Process

Gysin Brion

Description

Ulys O. Hanson, an African-American professor of the History of Slavery, who is in North Africa on a mysterious foundation grant, sets off across the Sahara on a series of wild adventures. He first meets Hamid, a mad Moroccan who turns him on, takes him over and teaches him to pass as a Moor. Mya, the richest woman in creation, and her seventh husband, the hereditary Bishop of the Farout Islands, also cross his path with their plans to steal the Sahara and make the stoned professor the puppet Emperor of Africa.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 29 novembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468303643
• Langue: English

Extrait

The phrase “it’s a classic” is much abused. Still there may be some appeal in the slant of the cap Overlook sets in publishing a list of books the editors at Overlook feel have continuing value, books usually dropped by other publishers because of “the realities of the marketplace.” Overlook’s Tusk Ivories aim to give these books a new life, recognizing that tastes, even in the area of so-called classics, are often time-bound and variable. The wheel comes around. Tusk Ivories begin with the hope that modest printings together with caring booksellers and reviewers will reestablish the books’ presence and engender new interest.
As, almost certainly, American publishing has not been generous in offering readers books from the rest of the world, for the most part, Tusk Ivories will more than just a little represent fiction from European, Asian, and Latin American sources, but there will be of course some “lost” books from our own shores, too, books we think deserve new recognition and, with it, readers.
Copyright
This Tusk Ivories edition first published in the United States in 2005 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. New York
NEW YORK 141 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
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Copyright © 1967 by Brion Gysin
Foreword Coyright © 1987 by Robert Palmer
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to beinvented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by areviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-364-3
Contents

Copyright

Brion Gysin 1916–1986
Chapter 1: I
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Thou
Chapter 4
Chapter 5: He
Chapter 6
Chapter 7: She
Chapter 8
Chapter 9: It
Chapter 10
Chapter 11: We
Chapter 12
Chapter 13: You (Fem.)
Chapter 14
Chapter 15: You (Masc.)
Chapter 16: They
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak, such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
OTHELLO : I iii 140–145
BRION GYSIN 1916–1986 by Robert Palmer
A philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation; a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray.
Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’rabi .
[T]he past remains present to the future … the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus form a phrase.
Ibid.
I understand that the late Henry Corbin was, in recent years, given access to books in Bombay belonging to the present Aga Khan, whose position as head of the Ismaili sect of Islam derives from his presumed descent from Mohammed’s daughter Fatima through the last Old Man of the Mountain. … Corbin and many others know infinitely more than I do about the Ismailis. I know next to nothing: read Marco Polo in my child-hood, became a hashishin in Greece at 19, read my Baudelaire, got syphilis like he did long before penicillin, smoked a lot in the Algerian Sahara and Morocco where I spent what is still more than a third of my lifetime. I did not become an Assassin.
Brion Gysin, Points of Order, in Here To Go: Planet R-101 , Brion Gysin interviewed by Terry Wilson.
I rub out the word. … I the Man from Nowhere negotiated like a Tangier Space Draft on a Swiss bank.
Brion Gysin, Minutes To Go
“But, Hamid,” I laughed, “I am not an Assassin at all!”
“We are Assassins, all of us,” he gravely replied.
The Process
The Process is a funny, picaresque, provocative magic carpet ride, a careening good read. Like its central character, a pot-smoking professor who has forsworn teaching in order to learn, it ranges widely, and travels light: “No baggage. This is the way I came and Inch’ Allah! (God willing) this is the way I shall return.”
It may be of interest that the city of Tanja (Tangier), the village of Jajouka with its Master Musicians, the desert out-posts, the trance rituals of the dervish brotherhoods, and many of the characters of this novel are drawn directly from life. Though timeless in mood (or transtemporal, in the Corbin/Ismaili sense), the book is also time-specific to a sixties Gysin knew from the inside, the sixties defined by the good doctors Hoffman (inventor of LSD) and Fanon, who figure herein.
But as equipment for appreciating The Process , information like this is probably marginal. My suggestion is that you abandon this preface and read the book. By the time you have finished it and doubled back here, you will probably want to read the novel all again anyway. For as William Burroughs observed, “You will find that it reads itself.”
The Process comes bracketed between Shakespeare’s pledge to deliver “a round, unvarnished tale” and a thirteenth-century Persian mystic’s insistence that “from the book alone, nothing emerges.” The book is an entertainment, an education, and an enigma, and in this respect getting to know it can be a little like getting to know the author himself. “He who seeks the mysteries and the realities, must seek out someone who knows” words quoted at the end of The Process and Gysin’s offer in Minutes To Go : “If you want to disappear, come around for private lessons” were all the encouragement I needed to seek him out in Tangier in the early seventies. The recent publication of The Process in America had generated little media attention; my admiring review in Rolling Stone had been a singular exception and was more than sufficient to get me in the door.
Before leaving New York, I had managed to hear tapes of Gysin’s beloved Pan music from the Moroccan village of Jajouka, recorded by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, when Gysin took him there. I was enthralled; Moroccan music, especially the “music as psychic hygiene” of the dervish brotherhoods, provided the common ground for my first encounters with Gysin’s adventuring spirit and formidable intelligence. Accidentally (“as if there were any accidents,” Brion would have said), I had begun at the beginning.
“I never was much immersed truly into Islam. … It was most particularly the music that interested me,” Gysin told interviewer Terry Wilson. “I went with Paul Bowles, who was a composer long before he was a writer, and … had very, very extraordinary ears, and, uh, he taught me a lot of things. I owe him a tremendous amount, I owe him my years in Morocco really.”
When I met him, Brion was in his mid-fifties. He lived in a European-style apartment building in Tangier’s “new town,” in a balconied flat from which he feasted his painterly eye on the patterned light and shade of the city’s whitewashed buildings, spread out across a series of low, gently rounded hills on the shore of the indigo blue Mediterranean. On a clear day, and most days were, he could examine through his powerful binoculars the pitted detail of the rock of Gibraltar, facing Tangier across the Pillars of Hercules.
Photographs of Brion as a youth reveal an almost arrogantly handsome young Adonis, the happy result of his mixed Celtic and Swiss genes. In his fifties he was still striking and trim, keeping in shape with the help of regular visits from a Moroccan master of exercise and massage. He went striding through Tangier as if he owned it, finding time for everyone from the expatriate crowd at Lily the Lion-tamer’s Parade bar to the budding Moroccan painters he enthusiastically and generously encouraged, from visiting hipsters to the Casbah’s canniest con men to the monied exiles who surveyed Tangier from their elegant walled villas on the higher outlying hills. He even found a renegade European audio technician down by the port to make a patch cord linking our two Uher tape recorders, so that he was able to download onto my bagfull of blank tapes some of the hours of recordings of dervish ceremonies he had made over the years. While the reels turned, conversation flowed. At times, it raged.
Brion was a living reproach to the sort of thinking that confuses category with reality and demands, “Yes, but what is it that you do ?” It is easy enough to compile a laundry list of some of the things he did. He painted, for example. There were astonishing panoramas of the Sahara’s “wordless wastes,” and studies of the D’jemaa el F’na, or Great Square, of Marrakesh, crowded with hundreds of shadowy yet indisputably alive figures playing music, buying and selling, riding bicycles, and, always, hustling. Other canvases overlaid calligraphy, “as if one took a page and wrote Japanese from top to bottom and Arabic across it from right to left,” in a pictorial space suggested by the cabalistic gridwork of Moroccan magic squares.
The writing Gysin left us includes, in addition to The Process , a second novel called The Last Museum ; he was working on it when I first met him in Tangier (but not finally published until shortly after his death in 1986). This second book is a re-imagining of the period in Brion’s life when he accomplished his most influential work with words, the early sixties, when he was living in a rundown Paris hotel that William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other seminal Beat figures also called home at the time thus the nameless hotel’s nickname, the Beat Hotel. When Maurice Girodias agreed to publish a volume of Burroughs’ visionary written “routines,” it was Gysin who collected the scattered pages and independent episodes, intuited a larger pattern, and was primarily responsible for assembling the manuscript published