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I recorded the music in my own place, The 1001 Nights, only when it was fading and even in later years I never was able to lay my hands on truly worthwhile machines to record sounds that will never be heard again, anywhere.
I started cutting up a spoken text... put it several times through their electronic equipment, and arrived at brand new words that had never been said, by me or by anybody necessarily, onto the tape. But the experiment was withdrawn very quickly there, I mean, it was... time was up and they were made rather nervous by it, they were quite shocked by the results coming out of the speakers and were only too glad to bring the experiment to an end. ("Well, what did they expect? A chorus of angels with tips on the stock market?" - William Burroughs).
William loved the idea of getting his hands on his own words, branding them and rustling anyone else's he wanted.
So I suggested to William that we should use only the best, only the high-charged material: King James' translation of the Song of Songs of Solomon, Eliot's translation of Anabase by St. John perse, Shakespeare's sugar'd Sonnets and a few lines from the Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley about his mescaline experiences.
Magic, practiced more assiduously than hygiene in Morocco, through ecstatic dancing to the music of the secret brotherhoods, is, there, a form of psychic hygiene. You know your music when you hear it, one day. You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.
And I heard some music at that festival about which I said: 'I just want to hear that music for the rest of my life. I wanna here it everyday all day.' And, uh, there were a great many other kinds of extraordinary music offered to one, mostly of the Ecstatic Brotherhood who enter into trance, so that in itself - it was the first time I'd seen large groups of people going into trance - was enough to have kept my attention, but beyond and above all of that somewhere I hear this funny little music, and I said 'Ah! That's my music! And I must find out where it comes from.' So I stayed and within a year I found that it came from Jajouka.
I recognised very quickly that what they were performing was the Roman Lupercal, and the Roman Lupercalia was a race run from one part of Rome, a cave under the Capitoline Hill, which Mussolini claimed to have discovered, but is now generally conceded to be some 10 or 15 meters down... the point was to go out to the gates of Rome and contact Pan, the God of Forests, the little Goat God, who was Sexuality itself, and to run back through the streets with the news that Pan, was still out there fucking as he flailed the women in the crowds.
And up there on the mountain another element is added, in as much as the women, who live apart from the men, whose private lives are apart from the men's lives to a point where even women's language isn't immediately understood by men - women can say things to each other in front of men that men don't understand, or care to be bothered with, it's just women's nonsense y'see... and they sing sort of secret little songs enticing Bou Jeloud the Father of Skins, who is Pan, to come to the hills, saying that... we will give you the prettiest girls in the village, we will give you Crosseyed Aisha... Pan is supposed to be so dumb that he falls for this because he will fuck anything.
In actual fact women do not dance in front of any but their own husbands, the women in Arab life, all belly-dancing movies to the contrary, do not dance in public, or never did, and most certainly don't in villages, ever dance where they're seen by men any more than men dance in front of women...
I kept some notes and drawings, meaning to write a recipe book of magic. My Pan people were furious when they found this out. They poisoned my food twice and then, apparently, resorted to more efficacious means to get rid of me...
A group of them came down from the mountain and stayed a period of time, living in the house with me, and so I heard them practising, I hear them teaching the younger children how to play, and learned more and more about the intricacies of the music... I found out various interesting things about them, first of all that they had a secret language, that they can talk through the music... but that they also have a language of which I really learned nothing, I didn't have the time to, but I think that at that point they would have been willing to teach me a great deal about it, even to start writing a vocabulary to find out what it was, which language it was they speak in private... but, uh, the restaurant folded with Moroccan Independence.
Brian had wanted to take the Stone's music rather toward the openings that Moroccan music made possible, and, uh, which have appealed to other musicians since and I think will have even more and more effect in the future... but Mick was very determined to keep it right down to that R&B which they had ripped off the American Black music, which he found a perfectly good product to last for the next 20 years, and has lasted 10, at any rate...
As to how a piece of spoiled canvas or scribbled-on paper suddenly becomes worth an enormous amount of money... has nothing to do with the case of literature and life and a career.
More people can read a book than can 'read' a picture.
It deals with the area of interior visions which has never been tapped before. Except in history, one knows of cases - in French history, Catherine de Medici for example, had Nostradamus sitting up on top of a tower... one didn't have any screen between the man on top of the tower and the Sun. And he used to sit up there and with the fingers of his hands spread like this would flicked his fingers over his closed eyes, and would interpret his visions in a way which were of influence to her in regard to her political powers... they were like instructions from a higher power.
I have seen in it practically everything that I have ever seen - that is all imagery.
The Alpha rhythm contains the whole human program of vision.
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