By Dave Teeuwen

William Burroughs had the unusual habit of rewriting and rereleasing his novels during the 1960s and 1970s. He is not the only author to have undertaken a revision of a previously published work. Henry James famously revised and added to his novels in the early years of the 20th century for the special New York Editions; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass saw a number of versions before his death; even Baudelaire reworked and rereleased Les Fleurs du mal. But Burroughs’ commitment to radically changing his already published work separates him from most writers. For Burroughs, there was nothing sacred about his texts; nothing was final, nothing was true, and everything was permitted.

The first published novel that Burroughs revised was The Soft Machine. There was an almost immediate but failed attempt to reissue it in 1963. The Acknowledgements page of the 1962 version of The Ticket That Exploded says “The Soft Machine First Edition: 1961. New revised and augmented edition: February 1963.” Ultimately a second edition would not come out until 1966, followed by a revision to The Ticket That Exploded, which was rereleased in 1967. These revisions yielded the versions most readers are familiar with — the Grove Press editions, which were the first publications of those two books in the United States. A third revision was made to The Soft Machine in 1968 for the Calder Press in England.

It would be interesting to collect all of the interview statements in which Burroughs discusses what he thinks about his novels. I doubt that there were many that he felt really measured up. If there are no boundaries on what you are willing to revise, it may be that nothing ever seems complete. Burroughs said in The Job that he was not satisfied with Nova Express as a novel, though he never revised it. In 1975 The Last Words of Dutch Shultz was revised from a more narrative 1970 version of the novel, and in 1980 Blue Winds Press rereleased the 1973 short novel Port of Saints in a larger, expanded version. Naked Lunch, however, never underwent any major revisions during Burroughs’ lifetime.

A note should be made about Dead Fingers Talk, released in 1963. This book was not a revision of any previous work, but an interesting experiment in taking content from Burroughs’ three previously released novels and creating what is essentially a cut-up at the chapter level. A chapter from Naked Lunch follows a chapter from The Soft Machine, followed by a chapter from The Ticket That Exploded. In the end a new novel emerges with attributes of its own. Strangely, this book has since gone out of print.

The Soft Machine initially took the same publicity route as Naked Lunch. Burroughs published portions of the book in various journals and magazines to introduce the book to the public. Comparatively large portions of Naked Lunch had appeared in journals like Big Table and The Chicago Review. The Soft Machine began appearing in smaller amounts, though in more places and in countries outside of France and the United States, suggesting a growth in Burroughs’ popularity. Burroughs described this plan in a letter to Allen Ginsberg in September, 1959: “I am working on a sequel to Naked Lunch… I will write pieces of the present work in the form of short stories that can be sold to magazines in the U.S. for immediate cash. If you have any suggestions or know of any magazine that might ask for material, I can deliver.” Burroughs did this in earnest both before and after The Soft Machine was released to increase the attention paid to his work.

Burroughs would not repeat this practice with The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express to nearly the same degree. By the time those books were released, he was occupied with other cut-ups and was using the underground press to carry out his experiments with form and text. He knew that the underground press represented a receptive audience and exploited it for his more experimental work, which was suited to short pieces presented in small magazines and alternative newspapers.

The First Edition

The initial edition of The Soft Machine was released by Olympia Press in 1961 after the success of Naked Lunch had placed Burroughs on the map as a challenging new writer of the avant-garde. Taken mostly from the remnants of the rumored 1,000 pages of material (his famous Word Hoard) from which Naked Lunch had been put together, The Soft Machine detailed yet more sexual encounters, scenes of drug use and abuse, the battle between the sexes and the developing Nova Conspiracy mythology that would run throughout the coming novels of that decade. (It was still at that time called the Novia conspiracy). The poetic nature of the prose in the first edition is likely a reflection of the material he was writing at the time — The Exterminator and Minutes to Go, both written with the assistance of Brion Gysin in the early 1960s, just before the release of The Soft Machine.

The first Olympia edition of The Soft Machine is a fundamentally different novel from the edition of The Soft Machine with which most readers are familiar — the second Grove Press edition. For this reason, it is easier to compare both the first Olympia and third Calder editions against the second, making it a kind of anchor.

The first and second editions have little likeness to each other. They are even laid out differently. However, the second and third editions do not vary so radically in content as to be seen as completely different novels. In many ways the third edition is really just a reworking of the second edition’s less commercial material. It adds new passages and cuts away what may have been too difficult or extraneous for a wider audience. Presumably the critical reception of the first two editions influenced the revisions Burroughs made in the third.

The first edition has a very specific framework that was removed from the later editions. There are four units, each assigned a color. The first unit is titled Red, with Green, Blue, and White following in sequence. Each section is made up of generally short chapters, some of which are familiar to readers of the second edition because they are later recycled into it, in both cut-up and straight narrative forms. The opening chapter of the first edition, “Gongs of Violence,” is the third-to-last chapter of the second edition. The opening chapter of the second edition (“I was working the hole with The Sailor…”) begins at a paragraph halfway down the page in the “White Score” section of the first edition, near the end of the book. This signals a shift in the overall concept of the book away from a vision of war to a vision of addiction and control that is typical of Burroughs’ concerns in the mid-1960s.

Throughout the novel, sections that appear in the second edition are found in completely different places, highlighting the concept of non-linearity that Burroughs maintained in the novels of the 1960s. This book can be read any which way. However, the third edition maintains the structure of the second edition, hinting that Burroughs may have settled on a rough structure for the book, perhaps backing away from the original color-unit concept after the first edition of The Ticket That Exploded.

In the first edition of The Soft Machine approximately 80 of the book’s 182 pages are never used again in either of the following two editions. That is nearly half of the novel. This alone shows why the first and second editions are really two different novels. Moreover, they focus to some degree on two separate though similar ideas. The first edition focuses more on war than the second — in particular, the war between the sexes. The second is centered more on control and addiction, with the male-female war basically in the background. As usual, sex in its many forms is a main theme for both versions.

Given that Burroughs so regularly recycled his characters and story lines in other pieces and novels over the span of his career, it would not be incorrect to argue that the first edition of The Soft Machine is a separate entity from the second edition in much the same way that Dead Fingers Talk is a separate entity on its own, despite being a cut-up of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. The first edition could easily be published alongside the second and third editions without treading on their conceptual territory. It’s a pity that the first edition is so difficult for most readers to obtain, since it gives insight into Burroughs’ areas of exploration immediately after and during the publication of Naked Lunch, when he was still living in Paris. More so than the other editions of the novel, the first edition was made up of overflow pages from the Word Hoard material, demarcating a certain period in Burroughs personal history that is presently lacking in print.

The Second Edition

Since the second Grove edition is the version most familiar to readers, it can be a shock when they find out that there were alternates. The second edition has long chapters instead of units cut into small, sometimes half-page sections. It is more narrative and less fractured than the first edition. This may be one reason that Burroughs insisted on revising it, allowing the reader some kind of access to an already difficult novel by offering extended narratives which were absent before.

In the first edition, as Oliver Harris has stated, “the reader is too forcibly & relentlessly reminded that something methodological is going on, without there being any visible means of deducing precisely what it is.” The first edition was a full-steam-ahead operation in using the cut-up method to create a novel-length manuscript. However, the number of cut-ups leaves the reader with nothing to follow consistently. The second edition has much longer continuous sequences. Burroughs could see by the mid-1960s that pure cut-up could not retain a reader’s interest. When Nova Express was released in 1964 a more continuous structure had been introduced into the cut-up novel. As Harris has also noted, “from the wholesale revisions he made to The Soft Machine it is evident that Burroughs had then only learned… that it was barely possible for anyone to read such a text.” The prose-poetry of the first edition was replaced with a more narrative form where cut-ups happened within the story instead of being the whole of the story.

The radical change from the prose poetry and narrative disconnectedness of the first to the second editions suggests more than just the pursuit of perfection or accessibility. Burroughs’ revisions may have been spurred by criticism of the first edition of The Soft Machine, and more than likely Grove Press demanded some changes to make the text more commercial and accessible. Also Burroughs was mindful of his finances, especially in the late 1960s when he was living in London. As Graham Masterson points out in a recent interview, Burroughs was short on cash and the need to create a salable novel must have weighed heavily on him. Thus, the Grove Press edition was released in a form drastically different from the original.

The Third Edition

In 1968, only two years after the Grove edition, Burroughs reworked The Soft Machine again, showing that he cared about it still and had something left to add to the book. It can also be assumed that the publisher, John Calder, encouraged Burroughs to make the book more accessible to the reader and therefore more commercially viable. Joan Didion had written, in a review of the section edition, that “The Soft Machine has only the dulling effect of a migraine attack, after pain and nausea and unwanted images have battered the nerve synapses until all connections are lost.” While on the whole her criticism was favorable and she remained a fan of Burroughs, such reviews may have prompted a more conventional format for the third edition.

The changes in the Calder reissue are fairly significant, though not even close to what we see in the transition from the first to the second edition. In this third edition Burroughs expands chapters that were previously much shorter, using both new material and selections from the first edition which he had omitted. In creating the second edition, Burroughs cut out many of the first edition’s cut-ups. However, in preparing the third edition, he went back to rescue some of the material he felt was still worth preserving. In some instances, this is the reason for extending what were shorter pieces in the second edition.

To demonstrate the difference between the second and third versions I will list in brief the more significant changes he made to the text, which eventually became an amalgamation of material from all three editions with new material added in as well, while still relying heavily on the second edition for structure.

The changes in the third edition are as follows:

• “Trak Trak Trak” replaces two pages with material from the first edition of The Soft Machine and then omits eight pages at the end which are moved in to the “Early Answer” chapter.
• “Early Answer” begins where “Trak Trak Trak” cuts out the last eight pages of the second edition. This chapter adds the first page of the second edition’s “The Case of the Celluloid Kali” onto its end.
• “The Case of the Celluloid Kali” begins in the third edition on the second page of the second edition.
• “I Sekuin” has a half page of new material added to the end of this short chapter.
• “Where the Awning Flaps” is nine pages longer, with both new material and material taken from the first edition.
• “1920 Movies” is retitled “Streets of Chance” and is 13 pages longer than the second edition, again with a mix of new material and material from the first edition.
• “Uranian Willy” has one page of new material with a footnote.
• “Gongs of Violence” has three extra pages of both new material and material from the first edition.
• “Dead Fingers Talk” adds five pages of new material.
• The book ends with 18 pages of new material concerning addiction and the apomorphine treatment. There is a short, one-page piece titled “Appendix to The Soft Machine,” an essay titled “A Treatment That Cancels Addiction,” a short piece titled “Plan Drug Addiction” and a final essay titled “Jail May Be Best RX For Addicts MD Says.” The last essay is in part taken from Burroughs article “The Death of Opium Jones” in New Statesmen from March of 1966.

The third edition is significantly different from the second, but the last 18 pages of material discussing apomorphine stick out as a fairly odd way to replace what was arguably the fine ending of both the first and second editions: “(The shallow water came in with the tide and the Swedish River of Gothenberg).” It is a haunting line almost reminiscent of the “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” that ends The Great Gatsby, a book Burroughs admired. Both have the nostalgic feel typical of Burroughs’ work. However, in the third edition we are left with this line: “Since all monopolistic and hierarchical systems are basically rooted in anxiety it is not surprising that the use of the apo-morphine treatment or the synthesis of the apo-morphine formulae have been consistently opposed in certain drearily predictable quarters of the soft machine.” It lacks the poetry of the earlier versions’ ending. Also it is more concerned with the immediate issues Burroughs was confronting at the time, 1968, than with the more universal theme of the previous versions’ ending.

This is not to say that the third edition is inferior to the second or, for that matter, the first. In many ways the third edition works out and refines the problems Burroughs experienced from the first edition in using the cut-up method on a novel-length scale. As Harris has noted in his essay “Cutting Up Politics,” the cut-up was well suited to short pieces of a page or two but less so on the level of a novel, where the poetic language suddenly demands a continuous narrative to maintain interest. With the third edition, we are introduced to a commercial cut-up method in a book with more logical chapter breaks and fuller story sequences.

It is interesting to speculate what Burroughs’ thought of his second edition and the fact that a version he once felt was imperfect was the only one still in print at the time of his death. Did the appending of apomorphine propaganda to the end of the third edition eventually seem dated? While apomorphine was a popular topic in the media at the time Burroughs was writing about it, it quickly faded into the past. Were the extensive additions to some of the chapters from the second edition still seen as an improvement? Given the complexity of the first edition, it is difficult to say what Burroughs might have thought about the second edition’s poularity.

If nothing else, he could at least have had a university press reissue the third edition in the 1990s, an opportunity more than a few presses would have jumped at. Evidently he was not motivated to seek a wider audience for that third edition of the book, which is less easily found in North America than it is in the U.K. (It took me three months to track down a reading copy that wasn’t priced in the hundreds. I’m not much of a collector, so no flyleaf and a few cigarette burns are fine with me. Regardless, it took actual effort in the age of the internet to find the book.)

What the various versions of The Soft Machine offer are three visions of the first real cut-up novel. They also display the process of a writer refining a technique over a decade of dedication to a single book. However, The Soft Machine also serves as an object lesson in responding to the demands of a publisher in a new market. For this reason alone it is of interest to scholars and writers because the three editions together are almost a textbook in how to conceive, execute, and finalize an influential experimental work.

New York: Evergreen 1988, a larger-size edition of the Black Cat printing, bound in wraps.

Paris: Olympia Press 1961, stiff olive-green wraps, with decorated dust jacket, one of 5,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A5a. The second publication of Burroughs’ work by Olympia Press. Dust jacket design by Brion Gysin.

New York: Grove Press 1966, first US printing, one of 18,000 copies, hardbound in dust jacket. Maynard & Miles A5b. This edition was revised from the Olympia Press printing with additions and expansions.

New York: Black Cat 1966, first wraps printing, one of 25,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A5c.

London: Calder & Boyars 1968, first British publication, hardbound in decorated dust jacket. Maynard & Miles A5d. The rear jacket panel states that following the Paris and U.S. Editions, “this final, definitive edition has been considerably revised by the author from the two earlier versions.”

_____ simultaneous British softcover edition. Maynard & Miles A5e.

London: Corgi Books 1970, first thus British edition in wraps. Maynard & Miles A5f.

New York: Ballantine Books 1973, first thus with surreal designed wraps. Maynard & Miles A5g.

London: Paladin Books 1986, first thus printing in wraps.

New York: Grove Weidenfeld 1992, first thus printing in wraps.

London: Flamingo 1992, first thus printing in wraps.

London: Flamingo 2001, a new British edition, bound in wraps.

Two Burroughs Cut-Ups Compared

A few months ago Professor Oliver Harris was kind enough to share with RealityStudio one of his working documents for Yage Redux. It is an incredible Microsoft Word palimpsest comparing Burroughs’ various yage publications and manuscripts. RealityStudio couldn’t publish it (for obvious copyright reasons), but we did add a few images of it to Jed Birmingham’s review of Yage Redux. Here they are again: one, two, three.

At about the same time, Patrick C. also happened to send RealityStudio a pile of xeroxes of weird and obscure Burroughs texts, mostly from small publications of the 1960s. These included Burroughs’ review of Mind Parasites and a 1974 interview with Allen Ginsberg. There was also a cut-up text called “Transitional Period,” which had been published in Two Cities #6 in 1961.

Noting that “Transitional Period” was an early version of the chapter “Gongs of Violence” from The Soft Machine, RealityStudio thought it would be interesting to create a side-by-side version of the two texts, noting what had been deleted from the first and interpolated into the second.

And while this comparison can’t achieve the depth of Professor Harris’ palimpsest, for the reason that RealityStudio did not have access to manuscripts or even to the first edition of The Soft Machine, putting the two texts beside each other did reveal some interesting things about Burroughs’ creative process.

For example, you can clearly see that the later text was dramatically cleaned up. Some completely crazy punctuation was straightened out and obvious signs of the cut-up process (“// Cut.”) were removed. The text was stylized by the insertion of em dashes. Elements that echoed Naked Lunch were removed: two mentions of Dr. Benway were deleted, as were two of three mentions of A.J. Two long passages were interpolated into “Gongs of Violence,” and several short paragraphs at the end of “Transitional Period” were deleted, only to reappear later in Nova Express.

The page juxtaposing the two texts opens in a new window, since it was more intelligible to format them in a simple way that makes no use of RealityStudio’s standard page design. If you notice any other interesting points of comparison between the two texts, please feel free to discuss them on the Burroughs forum.

A Review of The Soft Machine

By Joan Didion

There sometimes seems a peculiar irrelevance about what is claimed for William S. Burroughs, both by those who admire him and those who do not; the insistent amorphousness of his books encourages the reader to take from them pretty much exactly what he brought to them. Burroughs has been read as a pamphleteer for narcotics reform. He has been read as a parabolist of the highest order. He has been read as a pornographer and he has been read as a prophet of the apocalypse. The Naked Lunch I read first on a beach in the Caribbean and the Naked Lunch I reread a few weeks ago in a hospital in Santa Monica, the book I read once when I was unhappy and again when I was not, did not seem in any sense the same book; to anyone who finds Burroughs readable at all, he is remarkably rereadable, if only because he is remarkably unmemorable. There are no “stories” to wear thin, no “characters” of whom one might tire. We are presented only with the fragmented record of certain fantasies, and our response to that record depends a good deal upon our own fantasies at the moment; in itself, a book by William Burroughs has about as much intrinsic “meaning” as the actual inkblot in a Rorschach test.

Nonetheless Burroughs is read for “meaning,” for we tend to be uneasy in this country until we can draw from an imaginative work some immediate social application. À la Recherche du temps perdu as precursor to the Wolfenden Report, Emma Bovary as victim of the Feminine Mystique. And, on another level, William Burroughs as “satirist,” that slipshod catch-all category for anyone who seems unconventional and modish. Burroughs is by no means successful as a “satirist” or as an “allegorist”; both satire and allegory depend upon strict control of the material, and to talk about Burroughs in that vein leads only into cul-de-sacs where Donald Malcolm can complain querulously that if Mr. Burroughs is satirizing capital punishment then Mr. Burroughs must be unaware that the trend on this issue is toward liberalization.

So it goes. First the insistence upon some fairly conventional “meaning,” then the rush to the barricades. Either Burroughs is a prophet or Burroughs is a fraud. Either he must be the “greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift” (Jack Kerouac) or he must be a fabricator of “merest trash” (John Wain). In this stampede to first discern the “message” and then take a stand on it, Burroughs’ limited but very real virtues tend to be overlooked. In a quite literal sense with Burroughs, the medium is the message: the point is not what the voice says but the voice itself, a voice so direct and original and versatile as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying. Burroughs is less a writer than a “sound,” and to listen to the lyric may be to miss the beat.

Consider The Soft Machine. Burroughs is uninfected by any trace of humanist sentimentality, and his imagery is that of the most corrosive nightmare, obscene, specifically homosexual, casually savage, peopled by androgynous mutations. Flesh is not flesh but “biologic material,” undifferentiated tissue which metamorphoses, dissolves into mucus, sloughs off, passes into other vessels. Hot crabs hatch out of human spines; police files spurt out bone meal. Although it is easy to read The Soft Machine as a parable of technological suicide, a kind of hallucinatory On the Beach, that reading is not going to get us very far, because Burroughs as a dreamer of didactic dreams is not only distinctly hit-and-miss but quite unremarkable, in point of fact Victorian. It has been some years, after all, since we first heard that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, first stood upon the darkling plain of technology. Read for any such conventional meaning, The Soft Machine has only the dulling effect of a migraine attack, after pain and nausea and unwanted images have battered the nerve synapses until all connections are lost. For the Burroughs repetitiveness blunts response. The particular Burroughs preoccupations atrophy rather than engage the imagination. Ah well, one thinks, eyes glazing, fingers riffling the pages, another orgiastic hanging, all possible switches. It is difficult even to read the book sequentially; to imagine that one will be able to put the book down when the telephone rings and find one’s place a few minutes later is sheer bravura.

In fact the point is not to read the book at all, but somehow to hear the voice in it. The voice in The Soft Machine is talking about time. Some of the book is mock nostalgia, and the title, whatever else it means, seems as well to be a play upon The Time Machine. The voice roves back in time through Mexico, Panama, the Mayan Empire, back through a landscape of pervasive corruption. One city in particular appears and reappears in explicit and extraordinary details: a port city, “stuck in water hyacinths and banana rafts,” a place where jungle has overgrown the parks and diseased armadillos live in the deserted kiosks. Candiru infest the swimming pools; albinos blink in the sun. Although the city is in the here and now, it is terrorized by the Vagrant Ball Players, who seem to have come forward in time from the Mayan period. The Civil Guard tries to placate the Vagrant Ball Players, for they “can sound a Hey Rube Switch brings a million adolescents shattering the customs barriers and frontiers of time, swinging out of the jungle with Tarzan cries, crash landing perilous tin planes and rockets.”

The voice moves not only back but ahead in time, to what seems to be the end of the world. There is an ambiguity here; the last few men left on earth are clearly the survivors of some disaster, but they are also just assuming human shape, just rising from the slime. In short, what the voice in The Soft Machine is doing is giving an hallucinatory reading to Eliot’s Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end” and “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.”

This is by no means unintentional. Eliot’s is one of the rhythms into which the voice in The Soft Machine slips deliberately and frequently, sometimes ironically and sometimes not. Sometimes the voice is not Eliot but Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain: “Meanwhile an angle comes dripping down and forms a stalactite in my brain.” Sometimes it is the voice of the Hearst Task Force: “I have just returned from a thousand year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw… It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply — But it belongs to anyone with the courage and know-how to enter — It belongs to you.” Sometimes the voice slips into the peculiar rhythms of the hustler, sometimes into the ritualized diction of blue movies. The voice rattles off elliptical allusions, throws away joke after outrageous joke, shifts gear in mid-sentence, never falters.

It is precisely this voice — complex, subtle, allusive — that is the fine thing about The Soft Machine and about Burroughs. It is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the cliches and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure. Against that voice, those of the younger “satirical” or “black” novelists sound self-conscious and faked; it is the voice of a natural, and what it is saying is in no sense the point.

(Excerpt from The Soft Machine)

William S. Burroughs

Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story of the Mayan Caper exclusive to The Evening News —

A Russian scientist has said: “We will travel not only in space but in time as well” — I have just returned from a thousand-year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw — And to tell you how such time trips are made — It is a precise operation — It is difficult — It is dangerous — It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply — But it belongs to anyone who has the courage and know-how to enter — It belongs to you —

I started my trip in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites — When you skip through a newspaper as most of us do you see a great deal more than you know — In fact you see it all on a subliminal level — Now when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday — I did this eight hours a day for three months — I went back as far as the papers went — I dug out old magazines and forgotten novels and letters — I made fold-ins and composites and I did the same with photos —

The next step was carried out in a film studio — I learned to talk and think backward on all levels — This was done by running film and sound track backward — For example a picture of myself eating a full meal was reversed, from satiety back to hunger — First the film was run at normal speed, then in slow-motion — The same procedure was extended to other physiological processes including orgasm — (It was explained to me that I must put aside all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the heaviest anchor holding one in present time.) For three months I worked with the studio — My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment —

I went to Mexico City and studied the Mayans with a team of archaeologists — The Mayans lived in what is now Yucatan, British Honduras, and Guatemala — I will not recapitulate what is known of their history, but some observations on the Mayan calendar are essential to understanding this report — The Mayan calendar starts from a mythical date 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu and rolls on to the end of the world, also a definite date depicted in the codices as a God pouring water on the earth — The Mayans had a solar, a lunar, and a ceremonial calendar rolling along like interlocking wheels from 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu to the end — The absolute power of the priests, who formed about 2 percent of the population, depended on their control of this calendar — The extent of this number monopoly can be deduced from the fact that the Mayan verbal language contains no number above ten — Modern Mayan-speaking Indians use Spanish numerals — Mayan agriculture was of the slash and burn type — They had no plows. Plows can not be used in the Mayan area because there is a strata of limestone six inches beneath the surface and the slash and burn method is used to this day — Now slash and burn agriculture is a matter of precise timing — The brush must be cut at a certain time so it will have time to dry and the burning operation carried out before the rains start — A few days’ miscalculation and the year’s crop is lost —

The Mayan writings have not been fully deciphered, but we know that most of the hieroglyphs refer to dates in the calendar, and these numerals have been translated — It is probable that the other undeciphered symbols refer to the ceremonial calendar — There are only three Mayan codices in existence, one in Dresden, one in Paris, one in Madrid, the others having been burned by Bishop Landa — Mayan is very much a living language and in the more remote villages nothing else is spoken — More routine work — I studied Mayan and listened to it on the tape recorder and mixed Mayan in with English — I made innumerable photomontages of Mayan codices and artifacts — the next step was to find a “vessel” — We sifted through many candidates before settling on a young Mayan worker recently arrived from Yucatan — This boy was about twenty, almost black, with the sloping forehead and curved nose of the ancient Mayans — (The physical type has undergone little alteration) — He was illiterate — He had a history of epilepsy — He was what mediums call a “sensitive” — For another three months I worked with the boy on the tape recorder mixing his speech with mine — (I was quite fluent in Mayan at this point — Unlike Aztec it is an easy language.) It was time now for “the transfer operation” — “I” was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan — The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it — I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate — “He is the best transfer artist in the industry” I was told “For a price.”

We found the doctor in a dingy office on the Avenida Cinco de Mayo — He was a thin grey man who flickered in and out of focus like an old film — I told him what I wanted and he looked at me from a remote distance without warmth or hostility or any emotion I had ever experienced in myself or seen in another — He nodded silently and ordered the Mayan boy to strip, and ran practiced fingers over his naked body — The doctor picked up a box-like instrument with electrical attachments and moved it slowly up and down the boy’s back from the base of the spine to the neck — The instrument clicked like a Geiger counter — The doctor sat down and explained to me that the operation was usually performed with “the hanging technique” — The patient’s neck is broken and during the orgasm that results he passes into the other body — This method, however, was obsolete and dangerous — For the operation to succeed you must work with a pure vessel who has not been subject to parasite invasion — Such subjects are almost impossible to find in present time he stated flatly — His cold grey eyes flicked across the young Mayan’s naked body:

“This subject is riddled with parasites — If I were to employ the barbarous method used by some of my learned colleagues — (nameless assholes) — you would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites — My technique is quite different — I operate with molds — Your body will remain here intact in deepfreeze — On your return, if you do return, you can have it back.” He looked pointedly at my stomach sagging from sedentary city life — “You could do with a stomach tuck, young man — But one thing at a time — The transfer operation will take some weeks — And I warn you it will be expensive.”

I told him that cost was no object — The News was behind me all the way — He nodded briefly: “Come back at this time tomorrow.” When we returned to the doctor’s office he introduced me to a thin young man who had the doctor’s cool removed grey eyes — “This is my photographer — I will make my molds from his negatives.” The photographer told me his name was Jiminez — (“Just call me ‘Jimmy the Take’”) — We followed the “Take” to a studio in the same building equipped with a 35 millimeter movie camera and Mayan backdrops — He posed us naked in erection and orgasm, cutting the images in together down the middle line of our bodies — Three times a week we went to the doctor’s office — He looked through rolls of film his eyes intense, cold, impersonal — And ran the clicking box up and down our spines — Then he injected a drug which he described as a variation of the apomorphine formula — The injection caused simultaneous vomiting and orgasm and several times I found myself vomiting and ejaculating in the Mayan vessel — The doctor told me these exercises were only the preliminaries and that the actual operation, despite all precautions and skills, was still dangerous enough.

At the end of three weeks he indicated the time has come to operate — He arranged us side by side naked on the operating table under floodlights — With a phosphorescent pencil he traced the middle line of our bodies from the cleft under the nose down to the rectum — Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns — From a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor separate the two halves of our bodies and fitting together a composite being — I came back in other flesh the lookout different, thoughts and memories of the young Mayan drifting through my brain —

The doctor gave me a bottle of the vomiting drug which he explained was efficacious in blocking out any control waves — He also gave me another drug which, if injected into a subject, would enable me to occupy his body for a few hours and only at night. “Don’t let the sun come up on you or it’s curtains — zero eaten by crab — And now there is the matter of my fee.”

I handed him a brief case of bank notes and he faded into the shadows furtive and seedy as an old junky.

The paper and the embassy had warned me that I would be on my own, a thousand years from any help — I had a vibrating camera gun sewed into my fly, a small tape recorder and a transistor radio concealed in a clay pot — I took a plane to Mérida where I set about contacting a “broker” who could put me in touch with a “time guide” — Most of these so-called “brokers” are old drunken frauds and my first contact was no exception — I had been warned to pay nothing until I was satisfied with the arrangements — I found this “broker” in a filthy hut on the outskirts surrounded by a rubbish heap of scrap iron, old bones, broken pottery and worked flints — I produced a bottle of aguardiente and the broker immediately threw down a plastic cup of the raw spirit and sat there swaying back and forth on a stool while I explained my business — He indicated that what I wanted was extremely difficult — Also dangerous and illegal — He could get into trouble — Besides I might be an informer from the Time Police — He would have to think about it — He drank two more cups of spirit and fell on the floor in a stupor — The following day I called again — He had thought it over and perhaps — In any case he would need a week to prepare his medicines and this he could only do if he were properly supplied with aguardiente — And he poured another glass of spirits slopping full — Extremely dissatisfied with the way things were going I left — As I was walking back toward town a boy fell in beside me.

“Hello, Meester, you look for broker yes? — Muy know good one — Him,” he gestured back toward the hut. “No good borracho son bitch bastard — Take mucho dinero — No do nothing — You come with me, Meester.”

Thinking I could not do worse, I accompanied the boy to another hut built on stilts over a pond — A youngish man greeted us and listened silently while I explained what I wanted — The boy squatted on the floor rolling a marijuana cigarette — He passed it around and we all smoked — The broker said yes he could make the arrangements and named a price considerably lower than what I had been told to expect — How soon? — He looked at a shelf where I could see a number of elaborate hourglasses with sand in different colors: red, green, black, blue, and white — The glasses were marked with symbols — He explained to me that the sand represented color time and color words — He pointed to a symbol on the green glass, “Then — One hour” — He took out some dried mushrooms and herbs and began cooking them in a clay pot — As green sand touched the symbol, he filled little clay cups and handed one to me and one to the boy — I drank the bitter medicine and almost immediately the pictures I had seen of Mayan artifacts and codices began moving in my brain like animated cartoons — A spermy, compost heap smell filled the room — The boy began to twitch and mutter and fell to the floor in a fit — I could see that he had an erection under his thin trousers — The broker opened the boy’s shirt and pulled off his pants — The penis flipped out spurting in orgasm after orgasm — A green light filled the room and burned through the boy’s flesh — Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan — The words curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils — I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel — The broker smiled and held out a hand — I passed over his fee — The boy was putting on his clothes — He beckoned me to follow and I got up and left the hut — We were walking along a jungle hut the boy ahead his whole body alert and twitching like a dog — We walked many hours and it was dawn when we came to a clearing where I could see a number of workers with sharp sticks and gourds of seed planting corn — The boy touched my shoulder and disappeared up the path in jungle dawn mist —

As I stepped forward into the clearing and addressed one of the workers, I felt the crushing weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing my spirit in a soft invisible vise — The worker looked at me with dead eyes empty of curiosity or welcome and silently handed me a planting stick — It was not unusual for strangers to wander in out of the jungle since the whole area was ravaged by soil exhaustion — So my presence occasioned no comment — I worked until sundown — I was assigned to a hut by an overseer who carried a carved stick and wore an elaborate headdress indicating his rank — I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation — I turned on the thoughts of a half-witted young Indian — After some hours the invisible presence withdrew — I had passed the first test —

During the months that followed I worked in the fields — The monotony of this existence made my disguise as a mental defective quite easy — I learned that one could be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and only after the priests were satisfied that any thought of resistance was forever extinguished — I decided to retain the anonymous status of a field worker and keep as far as possible out of notice —

A continuous round of festivals occupied our evenings and holidays — On these occasions the priests appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or lobsters — Sacrifices were rare, but I witnessed one revolting ceremony in which a young captive was tied to a stake and the priests tore his sex off with white-hot copper claws — I learned also something of the horrible punishments meted out to anyone who dared challenge or even think of challenging the controllers: Death in the Ovens: The violator was placed in a construction of interlocking copper grills — The grills were then heated to white heat and slowly closed on his body. Death In Centipede: The “criminal” was strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes — These executions were carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.

I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields — However, I knew that to play these recordings would invite immediate detection — I needed not only the sound track of control but the image track as well before I could take definitive action — I have explained that the Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances — These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought — I found out also that the priests themselves do not understand exactly how the system works and that I undoubtedly knew more about it than they did as a result of my intensive training and studies — The technicians who had devised the control system had died out and the present line of priests were in the position of some one who knows what buttons to push in order to set a machine in motion, but would have no idea how to fix that machine if it broke down, or to construct another if the machine were destroyed — If I could gain access to the codices and mix the sound and image track the priests would go on pressing the old buttons with unexpected results — In order to accomplish the purpose I prostituted myself to one of the priests — (Most distasteful thing I ever stood still for) — During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut — I was able to endure these horrible encounters by promising myself the pleasure of killing this disgusting monster when the time came — And my reputation as an idiot was by now so well established that I escaped all but the most routine control measures —

The priest had me transferred to janitor work in the temple where I witnessed some executions and saw the prisoners torn body and soul into writhing insect fragments by the ovens, and learned that the giant centipedes were born in the ovens from these mutilated screaming fragments — It was time to act — Using the drug the doctor had given me, I took over the priest’s body, gained access to the room where the codices were kept, and photographed the books — Equipped now with sound and image track of the control machine I was in position to dismantle it — I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images and the changed order would be picked up and fed back into the machine — I had recordings of all agricultural operations, cutting and burning brush etc. — I now correlated the recordings of burning brush with the image track of this operation, and shuffled the time so that the order to burn came late and a year’s crop was lost — Famine weakening control lines, I cut radio static into the control music and festival recordings together with sound and image track rebellion.

“Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill! — ”

Inexorably as the machine had controlled thought feeling and sensory impressions of the workers, the machine now gave the order to dismantle itself and kill the priests — I had the satisfaction of seeing the overseer pegged out in the field, his intestines perforated with hot planting sticks and crammed with corn — I broke out my camera gun and rushed the temple — This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static — You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors — Priests and temple guards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into the control room and burned the codices — Earthquake tremors under my feet I got out of there fast, blocks of limestone raining all around me — A great weight fell from the sky, winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground — Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar.