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Hikuta!

Tom Peschio on Burroughs and His Guns

“Hikuta!”

There were three bullet holes inside William Burroughs’ house that I know of. And possibly a few I don’t know about. In all fairness to William, two of them were accidental discharges by other people. One came about when after cocktails William’s friend Udo [Breger] accidentally shot the neighbor’s house through the window in the art room. Broken glass, smoke, ringing ears, shock, yelling, etc.

I asked Udo how it came about, and he excitedly explained in his German accent, but I couldn’t make any sense out of it, except that it was all very chaotic, and he was horrified. Udo is a classy guy and he understands that discharging firearms indoors when visiting people in their homes is surely the apex of rudeness. In most households anyway. In this instance they sat down to a nice home-cooked dinner after the smoke had cleared.

The other culprit was Wayne [Propst], supposedly. I’m not so sure he bears all the blame, though. The very credible story I got from him was that he and William were hanging out in the bedroom smoking weed and playing with William’s .38 S&W snubbie. This was the gun William carried at all times, and slept with under his pillow. The gun he was buried with, in fact. He was telling Wayne, possibly for the thousandth time, what a smooth trigger pull it had: “Go ahead, dry fire it, feel the action. It’s unloaded.” Kapow. Blew a hole in the bedroom wall and through the bathroom ceiling.

I have always suspected that William knew full well it was loaded, and I think Wayne knew on some level, too. In my mind, that incident was a clear-cut case of a couple guys impulsively deciding to liven up the evening.

The third bullet hole is in the jamb of the opening separating the two front rooms. It just kind of appeared one day. My theory, based on the available forensic and circumstantial evidence, is this: One night he shot it with a big gun.

(This just in: James [Grauerholz] says it was a visiting Englishman who accidentally let one go with one of William’s guns during a dinner party. I asked how, wondering if the gun was jammed or misfired or what. James shrugged and said, “He was an Englishman.” I assume he was referring to the fact that they don’t allow people to own handguns in the UK, so lots of Englishmen have never even held a gun. They’re not a gun-crazed nation like America. What they do when they want to shoot someone, I have no idea.

However, after James drew a diagram showing where the shooter was and where the furniture was in relation to the where the bullet hole is, it became apparent we were talking about two different bullet holes. The Englishman shot a hole in the east wall in the front room, about three feet beyond the jamb. This newly revealed information brings our bullet-hole tally up to four.)

Everything considered, there were lots and lots of rounds spent in that house. Years earlier William’s buddy George Kaull constructed a giant silencer in the basement. It was a ten-foot-long tube made of chicken wire and fiberglass insulation mounted horizontally on a stand. It was pretty effective. Just stick the gun in it and blast away at a target on the other end of the basement. They used to shoot relatively large-caliber handguns in the basement while people had drinks and conversation, unbothered, at the kitchen table directly above.

There were also countless tiny puncture marks in the front door, walls and trim from the blowgun. It shot three-inch steel darts at about 200 mph. Likewise, to this day the evidence of the knife-throwing range is also evident. “Knife-throwing range” being a fancy way of saying “garage.” Chucking knives and hatchets at the garage was a much-enjoyed activity. As was the BB gun range in the art room, I’m sure. I never got in on that, but the dozens of BB pocks in the plaster are unmistakable hallmarks of fun.

William went shooting at his friend Fred’s place out in the country fairly regularly. It’s beautiful out there, and Fred [Aldrich] was a great, if sometimes slightly nervous host. There were a couple of incidents there too, but surprisingly few given that many of the participants were visitors not used to handling guns and not acclimated to William’s booze and dope regimen. Not to say that people were getting wrecked while shooting as a general rule, but there were occasions…

One guy accidentally discharged a twelve-gauge shotgun into the ground and scared the shit out everybody, himself most of all. And William once got hit in the face with some rock shards. Not a good idea to use a rock wall as a backstop. Live and learn.

Michael [Emerton], William’s former assistant, told me that one evening while he was cooking dinner, William and Allen Ginsberg were out back testing out a new canister of pepper spray on the garage. They failed to take into account the wind direction or possibility of back-blast, and came staggering blindly into the kitchen, red-faced and disoriented. It’s true. Two of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century maced themselves out there by the garage.

Michael also told me he agreed to be the test subject for William’s new stun gun, and bitterly regretted it.

Michael accompanied William to things like doctor visits, barbershops and things like that, places where people could not help but notice that this old man was wearing a pistol on his belt. After a couple of uncomfortable encounters Michael — who, I should point out, was himself not above drunkenly shooting handguns in his back yard on the Fourth of July — insisted William not wear his piece in public, at least not in situations where it would freak people out. William, of course, objected to such constraints. It got to the point where Michael would have to frisk William before going out. This is when William got his derringers, which could get by the pat-down. It ended up being an uneasy compromise.

William owned 28 guns and 43 knives. The guns ran the gamut from derringers to shotguns to flare guns to a .454 Casull, and everything in-between.

The .454 was the most powerful handgun manufactured at the time. It was a thoughtful gift from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, fellow writer and firearms enthusiast. It’s a gorgeous gun with a dull stainless-steel finish, black rubber grips and a sweet action, and came in a red felt-lined wooden box. The rounds cost a dollar each, and would go a mile. One mile, baby. It had a monstrously huge scope mounted on it, which I don’t think anyone ever bothered to sight properly. But accuracy was not the important consideration when shooting that gun. What was important was hanging on to it hard enough so it didn’t kick back, hit you in the face, and leave a big scope-shaped indentation.

William’s knives ranged from switchblades to scimitars to huge Bowie knives, and he was liable to whip one out at any given moment for a variety of reasons. There were frequent instructional demonstrations, of course. And he loved getting packages in the mail because it gave him an excuse to slash open the box with some nasty knife. Even when he was engaged in peaceful activities like making tea or reading a book William’s body movements were jerky, erratic, and fast, let alone when he was gleefully hacking open cardboard boxes. It was a little bit nerve-wracking watching him. He’d already cut off one pinky, and nobody wanted to watch him to lose the other.

More than once there weren’t enough steak knives to go around at dinner because he had hoarded them as weapons. I’d look in the silverware drawer, and there’d be only one steak knife. He had the rest of them stashed all over the house, in desk drawers, bookshelves, mixed in with the Main Knife Cache, all over. He also had many saps, a cattle prod modified for personal defense, a samurai sword, bear-claw brass knuckles (don’t ask), the aforementioned stun gun, sword-canes, a gun-cane, and countless other weapons.

It was a weapon-rich environment. It seemed normal at the time. But in addition to his huge arsenal, William considered many everyday household items as deadly weapons. He ordered a self-defense manual out of the back of a magazine that instructed the reader in Hikuta: The Art of Controlled Violence. The idea was to harness automatic response, such as recoiling from a hot stove, into smashing an ashtray or something into somebody’s face. According to the author and Grandmaster of Hikuta, he, using the techniques outlined in his manual, was thrown naked into a pit with twelve Dobermans and killed them all. Kinky, but impressive.

For a time William would jump at any opportunity to explain the Art of Controlled Violence to people, always with demonstrations. He developed some moves. Besides the ashtray-in-the-face, my favorite was him enacting suddenly jamming a ballpoint pen into somebody’s eyeball during a business meeting. He felt it was important to yell “Hikuta!” mid-thrust.

And, like a kid, he loved to play with his weapons. He’d do stuff like file and sand an old railroad spike by hand till it gleamed, or sharpen every knife in the house with a weird knife-sharpening gizmo he ordered through the mail. He insisted on cleaning all the guns himself after a shooting expedition. He liked the feel of steel in his hands.

He also entertained with weapons. Visitors always seemed to get a kick out of it when William, sometimes deep in his cups, would whip out a huge knife and demonstrate, for instance, how the Thuggees, hash-crazed Indian assassins of yore, would kill and gut people. (It was important to gut them so they wouldn’t balloon up post-mortem and pop out of their hastily dug shallow graves.) William would also animatedly-drunkenly wave loaded guns around, sweeping everyone in the room over and over. Generally speaking, visitors loved the floor show. I sought cover.

William was a dangerous guy, in lots of ways. Woe to anyone who fucked with him. Sometimes he was spoiling for a fight. One night after dinner he wanted to go down to Johnny’s Tavern and get in a fight. He was pushing eighty at the time. I don’t know how serious he was, but he was pretty riled up and impatiently waved off my argument against it, showing me how he’d handle the Johnny’s patrons with his Spyderco serrated lock-blade.

William was always prepared, mentally and practically, to fend off perceived threats like attacking dogs, marauding Christians (of which we’ve got more than our fair share here in Kansas), burglars, and unbalanced fans. And in retrospect, I believe that these were all valid threats, except maybe the dogs. He had a thing about dogs.

So late one night when a big, drunk Native American dude burst through his front door yelling angry gibberish, the smart money would not have had him walking back out. He was soused to the gills, agitatedly bellowing for his old lady, and didn’t understand he’d walked into the wrong house. The exact wrong house.

Instead of blowing a hole in him — the Lawrence police department’s preferred method of dealing with unruly Indians in the 1990s — William laid the “helpless old man” routine on him, talked him down and out the door. No ballpoint pens in the eyeballs, no bullets in the kill-zone, no pepper spray in the pie-hole. No nothing.

William talked a lot about shooting intruders: “Wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.” But when it came down to brass tacks, he opted for Cool. William, in the clutch, assessed that this guy meant him no harm, and so treated him with what bordered on gentleness when you consider the alternatives.

(He did mention to me that during his helpless-old-man bit he slowly backed to within arm’s reach of the credenza by the front door where he kept the “just-in-case” .45 stashed.)

He picked his fights rather than let them pick him. “Control” and the “Evil Spirit” were two life-long adversaries, not to mention his personal demons. We’re talking super-heavyweight division here. He fought them through his work. Tooth and nail. In this regard, his shotgun paintings are famous, or infamous, depending. I don’t know what they mean exactly, or where they fit into the Western art canon, or even in American pop culture. Like William, I tend to see art in terms of magical talismans.

He had a lot of fun with his paintings. He’d go through them with people, looking for things like faces or animals, or space aliens or demons or what have you. It was a gas. He’d pore over them, waving his gnarly old hands over them like a conjurer, giving a running commentary, sotto voce. And things would appear in front of your eyes. The paint splatters would reveal little scenes just the same way that clouds do if you stare at them hard enough. And once something recognizable came into view, its significance was felt right away. Looking at art with William was more like reading tea leaves or cloud-gazing than anything resembling an academic or aesthetic process. He was casting spells.

There’s an elephant in the room: Joan. How do all William’s gun-art and gun-antics relate to Joan’s death? I can’t say. I only heard him speak of Joan once, and I couldn’t fully understand what he was saying because he had his face in his hands, pacing back and forth, sort of sobbing. Joan’s accidental shooting is not the kind of thing one can ever really get out from under. I can’t shed much light on how the single biggest tragedy of his life impacted his art or predilections, though he sure did in his intro to Queer. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t even mention Joan. She was always present, if only faintly, hanging in the air like smoke.

William had his heart attack while journaling. Armed to the end with piece and pen, he didn’t take off his .38 till the paramedics were on their way. Bent over in his writing chair in his green army jacket, grimacing and groaning, clutching his chest like a gut-shot cowboy, he removed the holster and gun from his belt to stash under his pillow, and then they took him away.

Things have been a little quieter around here ever since.

Tom Peschio
Lawrence, Kansas
Summer 2008

Written by Tom Peschio and published by RealityStudio on 12 March 2009. All photographs of Burroughs’ house and weaponry © Tom Peschio, 2009.

Playing with Fire: The Last Painting of Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire

by Ian MacFadyen

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

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, Exhibit Postcard

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

The Big Picture

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

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

The Late Brion Gysin

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

Kali Graffiti

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

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, Painting, 1985

Bring Me My Arrows of Desire

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

The Great God Pan Is Dead

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

Incendiary

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

Sabbah

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

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

Flicker

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

Seed Pod

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

Guillotine

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

Infamy Infamy They’ve All Got It Infamy!

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

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

Celebration of an Auto Da Fe

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

Inferno

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

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

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

October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street
London WC1N 3AL

To the Memory of Karen Trusselle, a beautiful artist. Text written by Ian MacFadyen, London, December 2008. Published by RealityStudio on 14 January 2009. Ian MacFadyen offers his special thanks to Kathelin Gray and everyone at the October Gallery; to Terry Wilson; and to Jonathan Greet.

Burroughs and Bookstores

As Bill Reed’s memoir makes clear, independent bookstores are key locales in a creative community. Part employment office, soup kitchen, flophouse, café, and publishing house, the bookstore functions as a communal center like the American Express office in Paris, the barber shop in Harlem, or the general store on Main Street. The role of the bookstore in literary history remains to be explored in full, but there are a few publications on the subject that I know of that look fascinating. Sylvia Beach’s memoir of Shakespeare and Company is essential for anyone wanting to get the full story of the Lost Generation. In 1997, rare bookseller and publisher John LeBow gathered a collection entitled The Phoenix Bookshop: A Nest of Memories. The book provides essays by writers like Diane Di Prima on Robert Wilson’s legendary store. LeBow did his subject proud with a collectible limited edition. Wilson added in his two cents in 2001 with Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York’s Legendary Phoenix Bookshop. I own some cancelled checks from the bookshop that document Wilson as a financial resource on top of all the other services he provided to artists and writers. A similar book could be written about Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop, Better Books managed by Bob Cobbing, or thousands of other stores around the world over the years.

Recently, I wrote about the threatened closing of John Calder’s bookstore in Great Britain. Anyone reading the literary blogs, like Silliman’s Blog, or similar information sources on literary topics get the sense that the independent bookstore is going the way of the carrier pigeon. Such closings are quite a blow to general readers and creative artists alike. To my mind, the independent bookstore is an essential institution, one needed for a healthy and happy existence.

In his memoir Early Plastic and in the excerpt on Eighth Street Bookshop, Bill Reed tells many tales of life on the Lower East Side. One of my favorite ancedotes was his description of seeing William Burroughs leafing through a book of poems by Charles Bukowski in the stacks at Eighth Street. I love the linking of Burroughs and Bukowski, but I also enjoy the fact that Burroughs haunted the alternative bookstores in his community. In his memoir on the Sixties, Barry Miles tells a similar story of Burroughs frequenting the Indica Bookshop at 102 Southampton Row in London. Burroughs lived nearby and was something of a regular there. Miles writes, “Bill had pinned a sign on the bookshop noticeboard some weeks before offering free Scientology auditing sessions to anyone who wanted them in order to improve his own auditing technique — even giving his home address and telephone number, which I thought was very trusting as he usually wanted to keep that very much a secret.” Despite his desire for a low profile, Burroughs was very much an active member of his neighborhood and something of a bookstore junkie.

One book in my collection highlights the important role of the independent bookshop in Burroughs’ social and creative life. Kaddish, Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and Bomb were all written in part at the Beat Hotel, but the book that most captures the spirit of 9 rue Git-le-Coeur is Minutes To Go. In his editor’s note to Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, Jan Herman describes the Beat Hotel atmosphere as like a “laboratory,” and Minutes To Go is certainly the most representative result of those experiments in lifestyle and literary technique.

I want to focus on the community of bookstores involved with this cut-up collection. In fact independent bookstores made Minutes to Go a pubished reality. Minutes to Go was issued by Two Cities in 1000 copies on April 13, 1960. A limited edition of ten copies included a manuscript page. This reminds me of the limited edition for the C Press Time. I have never seen the limited Time or Minutes to Go for sale on the rare book market. The John Hay Library at Brown possesses a copy of the Minutes to Go and displayed it prominently at their Burroughs exhibition years ago.

Two Cities was a bilingual (French and English) magazine edited by Jean Fanchette, a young doctor. Fanchette published expats like Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell. The first issue was dedicated to Durrell. Years later, the correspondence between Fanchette and Durrell from this period would be published by Two Cities as well. Anaïs Nin was a correspondent for the magazine. With Gysin designing the covers, Fanchette fashioned Minutes to Go to mirror the magazine.

Fanchette ran his magazine out of George Whitman’s Mistral Bookstore. The Mistral was a hang out for expat writers along the lines of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. In fact, Whitman would close the Mistral and reopen as Shakespeare and Company in the mid-1960s. From the Merlin Group around Alexander Trocchi (the Group that discovered the fiction of Samuel Beckett and published him in English with the assistance of Olympia Press) to the writers associated with the Paris Review, Whitman’s store functioned as a water cooler in the literary office that was Paris. In Exiled in Paris, James Campbell writes, “The Mistral doubled as ‘The Left Bank Arts Center’ and announced ‘a program of cultural events’” in 1951. Campbell continues, “The Librairie Mistral was housed in an ancient building near St. Michel, facing Notre Dame Cathedral. Before Whitman bought it… it had been an Arab grocery store. Not content with offering lectures, exhibitions and the rest, he set up a lending library with an estimated 10,000 books.” To this day, George Whitman’s bookstore is a thriving literary hangout and an essential stop for any bibliophile and aspiring Beat.

In Literary Outlaw, Morgan writes that Burroughs cruised the store, largely unsuccessfully. Yet Burroughs met his long time companion and collaborator Ian Sommerville at the Mistral. A student at Cambridge, Sommerville worked at Whitman’s bookstore in the summer of 1959. (According to John Geiger’s biography of Brion Gysin, Sommerville was perched on a ladder and dropped a book on Burroughs’ head.) Corso and Ginsberg both read at the bookstore. Burroughs’ first public reading occurred there as described by Harold Norse in Memoirs of a Bastard Angel. Like with Indica or Eighth Street, the Mistral was part of Burroughs’ routine.

My copy of Minutes to Go has the bookstamp of the reopened store. As Minutes to Go did not sell well despite a nice turnout at the publication party, copies were probably lying around the store for years. To the horror of collectors, Whitman diligently stamped the books sold in his store with the Shakespeare and Company logo. He claimed the stamp actually increased the value of the book due to the association with the store. I wonder, but the stamp does link my copy to the Paris bookselling community out of which Minutes to Go took shape as a literary experiment and as a published object.

Fanchette ran out of money and could not bring Minutes to Go to completion, so Gait Froge, the Frenchwoman who ran the English Bookshop, stepped in and saved the day. She ponied up the $500 needed to pay the printers. Froge’s bookshop was another legendary hangout for young writers. Campbell writes the English Bookshop “was a smaller affair [than the Mistral], and necessarily more discriminating in its stock. Whereas the Mistral boasted books ‘in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and German,’ she offered a mix of classics and the latest productions of the avant garde.” Froge delighted in mixing with writers and artists, opening her bookstore to the creative community of expat Paris. The Merlin Group was headquartered at the bookshop after a falling out with Whitman. Burroughs particularly appealed to Froge’s sensibilities and avant garde tastes. The English Bookshop financed the first pressing of Call Me Burroughs in 1965. This record has French and English liner notes and came out before the ESP LP of 1966.

In Barry Miles’ The Beat Hotel, there is mention of the release party for Minutes to Go in April at Gait Froge’s English Bookshop. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press supplied the champagne. A large portion of the sales at the English Bookshop came from the tourist market in Girodias’ Traveller’s Companion titles of which Naked Lunch was one (No. 76 in fact). The writers who hung around the English Bookshop (as well as the Mistral) provided Girodias with his stable of pornographers.

According to an interview Ted Morgan did with Sinclair Beiles, the four authors, Burroughs, Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, all signed at the party. One prominent bookseller challenges this fact in his description of a dedication copy of Minutes to Go to Gait Froge on sale for $32,500. This book of course lacks the Corso signature. In Literary Outlaw, Morgan recounts that Corso arrived with his girlfriend Sally November and that Froge, herself, commented “Do you have one for every other month as well?” In addition, all of Corso’s letters collected in An Accidental Biography from April 1960 are postmarked from Paris. It would appear that Corso was there and not in Scandanavia as suggested. Burroughs was lucky to make the party. At the time, the French authorities were pursuing Burroughs on a drug charge and suggested that he leave the country. Burroughs left Paris (soon after the publication party) and traveled to England with Sommerville. I believe he also went to Scandanavia as well before returning to Paris once the pot smoke had cleared.

Yet it is true that the Corso signature is unusual given the fact he disavowed all involvement with the book as contrary to his sensibilities as a poet. This is made very clear in a postscript to Minutes to Go. Yet he wavered on this point. The publication of a cut-up with Burroughs in the collaboration issue of Locus Solus in 1961 is proof that he was still associated with the technique after the publication of Minutes to Go. Possibly the dedication copy currently on the market was signed to Froge at a later date or maybe Corso refused to sign it at the party in an act of spite. Corso was nothing if not unpredictable. My copy is signed by Burroughs, Corso and Gysin. I like to think that the book was signed at that party and that in the hustle and bustle Beiles never got around to signing it, but that may be wishful thinking. Sadly, my copy of Minutes to Go lacks the wraparound band that said “Un règlement de comptes / avec la literature.” Translated, to settle a score with literature. Members of the Beat Hotel, the publishers, and those at the signing party would have caught the drug reference.

No doubt the crowd at the publication party had its share of thrillseekers, but, naively perhaps, I have the sense that they were mostly members of the anglophone literary community around the Beat Hotel, Olympia Press, and the independent bookstores. Again a look at Corso’s letters complicates this impression. On roughly April 19, 1960 a few days after the Minutes to Go party, Corso writes in a letter to Peter Orlovsky, “I had it out with Burroughs, his ass-licking friends are bores and they hate, and he, Bill, is okay, but he does not know me.” In an earlier letter also to Orlovsky from April 19th, Corso writes, “Yelled at Burroughs for being the world’s number one stool-pigeon which of course he ain’t.”

Corso is probably expressing his ambivalence about the cut-up and Burroughs’ embracing of the technique. These feelings may have been brought to a boil by the recent party. Yet it hints at a deeper critique of Burroughs. Corso has a reputation as a tragic clown, but he was a brilliant poet and something of a gadfly to the Beat Generation. Corso poked holes in the inflated egos of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs and challenged the myths of the Beat Cult. I have suggested that Burroughs was something of a scenester. As others have stated, Burroughs thrived in an active community and required contact with others. The mention of Burroughs’ “ass-licking friends” proves interesting and puts a negative spin on this need of Burroughs. According to Corso, Burroughs was far from the lone wolf of the Beat myth and more of a queen bee surrounded by a hive of drones. A literary community could shade into something of a fawning royal court.

From Shakespeare and Company of the Twenties to, well, Shakespeare and Company of the present day, the English language bookstore in Paris has a tradition as strong as the café for writers and artists. Sylvia Beach published the unpublishable in 1922 when Ulysses was issued in its wrapper the color of the Greek flag and the Mediterrean Sea. In the late 1940s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti studied in Paris and was greatly impressed and inspired by these bookstores, particularly Whitman’s Mistral. City Lights was founded on this model. By 1960, the term “Published in Paris” had a long history and the independent bookstore was an important part of it. Not surprisingly, histories and biographies dealing with the Beats in Paris inevitably mention Gait Froge, George Whitman, The Mistral, The English Bookshop, and Shakespeare and Company. Like the Beat Hotel or the Olympia Press, the independent bookstore and its owner play a crucial role in Paris of the Fifties. Quite possibly, the final touches and publication of Naked Lunch and development of the cut-up could only have happened in one city in the world in 1959. It was in this environment that Burroughs flourished and matured as a writer. In the circumstances surrounding its creation and publication, Minutes to Go captures the spirit of the Beat Hotel as well as the central role of the independent bookstore in that literary community.

Written by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 11 May 2007. The photo of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of City Lights Bookstore is by Larry Keenan.

Oliver Postgate – WHAT IS POLITICAL REALITY ?

WHAT IS POLITICAL REALITY ?

and shall we survive it?

There are many sorts of ‘reality’ about. Like minor gods they crouch for employment, waiting to be invoked to legitimate policies and projects that might otherwise be seen to be unwise or damaging. Their illegitimate offspring are called “unintended consequences” and are disowned and ignored, because the ‘reality’ lay in the intent, as expressed and celebrated, not in the outcome, disastrous though that may have turned out to be.

If we look around we will see ‘commercial reality’ cutting out the rainforests to make patio furniture, ‘industrial reality’ hoovering infant fish from the ocean floor, ‘financial reality’ scraping the flesh from generosity with its golden teeth. Wherever there is a short-term advantage to be exploited, there you will find its own ‘reality’, waiting.

But if we look up at the sky we will see, oblivious to human concerns, the one real overall reality, whose name is simply: “How things are.”

It is a vast spacecraft, with climatic weapons of untold disaster at the ready, tooling up to destroy all we recognise as life on earth. Are the nations of the world gathering together to defeat or deflect it? Have they pooled and consolidated their defences?

No, not because it isn’t there, but because it is the sun and has always been there, and under it we have always nursed our other, petty, ‘realities’; human greeds and squabbles about which it can know nothing, but away from which we cannot turn our eyes.

Global warming was first noticed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the dangers that it had started to bring were not widely appreciated until a clear and unequivocal warning was given by Mrs Thatcher to the United Nations in November 1989. There she gave a rousing speech in which she called for a vast international co-operative effort to reverse without delay the already damaging effects of global warming.

That was the moment of truth, the end of humanity’s innocence.
The United Nations received it with rapture and took no notice. Nor, come to that, did Mrs Thatcher, who promptly went on to foster a number of carbon-emission-rich initiatives, including the biggest road-building programme ever, for what she called “The great car economy”. So, in defiance of her own protestations, she and her government chose to follow ‘economic reality’ and, it could be said, thereby sealed the fate of the world.

Now, seventeen years on, with the largely man-made greenhouse gas (atmospheric CO2) at 380 parts per million and rising, global warming is now well under way. That was an ‘unintended consequence’ of the glorious industrial development of modern civilization, but nevertheless there is no doubt that the people of the world have to take notice of it and deal with it, or, very possibly, die.

The most widely-held consensus is that unless it is checked and reversed, global warming would cause the earth’s surface temperature to rise until a new ‘equilibrium temperature’, which may be several degrees Celsius higher than it is now, is reached. If that is allowed to happen, it is known that the earth would face a major extermination of most known life forms.

The obvious and perhaps the only sensible way to put a stop to this would be immediately to impose such restrictions on the output of man-made CO2 as are necessary to stop and reverse the progress of global warming.

What is not definitively established, and is therefore the subject of much conjecture, is how much time there is left in which to do this.

Estimating the time available is not an easy task and it has been made more complex by a technical peculiarity of the process of global warming, which has meant although the greenhouse effect has been well under way for some time, its true effects are not, yet, visibly and seriously, affecting our own day-to-day lives.

The current understanding is that this delay is due to the fact that the mass of the earth is so vast that it is taking a long time to heat up. In addition, much of the extra energy currently being received is, for the moment, being absorbed ‘endothermically’ in the observable preliminiary process of melting the glaciers and ice-caps and the evaporation of water. This process has the effect of cooling the atmosphere, or rather, of slowing the rate of its warming, which gives a false indication of the speed of the process.

Apart from a few fringe commentators, some of whom maintain that global warming either isn’t happening, or is going to be rather fun, there are at present two main ‘schools of thought’ about how global warming should be dealt with.

One, which takes what could be called the ‘gradual’ view, maintains that, (perhaps because the current rate of warming is regarded as typical), the process is relatively slow and that consequently, as well as making convenient, minor, but always publicly celebrated, gestures of energy economy, there is time enough to look for some, as yet uninvented, technical method of gradually reducing, without causing unacceptable inconvenience, the massive input of millions of tons of atmospheric CO2 from industrial and transport sources that are steadily building up the greenhouse effect and adding to global warming.

That this is the preferred policy of the political establishments and some of their scientists was confirmed unequivocally by the Prime Minister who told us in May 2005 on Channel 4 TV that . . .

“ . . . the reality is that you’re never going to tackle global warming by cutting economic growth or your living standards, and whatever people might want us to do there, the political reality is that it isn’t going to happen . . .”

The god that he summons for that assertion is the one called political reality. This deity, regardless of any actual considerations, is what he is obliged to follow, presumably because that is where our living-standards and the votes they bring are to be found.

What this actually means for the future of the world is so appalling as to be beyond belief, because it makes clear that, although he accepts that our precious economic growth and our extravagant living standards are known to be the main power-house of the pollution that drives global warming, there is precious little of substance that he is prepared to do about it, even though there is really no certainty that the gradual view chosen by the political establishment is either valid or likely to have the necessary effect in the time that remains.

The other school of thought, which could be called the ‘urgent’ view, takes into account other known aspects of the current situation. One is already mentioned: that the current rate of climatic warming is less than it would be if it wasn’t being used up melting the glaciers. Another is the observed fact that now, while the global warming is currently melting the glaciers and ice-caps, it is at the same time thawing out, and probably beginning to release, the large quantities of methane which are still deep-frozen in the polar regions. It is also understood that once this happens, there will be what is known as a ‘positive feed-back effect’, a process which is self-inducing in that the released methane, being a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, will increase the greenhouse effect, thus releasing more methane . . . and so on. That, coupled with many other similar ‘positive feed-back effects’ including the loss of polar-ice reflectivity, would, if unleashed, set global warming on its way to becoming runaway and non-reversible.

But also, as already mentioned, underlying and dwarfing these effects is the largely unrecognised physical fact that the immense thermal mass of the earth, which, like some gigantic storage-heater block, has been slowly soaking in the heat for decades, will go on slowly warming up and contributing to climatic mayhem even after the greenhouse is dismantled and the CO2 reduced.

The urgent view is that the present lull in the progress of global warming indicates that there could still be a ‘window of intervention’ which might last a few years, perhaps even a decade. Within that period the human race must, if it is to survive, plan, put into effect and complete the implementation of, all the social and industrial changes necessary to reduce the concentration of atmospheric CO2 to a level at which global warming is not only stopped but the long-term stored heat of the last twenty years warming is proportionately dissipated.

The above alternative prognoses, being “mere mathematics”, are inevitably in some degree conjectural and obviously can’t be demonstrated in practice. So no doubt people and governments are tempted to assume that they are entitled to choose and support a particular version of the situation. This may be the most convenient, or the most optimistic, or even the view which they think is most likely to be accurate. After all, as people say: nobody can ever be absolutely certain exactly what the future will bring.
They are wrong about that. We have no such entitlement. Nobody has. Ordinary common-sense tells us that there is only one thing that is absolutely certain.
It is this.

In circumstances where there is even the slightest chance that the result of failing to deal with a possible situation would be the death of the world, then, if it wishes to survive, the human race has no option but to take whatever action is necessary to deal with that situation, however unpleasant and difficult that may appear to be, and to take it at once.

In our situation there is, to use the Cold War phrase: ‘no alternative to worst-case thinking.’

So to take action now is not a matter of choice. It is an imperative.

We are not used to imperatives. We are more accustomed to being offered a choice between alternatives. So the options can be expressed as if they were a choice.
If, on the one hand, we choose to accept some quite severe privations in order to bring the levels of atmospheric CO2 down, we will certainly be seriously inconvenienced for a while, but we will survive (perhaps ingeniously finding new sources of energy), and there will be no reason why our grandchildren shouldn’t have a homely, habitable world to live in for the foreseeable future (and if, later, it should turn out that our caution was unnecessary, we might feel a bit foolish, but at least they would be alive).

If, on the other hand, we take no notice, if we choose to ignore the known likelihood and just go on more or less as usual. If we let life take its course as we make some gestures towards energy economy while continuing to pump up the CO2 concentration, then we should be able to go on being very comfortable, for a while. But if we do that there is a very real likelihood that most of our grandchildren will be dead or, if alive, will be vainly trying to find a way to go on living in a climatically explosive world that is inescapably on its way to chaos and death.

So if there is a choice, it is a straight choice between life and death, between the life and the death of the human race.

The reality is that if no choice, or the wrong choice, is made, if we are so limp that we allow the Prime Minister’s ‘political reality’ to prevail over actual reality, then the final ‘unintended consequence’ may well be that the only chance of survival for our grandchildren will depend on nothing but the hideous hope that the first major disaster of the oncoming climate change will turn out to be sufficiently dreadful to command the nations’ full attention at last, and that it will happen soon enough to bring the world to its senses while there is time.

Don’t bank on it!

Oliver Postgate. September 2006.

References:
www.meridian.org.uk
www.elflaw.org (Prof. David Hall lecture)
www.openDemocracy.net/globalisation-climate_change_debate/article_2455.jsp

© Copyright Oliver Postgate 2006 – All rights reserved
(but please make copies for your own use if you wish)
Comments: E-mail ro.pogle99@virgin.net

jam at my house this evening

let’s drink and play guitars at my house tonight…calling the phone…all operators to the jam room

NOTHING IS HOLY

\”I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.\”