner reading a segment of text. The reading is largely clear, although occasional words are a little difficult to distinguish through a combination of microphone positioning and enunciation. The piece contains a thin thread of narrative, beginning ostensibly with the scene of an execution, while also incorporating “classic” cut-up elements, in the form of references to virus and mutation and biological and technological synesthesia, such as “faded lips, palpitating emphysema lungs” and “infra-red veins” which are representative of the “composite bodies” that populate Weissner’s (anti-)novel.⁶ Interestingly, this section of text does not appear in the published version of the book, which appeared in 1970 on Jan Herman’s Nova Broadcast Press.

The second section is louder and clearer than the first, with a trebly sound which occasionally tweets at certain frequencies. It has a running time of almost twelve minutes. It features Weissner delivering a measured reading of a section of The Braille Film that begins on page 92. The delivery is deadpan, almost Burroughsian in many respects. The meter is reminiscent of those which appear on Call Me Burroughs, and, like Burroughs, Weissner adopts different voices for dialogue. To hear him raise the pitch of his voice and deliver the lines “Why, it is possible? Something’s touching me on the ass…!” in the tone of a posh woman in a state of affronted surprise cannot fail to amuse, while his rendition of an upper-class British accent for her “gray companion” is remarkable for its accuracy. 

Significantly, there are portions of text — the occasional sentence here and there — which are read here that do not appear in the final published version. The interest here lies not, perhaps, so much in the details of textual variations or edits per se (although scholars of major authors, including Burroughs, are often given to analyzing such variant and alternative edits in great depth), but in the way that this evidences the theories that lie at the heart of The Braille Film in live practice. Much of The Braille Film is given to demonstrating the ways in which the media, authors, historians, all manipulate text — and film — to achieve specific ends. Minor, often subtle edits, a change of camera angle or focus, the cropping of an image, all contrive to alter — potentially quite dramatically — the way the audience receives and perceives a “text.” As such, the minor alterations Weissner makes to his own text show the author effectively manipulating, adjusting, altering his own text, and in doing so, in some small way, the course of history is changed. This marks a central theme of The Braille Film, and also stands in parallel with Burroughs’ theories concerning the idea of “history as construct”:

We think of the past as being there unchangeable… the past is ours to shape and change at will. Two men talk… if no recording of the conversation is made, it exists only in the memory of the two actors. Suppose I make a recording… and alter and falsify the recording, and play the altered recording back to the two actors. If my alterations had been skilfully and plausibly applied the two actors will remember the altered recording.⁷

The third track is of lesser quality, and sounds as though Weissner’s voice has been recorded down a drainpipe or processed through a flange effect. This is, in fact, intentional, as he recounts: “I remember producing the effect of talking down a drain on purpose: I talked directly into an empty whisky bottle when I made that recording (Wong’s Cabaret, etc.) in Jan [Herman]‘s room on Bush Street, San Francisco, ’68.”⁸ Seemingly recorded in two takes, the material does undeniably suffer on account of the recording quality. Nevertheless, Weissner’s flat delivery stands in stark contrast to the sex acts he details within this section, which again, is not included in the published version of the book. However, it is worth noting at this juncture that Weissner produced a number of texts entitled The Braille Film; the 1969 German language collection of works edited by Weissner, entitled Cut-Up, which featured works by Burroughs, Mary Beach, Harold Norse, Jürgen Ploog, Claude Pélieu, Brion Gysin and Jeff Nuttall, features a number of short texts by Weissner gathered under the main heading of The Braille Film. While some of these “Composite Soundtrack” pieces do also appear in the book, they do so in re-edited forms. This may appear somewhat confusing, as The Braille Film was written directly in English, yet the texts which appear in Cut-Up, published a year earlier — are in German. However, as Carl explained, “the stuff in the antho was translated (sort of) from the English ms.” As such, this recording provides an insight into the evolution of The Braille Film as a book that emerged from an array of texts written over a period of time and then pieced together: a large-scale textual collage of smaller cut-ups.

The fourth and final track on side one is given to Weissner’s “Tape Experiments (New York / San Francisco 1967/68).” With a running time of eight minutes and ten seconds, it comprises a selection of segments of recordings from a range of courses cut together. Most of the different samples stand separate from one another: a few seconds of the radio, a few more of the television, a few more seconds of Weissner reading. The pieces are, as one would probably expect, of variable quality, although there are some interesting delay effects and overlays, plus an unsettling — not to mention slightly disorientating — loop of a crowd’s recorded laughter, which are noteworthy from an experimental perspective.

Beginning at the 1:21 mark, between a loop of what sounds like coughing accompanied by a droning hum in the background and a segment of narrative delivered in an eerie, echoed whisper, Weissner reads a permutational piece that effectively recreates Burroughs’ “Recalling All Active Agents.” In Weissner’s recording, the words are changed to “Calling All Erogenous Agents” and additional words and phrases are also incorporated. While recorded in 1960, Burroughs’ recording remained unreleased commercially until 1986, when Sub Rosa issued the compilation Break Through in Grey Room, evidencing that Weissner had access to Burroughs’ personal archive during the time they worked on their various collaborations. This demonstrates just how keen Burroughs was during his “cut-up period” to “spread the virus.” His prodigious output through the underground press and in his numerous collaborations, in conjunction with his liberal sharing of his methodology and frequent incitement for others to utilize the cut-up technique, evidence just how strongly he believed it was possible to revolutionize writing and all word-based media. Recordings such as those made by Weissner show how infectious Burroughs’ enthusiasm was. 

Other sections of these “Tape Experiments” are more developed and sophisticated, and contain a number of layers of audio simultaneously. Possibly generated in part by ambient sounds, the hum of electricity or even the amplified recording device itself, between 1:30 and 3:00 and from 7:15 to the end, long, low notes, drones and hums provide a backdrop to snippets of dialogue and also to longer readings from texts, with an almost musical tonality. In many ways, these sections are the most remarkable of all, in that they sound very like contemporary experimental / ambient records, illustrating just how ahead of their time these tape experiments really were.

Leading the Electronic Revolution

It is perhaps because of their continued relevance that Burroughs’ audio experiments, conducted in the 1960s, continue to be a source of great interest on both a literary and technical level. Burroughs’ interest in the applications of audio was well documented, particularly in The Job and Electronic Revolution, which would prove seminal for experimental music pioneers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Burroughs’ own recordings, however, remained in the vaults. Initially recorded for the purposes of his own personal research, the tapes were not intended for public consumption. It wasn Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle who convinced Burroughs to allow him to release a selection of these experiments commercially. After spending many long hours going through the tapes, Orridge compiled the hour’s worth of material that was released as Nothing Here Now But the Recordings on Industrial Records in 1980.⁹

Nevertheless, Burroughs’ influence on music, particularly the music of the avant-garde, precedes the public release of his experimental recordings, primarily on account of his book Electronic Revolution (1970, 1972, 1976), which expounds the theoretical contexts of some of his practical experiments with audio. Along with Cabaret Voltaire and Coil, Throbbing Gristle were among the first to explore the possibilities of using tape loops, cut-ups, samples and “found sounds” to make music. It was in the work of these bands that Burroughs’ influence on music became truly tangible.¹⁰ “A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music,” recalls Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk.¹¹ This was true of many of the bands involved in the Industrial scene that exploded on both sides of the Atlantic between 1978 and 1984. They immersed themselves in studio experimentation and the application of techniques first explored by Burroughs and Gysin some 20 years previous. The reason for the delayed spread of the Virus in sound recordings was largely due to the lack of technology to facilitate widespread experimentation prior to 1978. But once Burroughs and Gysin had made the “breakthrough,” it was almost inevitable that their ideas would spread. Kirk regards Electronic Revolution as “a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd… to create a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself” adding, “that side was always very interesting to us.”¹² The book’s great impact on the underground music scene is indubitable, serving as a catalyst for a new wave of avant-garde musical experimentation. 

The appeal of Electronic Revolution is obvious. While those who had followed Burroughs’ writing through the cut-up experiments would have been able to admire the many qualities of the writing, and even the methodology behind it, to the extent that it was possible to “write like Burroughs,” Electronic Revolution revealed new possibilities, demonstrating the potential for the written word to develop and mutate in new directions off the page. It also represented a “call to arms” for dissenters, providing as it did directions for sonic terrorism with the potential for “real” results:  

…make recordings and take pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, now play recordings back and take more pictures, will result in accidents, fires, removals. Especially the latter. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Center at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was carried out…¹³

Like Naked Lunch and The Third Mind, Electronic Revolution is a “how-to” book, a handbook, with instructions for the replication of the author’s techniques to achieve specific effects. “Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. Recorded police whistles will draw cops. Recorded gunshots, and their guns are out.”¹⁴ Burroughs explained the function of site-specific recording and playback thus:

…playback on location can produce definite effects. Playing back recordings of an accident can produce another accident… We carried out a number of these operations: street recordings, cut in of other material, playback in the streets …(I recall I had cut in fire engines and while playing this tape back in the street fire engines passed.)… (I wonder if anybody but CIA agents read this article or thought of putting these techniques into actual operation.) Anybody who carries out similar experiments over a period of time will turn up more “coincidences” than the law of averages allows.¹⁵

It was the capacity to achieve a specific desired effect, as Burroughs’ empirical testing of the theories demonstrated, which proved a significant factor in the book’s appeal to a certain audience. Although Burroughs believed that “the influence of fiction is not direct,” he always intended for his writing to have a tangible effect upon the reader in some way — after all, “if your writing had no effect, then you would have something to worry about.”¹⁶ That an early Cabaret Voltaire gig where Burroughs’ instructions were put into practice ended in a riot is testament to the effectiveness of the method.¹⁷

It is abundantly evident from hearing these brief examples of Weissner’s experimental recordings that Carl, like Burroughs, recognized the value of applying the cut-up method to audio tape.

The Recordings, Side 2, Part. 1: Mary Beach and Electric Banana

Side two begins with Beach reading from Electric Banana. This is a straightforward spoken-word recording, and Beach’s proper-sounding enunciation stands very much at odds with the colloquial and coarse elements of the prose, particularly within the dialogue. If anything, this heightens the impact of the reading and of the text itself. Beach’s performance is largely clear and confident, with only occasional stumbles, and the lines “wild screams of boys jacking off… on street corner of Madrid” causing some slight difficulty. Rather than detracting from the listening experience, such details remind us that this is a real, live reading captured on tape. While the readings Burroughs recorded for Call Me Burroughs were recorded over several takes and carefully edited to present an almost mechanically precise recording, free of background noise or errors, the scraping chair and other background sounds that can be heard during this twelve-minute recording are integral to its spirit, which is natural and immediate. The text itself is brutal and prosaic, a veritable blizzard of violence and sex, an orgy of drug consumption. 

As with Weissner’s readings from the then-unpublished Braille Film, so Beach’s Electric Banana was yet to be published, at least in its original language. (A section did appear in the Weissner-edited anthology Cut-Up in 1969, the year of this recording, and the full text was published in translation in Germany the following year, although it would be another five years before Cherry Valley Editions would publish an English language edition.) Once again, as with Weissner’s readings, the version Beach reads here is different from the published version. Beginning with a section that starts on page 12 of the Cherry Valley Edition, Beach omits a number of words, alters the tense of others and reads “I was apparently the only one interested in what was going on,” whereas the published version reads “I was not the only one.” Skipping most of page 13, she segues “Bromo-Seltzer trickling, foaming over blue headlights” into “Nothing but my own brain counts now.” 

The reason I draw attention to what may appear to be rather minor details is because, in the first instance, they enable us to observe the evolution of the text and the way additions and excisions were made over a period of time. Perhaps most importantly, however, we must consider the variations within the context of the theories which surrounded the cut-ups, specifically the ideas relating to textual manipulation. The underlying belief that words are malleable — Burroughs likened words to physical mediums such as paint — means that altering the position of a word within the broader context of the sentence and the paragraph in which it is located, and the way different juxtapositions of words can produce radically different meanings or present very different images in the reader’s mind’s eye, is key.

That the published text is, arguably, more explicit — and more Burroughsian — than the version Beach reads here is also noteworthy. The line “lips hovering over the ivory prick raised ready to strike like a snake — Iron exploding on a white moon, cool floods of white sound” would be published as “lips hovering over the ivory prick raised ready to strike like a pink cobra — Iron exploding on a white moon, cool floods of jissom & a white sound.” Whether or not this necessarily adds to the text’s impact is questionable, but one thing that is placed in sharp relief by this recording is Beach’s eye — and ear — for a Surreal image, and I would contend that some of the images conveyed in the recorded, earlier version of the text, are stronger or more striking than those which appear in the later revision. 

The Recordings, Side 2, Part. 2: Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Carl Weissner

The second track on side two has a running time of six minutes and twelve seconds. It comprises two separate readings, beginning with Claude Pélieu reading a brace of short pieces in a segment which has a duration of fractionally under five minutes, with a calm, smooth delivery. He speaks exclusively in French, which renders comment from me on the contents of the piece extremely difficult. On a purely technical level, however, Pélieu’s voice is clear, despite there being significant “snow” on the recording. Beach then reads briefly from a work in progress, which would appear to draw on cut-up articles from medical journals, with references to schizophrenia, liver disease and hepatitis, in juxtaposition with images of apocalypse, life-drawing and dissection. The sound quality suggests that it was recorded during the same session as Pélieu’s piece. 

The final section, which runs for eight minutes, begins with a collaborative piece, in which all three authors read in turn, although in no discernible sequence: Beach and Weissner in English, Pélieu in French. The result is certainly interesting, as each speaker delivers one or two lines from their text, their styles of delivery contrasting dramatically with one another — Pélieu’s style is laid-back and steady, while Beach’s delivery is akin to that of a newsreader, and Weissner has a controlled intensity in his voice. On a formal level, this intercutting of each author’s work effectively creates a new composite text that amalgamates three pre-existing texts. Described as a “spontaneous cut-up experiment,” its use of longer phrases in juxtaposition function more like those which form “The First Cut-Ups” that appeared in Minutes to Go than the choppier, more fragmentary cut-ups that would subsequently become the more popular form. However, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe this eight-minute sound collage as a real-time audio fold-in.

These recordings are fascinating and valuable in their own right, on a number of levels and not least of all because of the names involved in their production. While perhaps not possessing the commercial or mass appeal of discovering a “lost” recording of Burroughs, in the context of the broader Beat “scene,” Weissner, Pélieu and Beach are all significant writers, while Beach’s role in the publication and circulation of some of the most experimental works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, through her Beach Texts & Documents imprint was substantial. While it seems unlikely at the time of writing that further recordings from Weissner’s archive will surface — or find their way to me — it is extremely exciting to speculate about what gems may be in existence. At the very least, this tape affords a fascinating insight into a brief yet extremely fertile time in the ever-evolving, ever-mutating history of the cut-ups and the Beat generation.

Download the Lost Tapes

• Side 1, Track 1 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 2 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 3 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 4 (Weissner)
• Side 2, Track 1 (Beach)
• Side 2, Track 2 (Pélieu and Beach)
• Side 2, Track 3 (Pélieu, Weissner, and Beach)

Notes

1. Email from Gary Lee-Nova, 8th November 2010.

2. Ibid.

3. Jay Dougherty. “Translating Bukowski and the Beats: An Interview with Carl Weissner” in Gargoyle 35, 1988, p. 73.

4. Ibid., p. 70.

5. See the finding aid to the Weissner archive at Northwestern University Library.

6. Carl Weissner, The Braille Film. San Francisco: Nova Press, 1970, p. 26.

7. William S. Burroughs and Daniel Odier, The Job. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989,  p. 35.

8. Carl Weissner, email to K. Seward, April 2011 (edited for capitalization).

9. Industrial Records, IR0016. Reissued as part of The Best of William S. Burroughs at Giorno Poetry Systems 4 CD box set. New York: Mercury Records, 1998.

10. Although David Bowie famously applied the cut-up technique in the formulation of the lyrics to his album Diamond Dogs, this example of Burroughs’ influence being applied on a technical level within music is wholly isolated. Moreover, Bowie still only applied the technique to words on the page as Burroughs has in Minutes to Go, The Third Mind and the Nova trilogy. The cutting and splicing of audio represents a developmental departure from this.

11. Biba Kopf: ‘spread the Virus: How William Burroughs infected the world of music”, in My Kind of Angel: I. M. William Burroughs, ed. Rupert Loydell. Exeter: Stride, 1998, p. 72.

12. Ibid., p. 72.

13. William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution. Gottingen: Expanded Media Editions, (2nd edition) 1970, p. 74.

14. Ibid., p. 67.

15. Ibid., p. 74.

16. “The Nova Convention” by Richard Goldstein, reproduced in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2001, p. 436.

17. Biba Kopf: “Spread the Virus: How William Burroughs Infected the World of Music” in My Kind of Angel: I. M. William Burroughs, p. 72.

Published and Draft Introductions to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke

by William S. Burroughs

Jacques Stern is a writer.. That is he is writing actual events and conditions.. He says he is far away and this is literally true.. He says he is in ice and this is literally true, far away.. He far now is.. Separated from the reader by layers of cold transparent shale.. Distant fingers tapping on the pane in code.. I have endeavored to decode his message by folding some of my texts (which are composites of many writers.. All writing is) and laying them on the text of Stern and reading across so the resulting message rearranged and edited can perhaps be reduced to two words.. STAY OUT.. A writer maps psychic areas.. And like any explorer he runs the risk of being unable to return.. The difference between a real and spurious writer is quite as definite as the difference between an actual explorer and someone who does his exploring second hand (arm chair explorer).. The real writer is there.. And sometimes he can only send back a shortwave code message of warning.

To be followed by the enclosed texts.. I have been experimenting with the folded text method using Joyce and many others.. Results most interesting must be rearranged and edited as in any method of composition..

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
First page in the private edition of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Second page in the private edition of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Burroughs’ original manuscript

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Previously unpublished manuscript intended for the introduction to The Fluke
page 1

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Previously unpublished manuscript intended for the introduction to The Fluke
page 2

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

by Oliver Harris

Dismissed as Unreadable

The long and intimate association of William Burroughs with poets is well known: Ginsberg, most obviously, as well as Corso, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Leroi Jones, John Giorno, and so on. But to talk of Burroughs’ own material engagement with poetic form and poetics in relation to historical and contemporary practices — this can really only mean one thing: the cut-up project that began in Paris at the end of 1959. As well as brief encounters with old luminaries such as Duchamp, Peret and Tzara, this was the place and the context in which his activities would bring Burroughs in contact with George Maciunas’ Fluxus Group, the Domaine Poetique of Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin, the work of the Lettristes and poesie sonore. It’s easy to forget, but his first novel, Junkie, had been published as a pulp paperback on sale in rail stations only six years earlier. Now, to give just one example, Burroughs would find himself in print alongside John Ashbery, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia and Alice B. Toklas.¹

The enormously fertile and innovative period of the cut-up project has enjoyed a good deal of critical attention since Robin Lydenberg, in her ground-breaking study of 1987, complained that the “cut-up novels of William Burroughs have been dismissed without ever having been rigorously examined” (55). This was her starting point, “to demonstrate that these narratives, which many critics have dismissed as unreadable, offer new ways of reading and thinking” (xi). My point of departure is implied by Lydenberg’s revealing use of the terms “cut-up novels” and “narratives”: missing from Lydenberg, as from all the criticism that has followed, is the historical and material rigour that demands examination of the text that preceded the novels and their narratives; that is to say, the original manifesto and manual of the method, Minutes to Go (1960). Whether this is “unreadable” is open to question, since it remains the critically unread starting point of Burroughs’ cut-up project. It is also, and far from coincidentally, the text most materially invested with the poetry and poetics that gave Burroughs’ method its original identity.

What is at stake here? Why should Minutes to Go, a limited edition pamphlet of sixty pages, a work that had three authors other than Burroughs (Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso), and a text apparently so easy to overlook — why should it be brought in from the margins? In broad terms, there are two reasons.

First, as implied above, Burroughs criticism has taken a surprisingly conventional literary approach to a project conceived so radically in opposition to the conventions of literature. The analysis of Burroughs’ novel-length cut-up texts has been at the expense of his myriad shorter texts from the same era, texts that, taken together, amount to a comparable body of work and demonstrate a much wider range of collage-based experiments.² Even leaving aside his related work in other media — photomontage, collage scrap-books, tape-recordings, films — the effect of putting The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express centre-stage is to distort the history and scope of Burroughs’ experimental practices. Minutes to Go does not fit the critical frame because it inaugurated and belongs to another history, one characterised by publication of hundreds of short texts in dozens of small underground magazines — a history, in other words, where the material, the publishing contexts, and the means of distribution all coincided with the world of avant-garde poetry in general, and the postwar revival of collage-based techniques in particular. It’s tempting to invert critical history altogether and say that, far from being the acme of Burroughs’ cut-up work, the trilogy is in fact its aberration, because the truest realisation of the project lay outside the novel form. At the very least, we can say that it is hard to grasp the poetic identity of the cut-up project so long as Burroughs is approached, first and last, as a novelist.

Second, giving space to Minutes to Go is essential as a corrective to perhaps the most intractable and pervasive difficulty for Burroughs criticism, which is the relation of practice to polemic. That is, the claims Burroughs made for his cut-up methods invariably determine — and often substitute entirely for — close analysis of either the methods used or the variety of texts they produced. For criticism has also conjured up an abstraction fixed by a definite article by speaking of “the cut-up.” This temptation to generalise is, like the priority given to theory, a practical convenience that side-steps the difficulty of dealing with the multiple cut-up procedures that evolved over time, served different functions, and produced diverse results.

The upshot is that Burroughs criticism has in effect entirely reversed the historical priorities. After all, the essential fact of the cut-up enterprise from the outset was that this was an experimental method; “experimental in the sense of being something to do” (Third Mind 31). As Burroughs told Ginsberg shortly after publication of Minutes to Go: “Don’t theorize. Try it” (The Yage Letters 59). An experiment is also a process of trial and error whose outcomes are unpredictable and subject to revision — “an act the outcome of which is unknown,” as John Cage put it in the mid-1950s (13; my emphasis). This is why slighting the material basis of Burroughs’ methods and the text that first embodied them, hides from view both crucial historical origins and alternative potentials. Cited only to be passed over as quickly as possible, so that critics can discuss Burroughs’ theory or analyse his novels, the fate of Minutes to Go is the original instance and prime symbol of this reversal of priorities.

The most direct way to explore the poetics of Minutes to Go is to make good these shortcomings by focusing on the two names almost always cited together alongside the text: Arthur Rimbaud and Tristan Tzara.

Tzara Did It All Before

“At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater” (Third Mind 29). These opening lines from “The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin” (first published in January 1961), and others similar to them, have been endlessly quoted to establish a conscious historical line of descent and immediate context. The problem is not the inaccuracy of Burroughs’ account — the “rally” was actually a 1920 exhibition of Picabia’s paintings at an art gallery, not a theatre, was an event of Paris Dada, not the surrealists, and had there been a “riot” it would only have been one of many — but that it has closed off rather than opened up further investigation of its relevance.³

Now, within the text of Minutes to Go there are two references to Tzara. One is by Corso in his notorious “Post-script” that disowned his part in the cut-up project (“Tzara did it all before” (63)), and the other, which comes in the longer of his two polemical texts, is by Gysin, and is nearly identical to the lines from Burroughs cited above (“the Man from Nowhere . . . pulled words out of a hat” (42)). That Burroughs himself doesn’t mention Tzara in Minutes to Go — or in his one short text included in its immediate sequel, The Exterminator (1960) — is unsurprising, not only because he lacked Gysin’s agenda (Gysin promoted Tzara at least in part to settle an old score with André Breton), but given the specific nature of his contributions. Just over a third of Minutes to Go is attributed to Burroughs — but not “by Burroughs,” for (with the exception of one text, to which I will return) almost every word that appears above his name is itself attributed to other sources. Unlike Gysin, Burroughs did not juxtapose his first cut-up texts with any explicit polemical statement or set of instructions, and it would be another six months before he would publicly identify his method with Tzara’s and credit Tzara (rather than Lautréamont) with the maxim “Poetry is for everyone” (Third Mind 31). This delayed identification is a measure of the larger priority Burroughs gave to offering exemplary work over and above a theory of his practice or the practice of theory; the development of a cut-up poetics would follow from, be produced by, and closely resemble, the actual results of his methods.

What then of the texts themselves in Minutes to Go; do they confirm the prevailing view of the relation between Burroughs and Tzara, namely that “the cut-up begins as an exercise in negativity, as a kind of Dadaist destruction” (Lydenberg 48)? Following the formula of Tzara’s “To Make a Dadaist Poem” (“Take a newspaper. Take some scissors” (39)), as well as Gysin’s accidental re-discovery of the method forty years later, Burroughs worked specifically on newspaper articles, and used them as the basis for eleven of his sixteen texts. Significantly, even this subset is too heterogeneous in form to tell the methods of composition used, and the only certainty is that these texts could not all have been produced according to Burroughs’ own, much-cited “how-to” description. Four of these texts are set out as more or less continuous prose, the rest in stanzas of irregular length — and in one case (“FROM SAN DIEGO UP TO MAINE”) there is both a prose text and a reworked version set in stanzas. The stanza layout appears to imply a poetic intent, and an affinity with such previous uses of newspaper material as the “readymade” i-Zeichnungen and i-Gedichte texts of Kurt Schwitters; but I would argue that the details given of the source texts (“NEW CLUES TO CANCER CURES / Saturday Evening Post / October 31, 1959″ (18), and so on) redirect attention from the form towards the transformations of a specific content.

Indeed, while one text cuts up a recent article on the Beat Generation, and two cut up articles on juvenile delinquency, the other eight all rework articles on a single theme; the latest developments in cancer, gene, and virus research. We don’t need to know where Burroughs would take this material to see that the selection in Minutes to Go is recognisably strategic, indicating both that a predetermined set of issues preceded the indeterminate results, and that there must be a continuity between subject matter and methodology; if scientific material defines the most appropriate content of Burroughs’ experimental method, we might infer from this the scientific form of his experiment. Certainly, it would be difficult to advance precise textual interpretation or aesthetic evaluation of a piece like “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” (15):

Cancer tests… brown blood.. live babies.. proof of virus. vacine? Bio-control the London conference.. it was out sheep cattle and animals have wild system…. Blood time brown blood.

You could say that further interpretation is simply not possible; but the cumulative effect of such texts, enhanced by repetition of words and phrases across several of them, is still clear enough; to invite us to infer a calculated relation between language and the genetic code, twin deterministic systems subject here to systematic scrambling by the use of chance procedures. In this light, phrases such as “Cancer tests” and “wild system” take on meaning, but the closest Burroughs comes to making a direct statement to this effect in Minutes to Go — “In THEE beginning was THE word.. The word was a virus..” (59) — is still minimal and oblique. The conclusion has to be that texts such as “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” remain cryptic the better to exemplify a practice that must, in order to do its work, take priority over a fully coherent thesis. Or to put this the other way, a proselytising polemic, an authoritative statement of theory, would have pre-empted and therefore invalidated the logic of the methods themselves, and it was above all the methods that constituted the cut-up project.

What’s immediately apparent is how little Burroughs’ texts have in common with that of Tzara’s. In fact, the relation of theory to textual practice in Minutes to Go is precisely the reverse of that found in his “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” a set of instructions that actually preceded (by two months) publication of
his own exemplary text — an example that would remain the only one he ever produced according to his own method.⁴ Typical of both the Dada written manifesto and the épatisme of his own public manifestations, Tzara’s recipe for composing poetry flaunts a deliberate mismatch between practical steps and claims for the results: the material is to be selected according to the “length you want to make your poem,” not by its content, while the outcome, after gently shaking the cut-out words and transcribing them, is a poem that will prove you are “an infinitely original author of charming sensibility” (39). Tzara’s formula for making poetry out of newspaper clippings was an ironic, anti-aesthetic manifesto stratagem, a performance trick rather than a creative blue-print, whereas Burroughs produced multiple material examples of newspaper-based texts and fully intended that others do likewise. The creativity of these texts is not bound to the aesthetic criterion of quality,⁵ but nor are they “negativistic” in the vein of “Dadaist destruction”; operating in a clearly calculated thematic context and offered for practical use, their creativity functions according to experimental values of surprise, transformation, and discovery. Are these values scientific or poetic? As Ian MacFadyen argues, you could say that Burroughs produced scientific results from artistic intentions, but equally that “his scientism led to extraordinary artistic results” (33).

Burroughs’ use of chance factors was never an end in itself, as it was for Tzara, and was too pragmatic to be bound by rigid precepts (as, for example, automatic writing was for Breton) so that, while it was often a hit or miss affair, his experiments remained open, and committed to, enormous variation. Burroughs claimed that the results in Minutes to Go were presented intact, but the precise selection of the source material already pointed the way for his use of chance as a middle-term, opening up possibilities for further dialectical development that he would explore for the best part of a decade. Tzara, in short, had not done it “all before.”

Real Rimbaud Poems

“A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images — real Rimbaud images — but new ones” (Paris Review 154). As with Burroughs’ citations of Tzara, these lines, and others like them from “The Exterminator” and “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” have been routinely quoted without question, often even without context; without, that is, establishing the appeal and status of Rimbaud (for the Beat circle in postwar America, and in French avant-garde culture during the early 1960s), or the influence of Rimbaud on Burroughs’ work. In Minutes to Go, Rimbaud’s position is uniquely privileged, with three pages given over to two texts based on “A une raison,” taken from Les Illuminations. Before considering the significance of Rimbaud’s unique status here, one matched in Burroughs’ more polemical pieces, we have to ask what relation these texts demonstrate to Burroughs’ recycled claims that you can “recognize Rimbaud cut-up as Rimbaud” (Third Mind 71) and, “Cut Rimbaud’s words and you are assured of good poetry” (32). The answer is immediately apparent from the start of the first of the two texts in Minutes to Go (23):

EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD”

A rap of
Sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the time to you

From such fragments could anybody identify the source poem? Or recognise Rimbaud? Is this — good or bad — poetry at all? The absolute mismatch between Burroughs’ claims and the texts in Minutes to Go should prompt us to ask quite different questions: what is the relation between these cut-ups of Rimbaud and Burroughs’ cut-ups of newspaper articles? and what is the real significance of associating Rimbaud so emphatically with the cut-up enterprise?

The juxtaposition of these two texts with others created by cutting up newspaper articles might be taken as a statement about the equality of cultural materials, a position that has a long tradition in avant-garde collage-based work. But, while the cut-up Rimbaud poems do resemble the more fragmented of those based on newspapers, so asserting the basic materiality of language, there is a crucial difference. As with the newspaper cut-ups, both these texts end with a note that identifies the source text, but here it is followed by another line: “Words by Rimbaud, arrangement by Burroughs and Corso” (23). There are several things to say about this. Firstly, the term “arrangement” clearly denotes a design, the exercise of control, and so contradicts the assumption of materials presented entirely intact. Secondly, while the result is not offered as itself a poem, this description of creative process clearly maintains a distinction between the use of Rimbaud’s poem and anonymously authored journalism. More than that, it indicates a complex activity of collaboration: these are the only texts credited to two poetic practitioners, while Rimbaud is in effect recruited as a third collaborator (or a fifth, if you consider Minutes to Go as a whole). The result is a very particular act of hommage, one that has nothing to do with imitating Rimbaud’s style or creating “good poetry,” any more than it has with Dadaist destruction and the negation of poetry. Rather, it has to do with the cryptic invocation of a precise thematic relation and the practice of a particular poetics.

Identifying the source text as “A une raison,” Burroughs allows — invites — us to re-read the original in light of the new context he created for it, and vice-versa. The key line is clear at once: “Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps” (“Change our fate, overcome the plague, and begin with time”) (Rimbaud 246, 247). Now we can not only recognise the words but see the felicitous significance of the line “Our lots con” in Burroughs’ text. In “The Exterminator” he would make fully explicit this covert alliance between his method and Rimbaud’s revolutionary call to abolish reason and escape time by deconstructing the “con” of language: “See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines Keep Thee in Slots . . . The Word Lines keep you in Time . . . Cut the in lines” (Third Mind 71). Likewise in “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs invokes Rimbaud’s “colour vowels” (which he would use later in 1960 as the structural principle for the first edition of The Soft Machine) and his “systematic derangement of the senses” (32). However, the crucial fact remains that the cut-ups of Rimbaud’s poem in Minutes to Go do not themselves reproduce such a visionary poetics. The significance of this failure is twofold.

Firstly, as Burroughs must have known, Rimbaud was accorded a special place not only in Surrealist poetics but in historical definitions of collage, such as that given by Max Ernst: “Simple hallucination, in the words of Rimbaud . . . visual alchemy” (126). No coincidence that Gysin, who had worked with Ernst, should begin Minutes to Go with the words, “the hallucinated have come to tell you” (3), or that Burroughs should take the visionary figure literally by identifying Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens as the “place of mescaline hallucination” (Third Mind 32). However, Ernst also stressed that collage was an “alchemical composition of two or more heterogeneous elements” (Ernst 130; my emphasis); in other words, a technique that visibly combines disparate elements of diverse material origins. On this basis, the re-ordering of a single text does not qualify as a collage procedure. For the same reason, the line “Our lots con” cannot be said to function according to the collage principle of quotation as an act of abbreviated reference. Rather, as a cryptic phrase produced by the scissors, it signals one of the seductive pleasures of cutting up: the anticipation and discovery of messages, endowed with a magical potency or fetish quality precisely because they result from a mechanical procedure. The key feature is this private fascination of the “alchemical” act for the practitioner.

In short, the use of Rimbaud in Minutes to Go is determined by the value accorded the material activity of the method, by the process itself, rather than the reception of its products.⁶ Or as Burroughs put it, in his only use of the term “cut up” here: “ANYONE CAN RECORD WORDS — CUT UP your own hustling myself” (60). This emphasis — also integral to his claims for the therapeutic value of cutting up — was an essential ambition of the first-stage of experiment and was central to its promotion as an available method, one that could fulfil the maxim Burroughs attributed to Tzara: “Say it again: ‘Poetry is for everyone.’ Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place” (Third Mind 31).

This brings us to the second point, and to a conclusion. What Burroughs meant by being “in Rimbaud’s place” combined two quite different, even contradictory principles. If the first had to do with the material process of cutting up, as evidenced in Minutes to Go, the second had to do with the content and arrangement of the material, and would be demonstrated in his cut-up novels — texts that did, progressively and on a massive scale, fulfil the collage principle of combining and juxtaposing elements taken from diverse origins. This disposition is anticipated in Burroughs’ exceptional text, “REACTIVE AGENT TAPE CUT BY LEE THE AGENT IN INTERZONE.” This alone cites no sources, but familiarity with Burroughs’ work enables us to recognise lines from The Naked Lunch and other, at that time unpublished, manuscripts, which are cut up to produce a collage of phrases and images that approximates the density, rhythmic measure, and uncanny effect of déjà-vu characteristic of the cut-up novels.

Some six months after Minutes to Go, Burroughs would tell Ginsberg: “I find cut-ups most immediately workable on poetic prose image writing like Rimbaud, St. Perse and Your Correspondent.”⁷ What’s curious about this is that such an understanding ought to have been already clear to Burroughs, since he had achieved something very like it seven years earlier, in the “Composite City” section of The Yage Letters. A variation upon both the “Villes” of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and St. John Perse’s Anabasis, this phantasmagoria, which is motivated by the intense sensual derangement of yagé intoxication, is itself a composite text; for it not only reproduces the elliptical mosaics of imagery and long, densely rhythmic catalogues of Rimbaud and St. John Perse, but does so by recycling and transforming material that appeared earlier in Burroughs’ own text.⁸ As an exercise in “poetic prose image writing,” this was a model that Burroughs, in effect, went back to after Minutes to Go, now armed with a pair of scissors.

In Minutes to Go itself, “poetry” is not understood in terms of words on the page but as the “place” reached by a particular use of chance operations on pre-existing words, and this place is both unknown and where certain things can be seen, precisely because the outcome of the activity cannot be fore-seen. In sum, it was as a method, to be grasped by doing, not as a content to be understood by interpretation, that Burroughs both saw and demonstrated the relation of cut-ups to Rimbaud’s own definition of poetry: “I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses” (303).

While he worked intensively on his trilogy, Burroughs gave less attention to promoting his methods in terms of the practitioner’s active experience, which required simple techniques and short texts. With this shift came more poetic possibilities for the reader to experience, and in a sense the trilogy’s more complex effects were a response to that very shift, a solution to what one critic identified as the “problematics of reading cutups without actual cutup experience” (Géfin 95). The emphatic critical focus on Burroughs’ trilogy assumes that Minutes to Go was abandoned as a dead-end.⁹ But it would be well to recall the full context of John Cage’s definition of an experiment “as an act the outcome of which is unknown”; “providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure” (13). The verdict that Minutes to Go was a false-start misunderstands the evolutionary logic of Burroughs’ procedures that started in 1960, experimental procedures based on trial and error, repetition and variation, multiple functions and provisional results.

Five years later, Ginsberg observed that, since “a page of his prose is as dense with imagery as anything in St. John Perse or Rimbaud,” you could say that “Burroughs is a poet too, really” (Paris Review 320). Ginsberg therefore anticipated the fate of the poetics that cut Rimbaud up with Tristan Tzara, since, like everyone else after him, he was not thinking of Minutes to Go.

Notes

1 Burroughs’ text, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” appeared alongside pieces by these and other poets in the “cut-up” issue of C magazine (February 14 1965), 1.10.

2 For one of the very few articles to analyze such texts, see Skau. Even Laszlo Géfin, who contextualizes cut-up methods within historical collage practices, fails to deal with any specific texts.

3 Gérard-Georges Lemaire identified Tzara as one of cut-ups’ “distant ancestors” (Third Mind 14); Noëlle Batt has observed that “the two moves are decisively differentiated on the one hand in terms of the spirit in which they were undertaken, and on the other hand in terms of the productive power they demonstrated” (14; my translation); and Barry Miles notes that “the circumstances were entirely different” (196) — that these are the most rigorous engagements in Burroughs criticism suggests the scale of the problem.

4 In fact, Tzara had recently practiced similar chance cannibalizations, but applied to his earlier symbolist poetry and done with the aim of negating its poetic and personal expression. See Browning.

5 Jeff Nuttall, who published many of Burroughs’ short newspaper layout texts in the mid-1960s, specifically presented them defined against the “aesthetic frame of reference and intention” that determined “the classic cutups of Tzara and Schwitters” (“Nut Note on the Column Cutup Thing,” My Own Mag, 15 (April 1966), 15).

6 Writing to the publisher of The Exterminator, in July 1960 Burroughs even proposed a variant of the cadavres exquis of the Surrealists (“Perhaps a game would do it. Like, say four people each write a page on any subject comes to mind. Then cut and rearrange. With squared paper and the cut lines drawn you dig.”), further evidence of the priority given to soliciting practice, over and above consumption of Burroughs’ own results (Burroughs to David Hazelwood, July 26 1960 (University of California)).

7 Burroughs to Ginsberg, September 5 1960 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

8 For a more detailed analysis, see my William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003).

9 On this basis, you might as well say that the trilogy failed, since Burroughs published some two hundred short texts between Nova Express in 1964 and his next novel, The Wild Boys in 1969. Given the nature of his experiments, short texts were better suited to the cut-up project, so that Burroughs’ constant revisions of his trilogy — three titles, but six different editions — can be seen as a rather desperate attempt to apply this very logic to his novels.

Works Cited

Batt, Noëlle. “Rupture et déplacement dans l’oeuvre de William Burroughs.” Revue Française d’Études Américanes 1 (April 1976): 12-21.

Browning, Gordon Frederick. Tristan Tzara: The Genesis of the Dada Poem, or from Dada to Aa. Stuttgart: Akaemischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1979.

Burroughs, William. Interview with Conrad Knickerbocker. The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 143-174.

— The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963; 1975.

Burroughs, William, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin. Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities, 1960.

Burroughs, William, and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. London: John Calder, 1979.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, 1971.

Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting.” In Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970: 118-34.

Géfin, Laszlo. “Collage, Theory, Reception, and the Cutups of William Burroughs.” Literature and the Other Arts 13 (1987): 91-100.

Ginsberg, Allen. Interview with Thomas Clark. Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 279-320.

Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1987.

MacFadyen, Ian. “Machine Dreams, Optical Toys and Mechanical Boys.” In Flickers of the Dreamachine, ed. Paul Cecil. Hove: Codex, 1996: 21-48.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Skau, Michael. “The Central Verbal System: The Prose of William Burroughs.” Style 15 (1981): 401-14.

Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: John Calder, 1977.

by William S. Burroughs

by William S. Burroughs

A Poem by William S. Burroughs

August 1978

This text arranged in my New York loft, which is the converted locker room of an old YMCA. Guests have reported the presence of a ghost boy. So this is a Oui-Ja board poem taken from Dumb Instrument, a book of poems by Denton Welch, and spells and invocations from the Necronomicon, a highly secret magical text released in paperback. There is a pinch of Rimbaud, a dash of St-John Perse, an oblique reference to Toby Tyler with the Circus, and the death of his pet monkey.

Turgid itch and the perfume of death
On a whispering south wind
A smell of abyss and of nothingness
Dark Angel of the wanderers howls through the loft
With sick smelling sleep
Morning dream of a lost monkey
Born and muffled under old whimsies
With rose leaves in closed jars
Fear and the monkey
Sour taste of green fruit in the dawn
The air milky and spiced with the trade winds
White flesh was showing
His jeans were so old
Leg shadows by the sea
Morning light
On the sky light of a little shop
On the odor of cheap wine in the sailors’ quarter
On the fountain sobbing in the police courtyards
On the statue of moldy stone
On the little boy whistling to stray dogs.
Wanderers cling to their fading home
A lost train whistle wan and muffled
In the loft night taste of water
Morning light on milky flesh
Turgid itch ghost hand
Sad as the death of monkeys
Thy father a falling star
Crystal bone into thin air
Night sky
Dispersal and emptiness.

A Poem by William S. Burroughs

Its so hard to remember in the world - -   Weren’t you there?        Dead so you

think of ports - - Couldn’t reach flesh - -       Might have to reach flesh from

anybody - - 

           And i will depart      under the Red Masters

           for strange dawn words          of color                      exalting their

           falling on my face   impending attack         satellite in a 

          Gold and perfumes          of light              city red stone

          shadows brick terminal time             wet dream flesh            creakily the

          the last feeble faces             fountains play stale

          spit from crumpled cloth               Weimar youths            on my face

          bodies           where flesh circulates             Masters of color

         exalting their dogs      impending attack of light

         unaware of the vagrant        shadows on the Glass and Metal Streets

         silver flying   scanning patterns    electric dogs

         dark street life   ”Here he is now”       staring out

         from the dawn           he strode toward the flesh     jissom webs drifting

         where identity       scarred metal faces      masturbating

         ”Who him?” spitting blood laugh on the iron   afternoons

          ejaculates wet dream flesh          in red brick Terminal Time

          red nitrous fumes  under the orange gas flares

         grey metal fall out               on terminal cities

         to the shrinking sky fading color   sewage delta

        caught in this dead whistle stop                     post card sky

        dead rainbow flesh             and copper pagodas                flickered on the

        in a city of red stone       black skin work fish smell and

        dead eyes in doorways red water words             spitting blood laugh

        sharp as water reeds      fish syllables

        stirring this Moroccan sunlight           vagrant noon station

        spent in the mirror          dawn jissom webs       drifting rainbow

        speeded up from afternoon’s       slow ferris wheel          flesh.