Apprentice to an Apprentice The Perilous Passage of Terry Wilson

According to Brion Gysin, I was an Apprentice to an Apprentice and I have never claimed otherwise. In my work I have always done absolutely what I wanted to do at the time. I have been fortunate and privileged to encounter and become friends with some incredible people. - Terry Wilson, Introduction to Perilous Passage

The standardised explanation was published. I shall oppose it with heresy... Charles Fort, cited at the beginning of Perilous Passage

I first met Terry Wilson 30 years ago, at the time of The Final Academy in 1982. I was something of a star-struck schoolboy who couldnt quite believe his luck that here he was meeting William S Burroughs and of course Terry was part of the entourage, along with manager James Grauerholz, poet John Giorno, and of course the living legend that was Brion Gysin. There was also Derek Jarmans former boyfriend Howard Brookner, who was following the action everywhere with a camera, making his documentary Burroughs: The Movie - in much the same way that Victor Bockris had been the Court recorder at The Bunker, making With William Burroughs. And the others are arriving, phantoms in the heat... Bedaya, imposing, resplendent with his new wave black belt guitarist Attar scowling in his wake... The Little Corporal, who has laid on this show, a shaven-headed mascarad death dwarf in his army fatigues carrying his thermos flask filled with real English Typhoo Tea fresh from Tescos, Hackney, E8, giving the fish eye to Holz, his fellow entrepreneur, an enormous ageing blond boy-from-the-backwoods eyes glittering behind steel rims, disconcertingly alien and impossibly straight at the same time like at any moment he might whip out a sheaf of Jehovahs Witness pamphlets he strides quickly up to Whelme Good to see you. And I mean that most sincerely he intones, most sincerely And, travelling in his wake, The Old Man, long, thin, bent, like an ancient cantankerous, infinitely ominous arrival from another galaxy.1 Terry was there in his capacity as Brions informal secretary, friend, collaborator, and apprentice to an apprentice (as Gysin himself had said), and would also be one of the performers on the bill. He was tall and thin, in a crumpled dark blue suit, pale face fading away behind a fringe of hair, and seemed nervous, shy: on the one hand in awe of Burroughs & Gysin (older gay men, established Writer and Artist, whom he had known since 1971) and on the other wary of all the shaven-headed acolytes circling around event organisers Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV: ...the Final Entrepreneur. It was a great scam but it was rather too final for him. Dim as he is these days, his huge Crowleyesque peepers are still penetrating and liable to take a really good look around inside to see what there might be that he can make use of. Even dimmer, much younger flickering ephemeral figures hover around him with dead mongoloid mutant-like features and shaved heads, dispensable and fading in the last few days...2

I have already written elsewhere about the actual circumstances of meeting William for the first time, and there is also my review of The Final Academy itself (shortly to be reprinted). The only details I will add here concern Terrys photo in the program, Statements Of A Kind, wherein an even younger Terry peers out from beneath a heavy fringe and Williams hat, a very English-looking flat cap, and is also wearing Williams clearly rain-spattered coat, standing next to a bed on the floor (Brions bed?) It was taken in Brions apartment at rue St Martin, Paris (opposite the Pompidou), by fellow neophyte Udo Breger in December 1980. He looks strangely like a young boy trying to look more grown up than he really is - or even feels by dressing up in his uncles borrowed costume. The accompanying text reads: THIS IS the conclusion of D Train, a very condensed novel of 23 pages using to some extent material left over from Dreams of Green Base. It is concerned essentially with out-of-the-body experience, the necessity of leaving the D Train before it reaches its destination, and is addressed to Philippe Baumont.3 In David Darbys interview with Terry (published as KA by Inkblot in 1986, and then later included in the reissued Perilous Passage), he says of Dreams of Green Base that... It was a book for boys, written by a boy ...and there is a footnote that reads: The original subtitle of Dreams of Green Base (inadvertently omitted by the publisher) was The Ideal Book for Boys. TW. KA also includes the following exchanges: I was in a strange, disconnected, almost catatonic state... and I was more or less simply recording dream experience, a period of which I remember very little, thankfully. It sounds, and reads, almost schizoid. More than almost I think. Does it bug you now to be identified with the Burroughs circus? No... the circus, well you have to get the show on the road... and keep it there...4 Then in 1985-6 I was visiting London more and more, gearing up for the inevitable move still some lingering involvement with the circles around Genesis P-Orridge, Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, but mainly encouraged by my growing friendship with Geff Rushton & Peter Sleazy Christopherson of Coil. Through them I became friends with Derek Jarman also met the Poet Jeremy Reed Kathy Acker, who was living in London at the time the Filipino Performance Artist and Kinetic Sculptor David Medalla became friends with the former Music Journalist Sandy Robertson (who would write The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook) and eventually ran into Terry again. We became friendly, and he introduced me to a number of people that he knew, like Bob Cobbing, George Dowden, of course Felicity Mason, and Portuguese Artist Joo Penalva. It seemed obvious that when I did move to London we would see more of each other. Right from the start it is made clear that Terry feels that his friendship with William and Brion and, most particularly, his time spent with Brion in Paris, working on what would become Here To Go: Planet R101 was a kind of apprenticeship, even an initiation...

But initiation into what, exactly? Following Gysins death, Wilson felt isolated and cut off, and Perilous Passage was a way out of loss and despair, a magical writing making contact possible with other initiates, other minds. Third Mind techniques, including cutting-up, systematic disorientation, out of the body experiences, and the use of drugs in the transformation of the self, are all evoked...5 From the end of 1987 through to 1989 we were in pretty much weekly contact: a phone-call at the start of the week, then either a rendezvous in the West End or towards the end of the week another phone-call, co-ordinating trips to various Launches & Openings, or else just hang out usually with a visit to his local, a gay pub, The Champion in Notting Hill. Lancaster Gate Notting Hill Portobello just round the corner - could be Powis Square, the ghost of Turner passing in a phantom Rolls. The white faade of the building dazzles in the sunlight and then the front door opens at my touch as if I am expected, but Who Is There? An old Conjurors trick: I am in for a very different performance here, and there will be no calling Dr Burroughs for a shot Then I am IN, and everything turns negative: the floor trips me and pitches me forward like a ship on storm-tossed seas, into-down-along high-ceilinged narrow hallways (the walls are closing in) and upstairs, dont stop until you get to the top a black tunnel hung with luminous calligraphies that flicker with their own light. At the top the Sorcerers Apprentice appears, a shadow detached from the wall by the open door. His face swims towards me, wreathed with heavy-scented blue smoke, and the limp handshake reminds me of trying to bring like poles of two magnets together. Beyond the threshold I hear Moroccan music, as shadows dance like firelight, tinged red-orange-yellow. The flickering room, breathing, heaving... Uh, hi - glad you could make it. Enter freely and of your own will, and all that! I walk through the door into another world6 I soon discovered that Terry was very much a creature of habit, with a weekly routine of a trip in to the West End, when he would do the rounds of the bookshops (Books Etc. and Foyles were particular favourites.) Then down Old Compton Street to Patiserie Valerie, which had apparently been Brions favourite: a little slice of Paris in the West End of London. He very rarely ate actual meals, but would enjoy tea and the excellent cakes, and endless rounds of toast. He would point out to me the Soho newsagent where William & Brion had bought the Herald Tribune, the bars that they had used... Always trying to REMEMBER. ...I have had to attempt been compelled by his example to attempt to tell a truth that, like Brion, transcends so-called fact. A deceit in service of the truth in the words of the Amazonian shaman Don Juan Tuesta (as quoted by Cesar Calvo, The Three Halves of Ino Moxo). Fact is right where you are sitting now... I have worked principally from what are called dreams of an experience, rather than from the seeming occurrence, itself, as it were. Such is the Process. Im not presenting what really

happened, factually, because I dont know. In fact, I dont know if anything really happened at all. Do you? 7 Then back home on the tube via Notting Hill Gate, to try and write in the late afternoon in his highceilinged first floor apartment which was surprisingly bare, except for a reed mat in one corner, a sturdy bureau-cum-writing desk beneath the window, a number of Gysin calligraphies and watercolours lining the walls, and on the mantelpiece a dry leaf-husk by way of a whisk for flies (in the Moroccan style.) There was a surprisingly large kitchen - equally bare and hardly used, other than to occasionally make tea, or fetch an ashtray or corkscrew and glasses - a small windowless bathroom and a tiny monks cell of a bedroom: just a bed and a wardrobe, with very little in the way of clothes. Very little in the way of possessions at all, actually other than books by William and Brion, copies of his own (of course), and an incredible archive of letters, manuscripts, and photographs... A treasure-house of memories. Perilous Passage focuses for the most part on events as they developed just prior to and after Brion Gysins death. Ian MacFadyen has vividly described and commented on the general situation as presented herein in one of his insightful, rarely published essays... Phony magicians and phantom intelligence agents move in on rue St Martin, on the track of psychic power, while predatory hustlers and bloodsuckers emerge from under the floorboards, eager to grab a good-sized chunk of a dying artists estate... [The apprentices] initiation demands both risky out-of-the-body experiences and hazardous dealings with CREEPS, the con artists of a malign conspiracy... 8 Our friendship develops slowly, gently, over the sharing of those memories what little store I have to offer myself as Terry smokes joint after joint (Smoked transcendence is accessible to all!), always a most generous host even with what little he has and on some level it almost begins to feel like an education, of sorts the next link in the chain of The Third Mind, an experiment which failed, but which is still going on as Brion said. Anecdotes about The Old Man/William and Bedaya/Brion It all reads like sci-fi from here. Not very good sci-fi, but real enough at the time 9 and sometimes what could almost be Cautionary Tales masquerading as gossip: Antony Balch in a business suit by day, out cruising in Leather Man drag by night... and how the last time he visited poor Lost Boy Mikey Portman, he was whipping himself with a studded leather belt, shouting Victory to Aleister Crowley!, all beneath the poker-faced gaze of his decorators... I get the distinct impression that Terry is wary, to say the least, of those who actively identify as Occultists, the seeming ubiquity of post-Crowleyan Theory & Practice. At one point he cautions me about the company of predatory magical thinkers What, magick with a k? I ask Yeh... he sighs. This is perhaps inherited from Brion, who I think was pretty dismissive of Aleister Crowley as a queen bee, and the drones who are such eager followers (he was not impressed with Kenneth Angers box of tricks, when he met him in the 60s) Besides, he preferred an older, wilder magic, whose passing he still mourned: It was almost closing time for Magical Morocco. Electronic mind control was moving in and the Djnoun forces would soon be in full retreat gems to be snapped up before they disappear forever. Spells and curses. Dance and trance. The Other Method was up for grabs.10

He likes to talk about Charles Fort says that Burroughs was more aware of (and influenced by) him than he would admit. Reads Buchan, The Power House, draws some strange comfort from the famous lines "You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass." For my part, I try to be helpful, copying tapes of Brion that I have from the archives of PTV and Coil typing up articles bringing books that we talk about, that he is interested in: the recent works by Castaneda (clearly a major influence) books on Hassan-i Sabbh and his Assassins from the British Museum a copy of The Dispute Between A Man And His Ba that William has recommended also the wonderfully titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes all of which feed into our discussions, and our writings. Usually I bring along a bottle of wine. He particularly likes French reds... Why was someone like Bedaya surrounded by such awful people? I dont know anybody who isnt surrounded by awful people... Fear of being alone...11 He has almost finished the follow-up to D Train, a novel about his apprenticeship to Massa Bedaya that William has suggested he call Perilous Passage (after a WWII thriller about the French Resistance, that was made into a rather trashy film with Anthony Quinn, James Mason, and Malcolm MacDowell.) Terry also rather likes the idea of The Nervous System. He later has this to say about his three books, which he loosely conceives of as a trilogy: In these accounts I am not so much trying to detail a teaching method, a virtual impossibility in the case of the allusive and elusive Massa Bedaya (Brion resolutely refused to teach, without ever ceasing to do so), but rather to describe the effects of what he called the Process on those concerned, most particularly myself. 12 Later I interview Terry he wants to get his story down, and I will try and get it out. Down... and out. Hmm... Badly cut versions do later appear, in small fanzines mostly relating to the emerging Chaos Magic scene. The irony is not lost on us. My books are an account of my apprenticeship under the tutelage of a master practitioner: Brion Gysin. I was, as I have written, an eager wanting volunteer on the shining path. Brion, legendary avant garde maestro, peerless painter/writer-inventor/mentor was an accomplished shaman.13 At one point he is invited to contribute to a compilation tape that will accompany yet another small magazine, and asks if I will help him make a Spoken Word recording. He reads (You Hear Me Now?) from the manuscript of what will become Perilous Passage, and I add sound effects of telephone crackle and interference, shortwave and static. He seems very pleased with the results, but I dont know if it ever actually got used; certainly neither of us received a copy... I have to take control of this goddamn situation Bedaya has left behind. No one else can do the job... My allies for the most part are devious, unreliable, or plain bone stupid. Sometimes all three. Bedayas legacy.14 (You Hear Me Now?) is a study in paranoia, intrigue, confusion of purpose, place, persona as an unnamed narrator, presumably Toller Whelme from D Train (who is really Terry Wilson) gets an ominous phone call at 4 a.m. A hoarse, whispering voice one J (who is presumably really James Kennedy McCann) rings to say Ive seen Bedaya, Ive talked to him... (Bedaya, who is

really Brion Gysin - even though he has presumably been dead for a while at this point.) Spy thriller exchanges about attempts on his life are mixed no, Cut-Up with the question How do we escape from Time? the answer being ...Hassan I Sabbahs programme... The narrator comments: Well... I think its still in operation... You know we intend to continue by means of the Third Mind... Then J asks about the other J (presumably really James Grauerholz) You know he controls the Old Man...? (really William S Burroughs) and it is suggested that he works for the C.I.A. and we are back where we started, in a midnight mystery pulp espionage escapade... The plot couldnt get any thicker if it tried. Id like to emphasis this point about the Third Mind Bedaya wasnt fooling around, talking about this marvellous thing forever. It was necessary to produce some actual physical product. Immediately we made contact he got right onto the job. In other words, words were necessary, but he controlled and channelled them.15 Inspired by a certain recurring detail in D Train - and partly in response to the emerging Acid House scene - I record Terry reading the line The Body 24 Hours Is Frivolously Dancing and cutit-up over a House beat, complete with tape-loops of Jajouka and a TB303 bassline. The New Year starts warmly, a copy of D Train dedicated For Matthew with all best wishes for 89 and forever, but over the next couple of years things start to become strained. Former psychick youths that I have introduced to Terry and personally vouched for let us down let him down take advantage of him, he feels (and dont even get the quotes or spellings right, or give credit where credit is due!) His health deteriorates - people begin to avoid him, suspecting HIV or junk, although of course it is neither... Maybe tove opened ourselves up to all those dreadful spaces with all those drugs wasnt such a good idea... 16 I have begun a sort of Third Mind collaboration of my own with a young friend William sees early drafts, and generously comments that it is Accurate and honest... Young boys need it special. They may even listen. Unfortunately exactly the same words he had written to Terry with regard to D Train. There is perhaps for the first time a sense of competition. Walking by the side of a large body of water, the sun beating down on me, dazzling me. Not really sure where I am, things seem... through a heat-haze, the figure of a man coming towards me: tall and thin, just sort of drifting along as if his feet arent quite touching the ground. As he draws nearer I recognise the crumpled dark blue suit, pale face fading away behind a fringe of hair it is Toller. His usually nervous, haunted looking face bears a more relaxed expression and he smiles, reaching out to shake hands (as ever, I am reminded of trying to bring like poles of two magnets together) Hello! Well fancy meeting you here! Youre looking well... Where exactly is here? I study Tollers face for clues. He looks a little flushed, like hes been drinking, or maybe its just the heat. The heat... I start losing track of what Toller is saying, his words drifting off as my head swims... suddenly I feel faint, like its all too hot and hazy and I cant... faint voices in the distance,

watch me as I unwind in droplets and flashes of tomorrow - like going under anaesthetic, or... confused memories of hospitals, dying dreams and conversations I havent had yet. The last thing I hear him say is: Hows your young man coming along? (It is to be remembered that the Ka usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, and is the same sex as the subject) This morning a note arrives from Toller: hes just got back after being in Paris and then going down to Milan with Vogue, where they stayed at the Lake Como resort. He says he has something for me, something that we will need to continue... I decide to ring and tell him about my dream, and about what I have been seeing in the mirror. We have six thousand million years to travel but where will it take us? he says, not really expecting an answer. So the Old Man and I drew in the nets... He talks in his sleep (someone has taught him how.) Last night I dreamt that there was this voice trying to write a book in my head. All I had to do was write down what it said, like taking dictation, but it was going too fast... Unlike me he seems to have little trouble remembering his dreams (someone has taught him how.) 17 He is diagnosed with M.E., but not everybody even accepts yet that it is a real illness. The press joke about this new Yuppie Flu, which doesnt help. There are endless delays concerning Brions Will, his Estate French red-tape and in the meantime energy levels are at an all-time low, friends are scarce, money is tight... There was a conspiracy to wipe out Bedaya and myself... Of course they intend to do everything they can to stop me getting any of that money. But the whole thing is part of a bigger scene a big power battle, to neutralise and assimilate a lifetime of psychic power into three-dimensional financial manipulative areas.18 I have troubles of my own: relationships unravelling, projects that dont materialise for me too money is tight, and my health also begins to suffer... Terry leaves town to avoid the Notting Hill Carnival, begins to spend time with his parents in Southampton. His father cannot understand how as a writer with three books in print he has no money. Terry can hardly get out of bed, browses Buchan and Charles Fort, lets daytime TV wash over and through him... all the old movies. The grandfather who I grew up with has a stroke, I have to drop everything and try and help out. We lose touch... Terry later said of this time: ...I found myself in West End, in Southampton, and I just became extremely receptive, as if everything I read or heard or saw on T.V. was streaming right through me... 19 In 1992 I hear about The Here To Go Show in Dublin, and although I am with them in spirit, I am not in a position to go anywhere. For me, the Perilous Passage is over and, for Terry, despite the apparent promise of those years the Irish Connection new adventures across Europe, reunited with Phillippe, trips to North Africa and the whole crazy wisdom that would inspire The Nervous System - the underworld patron and sponsor he had inherited from Brion, James Kennedy McCann, is

finally arrested on Conspiracy & Drug-Trafficking charges in Dusseldorf while they are travelling together, leaving Terry quite literally high and dry... He assured me that everything would be okay... As long as you have the strength to survive this initiation... 20 His next book would not come out until 2004. So, eventually, the book with the 16 year gestation and 3 separate titles - Perilous Passage, The Nervous System and The Universe In Other Words - finally sees the light of day thanks to psychedelic environmentalists Synergetic Press of Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the first limited edition barely registers nowhere stocks it, you cant get it online, and there arent even any reviews. Is it too late for The Other Method? Has The Third Mind become occluded from the Time Space continuum? Having lost my old address books, I have no way of getting in touch with Terry again, and no longer know anybody that would know him, how he is, or how to get in touch with him... Wilson has described Cut Up as a form of exorcism. A narrative illusion is broken and the end result is intended as an act of magic... - David Darby And: Do you think of writing as an act of magic? Well, I think it is.21 One has to wonder what it is exactly that Terry was seeking so desperately to exorcise... At times he seemed to be a haunted man, but a man haunted by that which he himself has conjured up continually attempts to conjure up until he is like some strange hybrid of slightly displaced Son-andHeir & Post-Modern Mariner who cannot help but tell his tale except it isnt really his tale, or at least not his alone: like the Professional Widow, the tale which Toller tells is more about someone else than it is himself even in his absence, Massa Bedaya-Brahim-Brion Gysin is still the main subject of Terrys writing. And in one very real sense his most recent book is - like Virginia Woolfs Orlando - one long love letter, except that it is addressed to a ghost. After surviving his Perilous Passage, experiencing The Nervous System, and even discovering The Universe In Other Words, Terry Wilson as Toller Whelme concludes: I simply did not remember Brion in the usual sense. To do so to really remember him requires an enormous effort of recapitulation because what he taught is not accessible to ordinary consciousness. The only way to reach him is to follow him there. What on earth really happened to me? What techniques? Where is everybody? Who can say? Not me. 22 Tellingly, the Introduction Dreams of BG opens with the following, a clue perhaps: It is important to know that the world is held together by unresolved contradictions. Brion Gysin And finally, Coming To Now, In Present Time: There is a second edition, hopefully more readily available. There was a Launch at The October Gallery, there are Reviews online, and Ian MacFadyen (who writes an Introduction to this new edition, again from the good people at Synergetic Press) has worked pretty tirelessly to help get the circus back on the road including a lengthy, in-depth conversation with Terry, Cutting Up For Real, which is sure to become the definitive statement. It actually explains more about Gysin, his

Other Method, and Terrys adventures than any of his books manage to do, and should be read alongside them, perhaps as a kind of key. It opens with a reference to the end of my 1988 interview with Terry Soul-to-Soul, concerning Irish Coffee and the beginning of a new age but for some reason un-credited - so for me at least something has come full circle here. It seems fitting to close with the words of the Master himself, which is of course in a way where it all begins. In Brion Gysins novel The Process, during a pilgrimage across the Sahara in search of Initiation, his narrator comes to the following realisation: I alone of all these Assassins had ever been foolish enough to conceive of happiness... There is no friendship: there is no love. The desert knows only allies and accomplices. The heart, here, is all in the very moment. Everything is bump and flow; meet and good-by. Only the Brotherhood of Assassins ensures ritual continuity, if that is what you want and some do; for the lesson our zikr teaches is this: There are no Brothers.23

Notes:

1: from Who Are They? (Time after Time), p.78 of D Train, Grapheme, 1985 2: from Crossing the Border, p.40 of D Train, Grapheme, 1985 3: from p.51 of The Final Academy: Statements Of A Kind, 1982 4: David Darby - KA: An interview with Terry Wilson, Inkblot, 1986 5: Ian MacFadyen - note to the reissue of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 6: Matthew Levi Stevens Operation Rewrite, Synapse, 1989 7+8: from Introduction Dreams of BG, Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 9: William S Burroughs, The Western Lands, Viking Penguin Inc., 1987 10: from The Man From Nowhere, p.49 of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 11: from We Are Very Close, pp.46-7 of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 12+13: from Introduction Dreams of BG, Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 14: from Fire, p.39 of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 15: from I Am Here... (?), p.63 of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 16: Brion Gysin to William S Burroughs, towards the end, rue St Martin, Paris 17: Matthew Levi Stevens & David Lengui The Speed of Light, Synapse, 1988 18: from I Am Here... (?), p.60 of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 19: Ian MacFadyen - Terry Wilson: Cutting Up For Real, Reality Studio, 2012 20: from St Lazare, p.15 of Perilous Passage, Synergetic, 2012 21: Matthew Levi Stevens - Soul-to-Soul: talking to Terry Wilson, interview 1988 22: fromThe Nervous System, 10% File Under Burroughs, Sub Rosa, 1996 23: Brion Gysin The Process, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1969