Instant Shaman (four)

Brion Gysin wanted to “disorder the mind,” and he succeeded in two well-known discoveries. One is the reordering of a text by the Cut-up method of composition and the second is the Dream Machine he co-invented with Ian Sommerville in the early 1960s. Sommerville was a colleague of William S. Burroughs, and Burroughs used Gysin’s Cut-up method in part of the writing of his novel Naked Lunch. Both of Gysin’s inventions move the conscious mind away from consensual reality, and assert what poets have known all along, that the visionary experience is fundamental to the art of poetry. Brian Sheehan’s documentary, FlicKer, is an excellent and engrossing introduction to Gysin’s Dream Machine. The Dream Machine is basically a cylinder containing a light bulb and various shaped forms cut from the walls of the cylinder; the cylinder revolves at a predetermined speed. The observer sits beside the Dream Machine with closed eyes, allowing the flickering images caused by the Dream Machine to induce mental images of colour, shapes, and symbols. The flickering produces a hypnogogic state—perhaps it is alpha wave activity—and what is visualized during this state can then be used in a work of art, or left as an experience in itself. Gysin had an early, prototypical experience of this when traveling by bus, and while sitting with closed eyes, there was a flickering caused when trees and buildings were juxtaposed between the sunlight and the bus, similar to the experience of observing the Dream Machine. After seeing Sheehan’s documentary, FlicKer, I remembered my own experiments using the Eeman Circuit in the late 1980s. In The Cameron Aurameter (ed. Meade Layne and Riley H. Crabb, Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, Vista, 1970), there is a description and short discussion of the Eeman Circuit, the subject of experiments I tried in the mid-1980s. The Eeman Circuit is simple to assemble and use:

The circuit is made by fastening six feet of insulated copper wire to a copper or brass handle on one end and to copper wire or meshed strands… Two of these outfits are used. One is placed under the base of the spine of a person lying on his back… The wire with the handle to be gripped in the right hand, is brought out from the screen and held in the right hand. The second screen is placed under the head and the wire brought out so its handle can be placed in the left hand… The idea is that the body electricity (our mana) will be picked up by the screens and caused to flow along the wires to the hands so that changes in normal flow are brought about.

My own experience of using the Eeman Circuit is that I was overwhelmed with dream imagery while using it. I don’t remember using the Circuit many times, it was uncomfortable to lie on, and when I moved back to the city twelve years ago I didn’t bring it with me. But it is worth trying out, as one might try out the Dream Machine. All of these strategies—the Dream Machine or the Eeman Circuit; mirror gazing or the psychomateum—are ways to try to access the visionary experience; they are small doors into the unconscious, small doors to shamanic and visionary experiences. Not everyone will be interested in a shamanic approach to poetry, but it is offered for those who might resonate to some of these ideas.