Gysin the THERE

Pretnar continuedfrom previous page at a good-natured gallop. Such charming arrogance is the essence of theatre and of those who inhabit its strange realm. Though he is referring to the theatre world per se, Marowitz might as well be referring to the reading experience itself when he cautions, at the opening of his book: ''If you cannot come to terms with emotional contradictions of that sort, it is probably no place for you." As paradoxical and constraining as his text may be at times, Marowitz makes it worth our while to find a way inside. Lauren Pretnar has written, produced, directed, and acted in plays in collaboration with the School ofthe Art Institute ofChicago, Chicago's PAC/edge Festival, Curious Theatre Branch, DePaul Theatre School, and Hermit Arts. Gysin the THERE Davis Schneiderman Nothing is True Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin John Geiger The Disinformation Company http://www.disinfo.com 336 pp; cloth, $27.95 Throughout John Geiger's new biography, Brion Gysin, the man from nowhere, turns out to be less a figure saddled with the quotidian vagaries of the human condition—fear, sickness, ambition—and more a cipher for the manifold aesthetic personalities that passed through that last, long, atomic century. Geiger gives us, among others, Gysin the surrealist ("unhung by Paul Eluard on the orders ofAndre Breton"); Gysin the cut-up; Gysin the Beat; Gysin the frustrated author; Gysin the sound poet; Gysin the Dean Moriarty-like road buddy for Paul Bowles; Gysin the restaurateur, music promoter, mystic, and "purveyor of Moroccan Exotica"; Gysin the entrepreneur behind the flicker-inducing Dream Machine; Gysin the junior letter-writer for larger literary personalities (Carl Van Vechten, Alice B. Toklas, et al.); Gysin the senior mentor for younger artistic personalities (Keith Haring, Genesis P-Orridge, et al.); Gysin the raconteur; Gysin the misogynist; Gysin the sick (with colostomy bag and emphysema, petulant in his apartment across from the Centre Pompidou); Gysin thejazz musician; Gysin the. . .why stop there? Why stop anywhere? Gysin the sun; Gysin the moon; Gysin the stars. It is the difficult task ofGeiger's biography, the first (and long overdue) full-length study to focus on a figure whose considerable legacy, like that of his longtime collaboratorWilliam S. Burroughs, depends in large part on the difficult elision of the "man" into the "work." Compared to the boldness of Gysin's art, the merely theoretical critiques of "authorship" current from the late 1960s onward are invisible dinner plates emptied by blindfolded mimes. In Gysin's most extreme work, food may indeed be devoured, but as with the permutations of a phrase such as "I American HevïeW AM THAT I AM" from 1959, your mouth may no longer be the point. To take Gysin's aesthetic ego diffusions seriously , we must believe, as one critic notes, that Gysin loses "self-identity in the face ofthe fecundity ofthe permutation system." Geiger admirably details Gysin 's permutations: the pistol poem on BBC radio; the cut-up texts with Burroughs; the excellent novel The Process (1967); and, of course, the most important breakthrough—the mix of'Arab and Japanese calligraphies to produce fantastic grid arrangements. In the furious mechanism ofthese cabbalistic grids, the viewer is provoked to a sort of visual masturbation, in which, indeed, absolutely everything is permitted. Gregory Corso, for instance, sees: Ah, and there's a bow-tied cat melting its paw into a man's eye and a fierce angel blasting a clarion in the bellybutton of a Yonkers Raceway official and also a shark balancing a whale's head on its snout. I could, if I kept looking, see more and it's not because I have good imagination: it is because I have eyes, eyes to see what is THERE. Gysin insists on wedging a subject, some subject, THE subject —no matter how infinitesimally— into the endless crevices ofthe aesthetic image. Corso's remark is telling. As in the surrealist work with which the young Gysin wanted to align himself, avant-garde production often has a nasty habit of reifying the obnoxious fecundity of location . How to leave the planet and go, as Gysin often advised, when each new attempt, each...