Letter from Brion Gysin to Roger Knoebber, 7 May, 1979




Paris, France: Brion Gysin (letter), 1979.
letter: 11.75" x 8.25", single sheet, recto only.
envelope: 4.625" x 6.375".
RK19790507_LBG1_1

A letter from Brion Gysin at 135 rue St. Martin, Paris, France to Roger Knoebber in San Francisco, California.

This reads:

135 Rue St. Martin, Paris 4
7 May 79

Dear Roger

Since your letter in Feb I have been to India for a long weekend & quite enough to see what I went for Fatehpur Sikri the city Akbar built & abandoned 1560 to 1570. The Taj Mahal by an eclipse of the full moon in March and buy some shirts to cover the mess the surgeon made of my belly.

Also back & forth to Switzerland for shows and the building of 20 super Dreamchines for that June. Burroughs will be coming over for it. Wish you were here too but you’d find me a mess so perhaps not.

Do send me a photostat of the Poem of Poems. I don’t have a copy & you see that Bill seems to appropriate it to himself in The Third Mind, despite my corrections to the proofs, overridden by the publishers. Ah well.

I am tired of the cold lousy weather & dream of blue skies but I can’t really figure on quitting Paris expensive as it is. I get along on my own OK but it sure would be lovely to see you again

Lots of love
Brion


Notes:

"the mess the surgeon made of my belly": Between Late 1974 and April 1975 Brion Gysin underwent a traumatic colostomy to address cancer.

"Dreamachines for that June": At Galerie von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland, opened on June 7, 1979. Organized by Carl Laszlo.

"the Poem of Poems": The Poem of Poems was an early Cut-Up work by Brion Gysin composed of The Song of Solomon, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, T.S. Eliot’s translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabasis, and some of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. The poem was very likely a love poem to Roger Knoebber, and may be read in Jason Weiss’ compendium of writings by Brion Gysin entitled Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader. The original typescript – typed on the same Beat Hotel typewriter that was shared between the inhabitants of the Hotel and later was used by Roger Knoebber – was inscribed to Roger in 1961 and was maintained in his archive. This typescript was very likely the sole complete instance – indeed Jason Weiss used a photocopy sourced from Roger Knobber – which is why Brion Gysin here requests a copy.

"Bill seems to appropriate it to himself in The Third Mind...": As noted in Jason Weiss’ Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, this poem which was “never published in its entirety, was ambiguously attributed to Burroughs in The Third Mind, where a brief excerpt appeared.” [Weiss]

Comments