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THE CUT-UP METHOD OF BRION GYSIN ~
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. Andre Breton expelled
Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the
Freudian couch.
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut
newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at
random. "Minutes to Go" resulted from this initial cut-up experiment.
"Minutes to Go" contains unedited unchanged cut-ups emerging as
quite coherent and meaningful prose.
The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been
used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still
camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the
unpredicatble factors of passersby and juxtapositon cut-ups. And
photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . .
. writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done
almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made
explicit-all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point-had
no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will
spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous
factor with a pair of scissors.
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this
page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . .
one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four
with section one and section two with section three. And you have a
new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes
something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an
interesting excercise-in any case you will find that it says something
and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy.
Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have
lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem
and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the
page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many
Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: "Poetry
is for everyone." And Andre Breton called him a cop and expelled
him from the movement. 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. Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up.
"Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the
suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife.
"The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood
laugh and drunken penance.
"Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.
"The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to
mist."
Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-upws. It is
experimental in the sense of bein something to do. Right here write
now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers
assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object
would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two
objects off the table and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud live
in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-
ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for
the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the
usual deplorable performances of contacted poets through a medium.
Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly
bad poetry. Cut Rimbaud's words and you are assured of good poetry
at least if not personal appearance.
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard
overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit
and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be
composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a
page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing
enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images
shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound
sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color
of vowels. And his "systematic derangement of the senses." The place
of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling
forms.
The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann
in his Theory of Games and Economic behavior introduces the cut-up
method of random action into game and military strategy: assume
that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If your strategy is
at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent will
gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he cannot
predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in
processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by
accident? We cannot produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could
add new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand
gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the
world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is no
reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best.
And the best is there for all. "Poetry is for everyone . . .
Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections
and rearranged:
ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC
BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST
HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME
POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR
OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR
STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE
CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW
DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND.
GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL
STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL:
"POETRY IS FOR EVERYONE" DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS
READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE
POCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY. VARIATION CLEAR AND
ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OR REARRANGED CUT
DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO
ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE
CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING
TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS
WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD
"SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT" OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A
TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS.
REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN
WRITING. - William Burroughs
~ BRION GYSIN ~
A biography/appreciation by Terry Wilson . . .
BRION GYSIN
(19 January 1916- )
SELECTED BOOKS
Minutes to Go, with William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Sinclair
Belles (Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960; San Francisco: Beach Books,
1968);
The Exterminator, with William Burroughs (San Francisco: Auerhahn
Press/Dave Haselwood Books, 1960, 1967);
The Process, (New York: Doubleday, 1969; London: Jonathan Cape,
1970);
Oeuvre Croisee (The Third Mind), with William S. Burroughs (Paris:
Flammarion, 1976; New York: Viking Press, 1978; London: John
Calder, 1979).
Brion Gysin is regarded as one of the most influential and visionary
of living poets and painters. In 1958, a chance encounter with
William Burroughs on the Place St. Michel in Paris resulted in him
moving into the famous Beat Hotel at no. 9 rue Git le Coeur in the
Latin Quarter. He confided to Burroughs his inventions, the Cut-ups
and Permutations, and thus began the most important collaboration
in modern literature.
A naturalized US citizen of Swiss extraction, Gysin was born in
Taplow House, Taplow, Bucks, UK. After the loss of his father when
he was nine months old, his mother took him to New York to stay
with one of her sisters and then to Kansas City, Mo., to stay with
another. He finished high school at the age of fifteen in Edmonton,
Alberta, and ws sent for two years to the prestigious English public
school, Downside. While there, Gysin began publishing his poetry
before he went on to the Sorbonne. In Paris, he met everybody in the
literary and artistic worlds. When he was nineteen, he exhibited his
drawings with the Surrealist group, which included Picasso on that
occasion.
Gysin is an entirely self-taught painter who acquired an enviable
technique without putting foot in an art school or academy. At the
age of twenty-three he had his first one-man show in a prestigious
Paris gallery just off the Champs Elysees. It was a glittering social
and financial (even a critical) success, with an article in Poetry World
signed by Calas. But it was May, 1939. World War II caught Gysin in
Switzerland with an overnight bag. When he got to New York,
everybody asked: "How long you been back?"
~ HERE TO GO: PLANET R-101 ~
An excerpt from Here To Go: Planet R-101, by Terry Wilson
T: How did you get into tape recorders?
B: I heard of them at the end of World War II, before I went to
Morocco in 1950, but unfortunately I never got hold of good
machines to record even a part of the musical marvels I heard in
Morocco. I recorded the music in my own place, The 1001 Nights,
only when it was fading and even in later years I never was able to
lay my hands on truly worthwhile machines to record sounds that
will never be heard again, anywhere.
I took Brian Jones up to the mountain to record with Uhers, and
Ornette Coleman to spend $25,000 in a week to record next to
nothing on Nagras and Stellavox, but I have to admit that the most
adventurous sounds we ever made were done with old Reveres and
hundred dollar Japanese boxes we fucked around with, William and I
and Ian Sommerville. I got hold of the BBC facilities for the series of
sound poems I did with them in 1960, technically still the best,
naturally. I had originally been led to believe that I would have a
week and it turned out to be only three days that we had, so in a
very hurried way at the end I started cutting up a spoken text-I
think the illustration of how the Cut-ups work, "Cut-ups Self
Explained"-and put it several times through their electronic
equipment, and arrived at brand new words that had never been
said, by me or by anybody necessarily, onto the tape. William had
pushed things that far through the typewriter. I pushed them that
far through the tapeworld. But the experiment was withdrawn very
quickly there, I mean, it was . . . time was up and they were made
rather nervous by it, they were quite shocked by the results that
were coming back out of the speakers and were only too glad to
bring the experiment to an end. ["Well, what did they expect? A
chorus of angels with tips on the stock market?"-William Burroughs)
"The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin" (as put through a computer
by Ian Sommerville) was broadcast by the BBC, produced by Douglas
Cleverdon. ("Achieving the second lowest rating of audience approval
registered by their poll of listeners"-BG) Some of the early cut-up
tape experiments are now available: Nothing Here Now But The
Recordings (1959-1980) LP (IR 0016) available on the Industrial
Records label from Rough Trade, 137 Blenheim Crescent, London
W11, England.]
What we did on our own was to play around with the very limited
technology and wattage we had in the old Beat Hotel, 40-watts a
room was all we were allowed. There is something to be said for
poverty, it makes you more inventive, it's more fun and you get
more mileage out of what you've got plus your own ingenuity. When
you handle the stuff yourself, you get the feel of it. William loved the
idea of getting his hands on his own words, branding them and
rustling anyone else's he wanted. It's a real treat for the ears, too, the
first time you hear it . . . made for dog whistles, after that. Hey Rube!
- the old carny circus cry for men working the sideshows when they
saw some ugly provincial customer coming up on them after they
had rooked him . . . Hey Rube! - a cry to alert all the carny men to a
possible rumble . . . Hey-ba ba-Rube-ba! - Salt Peanuts and the
rude sound coming back so insistent again and again that you know
the first bar of Bebop when you hear it. Right or wrong, Burroughs
was fascinated because he must have listened to plenty of bebop talk
from Kerouac, whom I never met. He must have been a fascinating
character, too bad to miss him like that, when I was thrown up
against all the rest of this Beat Generation. Maybe I was lucky. I
remember trying to avoid them all after Paul Bowles had written me:
"I can't understand their interest in drugs and madness." Then, I dug
that he meant just the contrary. Typical. He did also write me to get
closer to Burroughs whom I had cold-shouldered . . . until he got off
the junk in Paris.
T: Who produced the "Poem of Poems" through the tape recorder?
The text in The Third Mind is ambiguous.
B: I did. I made it to show Burroughs how, possibly, to use it. William
did not yet have a tape recorder. First, I had "accidentally" used
"pisspoor material,"fragments cut out of the press which I shored up
to make new and original texts, unexpectedly. Then, William had
used his own highly volatile material, his own inimitable texts which
he submitted to cuts, unkind cuts, of the sort that Gregory Corso felt
unacceptable to his own delicate "poesy." William was always the
toughest of the lot. Nothing ever fazed him. So I suggested to William
that we should use only the best, only the high-charged material:
King James' translation of the Song of Songs of Solomon, Eliot's
translation of Anabase by St. John Perse, Shakespeare's sugar'd
Sonnets and a few lines from The Doors of Perception by Aldous
Huxley about his mescaline experiences.
Very soon after that, Burroughs was busy punching to death a series
of cheap Japanese plastic tape recorders, to which he applied himself
with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a
matter of weeks, days even. At the same time he was punching his
way through a number of equally cheap plastic typewriters, using
two very stiff forefingers . . . with enormous force. He could punch a
machine into oblivion. That period in the Beat Hotel is best illustrated
by that photo of William, wearing a suit and tie as always, sitting
back at this table in a very dingy room. On the wall hangs a nest of
three wire trays for correspndence which I gave him to sort out his
cut-up pages. Later, this proliferated into a maze of filing cases filling
a room with manuscripts cross-referenced in a way only Burroughs
could work his way through, more by magic dowsing than by any
logical system. how could there be any? This was a magic practice he
was up to, surprising the very springs of creative imagination at
their source. I remember him muttering that his manuscripts were
multiplying and reproducing themselves like virus at work. It was all
he could do to keep up with them. Those years sloughed off one
whole Burroughs archive whose catalogue alone is a volume of 350
pages. Since then several tons of Burroughs papers have been moved
to the Burroughs Communication Centre in Lawrence, Kansas. And he
is still at it.
T: The cut-up techniques made very explicit a preoccupation with
exorcism - William's texts became spells, for instance. How effective
are methods such as street playback of tapes for dispersing
parasites?
B: We-e-ell, you'd have to ask William about that, but I do seem to
remember at least two occasions on whyich he claimed success . . .
Uh, the first was in the Beat Hotel still, therefore about 1961 or '2,
and William decided (laughing) to "take care" of an old lady who sold
newspapers in a kiosk, and this kiosk was rather dramatically and
strategically placed at the end of the street leading out of the rue Git
le Coeur toward the Place Saint Michel, and, uh, you whent up a flight
of steps and then under an archway and as you came out you were
spang! in front of this little old French lady who looked as if she'd
been there since-at least since the French Revolution-when she had
been knitting at the foot of the guillotine, and she lived in a layer of
thickly matted, padded newspapers hanging around her piled very
sloppily, and, uh, she was of absolutely incredible malevolence, and
the only kiosk around there at that time that sold the Herald-
Tribune, so that William (chuckling) found that he was having to deal
with her every day, and every day she would find some new way to
aggravate him, some slight new improvement on her malevolent
insolence and her disagreeable lack of . . . uh (chuckling)
collaboration with William in the buying of his newspaper (laughter)
. . .
So . . one day the little old lady burnt up inside her kiosk. And we
came out to find that there was just the pile of ashes on the ground.
William was . . . slightly conscience-stricken, but nevertheless rather
satisfied with the result (laughter) as it proved the efficacity of his
methods, but a little taken aback, he didn't necessarily mean the old
lady to burn up inside there . . . And we often talked about this as we
sat in a cafe looking at the spot where the ashes still were, for many
months later . . . and to our great surprise and chagrin one day we
saw a very delighted Oriental boy-I think probably Vietnamese-
digging in these ashes with his hands and pulling out a whole hatful
of money, of slightly blackened coins but a considerable sum, and
(laughing) we would have been very glad to have it too - just hadn't
thought of digging in the thing, so I said: "William, I don't think your
operation was a complete success." And he said: "I am very glad that
that beautiful young Oriental boy made this happy find at the end of
the rainbow . . ."
T: She consummated her swell purpose . . .
B: (Laughing) Exactly . . . exactly . . . (chuckling)
Now the other case was some years later in London when he had
perfected the method and, uh, went about with at least one I think
sometimes two tape recorders, one in each hand, with prerecorded,
um-runes-what did you call them? You said William's things-
T: Spells.
B: Spells, okay, spells.
T: Like-
B: (chanting)
Lock them out and bar the door,
Lock them out for e-v-e-rmore.
Nook and cranny windo door
Seal them out for e-v-e-rmore
Lock them out and block the rout
Shut them scan them flack them out.
Lock is mine and door is mine
Three times three to make up nine . . .
Curse go back curse go back
Back with double pain and lack
Curse go back - back
Et cetera . . . yeah . . . pow . . . "Shift, cut, tangle word lines" . . . sure
.
Well, that was for the Virus Board, wasn't it, that he was gonna
destroy the Virus Board . . .
~ HERE TO GO: PLANET R-101 ~
An Excerpt from Here to Go: Planet R-101, Brion Gysin interviewed
by Terry Wilson (with original writing and an introduction by W.S.
Burroughs), available July 1982 from Re/Search Publications . . .
- Who Runs May Read
"May Massa Brahim leave this house as the smoke leaves this fire,
never to return . . ."
. . . Never went back to live, and I've only been back there even to
visit only very briefly . . .
And then it was back to Paris for a year or so, 1949-50, and then in
1950 I went to Morocco with Paul Bowles, who had taken, bought a
little house there, and I stayed there really, or felt that I was
domiciled there, uh, although I was really only a sort of terminal
tourist, from 1950 till 1973 . . .
"Magic, practiced more assiduously than hygiene in Morocco, through
ecstatic dancing to the 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."
BG "CUT-UPS:
A Project for Disastrous Success"
in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In
B: Yeah . . . what a tale . . . what a tale . . . yeah, I met John Cooke in
Morocco uuummm but, uh . . . I don't know what to say about all
that, really . . .
T: He designed tarot cards . . . ?
B: Yeah . . .
T: A new set of tarot card . . .
B: Yeah, so he did. How did you even know that?
T: I saw them the other day.
B: Oh really? . . . No kidding? They're still around eh? Well well . . .
T: Is he still alive?
B: Yes, I imagine he's still alive, I think living in Mexico [John Cooke
died sometime after this was recorded.] . . . and he comes from one of
those very rich and powerful families who were the Five Founding
Families of Hawaii . . . who own the island, did own the island of
Molokai . . . and, uh, many people in his family have been interested
in mystic things, and he was particularly interested in magic all his
life . . . early connection with . . . what do they call it, kaluhas or
something, the Hawaiian shamanistic magic men? . . . Kahunas, yeah .
. .
T: Yeah. So tell me about Morocco . . . you got more and more
immersed into Islam, or, uh-
B: Not really, no, I never was much immersed truly into Islam, or I
would've become a Moslem, and probably still be there . . . uh, it was
most particularly the music that interested me. I went with Paul
Bowles, who was a composer long before he was a writer, and, uh, he
had perfect pitch, an unusual thing even among composers, and he
taught me how to use my ears a great deal during the years we'd
known each other in New York, but when he'd taken this house,
bought this house in Tangier, he suggested that I go and spend a
summer there living in the house and he was on his way to America,
he was just going to leave me in the house . . . but it turned out
rather differently . . . he was goin to New York to write the music for
his wife's play, Jane Bowles' In The Summerhouse, and he had
written a great deal of theatrical music for Broadway, all the
Tennessee Williams plays, all of the plays by Saroyan, and many
other productions of that time . . . and was a great expert on that . . .
but he also 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 because I wouldn't've gone there if he hadn't
suggested it at that particular time . . . I might have gone back to
Algeria, which isn't nearly as interesting a country, never was . . .
But, uh, in 1950 we went to a festival outside of Tangier on the
beach, on the Atlantic shore, at a spot which was previously a small
harbour, 2000 years ago in Phoenician times, and must've marked
one of the first landfalls that any boat coming out of the
Mediterranean via the Straits of Gibraltar would make as soon as the
boat entered the Atlantic, the first landfall would be at this little
place not very far from Cape Spartel . . . and, uh, the Phoenician habit
was always to establish a center of religion, I mean a thanks offering
for getting them safely over the dangerous sea, one supposes, and a
marking of the spot which eventually became a center of their
religious cult, presumably a college of priestesses . . . two or three
more landfalls further down the Atlantic coast is what used to be the
great harbour of Larache . . .
All these harbours are now silted up completely . . . Larache was the
site of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, where Hercules went to
get away from the demonic . . . the orgiastic priestesses, who were
guardians in a sacred grove surrounded by a serpent if you
remember, a dragon - well the dragon is the river, in each case there
are these winding rivers that go back up into the country; only one of
them still exists, the Lixos. Well the Lixos was presumably the
dragon in the mythological tale and there was an island in the
harbour, and this spot that we went to had been on the same
geographic and even religious plan, as it were, and the festival was
given there, which doesn't correspond to the Lunar Calendar but to
the Solar Calendar, and has to do with the harvest and actual cycle of
agricultural life of the people there . . . And I heard some music at
that festival about which I said: "I just want to hear that music for
the rest of my life. I wanna here it everyday all day." And, uh, there
were a great many other kinds of extraordinary music offered to one,
mostly of the Ecstatic Brotherhood who enter into trance, so that in
itself-it was the first time I'd seen large groups of people going into
trance-was enough to have kept my attention, but beyond and above
all of that somewhere I heard this funny little music, and I said "Ah!
That's my music! And I must find out where it comes from." So I
stayed and withing a year I found that it came from Jajouka . . .
(LOUD CRASHES, TAPE STOPS)
B: Your question . . . ?!
T: You found that your music was at Jajouka . . . The purpose of the
Rites of Jajouka is to preserve the balance of Male-Female forces, is
that correct?
B: Yes, in a very strange way I think it's a very pertinent question
that you ask. Uh, when I met them finally, it took about a year to
find them, and went up to the mountain village, I recognized very
quickly that what they were performing was the Roman Lupercal,
and the Roman Lupercalia was a race run from one part of Rome, a
cave under the Capitoline Hill, which Mussolini claimed to have
discovered, but is now generally conceded to be some 10 or 15
meters further down . . . and in this cave goats were killed and
skinned and a young man of a certain tribe was sown up in them,
and one of these young men was Mark Antony, and when in the
beginning of Julius Caesar, when they meet, he was actually running
this race of Lupercalia through Rome on the 15.March, the Ides of
March . . . and the point was to go out to the gates of Rome and
contact Pan, the God of the Forests, the little Goat God, who was
Sexuality itself, and to run back through the streets with the news
that Pan was still out there fucking as he flailed the women in the
crowds, which is why Julius Caesar asked him to be sure to hit
Calpurnia, because his wife Calpurnia was barren . . . Forget not in
thy haste, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia, for the Ancients say that in
this holy course the barren are rendered fruitful, or something like
that, are the lines from Shakespeare on the subject . . . Shakespeare
dug right away that's what it was, the point of the sexual balance of
nature which was in question . . . And up there on the mountain
another element is added, inasmuch as the women, who live apart
from the men, whose private lives are apart from the men's lives to a
point where even women's language isn't immediately understood by
men-women can say things to each other in front of men that men
don'ts understand, or care to be bothered with, it's just women's
nonsense, y'see . . . and they sing sort of secret little songs enticing
Bou Jeloud the Father of Skins, who is Pan, to come to the hills,
saying that . . . We will give you the prettiest girls in the village, we
will give you Crosseyed Aisha, we will give you Humpbacked- . . .
naming the names of the different types of undesirable non-beauties
in the village, like that, and, uh, Pan is supposed to be so dumb that
he falls for this, because he will fuck anything, and he comes up to
the village where he meets the Woman-Force of teh village who is
called Crazy Aisha-Aisha Homolka . . . well Aisha is of course an Arab
name, but it's derived from an earlier original, which would be
Asherat, the name of Astarte or any one of these Venus-type lady
sex-goddesses like that . . . And, uh, Bou Jeloud, the leader of the
festival, his role is to marry Aisha, but in actual fact women do not
dance in front of any but their own husbands, the women in Arab
life, all belly-dancing movies to the contrary, do not dance in public,
or never did, and most certainly don't in villages, ever dance where
they're seen by men any more than men dance in front of women . . .
so that Crazy Aisha is danced by little boys who are dressed as girls,
and because her spirit is so powerful-
(TAPE STOPS)
" . . . a faint breath of panic borne on the wind. Below the rough
palisade of giant blue cactus surrounding the village on its hilltop,
the music flows in streams to nourish and fructify the terraced fields
below.
"Inside the village the thatched houses crouch low in their gardens to
hide in the deep cactus-lined lanes. You come through their maze to
the broad village green where the pipers are piping; fifty raitas
banked against a crumbling wall blow sheet lightning to shatter the
sky. Fifty wild flutes blow up a storm in front of them, while a
platoon of small boys in long belted white robes and brown wool
turbans drum like young thunder. All the villagers, dressed in best
white, swirl in great circles and coils around one wildman in skins.
"Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air on the music, races after the women
again and again, lashing at them fiercely with his flails-'Forget not in
your speed, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia'-He is wild. He is mad.
Sowing panic. Lashing at anyone; striking real terror into the crowd.
Women scatter like white marabout birds all aflutter and settle on
one little hillock for safety, all huddled in one quivering lump. They
throw back their heads to the moon and scream with throats open to
the gullet, lolling their tongues around in their heads like the clapper
in a bell. Every mouth is wide open, frozen into an O. Head back and
hot narrow eyes brimming with dangerous baby.
"Bou Jeloud is after you. Running. Over-run. Laughter and someone is
crying. Wild dogs at your heels. Swirling around in one ring-a-rosy,
around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More and
No More and No! More! Pipes crack in your head. Ears popped away
at barrier sound and you deaf. Or dead! Swirling around in cold
moonlight, surrounded by wildmen or ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you,
butting you, beating you, taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great
wind drops out of your head and you hear the heavenly music again.
You feel sorry and loving and tender to that poor animal
whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing there beside you like
[part of the text is lost here]
Maraini demanded an interview with the general and- here's this
Japanese general sitting with regimental sword in front of him like
that, and Maraini . . . took his sword, and cut off his own finger and
threw it into the man's face. And that had absolutely the desired
effect - it was the thing that really impressed the Japanese more
than anything else that he could have done. Everybody got more
food, and lives were saved by this gesture. So maybe it's partly that
true story that's been loaned to William as part of his legend. But
that didn't happen quite that way.
GEN: So you've lost a toe, and he's lost some finger-
BRION: Everybody loses a little something here and there on the way
through this rat race . . .
This excerpt is from a forthcoming book of interviews with Brion
Gysin, edited by Genesis P-Orridge, Genesis and Peter (Sleazy)
Christopherson asked the questions . . .
"Real total war has become information war, it is being fought now . .
. "