‘The way of Permutations is the closest way to truly know God... The individual who wishes to enter this Way should permute [purify] his heart with the great fire of darkness.| www.permuted.org.uk |
Thus it was, in the tradition of the maverick mystic who explodes the secrets of the unconscious, that Gysin found himself marginalised. The cut-up, which of course cannot be patented, packaged or otherwise disseminated to the benefit of its inventor, went on to create a whole literary genre of its own, stretching from Gysin and Burroughs to Kathy Acker, Terry Wilson, David Bowie and a plethora of lesser lights. Gysin himself, meanwhile, focused on the far less commercial literary form of permutation. He described his experience of these in The Third Mind: ‘The Divine tautology came up at me off a page one day. I AM THAT I AM, and I saw that it was lopsided. I switched the last two words to get better architectural balance around the big THAT. There was a little click as I read from right to left and then permutated the other end. AM I THAT AM I? “It” asked a question. My ear ran away down the first one hundred and twenty simple permutations and I hear, I think, what Newton said he heard: a sort of pealing inside my head, like an ether experience, and I fell down.’
‘The way of Permutations is the closest way to truly know God... The individual who wishes to enter this Way should permute [purify] his heart with the great fire of darkness.
So wrote Abraham Abulafia, a 13th century cabalist.
When Abulafia suggested that we permutate a word or phrase he proposed a method that leads to a transcendence of normal consciousness. Gysin is making the same claim when he tells us to ‘rub out the word’. Both methods deliberately induce intellectual overload. Meaning is lost and the mind becomes focused inward on the structure of the letters or numbers or words, and their possible reverberations in different forms. Gysin, in collaboration with Ian Sommerville, produced countless permutational pieces with a crude but effective computer programme. Again and again he would explore the meaning behind the words, behind the formal structures of language.
Working with an extended permutation is best likened to listening to a complex rhythm that transmutes by the slightest of degree each bar. Overall, the whole piece becomes a perfect mirror of itself with every beat or note of the initial bar having taken every possible position in relation to all the others. At any point in the music, the value of what is played is identical, yet simultaneously its form is unique. A simple scale of seven notes would incorporate 5040 different melodies, all of which would be played out just once. Gysin restricted his poems to, generally, no more than 4 or 5 words.
For Gysin the way of permutation was the ‘way out’, the means of transcending our physical existence. The dreamachine was a similar device, creating pattern after pattern within the brain itself, turning image upon image, light upon light until the infinite became possible.
Although permutations are mathematically finite, in practical terms they are not. Combining just 22 elements (the number of letters in the alphabet used by Abulafia) produces approximately sextillion (1021) permutations, a fair estimate of the number of stars in all the galaxies of the universe. (The calculation is 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x... x 3 x 2 x 1.) This is indeed the world of ‘infinite number’.
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Text copyright Paul Cecil, 1996