4/18/09
Perhaps the highlight of this trip (with the possible exception of panhandling in Paris) was having the chance to make a friendship that has existed only virtually for the past several years into a real life one.
My visit with Isabelle Aubert Baudron and then spending some time with her ex-husband, Jean Louis was the stuff that dreams of travel are made of.
I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice to say that Izzy and Jean-Louis made me very comfortable and the small city of Thouars is one of those dream places where one meets a man who has been collecting ancient things since his boyhood and built a museum, ancient buildings sit side by side with modern ones, and the fattest cats in the world purr on in contentment while old french dogs beg for cheese, and are quite content in themselves.
Hearing the stories of Izzy and Jean Louis, seeing Jean Louis’ spaceship, experiencing the wonder of Brion Gysin’s dream machine, and hanging out in the French countryside make my Paris pennance more than worthwhile.
And as I sat in my battered old hat and read personal inscriptions in first editions from William S. Burroughs and others, I realized that this journey is just as important as those that the beat poets took and others as well.
The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter’s book, The Living Brain.A dreamachine is “viewed” with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain’s electrical oscillations. The “viewer” experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the “viewer” feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state.
There are amazing people in this world and I am very happy to be able to be friends of quite a few of them.
Here are a couple of pictures from Izzy’s galleries at www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands
With William Burroughs
Kandahar Afghanistqn October 1974
And finally, for those who are worried, I managed to get access to my funds in both Paypal and my credit union, though the bulk of my funds are lost in transfer somewhere, but at least I’m not penniless just in time to leave Paris.
Next post will be a full update on my three days in Paris, the city is a whore, but one can’t help but love her anyway. Perhaps Sophie, the whore in W.Somerset Maugham’s The Razors Edge is actually Paris. It makes the line “I thought Sophie was my salvation” into something else completely and perhaps the millions of dreams that Paris has inspired and the disappointment that has followed are more what the story is about. In any event, my Paris is not the one everyone gets and for that I am grateful. I leave this city as a man leaves a whore he is in love with, satisfied, disgusted, and left with a glow that makes the empty spot in his wallet seem not so terrible a price to have paid.
On to Amsterdam now.
Vago Damitio is the Vagabond in Chief. He is also a writer, blogger, traveler, adventurer and teacher. He has spent his life mastering how to have incredible adventures on minuscule budgets. Someday he hopes to have the option of using gigantic budgets for miniscule adventures.
