Nothing is True Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, is being billed as the first-ever biography of the painter, poet, piper who died in 1986. In the 1960's Brion spent some time at the Chelsea carrying on a love affair with John Giorno in room 703 among other things. John Geiger, the book's author, regrets that he has never stayed at the Chelsea, "but last few trips have bettered it: crashed at the Bunker!"
Excerpted with permission From: Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, John Geiger, The Disinformation Company, 2005.
Gysin and Giorno were drunk or stoned, or both, and shared an immediate, extreme attraction. Gysin asked the young man to call on him at the Chelsea Hotel, and a few days later they became lovers. Giorno felt emotionally and intellectually attached. At twenty-eight, he was just coming into his own creatively, and he considered Gysin a "great teacher," not only in terms of art but the spirit. Said Giorno: “Before I met them I was just this dumb American. At that time in spring of 1965 I took my first 34 LSD trips with Brion Gysin at the Hotel Chelsea in Room 703. I was in my mid-twenties but it didn’t matter, I was like a 14 year old. I had come out of the 1950’s. My mind was blown in the context of those LSD trips, which we took one or two times every week. The Chelsea was the only safe place for us to do that. I was living on 9th Street and Brion lived in the Chelsea in this nice big room. At those times [on LSD] you don’t want to be outside. We were lovers so we fucked all the time as well. Brion was not a Buddhist or Hindu but he was doing his own sort of meditation that he never told me about, some kind of magic. On those acid trips I would also sit. The mind being a wild elephant, we’d both sit on the bed in meditation, resting our minds. They were my first experiences with real meditation in terms of trying to deal with my mind.”
Gysin had not abandoned the practical application of magic, either. He always had a good supply of hash and, at the Chelsea Hotel, even received a slab in the mail. It had been sent from France, and was so badly packed that the hash had eaten through the walls of the flimsy wrapping paper. Rather incredibly, it had simply been re-sealed by a customs agent, and sent on to him. Burroughs was deeply impressed with this demonstration of practical magic, and the fact that, as he put it, "some Johnson had put it back in and sealed it with tape." To Burroughs, a Johnson is someone who refuses to join in when everyone else is on their way to the Commissariat to denounce a neighbor.
Brion Gysin, March 1957.
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