Back in No Time. Brion Gysin

of Fire 289

       The Sculpted Line 291

       The Last Museum 292

       The Door 293

       Hotel Bardo 297

       Back Jacket Copy 297

       The Last Museum (excerpts) 298

       Drawings for The Last Museum by Keith Haring 322, 339

       Bibliography 349

       Discography 351

       Permissions 353

      Preface

      This book began—a decade after Brion Gysin’s death—as the result of occasional discussions with friends I knew by way of him. I came to realize there was a certain quantity of rare or unpublished writings by Gysin, at the same time as I noticed that all of his published work was going out of print. This vanishing body of evidence, literarily speaking, sparked an idea that soon would not let me go.

      I thought, at any rate, that it would be a project for me to do on the side—pull down the old books from my shelf and chase down a few texts in libraries or by word of mouth. It became, rather, a more involving project, which resembled a feverish sort of detective work: finding my way amid diverse paths and, with patience, catching the lepidoptera. The way things were going, it seemed to me, this might well be the only book available of Gysin for some time. I had to gather as much as I could, therefore, and then see what fit, taking full advantage of the publisher’s interest so as to offer the greatest range.

      Ultimately, Gysin was a storyteller and a poet too, but he wrote in many different forms. How was I to make a coherent order of the many pieces except by chronology? And even there, a strict rule had to be bent a little, precisely for the sake of coherence (grouping the Permutation Poems or the Songs together). We can thus see the course of his written production over five decades, and perhaps glimpse some measure of the life lived.

      Another way to divide the book is in two parts: half comprising the long excerpts from his historical narrative and his two novels; the other half made up of some forty pieces. Instead, I shuffled the decks and was back at chronology. The little pieces alongside the large—that indeed is a writer’s life. Any other system to classify these writings would be to set up needless obstacles in approaching them.

      In selecting excerpts from the longer works, I sought to give a sense of the whole (beginnings, ends, important passages along the way) but also to highlight the strongest writing. I had to consider as well what sections might stand more or less on their own. For the historical narrative, To Master—A Long Goodnight, I have provided a brief overview of events in the parts of the text that I left out, but for the two complicated novels (and his screenplay of Naked Lunch) such summaries would have proved both cumbersome and unnecessary. Choosing the shorter pieces, on the other hand, was relatively easy: many, like the cut-ups and permutations, were particularly significant in Gysin’s career; others, more occasional pieces, reflect his varied activities and interests, or serve to illustrate certain turns in his thinking, or else they are simply curious and amusing. In the end, I think there may be some pleasant surprises for even the most ardent Gysin fans.

      I would like to thank the following individuals who have helped with their suggestions, assistance and overall support in drawing together the materials for this anthology: Marie-Odile Briot and Gladys Fabre of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Ira Cohen, Graham Dawes, Steve Lacy, Ramuntcho Matta, John Geiger, James Grauerholz, José Férez Kuri, Guillaume Gallozzi, Terry Wilson, Bernard Heidsieck, Suzanna Tamminen, Timothy Murphy, Pierre Joris, Maura High, Julie Allred, Udo Breger, Theo Green, Linda Norton, Katherine Fausset, Jennie Skerl, Richard Aaron, Séamas McSwiney, Ali Alizadeh, Carol Moore and Marilyn Wurzburger at Arizona State University Library’s Special Collections, Tara Wenger at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin at the University of Delaware Library’s Special Collections, Ulrik Trojaborg and Annelise Ream at the Keith Haring Foundation, and Chris Chapman of Honeybee Robotics.

      Introduction

      Brion Gysin used to refer to himself as the man from nowhere—not surprising, given his multiple origins and thoroughly international existence. When Paul Bowles ran across him in New York in the 1940s, he described Gysin as then being into his fourth nationality. But perhaps the phrase that Jorge Luis Borges used to describe some of his own characters might be more appropriate: in his life as in his art, Gysin was “a man from the border.” His restless curiosity kept him always on the move, going where it pleased him, carrying no baggage; such perhaps was the ideal, yet it was also, in large measure, his inescapable reality. A nomad at heart, he kept returning—physically or imaginatively—to the various far-flung locales that had formed him.

      In this age when scholars and readers are eager to think across the disciplines, to find connections between cultures, to discern the underlying matrix of an artistic moment beyond fixed notions of identity or traditional expectations—as if any of these tendencies were new—surely it is time to reassess the work of Brion Gysin. As singular a figure as any, he was often dismissed for not being entirely a painter, nor entirely a writer, though he continued to explore both domains for some fifty years with an inquiring instinct that expressed itself differently according to the occasion. Worse for him, he did not hold still within these media, nor devote the bulk of his efforts to a chosen genre. Rather, he came and went, alert to creative openings, following his ideas in and beyond such practices simultaneously, alternately, sequentially. If some consider him essentially a painter, and his production in the visual arts possibly more accomplished, his fascination with writing and the mysteries of language remains nonetheless central to all his output—he did, after all, learn to speak seven languages. As a writer, his insightful understanding of history combined with the expansive flair of a born raconteur to set his prodigious imagination in motion: he produced long and short fiction, historical narrative, poems, song lyrics, travel pieces, memoirs, experimental forms, and more. Taken as a whole, his great versatility should be regarded not as a wild display of excess talents but instead as an ongoing method in his art of the opening, of uncovering paths which many younger artists took up in turn.

      Though Gysin has been peripherally associated with the Beat Generation writers, it is more by intermittent points of convergence and especially his long friendship with William S. Burroughs that the affiliation holds. However, his multinational background and interdisciplinary perspective as an artist, as well as a healthy skepticism toward the spiritual yearnings of many among the Beats, rather set him apart. A foreigner everywhere, he did not claim any one culture as his own; despite the fact that he rubbed shoulders with various aristocracies all his life, his sympathies lay most often with the outsider, whether in the guise of artist, immigrant or heretic, not to mention the added markers of racial or sexual difference. He recognized the advantages of his hybrid origins, which allowed him more freedom of movement as an artist and as a person, so that whatever sparks of rebellion may be found in his work can be traced to his attitude toward the fixed thinking and implicit limits of all groups. His independence, of course, had a price: if by nature and temperament he dodged most efforts to package him as a recognizable commodity, given his many fields of action, he seldom had an easy time of it when he did seek to market his products.

      Practical (or at least commercial) matters aside, the question of identity did not plague Gysin; on the contrary, it provided ample room for play. Indeed, the theme of the search for identity is found often in his