Magick SQUARES,
Future BEATS
The Magickal Processes & Methods
of William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin °
Genesis Breyer P-ORRIDGE
Being the FIRST Part
Change the way to perceive and change all memory.
Our very first “memories”
are hand-me-downs from other people. Various events and moments, amusing
anecdotes of when we were babies and very small children. Usually stories from
a period in our life that we actually cannot recall for ourselves. These are
the cornerstones which we begin to add onto, building more conscious,
personally recorded, experiential memories. Usually, without much consideration
of veracity or motive, we assume those original stories (whose source is
usually parental) are true, rather than separately authored and constructed
mythologies. Yet, with the best will in the world, they are edited highlights
(and lowlights) from another person’s perspective, interpreted by them, and
even given significance and meaning by their being chosen to represent the
whole of us, before our own separate SELF consciousness sets in. All the
information we have at our immediate disposal as self-consciousness develops is
from someone else. Everything about us is true. Everything about us is false.
Everything about us is both. It is by omission that we are described exactly,
creating an unfolding program not of our own choosing. We are edited bloodlines
seeking an identity with only partial data and unknown motivation and
expectation.
(I should point out here that Brion Gysin claimed very convincingly to recall being in his mother’s womb, the traumatic drama of actually being born and the horror of arriving at the “wrong address” and all subsequent events. I personally believe(d) him. I also suspect it is a part of what made him so incredibly remarkable, important and effective as a cultural engineer and innovator, as a sorcerer of light and language, as a magickian.)
These inherited, brief memories are a little jigsaw puzzle. A picture that contains impressions of what kind of “child” we are, in the eyes of our familial others. Without malicious intent necessarily, they still tend to guide us towards an unbalanced, prejudiced perception of who we are; they can easily become at least a basic sketch of our character by our parents, a blueprint made more solid by each re-telling, less possible to challenge. Just as we tend to like to please our parents by doing what they praise, so we can also manifest and reinforce their criticisms as well.
At their unintended worst, these assumptions and maps become the metaphors/enhancers/deciders/directives for a lifetime’s neurotic self-image, selected recordings of who we are, who we are imagined to be, who we are instructed we are, who we are expected to become, what kind of adult we will unfold into and of course evidence of an inherited fiction from which we will be conditioned as to how we too will perceive the world and our place in and on it. Looping around and around, a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling and prophetic sampling into which we immerse ourselves, our SELF without any great wisdom to hint we might wait and see, listen and watch, question and perhaps even re-edit in order to maximize our potential to become.
If our self-image is primarily built upon the faulty, biased, prejudiced and highly edited memory recordings of other people, with their own agenda of who we are intended to become, as defined by this perceptual process of un-natural selection... Then ways and tools that allow us to seize the means of perception become vital in our fight to construct a self, a character, an identity that is truly and independently our own. Which makes any magic that empowers us to do that, both sacred and profane, a matter of survival, a cause of infinite concern in terms of the evolution of both our SELF and our species.
In short, a divine territory that recognizes behavior, perception, and character as malleable matter equal to all other forms of matter, distinguished (so far) only by our apparent awareness that we exist and have choices, mortality and doubt as signifiers of our individuality. If there is any right, any birthright, it might well be the right to create one’s SELF.
In a pre-recorded universe,
who made the first recordings?
In a very real sense, I do not own my early life. The first “memories” I have are actually short anecdotes describing things that happened involving me that I actually have absolutely no recollection of. Interestingly they all revolve around me doing something “naughty” which influenced others negatively (by parental standards) and for which fact I got “blamed.” The mistakes of others were placed very squarely at my door. A classic “bad influence.” For much of my life these shameful crises were simply accepted on trust. I have even recounted them myself, for years, without doubting their veracity. Yet I have come to know how subjective, selective and personally convenient and self-serving various sources of versions of events can be, and that we consciously and unconsciously edit out all kinds of things to suit ourselves, pragmatically, or manipulatively in order to make things happen. These are the roots of a childhood theatre of behavioral depth magick. A form that sadly suffers from being born of devout ignorance, and a total lack of shamanic guidance. Magick is, by one definition if you will, the science of making things happen according to your desires in order to maximize control over one’s life and immediate environment in order to create a universe that is perfecting in its kindness towards you.
This could all be innocuous, and perhaps, for many, it is. For my SELF, it has emerged as a key factor, a continuous exploration and necessity for my emotional survival as a creative being to free my SELF from imposed ways of being initiated by these uninvited guests in the recording device that is my experiential existence. My recordings are what I build my soul from. The act of independently visualized and consciously chosen creation builds that phenomenon that is what I call and perceive as “me.” If I am not who I was told I was, then who am I? More importantly, can I find ways to change the original recordings and inherited construct and actually remember and become whoever it is that I am, or even better, who I dream I wish to be? Can we build our SELF? Are there methods, examples, tricks and techniques, methods and madness, analysis and delirium that empower my self?
It is very easy to fall victim to peer group pressure. Parental expectation. Emotionally crippling tales that put the blame for negative events upon your personality and behavior. We are pushed, shoved, squashed and bullied into submission and contrition. At some point in each being’s life, I believe we are presented with a critical choice, a classic, cliché, a fork in our road of life. As this occurs, I would suggest that the split is between the consensus reality, consensus-perceptual “memory” pre-recordings of a more or less controlled and predictable biological time line existence and an opportunity to redefine self-perception and remix re-recordings infinitely and chaotically in entirely unique and original combinations and collisions of SELF determined and SELF creating recordings assembled from, with and by freedom choice. Instead of our identity (in all possible and impossible senses of the word) being built by others we can build our own, and own it.
It was in 1967 that this critical concern overwhelmed me. Was there a system, a way to adjust, control, break-up and re-assemble behavior, personality, creativity and perception, so that novelty and surprise, the unexpected and improvisation could be applied to my identity, using my SELF as raw material, as malleable physically and mentally as any other medium? Could I change the way I perceive and change all memory? It seemed to me that there had to be a way to truly live my life as art and make my art an inseparable extension of my life. I began my search for a creativity-centered system of applied magick.
You might think that seeking out two Beatniks was a funny place to start looking for a functional, modern process of magick. But, in fact, it turned out to be exactly the right place to look, and just as I had hoped, it did change my life, and it did enable me to build, with intention and clarity, the bohemian, divinely seeking being I willed to become.
If I was constructed on the foundation of, and from, inherited memories taken on trust, on metaphors handed down with their own agenda via language and image (what one might think of as the cultural DNA of personality) then I needed to confront the omnipotence of word control. It was imperative to my survival as a sentient being to locate the most advanced alchemists, and the most radical in their field, in order to learn what I could of strategies that would force the hand of chance in favor of self-creation rather than submissive reaction.
(In Paris during the 1970’s Brion Gysin pointed out to me that is was extremely significant that the first book of The Bible is known as the book of CREATION, and that he chose to point out in an early permutation, “In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was God.”)
I first met William S. Burroughs in London, at Duke Street, St James in 1971 after a brief series of postal correspondence. It actually felt and seemed strange, as I had discovered his existence via Jack Kerouac as the mysterious character Bull Lee. Confirmation of his being an actual person led me to the porn district of Soho in 1965, where I snagged a copy, a first edition actually, with dust jacket by Brion Gysin, of Naked Lunch. It had been prosecuted for obscenity, and porn shops were the only places in those days to buy W.S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet and pretty much everything I was consuming as confirmation, vindication and affirmation as a 15-year-old. Six years after beginning my Beat “oddesey,” via books, my very first question to him, a living, breathing, beatnik legend in the flesh was…“Tell me about magic?”
Nothing here now but thee recordings.
William had a cut out, cardboard, life-size photo of Mick Jagger standing by his bookcase. Its significance was the rite of “Performance,” not rock and roll. On the television set was a full bottle of Jack Daniels, and a remote. The first I ever saw. William was not in the least surprised by my question. “Care for a drink,” he said. “Sure” I replied nervous and, for one of the only times ever in my life, in awe. “Well… Reality is not really all it’s cracked up to be, you know,” he continued. He took the remote and started to flip through the channels, cutting up programmed TV. I realized he was teaching me. At the same time he began to hit stop and start on his SONY TC cassette recorder. Mixing in “random” cut-up previous recordings. But these were overlaid with our conversation. None acknowledging the other. An instant holography of information and environment. I was already being taught. What Bill explained to me then was pivotal to the unfolding of my life and art. Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, then it can be edited. If it can be edited then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the agenda and/or person editing. This is magick. For if we have the ability and/or choice of how things unfold, regardless of the original order, and/or intention, that they are recorded in; then we have control over the eventual unfolding. If reality consists of a series of parallel recordings that usually go unchallenged, then reality only remains stable and predictable until it is challenged. And/or the recordings are altered, or their order changed. These concepts lead us to the release of cut-ins as a magickal process.
At this point we broke open the hard liquor and each downed a large glass. Soon (it seemed) the bottle was empty.
(I should point out here that Brion Gysin claimed very convincingly to recall being in his mother’s womb, the traumatic drama of actually being born and the horror of arriving at the “wrong address” and all subsequent events. I personally believe(d) him. I also suspect it is a part of what made him so incredibly remarkable, important and effective as a cultural engineer and innovator, as a sorcerer of light and language, as a magickian.)
These inherited, brief memories are a little jigsaw puzzle. A picture that contains impressions of what kind of “child” we are, in the eyes of our familial others. Without malicious intent necessarily, they still tend to guide us towards an unbalanced, prejudiced perception of who we are; they can easily become at least a basic sketch of our character by our parents, a blueprint made more solid by each re-telling, less possible to challenge. Just as we tend to like to please our parents by doing what they praise, so we can also manifest and reinforce their criticisms as well.
At their unintended worst, these assumptions and maps become the metaphors/enhancers/deciders/directives for a lifetime’s neurotic self-image, selected recordings of who we are, who we are imagined to be, who we are instructed we are, who we are expected to become, what kind of adult we will unfold into and of course evidence of an inherited fiction from which we will be conditioned as to how we too will perceive the world and our place in and on it. Looping around and around, a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling and prophetic sampling into which we immerse ourselves, our SELF without any great wisdom to hint we might wait and see, listen and watch, question and perhaps even re-edit in order to maximize our potential to become.
If our self-image is primarily built upon the faulty, biased, prejudiced and highly edited memory recordings of other people, with their own agenda of who we are intended to become, as defined by this perceptual process of un-natural selection... Then ways and tools that allow us to seize the means of perception become vital in our fight to construct a self, a character, an identity that is truly and independently our own. Which makes any magic that empowers us to do that, both sacred and profane, a matter of survival, a cause of infinite concern in terms of the evolution of both our SELF and our species.
In short, a divine territory that recognizes behavior, perception, and character as malleable matter equal to all other forms of matter, distinguished (so far) only by our apparent awareness that we exist and have choices, mortality and doubt as signifiers of our individuality. If there is any right, any birthright, it might well be the right to create one’s SELF.
Being the SECOND Part
In a pre-recorded universe,
who made the first recordings?
In a very real sense, I do not own my early life. The first “memories” I have are actually short anecdotes describing things that happened involving me that I actually have absolutely no recollection of. Interestingly they all revolve around me doing something “naughty” which influenced others negatively (by parental standards) and for which fact I got “blamed.” The mistakes of others were placed very squarely at my door. A classic “bad influence.” For much of my life these shameful crises were simply accepted on trust. I have even recounted them myself, for years, without doubting their veracity. Yet I have come to know how subjective, selective and personally convenient and self-serving various sources of versions of events can be, and that we consciously and unconsciously edit out all kinds of things to suit ourselves, pragmatically, or manipulatively in order to make things happen. These are the roots of a childhood theatre of behavioral depth magick. A form that sadly suffers from being born of devout ignorance, and a total lack of shamanic guidance. Magick is, by one definition if you will, the science of making things happen according to your desires in order to maximize control over one’s life and immediate environment in order to create a universe that is perfecting in its kindness towards you.
This could all be innocuous, and perhaps, for many, it is. For my SELF, it has emerged as a key factor, a continuous exploration and necessity for my emotional survival as a creative being to free my SELF from imposed ways of being initiated by these uninvited guests in the recording device that is my experiential existence. My recordings are what I build my soul from. The act of independently visualized and consciously chosen creation builds that phenomenon that is what I call and perceive as “me.” If I am not who I was told I was, then who am I? More importantly, can I find ways to change the original recordings and inherited construct and actually remember and become whoever it is that I am, or even better, who I dream I wish to be? Can we build our SELF? Are there methods, examples, tricks and techniques, methods and madness, analysis and delirium that empower my self?
It is very easy to fall victim to peer group pressure. Parental expectation. Emotionally crippling tales that put the blame for negative events upon your personality and behavior. We are pushed, shoved, squashed and bullied into submission and contrition. At some point in each being’s life, I believe we are presented with a critical choice, a classic, cliché, a fork in our road of life. As this occurs, I would suggest that the split is between the consensus reality, consensus-perceptual “memory” pre-recordings of a more or less controlled and predictable biological time line existence and an opportunity to redefine self-perception and remix re-recordings infinitely and chaotically in entirely unique and original combinations and collisions of SELF determined and SELF creating recordings assembled from, with and by freedom choice. Instead of our identity (in all possible and impossible senses of the word) being built by others we can build our own, and own it.
It was in 1967 that this critical concern overwhelmed me. Was there a system, a way to adjust, control, break-up and re-assemble behavior, personality, creativity and perception, so that novelty and surprise, the unexpected and improvisation could be applied to my identity, using my SELF as raw material, as malleable physically and mentally as any other medium? Could I change the way I perceive and change all memory? It seemed to me that there had to be a way to truly live my life as art and make my art an inseparable extension of my life. I began my search for a creativity-centered system of applied magick.
You might think that seeking out two Beatniks was a funny place to start looking for a functional, modern process of magick. But, in fact, it turned out to be exactly the right place to look, and just as I had hoped, it did change my life, and it did enable me to build, with intention and clarity, the bohemian, divinely seeking being I willed to become.
If I was constructed on the foundation of, and from, inherited memories taken on trust, on metaphors handed down with their own agenda via language and image (what one might think of as the cultural DNA of personality) then I needed to confront the omnipotence of word control. It was imperative to my survival as a sentient being to locate the most advanced alchemists, and the most radical in their field, in order to learn what I could of strategies that would force the hand of chance in favor of self-creation rather than submissive reaction.
(In Paris during the 1970’s Brion Gysin pointed out to me that is was extremely significant that the first book of The Bible is known as the book of CREATION, and that he chose to point out in an early permutation, “In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was God.”)
I first met William S. Burroughs in London, at Duke Street, St James in 1971 after a brief series of postal correspondence. It actually felt and seemed strange, as I had discovered his existence via Jack Kerouac as the mysterious character Bull Lee. Confirmation of his being an actual person led me to the porn district of Soho in 1965, where I snagged a copy, a first edition actually, with dust jacket by Brion Gysin, of Naked Lunch. It had been prosecuted for obscenity, and porn shops were the only places in those days to buy W.S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet and pretty much everything I was consuming as confirmation, vindication and affirmation as a 15-year-old. Six years after beginning my Beat “oddesey,” via books, my very first question to him, a living, breathing, beatnik legend in the flesh was…“Tell me about magic?”
Being the Third (Mind) Part
Nothing here now but thee recordings.
William had a cut out, cardboard, life-size photo of Mick Jagger standing by his bookcase. Its significance was the rite of “Performance,” not rock and roll. On the television set was a full bottle of Jack Daniels, and a remote. The first I ever saw. William was not in the least surprised by my question. “Care for a drink,” he said. “Sure” I replied nervous and, for one of the only times ever in my life, in awe. “Well… Reality is not really all it’s cracked up to be, you know,” he continued. He took the remote and started to flip through the channels, cutting up programmed TV. I realized he was teaching me. At the same time he began to hit stop and start on his SONY TC cassette recorder. Mixing in “random” cut-up previous recordings. But these were overlaid with our conversation. None acknowledging the other. An instant holography of information and environment. I was already being taught. What Bill explained to me then was pivotal to the unfolding of my life and art. Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, then it can be edited. If it can be edited then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the agenda and/or person editing. This is magick. For if we have the ability and/or choice of how things unfold, regardless of the original order, and/or intention, that they are recorded in; then we have control over the eventual unfolding. If reality consists of a series of parallel recordings that usually go unchallenged, then reality only remains stable and predictable until it is challenged. And/or the recordings are altered, or their order changed. These concepts lead us to the release of cut-ins as a magickal process.
At this point we broke open the hard liquor and each downed a large glass. Soon (it seemed) the bottle was empty.
A Cassette Tape Recorder as a Magickal Weapon:
What I was then told changed the unfolding of my L-if-E in every possible dimension and concept of the word. He told me about how during the Chicago convention he had walked around recording the background noises of the Yippie demonstrations, the riots, the Mayor Daley repression and violence. As he walked, he would randomly hit record at intervals “cutting-in” the most recent sounds around him creating a collage that was non-linear time. What he observed happening was that as a configuration of “trouble sounds” occurred (i.e. police sirens, screams, chanting of slogans) the actual physical manifestations and/or expressions of those sounds also increased in what WE think of as the “real” physical world. His next experiment was to work with “passive” environmental audio-scapes in order to check his evidence and see if it could be replicated. As William explained it to me at that time, in what became an apocryphal action, he had decided to check more “scientifically” the theories he had been assembling with Brion Gysin regarding “reality” being a linear recording. A malleable medium or element that was subject, as such, to the intervention of edits and erasings, rub-outs and re-sculpting if you will. Not far from Duke Street (where he was then living in voluntary exile. A choice I would find my SELF compelled to make years later) was a basic British/Greek café where he might sometimes relax and get the classic English breakfast of chips, baked beans, fried eggs, fried tomatoes, mushrooms and toast with a large cup of tea, or an instant coffee. Nothing special. Nowhere special. The perfect place, in fact, to encounter arrogance and snobbery, abruptness and poor manners on the part of the very people indentured to one’s service. On one of those days – a day when all is over-colored, over-laid, and over-bearing – William was treated with great disdain, with rudeness beyond belief. Crass, crude, rude, nasty and aggressive, insulting behavior quite beyond the acceptable pale of manners. Such was the rudeness and unpleasantness experienced by William that he swore never to eat there again. But, more than that, his disgust and anger was so intense and intentional, so unforgiving and angry in the moment that he felt quite compelled to experimental “sorcery” (his word to me, take note). What form did his curse take? Herein follows the first lesson in contemporary intuitive and functional magick.
William took his SONY TC cassette recorder and very methodically walked back and forth in front of the offending café, at breakfast-time, and other times of day, making a tape of the ongoing street noises that made the sonic background of its location. A field recording encapsulating a typical day via street sounds. Next he went back to his apartment and at various random places on the same cassette he recorded “trouble noises” over bits of the previous recordings. These were things like police car sirens and (in those days) bells, gunshots, bombs, screams and other types of mayhem from the TV news primarily. Now he went back to the café location and again walked up and down the street outside playing the cut-up cassette recording complete with “trouble noises.” Apparently the tape does not need to be played very loud; in fact a volume level that blends in so that passers-by on the other side of the street, or a few feet away would not, and do not, notice the additional sounds as implanted fictions. This process was repeated several times, quite innocuously to any observer. “El hombre invisibile” at work. Within a very short time, the café had closed down! Not only did it close down, but also the space remained empty for years, unable to be rented for love, or money.
We do well to consider, at this point, that each individual human being is inevitably the center of their own unique universe/sensory/experiential world. Only you are physically present every single second of your personal L-if-E and as a result, any person, or event that takes place without your physical presence is a part of somebody else’s unique universe. Of course, there are times when others arepresent and then they will tend to assume they are all in one universe together. However, ask any cop if they get the same story from a variety of witnesses, or the same description of a suspect, and you will be told in no uncertain terms, that nobody sees, or hears, the same thing at the same time. Nor do they share equal abilities to describe or recall what they imagine their memories have recorded. In other words, even consensus reality is just that: an amalgamation of approximate recordings from flawed bio-machines. In the background of our daily lives is almost the equivalent of a flimsy movie set unfolding created by the sum total of what people allow to filter in through their senses. This illusory material world, built ad hoc, second to second, is uncommon to us all. It will only seem to exist whilst our body is passing through it. After that its continued existence is a matter of faith, and our experience of it seeming to have a certain continuity of presence, i.e., we find we can apparently go back to a place that seems solid. It is quite possible that the energy or phenomenon that glues together a repeatable experience of solidity and materiality on this earth is the pressure of billions of human beings simultaneously, and in close proximity, believing in what they see and hear. Bear in mind that Astory (my preferred word for the redundant word “history”) is the collected recordings of subjective previous people(s) and our species. What has survived, what was memorized or stored in some form is usually assumed to be the story of our unfolding species. Nevertheless, we are more than aware that certain events are written up with agendas included – dogmatic religions, democracies, bitter families and totalitarian regimes all collude in this process of editing. It has crossed my mind that this entire planet is a recording device itself. As archeology and anthropology and forensic science progress we are able to discover and reveal endless detail of happenings going back millions of years. Also, side by side, we have almost every period of human species Astory still continuing today. The bushmen in Africa live in a basically pre-astoric way; tribes in New Guinea in the stone age to a degree perhaps; other peoples in a barbaric middle ages; entire communities in middle America live in a fundamentalist Victorian era; and yet others, in somewhere like Silicon Valley or Tokyo, live in a technological science fiction future. This is a remarkable thought. Infinite micro-realities existing simultaneously, by their very activation creating an appearance of “reality” and infinite, social, macro-realities parallel and colliding and competing for supremacy and with it the power to edit and describe a global “reality.”
At this point I feel it helpful to re-mind the reader that this essay is necessarily, as part of an anthology, only an over-view of the complex and wide-ranging evidence consistently to be found in the creative works, in all media, of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.* My thereby implicit proposal is, that whilst Burroughs was, indeed, a classic literary figure of the 20th century; and Gysin was a classic 20th century renaissance artist; who together bequeathed to us through intuitive science and method, and a prophetic appreciation of meaning a pivotal approach to questions of perception and the nature and origin of literature and art, they can only be fully appreciated, and, perhaps, finally understood in terms of their central and passionate inner agendas and obsessions when re-considered and re-assessed as serious, conscious and masterful creative/cultural alchemists and practicing magickians. (N.B. A mission for which I have taken the linguistic liberty of coining the term/occupation “Cultural Engineer.”)
As their works as this unexpected brotherhood unfold after their collaborations begin at “The Beat Hotel” in Paris during 1957 to 1963 and meticulously thereafter, one is immersed with them in a fascinating journey into pre-material consciousness. A place where direct and indirect communications with the nervous system occur; where nothing is fixed or permanent but everything is true and permitted; where ancient programming holds prisoner the possible truths of who and what we are, and where even words are potential enemy agents and distortion devices that assist in the suppression of our potential as beings. This wordless “interzone” was, as has been pointed out before (see Here To Go in the bibliography) so “inconceivable” to even such a libertarian poet as Allen Ginsberg that he felt that it “…threatened everything.” It is not uncommon for people to demonstrate symptoms of fear and insecurity when the very fabric of their protective safety blanket “reality” is scattered, shattered, shredded and then further cut-up to reveal a central possibility of divinity and love within all things and perceptions of things. It can be painful to release the last connection to an inherited and linear space time “reality” assembled from filtered essence of solidifying mundanity. In a magickal universe, everything, and every THING, is malleable, changeable, interconnected at invisibly deep levels, levels so subtle and sub-atomic that consciousness and intention can affect them.
“Intention is the work of envisaging and enacting will.” (Ray L. Hart in Unfinished Man and the Imagination. See the bibliography for “Even Furthur: The Metaphysics of The Sigil” by Paul Cecil in Painful But Fabulous)
In an often-quoted moment Gysin proposed to Burroughs that “writing is fifty years behind painting.” By which he meant that painting had begun to call into question all the traditional boundaries and templates. Even reason and object were arbitrary and unnecessary markers. The only frame left was the Diggers’ frame of reference. By his introduction of the cut-up in all its manifestations, Gysin the accomplished “shaman” (as Burroughs so rightly designated him), gave his compadre the magickal tool(s) required for a lifetime’s astonishing, and recorded as literature, revelation. Their intricate and dazzling story and their functional, demystified techniques and process continue to leak into present time in preparation for various possible futures. I believe that a re-reading of their combined body of work from a magickal perspective not only confirms what they themselves accepted about themselves, that they were powerful modern magicians. This omission does a great disservice to us all. In this post-digital age, as we each construct our own personal “reality fields” it is my conviction that a positive unfolding of our species, and an evolution that is non-destructive and anathema to polarization is absolutely central to our survival with ethical honor.
In the ever more metaphysical world of physics a parallel sequence of “discoveries” equivalent in their importance to science as the “cut-ups” system of magick is to culture, has potentially reshaped our understanding of the universe and “reality” (see The Holographic Universe in the bibliography). According to physicist David Bohm (simplifying and colloquialising as best as I can as a lay person) any apparent separation between matter and consciousness is an illusion, an artifact that occurs or is assembled only after both consciousness and matter have unfolded into the “explicate” world of objects and linear/sequential time. As one might expect, the other realm would be the “implicate” world, which would be all those inner “worlds” (including thought) that take place outside linear time, and sensory confluence. What is coming to be accepted as a non-material field of consciousness? Bohm’s researches suggested to him that “…at the subquantum level, in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist. All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything being separate from anything else.” Interestingly, a Cheyenne/Apache shaman told me years and years ago that there was no word for death in his clan; instead they used the word “separation” to express the concept. Similarly, the Shiva holy man Pagalananda Nath Agori Baba spent many patient hours deprogramming my western linear materiality in order for me to be better able to grasp the concept of his “path of no distinction.” The Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus explained this absolute elsewhere idea hundreds of years ago when he was recorded as saying “The without is like the within of things and the small of things is like the large.”
So now, finally, after thousands of years, we have a consensus of great significance born of this unprecedented and radical intersection between mystic, scientist, shaman and artist/creative being. Partly for lack of adequate language and partly to camouflage their subversive ideas in order to stay alive, various enlightened visionaries, often the “heretics” of their era, have employed brain-twisting metaphors to describe the Universe of objective “reality” an illusion. What scientists are trying to describe to us now is a Universe where, according to thinkers like Niels Bohr and others, subatomic particles require an observer to come into existence and without an observer’s presence they do not come into existence. Even more remarkable that away from us, each observing from the center-point of our individual existence, the Universe is a measureless resonating domain of frequencies that are an open source that only gets transformed into this world as we think we recognize it after being accessed by our senses and entering our brain. There it is decoded/encoded/acoded who knows which or all and is assembled according to the dimensions of linear time and space, and, I would argue, our subjective cultural expectations. There seems to be a growing agreement at the heart of creation among those in service of the path of the divine, the scientific, and the artistic that the primary reality is one of wholeness, an indivisible unity that functions not unlike a living being, or (my favorite analogy) a coral reef. So, while we rush about, billions of us, interacting experientially with our environment and various objective events do, for all practical intents and purposes, happen to us in particular locations, on a subatomic level things are quite different. On a subatomic level, the Bohm School of science proposes that all points in space become equal to all other points in space, they are nonlocalities. So, to quote John Lennon, “Nothing is real.”
To sum up this section, the Universe is a unified source, an infinite, open, timeless, intricate quaquaversal frequency field in constant flux that appears to have objective form and material solidity when and because we observe it. And observe it we do. We observe it over and over, we are obsessed with recording it too (just think of all those hundreds of paparazzi documenting J Lo’s every breath) and then we store it in monolithic museums, libraries, databanks. These huge repositories can act on a society’s behalf to symbolize anthropological recorders and our maintenance of them. Our belief in their contents in turn functions as the batteries that charge up and energize the social hologram that we have assembled as consensus reality in order to give continuity, consistency, solidity, and even significant sense of meaning with enough consistency and reliability for us to function during life as biological sentient beings. Nevertheless, it is our expectation that things will be the same, that a log will remain a log, and if enough of us keep “creating” logs as a matter of habit, eventually... yes... log jam; but it is still no more “real” despite the materiality produced by repetition. It is not a co-incidence that in more established doctrinal/dogmatic religions worldwide; in so-called “primitive” tribal and/or shamanic cultures; in the rituals of public and secret Western magickal and/or Masonic orders, or in the ecstatic rhythms and ancient beats of trance targeted music and chants that go with them repetition of key power words and phrases are as integral as is the phenomenon of call and response. Even at this deepest level of a relationship with the measureless frequency field, with the universe as a unified open source that has no locality, we are trying to solidify and maintain our sensory illusion(s). The purpose of these various “services” is to collectively reconstruct a social reality seamlessly with language, with words and names, with devotional submission to the power of its story, and thereby, ironically, to put into strict bondage through this habitual repetition the essence of life itself. Why? In order to predict and control it. Often, unwittingly, we empower the people who claim by continuity of descent by colluding in these rites. The real hidden doctrine handed down through the ages, the central agenda, is control. Why do those who control seek to maintain control? For its own sake. How do they control? By controlling the story, by editing our collective memory, conscious and unconscious. In many ways the edit is the invisible language of control and its corporate media allies. They cut and paste in order to separate us from each other by entrancing us with a pre-recorded reality that seamlessly isolates us in a world designed by those who would immerse us in service to their fundamentalist consumerism. Simultaneously divorcing us from the Universe that is creation itself in an infinite pre-sensory source.
“… writing is… not (just) an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality, so (the) writer can escape the limits of reality.”
William S. Burroughs, from Last Words
In his book Last Words Burroughs writes of the enemy and their two weaknesses being firstly that they have, “… no sense of humor” and secondly “They totally lack understanding of magic.” Later he directs our attention to two other enemy weaknesses in reference to dogmatic scientific modes of enquiry by pointing out that phenomena “… that occur only once…” will automatically be invalidated by virtue of their uniqueness and that they have an “…insatiable appetite for data.” Yet we have seen that everything is indivisibly unified. That there really are no hard edges, no division between mental and physical worlds, or any worlds or dimensions animate or inanimate. Instead we have been introduced to an holographic universe of infinite interconnectedness that responds to the future beat of a magickal shaman’s drum. It is fundamental to understanding how to operate and interpret the challengingly effective, modern, and magickal exercises of Burroughs and Gysin, with cut-ups as their foundation and words as the disputed territory. What we have been trained from birth to believe of as a solid environment, is only a tiny fragment of what is available to our perception. At the same time, the behavioral, political and anthropological astory of our society and culture has been written and recorded by authors fulfilling an agenda of (and for) vested interests who do not have our well-being at heart, leaving most of us trapped in their current description of the universe.
“No two actual entities originate from an identical universe… The nexus (lineage) of actual entities in the universe correlate to a growth by assimilation that is termed the actual world.”
Adapted, with apology, from Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead.
Back to the café. Experiments have shown we live a great deal of our lives “asleep,” filtering out sensory input. Film a street as its residents are going to work in the morning. Add in a police car going past afterwards in the editing suite. Play it back to those same residents the following evening. Asked if this is a recording of the morning, almost all will say yes. They will also say they recall the police car going by. This is the phenomenon Burroughs was working with. Added to the fragility of our individual neurological recording devices is the age-old technique of suggestion. Yet, here we are faced with something perhaps even a little deeper. A conscious attack upon, and alteration of consensus reality by a formularized ritual.
“In a pre-recorded universe, who made the first recordings?” So asked Gysin and Burroughs. Further, if all we imagine to be reality is equivalent to a recording, then we become empowered to edit, re-arrange, re-contextualize and re-project by cutting-up and re-assembling my own reality and potentially, the reality of others. If this is true and effective, then a magickal act is taking place. Simplified magick has been defined as a method for changing reality in conformity with one’s true will, or as a methodical demystified process that allows us to force the hands of chance in order to make things we truly desire happen based upon and within purity of intent. Crowley said that magick has “The aim of religion and the method of science.” Brion Gysin talked of magick saying it was “… the Other Method, an exercise for controlling matter and knowing space, and a form of psychic hygiene.” So what happened to the café? If it was only suggestion, then it would have only discouraged the people in the street whilst William was walking about playing his tape. None of them might have been customers anyway. It was NOT necessary for the café proprietors to be aware of the “curse.” The premises closed and remained closed, followed by a series of brief failed businesses, long, long after William moved on to other activities.
“(The process) involves a reversal of our ordinary understanding that causes produce effects. The cause must precede its effect in (present) time, yet it must be presently existent in order to be active in producing its effect.”
From The Lure of God by Lewis Ford
According to Gysin in Here To Go (see bibliography), William sometimes used two cassette recorders, one in each hand and occasionally even added his own voice repeating an incantation he had written to intensify the focus of his spell. This particular incantation ended up as part of the soundtrack of Witchcraft Through The Ages, an obscure, and really rather kitsch Scandinavian black and white movie for which Burroughs did the voice over. A quirky anomaly resulting from the fact that beat filmmaker Antony Balch had the UK distribution rights. Part of it went something like this:
Lock them out and bar the door,
Lock them out for evermore.
Nook and cranny, window, door,
Seal them out for evermore…
In addition to tape-recorder magick, William also employed a version of the cut-up photograph as additional sorceric firepower. On that first visit, as he explained magick to me, he very generously showed me some of his journals. On one page he had stuck in two pictures. One was a black and white photograph of the section of the street buildings where the café was. Beneath it was a second print in black and white of the same section of street, or so it seemed at first glance. However, upon closer examination he had very neatly sliced out the café with a razor blade. Gluing the two halves of the image back together minus the offending establishment. This same principle can be applied to people one wishes to excise from one’s daily L-if-E, and variations can be used according to your imagination and needs. And, of course, these modern upgrades of magickal practice can be easily integrated into older traditions if one desires. For example, one could put the cut-out image into a brown paper bag with one’s invokation added in pencil, black pepper, ground/broken glass, sharp blades, and vinegar and then throw it over one’s shoulder into a graveyard whilst walking away without looking back.
Once one accepts a possibility that the Universe is holographic and that at the smallest subatomic levels all elements of phenomena can be affected by all others, then the probability of these operations being effective becomes far more credible. Indeed I would argue that a magickal view of the Universe is the most likely description we have proposed so far as a species. In The Job Burroughs discusses silence as a desirable state. What he seems to imply is that words are potentially blocks, both by their linearity in our language system and the manner in which they narrow definitions of experiential events and actions. He says, “Words… can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience.” He does not want to turn the human body into an environment that includes the universe. That would once more create limiting templates and maps of expectation that discourage new and/or radical explorations. Rationality and the fixed progression of physical biology narrow consciousness. One magickal method he proposes is then discussed.
“What I want to do is to learn to see more of what’s out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings… I’m becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images.”
From The Third Mind interview with Conrad Knickerbocker, 1967
One pre-requisite of most Western magickal orders is that the applicant/neophyte keep a daily magickal diary in which they note their dreams, synchronicities, apparent resolution of temporal events and desires after magickal operations. This is not so much just to document and vindicate the system being applied, as to create an ongoing awareness of the constant relationship we all actually have, moment to moment, with the other. In a universe where everything is, to quote TOPI, “interconnected, inter-dimensional and integrated,” or as Michael Talbot describes it, holographic, the acceleration of and practical collaboration with this interrelation of energies and their ability to assist us in affecting manifestations is more clearly revealed by methodical documentation. It seems that the more one acknowledges this confluence of mutability the more kindly its relationship to and with you. This interaction is the one symbolized by the number 23 in both Robert Anton Wilson’s books and in the mythologies flowing throughout Burroughs’ fiction. It is not so much that the number 23 is a “magickal” number that does “tricks” for the person who invokes it; it is more that the number 23 re-minds us of the inherent plasticity of our inherited reality and our potential to immerse our self in that quality to our own advantage and possible well-being. It represents a magickal vision of life rather than a linear and existential one. Significantly, Burroughs, like Kerouac and Gysin, kept dream diaries and journals. Gysin and Burroughs extending their range further by including cut-up texts, newspaper headlines, photographs, fictional routines and poems in a kaleidoscopic visualization of multi-faceted and layered “reality.” Burroughs suggests a practical exercise to amplify our appreciation of, and practical familiarity with, this manifestation.
“Try this: Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, then read it; you’ll find you can actually read it without the words making any sound whatever in the mind’s ear. Extraordinary experience, one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you’re well on the way.” (FromThe Third Mind)
On the 6th of August 1981 I visited Burroughs in New York. He was living at 222 on the Bowery in the basement, a locale fondly nicknamed, and immortalized in various biographies as, the “Bunker.” A book that Burroughs had introduced me to was Breakthrough by the Latvian paranormal investigator Konstantin Raudive. In his book Raudive documents hundreds of “recordings” of the voices of the spirits of the dead. His method was unusual but simple. To attach a crystal receiver to an otherwise standard reel-to-reel in the socket where a microphone would be plugged, hit record, and see what appeared on tape. What Raudive found was that within a wall of white sound and hiss, various intelligible sentences and messages that he believed were from souls in the dimensions associated with being dead, were audible. Given that we were meeting on Hiroshima Day, as Burroughs designated it, there was a feeling that perhaps quite a large number of dead souls might wish to breakthrough. We set up an old tape recorder on the kitchen table where many a dinner soirée was held over the New York years and hit Record. Each of us took turns listening through headphones live to the noise and interference going down on analog tape as it slowly turned. After half an hour we played the “results” back, intently noting the slightest sonic detail. Like good, objective, laboratory researchers we made notes, both on paper and into a cassette SONY walkman I had with me. Almost in a parody of an autopsy on TV. Final report from the bunker… nothing! Oh, how we hoped for evidence, but we got just the expected hiss and short-wave “Twilight Zone” type sounds. Regardless of this – and Crowley was fastidious in reminding the initiate of this – we did not fall into the trap of “…lust for result.” Sometimes only one phenomenon occurs to vindicate a theory, sometimes things seem unrepeatable. In terms of this text, what is significant is that Burroughs truly believed in the possibility of communication with the soul after physical death, long before he went public with that in his “Last Words.”
As a footnote to this experiment an extra event is worthy of mentioning. During 1985 Psychic TV were recording a song about the deceased/murdered founder of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, called “GODSTAR.” Still fascinated by the Raudive book and Burroughs’ dogged exploration of its technique as a magickal tool I arbitrarily, on impulse, told Ken Thomas (my co-producer and creative engineer) to leave track 23 of the 24-track analog tape empty. After all the elements of the song were recorded in the traditional multi-track way I instructed him to re-run the master tape with every track muted except track 23. This track was to be on record, but with absolutely NO form of microphone or even a crystal receiver plugged in. Simply a tape deck running through a tape with no scientific means of recording on one track. To be honest Ken seemed to think this was both illogical and “…a bit spooky.” To his credit, he went ahead and did as I asked anyway. When we played back the previously virgin, pristine and blank track 23, much to our amazement, we heard a metallic knocking at a few points! We replayed and replayed the track. It was definitely there and had certainly appeared during our “token” Raudive/Burroughs experiment; yet it seemed random, and was not a “voice.” Suddenly, I had a moment of clarity and suggested Ken replay the track with the vocals of the lyric and some basic elements of the music added in the mix. The knocking sounds came very precisely under a sequence of words in the exact phrasing and position of the following, “…I wish I was with you now, I wish I could tell you somehow…” (Later I would change the lyric to, “I wish I could SAVE you somehow.”) If I am truly frank, I really did take this as a sign of approval of the song and its message, that Brian Jones was murdered and received a callous treatment at the hands of the media during his last days. He became, for myself and many other fans of his iconography, a scapegoat in the essential magickal and sacred way. Sacrificed at the very least, by ignorance and greed, to the consumer and materialistic machine of linear reality. It is worth noting that at the time we were taping the song the consensus opinion, and official coroners verdict was “death by misadventure” with a lot of media hinting that he either drowned during an asthma attack, or he was so high on drugs that, despite being an athletic swimmer, he drowned right in front of his current girlfriend and guests. Our “magickal” message tended to imply there was more to the story and eventually, during the 1990’s, the builder Frank Thorogood confessed on his deathbed to murdering Brian Jones by holding him under water. Whatever you may choose to believe, it certainly appears that there are ways to make contact with realms considered Other via the most simple of tape recording devices.
Burroughs and Gysin both told me something that resonated with me for the rest of my life so far. They pointed out that alchemists always used the most modern equipment and mathematics, the most precise science of their day. Thus, in order to be an effective and practicing magician in contemporary times one must utilize the most practical and cutting-edge technology and theories of the era. In our case it meant cassette recorders, dreamachines and flicker, polaroid cameras, Xeroxes, E prime and, at the moment of writing this text, laptops, psychedelics, videos, dvds and the world wide web. Please note that earlier we discussed the possibility that the universe is an holographic web constructed of infinite intersections of frequencies (of truth). Basically, everything that is capable of recording and/or representing “reality” is a magickal tool just as much as it is a weapon of control.
Being the Fourth Part
Look at that picture, does it seem to be persisting?
Brion Gysin was born in Taplow, England in 1916, but, indicative of the unspecific density of his visitation on earth, and I use the word “visitation” because until his dying day, in 1986, Brion insisted that in being born human he was “delivered here by mistake.” His conviction of mislocation, and with it a disruption of a different, perhaps parallel, dimensional existence, fuels his remarkably deep sense of irony and Otherness and is a central quality of his body of magickal artistic work. Gysin was a transmediator, a 20th century renaissance man, a multi-media explorer and innovator. Innately disciplined, he would continually paint and draw, extending his calligraphic journeys into what Burroughs would describe as “… painting from the viewpoint of timeless space.”
During my conversations on magick with Burroughs in Duke Street, St. James, London (during the 1970’s) it became more and more clear to me that Gysin was pivotal in the Astory of the magickal unfolding and the techniques of cultural alchemy, that had drawn me to his Beatoeuvreand from thence to make direct contact. During my conversations on magick with Gysin the cassette tape-recorder that I had with me was tolerated onlyon the condition that certain key teachings were spoken, whilst the tape was switched off. As he presented it quite plainly to me, “…magick is passed on by the touching of hands.” In other words, certain ideas and methods are handed-down master to student one on one directly in each other’s physical presence. This agreement has been honored ever since, and remains so. Nevertheless, just to have confirmation from him that it was indeed true that his work was contemporary magick, and not just artistic or literary experimentation, was a great solace and gave me determination in my personal path.
It was Gysin who first recognized the potential of cut-ups as a means to update and upgrade writing and art, and as a contemporary application of magick. In collaboration with Ian Sommerville and Burroughs he discovered and made cheaply accessible, the Dreamachine; “The first artwork to be looked at with eyes closed.” The story of and implications of which are marvelously catalogued in John Geiger’s book The Chapel Of Extreme Experience (see below in the bibliography). In that book, for the first time, out of a kaleidoscopic cyclone, a blizzard of revolutionary scientific information and ultra-visionary creation we are exposed to an incredibly significant creative and conceptual exploration of consciousness via “flicker.” In terms of possibility both Burroughs and Gysin would often quote Hassan I Sabbah, the “old man of the mountains,” who from his fortress in Alamut, Iran, was rumored to have controlled via assassins a huge swathe of ancient Arab civilization. His motto, “Nothing is true, Everything Is Permitted” recurs over and over, especially in Burroughs’ books. It is not so far from the Thelemic precept, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” A theoretical connection that Burroughs appeared to acknowledge towards the end of his life.
Gysin spent 23 years living in Morocco. During that time he ran a restaurant called “1001 Nights” and would invite a group of The Master Musicians of Jajouka to play music for the guests as the entertainment. He tells the story more than once, of how that business crumbled after he found a magick spell: “… an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each, and a little package in which there was a piece of writing…which appealed to the devils of fire to take Brion away from this house.” Very shortly after this discovery, he lost the restaurant and ultimately returned to Paris. On one of my first visits to Paris to meet with Gysin I was blessed with a special evening. After looking into the dreamachine for a couple of hours, Bachir Attar, then the son of the Master Musician of Jajouka, and his brother cooked me a ceremonial meal. During the feast Bachir played flute music that he told me raised the Djinn, the little people, and the spirits and bestowed great fortune upon the listener. Despite the friction of the era when the restaurant was lost, a very powerful magickal bond remained between the ancient system of magick and the most contemporary of elaborations represented by Gysin.
Calligraphic magick squares were one of the techniques most commonly applied by Gysin. He would reduce a name or an idea to a “glyph” and then write across the paper from right to left, turn the paper and do the same again, and so on, turning the paper around and around to create a multi-dimensional grid. Gysin believed this “scaffolding” allowed the Djinn, the little people, to run with the intention “exercising control of matter and knowing space.” The same techniques and consciously driven functional intention also permeated his paintings. In a very real sense, everything he created was an act of sorcery.
William S. Burroughs described the central difference of Gysin’s painting as follows:
“All art is magical in origin… intended to produce very definite results. Art is functional; it is intended to make things happen. Take a porcelain stove, disconnect it and put it in your living room, it may be a good-looking corpse, but it isn’t functional anymore. Writing and painting were once in cave paintings to ensure good hunting. The painting of Brion Gysin deals directly with the magical roots of art. His paintings are designed to produce in the viewer the timeless ever-changing world of magic caught in the painter’s brush. His paintings may be called space art. Time is seen spatially as a series of images or fragments images past, present, or future.”
Gysin felt trapped and oppressed by materiality, but optimistically searched for techniques to short-circuit control and expectation. He accepted nothing as fixed and permanent, reducing the most intimidating formulae of language to animated permutations that become portals of behavioral liberation. If, as we have seen, the Universe consists of interlaced frequencies that pulse and resonate at various interconnected rhythms then his search was for a future beat that would liberate the body and mind from all forms of linearity. Each magick square is essentially holographic, suffused with a directed unity. Intertwined in his grids as confirmation and illustration of the magickal ideas proposed are examples of routines, exercises with words, and densely cut-up texts. What we observe is a complex, deeply serious mind, an occultural alchemist, camouflaged by passionate humor.
In Gysin’s works and writings we are blessed with a perfect example of the storyteller teacher. A practiced post-technological shamanic guide to the mind, providing exercises, navigational tools and data to assist us in the essential process for magickal survival and for the exploration of this strange place in which we seem to unfold our physical existence(s). A domain we call earth, society and life but rarely call into fundamental question. Rationality and materiality have generated a depth of inertia so profound that it could destroy our potential as a species to survive or evolve. All the more reason to re-appraise and study as magickal masters the instructive works of Burroughs and Gysin as we enter the 21st Century. As science confirms their revelation of this space time neurosphere to be an holographic universe, I have no doubt that Burroughs and Gysin, re-defined as occultural alchemists and practicing magickians, are destined for an accelerating appreciation for the seminal influence of their cultural engineering experiments.
There is an exquisite mastery of perception that these discoveries unfold. Both Gysin and Burroughs use a serial seduction of detail. Meaning is shattered and scattered to become a more accurate and truthful representation of this arbitrary plane we needlessly confine by using the word-prison “reality.” Consecutive events are subverted as we read, revealing the fragility and distortions that our conditioned senses filter out for simplicity of behavior and illusory reason. Nothing tends to remain as it seems, but becomes as it’s seen. Contradictory experience is portrayed as equally perceived, parallel images and thoughts. Mundanity is turned strange and disturbing.
Burroughs and Gysin, as master magickians, grasp the elasticity of reality and our right to control its unfolding as we see fit and prefer. They consolidate our right to active participation in the means of perception, and their proposal of the nature of consensus being is still quite revolutionary. As we navigate the warp and weft of biological existence and infinite states of consciousness, the holographic universe that looks kindly upon us, at the magick squares of their methods and the delirious madness they supply us with, we are offered a unique perspective and afforded respite, balance and the possibility of retrieving new and valuable information for a future.
We are not talking about a matter of faith here; faith is something that has a low quotient in these experiments. Rather we are looking at prophetic predictions based upon a magickal vision of the universe and the resulting, practical applications of magickal/alchemical theories and exercises. In fact we are looking at an early, workable model of the future, in which a positive, compassionate unfolding of our latent qualities as a species is defined and described in the vainglorious hope that we “abandon all rational thought” and immerse ourselves in an ecstatic series of creative possibilities.
In a way, it is a bit like learning a martial art. We develop our media reflexes and accelerate our improvisational responses in order to maximize our individual potentialities and the interests of our chosen people or our private dream agenda. In his various essential commentaries on media divulgence, Douglas Rushkoff astutely directs us to a re-examination of the original source of an inherited narrative of culture and life. Surprisingly, his conclusions are very similar to my assertions in relation to Burroughs and Gysin. That the very astory that began this examination, the social narrative imposed upon us as a child, that so easily programs us to maintain every possible status quo without criticism; and that compounds the notion of linearity and a serial phenomenological universe seems more clearly to be an illusion and a deliberately inert construction. A picture of “reality” that is designed by those with a vested interest in stasis to maintain our surrender to cultural impotence and all forms of addictive consumption.
The past controls through people and their surrender to a closed system, where the laws of physics remain constant, and predictability is a desirable state in an ever more rigid global world order. Yet, in fact, as we are entering a digital future, an holographic universe, where, at least theoretically, every sentient being on earth will be interconnected, international and interfaced entirely new navigational tools are required. The possibilities alone are endless. It is my contention that as the authorship of our own private narrative becomes increasingly autonomous, malleable and optional, that a new future, a future that is inclusive, rooted in the idea of an open source that we can affect by logical and magickal means, becomes critical to our species’ survival, comprehension, and evolutionary change. A future where Burroughs and Gysin, and their modern occultural brethren, have supplied prophetic, functional skills and nonlocal points of observation which can intrinsically train us to be fittingly alert and prepared for the unpredictable aesthetic and social spasms to come.
Final Note: The Discipline of Do Easy
I strongly advise any reader who has been inspired to re-consider their picture of both the “future” beats and their world picture to go online and look for the text of a short, one-page essay by William S. Burroughs titled “The Discipline of Do Easy” or “The Discipline of DE.” In my own private, magickal life a rigourous and continual application of this idea has been as central to my uncanny achievement of countless goals as the Austin Osman Spare system of sigilization.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I would like to suggest that anyone whose interest has been stimulated at all by this more unorthodox point of observation and interpretation of two classic Beat figures seek out, and actually read, the books listed below, and/or re-read them with a different perspective in mind. Needless to say, there is no end in sight, even within the realms of time or mortality as to how we recreate our subjective means of perception. I really believe that listed below is a functional, inspirational and thorough library of ideas and techniques for seeing this mystery of biological and neuro-illogical L-if-E in its intended and intrinsic holographic form. As you might suspect from my text, seeking out and finding, with dogged determination and a deeply hungry appetite for soul and wisdom, for purposes of self-determination in a world built of feedback loops of surrender and submission to consuming, to addiction to the products of an ever more banal culture that can never-supply satiation, aesthetic nutrition, sensual self-creation, or freedom of identity.
° Minutes to go
by William S. Burroughs;
Gregory Corso;
Sinclair Beiles
and Brion Gysin, 1968.
° The Process
by Brion Gysin, 1969.
° Future Ritual
by Philip H. Farber, 1995.
° Brion Gysin: Let the Mice In
by Brion Gysin,
William S. Burroughs
and Ian Sommerville, 1973.
° The Exterminator
by William S. Burroughs
and Brion Gysin, 1967.
° Here To Go/Brion Gysin
by Terry Wilson
and Brion Gysin, 1982.
° The Beat Hotel
by Barry Miles, 2000.
° Thee Psychick Bible
by Genesis P-Orridge, 1994.
Later heavily expanded and republished
as Thee Psychick Bible by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (et al) 2009.
° The Job
by Daniel Odier (interviews with William S. Burroughs) ° Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge
by Julie A. Wilson;
Douglas Rushkoff;
Richard Metzger;
Paul Cecil;
Bengala;
Carol Tessitore
and Carl Abrahamsson, 2003.
° Chapel of Extreme Experience
by John Geiger, 2002.
° RADIUM, 226.05,
Magazine edited by Ulrich Hillebrand
and CM von Hausswolff, 1986.
° Back in No Time
° The Brion Gysin Reader,
edited by Jason Weiss 2001.
° Cyberia
by Douglas Rushkoff, 1993.
° Media Virus
by Douglas Rushkoff, 1994.
° The Holographic Universe
by Michael Talbot, 1991.
° The Third Mind
by William S. Burroughs
and Brion Gysin, 1978.
° The Best of Olympia,
edited by Maurice Girodias, 1961.
° The Last Museum
by Brion Gysin, 1986.
° Wreckers of Civilzation
by Simon Ford, 1999.
° RE/SEARCH #1—W.S. Burroughs/Brion Gysin/Throbbing Gristle,
edited by Vale, 1982.
° Flickers–Of the Dreamachine,
edited by Paul Cecil 1996.
° The Soul’s Code—In Search Of Character And Calling
by James Hillman, 1997.
° Disinformation: The Interviews,
edited by Richard Metzger, 2002.
° Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons,
by John Carter 1999.
° Breakthrough: Voices of the dead
by Konstantin Raudive.
° The Final Academy: Statements of A Kind
edited by G. P-Orridge and Roger Ely;
with texts by Antony Balch;
Felicity Mason;
William S. Burroughs;
Brion Gysin;
John Giorno;
Dave Darby;
Jeff Nuttall;
Ian Sommerville;
Victor Bockris;
Jon Savage;
Eric Mottram;
Barry Miles;
23 Skidoo;
Cabaret Voltaire;
Psychic TV;
Ian Hinchcliffe;
Last Few Days;
Paul Burwell;
Anne Bean, 1982.
° This is the Salivation Army,
a compilation by Scott Treleaven;
with a foreword by Genesis P-Orridge, 2003.
° Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader
edited by Scott Michaelsen;
with forewords by Genesis P-Orridge;
and Robert Anton Wilson, 1989.
° Naked Lens: Beat Cinema
by Jack Sargeant, 1997.
° Apocalypse Culture #1 and #2,
edited by Adam Parfrey, 1987, 1990 and 2000.
° Rapid Eye #2,
edited by Simon Dwyer, 1992.
° Rebels and Devils: The Psychology Of Liberation,
edited by Christopher S. Hyatt;
with contributions by William S. Burroughs;
Timothy Leary;
Robert Anton Wilson;
Austin Osman Spare;
Lon Milo Duquette;
Genesis P-Orridge;
Aleister Crowley;
Israel Regardie;
Peter J. Carroll;
Osho Rajneesh;
Jack Parsons and others, 1996. ° Global Brain: The Evolution Of Mass Mind From The Big Bang To The 21st Century,
by Howard Bloom, 2000.
Hotel would like to thank Trapart Books & Carl Abrahamsson for his editorial assistance and support.
This essay reproduces a run of pages from Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master: Texts & Interviews,
(ed.) G. B. P-ORRIDGE (Trapart Books, 2017)
I would like to suggest that anyone whose interest has been stimulated at all by this more unorthodox point of observation and interpretation of two classic Beat figures seek out, and actually read, the books listed below, and/or re-read them with a different perspective in mind. Needless to say, there is no end in sight, even within the realms of time or mortality as to how we recreate our subjective means of perception. I really believe that listed below is a functional, inspirational and thorough library of ideas and techniques for seeing this mystery of biological and neuro-illogical L-if-E in its intended and intrinsic holographic form. As you might suspect from my text, seeking out and finding, with dogged determination and a deeply hungry appetite for soul and wisdom, for purposes of self-determination in a world built of feedback loops of surrender and submission to consuming, to addiction to the products of an ever more banal culture that can never-supply satiation, aesthetic nutrition, sensual self-creation, or freedom of identity.
° Minutes to go
by William S. Burroughs;
Gregory Corso;
Sinclair Beiles
and Brion Gysin, 1968.
° The Process
by Brion Gysin, 1969.
° Future Ritual
by Philip H. Farber, 1995.
° Brion Gysin: Let the Mice In
by Brion Gysin,
William S. Burroughs
and Ian Sommerville, 1973.
° The Exterminator
by William S. Burroughs
and Brion Gysin, 1967.
° Here To Go/Brion Gysin
by Terry Wilson
and Brion Gysin, 1982.
° The Beat Hotel
by Barry Miles, 2000.
° Thee Psychick Bible
by Genesis P-Orridge, 1994.
Later heavily expanded and republished
as Thee Psychick Bible by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (et al) 2009.
° The Job
by Daniel Odier (interviews with William S. Burroughs) ° Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge
by Julie A. Wilson;
Douglas Rushkoff;
Richard Metzger;
Paul Cecil;
Bengala;
Carol Tessitore
and Carl Abrahamsson, 2003.
° Chapel of Extreme Experience
by John Geiger, 2002.
° RADIUM, 226.05,
Magazine edited by Ulrich Hillebrand
and CM von Hausswolff, 1986.
° Back in No Time
° The Brion Gysin Reader,
edited by Jason Weiss 2001.
° Cyberia
by Douglas Rushkoff, 1993.
° Media Virus
by Douglas Rushkoff, 1994.
° The Holographic Universe
by Michael Talbot, 1991.
° The Third Mind
by William S. Burroughs
and Brion Gysin, 1978.
° The Best of Olympia,
edited by Maurice Girodias, 1961.
° The Last Museum
by Brion Gysin, 1986.
° Wreckers of Civilzation
by Simon Ford, 1999.
° RE/SEARCH #1—W.S. Burroughs/Brion Gysin/Throbbing Gristle,
edited by Vale, 1982.
° Flickers–Of the Dreamachine,
edited by Paul Cecil 1996.
° The Soul’s Code—In Search Of Character And Calling
by James Hillman, 1997.
° Disinformation: The Interviews,
edited by Richard Metzger, 2002.
° Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons,
by John Carter 1999.
° Breakthrough: Voices of the dead
by Konstantin Raudive.
° The Final Academy: Statements of A Kind
edited by G. P-Orridge and Roger Ely;
with texts by Antony Balch;
Felicity Mason;
William S. Burroughs;
Brion Gysin;
John Giorno;
Dave Darby;
Jeff Nuttall;
Ian Sommerville;
Victor Bockris;
Jon Savage;
Eric Mottram;
Barry Miles;
23 Skidoo;
Cabaret Voltaire;
Psychic TV;
Ian Hinchcliffe;
Last Few Days;
Paul Burwell;
Anne Bean, 1982.
° This is the Salivation Army,
a compilation by Scott Treleaven;
with a foreword by Genesis P-Orridge, 2003.
° Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader
edited by Scott Michaelsen;
with forewords by Genesis P-Orridge;
and Robert Anton Wilson, 1989.
° Naked Lens: Beat Cinema
by Jack Sargeant, 1997.
° Apocalypse Culture #1 and #2,
edited by Adam Parfrey, 1987, 1990 and 2000.
° Rapid Eye #2,
edited by Simon Dwyer, 1992.
° Rebels and Devils: The Psychology Of Liberation,
edited by Christopher S. Hyatt;
with contributions by William S. Burroughs;
Timothy Leary;
Robert Anton Wilson;
Austin Osman Spare;
Lon Milo Duquette;
Genesis P-Orridge;
Aleister Crowley;
Israel Regardie;
Peter J. Carroll;
Osho Rajneesh;
Jack Parsons and others, 1996. ° Global Brain: The Evolution Of Mass Mind From The Big Bang To The 21st Century,
by Howard Bloom, 2000.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, and occultist. After rising to notability as the founder of the COUM Transmissions artistic collective and then fronting the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge was a founding member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth occult group, and fronted the experimental band Psychic TV. P-Orridge identifies as third gender.
Born in Manchester, P-Orridge developed an early interest in art, occultism, and the avant-garde while at Solihull School. After dropping out of studies at the University of Hull, they moved into a counter-cultural commune in London and adopted Genesis P-Orridge as a nom-de-guerre. On returning to Hull, P-Orridge founded COUM Transmissions with Cosey Fanni Tutti, and in 1973 they relocated to London. COUM’s confrontational performance work, dealing with such subjects as sex work, pornography, serial killers, and occultism, represented a concerted attempt to challenge societal norms and attracted the attention of the national press. COUM's 1976 Prostitution show at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts was particularly vilified by tabloids, gaining them the moniker of the “wreckers of civilization.” P-Orridge's band, Throbbing Gristle, grew out of COUM, and were active from 1975 to 1981 as pioneers in the industrial music genre. In 1981, P-Orridge co-founded Psychic TV, an experimental band that from 1988 onward came under the increasing influence of acid house. Although involved in reunions of both Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV in the 2000s, P-Orridge retired from music to focus on other artistic mediums in 2009. P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases.
A controversial figure with an anti-establishment stance, P-Orridge has been heavily criticised by the British press and politicians. P-Orridge has been cited as an icon within the avant-garde art scene, accrued a cult following, and been given the moniker of the “Godperson of Industrial Music.”
Born in Manchester, P-Orridge developed an early interest in art, occultism, and the avant-garde while at Solihull School. After dropping out of studies at the University of Hull, they moved into a counter-cultural commune in London and adopted Genesis P-Orridge as a nom-de-guerre. On returning to Hull, P-Orridge founded COUM Transmissions with Cosey Fanni Tutti, and in 1973 they relocated to London. COUM’s confrontational performance work, dealing with such subjects as sex work, pornography, serial killers, and occultism, represented a concerted attempt to challenge societal norms and attracted the attention of the national press. COUM's 1976 Prostitution show at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts was particularly vilified by tabloids, gaining them the moniker of the “wreckers of civilization.” P-Orridge's band, Throbbing Gristle, grew out of COUM, and were active from 1975 to 1981 as pioneers in the industrial music genre. In 1981, P-Orridge co-founded Psychic TV, an experimental band that from 1988 onward came under the increasing influence of acid house. Although involved in reunions of both Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV in the 2000s, P-Orridge retired from music to focus on other artistic mediums in 2009. P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases.
A controversial figure with an anti-establishment stance, P-Orridge has been heavily criticised by the British press and politicians. P-Orridge has been cited as an icon within the avant-garde art scene, accrued a cult following, and been given the moniker of the “Godperson of Industrial Music.”
Hotel would like to thank Trapart Books & Carl Abrahamsson for his editorial assistance and support.
This essay reproduces a run of pages from Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master: Texts & Interviews,
(ed.) G. B. P-ORRIDGE (Trapart Books, 2017)