Brion Gysin - Terry Wilson

We began to fond out a whole lot of things about the real nature of words and writing…What are words and what are they doing ? Where are they going ? The cut-up method treats words as the painter treats his paint, raw material with rules and reasons of its own… Abstract painters found that the real hero of the picture is the paint. Painters and writers of the kind I respect want to be heroes, challenging fate in their lives and in their art. What is fate ? Fate is written : Mektoub means "It is written." So … if you want to challenge and change fate … cut up words. Make them a new world. (BG to Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone, May 1972). (p. 55)

(p.181)

Burroughs was always very good at disappearing. He could slide into even the most inoffensive wallpaper, such as the rose wallpaper he was always writing about. The great artist learns to disappear into his work. This is a very hard thing to do, hard in every sense of the word. It is a very painful decision to take because you are going to miss out on all those tasty goodies which go sop easily to lesser artists who won't have to give up anything in order to succeed. A mere trick of the light. You must always remember that art itself is the Great Illusion, the illusion which Madame Maya manufactures in order to hold the rest of the house of mirrors together.

So … we did a great deal of lengthy mirror-gazing at that time. We felt that we had all the time in the world to give such explorations and we did see some strange stuff, just like "they" always said we would. We knew we were on the right track when our tricks worked, you see, and they did. For example, the cut-ups, they worked immediately and they still do although we know a great deal more about them than we did when every new cut of the scissors gave out something hilarious and to the point. The permutations discovered me - because permutations of course have been around for a long time; in the whole magic world permutations are part of the Cabalistic secret - and they worked as soon as the BBC asked me over in London and gave me their Special Effect & Footsteps studio and the staff to work with - first crack of the bat and we made I AM THAT I AM, and acknowledged sound poetry classic. The Dreamachine worked from the first time it spun around a light bulb and we closed our eyes in front of it. Etcetera.

Of course the Establishment never wanted to pays us any money for any of these things. That is a whole other branch of the art, I guess. Never mastered it. Not yet, anyway.

>It is to remember that all art is magical in origin - music sculpture writing painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more that Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end by itself. Like all formulae, art was originally functional, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formula. Take a porcelain stove and disconnect it and put it in your living room with ivy growing over it… it may be a good-looking corpse but it isn't functional anymore. Or take a voodoo doll full of pins - authentic West African, $500 on the 57^th Street - and hang it on the wall of your duplex loft. It isn't killing enemies anymore, and the same goes for a $5,000 shrunk-down head, which a fashionable shrink bought for his consultation room. Writing and painting were one in cave paintings, which were formulae to ensure good hunting…

Terry : The timelessness of your painting - past present and future merge on the page, and the painted page, as you call it … Did you specifically give William a way out of time ?

Brion : How could I ? I had myu way; William had his own. My way was and is to look at a problem as a whole and then proceed to eliminate, to pare away one legitimate element after the other until I find myself left with the simplest answer which remains. William on the other hand , if pushed to it - and he could be pushed to it only by the most exact formulation of the question - used to submit it to what I always thought of as "William's Machine." As I said before, if I formulated a question such as What is Time? I would propose it to William who would stand there looking rather strange, as if he were swallowing his Adam's apple. It would move up and down for quite a few minutes, and, um, he seemed to be making this sort of humming, like he has a machine in there that he set to work … as though he had submitted this question to a computer (chuckling) and he would come up with a convincing answer, like : Time is that which ends It was like having one's oracle at home at all hours. So, in that way, a good many amusing and instructive things were … discovered or rediscovered or… made more evident to us by various applications of those two, uh, procedures. Presumably, that machine humming away inside and the answer that came back could be said to have been of the Third Mind.

T Yes. But why did you need someone to give the technique to, rather than use it yourself?…

B It's a very good question. You mean the cut-ups, of course. When I first fell into the cut-ups and put those texts together which appeared in Minutes to Go, they amused me. I laughed out loud. I knew all about Breton's precious and pseudoautomatic writing and I had heard of the poem that TristanTzara pulled out of a hat about the same time that Aragon was reciting his alphabet poem to the avantgarde of the 1920s. all that was old hat. The cut-ups were brand new because the words were treated like mere material, like the images they are and treated in a painter's creative way rather than a writer's metaphysical view of language as the lesser part of speech. Words were attacked physically with the scissors or framer's Stanley blade. Words spurted into action as in my text "Cut-Ups Self -Explained," immediately proved…

I showed the first texts to Burroughs hoping to hear him laugh out loud as I had. He took off his glasses to reread them even more intently, saying : " You've got something big here, Brion." He'd put his glasses back on to stare at me across the room, as I explained to him how the texts had been made, then he'd snatch them off again to plunge right back into the pages. He recognized immediately that this was a tool of enormous importance to him and he said rather, diffidently: "Do you mind if I try some of this stuff ?" and I said, "No, go ahead, that's what it's for." And he did, he did it to his own stuff, he had a suitcase full of it, the mighty manuscript that was not in Naked Lunch but was about to become, uh… Dead Finger Talk, Soft Machine and Ticket That Exploded. William worked like a fiend and then went off to the Edimburgh Writer's conference where he read a paper on "The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin." He didn' t come along and say, Look, here's some hot new stuff of mine, my cup of genius is brimming over. No, he took the literary bull by the horns and said what I said : "Writing is 50 years behind painting. I propose to apply the painter's techniques to writing… etc."

p. 272 :

Both extraordinary encounters and unusual experiences had led me to think about the world and my activity in it in a way that came to be termed psychedelic… I have spent more than a third of my life in Morocco where magic is or was a matter of daily occurrence, ranging from simple poisoning to mystical experience. I have tasted a pinch of both along with the other fruits of life and that changes one's outlook, at least somewhat. Anyone who manages to step out from his own culture into another one can stand there looking back at his own under another light … Magic calls itself the Other Method … practiced more assiduously than hygiene in Morocco, though ecstatic dancing to music of the secret brotherhoods is, there, a form of psychic hygiene. You know your music when you hear it one day. You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper… Inevitably something of all this is evident in what I do in the arts I practice.

(p. 218)

p. 228 :

T Control at one time said it received orders from Virus B and was controlled by the need to control, and at another time it claimed to be God - "no one controls Control" - very contradictory answers -

B "No one controls Control?" A tautology , surely… no ? "Control is Control" would be a tautology, and that's essentially what it's saying…

T Why is this planet so desirable to alien agencies ?

B Because , one gets a body on this planet, and it is better to have a body than not to have a body, and to our almost certain knowledge there are no bodies, there may be other intelligences, but there are no other bodies in our galaxy.

T Anthony asked Control: "Is there immortality?" and the answer was: " Not for humans."

B No, the earth is for humans. And it's a good place to be, till you fuck it up completely, as we're doing.

T Are you controlled by Control ?

B Yes, I think I am controlled by Control, I am controlled by my body. As in childhood, certainly, one grows up thinking one is one's body and only later perhaps finds that one is not… But one is still controlled by the apparatus in which one exists, whether it be the circulation of the blood, or the circulation of the lymph of which we are even less aware - we're not ordinarily aware of our blood except at certain moments of excitement, but we're really never aware of our absolute necessary elimination of dead cells, waste which is being carried on and oxidized by the movement of the lymph in our bodies. In both cases we need oxygen. So we are controlled by our need of oxygen, if it were only to that extent.

Many ears ago I said: "I can show you only what you have already seen," and it means to me now that everything can be seen, and I mean really visualized with the eyed closed, would seem to be contained within the visions that one experiences with the Dreamachine. Therefore one might come to the conclusion, perhaps hasty, that everything that can be seen can be seen only in the alpha band, between eight and 13 flickers, light interruptions, per second. If this is so then we are programmed. If indeed there is such a thing as the alpha band, which is now perceptible - has been for the last 30 years since the invention of the electroencephalogram - we may presume that this is a programme…

The figures involved, of the possibilities of combinents, of permutations, and powers in the Human Programme, is very well explained by some of the more popular writers in modern science like… Carl Sagan, that book…

T Dragons of Eden.

B yeah. The Dragons of Eden; you find a few dazzlingly clear pages in there showing you the almost in - all but incalculable, but nevertheless calculable possibilities within the brain. So that the brain itself is laid down with certain limit beyond which it cannot go, therefore it would seem to be programmed. And if there is a programme there must be a programmer… and the programmer would seem to be Control.

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

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