“This book is based on conversations with Ramuntcho Matta in Chateau Thierry and London, 2023-2024. We discuss our friendships with visual artist and raconteur, Brion Gysin, and his best friend, William S. Burroughs. Ramuntcho and I met in the 1970’s through Gysin. We reflect on the creative process, magic and science, transmission, the nature of friendship, and the experience of aging. At the time of these conversations, we are the same ages as Gysin and Burroughs were when we met them… My own encounters with characters of the movement…
“By SACRED FIX I mean the fix on and with Madness – that sanctified condition when all has meaning and the madman is a poet living a poem. Apart from LEAR IN LOS ANGELES, I have enclosed ‘The Needle Vestal’, ‘The Rake’s New Progress’… all of which were written either in asylums or when I was under psychiatric supervision. Indeed these have been the conditions in which most of poetry has been written. In many ways the conditions of an asylum are ideal for a poet, for he is surrounded by other madmen subject to all kinds of poetic visions and hallucinations…