Iain Sinclair: Bad Magic

Iain Sinclair

The birth of Queen Elizabeth II’s second and, by court rumour, favourite son was attended by a bad fairy. A spell, with emphatic italics for second, was derived from a shuffled conjuring of newspaper reports. The conjurer, a person of many masks and disguises, was hiding out in a Left Bank ghost hotel and wielding his Stanley knife like one of those crazy surgeons in a routine by William Burroughs. The paper Caesarean section was performed blind by the self-taught painter-poet Brion Gysin. While cutting mounts for a drawing, he sliced through several layers of newsprint beneath the card. Promoting the implications of his accident to the other inmates at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, he described the way he ‘picked up the raw words and began to piece [them] together’. Here was one of the most spectacular examples of collateral damage from an era when such metaphors ran wild. Arbitrary phrases bleeding across mutilated newspaper columns were welcomed as a valid communication from a ‘third mind’, other-sourced dictation. The slip of the blade triggered psychic consummation between the marmoreal and silent Burroughs and Gysin, a compulsive tale-teller and exquisite gossip who would sit for hours staring into a mirror behind which an infinity of other mirrors stared back. In a late and never definitively completed fiction called The Last Museum, Gysin sketched Burroughs, his study partner: ‘His pale and impassive old junky face looks like two ivory profiles.’ That’s how it worked. Both men were dedicated to sloughing off limitations of race, caste and gender, singular identities. As privileged victims mainlining paranoia, they were readily seduced by systems of control. As strangers in strange lands, they were adept at fixing the odds in order to beat the bank. ‘Just imagine, you and I are on opposite sides of some shiny surface like a two-way mirror but thinner than paper; dividing two mirror-identical worlds, yours and mine,’ Gysin wrote in The Process, his novel of 1969. This was sixty years before confused footballers and disgraced politicians started yapping about ‘trusting the process’.

‘Dreamachine’ (1979)

A spectral remittance man in a Paris waiting room, hoping to escape our dying planet, but too soon for Elon Musk, Burroughs recognised Gysin’s breakthrough. The Stanley knife was a viable agent for subverting conditioned reflexes, evading the language police and establishing a brand: The Cut-Up Boys of the Interzone. Cue anecdotes for countercultural interviews. Subterranean films (already cut up) on a loop. Repetitive drone-chants with single phrases somewhere between mind-control gimmicks and acoustic torture. Guest star status at literary festivals with cover-quote acclaim from Norman Mailer. Heavily publicised trials confirming the integrity of an outrageous product, Howl or Naked Lunch, soon followed. Splicing, sorting and retyping binges carried out by willing accomplices – Sinclair Beiles, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso – brought order to the mass of nightmare scripts left in cupboards and drawers. Suitcases were abandoned when Burroughs flitted. Famous for his greyscale anonymity, Burroughs was the invisible man time-trapped in a thousand squid-soft photographs. He worked with his scrapbooks, recorder and camera, in flophouses and celebrity-enhanced bunkers. He leased apartments, convenient for all-night chemists and rent boys, in the best part of town. He was proud of the fact that Beckett called him a writer.

There is nothing random about the cut-up. The released text always bears the signature of the surgeon. A cut-up by Gysin can never be mistaken for a cut-up by Burroughs. Gysin’s Stanley knife inspired the first experiments, but it was Burroughs who took a particular copy of the New York Herald Tribune for The Exterminator. Gysin, with calligraphic designs and performance poems, contributed to the publication from the Auerhahn Press.

The European edition of the New York Herald Tribune for 20-21 February 1960 leads with the royal event: QUEEN GIVES BIRTH TO SECOND SON; CROWDS CHEER IN THE STREETS. Second column: FIFTH BOMB IS FOUND IN MADRID. And to complete the triptych: CHESSMAN REPRIEVE FOR 60 DAYS BY BROWN AFTER PLEAs BY URUGUAY. CONVICT HAD GIVEN UP HOPE AFTER 12 YEARS. The Burroughs re-edit is dictated by his choice of material. But the strategic cut-up has already been carried out by sub-editors, typesetters. Gysin, as practising magician, trance dancer, multifaith occultist, understood the true state of things. By excising slack prose and weaving royalty, terror outrages and a death-row rapist into an ecstatic rush, Burroughs would determine the future by recalibrating the wrecked present from the yatter of the most formulaic journalism. The cut-up text writes itself. ‘Capital Punishment laned The Royal Birth … Hard Queen … Some dealing … 000000 persons outside the gate signed by The Royal Baby … The Depravity Palace soon after with Prince … All red light bandits moves such eons of magic.’

What is alarming, and what carries the Gysin virus into our post-truth era, is how smoothly it cohabits with AI interference. Forgetting where and when the Burroughs text appeared, and thinking it might have come from Gysin in Minutes to Go, I googled: ‘Gysin. Cut-up. Royal birth’. And drew a blank or an algorithmic bluff padded with some frame-grab obstetric stuff. Then, out of nowhere, a machine-composed Prince Andrew poem, not yet having to assert the subject’s innocence, was improvised and credited to Gysin, bardo master of counterfeit scholarship. The poem managed to pastiche my stumbling attempts at employing the right question. If this fake is now filed in a Cloud hangar, I can see it being anthologised, much to the posthumous amusement of Gysin, whose ultimate project was always going to be Le Dernier Musée, the grand retrospective summer show at the Musée d’Art Moderne in the 16th arrondissement, which has just closed. He would appreciate the location. The imposing culture palace, with many outside lunchers and few gallery visitors, was a short step from the Pont de l’Alma underpass, highlighted in my Paris guide, with accompanying miniature, as ‘Shrine of Princess Diana’.

It all started, this time round, on 19 January 1916. Gysin was convinced that his physical birth was a misfortune: wrong place, wrong time, wrong host. He could be perverse about women, but he was never a crude misogynist; he was, he said, a card-carrying misanthrope. The karmic accident would have to be rectified after trialling a menu of provisional nationalities – Canadian, English, American, with disaffiliated sidebar residences in France, Tangier, New York, London, Basel. Following the money, the slavery-thesis foundations and the Lichtenstein archives was as good a road map as any. He used subject-directed photographs as a passport to carry him across borders and constantly revised roles. From traditional boho-studio hair to cropped Sufi initiate to robed convalescent at the window: a carousel of portraits and autoportraits. Faces were projected over his face. Jockstraps of exotic vegetation, calligraphic scratchings to dress his proudly clothed and unclothed form. ‘The image vine,’ Burroughs called it. One Polaroid, one postcard summoning the next. Lay them out in any order. There are more frozen mirrors in Gysin’s last museum than there are paintings.

The Process remains the essential Gysin manifesto. Playful, cannily deranged and dangerous, it is the best preparation for navigating a smooth passage through the labyrinth of Le Dernier Musée. The exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, curated by Olivier Weil and Hélène Leroy, might have used Gysin’s multi-voiced fiction as gallery plan. The Process parallels the show, worlds within worlds, as a form of posthumous confession in which barely disguised figures, lovers, associates and enemies are allowed to present their untrustworthy segment of an other-composed autobiography. ‘If I was really going to succeed in what I had always thought of doing – changing my skin but from the inside out, as it were,’ Gysin wrote, ‘I was, at last, going to become myself by becoming somebody else.’

Jim Pennington, the Burroughs scholar who called on Gysin at his Paris apartment in 1975, said that his host presented himself that day as ‘a sophisticated and enlightened and knowledgeable Parisian artist helping us on our way to a slice of the magic world in Morocco’. Listening to the rise and fall of that confident voice, it was easy to be seduced. ‘Charisma’ was Gysin’s middle name, Pennington noted – or was it ‘bullshit’? The Burroughs biographer Barry Miles, when I asked about his experience of Gysin, confirmed the impression of a brilliant conversational cape-waver. ‘He was a terrific raconteur. He would tell salacious stories about the goings on of people one had never heard of, then it would turn out they were from the court of Louis XIV … He only talked to people about things he thought they would be interested in.’ There would be no mention of his early experiment as a union organiser on the Brooklyn Waterfront for Burroughs. No magic and mystery for Miles.

‘Living in Morocco for 23 years gave him a gravity, a commanding presence, so that he dominated a room and his way of walking was confident and purposeful, as if he were walking in the desert,’ Miles said. Which is the recommended technique for shaping a pedestrian tour of the programmed space of the Gysin exhibition. Curtains of painterly evidence. Glass cases ripe with drawings and publications. Hallucinatory screens for fables that never quite happened as recounted. The tactfully showcased life and career of Brion Gysin is celebrated as if it were still in progress and open to revision.

It was the humour of his eccentric and ecumenical gods to earth Gysin in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, in a Canadian military hospital that is now the site of a retirement village. His father, an officer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was killed eight months after Gysin’s arrival. The future artist finessed his birth certificate: John Clifford Brian of the Thames Valley became Brion of everywhere. The Interzone of Tangier was the ideal clinic for skin-shedding transformation. Gysin emerged as an Orwellian on psilocybin; he sampled and promoted every available system of control. The Process is saturated in aspects of Scientology. And this latest Paris exhibition is unconsciously built around a curation of salvaged Gysin ‘engrams’; those mental images, actual or fabricated, that block spiritual progress. Gysin had his fun with the doctrine according to L. Ron Hubbard, an obese confidence man in an admiral’s uniform. Hubbard wrote junk science-fiction by living it first. As potential ‘clears’, we are invited to dreamtrip through the tomb-cool chambers of a gallery recovering a prescribed version of the artist by way of fabulous image clusters and menacing grids.

Bad magic attracts bad money. Gysin had a preternatural instinct for the fluctuations of the art market, high-capitalist juju with its social and sexual entanglements as an extension of the souk. He burnished his role as a silver shadow and mentor to Burroughs. The pair were photographed together so often they could double as the suited and menacing Gilbert and George of the counterculture. There is a triptych of photographic portraits by François Lagarde in which Gysin merges into the black-hatted Burroughs; a composite with no dominant sitter. ‘La combinaison de leurs deux personnalités engendre une troisième entité,’ the catalogue tells us. For most of his career, Gysin favoured status exhibitions over percentage-harvesting agents and galleries.

The exhibition space at Le Dernier Musée was curving and chilled. The world outside was an inferno. The walls, never crowded, never shouting at you, were occupied by multitudes, and all of them Gysin. Two or three interested parties shared my journey. A woman pressed hard against the calligraphic panels, trying to unpick the thread of gesture, layers borrowed from Japanese verticals and horizontal Arabic script. A silver-haired man with a meaningful beard and a black T-shirt emblazoned THANK YOU FOR GETTING NAKED sat on a square block, tending his blue phone and not looking at the revolving Dreamachine. The atmosphere was benign. It was easy to let time drift.

Footsteps in the sand, like the overlapping narratives of The Process, led the Gysin pilgrim through the stages of illumination, from pencil and crayon sketches of handless figures in delicately vegetative surrealist nowheres to splashes and blots of brilliant eidetic coral to untitled Moroccan and Saharan documentation. Serial compositions hovered between painting and language. Windows and window-watchers were registered in the art and in the supporting photographs of Gysin’s friends and his pantomime costumes. Framed grids with their coded scribbles evolved into scaffolding cages, into unfinished buildings. The construction of the Pompidou Centre was witnessed and photographed by Gysin through his window at 135 rue Saint-Martin, trapped in one place after colon cancer, invasive operations and contemplated suicide. A late series depicts friends staring out of anonymous tower blocks. He anticipated falling figures. There is a self-portrait, jumping man from 1977, rehearsing an abrupt departure that would never take this showboating form. Structures fail through corrupt politics, horror threatens. The mind grid collapses.

One period, one set of enthusiasms, stretched seamlessly into the next. If the drawings were invitations to pause, to slow the breath, to stand still and wait, the exhibition offered two major punctuation points. The glass case with the angled Stanley knife summoned the cut-up experiments. The revolving Dreamachine with its attendant stool was an invitation to engage. Audience participation for an audience of one. The original psychedelic accessory was assembled by Gysin and Ian Sommerville, a Cambridge mathematician and Burroughs acolyte. Gysin’s inspiration came from a coach trip to Marseille, the pulsing brain rhythms of sunset behind lines of poplars. Reconstructed for this exhibition, the cardboard tube on the turntable of a record player, with its light source and cut-out windows, felt curiously diminished. It’s like a vintage Terence Conran multiple for design-conscious 1960s home-makers, newly available from the alternative Habitat catalogue.

‘Cylinder for Dreamachine’ (1979).

The extension of my leisurely drift through Le Dernier Musée, into the lesser world of present-time Paris, worked as intended. The magician’s last projects trended towards bardo hotel pornography, clinics for dead and dying fantasies, theoretical museums in which nothing was owned and everything was suspended. The necessary step carried me along the banks of the Seine from the Eiffel Tower to the Beat Hotel in rue Gît-le-Coeur, close to place Saint-Michel. The afternoon heat was worthy of the torments experienced by Gysin when he chauffeured Paul Bowles on desert recces, rides spliced into The Process. Chasing shade meant moving from pavement to riverside walk and back. It meant detours around construction sites and bargaining for plastic water with African street traders in a sellers’ market. It meant drains, bicycles, tourists. The Beat Hotel where so much mischief was cooked up and where Gysin processed between mirror and window has been professionally heritaged into Relais Hôtel du Vieux, with plaque boasting of the residence of Gysin, Harold Norse, Corso, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Sommerville. And congratulating William Burroughs on achieving Le Festin nu within these mean walls. Privileged suites are available at up to 1200 euros or ‘2 lits simples et baignoire’ at 750 euros. Different days. The dim antiquarian bookshop on the other side of the road features a vintage copy of Blanche-Neige et les sept nains.

Looped on analogue film, shoulders hunched, hands gripping weaponry, Burroughs shuffles down the narrow passage to place Saint-Michel. Graffiti alongside the arch shows phallic-nosed anthropomorphic figures smoking spliffs and peddling product. The Cabaret des Merveilles offers ‘feminist’ cocktails and ‘the sharing of diverse passions’, dance, meditation and self-defence. Burroughs passed this way to collect his newspapers, his raw material. The ill-tempered woman who ran the kiosk fell victim to one of his curses.

My hurried trespass on Gysin’s turf did not go unpunished. After the standard Eurostar bottleneck at the Gare du Nord, static queues for three cancelled or delayed services, a packed and agitated waiting area, we got away. And scraped to a halt outside the Channel Tunnel. Electricity and air-conditioning off while the driver, so we were told, climbed on the roof to attempt a reconnection. Time yawned. I catnapped with a copy of The Process resting across my lap. I woke, lights back on, in the tunnel. This was a prized volume and I had removed the dust wrapper. It was a gift from Nick Austin, my first editor. The book was inscribed to him, ‘yours in Present Time’, by the author. I was close to the finish, the moment when Gysin’s narrator, an obvious avatar in a black skin, is escaping on a train with a forbidden truncheon of keef secreted in his pants, while trying to pull together all the strands of an epic tangle of memories and inventions.

Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville photographed at the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris.

‘We feel it even more hauntingly here,’ the chapter concludes. ‘Present Time is draining away from this point like the sand in an hourglass.’ And so it was. Something I had used to mark an earlier passage fell out. The sole photograph I’d retained from a collection bought from a nervous runner in my days on the bookstall in Islington’s Camden Passage. The speed-rapping man had acquired a battered suitcase he wanted to dispose of right away; fascinating and authentic material had been passed on like a nuclear secret junked by a temporarily embarrassed squat-sharer with the sweats. The photographs came from the days of the Beat Hotel. They featured or were taken by Burroughs. The one I lodged inside The Process was a complicated reading of three significant figures in a Beat Hotel room with an open window. Sommerville has lifted the camera. Burroughs, seated, has his back to him. He is reading. Gysin, centred, in white T-shirt, stares out at us. With the manipulation of mirrors and windows, the composition is unstable. Somerville and Burroughs repeat. Gysin is unblinking, the ringmaster. But the page I was marking, 61, is part of a Sheltering Sky-influenced desert expedition. ‘My torpor deeper than sleep.’ The truck moves into a sandstorm. The narrator, digressing on scent, discusses something that might have been an exhibit in Le Dernier Musée: ‘A bottle the size of your little finger with the picture of a naked black girl on the label … In very small letters beneath the girl’s feet, it says: Hackney E8, I think.’ I think so too. What else? Burroughs made phone calls to his disciples in Martello Street, alongside London Fields. But Gysin and Hackney? E8 was where I was going now. With a commission to respond and report.

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