Curated by Axel Heil, Udo Breger and Peter Weibel

March 24 — August 8, 2012

Text: Ian MacFadyen

Photographs: Eric Andersen

.” . .the city moved in swirls and eddies and tornadoes of image. . .”

Off the Map

This is a major exhibition of Burroughs’ work in all media over a lifetime of unparalleled research and creativity, and it also explores Burroughs’ influence on later generations of artists. With around 2,000 items, including books, newspapers and magazines, photographs, films, paintings, sculptures, letters, and artefacts, it is a wonderful testament to Burroughs’ extraordinary achievements, and to the dedication, scholarship and originality of the curators. It is a huge show, with 600 editions of Burroughs’ books and publications, and 150 original exhibits courtesy of the Estate of William S. Burroughs, as well as a selection of works by artists who collaborated with Burroughs, who acknowledged his influence, or whose works seem aesthetically, historically and culturally connected to Burroughs’ own ethos and praxis. The show is a travelogue in which sidetripping off the map is not just allowed, but de rigeur. Although Barry Miles has provided an excellent chronology and the show moves from birth to death, conventional structures of linear biography and historical “progress” are contradictory to and made redundant by Burroughs’ work of recycling and rewriting, cutting up and folding in, and the ZKM show severs the time lines at strategic junctures. Echoes and correspondences are set up by placing particular works in different contexts, so that one of Rolf-Gunter Dienst’s paintings, for example, a blue-on-red calligraphy, is hung not in the Gysin section with Dienst’s other work, but in another space, alongside Gysin’s “DANGER” photos of Burroughs and the cabinet containing The Soft Machine. Likewise, a Gysin Naked Lunch quotation grid, the opening of Naked Lunch transcribed from the German, is hung, appropriately, in a space relating to that book, rather than in the Gysin section of the show. In this way, a too-rigid uniformity of thematics and practices is avoided. Directional signs are set in the floor at strategic points, psycho-geographic Situationist homages used to some purpose — that way Rauschenberg, this way Paris, and over there Photography. . . But you make your move, get diverted en route, and find yourself happily lost in fascination. The exhibition is not a tourist itinerary, a chronology of dead sites, a comparative presentation of artworks, but a switchback topography, inviting excursions off the main drag. . . St Louis. . . Tangier. . . Paris. . . Los Alamos. . . London. . . Kansas. . . South America. . . The viewer-stroller moves in and out of the sets and the unfolding creative domains. . . Larry Clark. . . Robert Mapplethorpe. . . Walter Stohrer. . . George Condo. . . Genesis P-Orridge. . . Clemente. . . Basquiat. . . Patti Smith. . . Rauschenberg. . . Orientation is by design, desire and pure happenstance, and the route you take determines what you see and how you see it. . . 

The Writer Is on the Cover

Burroughs’ books are displayed in specially constructed shelved wall cabinets of varying dimensions. Hardback and paperback editions, including German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and other languages, chart the images and typography and design of Burroughs’ books over 50 years. These cabinets, fascinating to fans of Burroughs and book collectors, and beautiful to look at, also function as cultural transmission collages, 3D time capsules, and they reveal the complex history of the marketing of Burroughs’ avant-garde writing and the representation of homosexuality and drugs from the early 1960s onwards. There are also wall-angled and standing vitrines in the ZKM show in which journals, periodicals, critical reviews and anthologies, photo books and compilations are displayed — along with scores of images of Burroughs. Certain vitrines collect and focus on particular areas such as the Beat Hotel and the Paris years, with books by Harold Chapman, Harold Norse, Barry Miles, J-J Lebel and Henri Michaux, others are rich with Burroughs’ coverage in the media, from Big Table I and the Chicago Review of Autumn, 1958, to Life’s November 30, 1959 issue, with “Beats: Sad But Noisy Rebels” by Paul O’Neill, through into the 1960s and a cornucopia of underground mags and newspapers. . . There’s a drawing of Burroughs as the man with X-ray vision on the front of RAT: Subterranean News, October 1968, and there’s Burroughs again on the front of Books and Bookmen, March, 1963, with Madame Rachou making an extremely rare media appearance — “his banned book The Naked Lunch is named by Mary McCarthy ‘one of the two great novels of the twentieth century’ but. . . read B&B’s cool appraisal of this unknown, unread author.” That phrase gives one a start — Burroughs, the “unknown, unread author.” . . On into the 1970s and 1980s, Heavy Metal, magazine littéraire, Creative Camera, Soho News, Playboy — the sheer range of sources is striking. Here’s Burroughs as a comic book character by S Clay Wilson, or in serial solarisation on the cover of the December-January 1977 issue of lightworks. . . There’s Burroughs photographed with Jimmy Page on the front of Crawdaddy in June 1975, and Richard Avedon’s classic whiteout shot on the cover of HP (Bocken), 15 January 1983, “De Godfather Van De Beat-Generation,” and Burroughs posing with pistol on the front of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring, 1984. One thing for sure — from glossies to mimeograph, high to low, Burroughs really made the covers. The Soho News, February 18-24 1981, has one of those rare pictures of Burroughs smiling — “The Inner Burroughs: Novel Ideas On Urban Terror,” by Edmund White. . . The punning title neatly condenses and promotes Burroughs’ peculiar mixture of fiction writer and polemicist, the infamous marginal man getting his radical ideas out there, the renegade author as professional writer, making a living from his own strange perspective. . . Another vitrine contains newspaper spreads from Basler Magazine, 1989, 1993, 1999, by Udo Breger — just one example, along with expanded media editions publications such as Naked Scientology, Electronic Revolution, Ali’s Smile, and issues of Radium Magazine, of the importance of Burroughs’ work, especially the cut-up, for more than one generation of German-speaking writers and artists. Burroughs is contextualized within an international avant-garde, appearing on the cover of Radium 226.05 Magazine, Spring 1986 — “Bisticas Bowles Breger Burroughs. . . Giorno, Gysin. . . Ploog P-Orridge Wilson.” A vitrine with copies of Burroughs’ seminal The Job also includes So Who Owns Death T.V., The Dead Star, Apo-33, and L’Herne’s Burroughs Pélieu Kaufman: Textes. The textual material is skilfully juxtaposed and both thematically coherent and visually striking, so that The Soft Machine is accompanied by Exterminator and Minutes to Go, while, for example, editions of Roosevelt After Inauguration are placed in the same cabinet as copies of The Yage Letters — as Miles says in his guide notes, “It was not until 1979 that Lawrence Ferlinghetti finally published it with City Lights and in the meantime it has been reinstated where it originally belonged in The Yage Letters.” Miles’ notes which accompany the show are excellent and precisely informative, and he’s prepared to take issue, too, as with Burroughs’ attitude to women: “the old dualism of men being of the air, that they have the adventurous spirit and women being home makers are earthly, committed to stay grounded. . . This is of course the opposite of most stereotypes which attribute magical knowledge, witchcraft and spirituality to women and pointing out that men created the rigid authoritarian structures of state and the military that Burroughs objected to so much.” It’s significant in this respect that Burroughs was inspired by nagualism, and although he knew that in the history of this heretical magical system there had been many vitally important women shamans and followers, he criticized Carlos Castaneda for being surrounded by female devotees — “Too many nagual women.” 

Silver Boys and Screaming Skulls

“The space of heaven is filled with naked beings rushing through the air. . .” Burroughs’ painting Silver Boys, 1987, is a dance of cosmic transcendence, like the one performed by Lykin in The Ticket That Exploded — “He was drifting through space, wafted by currents of glowing gases. . . twittering creatures pulling and tugging at him and dancing on their way leaping from soaring black heights into deep blue chasms trailing the neon ghost writing of Saturn. . .” The Silver Boys derive from bodies which “burn with a silver flash” and drift like phosphorescence in The Ticket That Exploded, while the silver flash is described in The Place of Dead Roads — “the answer came to Kim in a silver flash. . . Silence.” Boys’ eyes flash silver in Burroughs’ texts, they escape gravity and mortality and swirl through the silence of space, breathing silence. . . Their bodies merge in an erotic space dance, drops of semen falling like shooting stars, “like opal cane” and “jissom turn to little white flowers in the air fall so slow. . .,” while “The SILVER SMILE” is the ghost sign of the Wild Boys, floating in a blue twilight sky beneath a silver crescent moon, an erotic, beckoning apparition. . . The aerial ballet is anti-gravity sex, and the boys copulate in space in The Wild Boys and in The Ticket That Exploded — “The sexual acrobats balance a chair on high wires and ejaculate from the tension” and turn “jissom cartwheels.” As ever in Burroughs’ work, in all media, there’s the fated switcheroo — a rocket’s blast cuts to a burning oil drum, the great project of self-creation and immortality devolves into corpses and rubble-strewn streets. You see breathtaking satellite pictures of silvery galaxies and then the close-up of a sad dead monkey’s paw. Those adolescent aeronauts joyfully swooping through the ether have their dark counterparts floating on a river of night, screaming skull-masks cast into outer darkness, noir silhouettes in a dead city, a pistol in a gloved hand. . . No other writer, no other artist has ever approached Burroughs’ visionary alternation between transcendence and degradation, the cosmic and the quotidian alternating in a continual flickering stream. 

Slits in Time / City of Sodom / Flying over Ruins

Looking at Burroughs’ paintings at the ZKM, I remembered André Breton’s statement, that surrealist collages are “slits in time” through which “former lives, actual lives, future lives melt together into one life” — the collage cuts through time and space, juxtaposing and concatenating and merging historical and psycho-geographic scenes. Breton’s “slits in time” seems in accordance with Burroughs and Gysin’s practices of “cutting through time lines,” and with the spinning slits of the Dreamachine, while Hal Foster has pointed out the resemblance between Breton’s understanding of collage and Walter Benjamin’s definition of the dialectical image: “It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past; rather, an image is that in which the past and the now flash into a constellation. In other words, image is dialectic at a standstill.” This, in turn, suggests something essential to Burroughs’ approach to the visual image, both written and painted — the evocation of the silver flash and the whirling mosaic, and the hole “blown through time,” resurrecting pirate utopias, activating the sets of the Old West and the New World, escaping from the doomed planet. . . Burroughs seeks those transcendent moments of stillness and wonder which Breton evoked in his paradoxical formulation of collage as the creation of “illusions of true recognition.” Through written and painted palimpsests and those “magical photographs and films,” Burroughs explored the psychic potential of social mythologies, cutting through the materials of historical reproduction, transforming the dialectic into flashes of enlightenment, creating constellations of fascination — promising escape from the self, out-of-the-body experiences, the living of other lives in other times. . . It is in this sense that Burroughs has the “company” of his own shape-shifting characters, and why he employs the maxim, “It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.” For Burroughs, painting was a method of time travel, the conjuration of the scenes and times and characters of his own life and cosmogony, and it was also the convergence of psychic exploration and the reclamation of radical, secret histories. Like Gysin, Burroughs was an instinctively and determinedly heretical historian, and Operation Rewrite was crucially bound up with the two men’s homosexuality and their lives lived in subcultural, marginal milieux. If history is fiction, if nothing is true and everything permitted, then the social and political records may be recast, reconfigured, according to homosexual desire and the experience of criminalization — the hidden histories of homosexuality would be regained through the writing of fictions, through visionary projections, through a spirit of systematic contradiction and deconstruction. News clippings in Burroughs’ paintings are presented in order to be lacerated and scorned, as in the 1988 painting Last Chance Junction And Curse on Drug Hysterics — “It is my firm belief that the drug addicts in the United States should be dealt with the same way they were dealt with in China. . .” This cutting of the Ann Landers column is both framed and despoiled by brush strokes, red painted flames shooting out from the derided text, while another clipping in the picture is titled “the world’s end” — “Scores of religious fundamentalists are heeding an author’s predictions that a prelude to Christ’s second coming is near and some are selling their worldly goods to prepare for the end of the world. . .” These true believers liquefy their assets before The Rapture comes down and lifts them up — they’ll bank their cash as soon as they’re booked into Paradise . . . Christian Fundamentalism, the oppression of gays and drug addicts, the coming apocalypse, the buying and selling of the earth, the extinction of wilderness species — Burroughs literally draws upon the reportage, sticks it on the painting wall and frames the lunacy and bigotry with his own splenetic calligraphy and graffiti. The train image in this painting, captioned “Casey’s last ride,” is an early steam-driven version of the Nova Express — the train of history on its fixed linear tracks, on its one-way trip to oblivion. Asked about the “world situation,” Burroughs would reply, “Hopeless,” but if he intended to “write his way out” of personal anguish and despair, and out of an ideological, historical and linguistic impasse, he and Gysin would also create their own, alternative anti-capitalist image bank, picturing and transmitting the world otherwise, the way they wished to see it, while envisioning other ways of being in the world. Paul Hallam, in The Book Of Sodom, 1993, writes: “There is no Sodom, there are only Sodom texts. Stories of Sodom, commentaries, footnotes, elaborations and annotations upon Sodom.” But the Book of the City of Sodom would surely include images as well as texts, pictures hidden in plain sight as well as the provocatively “pornographic” — elegiac and celebratory representations and projections, from black-and-white Times Square hustler photos to the paintings of Francis Bacon. Sodom City would exist not only through the recreation of a City of Words, written out of the erasures of censorship, but would be a City of Images, a plenitude of polymorphous-erotic pictures filled with human feeling. A number of Burroughs’ paintings are part of this City of Sodom, though they are only rarely illustrative or specifically “queer” in their iconography — rather, they are allusive in their seductive effects and sensual sweep, invoking the return of the repressed, the lure of what lies hidden beneath. The breaker of taboos, the scorner of censorship, the creator of images of attack and rupture, is also the artist of drift, of endless recreation and disappearance, ceaseless transmigration and dispersion. Burroughs’ painting is a form of Memory Theater, the re-staging of characters and sets from his written work, though only vestigial narrative links are suggested — the image fragments are caught in circulation, phantasmatic ciphers marooned in space, ghostly manifestations among the ruins, images of separation cut adrift in splatter and whirl, torn and punctured. Burroughs’ written narrative sequences, in which sets and characters are linked and combined in scenarios, however fractured or elliptical, are spilled in his painting, traced and registered only to dissolve and become undone, visual versions of the great theme of disembodiment in Burroughs’ writing. It is painting as the medium of remembrance, and painting as perpetual Disappearing Act — the salvation of shards from the Floating World, and the dream of escaping entropy and the planet’s gravitational pull. . . Asked about his belief in the possibility of immortality, Burroughs would reply, “Well, a writer has his books, an artist has his paintings. . .” Faithful to the spirit of contradiction, Burroughs’ belief in the immortality of art challenges his dictum that the artist is working towards his own obsolescence — the artist would live on through the magic of his creations, through his radical vision: ars ab experimento. Paul Klee, the artist so revered by Burroughs, wrote in 1935: “I have long had this war inside me. . . And to work my way out of my ruins, I had to fly. And I flew. I remain in this ruined world only in memory. . .”

Cut-Outs and Terminal Holes

The stencils Burroughs used for his sprayed paintings are displayed — the ex votos of the art process, a talismanic cabinet. These tools of the trade, paint-splattered masks and silhouettes, have their own seductive power, progenitors of Burroughs’ cut-out figure painting Crazy Man. Stencils, sprayed, painted and screened, feature in the work of a number of artists in the show, like the grimacing lapel badges, upside-down smiley faces and idiot grimaces in Walter Dahn’s Materiabild of the 1980s. . . Wolf Pehlke’s Beat Farming Area 23, in which the dead play panpipes and have mushroom heads, is spray-painted with stencils on canvas. . . Mike Kelly’s exhibits include a striking black mask visage from the Pansy Metal series while in his paintings Stump, A Scion Of Gun World, and Finger Poppin Time, all from 1975, crystalline star forms radiate around ragged, torn, impasto holes, centers of absence, coagulated, the informe of the material of paint itself . . . There’s a Peter Doig painting of repeated gun motifs, with a face mask sticking out its tongue, and Philip Taaffe’s gorgeous Sanctuary, 2002, a biomorphic paradise garden with templated, tentacular biomorphic forms in red on a green ground. . . A work by Wallace Berman, document paper on wood, from the 1970s, features his signature repeated motif of a hand holding an image box — a cross, a stopwatch, daisies, a Buddha. . . Turn any corner and you pass from an urban inferno to a new Space Eden, from pictures of riot culture to projections of transcendence. A prevalent mode is that of pictures-within-pictures, painted and stencilled and photo-inset, with the repetition and variation of painted cut-outs. . . The transposing and subverting of media is apparent throughout the show — the reproduction and manipulation of images, the creation of détourned, personalized iconographies. Artists engage with chance procedures, expressionist and calligraphic gestures, heterogenous materials and processes, variation through reiteration, creating palimpsests of layered images, transforming digital information into analogical, handmade motifs. . . Burroughs and Gysin influenced other artists through cut-up and Third Mind media processes — this included systems artists of the 1960s and early ’70s. But Burroughs’ painting did not influence other painters, rather his late career coincided with the rise of a new expressionist figuration in art in the 1980s, including graffiti artists, while younger artists like Basquiat, were powerfully attracted to Burroughs’ legendary life and his writing, and Burroughs’ collaborations with many artists, including Keith Haring, Philip Taaffe and Robert Wilson, contextualized his art within contemporary practice. Book and magazine artists had previously illustrated Burroughs’ work — Malcolm Mc Neill‘s collaboration with Burroughs, Ah Pook Is Here, showed that this could be done with great individual style and elan, and likewise Bob Gale’s illustrations to The Book Of Breeething were striking and apposite, while several of Norman Rubington’s black ink illustrations to extracts from The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded in The Olympia Reader of 1965, were effective. A crucial part of the influence of Burroughs’ iconography and iconoclasm is his own image reproduced in the media, and at the ZKM we see versions of this image as they have been re-deployed, re-contextualized, subverted and celebrated by other artists, through photography, paint, collage and film. Beyond this fascination with the mythos, we find many artists inspired by the anarchic spirit of Burroughs’ work — violent, satiric attacks upon America, the military-industrial complex, religious bigotry, censorship, the war on drugs, a destructive culture of excess imperiling the ecology, blindly killing thousands with unmanned drones and signing off on it.  

Dangerous Immaculate / His Work Is Crystal / John Isaacs On Burroughs

I spoke with the artist John Isaacs about Burroughs and his work, and about his own contributions to the ZKM exhibition, in particular John’s 2007 sculpture Where Is My World, made of glazed ceramic, steel, plastic, spray paint, human hair and an electric appliance. John Isaacs:

Burroughs’ front is armour-plated, a carapace, he’s there with a gun or a typewriter, and it’s frontal, frontal, frontal. . . He confronts you, he’s looking out directly, and it tells you something about the image world, the world he sees and how we see his image . . . Then you see him from behind and he’s totally vulnerable, you see him walking in a field in a photo or shooting at targets and he’s so frail and defenceless, even though he’s shooting a gun, and you realize he was always that way, he was always old, he was always vulnerable, but he stood there, he looked at the world, he confronted it. . . Burroughs’ work, it reflects the light, it’s so pure, it can’t be corrupted, it’s dangerous, immaculate, the most terrifying thing, and Burroughs’ purity was terrible to people because their view of life could be crumbled, obliterated. . . His vision cuts through, his work is crystal, crystalline. . . I studied art after I studied biology and that’s part of the connection, I mean, Burroughs is about getting away from the body, out of the body, but the body in his work is insistent in its beauty and in its decay. . . The drugs, the alcohol, people will do it in a nightclub filled with light in darkness and smoke and Burroughs has that in his writing, the shattering of syntax and words like hieroglyphs, a writing you have to navigate through, you can see it moving on the page, and you’re passing through these atmospheres and the feeling you get is not like any other. . . My sculpture in the show, the one you like, it’s an amorphous blob of flesh in ceramic, but the neon light coming through the hair is kind of angelic. . . And on top of it is a Kurt Cobain record. . . It’s the idea of a lamp as a domestic object that you reach out for in the dark, at night, to illuminate, the first thing you reach for, to switch on the light, to read a book in the night, to be illuminated. . . And it’s the light, the radiance taken over by the Church, the monopoly of Divine Light. . . There’s a fair degree of highly suggestive surrealist possibilities in this idea of a highly manufactured object with this hair hanging down, it’s absurd, uncanny, untimely, and these metamorphoses you can’t grasp. . . You ask what this has to do with Burroughs, but it doesn’t work like that, this piece is in the show and there are certain correspondences, it’s about confluences, possibilities, and I don’t prescribe a single meaning to a work. . . It floats in space and yet it’s this amorphous mass, and there’s a lot of amnesia involved. . . I’m the artist but how can I account for the origins of this piece? Well, no, I can’t. . . You said you found it one of the most fascinating things in the exhibition, but it isn’t specifically about Burroughs’ work, and a work must transcend its own origins. . . That ceramic lamp, it’s exotic, you can’t account for it, you want to cuddle it and demolish it, and maybe that’s how it belongs in the Burroughs show. . . This ceramic blob is the tumour, it’s broken through the surface, it’s the light you just switched on in the darkness, and you switched it on, and you’re looking at it. . . So embrace it, hate it, love it, smash it to bits.

Not Dead Matter

There are spectral aphasias throughout Burroughs’ cosmogony, scenes of sensory overload and cancellation, a feeling comes through, but it escapes visualization as it exceeds verbalization — ectoplasmic flesh, the odourless alleys of space, the silent frequency of junk, the colorless no smell of death. . . And then there is the deliquescence of the abject and anomalous, the dissolution of matter into liquid oozing sludge — super-entropic schlupping-up. Life becomes ethereal, phantasmagoric, or degenerates, becomes base, loathsome, informe. The viscous state seems allied to cooking up heroin and shooting up, the liquid shot and the liquefaction of the body, and Burroughs returns hypnotically to the tropes of the degraded and the spilled. . . As psychoanalyst Mary Douglas wrote in her seminal work Danger and Purity, “The viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a cross-section in a process of change. It is unstable. . .” Heroin is escape from “base conditions,” it is transport out, and a taste of immunity, but the addict’s return to the suffering body is excruciating, and the ethereal and the abject are intertwined throughout Burroughs’ writing — in his painting the materiality of paint and its ineffable effects combine as praxis and synecdoche of this existential dialectic. Burroughs treats paint as matter, smearing it around with a suction cup or his hand, he splatters it and scrawls in it and presses and drags it. Even shot at from a distance, paint is physical material to be manipulated or damaged, or, in Gysin’s more restrained phrase, “given a little push.” In his painting Burroughs was indeed indebted to Gysin, and to their collaborative scrapbook work which returned in his paintings, and he continued the Third Mind precept of creating through processes which bypass the agency of control — the physical matter of paint conjures both ethereal states and biologic degradation through a panoply of effects, conjuring both transcendent spaces and scenarios of earthly horror. It’s paint as the prima materia from which new life emerges — as Burroughs wrote in Nova Express, “the image material was not dead matter.” It was physical material transformed into the living image, coming alive through other eyes and seeing fingers. Burroughs’ paintings mix expressionistic brushwork, calligraphy, collaged newspaper and magazine texts and photos, grids and lattices, scrawls and drips, satellite photos, cut-out figures and shotgun holes, sprayed silhouettes and space-filling pattern-making. . . He used anything and everything to hand, and in process and in form they are heterogeneous works, while they are structured to provide multiple viewpoints and layered surfaces. Composed as a series of pictures within pictures, equivalent to his writing which concatenates scenarios and develops stories within stories, their effect and their meaning is intrinsically bound up with the jumps and bridges they make between quite disparate kinds of material, and very different representational forms — again, the Scrapbooks of The Third Mind were the progenitors of this approach. Vision moves through grid and splatter, photo and calligraphy, sprayed masks and pours of paint — from hand-smeared pigments to a gun-blown hole in a literal Door of Perception. The blast hole is a space for projective vision, an opening, an invitation to see through. . .  

Flynn’s Flying Fuckers / Painting His Way Out / A Killing Hate

There are swirls and veils of color in pictures like Dance of 1001 Veils of 1990, Key to Pink Door, 1987, and Compunction in Silver and Tourquoise, 1990 — strokes and sprays of paint which might be seen as “space-fillers,” decorative and repetitive mark-making filling the tabula rasa of the blank panel or the empty page, but Burroughs sees and treats the unfolding, burgeoning space as cosmic, with the trajectory of celestial bodies passing through multi-dimensional lattices, confirmed by the inclusion of satellite photos. Burroughs had described the writer, with a nod to Trocchi, as a “cosmonaut of inner space.” As a painter he approached the image as both dream travel and space travel, equating the two — both were trips into the unknown, across the event horizon, through spaces which, as Gysin insisted, were not contained in the individual psyche, but existed between psyches as well as being observable, under certain conditions, in parallel dimensions. For Burroughs, painting provided access to those spaces, he was trying to make visible the creatures he believed inhabited those literally magical realms, seeking contact . . . Alien heads and masks appear in the paintings alongside space photos and “Anyone can see them,” Burroughs said to me — anyone alive can access these apparitions, so long as they are open, receptive: “None so blind as he who will not look.” He knew he was researching areas of decried and scorned experience, perceptual and spiritual — as Burroughs once said to Gysin, in Gysin’s apartment in Paris, “If you can’t see it, you’re nowhere. If you can see it, it’s in the folklore department.” In The Last Rocket Out, 1992, a gold penis escapes a liquefying grid as the structures of the doomed earth buckle and melt. The winged, flying rocket penis recurs, an emblem akin to Erroll Flynn’s private gang pin-badge, which Flynn once gave to his child co-star Dean Stockwell, a winged penis with the initials F.F.F. — Flynn’s Flying Fuckers. Stockwell proudly showed the badge to his mother, who was appalled — like an outtake from Burroughs’ Port of Saints. The penis reappears in the painting The Old Man of the Mountain, 1988, beneath the crossed bones of piracy and heresy, an emblematic homage to Hassan I Sabbah — the erection in insurrection. The image links the silence of images and Hassan I Sabbah who, at the end of The Ticket That Exploded, paradoxically speaks — “Silence to say goodbye.” Painting for Burroughs was a way of continuing his attempts to “learn to think in silence” — painting was communication in silence, through space, escape from the linear sequencing of time-bound, endlessly circulating word jabber. Another silver spray painting, Room For One More Outside Sir, 1988, reverses the phrase from the film Dead of Night used in Naked Lunch and other texts, but plays once again on the inside / outside thematics of Naked Lunch‘s “Postscript” — well, it may be “COLD OUTSIDE,” freezing in the “icy blackness of space,” but that’s where the artist wants to go, to escape the mortal condition, the nagging aging body, the gravity drag, the earth-bound quotidian, to blast off into those “fluid spaces” and stream through galaxies. Burroughs’ pictures do not seek to illustrate his texts, but rather transpose subjects and even characters through a process which brings them forth. When I talked with Burroughs about this, he spoke of “recognizing” scenes, of making connections and associations as he worked on a picture — elements emerged and mutated, apparitions which he would track in a painting, and from picture to picture, and these spirits and demons, revenants and archetypes, and the sets they inhabited, moved back and forth between his paintings, his writing in progress, his published books and his memories and dreams. Painting was not illustration, but conjuration through felt transpositions, revealing what Burroughs could not have accessed otherwise. It was an extension of the visualization processes which had vitally fuelled his written work, and it was also the fulfillment of a long-held desire to create his own entirely visual art — he had made hundreds of drawings in Tangier, and worked on scrapbooks, and discussed art with Gysin and studied his paintings, and he loved the work of Paul Klee. . . It had been a long and dedicated apprenticeship. Burroughs writes in My Education of “the untenable position of an omniscient observer in a timeless vacuum. But the observer is observing other data, associations flashing backward and forward.” Through his painting Burroughs pursued and traced those flashing associations and they lead him not towards “a timeless vacuum” but into the infinite unknown, a scorned, ignored universe of magic and possibility, systematically eclipsed by the quotidian earthbound. He was getting old, he’d lived a life, and it might be supposed that his preparations for death and his desire to travel through space were synonymous. But if death was inevitable, Burroughs’ desire to “get off the planet” was a choice, a conviction, and polemically driven — “anything to avoid the hopeless dead-end horror of being just who and where you all are: dying animals on a doomed planet.” In this sense, space was not death, it was the promise of escape from death, and painting, for Burroughs, was the projection of his characteristic desire for literal transcendence. To paraphrase Burroughs in “Lee’s Journals” — “I include the painter in the painting,” even though the painter is “painting his way out.” Burroughs’ paintings may be beautiful and seductive, and he certainly emerges from this show as a captivating colorist, but in his art, as in his writing, he is polemically driven — perhaps only Burroughs would have proselytized painting as a method of implementing curses. Throughout his work Burroughs is confrontational, intransigent, and hostile to the impositions of morality and law, enraged by attempts to curtail his own desires or restrict his liberty. In Queer, Lee “felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted them to do. ‘Someday I am going to have things just like I want,’ he said to himself. ‘And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.'”  

Pied Piper Artists of Marrakech and Hamelin

The titles of Burroughs’ paintings are bestowed, not pre-ordained, they are possibilities, not givens — here language provides points of entry to the unfolding ports-of-entry of the images. The titles can also be pretty long, word streams generated by triggered associations — part of Burroughs’ exploration of the relationship between word and image, as in the silver skein painting from 1993 at the ZKM which is titled, Cosmic Sad Clown He Knows the End. He’s Full of Holes! He’s Full of Holes!. However poetic such titles may appear, they are actually intuitive, felt recognitions and responses to the apparitional images, providing glimpses of the moving scenarios and “living forms” which Burroughs saw emerging from the pigment like our own doomed species in The Soft Machine — “When we came out of the mud we had names.” A critic has said that it’s sometimes unclear what Burroughs’ titles refer to, but in the two examples he cites, the titles are both lucid and richly suggestive. The Alleys Of Marrakech, 1993, pays homage to Peter Mayne’s classic 1953 book about the Medina, better known today under the title A Year In Marrakesh, and still a wonderful read. In the painting a storm breaks over the Djemaa el Fna and the rain runs in red torrents down the “red clay walls” which Burroughs referenced elsewhere in his writing. A linear sketch of the stalls, rooftops, alleys and awnings can be glimpsed through the downpour, reminiscent of Gysin’s exquisite ink drawings of the Medina, and the exemplary site of Gysin’s multiple image paintings — the topographic eye penetrating the shifting pictorial maze with its many “ports of entry.” The picture is a memorial to Marrakech, the city which Burroughs had visited with Ian Sommerville, and with Mikey Portman and Brion Gysin, in the 1960s. Those friends and lovers have gone, and the red storm has driven the acrobats and storytellers and musicians and dancers away, but visions of Marrakech remain, and Burroughs would dream about the city at the end of his life — “Walking along a narrow street in Marrakech with Brion Gysin. The street is covered overhead, as many streets in Morocco are. . .” The 1992 painting The Door in the Mountain Side Through Which the Piper Led the Children of Hamelin does not illustrate Grimm or Robert Browning’s versions of the story, both of which Burroughs knew well, rather the image of a line of dancing figures emerges from the process of smearing and impressing paint over a chaos of grids, and the title recognizes and identifies this possible reading of the picture while the theme also corresponds to Burroughs’ approach to painting as lure, seduction, the hypnotic magic which leads astray, off the map, into the picture. The Painter is the Pied Piper, the magical artist Brion Gysin who listened to the trance pipes of JouJouka while he painted his visual seductions, and who paid homage to Wu Tao-tzu, the artist who vanished into his own picture — the artist creates a pictorial world with “a life of its own,” and is consumed by it, but not before he’s led his followers into the captivating domain. In The Ticket That Exploded, prisoners hear the blue notes of the flute of Pan trickling down from a remote mountain village and they stream after it, hypnotized by the music, pursuing the siren call of the Little Blue Hills. Gysin liked to listen to Miles, Joujouka and great old Blues recordings as he worked, and those calligraphic, emblematic Gysinian strokes and flourishes are notes and runs on a grid of staves, a living score, to be seen and heard, played horizontally and vertically, on a tilted plane of reference, tangled up every which way, because seeing is hearing and feeling in our synaesthetic sensorium. 

Alien Communion

The sprayed silhouette of a homunculus appears on the verso of Burroughs’ double-sided red cut-out figure Crazy Man, 1988, exhibited in the final space at the ZKM. This has been described by one critic as an “alien and heartless” creature, but it may be read quite otherwise, as heralding the resurrection of the perfected human in alien form — the extraterrestial as the vehicle for the continuation of the alchemical project of the homunculus, following the eradication of the human species. Alien life forms manifest in Burroughs’ paintings, and “alien penetrations,” as in Four Celestial Babies of 1992, a painting about the babies created by aliens who abducted the crew of the Mary Celeste in 1872 — in My Education Burroughs describes how these creatures can shape-shift, becoming lemurs, cats, monkeys and flying foxes as well as fantastic unknown hybrid dream creatures. Burroughs says that they can “take any form that the Guardian can see” — the artist creates these creatures by seeing them, his vision protects the endangered species. No distinction is made between the lemur of Madagascar, the alien Crazy Man, the flying fox, and the Celestial Baby because the creatures of the human imagination, like those of the Amazon, are also under threat, in the process of being expunged or driven out. Creation is vision for Burroughs — as he said about his attitude to writing, “If you can’t see it, you can’t say it.” The eye sees, and the picture comes alive, it is activated, moving, full of potential, the not-yet-seen, flickering back and forth between figure and ground. Burroughs told me about his use of satellite photos in his pictures, the eye reading vast distances, defining the pictorial space as that of the universe, then closing in fast on a tiny surface detail in the painting. Creation does not stop when the painting is made, he said, because every time it’s looked at, it changes, revealing other scenes and unfolding vistas. . . The artist looks at his own pictures, but they are not “his own” — what he sees he did not consciously put there, how could he? Because the pictures unfold with an uncontainable “life of their own,” the metaphoric made literal — words on fire, the machinery of genetics, galactic spermatozoa, fungus spoor, a stricken buffalo, a behemoth in chains, the Devil at noon, a golden word in a blue spinning world, liquid nets, tombstones in a rain of scimitars, an avalanche of sheeps’ blood pouring down the red walls of Marrakech, a homunculus in an oubliette, black Christmas trees and silver will-o’-the-wisps . . . Burroughs is the artist as Guardian of this way of seeing, the protector of the lemur through the art of seeing the lemur. In a 1988 work, paint on paper, Ronald and Nancy Reagan appear upside down through a palimpsest of heavy black calligraphy — the media repro image is like a grinning death brand coming through the animal’s rippling, living fur. . . Burroughs was fascinated by accounts like Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion, only complaining that he hadn’t been abducted himself, and Burroughs’ art was motivated by the desire for alien communion, to make contact with the other. Even if this is dismissed or explained as a synecdoche of the hostile unknown of his own psyche, it is actually an accurate description of Burroughs’ approach to painting — he sought to be transported, seduced by creations beyond his own determination, to see otherwise, to recognize that emergent other as alive, to be taken out of himself, captivated, immersed, transported by wonder, rapture and awe. And, not coincidentally, this was a cause which had to be fought for. 

Covert Stories

Images of Burroughs, photographed, drawn, painted and collaged, appear frequently on the front covers of his books — not only on editions of his essays, interviews, collections of experimental texts, but also on the covers of his fictions. Today celebrities appear on the covers of their ghosted trash, because that’s what they’re selling — their images on the jacket. But Burroughs was a celebrity of a different order, and no other writer, or celebrity, ever looked like that. . . The image of the author on the front jacket of a novel is not at all common, and is especially suggestive in Burroughs’ case. These cover images of Burroughs show either the writer’s inscrutable, photographic, screened veneer or air-brushed SF or expressionist illustrative versions of the Burroughs persona, attempts to evoke the hallucinatory psyche, the “multiple selves” and fictional extensions of William Burroughs / Inspector Lee of the Nova Mob. Artists have homaged Burroughs and used his image since the 1960s, but these book covers, by designers and illustrators and photographers, are also homages, and though cued to the promotion and selling of the books, they are a crucial part of the Burroughs iconography. The process began with the Calder 1964 Naked Lunch cover with the cut-out head of the cut-up writer, inset with collaged photos from the Gray Room, the eyes razored out and replaced with blazing red discs, the face blurry with the unreadable photo-scenes of Ian Sommerville’s infinity wall collage, images projected onto and through Burroughs’ face. . . It is a seminal image and the progenitor of a lineage of covers focusing on Burroughs’ haunted visage. Its relation to Gysin and Sommerville’s face and body projections would become clear, though Calder seems to have created the image intuitively, seeking an appropriate effect to convey the nightmare miasma of the book, combining the mask of the seer and the face of suffering. The gray photo-montage illustrates the disease of images ravaging and consuming the human image, which actually accords with the description of the pipe-smoking agent in Junky, a description which elsewhere merges into the changing faces of the junk-sick addict, skin crawling and burning up like a hive or attacked by rabies: “His face had not only aged, it had decayed. He had the look of a man suffering from a fatal illness.” Burroughs’ image here becomes a screen for fascinated projection, a transformed image of the “Definitive Bulletin” description of the Sender in Naked Lunch — “The Sender will be defined by negatives. A low pressure area, a sucking emptiness. He will be portentously anonymous, faceless, colorless. He will — probably — be born with smooth disks of skin instead of eyes. . . He doesn’t need eyes.” Burroughs’ own eyes are replaced with twin red suns, hot and explosive as the eyes of addiction in Junky — “Sparks exploded behind my eyes. . .” The image is genetically, generically allied to images of Ray Milland as Dr Xavier in the 1963 film The Man with X-Ray Eyes, directed by Roger Corman. Dr Xavier can see through ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths and is pictured on the film poster with white disks for eyes (in the film, Miland wore special contact lenses) — he’s the literal visionary who can see to the very edge of the universe, who can see the “eye that sees us all.” But this transcendent vision proves to be a curse, at the expense of the good doctor’s humanity and sanity, and at the end of the film Dr Xavier blinds himself like Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. The Calder image is of alien vision, the eyes of a seer whose vision transcends the limited range of human vision, but the gaze is possessed, demonic — the eyes looking out from the image bank, from the stricken psyche, millions of images passing in a miasma across the “grey screen always blanker and fainter,” and images “moving around under the skin…” The image seems connected, in part, to a passage in Junky, rather than Naked Lunch, in which Bill Lee sees an Oriental face eaten away by a disease, the face melting “into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated. . . a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.” Those red eyes glaring through the gray mask are the same red as the typography of the two words “BURROUGHS” and “NAKED,” flashing out from the otherwise black lettering — Burroughs. . . . Naked. . . 

Mutant Heads / Subject to Endless Possession

The Calder cover may be seen as the progenitor of a Science Fiction / Horror lineage in Burroughs’ visualized iconography, a fantasy illustration mode in which Burroughs’ image morphs into “The Voracious Aliens,” creatures with staring eyes and shaved heads, including the airbrushed mutant heads of the Corgi editions of Burroughs’ novels in the 1970s and Mark Foreman’s late ’80s screaming demon on the cover of the Paladin edition of Naked Lunch, while we project Burroughs’ eyes looking through the blue mask on the Flamingo edition of The Soft Machine, the staring eyes beneath the helmet and through the gas mask on the Paladin edition of The Ticket That Exploded. . . There are thirty examples of book cover images featuring Burroughs in the ZKM exhibition, and these are extended by their genetic, and generic, transformations. They are reminders of how rare it is for a writer of fiction to appear so frequently in this way, over so many decades, as the image incarnate of his own texts — images of the writer shape-shifting into alien representatives of his own scenarios, like Charles Burns’ drawing of Burroughs morphing into an alien creature on the jacket of the 1995 Paladin edition of My Education<. “The name is Burroughs” — and the image is Burroughs too, with hat, gun, syringe and cigarette props, back-dropped with sets collaged from the books, from the meat rack to lunar ruins, his persona subject to endless possession and mutation. Elsewhere in the show, there are portrait photographs of Burroughs by Ginsberg and other photographers, but these have been strategically juxtaposed with quite different, though telling photographs which evoke Burroughs’ writing. Ginsberg’s 1953 photos of Burroughs in front of a sphinx, Burroughs expounding to Kerouac, and reading Saint-John Perse, hang in the same space as images by Weegee — the nightlife of the city, a police arrest, a transvestite, a drugs sign and a gun sign, these mordant black-and-whites segue into Ginsberg’s ’53 photos of Burroughs and Kerouac acting out a scenario and Huncke strung out in the Hotel Elite. . .

Burroughs in and out of Time

Gerard Malanga’s b/w photograph of Burroughs outside 8 Duke Street in London features on the cover of Le Job: entretiens avec Daniel Odier, and there’s a blue / orange screened photo on the front of the Grove edition of The Job, and an illustration of Burroughs on the Jonathan Cape version, while Burroughs gazes out from the cover of the Academy Series published by Emergency Rip-Off Press. . . Naturally, Burroughs is on the front of Charles Gatewood’s photo portfolio 23, but he’s also on the front of Les Garçons Sauvages: un livre des morts, and Interzone, both published by Christian Bourgois editions. The photo on that 1991 Interzone is a shot of the elderly Burroughs by celebrity portrait photographer Renaud Monfourny. The figure, features entirely hidden, a black shrouded form, is nevertheless instantly recognizable — the silhouette of the hat brim, the raincoat epaulets, the stooped figure advancing with cane through shadows and light. . . A haunting image, but the way these things go, it is entirely out-of-sync with the text, like the front cover of the Picador 1993 hardback of The Letters of William Burroughs — 1945 to 1959, edited by Oliver Harris, with its photo of Burroughs by Alastair Thain — a good portrait of the elderly writer, but three decades out of time. Supposedly, according to a publisher’s assistant at the time, the younger generation of Burroughs’ admirers would not have recognized an image from the 1940s or 50s, even though the guy’s name was on the book. . . I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. Burroughs’ appearance is more temporally appropriate on the cover of the 10/18 paperback cover of Nova Express, cropped from a Gysin photo taken in Paris, and likewise in a detail from Charles Henri Ford’s famous fairground photo of Burroughs, screened in deep black and white contrast, which makes a classic cover for the Grove paperback of The Soft Machine — that man, that hat, the glasses and overcoat, the way he holds his cigarette. . . It’s the signatory style, the dress code de rigueur, and walking through the ZKM you can see it and track its variations — William Burroughs, in his true role of writer, his expression unreadable, remote, or scrutinising, submitting to the image machine, the one he analyzes and deconstructs in the books — “millions of images of me.” But that “me” would remain inscrutable, unknowable, fascinating. This image of the writer, the style of the presentation and performance of “self,” recall the private investigator and the Cold War operative, the author in the guise of his own character, Inspector Lee — the double agent, the secret service man, the man on a mission travelling through space-time in hat and raincoat like Lemmy Caution in Godard’s Alphaville — “I’d like to telecommunicate. . . I’m on a JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT. . .” 

These Are Not Straight Accounts  

Lemmy Caution blows his fake cover, admitting, “I’m not really a journalist.” The role of journalist is also one of Burroughs’ “cover stories,” as it is for Lee in Naked Lunch — the agent as reporter, the reporter as spy. Burroughs would write for Rolling Stone and Esquire, as well as a column for Crawdaddy and “Bulletins” for Mayfair — texts in which he sometimes parodically, ironically plays upon his journalistic role while his copy puts a freak spin on the news story and current affairs article. As a Mayfair sub-editor noted in 1968 of Burroughs’ coverage of the Chicago Democratic Convention, “The reports he brought back are not straight accounts. . . They are warnings. . . in the savage style of The Naked Lunch. . .” Burroughs’ media contributions were, in fact, often drawn from works in progress, and his current, related concerns, while his polemical “journalism” fed back into the writing of fictions, the autodidact intertwined with the writer of fictions. . . This is clear in the cut-up publications, in which polemic and fiction alternate and merge. Naked Scientology of 1978 brought together Burroughs’ 1970 article in the Los Angeles Free Press, his Open Letter published in The East Village Other, and his book review and letter which appeared in Rolling Stone in 1972. These texts are followed by Burroughs’ story “Ali’s Smile,” which had appeared in the 1973 collection of stories (marketed as a novel) Exterminator! This heterogeneity and recycling of material would characterise Burroughs’ media contributions, mixing and splicing the “How To” mode, the radical critique, the ostensible “report,” and scenarios in progress. Burroughs played out the role of reporter, and editor of the Cold Spring News and The Last Post, with a certain relish and irony, reminiscent of Gay Talese’s description of the old-time journalist as a member of “a tough profession. . . smitten by the flamboyant spirit of the ‘Front Page’,” his style paying homage to those “reporters who talked like big-city detectives.” But Burroughs’ journalistic function and practice were quite otherwise. 

Christof Kohlhofer / Other Level Processes

In the ZKM show there are several paintings and mixed media works by Christof Kohlhofer, including his ever-circling skeletal dance, Pearls before Swine of 1982. Kohlhofer has made a number of extraordinary re-picturings and bricolages of Burroughs’ image — Burroughs morphing into weird literary and artistic progenitors, staged “historic encounters” like Dolphin Starkist Presents William S. Burroughs As Vincent Van Gogh in Little Red Riding Hood, of 1991, a mixed media work on paper with running lights. In these delirious, yet wonderfully apposite meldings, the mythic and the quotidian are played off in a parody of Courbet — Good Evening, Mr Burroughs. Images are visually intercut, abridged in diffuse painterly styles, creating funny, macabre, twisted scenarios. In a quite different mode, Kohlhofer’s 1984 painting, Uncle Bill as a Young Man, is a minimal but painterly silhouette portrait, a single line of yellow paint miraculously conjuring the likeness and the look of the melancholy, contemplative Burroughs. This silhouette directly references Duchamp’s profile cut-out, and relates to Jasper Johns and Sturtevant’s homages to the Duchamp work, but it transcends these takes — this is quite simply a great portrait of Burroughs, beautifully achieved, and it shows just how little, and exactly how much, is required to communicate Burroughs’ image. For me, this was a standout work in the ZKM show, seamlessly combining in a conceptual and painterly form both a true homage and a comment on media identity. This image is reproduced in a 4-page Burroughs spread in VOGUE INTERZONE — SPECIAL SIMULATED EDITION, a brilliant glossy 206 page détournement of Vogue Magazine by Kohlhofer — the reproduced image has the title of Burroughs’ text, “The Humane Thing To Do,” superimposed and is followed by Burroughs’ one-page text on the abuse of animals (“Cats are being boiled alive in Korea as food”), a photograph of a grinning female butcher’s assistant sawing through a joint of meat, her face in the photo strategically smeared with red blood/paint, and a black and white blurred image made by pulling an image of Burroughs through a photostat machine. This image, Ruby Ray’s photo of Burroughs with a gun, William S. Burroughs in a San Franciso Garden, is transformed by Kohlhofer’s manipulated Photostat, creating a multiple image of Burroughs including the figure turning its back, as if the reproduction and transmission of the original image had made it rotate, revealing the image’s other side. . . This literal spin on the repro of Burroughs’ image would be used as the basis for Kohlofer’s W.S. Burroughs and G.I.S at the Persian Gulf Getting Ready for Take-Off, News of the Day: Mark Twain’s Lost Manuscript Found, a 1991 mixed media work on shopping bags. In these ways the iconography of Burroughs’ photographic iconography is usurped, challenged, played with, remade, and put through mechanical and reproductive processes, manipulated by hand, elegantly drawn and viscerally painted, politically as well as aesthetically redeployed. Kohlhofer’s work is unmistakable, special and individual, but it nevertheless exemplifies the ways in which many artists in the ZKM show engage with the Burroughs mythos, but also with his cut and transpositional processes, shattering and twisting the usurped image. Visual artists have been influenced by the cut-up texts, but also by Burroughs and Gysin’s processing of material — roller grid on scrapbook page, insert images and texts, use as source material for written text, cut-up the text, insert on scrapbook pages, cut up the pages, move, delete, overlay, recompose. . . Speak on tape, rewind, cut in, playback, transcribe, cut-up, transpose. . . It was this sense of inspired, indefatigable processing, the production of material through a synesthesia of reaction and effect through media systems which has influenced many artists. The art in the ZKM show recodes its electronic, media sources, its cybernetic cultural data, and layers its meanings through material transpositions of media signifiers, celebrating the intervention of the hand — I kept seeing analogue processes brought to bear on the digital, the hand and the gesture and the prima materia of paint used in the transformation of electronic media images and texts, making materially manifest the semiotic ghosts of the new digital ether, pushing technology into the creation of Burroughs’ “other-level experience.” Kohlhofer’s satiric and liberated processing of Burroughs’ mythos and image, and his wild, pantomimic art historical connectivity, are revealing of Burroughs’ own aesthetic disregard and bravura effects — Kohlhofer’s takes are not illustrative or hagiographic, but irreverent, hilarious acts of radical sympathetic magic.  

Doolie Junk Eye 

Neil Stuart’s design for the 1977 cover of the Penguin Junky has an extreme, cropped close-up of a human eye, the dark iris almost eclipsed by the black dilated pupil — the aperture is open, hypnotically drawing the viewer in. . . This dark gaze, in which a tiny window of light is reflected, shadowed by the eye’s lashes, is inscrutable, insatiable, the eye as black hole, sucking funnel, all-consuming void. . . We read it, helplessly, as Burroughs’ eye, the eye of the author of Naked Lunch, the addict who could look “at the end of my shoe for eight hours,” giving a whole new meaning to the term “persistence of vision.” It’s the ineluctably observing eye of the addicted writer, and it’s the mercenary, utterly immoral eye of Doolie in Junky — “You could feel him walk right into your psyche and look around to see if anything was there he could make use of.” The Doolie junk eye is a criminal psychic reader — piecing together the odds on visceral pleasure, theft, supply and demand, the lowdown on the real dope, and it is unremitting in its predatory surveillance, serving a chilling, voracious appetite, expunging whatever it has no use for as the image world passes silently through the dark glass of the now fixed, now swivelling optical apparatus. The injunction to see in Naked Lunch is the emergency antidote to this cold regard, turning uninflected, meaningless receptivity into galvanic recognition of significance, making the world come alive, and yet this photographic Junky eye could also have been used as a cover for Naked Lunch, showing the unflinching eye which sees “what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon,” seeing it all cold and clear and clean, seeing through the junk condition of unfeeling separation. That Junky look recurs in Burroughs’ writing, indifference and knowingness hardly differentiable, like the eye of the junk procurer and retailer in Nova Express which has an iris “shiny black like broken coal,” an uninflected black mirror swallowing light. It is quite unlike the eyes of the beautiful, gentle Lemur People in that book, their “liquid black eye screens swept by virginal emotions.” “Virginal”? “Emotions?” This Junky eye is beyond pity, beyond all care, except when demonic visions break through the junk immunity screen — in Junky the phantasmagoric invades the forensic, the hallucinatory and the fearful leak through the laconically descriptive, and even if these are described as if “watching a movie,” they bring with them a mortal trepidation. Junky‘s ostensibly flat, noir style is shot through with nightmare picture shows which Naked Lunch would enter and inhabit, escalating those images and sets into transporting overdrive. There are kicking nightmare visions in Junky: “One afternoon, I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of empty bars and cafeterias and drugstores on Forty-second Street. . .” Or the hallucinatory hit is evoked — “I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed like watching a movie: A huge neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in the clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.” Significantly, in his writing Burroughs evokes heroin addiction and withdrawal in visual terms — withdrawal “takes on a hellish glow of menace and evil drifting out of neon-lit coctail bars” while junk “blunts emotional reactions to the vanishing point,” it “telescopes down.”  

See With The Mouth And The Hand

Burroughs’ writing is supremely visual, and what is seen is often described as a series of unfolding scenes which are tactile, olfactory, auditory, synaesthetic, while the image moves, unfolds, shape-shifts, becomes a little movie which is then spliced with other footage. . . In My Education Burroughs recalled — “As a child of three I thought that one saw with one’s mouth. My brother then told me to close my eyes and open my mouth and I got the idea that I couldn’t see with my mouth. . . but people do feast with their eyes.” (Burroughs note: Did I ever tell you about the boy who thought his mouth could see? He became a very great artist.) There is a mysterious, poignant connection here, the orifice of spoken words as the instrument of vision, language transformed into sight — the silent open mouth of the writer who sees. In Painting and Guns, 1992, it is the hand which sees, Burroughs writing that “In painting I see with my hands, and I do not know what my hands have done until I look at it afterwards. It is when I look at the completed canvas that I know what the painting is about.” Cut-up was a “hands-on process” and machine processes were hand-manipulated and hand-screwed-up — the hand that sees in Burroughs’ paintings is an extension of the visionary hand of the Third Mind, making use of, and making otherwise, the hand put to work, moving heterogenous materials through diverse processes. In his artwork Burroughs used acrylic, spray paint, ink, letterpress, newsprint, woodblock and serigraph, housepaint, roller, gelatin-silver prints, glass windows, graph paper, stencils, crayon, typescript, collage, burn marks, offset litho, shotgun holes, pistol holes, canvas, plywood, handmade paper, suction cups, ink-jet prints, wooden doors and objects. Synesthesia and transposition crucially determine this exploration and combination of mediums and processes — Third Mind adventures in transcending materiality, which ironically, yet ferociously, put the human subject and the physical body back into the symbol systems and abstract analyzes of computer coded cognitive psychology.

Homunculus in Hell

In a painting by Burroughs at the ZKM, Death By Lethal Injection, 1990, the Gysinian grid mutates into the bars of a death cell, while the homunculus, the little man symbolic of rebirth and new life, made by spraying around an artist’s mannequin, is here cast as victim awaiting execution. The homunculus appears in Burroughs’ work with arms outstretched, rising from a red inferno, pleading for mercy, while in an untitled painting in the show, a red gunshot picture on wood, homunculi appear through the smoke of gun blasts, while others lie prone, in suspension, waiting to be born, or frozen forever underground. The image of the homunculus was clearly important for Burroughs — the man-created, not God-created model of human perfectibility, it represents his lifelong struggle to “recruit a real existence,” to change his consciousness and become truly aware. In this sense, the creature stands for Burroughs himself, as well as the dream of self-creation and immortality. The homunculus certainly connected with an early memory which he describes in Junky: “I was subject to hallucinations as a child. Once I woke up in the early morning light and saw little men playing in a block house I had made. I felt no fear, only a feeling of stillness and wonder.” The homunculus symbolizes the passage from abnegation and despair to integration and enlightenment — the creature passes through torments, tears himself with his teeth, vomits his own flesh, his eyes spill blood, he must endure terrors and despair in order to become the opposite of himself, breaking through his own conditioning and nature in order to achieve true self-creation and freedom, testing his own will and being to the absolute limits, achieving an alchemical, spiritual transformation. In the paintings we see the homunculus and his brother homunculi as they pass through stages of earthly hell, while scenes of terror, torture and murder continually emerge from Burroughs’ painted palimpsests — the blood red cages of an animal research unit, the bandaged screaming heads of a burns unit, while Jack is back in town in The Ripper Strikes Again of 1990, complete with a couple of bumbling booby Bobbies in the top left hand corner. . . Burroughs’ reds are bloody as blood-soaked cottons and smeared sunsets, suppurating mouth-wounds and squirted syringes, blood oranges and the saturation of red neon signs, the pictures splattered and drenched and explosive in their earthly uproar and anguish, the antithesis of the beauty and poignancy of his erotic utopian space paintings. Space is blue in Burroughs’ paintings as in his writing, while earth is a control planet on permanent emergency countdown — CONDITION RED. Burroughs paints the blue of the planet’s vanishing wilderness skies in his 1988 Brightness Falls from the Air, a picture of a monkey leaping through the trees, the title referencing Thomas Nashe’s lines — “Brightness falls from the air. . . I am sick, I must die: / Lord have mercy on us.” On the verso of this picture there is a dancing homunculus caught in the burned-out planet’s golden afterglow. Farewell, flying monkey. Goodbye forever, little man.

Paris Photos

A head shot, taken from a Gysin 1959 Paris photograph of Burroughs in a doorway, is reduced and simplified to an image less than an inch high on the cover of the L’Herne edition of Les Lettres du Yage, a button badge image, instantly recognizable — that’s all it takes. This image, in larger format, was used by sound poet Henri Chopin for an edition of 30 prints in which the head is reproduced twice, the lower image superimposed with Burroughs’ text “a man of letters un poème moderne.” At the ZKM this print is displayed in a vitrine along with a Chopin OU revue-disque featuring Brion Gysin’s poems, Bernard Heidsieck and Chopin himself. The vitrine also includes an EP of Gysin’s “Junk,” performed by Gysin, Ramuntcho Matta, Frederick Cousseau and Yahr Lekker, alongside a photograph of Gysin and images of the Dreamachine. In this way, Burroughs’ image, and his cut-up “poem” text, take their place in the context of Poésie Sonore, performance art, music and mixed media. A variant treatment of the Burroughs image appears on the cover of the December 1967 issue of La Quinzaine and it’s clear that this Gysin picture, along with another Gysin Paris photo of Burroughs, from the same period, this time wearing glasses, posed in front of two wine drinkers on a bench, exerted a strong fascination, in part because of the way Burroughs stands, cigarette in hand, regarding the camera, posed but coolly remote. Udo Breger used the doorway image as the frontispiece photo for the 1976 e.m.e. edition of Die elektronische Revolution, and combined the reversed image of the head with a TV set flickering static for the 69’d frontispiece to the accompanying English version — an effective photo-montage inserting the Burroughs’ Broadcast into electronic media, the cut-up writer cutting through the static. Those running bands of interference, which may be procured by looking at the Dreamachine, would mutate into Gysin’s psychedelic Dreamachine paintings, themselves the beneficiaries of Gysin’s earlier desert paintings, the horizontal ribbons of color in the latter transformed into Gysin’s colored ink and airbrush picture, Untitled (Dreamachine) of 1963, in which the desert mirage becomes the interiorized alpha / theta scanning zone of the Third Mind, manifesting as a brilliant art work on paper. This was, this is the process of synesthetic, multimedia transference and transposition.  

My Name Is Not Yours to Use

The Paris wine bench photo was included by Burroughs and Gysin in a scrapbook collage for The Third Mind, circa 1965, the page identified as “W.R. Hearst Jr.” The collage includes a newspaper image of William Randolph Hearst, Jr. and typescript by Burroughs, both with burned edges — these may be read as charred fragments from the blast of the S.S. America described in the cut-out Burroughs text which directly connects Burroughs’ image with Hearst’s image: “BLOOOMMM / Explosion splits the boat –” It’s an extract from “Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” written by Burroughs and Kells Elvins in 1938. Hearst was editor-in-chief of Hearst Newspapers and chairman of the executive committee of the Hearst Corporation, and he’d received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in the mid ’50s. Burroughs hated the power of the Hearst Corp. and the “yellow journalism” employed and developed by Hearst’s father — the phony pictures, distortions and smears, fake interviews, ruined reputations and sensationalised copy consumed by a rabid readership. The term “yellow journalism” derived from the character The Yellow Kid, who first appeared in the comic strip “Hogan’s Alley” which ran in the New York World and New York Journal, while Burroughs would write about Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, the great con man whose moniker derived from the strip. Crucially, the burned Burroughs typescript in the Third Mind collage is a text dealing with “Hurst” [sic] and “you Board Members, vulgar stupid Americans you will regret calling in the Mayan Aztec Gods. . .Get out of the game and take it to Cut City. . . Give my name back. You have not paid. My name is not yours to use.” The collage is a spell against Hearst Corp. and expresses regret that Burroughs and Gysin had submitted themselves to the Life routine, the Old Gold gimmick. The Third Mind employed scrapbooks and tapes as transmitters of curses, and Burroughs would create a number of curse paintings, designed to “make the image happen” — after all, if the art was alive, if it was a “living image,” then it could produce an intended effect. For Burroughs, curse images were a logical extension of his view of art as animistic. Burroughs believed that anything you look at can come alive through the act of seeing — vision is the bestowal of recognition and connection, what you see comes alive in you.

Record Archive

There are Burroughs CDs in a vitrine — radio interviews, live readings, Spare Ass Annie, The Priest They Called Him, Break Through in Grey Room, beneath photos of Burroughs with Jimmy Page. . . In this space many albums are displayed, including Burroughs’ classic Dead City Radio. The importance of the spoken word for the Beats is clear — Kerouac and Steve Allen’s Poetry For The Beat Generation, Kerouac’s Blues and Haikus, featuring Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Ginsberg’s First Blues. Groups from the ’60s onwards inspired by Burroughs’ work, from rock to punk and beyond, are represented, including, of course, Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and Countdown to Ecstasy, albums by Soft Machine, and Seven Souls by Material, as well as Bowie’s seminal pre-punk prophetic Diamond Dogs. . . And there are specific homages to Gysin and Burroughs like The Hafler Trio and The Temple Ov Psychick [sic] Youth Present: Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, Manapsara Presents Queer: a Soundtrack to the Novel by William S. Burroughs, as well as Burroughs’ Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, the soundtrack to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson’s Mr Heartbreak. . . In another space the Long Players of John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem Poets series are exhibited — Life Is a Killer, Better an Old Demon Than a New God, Totally Corrupt. . . Album cover images from the pre-digital age, memories of the spoken word in rock culture before the rap of post-rock, Burroughs as performer, as recording artist. . . This is the archive as a record of recordings, the importance of the transmission of the sound of Burroughs’ voice, the tape experiments, the broadcast routines, music world and world music collaborations and homages, the soundtracks to Burroughs’ image, and to his work, on audio tape and vinyl and disc. A computer in the sound section provides access to RealityStudio — part of the new system for the dissemination of Burroughs and his work, and the transposition of his analogue history through digital processes, the bootleg cassette replaced, for the moment, by the download.

The Gysin Room / And More Besides

A Gysin wall cabinet includes Soft Need 17 (the Brion Gysin special issue) and the 1987 Galerie de France publication on Gysin, as well as The Cat Inside, an unfolded Calligraffiti of Fire makemono, the T.O.P.Y. document Dreamachine Plans and Die Traummaschinen — Plane (Bohmeier Verlag). Also the Guillaume Gallozzi catalogue of Gysin’s 1994 New York show, and Sphinx Magazine 5 featuring the Dreamachine and “Le Colloque de Tanger” in Kontexts 8, along with copies of Here to Go, Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, The Last Museum, Living with Islam, Désert Dévorant, and copies of The Process, including the Jonathan Cape edition with the great Hamri cover, so superior to the American antiquated typo aesthetic. . . To Master a Long Goodnight, and the beautiful Légendes de Brion Gysin traduit par Brice Matthieussent (gris banal, editeur). . . All this gives an idea of the range of Gysin’s complex, often frustrated career as a writer, while his recordings are displayed in a separate cabinet — Steve Lacy/ Brion Gysin: Songs, Gysin’s Poem of Poems and Orgy Boys, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at JouJouka, and Ramuntcho Matta Presents: Brion Gysin. There’s a nine-foot high enlargement of a photo by Udo Breger of Gysin looking out over his balcony opposite the Pompidou, the artist in a djellaba and Moroccan slippers, framed against the latticed architecture which he had prophesied in his work and which he would recreate in his late photo grids. Although his face is turned away, it’s clear that he is looking down at the street life below, the city flow, the passing traffic of the City of Light. . . The ZKM has some gorgeous Gysin paintings on view — calligraphic, rollered, photo-inset and written over, revealing the variety and ingenuity of Gysin’s use of the grid format and his electrifying graffiti. The torn and ripped blue collage grid Guerrilla Conditions is written over, horizontally and vertically, and physically lacerated, the lower part including a torn hole — “NON CREATION. . . THE AREA OF POETRY THEY CREATED. . . GUERILLA CONDITIONS. . .” It’s a ripped-up picture, a validation of, and testament to the violence of cut-up and the vision of The Third Mind, a “restoration” which recalls the mutilated art works of Gysin’s late ’50s and early ’60s performances with Burroughs and Sommerville. Next to this is a delicate linear grid, vertical stripes of scintillating pinks and reds, overlaid with semi-transparent oranges and pale yellows and reds in checkerboard squares — it’s a conjuration of the Dreamachine in motion, the evanescent whirl of blurred, melding layers of color shot through with points and lozenges of light. . . The overlaid, broken grid has been rollered horizontally, against the vertical flow, creating a flickering synthesis, an optical pulsation. . . As with the Dreamachine cylinder which seems to slow, reverse, then speed up, this picture fluctuates and shimmers and dazzles. . . In the 1974 roller ink grid called Burroughs in Tangier, two very small color contact prints of Burroughs with friends, one taken on the beach, are inserted into a blue yellow green orange grid of 12 rollered vertical strips. The pictures play upon the idea of the film strip or contact strip, while the crescent arches made by the roller suggest Moorish doorways and entranceways, passages into and through the picture space. This bright picture with its lightness of touch and empty spaces evokes the city and windy, open skies, memories of gone days, old photos in painted vistas, time images held in fragile suspension. There are pictures at the ZKM from the Naked Lunch grid series, with Gysin’s written quotations from the book in capital letters, laid over and within the rollered grids. In one picture Gysin has made a mistake, and quite artlessly corrected it, changing his misremembered “I CAN FEEL THE HEAT MOVING IN. . .” to “I CAN FEEL THE HEAT CLOSING IN. . .” The great passage from Naked Lunch about crossing the border into Mexico is written in red ink through a blue grid, conjuring “the sound of running water” and that “warm misty place.” These works testify to Gysin’s admiration for Burroughs’ masterpiece, and to his work on the screenplay, and they also combine the abstract system of the grid and literary quotation, image and text, pictorial calligraphy and handwritten language. . . Gysin was filmed by Antony Balch as he worked on these rollered “storyboards” and we can see Gysin’s hand-lettered capitals cut in with newspaper headlines, as superimpositions merge vertical and horizontal written texts, and Gysin moving the image around and the camera revolving. . . These Gysin pictures are visual homages to the textual dynamics of Naked Lunch, Burroughs’ words transferred to rollered strips which may be seen as akin to rolls of film, the literally “visual script” treated as units of a certain length, material cut into the pictorial format. The creative friendship of the two men is embodied through the act and processes of transposition, and looking at these works I think of the cover of The Three Minds by Francois Lagarde (Images Nuit Blanche) in the ZKM show with the intertwining of the two men’s names on the cover — “W.S. Burroughs Brion Gysin / W.S.B. Gysin / W.S.B.G. / Brion Burroughs / Brion Gysin W.S. Burroughs.” . . The bright orange ink painting Sweet Dream Song of 1963 homages Pantopon Rose in German — “WAS KUMMERT SIE SICH UM ATOMBOMBE SUSSE TRAUME PANTOPON ROSE.” The ink is bleached, transparent in places as if eaten away by acid, the ink dried around the edges of brushstrokes. . . “Grid” suggests fixed, but Gysin’s grids shift through superimpositions, they’re fluctuating, unstable, they shake and rock. There are two ink on paper Plans of 1961 and in the most striking, an orange and yellow roller grid has been overlaid with two blocks of mauve grid lines at a 45-degree angle. Rotation, a key principle of Islamic geometric art, here creates a vertiginous, flashing superimposition. . . A vitrine encases a Gysin Brayer roller and a Stanley knife, and in the vitrine next to it there’s a Burroughs typewriter. I look up from these “tools of the trade” and see the open gallery spaces around the central courtyard of the ZKM, the brilliant artworks and the cabinets of books and publications, and then I look back at the typewriter, the roller, the knife — all from this, and more besides.  

Rolf-Gunter Dienst

One of the great delights of the Gysin room, and of the ZKM show, is the work of Rolf-Gunter Dienst, who as a young man visited Gysin in Paris, while Burroughs, learning about Dienst and his work from Gysin, would take the train and visit Dienst in Germany — the young man’s mother noticed when Burroughs arrived that a button was dangling from his overcoat and she immediately took his coat, got a needle and thread, and fixed the button. . . The show includes a collaborative work from 1962, Schriftgarten (Ubermalung durch Brion Gysin), and several beautiful small paintings from ’62/’63, the Momentetagebuch. These employ variations of a complex, spidery, chrysanthemum-like ideogram, alternating between red and orange, or red and green, or red and black on green grounds. Looked at from a few feet, the characters recede and the interleaved lines of the green ground move forward, shimmering, and an instant later, the red characters blur into vertical, pulsating stripes. . . The effect of these apparitional paintings transcends optical art and the “purely” retinal — Dienst’s ideograms seem to rotate concentrically, and the colors flash and fluctuate, producing a disturbance in the circuitry of the nervous system, a disorienting, dizzying psychic buzz. 

American Flag Porch Sunset

There are photographs in the exhibition of Burroughs with the tools of his trade and significant props. There’s the writer with his wire manuscript trays on the front of Harold Chapman’s Beat Hotel. And he’s pictured on the cover of the Sans Soleil edition of Last Words, the author writing, pen in hand — it’s the performance of the act of writing, the very image of the writer’s vocation, the literal signature shot. And there are images of Burroughs with typewriter and with gun — Burroughs as dedicated writer and enthusiastic shootist, reminders that the gun was in the art before the art came out of the gun. Burroughs is a writer of Westerns, and a painter of Western shoot-outs in space — the painter as shootist, for real. Bowles recalled Burroughs in Tangier in the ’50s, and his room in the Medina — “One wall of the room, his shooting gallery, was pock-marked with bullet holes. Another wall was completely covered with snapshots, most of which he’d taken on a trip to the headwaters of the Amazon.” Thirty years later, the image wall and the gunshot wall would coalesce. Shoot through the image wall, and make an image of the shooting wall — see the door to the room as an image and blow it off its hinges. Here’s a photo of Burroughs playing out the character of the old writer on his porch with a shotgun in his lap, on the Penguin cover of The Job — a serendipitous reenactment of Kerouac’s memory of Burroughs in Texas, sitting on his porch with a gun across his lap as the sun was slowly sinking into the blood-red earth. . . An image reminiscent of William Burroughs Jr.’s account of Burroughs on the rooftop in Tangier, watching the sun go down, “right hand holding the perpetual cigarette, lips parting to the sun. . .” Then the rush to the typewriter, to the dark room illuminated by a haunting painting of the moon by Brion Gysin. . . These are moments of illumination, memorable visualizations of Burroughs as witness to the light fading out, the impermanence of all things, like Hokusai’s famous image, Nakamaro Gazing at the Moon From a Terrace — Nakamaro who went to China to discover the measure of time, and was imprisoned on a roof terrace, condemned to watch the moon rise and fall, until his last moon rose and fell. . . Burroughs’ proposed anthology of outstanding passages from literature would have covered love, solitude, old age and death, and would have been illustrated with “panoramas of sunsets and sunrises. . .,” and Burroughs watching the sun go down, the sun setting north or south of due west, is a synecdoche of Spengler’s The Decline of the West, an epoch extinguished like the life of a man at the end of The Place of Dead Roads — “. . . the sky darkens and goes out.” In American music, literature and art, the porch is the site of reminiscence and quiescence, both serenity and acceptance of the ending of a life — the view of the lawn, the garden, the street, passers-by, the old familiar neighbourhood, the gold light of evening leaving and the night coming on, and you can see it all ending. It’s the sunset porch, epitomised by James Agee and Samuel Barber’s 1947 elegiac, transcendent Knoxville Summer of 1915, for soprano and orchestra, the illuminated moment out of time, the world of childhood remembered towards the end of a life, recalling “that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street. . .” And here are photographs of Burroughs in old age, walking away, taking his leave, or with his eyes closed, head tilted back to receive the sun’s rays, an old guy on a torn davenport in a back yard, and the yard went on forever. Agee’s words evoke the vanished time which Burroughs would write of in Cobblestone Gardens, the elegiac mode which breaks through in his writing in bittersweet, unattended moments of nostalgia. . . In Knoxville, Agee recalls the blue dew and morning glories of a gone childhood, the long lawns and the tramcar spark running like a sprite down the wire, quiet talk on porches, the evening light falling and night coming on, and the mystery of “who I am” which remains, and the beauty and sadness of existence — “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth. . .” Burroughs’ memories, in the prologue to Junky, of the Midwest world of 1914, are akin to Agee’s elegy to the Tennessee of 1915 — the front lawn and the gas streetlights and the shiny Lincoln and the fish pond: “All the props of a safe comfortable way of life that is now gone forever.” The porch is a set in Western movie-lore as well as in representations of American suburbia from the turn of the century through to 1950s and ’60s Cheever Land and beyond, and images of Burroughs combine the two strands — shots of an old shootist, the retired frontiersman, his battles behind him but the gun still loaded, just minding his own business as blue shadows fall, but prepared to defend his suburban plot, his bit of paradise, should deluded trespassers or suicidal intruders call. . . I remember Ginsberg’s “porch haikus,” as he dubbed them — the direct perception of mortality, moments of fleeting existence caught on the wing, spontaneous soul transmission, views of the passing parade and the breeze through the leaves, first thought best thought and maybe last thought too, the poet with pen and page on the lap, at porch time. In fact, Agee’s original Knoxville text, written in 1935, was the spontaneous prosody of the porch, an improvisation, a stream of memory associations, and it was written and completed in just 90 minutes, a process prophetic of the writing of Jack Kerouac. . . As ever with Burroughs, there’s a corkscrew twist, an aberrant take on his own relationship with the American porch, despite those long hours spent reading the newspaper in the rocker in Algiers in 1949 — and so we CUT to Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1938 and “a small frame house on a quiet tree-lined street beyond the Commodore Hotel.” . . Burroughs and Kells Elvins are acting out improvised scenarios in the Hammett / Chandler mold and researching the sinking of the Titanic and the Morro Castle disaster. . . “On a screened porch we started work on a story called ‘Twilight’s Last Gleamings’ which was later used verbatim in Nova Express. . .” Here the porch becomes the site of story telling as the desecration of patriotism and heroism and manly virtue, while “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the National Anthem, is cut up and mocked on that leafy suburban street, along with the flag displayed on even the poorest porches of America. (Burroughs Note: A porch flag pole, metal, “with a wood grain coating for appearance,” and accompanying mounting bracket, is available from Wal-Mart for $24.75, while the flag comes in at a pretty reasonable $13.97). In Gus Van Sant’s 1990 film of Burroughs reading A Thanksgiving Prayer, the American flag ripples through Burroughs’ face as he says, “soak it in heroin and I’ll suck it” — while on the jacket of the 1985 John Calder edition of The Adding Machine, Thomi Wroblewski collages the American flag behind a photograph of Burroughs saluting — the flag emphasises the irony implicit in Burroughs’ salute, a civilian gesture, and one from a performer to his audience, which subverts the formal paying of respect of the armed services, while on another level we recognise it as a signal of recognition, a mark of true respect, directed at those who share his attitude towards the military and, by extension, the flag: “Last flag flaps when the yankee summons me with synthetic time synthetic life. . .” The porch and the flag evoke scenes and signs of tradition, memory and reminiscence in American life, and of disruption and overthrow in underground culture. The site returns in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino as the territory to be defended by the Republican with a gun, in the name of individual freedom — in fact, it is in this film that the porch becomes the paramount last bastion, the final ethical and ethnical defence of a beleagured notion of the old, white American dream: My porch — My America. But there are other, more hedonistic porches in the American iconography. John Leonard wrote of Hunter S. Thompson — “It is nice to think of him, naked on his porch in Colorado, drinking Wild Turkey and shooting at rocks.” While Thompson would remember street fighters and militants and a motorcycle gang attacking a flag pole in Washington, D.C. in 1969, screaming, “Tear the damn thing down!” The porch would return to Burroughs in dreams at the end of his life, as the site of desuetude and decrepitude, old abandoned sets and no one in the streets or leafy avenues — “Houses boarded up, others have an air of being semi-occupied. On a porch a rusting bicycle is overgrown with morning glory vines.” Burroughs escaped New York and it’s significant that his ecological art issued from the reversion to a form of the rural, the mind-your-own business Johnson neighborly ethics of “porch philosophy” in Kansas. . . The lemurs had been there from Naked Lunch on, but it was in tranquility that they reemerged in a rustle of leaves, a flickering of shadow and light. . . 

The Nekia

At the time of reading Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and writing The Western Lands, the Egyptian underworld was again paramount in Burroughs’ work, and the color blue in his work becomes night-blue, moonlight-on-water-blue, the Duad Blue of the Egyptian Underworld. Jung analyzed Picasso’s Blue Period as a descent into hell, the blue of the nekia, the artist dying through his work, entering the Land of the Dead. For Burroughs, this is a journey through a starry otherworld, a dream domain with narrow passageways and darkened galleries and chambers populated by fiends and terrors. On this journey the jackal-headed mortuary god Anubis acts as guide. Creatures appear out of the desert of death, like the jackal described by Kafka in “Jackals and Arabs,” “a jackal came trotting up, from one of whose corner-teeth there dangled a small pair of sewing scissors, covered in ancient rust” — cut-up scissor relics carried by the hated, hunted animal, the pariah dog destined to be the soul companion on that final trip across the Western Lands. In Burroughs’ work, the unspeakable must be spoken, fears confronted, the unimaginable brought forth from the depths of the psyche, life lived through an unremitting consciousness of death. Wittgenstein said that death is not an experience of life because it is not “lived through.” Nothing could be further from Burroughs’ recognition of mortality — it is the imprimatur of his writing, the death’s head seal on the codex of his cosmogony, the living truth of his death trip from St Louis to the Duad.  

Phenomenal Fires

There is something haunting and melancholy in Burroughs’ image, but also an intense fixity of regard, as well as a look of appraisal and self-protection. . . At the ZKM I kept thinking of Kerouac’s famous evocation of Burroughs’ “mad bony skull with its strange youthfulness — a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries.” Kerouac described Burroughs as “gray, non-descript-looking” until “you looked closer” and discovered, beneath the seemingly anonymous façade, the visionary, the esoteric teacher. This view is twisted onto a different plane of reference in Naked Lunch where fires burn through the addicted Lee, and the interior illumination is drug-fuelled self-combustion. . . Photography would reproduce Burroughs’ professional front, whilst providing glimpses of those “phenomenal fires” within, even though the subject, photographed so often over decades, accrues an armored regard against the intrusion and searching examination of the camera. Burroughs’ innate conservatism and shyness are inseparable from this strategy of concealment, but the secret life still comes through, or we read it so, or think we must see it so, breaking through the impassivity to penetrate the enigma. There’s a combination of iciness and dreaminess in Burroughs’ remote gaze, in the pensive and stoic appeal of those eyes which have seen so much and which seem to look out guardedly at a world as perennially sad as it is hostile. They are eyes which Victor Bockris would describe, in his transcript of the interview “The Captain’s Cocktail Party,” strategically echoing Burroughs’ own words, as “unbluffed, unreadable.” . . It’s the Burroughs gaze which Ginsberg characterized as a look of “benevolent indifferent attention,” or “attentive indifference.” So it’s startling, bizarre, a real shock, to see a photo of Burroughs actually laughing on the front of Edition Isele’s Portrait 4 — like seeing the impassive mask of Buster Keaton suddenly, incredibly, inexplicably breaking into a grin. Burroughs had his mask, and if, like Keaton, many subtle, tender, wondrous expressions pass over that mask, an irreducible, sorrowful look remains, the mask in place, caught on film, in the black and white which filmmaker and photographer Robert Frank considered the true dialectic of photography — the twin poles of hope and despair, materially embodied in the medium. It is in black and white that Burroughs and Keaton mutely personify the tragic Pierrot, the bloodless masker, the mortal mime of la condition humaine. At the ZKM I was reminded of Robert Benayoun’s critique of the genius of Keaton — “Keaton may have smiled on screen upon occasion (contrary to legend) — but his look never did.” Antony Balch told Terry Wilson that Burroughs “could look like many things,” but that special, haunted and haunting look remains — down all the years, beyond all laughter, beyond words. When Burroughs directly confronts the camera, the look pierces and penetrates the viewer — the transmission through time of an unaccountable sense of loss, the bleak apprehension of mortality and the expression of something secret, unimaginable, never to be disclosed, something beautiful and terrible which cannot be said, which nevertheless we feel driven to decode, because it addresses us, it mesmerizes us. André Breton: “Yet you see into a pair of eyes and know not what you see in those eyes / Since they see you.” 

Camera Immorata / Peter Hujar 

The ZKM show includes 80 prints from Burroughs’ original negatives, from the collection of Barry Miles, reminders that Burroughs was a photographer who investigated this medium with characteristic individuality and rigor. Burroughs was clearly drawn to the nostalgic and melancholy power of photography, as evinced by his scrapbooks and notebooks, but his own photographic works explore the illusionistic power of the photographic image through systems-based operations, questioning and subverting invested belief in the image as a record of a moment in time — like his black and white photographs, taken from his window in Duke Street, London, which appeared to document the hours of a day, but each image was actually taken on a different day, though the viewer would see, and so believe, otherwise. Burroughs photographed ruins, buildings in decay, a London which was being transformed, but too late for him — “They are rebuilding the City.” / “Yes. . . Always. . .” There are some lovely b/w portraits by Burroughs — of Terry Wilson, for example, a rarely seen image — but Burroughs’ photographs have a prosaic, sometimes forensic and even desolate effect — the distanced, bleak recording of a disappearing world, and street views as empty as in an Atget, but without the proto-surrealist strangeness and charm. Peter Hujar’s portrait of Burroughs, taken in 1975, was part of a project in which sitters were asked by Hujar to contemplate their own mortality, their own future deaths, as they gazed at the camera and waited for the photographer to get that “final” shot. The book, Portraits in Life and Death, published in 1975, included images taken by Hujar of the Catacombs in Palermo, juxtaposing the dead in waiting and the underground remains. . . Burroughs’ own deathly gaze, unlike that of some of Hujar’s other sitters, is reminiscent of his look in photographs by other photographers — it is as if that mortal recognition was innate, had been fixed in Burroughs’ look many years before, and he gazes back at Hujar’s camera with a long practiced, resigned, sad regard. One turns with a certain relief to the photographs of Burroughs by Udo Breger, a trusted friend who was able to capture Burroughs when he was relaxed, his guard down, living the kind of life that was being lived, forgetful of what that immortal lens signified and threatened.  

Amber Bead / Mirror Ball / Glass of Mint Tea

Images move in the mind, behind closed eyes: “I closed my eyes and saw cliffs on the outskirts of a town with houses on top of them, and a China blue sky, and white linen snapping in a cold spring wind.” Or the haunting images appear in dreams, as in this 1956 note — “I just fell asleep for a moment and had a flash of a dream: a policeman on a bicycle, screaming with shrill lust, following a boy down a long, dusty road in Mexico. In the distance a river with trees growing along the banks, and on the other side of the river a town.” In Paris in 1959, Burroughs sees the apparition of the face of his character Fats Terminal “in an amber bead Brion Gysin showed me from magic, Arab necklace. . . (Monster virus forms frozen in amber, looking for a way out and in you might say.)” Gysin and Burroughs also practiced crystal gazing and mirror scrying in the Beat Hotel, using a mirror ball which Burroughs had purchased, watching the images appear and vanish. November 1955, Tangier: “Watching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blown back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney. It seemed to have some special significance like an object spotted in a movie.” This tea glass in the sun manifests its magic courtesy of the influence of “Miss Green.” Throughout his writing Burroughs describes scenes becalmed in time, moments out of time — autumn leaves, scraps of silver paper, clouds and vacant lots on a windy September day and it’s getting late already, there’s a silver crescent moon like the set of a distant school play, and flickering silver titles fade out on a movie screen. These images, related to those images falling “slow and silent like snow” which he experienced through ayahuasca, had a recurrent, melancholy, uncanny power for Burroughs, their meaning just out of reach, with a significance which, he confessed, eluded him. They were evocations of loss, and have often been read as expressions of nostalgia, but they are also moments which seem to promise fulfilment and rapture, access to a magical domain. . . “In Interzone it might or might not be a dream, and which way it falls might be in the balance while I watch this tea glass in the sun. . . The meaning of Interzone, its space-time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world. . .” The glass of tea is not Proustian, it does not return Burroughs to the past, but heralds a dream life to come — a radically new existence is immanent in the glass of mint tea in the sunlight, and there is a feeling of transcendence as the vapor condenses in the air . . . Crucially, for Burroughs, this revelatory experience is not the involuntary return of memory, and the tea does not require tasting as in Proust — “the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate. . . The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.” Rather it is seeing the glass of tea in sunlight which is transfiguring for Burroughs, and which procures a sense of something crucial about to happen, an eruption which will transform “the real world.” The glass of tea has “some special significance” which is revealed through vision, a meaning which is held “in the balance” between the glass’s factuality and its strangeness and intangibility. Burroughs sees both quotidian object and dream image — the two are equivocal, suspended in a timeless moment in which he feels the possibility of the eruption of the dream into the so-called “real world.” . . The little episode of Miss Green’s Mint Tea is one glimpse of a way of seeing which would profoundly influence Burroughs’ writing and painting — the coexistence of “three-dimensional fact” and the object invested with “special significance,” and no way of knowing “which way it falls.” . . Vision holds a precarious “balance” between fact and dream, between steam in a glass and smoke from a factory chimney, between an object “right in front of you” on a bamboo mat and an image glimpsed on a movie screen. That sense of imminent breakthrough, and the feelings of wonder and elation and fear induced, would run throughout Burroughs’ work, privileging the visual and the gift of second sight. As with Nabokov, what is seen is supreme, but the true pattern of the “fabric of life” is revealed through the superimposition of the apparent design and what lies beneath — the fabric’s other side. As in Burroughs’ fold-in method, and as with a number of his artworks, the recto has its verso. Although the madeleine experience is determined by taste, Proust is a great visual artist, and Léon Daudet’s comment on Proust applies to Burroughs: “Not seeing what other people see, he saw things that no one else saw.” 

Queer Covers

There would be images from the ’80s of Burroughs happy and smiling with Corso, Leary, Bockris, Laurie Anderson, John Giorno, James Grauerholz, and others — and camaraderie and pleasure in company is there in the shots of Burroughs playacting with Kerouac and Ansen, in the 40s and early ’50s, but somehow, in the 1960s and 70s, the latter were not at all central, recalled or called upon, and not widely reproduced. No, it was the image of the writer as secret agent, the spectral observer, the apocalyptic dystopian which presided, which was required, during the years of the cut-up and the Third Mind. There is the myth as public dream, and the dream as private myth, and Joseph Campbell’s distinction is enfolded in the Burroughs image. The cover of The Burroughs File, 1982, shows Burroughs in the jungle, and this becomes an image of the writer as explorer, as well as placing the taking of Yage in relation to cut-up and Burroughs’ experimental writing. A cover may of course be constructed at hazard as well as over-developed, but the result is always fixed, a template of its time, a clue to the reading of the text within, and the different ways in which Burroughs’ covers function is both complex and revealing. Which covers did Burroughs himself like? Well, Burroughs told Terry Wilson how much he liked the Calder & Boyars 1972 edition of The Wild Boys, designed by John Sewell, with its parade of clay-colored faceless silhouette figures brandishing black guns, knives and whips — we don’t know why he liked it, but the fact that he did so may make us look at it in a special way. . . There are, too, some really bad Burroughs covers, like the 2010 American 25th-Anniversary Penguin edition of Queer with its chopped in half drawing of a skeleton in a suit sitting on a stool — an awful piece of poshlost. The figure is apparently to be read as the dead author still rattling around in his bones — well it’s not every skeleton that can pose for its own portrait, I guess, but the artist has entirely failed to correctly sit the deceased down on that damned stool. There are desperate, fraudulent attempts here to travel into another dimension of time — simulating the olive green of the Olympia Press (which of course did not publish Queer) and employing antique decorative letter blocks to signify the folky exotic culture of Mexico in the 1950s. This is a case of over-determination — the attempt to mark the significance of the book’s anniversary is pushed too literally and too far, and in all the wrong, heterogenous directions, while the idiotic depiction of the deceased author can’t in any way be justified as appropriately “Burroughsian,” or as a Charles Adams-style take on “the living dead,” or as a graphic twist on the Mexican Day of the Dead, or a trash aesthetic nod to ’60s underground comics, or a homage to George Olsen’s 1929 foxtrot “‘Taint No Sin (to Dance Around in Your Bones)” which Burroughs knew so well. . . No, it just won’t wash. “Queer” is spelled out on the front cover, but Burroughs’ Queer is absolutely nowhere here to be seen and the reader turns the book over and sees with relief the photograph of Burroughs and Marker on the back cover. . . The photograph of a young man by Ian Teh, on the front cover of the edition published in Great Britain, is far better, and at least encodes something of the desire and heat of the book — though the name of this brilliant, acclaimed photographer is spelled incorrectly on the back cover. The most famous cover of Queer is the reproduction of the painting Orangenesser X , 1981, by Georg Baselitz, on both the front and back of the jacket of the 1985 Viking edition — a powerful image chosen by Andrew Wylie. Baselitz may have exhibited his paintings upside down in order to draw attention to composition and painterly qualities, but the Orange Eaters series works quite otherwise and the pictures in the series have often been read as strung up, gagged torture victims, images of suffering. This is partly the way Orangenesser X works in relation to Queer — read as analogous to Lee’s distress, and to his routines which stand the world on its head, though this oral consumer has his mouth full of fruit. Baselitz’s “neo-expressionist” painting, though he has denied that the term applies to him, may be equated with Lee’s delirious possession, but not with the book’s third person, scrupulous, precise, unflinching but also tender and melancholic tone. . . Burroughs made his first shotgun pictures in 1982 but between 1983 and 1985 he concentrated upon the writing of The Western Lands, turning increasingly to his visual art in 1986, following the death of Brion Gysin. By 1990 his visual career was well under way with 18 solo exhibitions of his work. His own art would appear inside and on the outside of his books, like Creation of the Homunculus II, used as the frontispiece to My Education, and a detail of the Space Door painting of 1987 gracing the front cover of the Penguin 1990 Interzone. Unfortunately, incredibly, ironically, the latter image has been reproduced upside down — and not in the manner of Baselitz, though I guess it’s just possible that the image was manipulated to make the door handle appear on the right of the cover, above the Penguin logo, for “design reasons.” . . Well, I don’t want to believe it, and probably I don’t. 

Expanded Media

The title of the show, “Expanded media,” contains a reference to the German publishers Expanded Media Editions, in which one of the curators of the ZKM show, Udo Breger, was vitally involved. e.m.e. published significant works by Burroughs in German translation and English during the 1970s, including Electronic Revolution, Ali’s Smile / Naked Scientology, and the magazine Soft Need, including a significant Brion Gysin special issue. The term Expanded Media also refers to the connections and extensions of mediums of representation and transmission, connoting different kinds of data storage on computers and the transference and reprocessing of material. Our human memory is now inextricably plugged into the art, literature, culture and history data files of media storage, just as our knowledge is inseparable from the electronic processes through which data is retrieved, analyzed, edited, rearranged, reprocessed, re-presented. “Expanded media” is an appropriate theme for the ZKM which is an important center for the study of the potential of New Media in the arts — digital networks, creative participation, interactive feedback, technology as tools for social change, including the interfaces and transitions between analogue and digital processes. The frequency of usage, and the number of applications and meanings of the term “expanded media” have changed enormously since Udo Breger employed it in the 1970s, and this is also true of the related term “multimedia” as used in the title of José Férez Kuri’s book, Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age in 2003. The term “Multi Media” originated in the mid-1960s as a description of visual-and-sound performances and was used in the ’70s to describe multiple slide projector shows using a soundtrack — in fact, Gysin had already performed with Burroughs and Ian Sommerville in both these “multimedia” areas in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and if he was prophetically “tuning in” to the multimedia age, then he was broadcasting with his colleagues and collaborators from their very own Third Mind station, as well as sounding a warning about machine control and the apparatus of art as spectacle. By the ’90s, the term multimedia, like expanded media, primarily denoted the storage, retrieval and processing of different media, including the interaction of text, image, sound, film and animation via computer, an interactive process now known as hypermedia. Gysin and Sommerville used computers to create the Permutated Poems, but it is in a larger sense that Gysin and Burroughs’ work was prophetic of the multimedia / expanded media age, because they did not simply create in a number of different media, such as painting, writing, and sound, or combine / alternate these different media — rather, they created technical processes which moved through as well as between media, processes of transposition and translation and transference which transliterated sound, text and image. These processes depended upon sabotage and feedback, appropriation and manipulation, continual re-transcription and reprocessing, multiple layering, erasure and reiteration. Although “multimedia” has been used to describe “static” content such as a nonlinear text with pictures, Burroughs and Gysin’s scrapbooks and notebooks were not simply “word and text” creations, while their tape and projection works were more than sound and image performances — they were works in process, moving through media, analogical and aleatory, created through accretion and erasure, words becoming numerals and symbols, juxtaposed images transformed into written scenarios, the stroboscope hybridized with calligraphy, the computer printout treated as an oral recitation to be literally played back into the system. It’s in this sense that Burroughs and Gysin’s work was prophetic of the mixing of processes and the translation and transformation of material via computer. Cut-up and the tape experiments were part of “Operation Open Bank,” Burroughs and Gysin providing methodological and technical explications, urging readers to become writers, a democratization which would become the key participatory mode of social media. They accessed computers with the technical assistance of Ian Sommerville and their work was prophetic of the key characteristics of digital New Media — the manipulation of processes, interactivity and creative participation, the use of feedback as a generative tool, the democratization of creation, publishing and distribution, the creation of alternative markets of exchange rather than consumption. Gysin and Burroughs’ layering of analog material was prophetic of the compression of digital data, and though it’s true that they were mostly confined to the exploration of pre-digital formats of paper-based processes and film, as Antony Balch noted, the Third Mind scrapbooks were extended by the scrapbook system of IBM computer operators Willy Deiches and Brenda Dunks, working ostensibly through a Seattle IBM computer setup, according to mathematically precise coordinate points. Burroughs and Gysin treated the scrapbook as an archive in motion, the image-text volumes moving through time and space — the material (re)sources were continually accruing and re-made, the interconnectivity of the parts of the system exponentially radiating on multiple levels, it was the paper-based model of the digital interactive word-image data bank. But if later artists used “data compression” to omit “redundant” information and increase the quality of transmission, Burroughs and Gysin were actually interested in precisely the distortion and so-called redundancy in the systems they worked with, and on. The verification of accuracy, the “correction mode” — they didn’t want any of that. Rather, they pursued the corruption and infection at the interface of human and machine communication — theirs was the fearful study of possessed machine technology. Burroughs and Gysin did not subscribe to the idea that machine technology was neutral, and they treated recording and transmission as processes which transformed the “human” message, both revealing and negating it. Burroughs wrote in The Ticket That Exploded: “The words were smudged together. They snarled and whined and barked. It was as if the words themselves were called in question and forced to give up their hidden meanings.” Inching the magnetic tape back and forth, switching record on at very short intervals, those “hidden meanings” were “brought forth” and what emerged, as Burroughs heard it, was the machine production of self-referential consciousness, the Voice Inside — “Listen carefully and you will hear words that were not in the original text: ‘do it — do it — do it. . . yes I will will will do it do it do it. . . really really really do it do it do it. . . neck neck neck. . . oh yes oh yes oh yes. . .'” This biofeedback process was regarded by Burroughs and Gysin as the externalization of the human psyche — they would probe, analyze, record, reprogram, and reinstall it, according to their own “total resistance” design, before the cyber technicians of the burgeoning techno corporations plugged their own models of the Soft Machine in the world marketplace, and into millions of minds. Well, that was the heady, paranoid, and prophetic plan in that distant doomed decade, before it all came down. “I will create a system of my own or be enslav’d by another man’s.” — William Blake

Summoned by the Creatures of Childhood Wonder

It seems like the logical outcome of a lifetime analyzing and challenging conventional notions of perception and so-called “reality,” but magical contact with alien life, both the abjured, exploited animal world and the ridiculed idea of extraterrestial life, the sense of the living other, had been there throughout Burroughs’ entire life, from his childhood on — as a child he had “a recurrent hallucination or nightmare” about “animals in the wall.” Those hallucinated animals would break through the wall, the screen, the picture plane, the text, like the “animals of dreams” referred to in The Wild Boys, coming in and going out. They would appeare in Burroughs’ dreams, as recorded in My Education — “From one house drifts a heavy odor of flowers and the musky smell of impossible animals — long, sinuous ferretlike creatures that peer out through bushes and vines with enormous eyes.” Animals become Burroughs’ precognitive familiars, they are “beautiful creatures,” they fascinate him and fill him with tenderness and pity — “Realize how I love animals. . . weasels and skunks and wolverines and seals and bush babies.” You can try to call them forth, but they do not have to answer or respond — like the creatures of childhood wonder, Burroughs’ animals are timid, secretive, they emerge into “the light of day” then retreat, shooting back into their primeval night habitat. . . Now you see them, now you don’t, and sometimes a glimpse is all you get, and for Burroughs, this was the lure of painting — it was an invocation, a conjuration, and not only to see but to be touched by the lemur’s paw, as if the viewer and the image could become co-existent, transcending all boundaries and sharing the same space and time. It’s a refusal to accept the screen between image and viewer, and as with Sommerville’s infinity montages, Burroughs wanted to step right through and inhabit those other worlds, to activate layered images, to feel himself moved through avenues and ports of passage into wild, uncharted demesnes, transported out of the self, the summoner becoming the summoned.  

Multimedia Show on Mind Screens of the World 

In his cut-up books Burroughs describes vision in motion, as images are projected and mutate, and the pre-history of cinema switches to the sci-fi technological spectacle of the future city, merging the Domaine Poétique projections and the Dreamachine with animated calligraphy. In Nova Express, “A magic lantern projected color writing on their bodies that looked like Japanese tattooing. . .” while “Projector towers sweep the city with color writing of The Painter. . .” A room in the Beat Hotel becomes the projection site for a melange of cities, while the Dreamachine multiplies and grows in size, becoming “vast revolving flicker lamps,” “flickering cylinders of colored neon” in multimedia art events and discotheques in which the spectators and dancers become translucent in the dazzle, whirling their neon hula hoops — those hoops have themselves mutated from the Dreamachine, while the dancers disappear like the body illusions of the Gysin/Sommerville slide projections, becoming ghosts of the Dreamachine, spectres of the spectacle. In Burroughs the “towers open fire” and searchlight towers repeatedly strafe and “sweep the city,” but this military policing apparatus is transformed into the spectacle of mass entertainment in which superego turns into id, and control becomes an embraced dissolution. In Nova Express, the Subliminal Kid and his agents of the id implement the terminal rapture, employing film and sound projections as weapons — the city is revealed as the site of mindless entertainment and illusion, art is a fairground attraction which may then be dissolved with the human images of the mindless, transparent punters. It’s the Maya Movie, cast on “vast reflector screens,” a “million drifting screens on the walls of his city.” The screens connect with Burroughs’ experience of ayahuasca, images falling like slow snow on the screens of the mind, and in the cut-up books these screens reveal the illusionary nature of material and physical existence and all is Madame Maya — “the city dissolved in light and people walked through each other. . .” Images are insubstantial, fleeting, in continual transformation, and so called “reality” dissipates — “the great globe itself. . . shall dissolve. . . this insubstantial pageant faded. . .” In Burroughs’ fictions, the screens which momentarily catch the sweeping image flux are themselves “drifting” through the city so that “the city moved in swirls and eddies and tornadoes of image. . .” It’s the Transubstantiation Light Show, and there’s nothing here now but the projections and playbacks, and then the color and music fading out to silence and word dust, bone meal and scraps of silver paper in Waste Land lots. . . End of the Greatest Show On Earth. . . 

Community

A Dreamachine spins at the ZKM, films of Burroughs and Bacon and John Giorno run on monitors, and Antony Balch’s seminal footage is shown. . . Filmmaker Aaron Brookner introduces Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie, Yoni Leyser shows A Man Within and Lars Movin his film Words of Advice and both directors talk about their work, while Carl Michael von Hausswolff introduces his film in progress on Alamout. . . There’s a thrilling, visceral performance by John Giorno of his poetry, and Terry Wilson gives a moving, spellbinding reading from Perilous Passage. . . Axel Heil, Peter Weibel and Udo Breger, the curators, talk about the show and the significance of Burroughs’ work, and Udo Breger pays personal testimony to Burroughs as a friend. . . There are critiques and celebrations at the ZKM as artists and writers, admirers and scholars and curators come together to discuss Burroughs’ work and to pay homage. . . The feeling is one of delight, fascination and camaraderie as we move through the work of a lifetime. . .  

Switcheroo / 23 Skidoo

The magazines and newspapers at the ZKM reveal the vital part played by the interview in the transmission and dissemination of Burroughs’ ideas, from the visit of Life reporters Snell and Dean to the Beat Hotel in 1959 down through all the years. . . But if Burroughs was an interviewee, he was still getting his own copy out there, including the reproduction of his own texts as part of interview and article formats. More than a writer promoting his books, he appears in the media as a social commentator and radical theorist — the polemical address of writer to reader in Naked Lunch is extended through newsprint media, and through Burroughs’ projected autodidactic persona. From Naked Lunch onwards, different editions of key Burroughs’ fictions would be framed, contextualized and expanded by transplanted articles and essays, while the 1982 Calder edition of Naked Lunch would include the protracted “Ugh” correspondence of 1963 from the Times Literary Supplement as part of the “extended appendices.” This crucial “extra-literary” dimension of Burroughs’ writing is shown in the revised edition of The Job of 1974 in which Burroughs’ interviews with Daniel Odier, his explications of his ideas and his polemics are sometimes intercut with, or seem to spontaneously erupt into Burroughs’ fictional scenarios. These scenarios are read as illustrating or embodying the described technical procedures, theoretics and social critique, though they often wildly exceed his apparent portfolio — replying to a question on drug legislation, for example, Burroughs is galvanized by possible scenarios of what would happen if the police enforced anti-drugs laws to the letter, and so we cut to Hyde Park where six police dogs are doused with gasoline and set on fire “before a vast cheering crowd.” . . Revealingly, this ideological / fantastic dialectic is absolutely paradigmatic of Burroughs’ writing — the anti-ideology ideologue’s “illustrations” spiral out of control, moving at speed from a diatribe or technical explication into a series of crazed scenarios, in which he is caught up, galvanically and inventively driven. There is method in this madness — we might say, this is the method, and no madness. It isn’t a trope, it is a structural extension of the Burroughs routine — moving into an explanatory aside or explication or illustration which gathers momentum and further digressions and deparures from the subject at hand. It suggests that the original routines, fuelled by emotional and psychic stress and upheaval were themselves excessive versions of something intrinsic to Burroughs’ personality and style of communication — his combination of autodiacticism and fantastic invention, his strange, skewed, insistent pragmatism and his dreamy, floating, erotic escapes into bizarrerie . . . For example, “Experiments in Norway indicate the possibility of activating word patterns in the brain by tape-recorder techniques. The following story explores these possibilities. . .” — and the wild “23 SKIDOO” is strategically inserted into the interview response, a text published in 1960 which would be republished in 1984. . . The most famous early model of this fore and aft re-editing process is in Naked Lunch — the book begins with “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” Burroughs’ polemics modulated and integrated with a measured account of his drug history, but this is immediately followed by “Post Script. . . . Wouldn’t You?” which moves at speed into jump-cuts and hipster argot, as if the message in the first half of the intro had to be translated into Lunch mode in order to be properly sold to the reader, or listener, as a spoken rhetorical tirade — and Burroughs does just that, ventriloquizing the drug pusher as writer (and vica versa) in order to sell his own delirious “product,” a drug / book which is the means of transmission as well as the urgent message. What is striking is how the scenario so often relishes what has been polemically decried — the warning, admonishing Dante, reflected hell-flames glittering in his eyes, says, “This is Hell. . . and it’s hot,” before continuing on his infernal pilgrimage. . . The 1974 Grove edition of The Job would include versions of material which had previously appeared in Books And Bookmen, Harper’s, and Mayfair, as well as including the text of Electronic Revolution which had appeared in a limited edition in 1971. . . The ZKM exhibits news and media material not only because Burroughs’ image and work appear there, but because the relation between his books and his “extra-literary” writing was osmotic, generative, and crucial, the fictions both framed by explanations of his techniques and by his social critiques, whilst being infiltrated by these modes and feeding back into them. Burroughs thought that journalism, like history, was fiction, though that did not stop him quoting from news articles, either to decry them or to use them in support of his own arguments, and to use them in his own fictions . . . News is ephemeral as Kerouac’s newspaper blowing down Bleecker Street, but that newsprint media displayed in vitrines at the ZKM remains significant in the development of Burroughs’ writing, and some of the texts which Burroughs first published there would re-enter his fictions and become part of literature, “the news that stays news.” The polemical impetus of Burroughs’ letters, early routines and Naked Lunch itself would be channelled through the explications of Third Mind ideas, techniques and processes, including attacks on ideology, and it was this intertwining of the fictional and critical, the coupling and conjoining of dream scenarios and polemics, which was crucial — and to which print media contributed so much, providing outlets and opportunities for the publication of experimental, outré and often unaccountable, hybrid texts, mixing, as in Naked Lunch, the “How-To Book” and “Revelation and Prophecy,” the blueprint and the dream, and continuing Burroughs’ intertwined practice, on different levels, of noir-style cool and the phantasmagoric, control and disarray, existential removal and possession, critical distance and total immersion. No matter how cranky and odd and haphazard Burroughs’ contributions to the media may have been, and there were a few, he wasn’t a writer just hacking it or slumming it, he was engagé, and enragé, and that was because the use of cut-up and the related practices of the Third Mind were from the very beginning understood and treated as ideological, as technological weapons of media deconstruction, transformation and transposition — the cut-up fictions are political texts, engaged with non-literary issues and practices, while Burroughs’ media interventions are propelled and extended by his radical experimental literary practise, diverting critique and exposition into routines, scenarios and examples of his experimental writing. Importantly, if to a limited extent, Burroughs would employ cut-up in a journalistic context — the first newspaper cut-ups re-entering the media machine. Walking through the ZKM, looking again at magazines from the ’60s and ’70s, the fervor of those doomed decades came back to me, when Burroughs’ revolutionary explorations of consciousness and appeals for the overthrow of quotidian authority were so thrilling, incandescent, delirious — those days when he shattered the discourses, when his writing challenged the orthodoxies and broke the linguistic molds, and it really did feel like the dream breaking through. 

The Wrong Archetypes / Swell Purpose

Burroughs appears entirely indifferent to the camera, inscrutable, remote, or his regard seems to directly challenge the taking of the image. His attention is often elsewhere, what he sees is off-frame, out of shot, or he’s abstracted, somewhere else entirely, lost in introspection — caught on film just before disappearing back into the netherworld, the margins, back into already mythic sets, his own scenarios, the streets of Paris and London. It’s the failed Man of the Crowd, the notorious Underground Man. The Burroughs image is continually re-made, remodelled, re-screened, repackaged, fuelling an endless fascination as we try to read through and decode the Burroughs front. The perpetually ambiguous Burroughs image remains — an image so straight it’s disconcerting, so declarative it’s weird, out of sync. . . There’s always a piece missing, and we search for it in vain. Burroughs was good at acting out his roles, and not only in Balch’s films, or in Chappaqua or Drugstore Cowboy, and one thinks of his stand-in Lee, who “goes around exuding his own archetypes.” In “Lee’s Journals,” the campy self-acclaimed composer tells his young Arab poet protégé: “A culture gets its special stamp — Mayan, Northwest Coast, North pacific — probably from one person or small group of people, who originally exuded these archetypes. After that, the archetypes are accepted unchanged for thousands of years. Well, Lee goes around exuding his own archetypes. It isn’t done anymore. Already the Interzone Café reeks of rotted, aborted, larval archetypes. . . Look, I am a success because I mesh with existing archetypes. If I accept, or even get to know, Lee’s archetypes. . . and his routines!!!” The composer and his companion, “Titmouse,” pack their bags posthaste and head off to meet Cole Porter in Capri. . . Burroughs and Lee, William Lee, “William Seward Lee Burroughs” as he inscribed his 1950s “Blind Mouth” self-portrait drawing, they dare to commit “the crime of separate identity” — they break the molds, they do what “isn’t done” and refuse to mesh, to court success, they don’t “exude” right with the right people. (Burroughs note: “exudation” results from a CUT through a membrane). Titmouse says, “You don’t have to see him.” The composer replies, “See him — I should think not.” Lee and Burroughs have a shared invisibility, and even when they dress the part, walking around in the suit-raincoat-hat combo, they’re refractory to assimilation, they fail the simulation test, and despite all the roles they play and act out for real, the Junky investigator, the reporter as remittance man, these are spectral, shifting speciality acts, with a tendency to dematerialize. . . At the ZKM, I see the Burroughs image as the perfect cover for the covert action of his stories. Something doesn’t quite fit, something’s always askew, but the disguise that is seen-though turns out to be exactly true — that guy really was an agent, a Rewrite Operative, an undercover investigator, hidden in plain view, though he wasn’t working for either Islam Incorporated or Esquire, and his work had nothing to do with what Terry Southern liked to call “the quality lit game.” No, his swell purpose was quite otherwise. 

Images of Collage / The Syringe Becomes Generic

A book cover is a collage, the selection and arrangement of typographies, images, texts, colors and formats, though this collage process is determined by a pre-existing portfolio, by current stylistic orthodoxies and budgets. In the case of Burroughs’ book covers and jackets, there’s an attempt to parallel and embody both the nature of collage and the collage nature, as it was understood, of his cut-up texts — and this consistently backfires. The Grove Press paperback cover of The Ticket That Exploded cuts up and “explodes” the letters of the “Ticket,” while both the Grove and Calder hardbacks take a tasteful, too genteel approach, typographically paying homage to an outdated notion of collage which hardly approximates Burroughs’ methodology. Tasteful repros from a forgotten design award annual, these covers seem very weak compared with the photo wall montage by Ian Sommerville reproduced on the first edition of Ticket, in which it is the concatenation of images within images which expresses the cut-up and fold-in methodologies and Burroughs’ flickering, flashing “image track.” It’s instructive to see these examples of the aesthetic illustration of collage in the same wall cabinet as a number of tacky, determinedly sensational, illustrated covers. Two Tandem editions of Dead Fingers Talk have the syringe in the arm, a fish-eye photo setup on a fire escape and a pulp-style illustration, while a Star edition has a photo of syringe, foil and blood in the spread, dead-fingered hand of the Junky, like Blind Pew showing the Black Spot. This shock shlock continues with the Corgi cover of The Wild Boys with its blazing body and dribbles of blood in a heavy metal psychedelic rainbow style with absolutely none of the aesthetic principles and finesse of the designers of typographic belles-lettres. Good. Highly recommended. Those seem to have been the two main routes to go down — decorous signification of Burroughs’ presumed literary method, or the drug and homosexual angles selling the sensational product, leaving the buyer in no doubt about the even more degrading and lubricious content within. Well, one approach works, the other doesn’t come even close to making it, though the syringe would become emblematic and programmatic, axiomatic and generic in conveying Burroughs’ work. On the front of the 1968 Panther edition of Nova Express, the syringe turns into a rocket blasting off, the needle exactly bisecting the letter X, an illusionistic torn jacket cover effect (like a coffee cup ripping off the image) creating an illusion of lift-off fuel-burn. (Burroughs note: a hypoblast is the inner germ layer of an embryo which develops into the endoderm). It was practically inevitable that somewhere down the line “The Disembodied Art Gallery” would create their “Beatopoly” bag, “designed in close partnership with the ghost of Brion Gysin” — “A William Burroughs cut-up writing kit for all aspiring junkie novelists.” The kit consists of a folded half-A4 instruction card in a transparent bag with a plastic syringe. This package came Absolutely Free and is now a highly desired collector’s item, fetching fabulous prices on the international quality lit market and art curator scenes (or maybe, hopefully, not). At the ZKM you can see how Burroughs’ work put the syringe onto the book jacket, and along with published photos of writers like Philip Lamantia and Burroughs himself tying up and taking a shot, this foregrounding was in one sense in accord with the injunction of Naked Lunch, to see what is on the end of the fork, on the end of the long newspaper spoon — to put the terror mystique of the heroin ritual out there in plain view, for all to see, in Times Square, in Piccadilly, seeing right through the needle’s eye. At the same time, the image of the syringe would be re-contextualized and reconfigured, as with that rocket on the cover of the interplanetary, S.F.-sourced Nova Express — the book includes the section “PLAN DRUG ADDICTION” and there are a number of drug set-ups and references to hypodermics in the text including “yellow light quivered sharp as a hypo needle,” “the nurse charged in with a loaded hypo,” and “a hypo big as a bicycle pump. . .” The rocket-syringe has a dual function, though heroin as a method of transport into the liberation of Space is the antithesis of Burroughs’ message, and a rocket ship of junky cosmonauts might run into trouble somewhere around Crab Nebula. . . By the time of the 2003 50th Anniversary Edition of Junky, the hypo had surely lost its chic taboo, its talismanic power, but its image was still deployed in the form of a simplified, knowingly primitivist drawing, framed by handwritten lettering, with a dumb caricature in the syringe’s chamber — a miserable sad cartoon head to be read as a cipher of “Burroughs.” Again, it was inevitable that a representation of Burroughs would eventually appear inside the syringe, placing the image of the writer signified by the hypo-logo inside the signifier itself — a shot at the “Burroughs” shot. Ideally, this would be the terminal point in the lineage — needle withdrawal, the truly disposable syringe. But it doesn’t work that way, not in junk culture. The eye was in the needle before the needle was in the eye. 

Typographica Non Implementa

Burroughs and Gysin analyzed the effects of word and image, and treated the word as image, but very few of the designers of their book covers tried to engage with Third Mind processes such as cut-up, fold-in, bisection, simultaneity, layering, splicing, reiteration, and transposition. It’s a reminder that with a few exceptions, most notably Burroughs’ Gysinian calligraphy for the Olympia Press Naked Lunch jacket, and Gysin’s calligraphy on the front of Exterminator, Burroughs and Gysin, like most writers, had little or no say in the design of their jackets, and if they tried, they were ignored. As Stanley Booth writes in the afterword to his seminal The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, many editors and publishers don’t give a damn what “their” writers think, they’re “frustrated writers themselves, desperate. . . to demonstrate what they sincerely believe to be their superior creativity. Young, unpublished writers should consider yourselves warned.” This extends to the design of the book jacket in which the publisher is so often determined to play a leading role. The covers of works by both Burroughs and Gysin published by the underground press and small publishers are the most likely to show the influence of Fluxus and more radical art practices, especially those of small independent design studios set up by art students in the 1960s. Sometimes the “Functional Typography” so prevalent in 1960s design, which emerged from the “elementary” and “international” styles, works well enough, combining asymmetrical composition with an unornamented, unemotional lucidity in the fonts of that time — Helvetica, Folio, Univers. What is signified is something cool and methodical, which might suggest something of Burroughs and Gysin’s techno-scientism, but the expressionistic and spontaneous aspects of their work are often in these cases entirely missing. Burroughs and Gysin were both systems artists and expressionists, they went for the raw and the cooked, the cool and the wild — computer permutation and calligraphy, the random splice and splatter and then the word held in tweezers, placed in its intuited and destined space-time location. First the razor, then the glue — cut through with a hand-operated guillotine, and then let the processor do all the wet work, moving from analogue to digital and all the way back again, from Philips to the Paleolithic, from Steve Jobs’ Apple to the Forbidden Fruit. 

Visualization / Crossing The Time Split

The picture as habitat is also a jungle to be explored, the world indifferent and resistant to the human presence. The black and white reproductions of Burroughs’ paintings in Ghost of Chance, first published in 1991 by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of Art, perfectly complement the text, their liana swirls and dense convolutions of brush strokes and suction smears creating an at first impenetrable mass which the viewer penetrates through details and gaps, openings back through time into the “hidden wilderness” of the image, entering the lost domain of the natural animal world before it is invaded by “more and more devalued human stock” — it’s the Garden of Lost Chances before it is terminally buried by “human progress” beneath “A vast mud-slide of soulless sludge.” The images are not illustrations, and Burroughs’ text alongside the pictures provides not literal descriptions but topographies for ways of looking. A stone temple provides the opening to the biological garden, one of a number of “ports of entry,” as if the gaze must find a way through the layered paint strokes of this rain forest, through entangling vines and foliage, and penetrate the unfolding spaces, escaping “time and sequence and causality,” crossing over what Burroughs calls “the split” which separates “the wild, the timeless, the free” from “the tame, the time-bound, the tethered.” Burroughs’ pictures attempt to procure a visual experience akin to that described in the text — the viewer as explorer emerging from a labyrinthine tunnel into a clearing is suddenly transfixed, enraptured by “a moment of arrested motion.” The skittering, trembling lemurs appear, twitching their tails and then — “whisk” — they are gone, swinging through the trees and disappearing into the forest, vanishing back into their wild sanctuary, the pre-human spaces of their species, before the eradications of time, before the guns and diseases and experiments of Homo Superior, Homo Saps. The significance of Ghost of Chance is that it combines the experience of reading a text and the experience of looking at pictures in ways which together incarnate a special process of visualisation. Ecological content in the paintings, in the form of images of lemurs and monkeys and their either lush and dense foliage or torn, invaded, shattered and degraded habitats, and Burroughs’ own explications in interviews about his art, had made clear his motivation, but the book, a polemic against blind human destruction and an elegy for a lost visionary domain, equates and intertwines Burroughs’ narrative of exploration and time travel and the desire to visually penetrate and become immersed and lost in his painted palimpsests. Man’s blindness is corrected by a new art of learning how to see, the act of looking inseparable from wonder and a feeling of pity for doomed otherness, for those glimpses of beauty on the brink of being lost forever. In the text of Ghost of Chance, Burroughs uses visual reorientation as the instrument of raising ecological consciousness — the gilt-edged etchings in an old book, The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, come alive, while the crystals of the drug called indri, which means “look there,” are taken at dawn or twilight when the secret creatures emerge from the jungle, from the psyche. . . A black tunnel opens into a series of dioramas, the scene is like “a limpid frameless painting” which you step through, entering the dream domain. . . Mission can see “for miles in every direction,” and the visionary terra incognita opens beyond limited, blighted, quotidian human vision. . . 

The Revenant without a Face 

Burroughs’ paintings were inspired by his dreams, including the attempt to depict the fearful. In My Education Burroughs describes seeing a terrifying figure in a dream, wearing a black monk’s caul [sic], on the stairs in the house at Price Road. He was frightened, and tried to call his mother. . . “This is a figure that has appeared before in dreams, and always I am paralyzed with fear so that I cannot even cry out. . . Yesterday I painted a picture called Le Revenant, with just such a figure, in a robe that covered the head and only a black outline where the face would be.” The face in the picture, as in the dream, would not materialize, could not be realized in paint and would remain a fearful, spectral absence. Burroughs’ paintings are filled with masks and silhouettes — blank-eyed figures gaze out or turn aside, their features and expressions inscrutable, and the unreachable is paradoxically there in the paintings, as lacunae, black holes. Burroughs decries the limitations of human vision, the physiological and psychic blind-spot, and there is always the unseen in his pictures, that which cannot be seen, something hidden behind the picture surface — uncanny, tantalizing, hovering just out of vision’s reach and touch. 

Dream Shifts / Kaleidoscope of Vistas

Burroughs wondered, “How are shifts made in a dream?” The fast cuts and slow transitions of dream travel would be approximated through cut-up and fold-in, while in his paintings, one image morphs into another through superimposed layers of paint, collaged images creating pictures-within-pictures — not a single fixed-viewpoint perspective in a coherent linear space, but multiple levels analogous to dream shifts. Images are seen in a succession of planes, hidden images unfolding through the depths of the picture space, moving through a succession of image screens, a process of emergent, apparitional visualization which Burroughs had experienced while looking at Gysin’s work. . . This pictorial approach is also related to the structural methodology and dynamic visual switches of Naked Lunch as described in Burroughs’ letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 28, 1957, Tanger — “In a sense the action occurs in a superimposed place which is South America, U.S.A., Tanger and Scaninavia, and the characters wander back and forth from one place to another. That is a Turkish Bath in Sweden may open into South American jungle. . . the historical novel form. . . is a three-dimensional chronology of events happening to someone already, for purposes of the novel, dead. That is the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening. . . . The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous.” Out-of-body experience, immersion in the process of living creation, psychic risk . . .Burroughs’ methodology of topographic shifts arose from the practice and problematics of his writing in the 1950s, in which, as James Grauerholz has written, “the lines between ‘letters,’ ‘journals’ and ‘writings’ are blurred,” and the methodology appears in the osmotic city scenarios of Naked Lunch and other books — it’s the composite sprawl, the concatenation of spaces in which “All houses in the City are joined” and “a network of rooms and corridors” concertina and merge, creating a vast, fluid architecture which spills out “in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas,” the inhabitants sucked and popping through the viscous walls. . . Characters would fly and float through Burroughs’ mutating dream city, swimming through the ruined streets trailing colored bubbles and blue streamers — the City is not only a shifting melange but has its own anti-gravity atmosphere. . . In his aquatic decalcomanias and in his arrangement of images from different sets, Burroughs creates both fluid spaces and multiple viewing points, windows set in space, the viewer invited to move down a succession of corridors into a kaleidoscope of vistas, and through layered veils and swirls and drifts of paint. . . Burroughs questions his dreams but doesn’t analyze them, though they may trigger memories — their value for him is manifest not latent, and he seeks to do something with them. The dreams spilled over into waking “Daydreams,” the unrolling of “little films” in the mind’s eye, which Ira Cohen associated with the Akashic realm, and which Paul Bowles described as “God’s Home Movies.” Writing and painting channelled Burroughs’ daydreams, they were means of transport, allowing him to travel further and further through the torn alleys and brilliant vistas of the psyche, seeing, transcribing, evoking and entering the magical scenes as they unfolded. . . 

Locked Out / Looked Out / Through Other Eyes

In Queer, Lee finds himself in Guayaquil in Ecuador, but he feels separated from the life of the place — “there was something going on here, some undercurrent of life that was hidden from him.” This feeling of alienation is experienced by Lee through the resistance of what is seen, its refutation of any identification or feeling on his part, other than disgust or bafflement — he looks at the passing faces, he looks into the doorways and windows of cheap hotels, as if seeing the place will allow him to penetrate its mysterious otherness and connect him to it. “An iron bedstead painted light pink, a shirt out to dry. . . scraps of life. Lee snapped at them hungrily, like a predatory fish cut off from his prey by a glass wall. He could not stop ramming his nose against the glass in the nightmare search of his dream. And at the end he was standing in a dusty room in the late afternoon sun, with an old shoe in his hand.” Lee looks at salt shakers and water pitchers and kitchen pots with obscene decorations, he sees a hunchback playing panpipes, he sees the centipede symbol everywhere, and the dirty yellow river and rusty battleships, he sees a group of boys playing in rubbish on the waterfront. . . Alone, silent, he can only look, but he is locked out from the world he sees. But then another kind of vision is triggered — “He focused on one boy, the image sharp and clear, as if seen through a telescope, with the other boys and the waterfront blacked out. The boy vibrated with life. . . Fragmentary memories. . . the smell of cocoa beans drying in the sun, bamboo tenements. . .” If, elsewhere in Burroughs’ writing, the telescopic signifies the narrowing down of emotional contact to “the vanishing point,” here the telescopic focus and fixation of vision breaks through the remote external world and shatters separate identity — “He could feel himself in the body of the boy.” Lee sees the boy and fuelled by “the tearing ache of limitless desire,” is transported into the skin and psyche and memory of the boy — through the desire for the other, and through the act of seeing him, Lee becomes the other, and sees the world without screens, through the boy’s eyes. Throughout Burroughs’ work, separation is registered and expressed in visual terms, through the blank indifferent regard of junkie eyes, through the glass walls of an aquarium, through an old shoe held in Lee’s hand in the late afternoon sun. . . But then vision becomes the powerful instrument of erotic, psychic connection, breaking the boundaries of ego, transcending limited human perception, as if to focus on someone and truly see them is an act which allows the seer an out-of-body experience, telepathic contact, the possibility of merging one’s personality with another’s. . . Burroughs moves continually between the lonely, hostile, meaningless, tormenting scenes of a life from which one feels terminally shut out, and those moments when the eye breaks through the image world, to inhabit physically and psychically the sheer rapturous otherness of being / seeing — the optical apparatus of the eye is transformed into an erotic projector of psychic communion through an act of intense, empathetic vision. In Burroughs’ work there is always the feared other, and the desired other — they promise both agonizing engulfment and annulment, and the blissful deliverance from self. The seminal dash of the cut-up is itself the sign of division, of continual splitting, the mark of an existential elision, foregrounding a continual state of separation from the self as well as urgent attempts to re-connect with the self, to “recruit a new existence.” 

Flickering Message through Revolving Grids

The spaces opening up through layers in Gysin’s paintings are transposed through cut-up and fold-in in Burroughs’ writing — transparency, simultaneity and the rapid shuttle of images. The “action” of the cut-up fictions is created through the flickering and melding of intercut scenes, and the “flickering message” of Gysin’s “magnetic pencil” is itself significantly “passed back and forth, over and through shifting grills” in the section of The Ticket that Exploded called “writing machine,” in which Burroughs foregrounds mechanized processes of composition as fantastic extensions and equivalents of his own techniques. Beyond the juxtaposition of images, beyond collage, Burroughs describes scenes unfolding in depth, moving through layers, a profound element in “dreaming on the Gysin level” — images by the great artists move “past through each other,” are mixed as projections on screens, and the audience itself enters the screens, “permutating and moving” through the streaming images while “layers peel off” and reflections are glimpsed of “translucent tentative beings” moving into focus and fading out again. Significantly, the once radical technique of photomontage is itself fragmented and the broken pieces of the old avant-garde shimmer and flicker in new patterns — the composite picture of art and advertising is cut-up, set in continuous motion, pulsating and flickering like Gysin’s paintings and the Dreamachine. 

If I Could Paint

In 1953 on Yage: “It was like possession by a blue spirit. (I could paint it if I could paint). Blue purple. . . a blue substance throughout my body. . .” Well, he would paint it. . .  Later, in “Yage Notes,” he repeats this desire — “If I could only paint I could convey it all.” In this same passage he also refers to South Pacific and archaic “phylogenetic memory” which would be crucial in his approach to art. “Everything stirs with a peculiar furtive life like a Van Gogh painting,” but also further and further back, to the time when the money wasn’t on the art, like the image in Naked Lunch — “I see an archaic grinning face like South pacific mask. . . The face is blue purple splotched with gold. . .” This image becomes active, the room shakes and vibrates and that phylogenetic memory, that “blue substance” races through the body — “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near east, India, races as yet unconceived and unborn, passes through the body. . .,” prophetic of the streams of faces seen in the Dreamachine, or, to put it another way, the Dreamachine accessed the Yage level. . . It was always a vision quest — “I was thinking like a book you read which also has pictures and accompanying music. Of course couldn’t approximate life itself which is seen, heard, felt, experienced on many different levels and dimensions. . .” The “Blind Mouth” drawn by Burroughs in the ’50s has its corresponding “Silent Eye” in Korzybski’s philosophy, his belief that creativity comes from seeing in silence. Burroughs: “Korzybski says the creative process takes place when you look at an object or a process in silence.” The mouth cannot see because it speaks, and so breaks the silence of looking. Burroughs wanted to look in silence, to bypass the Voice Inside and move through images without verbalizing the experience — he desired contact and recognition beyond speech and dialogue, that truly wordless communion which Nabokov described as “the silence of love.”  

Broken Concertina

Burroughs’ actual experience of moving through cities informs his topographics of writing, as in “International Zone” — “Tangier seems to exist on several dimensions. You are always finding streets, squares, parks you never saw before. Here fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world.” The walkways and bridges and fire escapes of his mosaic sets are linked in a spinning web — the radial osmotic city. . . But this isn’t the formulated, thoroughly mapped “other world” of fantasy fiction, it’s a perpetually shifting topography — Burroughs’ map is provisional, continually re-sketched. As Burroughs wrote in “Ginsberg Notes” — “This novel is a scenario for future action in the real world. . . an attempt to create my future. In a sense it is a guidebook, a map.” But the guidebook spills every which way like a broken concertina, the map is a palimpsest — the city becomes the melange of all cities as memories and associations break through the physical boundaries of place, and the writer is waiting in an empty Tangier street, he’s also passing through the sunshine and shadow of Mexico City, and feeling the evening warmth on his skin on a night in Madrid, and the wind off the mountains on Saturn, the dry heat of Minraud. . . 

Death Research

Burroughs’ paintings evoke violent endings, terminal disappearing acts — the vanishing of animal species, Poe’s Red Death, fire victims, infernos, explosions, joy rider car wrecks, decapitated heads and bloody skulls, bleeding head holes and severed body parts, shootings, terminal drug psychosis, the Angel of Death and the phantom riders, icy black space and the evil river floating with guns and corpses, black Stetsons and copper’s narks in marl holes, momento mori and ex votos. Burroughs’ paintings were made in his final years — they are the Last Images to his Last Words. The pictures are beautiful, ravishing, vivid, but also damaged, torn, splintered, worn, degraded, bearing the marks of attack. There are yellowing stained snaps and cuttings on display at the ZKM, beautiful in their corrosion, but testaments still to aging, pictures of vanished epochs and the unquiet dead, while Burroughs’ paintings commemorate, memorialize and elegize even as they flash with energy and color, and Emerson’s words come to mind — “Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.” Time’s accretions and erasures, its tears and wounds, are embodied in the scraped and blown textures of Burroughs’ pictures, while the act of painting accessed and combined scenes from Burroughs’ memory and from his writing in ways which he could not otherwise have procured. Painting was a divining tool and a reconfiguring process — the dead increasingly appeared to Burroughs in his dreams, as recorded in Last Words, the models of his own characters corpsing and communicating from their parallel worlds, glimpsed through the ether in their dream costume, and manifesting in swirls and slathers of paint. Burroughs’ dream records and his paintings are the written and visual counterparts of a process of psychic self-investigation — the dead manifest and demand recognition, they want to remember what it felt like, the rain on the pavements and rooftops and the passing show, checking out all the old addresses, planning a final moving-in operation. . . Burroughs saw those visitations and ghost faces “against the icy blackness of space” and they shimmer through his paintings, each panel or page a “gleaming empty sky” for the skried manifestation of spooks and shadows and the possessed return of the dear departed. Here they come again, the Electric Technician Ian Sommerville and doomed, impossible Mikey, and there’s Targuisti and Jane, the loved ones with a few old enemies brought on by the dream stage manager — and here come Pantopon Rose and Eric the Fag, Louis the Bellhop, George the Greek, Subway Mike and The Black Bastard. . . Even if Burroughs was not looking for them, they were evidently looking for him, materializing as images in his very own multimedia Book of the Dead. Burroughs’ painting is death research, like the paintings of so many artists whose late work seems to confront their mortality, but in Burroughs’ case his painting career, despite a lengthy apprenticeship, is all “Late Period.” He viewed death as a dangerous rite of passage, necessitating reconnaissance trips across the Duad, scouting out the delirious terrain between earthly existence and an unimaginable afterlife. . . Burroughs once said to Gysin and Terry Wilson of his death — “I expect to kick my habit in one concerted moment of excruciating withdrawal,” but the Last Words notebooks, his dream records, his paintings, The Western Lands, all testify to a profound preparation for the journey ahead. It was in the spirit of one of his favourite poems, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” part of which was read at Burroughs’ funeral — “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 

Kim’s Game

Burroughs made his first shotgun paintings in 1982 while finishing The Place Of Dead Roads, published in 1984. In that book, “Kim observes that the doors and walls are compacted layers like plywood and that they have a malevolent life of their own, snapping open and shut, you can get lost in a maze of doors and corridors, steps going up to nowhere, steps going down to a dead end as a heavy door slams shut behind you.” Burroughs describes a narrow, almost two-dimensional space, in effect, the picture plane, in which houses appear, four feet deep — “They must slide around in there. . . nursery-rhyme magic. . .” He sees old women with spinning wheels “in tiny cottages of the plywood they use for building, compacted in layers like the cards animated by a malevolent sliding life, doors slide open, snap shut.” These visions have emerged from the plywood shotgun paintings and their connection with the layered transpositions and permutations of the Third Mind scrapbooks, the planar stacking of images in Gysin’s paintings, the attempts to think in “association blocks,” and the extra-dimensionality of the 2-D image, all of this is made clear in the form of the sinister Venusian card game which Kim intuits — “card magic associated with a special card deck. The cards are painted on a material like plastic that absorbs the colors to produce a three-dimensional impression. The cards move into combinations like animated cartoons. . .” The image cards open and shut like doors, inviting vision and locking it out, equivalents of the image panels juxtaposed and sprayed over by Burroughs in his door pictures of 1987, and the serial shuffled maze of the scrapbooks. Although Kim recognizes the game as alien in origin, it is nevertheless a form of “Kim’s Game.” Kim takes his name from Kipling’s great novel in which Kim plays the observation game with jewels and photographs and disparate objects, memorizing them as part of his training as a spy — in effect, what Kim is doing in The Place of Dead Roads — learning to see and remember, so the memory pictures can be laid out and called at will. . . Baden-Powell would précis Kipling’s Kim in Scouting For Boys, good prep for the service of King and Queen, as demonstrated by George Smiley in le Carré’s 1974 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in which the retired agent still scopes out the cars parked on his street, memorizes the names of shops on his route to the British Museum, and knows the exact number of stairs to his flat “and which way each of the twelve doors opened.” It’s “a test of memory, a private Kim’s game to preserve his mind from the atrophy. . .” The visualization and memory exercises of The Third Mind, color walking and street record-and-playback, and photographic reconstruction, were treated as strategies and field devices of an intelligence operation, as made clear by their technical explication and political contextualization in The Job, Exterminator, Minutes to Go and The Third Mind.  

What He Was Looking for

In his writing Burroughs tried to find through cut-up words, through fractured sequences and the layering and overload of language, a method of discovering something which could not be consciously directed or said in any other way. . . Forcing language to give up its secret, to divine it in the flashes of connection and rupture which could only be signified by the dash or ellipsis, in the breakages and provisional reconnections of syntax and phrase. The text is eviscerated and moved around in a continual re-writing / re-reading, an endless exhumation, a project attempting to go deeper whilst pushing language through its analogical, combinatory, self-generating possibilities. . . Burroughs’ paintings take images in the plane, equivalent to the pages of text to be cut up, and subject this material to processes which despoil and shatter — it’s painting as creation through violent action. . . What was he looking for? The “place of broken origins,” before trauma, disassociation and the split — before it all came down. Burroughs’ art is often beautiful, with delicate effects of color and texture, but it is an art of ruins, made out of the broken pieces of culture and a strewn life — how careless Burroughs could be, leaving at a moment’s notice, abandoning his papers and effects to the winds of chance, and to the ministrations of Gysin and his archival locker. But how brilliant, how supreme his powers of recombination, the putting together of the fractured pieces. 

The Falls of Art

Literature and art become bureaucratic, there’s a list of recognized writers and artists and “You’re just nobody if you’re not on the list.” The Inspector calls, he’s “a shabby gray inconspicuous man. He glances around the vernissage and yawns. . . The artist and the gallery owner stand there waiting. . . He shakes his head with a terrible smile. The List will grow into an institute with a research staff, a library, a museum and film archives. Bulletins will be issued and funds allotted to deserving projects.” Like the end of the section “Painting to Palaver to Polaroids’ in Here to Go, in which Gysin decries the proliferation of images and art tourism, art as entertainment, the chic disposability of “Deceptual Art,” so in “The Fall of Art,” Burroughs pictures art as a great potlatch, an economy of creation through destruction, and this is foregrounded in his own practice, while his literal projections of an apocalyptic art becoming a transcendental way of seeing are continually both validated and undercut by his contempt for art-as-art, for the art world and its economy — art falls into desuetude, is dumped in gray dusty basements, miles of aisles of forgotten, obsolete canvases are stacked to the rafters, the unwanted productions of artists who were not worth their salt. 

Tangier Mattress

A filmed conversation between Francis Bacon and William Burroughs is shown on a monitor as part of the exhibition, an extract from Howard Brookner’s Burroughs documentary — footage not included in the original film. Burroughs and Bacon talk about Tangier and people they have known, and how Bacon absolutely loathes Jasper Johns and his work. . . The drift of this encounter, the casual exchange and the shared memories are suddenly shot through with a surprising perception or declaration — their talk is a reminder of the quotidian, of happenstance, of the strange circuitous ways through which life influences art, crucially or subtly, insistently or illusively, how memory and taste, admiration and antipathy, political beliefs and personal tragedy, knowledge and humour inform the creative process, and how decisive are empathy, recognition and friendship, so often ignored in accounts of the genesis of literary and art works. The artworks at the ZKM show, including a brilliant spinning Dreamachine, alternate with documentary film and newspapers, magazines and books and exhibition catalogues, photographs and objects — the art work is contextualized in part by its written and photographed history, the sites and tools and the dialogues and disquisitions instrumental in its making. This is not “extraneous” material since it reveals, to greater or lesser degrees, how the polemic and praxis of Burroughs’ work was mediated, and how his own multimedia explorations were themselves disseminated, reproduced, re-made. The exhibition triggers intriguing connections and correspondences, in which the serendipitous as well as the programmatic, the casual remark in an interview as much as the declaration of intent in a manifesto, have their place in processes of creation. For Bacon, a chance meeting in Dean’s Bar, an envelope of photographs carried in a suitcase from Tangier to London, the memory of light over the landscape of Malabata — these are present in his paintings in ways which may be recognized or they may be intuited and pursued through tantalizing glimpses. The crucial significance and the incredible fragility of inspiration — without those photos, for example, a number of Bacon’s works would not exist in the form we know them, or they might not exist at all, and yet, as Bacon understood only too well, those photos might never have been taken, or might not have been given to him, and might not have resurfaced when the time was propitious from the detritus on his studio floor. . . Everything so easily might have been, would have been otherwise. . . Art makes happenstance immutable, but the very thought of that vital chance connection being missed can induce a special feeling of vertigo, of time out of alignment. Now critics celebrate Burroughs and Gysin’s use of chance in cut-up, that is, in texts, but the experience of chance in life, in every aspect of living, is present in this show — photos of encounters, trips taken, the provisional and possible turned into history, into artefacts of power and beauty. Recognition of the fortuitous in life became axiomatic for Burroughs and in his art, like Bacon, he put that chaotic chance encounter to brilliant use — playing with destiny, challenging fate, in the work and in life itself. But against all odds, against the grain, Burroughs believed that life had meaning, even if that lay in the transcendence of our mortal condition, while Bacon insisted that he had no faith and that life was meaningless. But there are, nevertheless, key resemblances between their approaches to making art. Bacon manipulated paint using corduroy or an old sweater or a squeegee roller, smearing and impressing and flicking oil paint, treating it as a seductive and volatile material — it was, he said, “mysterious and fluid.” Burroughs’ use of shotgun blasts, suction cups, aerosols and cut-outs and hand prints in what he described as “random procedures” is in the same spirit. Still, the cosmogony and the ethos behind, and through, those procedures are quite different. Gysin shared Bacon’s appreciation of paint as a vital substance which could be courted and pursued through chance procedures and the use of improvised extensions of the hand, lamenting to Terry Wilson the loss of “the matter, what the French critics used to call la matière, of painting.” Gysin felt that artists’ use of paint had become flat, illustrative, like a car body spray job or food tinted and lit for a glossy photo advertisement — plastic art for plastic money in the Plastic Age. Certainly Burroughs learned from Gysin’s attitude — a reverence for what paint could do, its inexhaustible possibilities, and esteem for the artist’s skill and control, but simultaneously he embraced a willing abandonment to the painting process and a recognition of the necessity of hazard, the seemingly gratuitous act, when pushing the possibilities of paint as far as he might. The courting of the possibilities of randomness was paradoxically determined, a ritual conjuration, like the calligraphic gesture of a master who must include the element of the unforeseen in the exercise of his disciplined art. Ginsberg would recall Bacon explaining in Tangier how he finished a painting — “He said he did it with a chance brushstroke that locked in the magic — a fortuitous thing that he couldn’t predict or orchestrate.” In Tangier in the late ’50s, Ginsberg had hoped that Bacon would paint “a big pornographic picture” of Peter Orlovsky and himself, and even suggested that he and Peter could pose for it. “That might be awkward, Allen,” said Bacon, “how long can you hold it?” But those Tangerine photographs which Ginsberg supplied, of himself and Orlovsky posed in bed, those black and white pictures, images soon to be creased and torn and ripped and paint-smeared in Bacon’s London studio, would be transformed on canvas and become iconic in late 20th century art — the lumpy, spilling, striped mattress, a lugubrious catafalque, becoming quintessential in Bacon’s immortal iconography of mortality. 

Carpet Psyche

For Gysin, the magic flying carpet was for real, its patterns were templates drawn from and acting upon the psyche, providing experiences of the ineffable, glimpses of infinity, forgetfulness of the so-called “self.” Entire visual systems unfold and permutate from those geometric designs, which in turn trigger changes in the consciousness of the viewer. Gysin was fascinated by the symbols triggered by the Dreamachine, by psilocybin, by Syrian Rue (Peganum harmala), by substances and manmade phenomena which give rise to geometrical patterns in the mind’s eye, and by the correspondences between Jungian archetypal symbols, hallucinatory states and Islamic patterns. For the Third Mind practitioners, art was research, it was the attempt to track image codes, to pursue methods of re-transmitting the deep source images — crucially, it was “art” as a sender / receiver loop, the “artist” was the one who found ways of re-creating moving scenes from his own “image bank” so that they could be studied and used to provoke alternate states of consciousness, and every result was itself a new starting point in a process without limit. Not the creation of a single scene but a series of images-within-images taking the creator / viewer deeper and deeper into the sensorium and continuum of the psyche — “Day-Dreaming” in the Tandric sense. Those “points of entry” stretching beyond the horizon and shattering all systems of perspective, merge the feeling of travelling and seeing in the exploration of space — “It is necessary to travel, it is not necessary to live,” as Burroughs quotes in The Job, and this precept underlies the visionary desert voyage of Gysin’s The Process with its circulating fabulations, its trips and tales going round on the reels, smoke rings and mirages vanishing into the blue, and the book dematerializes, and the recordings and paintings too, and whatever we thought we knew, we did not know. 

Terry Wilson in Conversation with Ian MacFadyen

As his book Perilous Passage is published by Synergetic Press, Terry Wilson talks with Ian MacFadyen about the 15 years he spent creating this unique work which embodies and develops the radical Third Mind techniques of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Wilson was a friend of Gysin and Burroughs, both of whom appear as characters in the “true fiction” of Perilous Passage. Wilson’s collaboration with Gysin, Here To Go, is now recognized as a seminal work. Perilous Passage was critically acclaimed on its first publication, in a limited edition, in 2005. In this extract from a tape made in December 2011 by Ian MacFadyen, Terry Wilson talks about the psychic techniques of The Third Mind, adventures on the road with Jim McCann, Brion Gysin’s special methods of teaching, William Burroughs and Charles Fort, ayahuasca, and the relation of memory and fiction.

“According to Brion Gysin, I was an Apprentice to an Apprentice and I have never claimed otherwise. In my work I have always done absolutely what I wanted to do at the time. I have been fortunate and privileged to encounter and become friends with some incredible people.” — Terry Wilson

William S. Burroughs and Terry Wilson, 1980s (photo by Udo Breger)

IM: Could we talk about your book Perilous Passage, first published in a limited edition in 2005, and now being published by Synergetic Press? It was written over many years, between 1986 and 2000, and took some time to appear in print.  

TW: Soon after Brion Gysin died in 1986, until near the end of the ’80s, I was writing Perilous Passage. . . I stopped in ’89 when I went to Tangier and that’s when I wrote a piece for that book, Paul Bowles by His Friends, the book edited by Gary Pulsifer, which came out in ’92. So I wrote that short text, called “Tangier 90,” and that was one of the additions that fell into place in Perilous Passage, and the book was extended. . . In ’89 I’d thought the book was finished, at the point where the character KJ and I clink our glasses of Irish coffee and toast “the beginning of a new age.” Because I was interviewed at the time and asked how the book ended, and that’s what I’d told the interviewer, in ’89.

IM: In fact, you said to him, “That’s where I’m heading for!” In other words, you thought you’d finished Perilous Passage and you were heading for that “new age” announced by the toast with Jim, but it turned out that the book would have its own momentum and before you were finished fate would have quite a few surprises and difficulties lying in wait for you.

TW: You can say that again.  

IM: So you wrote “Tangier 90” for the Bowles book and then that took its place in the third main section of Perilous Passage, the section called “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.” “Tangier 90” appears in the opening part of that section, a chapter called “THE FLAW (Inevitable Cops).” The chapter begins with you and “KJ,” the infamous entrepreneur James Kennedy McCann, driving on the autobahn out of Berlin and witnessing a horrific car accident, and it moves through this mystical Islamic system into the time you were in Tangier, 1990 — “It really hit the fan in Tangier. Inevitably. It’s the place for it.” And so you managed to flood the hotel room there, even though there were “only four hours of running water in Tangier so you have to remember to turn the taps off but we were in no condition. . .” And you also recall your visit at that time to Genet’s clifftop grave in the Spanish cemetery at Larache. . . Mohammed Mrabet, Ira Cohen, David Herbert, Paul Bowles and others appear, but the Tangier scene at that time is mixed with flashbacks to the character Bedaya, based upon Gysin, in Paris years before, and his ashes scattered at the Cave of Hercules. And then, again, there’s your European travels with the cultural impresario KJ, based upon Jim McCann, and scenes from the London period and your visit to La Roche-Guyon with Philippe Baumont, who’s called Vogue Etiquette in the book, immediately after Gysin’s death in 1986. . . So Tangier in 1990 is a crucible around which all these past and future events and these characters swirl phantasmagorically, as Gysin/Bedaya’s legacy is fought over and engenders all these disparate strategies and conspiracies and power plays. . . Perilous Passage would have been quite different if you hadn’t written and extended the book with “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,” the third section of the book, and the final chapter of the entire work, “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS,” set in Peru in 2000 when you took ayahuasca. 

TW: I wasn’t worried so much about the book in ’89 and ’90 because I had three other books out at the time, Dreams of Green Base, Here To Go, “D” Train, and also Brion’s The Process had been reprinted, and then everything changed when Brion died, like the power had gone out of the whole thing. . . I mean, I seemed to be at the height of success, the way these things go, and I’d got an advance from Quartet, the publishers, a considerable sum back then when you’re living on practically nothing, and yet nobody was interested in Perilous Passage at that time. I submitted it to Peter Owen, but they rejected it, and Black Spring Press, too. You know the routine — they couldn’t think of anything else quite like it, it was quite unique, they really admired it, and so on, but they didn’t know how they could possibly sell it. . . 

Terry Wilson, Lancaster Road, London, 1986 (photo by Alexis Bisticas)

IM: That’s always the thing, they need to follow something they recognize as a success, a model they can adapt and hitch their star to. When they say, “nothing else quite like it,” it isn’t praise at all, it’s actually a lament — “We don’t know what it is, we can’t figure out what to do with it.”  

TW: Yes, of course, that’s it. So then a lot of extensive travels with Jim McCann followed, a period when I didn’t do too much writing at all. Jim was working his way up to allegedly setting up an exhibition of Brion Gysin’s big painting the Makemono in Morocco, which was why Philippe Baumont and I were in Tangier in 1990, though Jim said, in an interview, very shortly before we arrived, that he was sending his special team to Morocco to organise tribesmen in the Rif Mountains to overthrow the King! Great! Thank you, Jim, and this perhaps explains the kind of hospitality we received from Gavin Young, among others. . . Gavin was staying up the road from David Herbert’s place on the Old Mountain, and he was very eager to hear the news and find out about our “mission.” . . And the American Legation, too, well, you can imagine, and it was out there on the jungle telegraph. . . Really, it was a devilish thing for Jim to have done, so we arrived blazing all this “arranging an exhibition” stuff, and it just came over as an unbelievable cover story. . . Then Ira Cohen and his son Raphael arrived, and Jim was paying for it all, and Ira was filming and writing everything down in his notebooks, and we were plunged into this crazy scenario, though it was fascinating, sure, and everyone opened their doors to us, not to mention their ears. . . Now all these old characters have left us, so being back in Tangier this year with Philippe, we didn’t know anybody. . . 

IM: And after Tangier in 1990 you travelled through Europe with Jim?

TW: Yes, a lot of travelling, from the late ’80s actually, with trips to Berlin and Dusseldorf and Strasbourg, and hair-raising points in between. Like, I’d had these extraordinary, magical times with Brion, and now I was with Jim and it was equally powerful and disturbing, but in a different way, and I had no idea what was going on. . . So that third part of Perilous Passage, “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,” was written out of what happened with Jim, hours and hours and hours of driving with him across Europe at amazing speeds, he is the most incredible driver, and I had to keep awake to keep rolling him joints, and I didn’t feel nervous when he was at the wheel because, as I say, he’s a genius driver. . . So Jim, as “KJ,” appears in “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,” the third part of the book, but also in the second part, “CHATEAU-ROUGE,” bringing along the usual chaos in his wake.  

IM: And you felt that your experiences with him were an extension, on another level, of what you had gone through with Brion Gysin?

TW: Well, Jim’s behaviour was shamanic. There’s no other word for it. I mean, you’d arrive in Paris at midnight and he’d decide to drive to Strasbourg to get a haircut! [laughter] He’d help you and then he’d just disappear, like he’d book several hotels in one city, and you had no idea which hotel he was actually in, or whether he was in any of them. One time he abandoned me in Berlin and I had to sneak into another hotel where I thought he’d gone, and I had no money, no German, and it was nerve wracking. That’s the way he was. Brion gave me a sort of preparation and Jim followed this with his theatre of total bullshit, but it worked, of course, and no end of crazy scenarios lived out for real, as they say. . . After the illusion trickster identities of Brion Gysin with his magical happenings, it was the sheer shamanic madness of Jim, going out into the world and drawing the heat and facing the music, the trickster guru inexplicability of his behaviour. . . Because after Brion’s death, it really was that time, all these power groups and nefarious businesses and fabulistic intrigues, never knowing what was going on. . . And Jim, KJ, he was so brilliant and funny and mercurial and fearless, an outlaw of his own making, and so I had this crash course into the power groups of this world, and he really stood everything on its head and played the crazy wisdom card to the maximum. . . Brion had been like a father to me and Jim was like. . . The Godfather! [laughter] Everything was a cover story to Jim, he just brilliantly made it all up as he went along, acting out his own “KJ” character, our loveable international practical joker, with a serious identity habit, which fitted in its way with Gysin’s masks, the playing with identity, and his own mythomaniacal fabulations. . . So, yes, they both played games, but those games can rebound on you, like being ostracized by the Paris artworld or kidnapped by the mafia or a bullet through the window or locked up in a high security prison. . . So, yes, those were crazy times, dangerous days, and “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” section of Perilous Passage emerged out of that period of uproar. The material accrued from the late ’80s and was written from 1990 onwards. . . 

James McCann and Terry Wilson (photos by Philippe Baumont)

IM: Jim was arrested in Paris in 1991, so “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” was written after that?

TW: Yes, and it still took many years for the book to be completed because ten years after all the madness with Jim, I went to Peru with Philippe and took ayahuasca and out of that experience I wrote “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS” which is the final chapter of Perilous Passage. So, I started the book in ’86 and finished it in 2000, and Synergetic Press decided they wanted to do it in 2001. John Allen was very enthusiastic, and he wrote me about it. He really got it.  

IM: Perilous Passage works perfectly as a book with the addition of that material — it’s not actually “additional,” it was essential to the book as it now exists. The book came together through a complex process, and it drew upon crucial, but diverse experiences you had over about 15 years. 

TW: I wanted to open up out of the claustrophobic situation of “D” Train, my previous book, to escape the intensity of the relationship between Whelme and Vogue which I’d described there. And then I found myself in West End, in Southampton, and I just became extremely receptive, as if everything I read or heard or saw on T.V. was streaming right through me. Like those sections of “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” called “THE DARKNESS CURSE (Playing For Time)” and “THE CALL OF AURAL BEECH (Remote Viewing),” they draw upon lots of old black-and-white films I was watching on T.V. in the afternoon, these old melodramas and thrillers, and books I was reading, and things I just came across, and these characters and plots and phrases just started to strike me, some of it very funny but also with this power and urgency, like there’s these references to organophosphates which I hadn’t planned on and I didn’t think originally that it was going to be part of the book. . . It takes the reader into this area of toxic poisoning, and ME and MS and AIDS, the entire viral maelstrom. . . Because that’s what was coming through. . . 

IM: And so you were picking up on these things, however bizarre or disparate, and recording them, and seeing how they might connect, following them though their association tracks, figuring out the story, and this would be a kind of mosaic of receptivity, of your own psyche during that time, a process akin to the Third Mind initiative of tracking through different media and making a map of consciousness, which Gysin and Burroughs explored through their scrapbooks and tapes at the Beat Hotel. . . You mention and draw upon John Buchan’s The Power House, a text very well known by Burroughs and Gysin, and also Dickens’ The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, but also Captain C.T. Arbuthnot, CDM, DFN, and his magisterial work My Battle Against Athlete’s Foot, a work I’m afraid I’m not familiar with. [laughter]

Terry Wilson with scissor tie, late 1960s-early 1970s

TW: Which really did exist, of course, unbelievably — and that was just the first volume, apparently. Yes, all this material began to come through, insistently, and I was in a condition of extreme receptivity, and as well as cutting-up a few things, I was incorporating and switching phrases as they struck me, like “The Great Itself,” “The Only No One.” . . Actually, both those phrases came from something you’d written about Brion at that time, it was typed on this now yellowing paper, and you’d written about “The Great Desert,” and I recombined a few of your phrases. . . The section in “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” called “ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT (The Lone Rider)” is like Charles Fort incorporating himself into his own notes via a short story. I could see this section as an extension of Fort’s technique, though I didn’t know at the time that Fort had tried to do that until you sent me the story he’d written. . . Of course, there are quotations and cut-ups of Fort in every book I’ve written. Fort was turning supposedly factual reports and scientific materials into fiction, or rather showing their eminent fictionality, treating facts and history as fiction. . . And I said to Burroughs, in regard to his statement “All history is fiction,” which is in Nova Express, that it came from Fort in his book Wild Talents, and William kind of grumbled something about how those farmers were lying about fish coming out of the sky, that kind of dismissive thing, but then he said, “Well, yes, that is one of the founder statements.” Actually, he’d nicked it verbatim for Nova Express. Like “Sir William Barroon” in Brion’s Beat Museum / Bardo Hotel, saying “the germ theory is a nonsense,” echoing Doc Schaffer in Naked Lunch, well, Burroughs said that Fort had said that, but he hadn’t, because Fort said, “I’m not saying that the germ theory is a nonsense,” although, in fact, that’s exactly what he was saying! . . . Well, Burroughs was very influenced by Fort, but he hid it. You know, psychic assailants, defenestration, spontaneous combustion, the Mary Celeste — William and Brion were fascinated by all this, and by Fort’s sorcery in Wild Talents. . . I think William just shied away from Fort because there were, for example, later associations with Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning Of The Magicians, and William and Brion did not want to be linked by default to Gurdjieff or Fort or anyone those people were into. . .  

IM: As well as the fiction of history, these parts of the book introduce special techniques like “remote viewing” and “scattering,” both of which would play an important part in your next book, Days Lane, techniques which are crucially bound up with the special meaning of tandra “Day-Dreaming,” the concept and practice at the heart of that work. And these sections of Perilous Passage are produced by techniques which are psychic, not literary, techniques related to Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind. These sections of the book seem to deal with suppressed and unaccountable memories. 

TW: Yes, like the reference to Mr Oak, the strange shaven-headed character I’d encountered many years before, in a gay pub in Notting Hill, The Champion, who looked at my fingers and told me that my days were numbered. And he was telling me that all these rare diseases were making a comeback, like kuru, this fatal degenerative disease supposed to have died off with the cannibals in Papua, New Guinea. And he’d come up with this “Virus X” which was apparently triggering all these unrelated diseases like TB and encephalitis. . .

IM: And he had the antidote.

TW: You bet he did! Some guck to cure an illness which he himself had invented. But there have been larger operators in that area. 

IM: And in Perilous Passage there are all these intelligence agents like “Marshall Peck,” Ivor Powell, the friend of Gerald Hamilton and Tom Driberg, and your fictional creation “Mr Green,” and the connections between Intelligence operatives and the esoteric world is crucial, like the “cadre of Indo-Celtic fifth columnist bolshies. . . Same crowd described by Doug Marshall in his book Mysticism.” Because the hermetic is precisely the area of secret information, and so we get all those ex-Etonians in the Foreign Office, ex-Guardsmen and diplomats with their Masonic connections and their affiliations to various magical brotherhoods, and the secret societies and the security services overlap and the elite move smoothly from one world to another. . . Politics, after all, like magic, is the realm of secrecy, the profession of non-disclosure, the transmission of secret knowledge. And this is something both Gysin and Burroughs knew, and had experience of — the symbiosis of the intelligence agencies and these esoteric organisations. The history of that is indisputable. Like Ira [Cohen] told me about these faux hippies who found their way to his door in Nepal, they were just looking for a bong, of course, a bang of a bong, apparently, but actually they were the Yale brotherhood, young CIA recruits sent out on a testing mission, and putting their gap year to some use before taking up their positions in aeronautics and academic think tanks and the burgeoning computer and electronics companies. . . Even Ira knew he had to keep his mouth shut around those types. It was the perfect work experience for aspiring agents in the field, penetrating the esoteric networks, getting their stars before going back to Washington and Dallas and Seattle. . .  

John Michell, Terry Wilson, and Ira Cohen (photo from the Wise Monkey Triptych by Ira Landgarten)

TW: Sure, sure. And you have these racist strands running through esotericism, you know, the supposed fascist connections of Evola, the Great White Brotherhood, and all that is the tip of the iceberg. You step into murky waters here. . . Western esotericsm based upon these “root races” as in Blavatsky, and the Nazis really took that to heart. . . And Brion and William thought that Pauwels and Bergier were reactionaries. Their book, The Morning Of The Magicians, had a considerable impact, and they were really onto Hassan-I-Sabbah, but also fascinated by Nazi occultism, that was the big lure. So Brion in Here To Go, he refers to their magazine Planète as that “pseudo-scientific magazine.” . . I mean, it’s inevitable, all these esoteric groups claim the true lineage and wage their magical wars, and it gets bound up with these notions of ideology and purity. . . 

IM: The true elect, the one and only, the divinely chosen. . . Could you say something about the technique referred to in Perilous Passage which is called “remote viewing” — in the book you have a footnote: “Another old technique, much practised by Intelligence agencies. Far away places and far away names. . . “

TW: The term comes from the Second World War, and although Brion didn’t use this term when I knew him, it’s impossible that he wasn’t familiar with it, given his wartime experiences, and the circles he travelled in, like the psychic Eileen Garrett. . . “Remote viewing” refers to the development of psychic abilities, a form of shamanism essentially, which was directed towards spotting subs in the Atlantic, or reading a document at a distance, gaining entry to some place when you’re miles away, accessing material and experiences without having to go through them physically. . . Like “Bi-Location” today. . . And this was related to learning a language just incredibly fast, as Brion had learned Japanese very fast, and he was in Intelligence during the Second World War and picked out by people in Intelligence to work in this area, developing the potential to project oneself through space and time. . . It was all very top secret, and we only have rumours, and cryptic suggestions, like with anyone who was in Intelligence, until the documents come out, the doctored non-evidence. . . But Brion had psychic abilities as well as linguistic abilities, that’s for sure. . . Actually, ayahuasca is related to this because the drug, like remote viewing, takes you “everywhere in space,” projecting you beyond the accepted limits of space and time. In that sense, the section “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” prepares the reader of Perilous Passage for the final short section of the book, “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS (Ayahuasca).”

IM: Perilous Passage is an account of an avant-garde, shamanic apprenticeship, but it’s also an esoteric guide, taking the reader from cut-up and receptivity to remote viewing and “scattering” techniques for the radical opening up of consciousness. Scattering, I think, might be defined to some degree as the picking up of hints and clues, these riddles left hidden by a teacher or previous initiates, an esoteric form of teaching in which a certain process must be engaged with and developed in order to access the strategically hidden. . . So in the context of the book, this, if you like, “recruits” the reader, turns him or her on to a different way of reading, of experiencing the power of words and certain signs and connections to reveal a radically different way of thinking, of experiencing. . . It’s very much akin to what Burroughs says about Gysin’s painting, which you quote towards the end of the book — “a certain path like a row or series of patterns. . . a series of neural patterns which already exist. . .” What I mean is that the scattering of clues is a trail that already exists, in potential form, in the brain, and the process of engaging with cut-up and other Third Mind techniques, opening up your receptivity, engaging with remote viewing, taking ayahuasca, and so on, all these are part of a creative process which both triggers and mirrors those neural patterns. Because Perilous Passage is more than an account of that process, it takes that very form, it’s produced by it, using the loaded, trigger phrases of cut-up, but also these techniques of rerouting fictions and so-called memories, to try and create a Third Mind consciousness in the reader, in effect to transport the reader along those lines. . . Which involves destroying established “time lines,” the linear, historical constructs which hold quotidian consciousness in place. And the experience which the text procures in the reader, it isn’t available to conventional analysis, intellectual criteria, literary interpretation, so there’s a very real, even visceral, psychic effect, but this cannot be transposed or reduced by critics to something else, put on to some other plane of reference and so categorised, analysed according to current literary theory and so assimilated, nullified.  

TW: Yes, that’s a very accurate way of putting it, I think, though just try and stop certain critics from doing exactly what you just described. Because if they don’t get it, and they won’t, I assure you, because they’ve already decided what it is and how to go about deconstructing it and explaining it away, then they’ll just dismiss it and say it’s a “collage” or something, and then write whatever they think or have been taught to think about that. . . Much good will it do them, of course. Well, the book hopefully works on the ideal reader as a preparation for the out-of-the-body consciousness of ayahuasca, and it reprises the kind of preparation which I’d gone through myself, though at the time I didn’t know that it would lead to my experience of ayahuasca in Peru.  

IM: And that “scattering,” again, it’s the clues you pick up on and trace in the book, it’s very much like Brion Gysin has left this trail for you, it’s like he has set these tests and traps for you to pass through, and left indicators in future time for you to follow and unravel. 

TW: An esoteric method of teaching, sure.

IM: How could he do that? By predicting the course you would take, or by setting you on that path, and planting signs along the way for you to encounter, a psychic paper chase. . . Or beyond that, the projection of his own spirit through your own life, so that you were making his presence manifest. . . And this would be an example of the “living experiment” and “experiment in living” of Burroughs and Gysin’s Third Mind work. . . You’ve said that Gysin was this great Teacher who was absolutely reluctant and disinclined to teach anyone, but this is a kind of teaching, as you say, which he has left you, a hermetic process you have to engage with in order, in effect, to teach yourself and become self-sufficient, and also go further, to continue The Third Mind. . . Gysin, as Bedaya, appears at key points in the text, his spirit manifests through unaccountable memories and apparitions and his loaded words come through — it’s the transmission of his “special knowledge” which nobody wants to know about, which has been dropped after his death, but however difficult the conditions, you feel you have to take up this great experiment, The Third Mind, “an experiment that failed but which is still going on. . .” Because this very definitely isn’t The Third Mind as scrapbooks, as artworks or artefacts in museum vitrines, it’s a process of psychic exploration, of deconditioning habitual behaviour, usurping fixed notions of identity — an extreme emotional and spiritual reorientation. The book homages Brion Gysin and his spirit inhabits the book. You were clearly haunted by his loss, and possessed by the desire to undo or overcome that loss — a recognized stage in the process of mourning, along with denial, and anger, and the rest. 

TW: Absolutely. But when I was writing “THE NERVOUS SYSTEM” in West End, I didn’t want to languish in my own emotions, and I became more textually and source creative, I was doing what I wanted, bringing anything in, because everything was a propos, an advantageous state for an artist to be in but exhausting, too. . . It was like a release, total freedom, freedom of access, just nothing was too weird or stupid or too recondite, because at one level I didn’t know what something might mean and how it might work, and yes, I do think this kind of receptivity could be understood as a form of remote viewing, because you can see the scenarios appear and develop as if you’re witnessing it happening. . . In those years in the country, in West End, I was getting into these extraordinary states of mind, very little internal dialogue, a quieting down of all that in order to become more receptive, and receptivity clears out all that taking of your own pulse. . . I could sit still for extended periods with nothing going on in my conscious mind, I was going into samadhi quite easily, which I lost when I came back to London in 2009. Taking ayahuasca in 2000 increased that ability, made it much deeper, and it was at that time, in that kind of condition that I finished Perilous Passage, the final section, “THE UNIVERSE IN OTHER WORDS (Ayahuasca),” and I couldn’t wait to write ayahuasca descriptions and cut them up, because I knew that was the way to go, to use the cut-up technique in that way, on those experiences, that was what I wanted to do and I knew it would work. It was the ideal subject matter for cut-up, and cut-up was the ideal method. . . Like Burroughs had the ayahuasca experience before he experienced cut-ups. 

IM: Yes, so ayahuasca is the psychic experience which laid the ground for Burroughs’ reaction to and reception of cut-ups, and cut-ups are prefigured in certain ayahuasca-inspired sections of Naked Lunch. 

Terry Wilson, Notebook for final section of Perilous Passage

TW: It was a relation between the two, between ayahuasca and cut-up, which I really had been waiting for, to put cut-up at the disposal of the drug. . . And it makes a real tour-de-force ending for Perilous Passage, you know, ayahuasca and cut-ups — an incredible combination. And that was the way to end it and make a great finale. . . Then I stopped writing and the receptivity went into another area, it wasn’t any longer about the desire or necessity of writing, of using words and creating images, all that stopped, and it was like these meditations went “clear,” went deeper than the receptivity related to the creative process, and I could sit in the sun or the shade for hours and I had all these classical types of chakra experiences, with all the colours, like a succession of colours from the gentials to the solar plexus, to the heart and the crown, behind the eyes, and I opened my eyes and it was like it was raining, like I was sitting under a fountain, drops of coloured spray, and I felt wonderful, a very Kundalini yogic kind of thing. . . I wasn’t in the lotus, I was in a chair in the garden with Penny, the cat, and all these colours were going all the way up, the way the brain works, colours clicking on in succession. . . I can’t remember the colours and the parts of the body, but I could feel it, it was spectacular. . . And the lawn looked like it was under frost. . . 

IM: The first part of Perilous Passage is called “MAN FROM NOWHERE” and that is more directly about what happened to you both before and after Gysin’s death, the situation in Paris and these various spooks and culture collectors who were on the scene, or behind the scenes. Actually, I’m stepping into that trap, because Gysin is not “Gysin” in the book, he’s “Bedaya,” and you’re not “Terry Wilson,” you’re “Toller Whelme.” But this isn’t merely the use of pseudonyms to protect or hide the innocent, or the guilty, it’s a deliberate confrontation and contradiction of any possible objective, biographical account, and it questions the projection of identity through naming, the gap between “identity” and “identification.”  

TW: Again, I wasn’t writing an official history because there is and can be no such thing. It’s fiction, “as ‘real’ as I can make it,” and when I’m asked to write my so-called “life story,” as if that would be the “real thing,” I can only point to Perilous Passage and my other books and say, “There it is.” If someone can’t get that, they’re holding onto this distinction between fiction and a “true and proper account” of “something which really happened.” It’s absurd! At the same time, the “real names” of these characters, dead or alive, apparently, do creep in later in the book, so that “Mr Green” is revealed to be Murray Smith, and “Vogue” is Philippe, and so on, because actually that makes the point — that all you have to do is use someone’s official name rather than a pseudonym, and some readers then take it as biographical, true and proper, but in fact the supposed biographical account is as written, as subjective, and unreliable as any fiction. Again, it’s Burroughs’ appropriation of Charles Fort’s maxim, “All history is fiction.” And William and Brion, they absolutely understood the significance of that statement, and it was crucial in their work and radically informed how they saw and experienced their lives, because otherwise you’re an automatic believer, you read something, whoever wrote it, whatever it might be, and you accept it at face value or you argue that it’s not correct, you believe the opposite, which is just as bad, if not even worse.

IM: So to accept a fictional universe is to stop being, as you say, an “automatic believer?” Like you read something like, “In 1954 the Mongol-Turk Khazers liquidated the white Adamic race in the name of the Soviet Anti-Christ,” and you just refuse to buy it.

TW: No, come on, that’s so obviously a fiction!. . . Isn’t it? [laughter] No, I mean you hear or read something like we’re being overwhelmed by immigrants, or the stock market is collapsing, or the weather’s going to be awful tomorrow, and instead of raving about it and getting incensed and crazy and yes, believing in it, you just stop! It seems like a simple thing to do, to just stop all that, but it’s not easy. And Brion and William deal with that in The Third Mind procedures. . . Read the Herald Trib, really read it, look at the way it’s all put together, look at how it’s written and composed, and don’t believe it!

IM: A lot of the news, of course, is pure prophecy and wish fulfilment. Still, I have that problem, I have this veneration of the word, I have a real word habit. 

TW: You’re over-intellectualized, Ian, and you know it. And you’re conditioned to be reactive to words. But you can stop it, because you understand the problem and it comes from you.

IM: I practically live in a library. Actually, thinking about it, I do live in a library.

TW: Get rid of the library!

IM: Like in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. 

TW: There you go again. 

Ian MacFadyen and Terry Wilson, London, November 2010 (photo by Eric Andersen)

IM: OK, so Perilous Passage plays upon what is supposedly “true” and what is fiction, it explores authenticity and belief. And you’ve said to me that by writing your “memoirs,” so to speak, as fiction, that turns your life into a fiction, or affirms its essential fictionality. 

TW: Yes, but there’s no deliberate falsification in the way I approached this, despite my quoting the Amazonian shaman Don Juan Tuesta, affirming what he calls “a deceit in the service of truth.” The book is about games of deception, ulterior motives, the shadow realm, power plays, all of that, but also how people deceive themselves, how easy it is to believe in these supposedly rational, accepted ways of thinking and behaving, to believe without even questioning where these beliefs come from. . . No, however irrational and crazy the book might seem, it’s a “true deceit,” the best possible account I could give of my experiences. . . It’s the case that I had some grievances when I was writing it, like Friends of Bedaya and this shaman on the make in the jungle, but I didn’t go out to misrepresent, precisely because I was not making that distinction between “true” and “false. . .” I was questioning the “reality” of people and events via memory, and playing upon the reader’s belief in what is, or was, “real” or invented, and making clear that the “truth of fiction” is an important consideration in regard to how each of us thinks and speaks and writes, what we think we know, what we believe did or did not happen. . . Whatever the confusion it generates, this whole area is vital, as William and Brion knew, it isn’t some philosophical talking shop, it’s the great imperative of “a new and different knowledge.” . . It’s a paradox, of course, because to insist upon fictionality, that all history is fiction, is actually to refuse to subscribe to Maya, the whole illusion world that we are born into, educated into, and supposed to spend our lives subscribing to. . .  

IM: Playing around with literary genres and pushing these fantastic scenarios, you’re stretching the reader’s credulity while simultaneously the pseudonyms give way to the real names, you’re challenging the reader’s ability or desire to accept the validity of the text or treat it as a fantastic subversion. . .

TW: I was playing with literary genres and scenarios, sure, mixing and pushing them to the point of craziness, but this was the process, an extraordinary receptivity taking over to a certain extent. . .That material had its own volition and it was also entirely a propos the circumstances I found myself in, those scenarios and that mayhem and confusion, it was all going on, in and out of the book itself. Like there were all these “Old School” Intelligence agents, so I let loose with my own Sapper-Bulldog Drummond-John Buchan, obtuse, over-the-top kind of Doctor Benway creation. . . And the names of the characters emerged from the receptivity of the writing experience. Like Burroughs is “The Old Man,” a play, of course, on Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. . . Brion connected William with Sabbah, and vice versa, but I also saw in a newspaper the phrase “the old man and I drew in the nets,” and it caught my attention, and I thought immediately of William and Brion in the Beat Hotel and later in London and Paris, attracting acolytes and pulling in the nets, drawing in people like myself and Udo Breger and others. . . So in Perilous Passage “Burroughs” is historically located while the “The Old Man” is fictionally, mythically at large, but it’s the same character, created through words. People will bring to it what they think they know about Burroughs, and project that, but where do their ideas of “William Burroughs” come from? So I guess one aspect of this approach is to affirm that “William Burroughs” is a fictional character, a fictional creation — as are we all. 

IM: And Brion Gysin is “Bedaya.”

TW: A bedaya is a traditional Moroccan waistcoat, maybe originally it was Persian, the kind which Brion and William both wore, and as I’ve said, Brion gave me Antony’s, in Paris, after Antony’s death and William commented, “He has every right to wear it.” So it had a symbolic, fraternal function. . . But also, I asked Brion what the name of a garment like the waistcoat was, what a Moroccan would call it, and instead of answering me aloud, he wrote it down — “Bedaya.” And it was odd, as if he didn’t want to repeat the word, he didn’t want to speak or pronounce the word out loud for some reason, so I spoke it aloud, pronouncing it, and he confirmed this as correct. So that was maybe some kind of ritual, because I never heard the word from his mouth. . . I thought it might well have been an esoteric name, even his Secret Name, or related to that, but when he wrote it down that time, I thought he was writing his signature, and it looked like his signature, curiously, like a name, or like he was writing his own name. . . But there it was, “Bedaya,” so I took it for his name in my writing, and that’s where it came from, and he’s referred to as Bedaya all the way through “D” Train. . . For many years Brion wasn’t seen without that kind of waistcoat, he had a couple at least, until the last couple of years when he stopped, I think. “Bedaya” means “covering the heart” I believe, or “heart contact,” a Sufi connotation . . . Well, Philippe used a Ouija board to come up with his own fictional alter ego, “Vogue Etiquette. . .” And my name in my books, “Toller Whelme,” it was the name of a house in the country in Southampton, and it struck me that it had my initials and of course Whelme is overwhelmed from the beginning of Dreams Of Green Base to the end of Perilous Passage. . . “Mr. Green” is based on Murray Smith and the name relates to another Green, Gerald Green, who was associated with J G Bennett. It’s like Brion in Here To Go, he says that he didn’t know his “true name,” or so he claims . . . 

Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson, London, 1981 (photo by Ulrich Hillebrand)

IM: Because Gysin was fascinated by his own name, the letters and their combinations, and he kept changing it, looking for the right fit, and the way he signed his paintings and drawings changed — “Brion Gysin,” “Brion,” “Gysin,” “BG,” writing over and correcting his own signature, and using this apparently aristocratic Swiss family emblem, which is actually more like a Sufi glyph, so that the name and the signature are unstable and they mutate, signalling and embodying the problematics of his own image and sense of identity. . . And he roller-painted his name, and deconstructed it, and developed his own “bean sprout” calligraphic signature, and played upon other people’s names, turning them into these funny monikers based upon sound play, these sobriquets with a real scorpion sting. Like Angus MacLise was “Angus MacFangus,” playing upon MacLise’s fascination with Jaguar Cults and his wearing a tooth on a leather thong around his neck. Ira told me about MacLise and his Jaguar obsession. . . Well, Gysin’s joke names were loaded with meaning, it was a game but it related to his profound disturbance about his own identity, and how to be born is to be named, and the birth and the name are both fated and imposed. And it’s like every person is turned into a fictional character, or a representative type. You’re born, not asked, and you’re named in the process, and most people suffer their given name or vaunt it for all their days. 

TW: Susan Sontag was “Susan Snotrag. . .” Kate Millet was “Mate Killit. . .” Evelyn Waugh was “Evilin Wog. . .” Aleister Crowley was “Aleister Growley. . .” and so on.

IM: Sort of childish, I suppose, but very funny and extremely acute. “What’s in a name?” It’s like Robert Hughes in his debunking of the art world in the ’80s, he has “Julian Snorkel,” “Jean-Michel Basketcase,” “David Silly,” and so on. 

TW: Well, there may be true names, official names, pseudonyms in fiction, or someone like Jim with his incredible multiple aliases and proliferating passports. . . I’d been out there in the world with Jim and he had so many aliases, all these different cover stories, and Brion, as you say, he made all these changes to his name. . . I blow the pseudonyms at the end of Perilous Passage, and also in the book’s Introduction, and then there are the photographs of Brion and myself and Udo Breger’s photograph of William and Brion with Jim, and these will be taken to document the text, however unbelievable. . . In the case of that picture of Jim, a very good picture by Udo, it unbelievably confirms that Jim apparently really exists, or existed, and isn’t, or wasn’t, my own deranged invention. . . Because I needed a big change, to pull right out of the claustrophobic and incestuous scene, to get out of there and have an overview, to open up and widen the scope, so it’s like I leave “Whelme” and all those characters and their “real life” counterparts behind. . . The book had achieved its purpose, for me. 

IM: Could you say something about the second part of Perilous Passage, called “CHATEAU-ROUGE?”

TW: Well, the first section “MAN FROM NOWHERE” continues on from my previous book “D” Train, and it delineates what happened subsequently, and Brion’s death, but when I got to the second section, “CHATEAU-ROUGE,” I really was trying to find my way out of this situation, the doldrums I’d been plunged into. Brion had died in ’86 and it took a while to get onto a different track and this section really takes the reader into what happened when Jim, or “KJ,” began to increasingly take over the scene in his own unique way. . . Because Brion had left this “area of total conflict” between different factions and vested interests and of course Jim liked nothing better than a situation like that, and he decided to push his Academia Foundation and exhibit Brion’s Makemono painting, which he owned, and had financed, and to make a film and all these other great plans and ideas which naturally never came to anything and caused all kinds of mayhem and grief, while having a great deal of fun and thrills in the process. . . So there’s KJ getting his whole show on the road and the beginnings of my times with him, but it’s in this section that something very different happens that begins to set the scene for the rest of the book and for my later work Days Lane, because Philippe’s apartment in the late 80s was in Barbes, next to the metro station Chateau-Rouge, and there was a lowlife bar there on the corner, called Chateau-Rouge. Well, I began to go into these memories, these tandra “Day-Dreaming” type messages or visions, which were tandra recapitulation-type episodes, memories which I apparently had which appeared in my consciousness but which I couldn’t account for. . . So I went into these memories of training establishments, “little factories” in different locations, and one of them was the Chateau, and for some reason that name, “Chateau-Rouge” just seemed to fit, transposed to a chateau in the French countryside, like taking a piece of Gysin’s Paris with me into the countryide after his death, and this was activated by the process of writing the book. 

IM: So the book, to some extent, helped to produce those memories, which I think helps show how the book was reciprocal, and it generated and embodied the very Third Mind emanations which stimulated it and which it recounts. Writing makes it happen — Mektoub: It Is Written. Writing as an active shamanic agent in the entire process, which you were trying to use in that way. . . And that act of writing is foregrounded at different points in the text, like “I sat back from the typewriter” and “He sits back from the typewriter,” and there are photographs of you writing at the typewriter, so that the creation of the book is an essential part of the story being told, which is still being written as the reader reads it, and the writing of the text is a key element in the psychic process . . . So the book is happening, it’s being written as you read it. . . The writer in the first person and in the second. . . You start by describing something which apparently happened, and then you enter the scene and it’s happening in real time, and it’s being written. . . And that pronoun switch is telling, too, showing the disjunction and also the merging of author and alter ego, the split between the character as “real life protagonist” and the writer as a fictional creation, the “I” and the “He” of self-recreation. . . The Chateau scenario seems related to Burroughs’ Academy 23 project in The Job and his Mayfair articles, the all-male training establishment which Burroughs dreamed of setting up, maybe at Boleskine, Aleister Crowley’s place on Loch Lomond, which Jimmy Page acquired. It was an extension of the idea of the psychic group in the Beat Hotel, but looking to the future, the necessity of having initiates rather than acolytes and to train them and deprogram them, to create a new school of practical enlightenment. . .  

TW: Yes, sure, there’s that connection but I wasn’t emulating that or playing with a version of it, I was remembering these episodes, these unaccountable but vivid memories. . . Memories arising, which I couldn’t account for, but which were no less “true” than so-called “real” memories. 

IM: Those “memories” do suggest that idea of the enclave with initiates as another key part of The Third Mind, not only as a kind of version of the Beat Hotel itself, but as a necessary psychic accompaniment to the project of re-educating the self, that one cannot do this without others. Pascal was right, we die alone, but we don’t live alone. Hell may well be other people, but other people, they are life itself, like it or not, and we can at least choose our friends. . . Actually, Perilous Passage is so much about you feeling alone and isolated and lost, and so this could be read as a projection, a reaching out for continuation of everything you’d loved about Brion, inseperable from his teaching — even though he refused to teach! [laughter] So what you were remembering was maybe a projection at some level of that vital part of the process, the essential need for brotherhood. . . To some degree a recognition of that area of recruitment and transmission, and those strange memories of this training Chateau, they recur later in the “NERVOUS SYSTEM” section of the book where they’re connected to memories of La Roche-Guyon where you went with Philippe after Gysin’s death, “the white stone village” outside Paris, and this is like the Third Mind technique which continually transposes written material and scenarios and memories, changing them and re-contextualising them, moving them around in space and time, a technique related to echo edits and Donald Cammell’s flash cuts in film, so you get these déjà vu glimpses and fragmented replays moving back and forth in the text and in the mind — it’s a way of developing memory in a different way, not to remember and preserve memories but to shift and concatenate and fracture and reassemble them. 

TW: I’d say it’s both a conscious decision in the writing process and the emergence of those ideas through the process. . . It’s not a literary technique, it’s true to the experiences involved, and that’s the most important thing. 

IM: So it’s not a literary technique, as critics would have it, it’s a way of altering consciousness and the experience of temporality, it’s absolutely a method, one that takes a number of different forms, and utilizes cut-up and tape layering and transposition, using the printed word to alter the brain itself and confute habitual responses, to make the reader aware of the processes of connectivity and the multiple levels of meaning — that’s the transmission from the writer to the reader, and it’s so complex that the effects cannot be predicted or controlled by the writer. 

TW: That’s it, you can try to express these states of consciousness, but at some point it really is transmission. Which isn’t to say that finally, as a writer, you don’t select and edit and decide upon what does this best, what works and doesn’t work. 

IM: Of course, very importantly, Burroughs’ techniques of cut-up and fold-in and scrapbook orientations and dreaming, these make the writer his own reader in a very special sense, because the writer discovers what he has apparently written by reading the results of the processes used. At one level what Burroughs is doing is mind screwing, that’s the only way to put it, I think, and that’s something the critics fail to notice or refuse to say, along with the sheer beauty of the writing. And Burroughs’ writing works on the reader’s memory and not just by creating memories of reading. . . It’s a tool of rapid connectivity, a “neural shuttle,” and triggers the synaptic flashing of images from different time locations in the brain, it impacts on the psyche and it’s carried on by the reader, quite helplessly. The effects will emerge not only in dreams but in waking life, I mean so-called waking life, and as you’ve said, this visceral possession is not something critics wish to talk about or consider at all, it doesn’t fit their literary and theoretical templates.

TW: That’s their form of protection. They have a certain theoretical understanding, but even that is hopeless, it just means they’re writing and talking about something they have no experience of, but they have their articles and lectures to prove otherwise, naturally. To “understand” cut-up, you have to do it. And that goes for everything else in The Third Mind. They really ought to try “rubbing out the word” — their own! You have to engage, you have to go through these processes and learn, and then you might write, because you might have something to say, or be in a situation to transmit something. 

IM: Actually, to deal with this writing as “literature,” it’s a category error. . . I mean, no one can deny Burroughs’ effect on “American Literature,” and this is fine as far as it goes, but that’s the point, that’s absolutely as far as it goes — for the trained exegetists. I think the inability to get Burroughs carries on to the reception of your own work — you’re seen as creating this complex, rarefied, difficult or perplexing form of “literature,” or it’s a “cut-up autobiography” that’s also somehow invented, maybe, and they just wish you’d just write your story exactly as it happened. . . or on the other hand, a recognizable narrative fiction, something that could be called “a novel. . .”

TW: My books do tell my story and I’m not interested in whatever these self-elected scholars and critics are so busy explaining to one another in their colloques and symposiums, I’m out of all that, definitively, and always have been.

IM: Surely the psychic impact of Burroughs’ writing is the most important thing. It’s writing as the teleporting of the reader from one place and time to another, not the escapist seduction of the reader into a particular story or period, and the old suspension of disbelief, but something quite different from that immersion in another world, on the contrary, it’s the vertiginous jumping from one setup to another, from one fictional scenario to another and back again, and the vivid awareness of that experience of transition, which shatters perceptual and mental concurrence and fixity. . . It’s commonly said that this is the result of cut-up, but it also comes from the other techniques which Burroughs and Gysin explored including journeys out of the body, the teleporting of consciousness, the projection of other lives, so-called “false memory syndrome. . .” There’s no doubt that Burroughs rewrote his own memories through textual and psychic processes which altered the written material in order to change the brain’s formatting of these memories, and memory patterns. . . And so memories can be textually generated in variant form, a cyclical process which is actually in accord with what we now know about the storing and activation and re-contextualization of memories. . .But the point is that Burroughs actually recreates and develops his “own” memories, and at this point, of course, you could bring in psychoanalysis and start writing about manifest versus latent memories, and screen memories, insisting upon the “real” episodes which Burroughs is supposedly exorcising, or attempting either to locate or obfuscate, but his methodology actually invalidates that hunt for “what really happened.” Burroughs is just too fast for that, in every sense, beyond even the “space age” of the ’60s in which he located his practice. Because cut-up smashed commonplace notions of cause and effect, and Sigmund Freud will never read The Soft Machine. [laughter]

TW: Again, and I guess it can’t be said too often, because nobody will listen — “All history is fiction!” 

IM: You’re trying to express these experiences of other states of consciousness in writing, and to procure and transmit something of those experiences, so it’s not an account but psychically generative. Burroughs said that a writer needs his readers, and that’s the key — the Sender needs the Receiver. The software, the anti-program, must be installed — to use a contemporary, commonplace version of the cybernetic imagery which was not metaphoric but literal for Gysin and Burroughs when they employed it in the Beat Hotel. The key is that the Word is understood as being transmitted as a virus — because it replicates, because it spreads. . . 

TW: Yes, that’s it, you want to have an effect which conveys the dynamics of consciousness. In London in ’86, after Brion’s death, I had this onslaught of spectacular fireworks, a psychic experience, what Krishnamurti called “The Process,” which of course has some relevance to the title of Brion’s novel and others have used this term in regard to initiatory experiences. Well, for about six months after Brion’s death I was seeing with my eyes closed, I had this rush of psychic experiences which is conveyed hopefully to some extent in Perilous Passage, a real psychedelic fandango, and it felt as if momentarily all this power was passing through me, the way he had felt throughout his life, that’s what I felt, producing the most extraordinary psychic fireworks, quite different from the receptivity and deep meditations which I experienced later, and different from ayahuasca, too. . . 

IM: In the book you describe seeing a blue sea and then you’re projected onto a movie screen before being swept away by “some uncontrollable volitionary force from one infinitely inconceivable metamorphosis to another. . .” You pass through a cavern of mirrors and you’re attacked by all these “quasi-human creatures,” and what I find so interesting is that you get out of this psychic pit by actually conjuring another kind of fear, your own fear of heights, by inducing vertigo, and by doing this you escape the “psychic fireworks” — it’s a method of overcoming a state of terror by invoking an inculcated psychic and physical fear. And significantly, your vertigo itself disappears during this process. It’s a lesson in learning to combat one terror with another, to induce a further terror and to pass through both. 

TW: But at the time, when you’re going through something like that, it’s not like you can think it through, or employ some strategy. . . There was this electrical energy crackling through me, and cracking me up physically and mentally, to the point where I thought I would die, overloaded with the voltage, as if that was what Brion had lived with. . . It was enormously debilitating and I felt I was being rewired. Such experiences seem impossible to describe, but that’s something I felt I had to try and do in Perilous Passage, it’s one of the functions of the book to see just how far I could go, to find ways to express these states, and not just provide an account, as you say. . . Writing as a method, one among others, to procure access to that kind of state, or communicate how it felt . . . And of course cut-up would seem to be the perfect method to use for expressing these states, as with ayahuasca. . .  

Terry Wilson, notebook and photos for Perilous Passage

IM: The time gap between the first parts of Perilous Passage and the last two sections shows how the book was written out of unexpected, unforeseen experiences which actually entered the book and changed it. And it was not “recollected in tranquillity,” it wasn’t written after the fact, looking back — it was lived. 

TW: My approach was not systematic, though I kept it strictly in the order in which it was written. Within that you have all these flashbacks and episodes moving back and forth in time, but there’s a chronology of writing. . . I wasn’t writing what had happened, I was writing it as it happened. The book was part of what happened during the years in which it was written, it was inextricably bound up with those experiences which created it. 

IM: And which in turn it helped to create. Even when you weren’t writing during this period, you were still a writer, and that is a crucial thing. Does a writer, can a writer, stop being a writer? If not, then that impulse, desire, necessity always plays a part. How do you feel about your own role, or profession of writer, the compulsion, or curse, of being a writer?

TW: I like writing, I enjoy it, but I distrust the artistic process. I don’t like the idea of being addicted to it. Sartre in his book on Genet, I think, he says that you show him someone who calls himself a writer, he’ll show you a slave, someone in chains. . . So I said, after Dreams Of Green Base, and after Perilous Passage, and other times, that I wasn’t going to write anymore, at those times I felt I’d said all I wanted to say. Then with Days Lane, I wanted to explain “The Gysin Level,” and tandra “Day-Dreaming,” to get at the quintessence of The Third Mind, so it’s a small book, very concentrated, like that, focusing on all the experiences I’d gone through in that area, a kind of summation, the final statement, if you like.  

IM: Burroughs wrote so much, he wrote all the time, and the material he generated overflowed the published books. . . It was for many years an extraordinary, astonishing process of writing, an organic, Amazonian flood of writing without end, this “orchidaceous splendor” flowing in all these directions. . . Totally uncontainable, a real river of writing in total flood. . . An absolutely unparalleled practise of writing — writing as addiction, out of addiction. . .And Gysin’s written and published oeuvre is comparatively small compared with that, and was directed to a few distinct projects, realized or otherwise. I think your own writing went through these years of experiences and experimentation, and each book developed so as to incarnate a particular stage in your development, I mean, your psychic development and what you were learning. . . So each book incarnates a particular period but also a crucial stage of initiation, from Dreams Of Green Base to “D” Train to Perilous Passage and then Days Lane. 

TW: Yes, like Days Lane. After the experiences in West End I found it impossible to believe in a hostile, predatory universe. And the experience of ayahuasca didn’t contradict this, even though the experience was terrifying. . . I went through it, but it didn’t contradict those experiences, no, it was beneficial but you have to integrate it, because once you’ve taken it, it’s inside you. . . Some people benefit enormously from ayahuasca, others seem unaffected. It depends entirely upon who’s taking it, the psycho-physical setup. . . At the very end of Days Lane, I wrote about seeing and accepting “that the beauty of existence is never exhausted and is ultimately invulnerable, and that Entire Being — the universe, in other words — is total elation.” 

IM: Perilous Passage is very much the account of a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but the Sorcerer has gone, the Apprentice has to navigate alone, contacting the Master through these strewn clues and psychic manifestations. Or he’s helpless, a conduit for these transmissions, set on the “shattering course.”  

TW: You know that Brion didn’t want to be my teacher, but one of the last things he said to me was, “You have only been an Apprentice to an Apprentice.” So there was someone, something, behind him, and what happened to me after his death was something which he could not show me when he was alive. . . Well, I’ve spent time with artists and practitioners, shall we say, and some of these were involved in those shifting worlds of intrigue and psychic power, and I learned that an artist is a self-conscious shaman and not a public entertainer. . . For William and for Brion, art wasn’t a religion and it wasn’t art for art’s sake, it was intended to have some effect, it was an instrument in the transformation of consciousness, directed at changing the circumstances of living, the experience of human existence. . . It wasn’t party politics but a disenfranchised electorate attacking existing ideologies, recruiting the disaffected and the rebellious. . . William and Brion were serious practitioners of a revolution in awareness, they were researching “a new and different knowledge,” creating an esoteric factory, going back to the roots of magical artistic practice and developing these shattering techniques through technology, surprising “the springs and traps of inspiration,” all of that and more besides. . . And that attitude has been essential for me and for my work, because these notions of so-called “art” and “literature,” all of that is quite beside the point. . . Brion taught by example, through allegory and incredibly intricate, complex story-telling. He taught elliptically, and through demonstration — he would show you something and leave the rest up to you. It was the opposite of didacticism, even though Brion had his own very pronounced views on things. I remember one time, someone ran out the room when Brion was telling this story because it just drove him crazy. . . It was at the time of the publication of Queer, or it was just about to be published, and we were there in Brion’s apartment in rue St Martin and William was in one room talking about the shooting of Joan, he was in Brion’s bedroom, actually, that’s where he’d installed himself or found himself with this audience listening to him, and, of course, they were rapt. . . And William was talking about possession, the version given in the introduction to Queer, no doubt. . . But I stayed in the main room with Brion and he was talking to me about looking after Bet, saying you have to look after your mother, you know, that was axiomatic, you had to do that, even though Brion had not done so with his own mother and felt considerable guilt about it. . . Well, this conversation took place while William was in the next room talking about the shooting of Joan, and maybe that misogyny theme arose, like the two were in conjunction — the shooting of the wife, the apparent desertion of the mother, and the terrible guilt involved. . . I was feeling very uneasy about what was happening, like some kind of double act they would put on, but this was actually very distressing and weird, and then Brion went into this incredible tale about some unbelievable character who went to vernissages and openings and salons where he proceeded to stamp on women’s feet! [laughter] This was Brion as a Fortean “Wild Talents” operator, telling me apparently out of the blue about this phantom foot stomper, some guy who just appeared and did this crazy thing and then ran off until the next time and how he became the curse of fashionable society. It was hilarious, incredible, and I had no idea why Brion was suddenly expounding upon this, and then he said that this man was his hero, he was the man he admired most in the world, you know, really lauding this character and enthusing about him and laying it all on, and as he described all these crazy incidents, I couldn’t stop laughing, but of course, I thought he was making it all up, but then he opened this drawer and came out with a whole load of press cuttings about this guy, like in seven languages, all of which Brion could read and proceeded to do so. . . The Phantom Foot Stomper, going around all the society hot spots and jumping on women’s feet before fleeing into the night. . . And meanwhile William is talking about the tragic killing of Joan, and the guilt he feels, and the “Ugly Spirit,” and we’re howling uncouthly with laughter in the next room, or at least I was, about this society foot fetishist . . I mean, what did that mean? Why did he suddenly come out with all that stuff and show it to me? I know it’s connected to his mother and to Joan through this idea about stepping on women, but at the same time it was so bizarre and freakish and unaccountable. It certainly wasn’t happenstance, because Brion wasn’t like that. It was teaching. . . it meant something that could not have been said in any other way. And he was the devil who made me react in the way I did, and I really couldn’t help myself — it was hysterically funny, and it was teaching, teaching through overturn, to shatter all your preconceptions and totally turn you around, like that. . . He made me laugh like crazy till I suddenly stopped and thought, “What just happened?” That was his way — something hidden in the telling, and you’d never forget it, though its meaning is ineffable. . . 

IM: Perilous Passage is very funny indeed, as well as scary and disorienting. Burroughs and Gysin could also be naturally very funny, but humor, like in your work, it had a strategic purpose for them, too — laughter, laughing out loud, the un-containable explosion of laughter, like, “you’re killing me.” . . It has a vital function in shamanism and in overturning self-control and the imposition of social control. Gysin and Burroughs were profoundly serious men, but they knew the value of wit and delight and fun, as well as the weapon of humor — the satiric, scatological sketch that ridicules some divine tyrant and turns him into a laughing stock forever. And how great is that. . . But what a lot of people think of first and foremost about Burroughs’ work, I’m sure, is the grotesquerie, the satire and scathing polemic, the caricature and the one-liners. That’s just one reason why the cut-up trilogy is less popular than some of his other works, though I think it’s his greatest achievement after Naked Lunch. Quite apart from the intensive cut-up employed, which is so incredibly heavy and like being machine-gunned, it’s far less pantomimic.  

TW: It might seem crazy or totally misguided that in a book which deals with very serious issues, the Third Mind and the death of Brion Gysin, that I have this insane slapstick with references to some retired General’s magnum opus on athlete’s foot and so on. . . But yes, you’re right, it’s a very necessary corrective to some “imparting the wisdom” setup. . . I owe much of that to Jim, I mean he was such a great performer and a perfect character for the book too, but it was more than that, it was an education, really — a terrifying education, sure, but I guess I learned a lot, and I realized that that was part of the process, which had begun with William and Brion, and now here I was with Jim and his antics and all this mayhem. . . When you’re with someone like that, even though there is no one else like that, you certainly see and experience things differently. And of course, Jim was the opposition, I mean he was against all these vested interests, he represented Brion’s interests, as far as I was concerned, because he’d financially supported Brion when Brion was ill and dying, and he’d financed and arranged for Brion to be able to paint his big Makemono, the multiple panels of the painting Calligraffiti of Fire, which he wanted to exhibit, and then he wanted to make a film of Perilous Passage, based upon the book I was writing, and this was 1990, and it seemed absolutely the way to go, because Jim was really pushing Brion’s work and my own work, and he believed in it.

Perilous Passage film poster (design by Philippe Baumont)

IM: The big advertisement for the proposed film, it appeared in that big issue of Screen International promoting the Cannes Film Festival, it was in May 1990. And Jim believed in Perilous Passage and the techniques employed, he saw it as the true continuation of The Third Mind. I have a copy of that big one-page poster here, it reads, “Who Is The Man From Nowhere? Perilous Passage by Terry Wilson. The Legacy of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. A Mind-bending Mega Trip Into Interior Space.” And then the whole project unravelled and fell apart, which isn’t unusual in the film world, it happened with Burroughs and Gysin and Tony Balch when they tried to make a film of Naked Lunch, though that took years and years before they finally gave up on it, or rather, accepted that they were being struck down with illness and it just wasn’t going to happen. But even though it all fell apart, Jim had seen the film potential of Perilous Passage, and he picked up on the filmic scenarios and film setups in the book. . . He saw the possibility of bringing Third Mind techniques to the big screen. 

TW: And then someone fires a gun through the window, just one of the things that went down at that time, as I mention in Perilous Passage. 

IM: The sound of breaking glass seems to have been a feature of the shenanigans, psychic and otherwise. And flickering lights. . . 

TW: Well, it all came to an end in any case when Jim was arrested and locked up, and that was the end of the idea of any movie. But that craziness which Jim brought along with him, it went into the book along with all this slapstick material that I was picking up on from various sources, and I’d chuck it in, and in a way it was like Brion taking a sci-fi chapter from some novel and sticking it in The Process, and Burroughs writing to Ginsberg about putting Junkie and Queer together, one written in the first person and one in the second person, because that kind of disjunction seems crazy but it was entirely appropriate. . . It’s the juxtaposition of different kinds of knowledge which was part of that process, and the humor is very much in the ludicrousness of this very disparate material dragged in. . . And it was complex, like the quotation from The Last Buffalo Of The Black Hills, it isn’t a quotation at all, it’s actually a cut-up I made, but it doesn’t appear to be a cut-up or read like a cut-up! But a reader might assume it’s a genuine quotation since I mention that book earlier on in the text. The reader may be puzzled, or elsewhere feel derailed by this Marx Brothers riot, but it’s not written for readers who might define it as “postmodernist,” it’s not some kind of “anti-novel,” no, not at all, my book is a spell, it’s intended to have a quite magical effect and in that way it’s closer to Brion’s The Process, as well as deriving technically to some extent from William’s The Job. . . And, as I say, I was entering the Tom Ripley world, and even these quite odd personalities Brion knew couldn’t compare with Jim’s antics and this whole dangerous scene I was introduced to, and then with Jim there were all these different people in one, the deranged motormouth suddenly switches into a description of the stars as we drive through the night, and then not saying a word. . .  

IM: Like Europe in the rain, travelling through a film of ruins, it comes over in the book and it encapsulates that feeling of the early ’90s. I liked the idea of Jim’s proposed film, from what I could make out of what Jim told me at the time. I imagined it would be a kind of homage to Donald Cammell’s great Performance, this mixing and merging of the artistic and criminal worlds, but with Third Mind techniques actually employed in the shooting. . . I’ve worked on even more nebulous film projects, and I thought this project was unlikely but it was at least quite promising compared with what I’d been through, like the one about the closeted gay cop who works at night in a massage parlour and inserts needles into his scrotum. [laughter] Well, that went straight into the video dungeon, but I imagined this film Jim had in mind as a black and white art house film, shot through with colour, a kind of New Wave homage in some ways. . . And the film would make the image of Brion Gysin appear, and that whole Maya illusion world, the great Beat Hotel melange, with all its sound and vision projectors, it would all be there, on screen and soundtrack . . . And then Jim drove me crazy, getting me to write all these treatments and synopses and articles, referring to your work and Gysin’s and Burrough’, and he appeared to be in Cannes, but maybe he was actually in Paris, and he was apparently meeting Bertolucci and David Lynch and even the Adorno Group, or was it the New Frankfurt School or something — and his demands and requests changed every night, depending upon whoever he was going to meet to sell this idea to, or whatever he was up to. I was writing all these things at a moment’s notice, and I remember once saying to him, “No one, and I mean no one, can write a screenplay in five hours, Jim,” and he said, “Cut out the dialogue.” [laughter] I mean, incredible! And there were these incredibly long phone calls, and Jim was brilliant, very inspired and inspiring, and he was very much someone who loved the work of Burroughs and Gysin and your own writing and he really wanted to do something and he thought film was the way to go, a Burroughsian, Gysinian vision on the screen, dealing with your situation at the time, trying to keep The Third Mind going somehow. And he was very funny. He made me laugh, and I mean, I was in pain. [laughter] 

TW: It was shamanic foolery, and that was vital for the book, I thought, or otherwise you’d be entering Beckettland, though Brion once told me that William actually found Beckett funny! [laughter] 

IM: You mean he really thought Beckett was funny?

TW: That’s what Brion told me.

IM: Well, actually, I can see that, I think, maybe, in the novels. There’s this absurd repetition of certain meaningless actions. Was that it, do you think?  

TW: I really wouldn’t worry about it.

IM: Jim treated the phone as an instrument of shamanic transmission. I found it impossible to break the call or hang up — he had me hooked. He phoned and claimed that David Lynch had called whatever I’d written “an insult to the profession” or something, and that Lynch had ripped it up and thrown it in the waste basket in an apoplectic rage, but this didn’t chime at all with what I knew about Lynch. The Adorno Group, or whatever they were, they promptly denounced me as a “class traitor” and “art parasite,” and Jim said, “How could you write such drivel? How could you do this to me?,” you know, emotionally prostrating himself, but then the next moment it was, “Forward, comrade!” and jubilantly triumphant before all obstacles. . . [laughter] Then I’d be up all night writing and burning up the fax machine. Jim phoned at one point and said that you and Philippe had gone AWOL in the Atlas Mountains and I should fly out to Morocco immediately and find you, but I should go “in mufti” . . . I mean, really, he made my head spin, and in those days I didn’t know if it was lunch or breakfast, but he was spellbinding, and unlike some, he did actually pay me for my work. Jim had honor, though Duncan Campbell, in his book The Underworld, he writes that Jim was “eccentric and devious. . . a man who has scruples like a hen has teeth, who lived in a netherworld between reality and fantasy.” 

Philippe Baumont and Terry Wilson, Tangier 1990 (photo by Oliver Harris)

TW: I don’t think Joseph Beuys, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin were wrong about Jim, and I know whose opinion I’d value. They appreciated Jim, they recognized him. He was the true revolutionary spirit, incarnate. 

IM: They were men of the world, they were great artists, and they’d been around — and they knew a crazy wisdom guru when they met one. And Jim supported Gysin, and yourself, he really did put his money down on the table. We must thank him for Gysin’s Calligraffiti of Fire and for helping Gysin through those dark times when he was so terribly ill. Jim picked up the tab, and he never questioned doing so. Certain others were unaccountably unavailable at the time, or occupied elsewhere. “By their deeds shall ye know them.”

TW: Absolutely. Yes, Jim came through for Brion, that is the truth of that time. . . He made things better for Brion than they would otherwise have been, and he never claimed credit or bragged about it, he just did it. . . So, yes, absolutely, you’re right. A trickster, for sure, but as you say, he had his own integrity.

IM: There’s so much more, but I think we can leave it there for now. Thanks, we’ll save the rest for another time. 

TW: My pleasure.  

Written by Ian MacFadyen and published by RealityStudio on 20 February 2012. Many thanks to Terry Wilson for his help and for the use of materials from the Terry Wilson Archive. Many thanks to Di Vincent for her invaluable assistance.

Perilous Passage is published by Synergetic Press. (Paperback, 189 pages, 11 illustrations, ISBN 978-0-907791-42-3)

Days Lane by Terry Wilson was published by Richard Livermore of Chanticleer Press, Edinburgh, in 2009.

Extracts from two interviews of Terry Wilson by Ian MacFadyen, including material on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, have recently been published in the new issue of the journal Pataphysics: Program, edited by Leo Edelstein and Judith Elliston. (ISSN 103-5197)

“Cutting Up For Real” is an extract from extensive interviews of Terry Wilson made by Ian MacFadyen over several years. Some of this material will be included in the book on The Third Mind which Ian MacFadyen is working on with Amsterdam-based painter Phil Wood. Further extracts will appear on RealityStudio.

by Ian MacFadyen

“Everybody here comes from somewhere.” — Michael Stipe

“Everything was alive like me on this earth, everything was breathing.” — Brion Gysin

Gysin Homage One: Terminal Tourist, Manifestions, Show, Recuperation, Strange Powers, Reading Script, Euphonics, The Raising Of Abramelin In Marrakesh, The Magical Squares of Abramelin The Mage, I Am Ion That Ian Am I, O Canada / IO Pan!, ME Not Julian, Polysemic Polytheism, The Great Dance Of The Magic Mushrooms, Psychotropic Vision / A Smoker’s Art, Sweet Sister Seconal / No Good Baby, Artist Sells Himself / Whore Magic, A Thousand and One Performances, Performance, Three Hours Underground In New York, Marabouts / Wu Tao-Tzu / The Modern Delphic Oracle, The Razor’s Edge of Time, Madame Guillotine / What’s In A Femtosecond, What’s In A Name, The Torso Of 1960 And The Torso Of 1939.

Terminal Tourist

The Hotel La Residence in Lyon was the place where we gathered for the retrospective of Brion Gysin’s art works at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne. The show had transferred from the New Museum in New York and yet this was much more than a second run — it was absolutely appropriate that this important exhibition should take place in France, where Gysin had lived for so many years, and where he produced some of his greatest work. He had moved through the street life and high society of Paris, and had seen the city through all its changes, from his arrival in 1934, aged eighteen, with 15 dollars a month to live on, to his death in his apartment opposite the Beaubourg in 1986, at the age of seventy. There had been some wonderful, and also pretty terrible, times spent in Tangier and London, and many a “trip from here to there,” but there would always be Paris. For many years he felt ignored and dismissed by the art world, and this wasn’t so much because Paris was no longer the center of the art world, but because he was a progenitor post-modernist of the trans avant-garde, a traveller and internationalist, and an esotericist. He would always regard Tangier as his spiritual home, but he was, he said, a “terminal tourist.” The markets and institutions of the art world had shifted definitively to New York and London after the Second World War, but Gysin was always just passing through those cities where a profitable art career could have been developed. Instead, he was “unlocatable,” often when it most mattered, not leading “a painter’s life” at all, but pursuing other, magical interests. Because of the Beat Hotel years and his Paris exhibitions and his final years resident there after a definitive return in the mid 1970s, his life and work are inextricably tied to that city, that country. This show testified to both Gysin’s Francophile sympathies and to his love of North Africa, but it also validated his cultural and geographic marginality — a marginality now seen to be inextricably tied to his originality. The fated denizen of the Boho Zone had the vantage point of the visionary outsider.

Manifestations

Our group included friends of Brion Gysin — Terry Wilson, Udo Breger, Philippe Baumont — and fellow admirers of his art, including Axel Heil, Stephen Vassilakos, Jacki Ledevehat and myself. The manifestations were starting — the young people, enraged and engaged, walked down rue Victor Hugo past our hotel to the Place, followed by cops in their body armour, with their visored helmets and shields and batons — the confrontations were inevitable, Minutes To Go indeed. . . Within days an image of the riot-torn, tear-gassed streets of Lyon would appear on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, that essential touchstone of American ex-pats the world over — and source of key material for the cut-ups of Minutes To Go. On French TV we would see the same clips endlessly recycled to hammer home the idea not of nationwide protests and injustice but of “troublemakers” and “mindless thugs” — well, I’ve come across a few thugs in my time, but I never saw one with “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” painted on her face. Petrol stations were out of fuel or would very soon run out — “Workers cannot be deprived of gasoline,” said Sarkozy, as protesters brought traffic to a halt at energy “chokepoints,” truck drivers staged “escargot” protests on the motorways, railways were disrupted and the garbage piled up… 1,423 protesters, mostly young, would be arrested by the 21st… Could this be May in October? Clearly, Gysin’s retrospective was opening under “Riot Conditions”… At the vernissage, Gysin’s friend Catherine Thieck, who curated the 1987 Galerie de France show “Brion Gysin: Calligraphies, Permutations, Cut Ups,” said to Terry Wilson, “Isn’t it just like Brion to bring us all together in the suburbs of Lyon?” In fact, there was a direct correlation between those young people protesting against state legislation and the crowd of young people who appeared at the Gysin opening. Ramuntcho Matta, Francois Lagarde, Francois de Palaminy, Rosine Buhler, Terry and Udo and Philippe and many more were at the vernissage, and Gysin would have loved it that his old friends and admirers were joined by those young people, eager to see his work. Louise Landes Levi wrote to me, “Lyon scene sounds incredible, almost as if Brion made it happen, as a similar riot, the young & strong, broke out the last time I saw him read, at Beaubourg, he was attached to all kinds of tubes under his white robe, I panicked, feared for his life but I think he enjoyed himself, I am sure he was there for the riots.” We were just passing through, the riots and jams hardly touched us, but the media message was inescapable, and that ambience of things going askew, pressure building, we could feel it, and there was, too, a Gysin current coming through… We were talking about Gysin’s lack of recognition, how he was always himself passing through different cities and time zones, and a Bowie track suddenly blasted out from a boutique, an echo of the ambience of Brion Gysin’s later Paris nights, when he was hanging out at The Palace with Keith Richards and Iggy Pop and other rock-star art cognoscenti — it was the perfectly ironically titled, “A New Career In A New Town…” Already we were picking up on the “Gysin Level” as Burroughs dubbed it, and as Terry always refers to it, and it really felt like dub music, the reshaping and remixing of the existing recordings with echo, reverb, and delay, the rhythm and alliteration of Gysin’s work coming through from other sources, an audio and visual remix following us around Lyon and up to Paris and through the city streets, manifestations of a different order, jumping out of speakers and sprayed on city walls, breaking through TV monitors and leaking through newspaper formats and old photographs, and mirror apparitions and psychic photography — associations, connections, tracks we were helpless but to follow, it would have been foolish to do otherwise, a whole series of currents of meanings, political, personal, aesthetic, which we would track in the days following the show. We’d come to see the show, to look at the Gysins — and our trajectories did more than intersect, they radiated outwards and connected in ways which seemed premonitory and fateful, literally manifesting as the manifestations built in the streets and those riot clips were incessantly, ideologically recycled and reiterated. We would cut that media material up, intervening and disrupting the image flow, rewriting the script. In derives around Paris in the days and nights following the show’s opening we passed significant Gysin locations, and caught visual echoes of his calligraffiti on the walls, the past suddenly glimpsed, appearing in a new guise. Gysin’s work permeated the experience — but it was something more than art. I realized I was reviewing an exhibition, but also tracking the effects of an exhibition — something hardly ever acknowledged by art critics or reviewers. We were picking up on the show’s afterglow, tracing the psychic connections which Gysin’s work is all about… After all, that “immense revolutionary demonstration” which Gysin saw in his own painting, and those “street barriers” he discovered in his calligraphy, we’d seen them, too, in the retrospective at Villeurbanne, and now here they were “for real” on the streets of French cities and as a running script on continual replay through the 24 hour media (we switched the sound off, we knew what those commentators and politicians were saying). A couple of days after the Gysin show, strolling down the Rue du Bac in Paris, Terry said, “Well, the manifestations haven’t ruffled any feathers around here.” The next second a very small man walked past us in boots and knee socks and a Tyrolean hat with two one-foot high feathers sticking up in the air from his hat band. He patted Bouddha on the head and disappeared. Such Gysinian manifestations had occurred in New York, too, with the sudden miraculous appearance, shortly before the show, of the missing eighth painting in Gysin’s beautiful 1961 series of calligraphic acrylics, whereabouts previously unknown. And Laura Hoptman, curator of the retrospective, told Terry that a very impressive, regal figure, dressed entirely in white, walked back and forth in front of the New Museum in the days before the show, as if safeguarding proceedings, his very presence casting a mysterious protective radiance. He did not speak to anyone and he didn’t enter the museum. “Brion’s representative, clearly,” Terry said. 

Show

In the last twenty years there have been fine shows of Gysin’s work, in particular at the October Gallery in London, which supported his work while he was alive and has continued to do so, but this retrospective provided an unparalleled overview, despite certain curious omissions such as the renowned multiple-image Marrakesh paintings of the late 1950s, and his big late picture Calligraffiti of Fire. The absence of the Marrakesh pictures was particularly baffling and unfortunate since these have always exerted a powerful fascination on viewers and their conjuration of shifting, elusive images is one of Gysin’s most original achievements. For those who had never seen the originals, it was a real loss. Still, the exhibition was an opportunity to get a sense of the work over forty-five years, from the 1940s decalcomanias to the final photo-grids of the 1970s. Several Third Mind scrapbooks, made with Burroughs, were exhibited, along with notebooks and related written and published material, in cabinets — the scrapbook collage pages were reminders that Gysin was not principally a collage artist at all, and that in fact he had great reservations about making pictures with that technique. Collage was a tool for Burroughs and Gysin in their systems collaborations, but it wasn’t until the Beaubourg and photo-grid series of the 1970s that Gysin employed it whole-heartedly in his art. Rather, the show revealed Gysin as a draughtsman and painter whose work conjures evanescent, transient optical and psychic experiences, a vision which ranges from transcendent detachment to possessed, splenetic attack. His art uses his calligraphic touch and layered processes to communicate the scattering, shattering, and dematerialization of perceptual phenomena and the flux of states of consciousness — seeking the creation of exemplary embodiments of transcendent moments and their dispersal, an art of apprehension in every sense. They are not “illustrations” of drug experiences, surreal depictions or visually contrived approximations of the hallucinatory. The pictures create continually shifting, flickering apparitional fields, both suggesting and stimulating changing states of consciousness — optical phenomena inseperable from psychic conjuration. Those tiny dancing figures of light, the “little people” of psilocybin and kif can be seen in gestural flashes and twists, implosions and radiations of color. The skyscraper becomes a grid, the stroke of paint a flower pistil, and back again, the painted image emerging and disappearing through a ghosting figuration which pulsates through rhythmic brush strokes, while the speed, time intervals, internal rhythms and velocity peaks of Gysin’s calligraphy are breathtaking. It’s the work of a “psychic assassin,” for sure, pushing extreme states including the alienation effect of the disembodied and mechanistic, but beneficent, too — seductive, poignant and tender. The show included a room where Gysin’s “Expanded Cinema” of scratched color slides was projected, another with several spinning Dreamachines, and Balch’s film Towers Open Fire was also shown, so that Gysin’s paintings were placed, as they should be, in relation to his multimedia work. People rushed in to sit around the Dreamachines, and they knew exactly what to do. It was entrancing.  

Recuperation

The exhibition “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” was curated by Laura Hoptman who has also written an essay, “Disappearing Act: The Art of Brion Gysin,” for the accompanying book, which she has edited, Brion Gysin: Dream Machine. The book, like the show in its New York incarnation, attempts to situate Gysin’s work in contemporary art practice as well as in 20th century art history — though Hoptman is aware that Gysin’s art was a psychic, magical exploration that does not fit convenient formal and stylistic categories. The title of the retrospective and the book separates “Dreamachine” back into its two component parts, though that conjoining was more than a marketing ploy, a brand name for a device — it was itself part of Gysin’s hybridization technique. The beginning of one word is found in the end of another and in their seamless coming together a profound idea is given perfect verbal form — the merging of two apparently contradictory states of being which are linked by their bypassing of human control. The autonomous device operating outside the human body and beyond human control passes into the dream as psychic event which takes over the helpless sleeper. This is the meaning of the Dreamachine as Soft Machine — the giving up of control, becoming an agency for the transmission of images, the Dreamachine triggering the hidden genetic permutations of the psyche. Hoptman distinguishes Gysin’s work from the calligraphic and the grid artists of his time — he could not be categorized, he did not belong to those schools to which his own work bore only a surface resemblance. He was playing a game with certain stylistic and formal tendencies, including action painting and Tachisme and kinetic art — whilst subverting these, doing something quite different and working undercover. The book includes homages by today’s artists who have been directly influenced by aspects of Gysin’s diverse, complex oeuvre, and it is significant that Gysin’s subterranean, heretical influence now seems more vital than so many of his contemporaries. This retrospective and the accompanying book are admirable attempts to re-evaluate Gysin’s work, and to recontextualize it in regard to certain contemporary art practices, and this has been long overdue. Even so, there is the still misunderstood, largely uninvestigated work of Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind. A number of the scrapbooks were presented in display cases at the exhibition, and examples of the grid collages are reproduced in the book, but the Third Mind cannot be accessed or understood through this kind of presentation alone. Gysin and Burroughs’ project was determinedly ant-art, anti-literature, and also anti-collage-as-art, and those who seek out the political, technological, esoteric Third Mind techniques and strategies will do so in ways which bypass, necessarily, the obfuscation and misdirection of cultural analysis and specifically artistic readings. The Third Mind is absolutely not reducible to a collage text or artwork — it was very much more than that, and even at the textual level, the way the scrapbooks work goes beyond such reductive formalist description. Telepathy, scrying, machine production, drugs, magical invocation, cut-up and other techniques, along with strategies related to photographic illusion must be explored through experimental material practice — which has nothing to do with being shown in a gallery or recorded on film or selling a book, and not only because of the transitory, inchoate and risky nature of the phenomena and processes involved. The idea that Gysin’s artworks from the late 1950s onwards can be separated from his Beat Hotel experiments is unsustainable since their development was reciprocal, entirely enmeshed, and this symbiosis continued after Gysin and Burroughs left the Beat Hotel — the discoveries informed both men’s work for the rest of their lives. At the same time, the artefacts and working documents accrued in the process of Third Mind research may be exhibited, and studied as formats and procedures linked to Gysin’s artworks, and to the texts of both men, while Gysin’s beautiful paintings may themselves be recognized for their originality and their significance in art history, but this kind of critical activity will only take you so far because “theoretical understanding,” in the case of the Third Mind, is a complete contradiction in terms — the process is experiential, it is of the unknown. If this is a problem for criticism, it’s also an opportunity — to explore Gysin’s art by actually engaging with the processes and techniques of the Third Mind which made Gysin’s work possible. Terry Wilson has written about attempts “to neutralize and assimilate a lifetime of psychic power into three-dimensional financial manipulative areas… to neutralize, assimilate, destruct. . .,” and the “contextualization” of Third Mind artefacts as historical manuscripts or artworks by any other name risks losing the essential purpose of Gysin and Burroughs’ work. Their own book, The Third Mind, was not what they had hoped for, the outcome a perfect example of market forces at work, while the original blueprints and “field recordings,” and the teachings passed along to a few, call for further research and action rather than the promulgation of “ideas” or the validation of existing knowledge. Despite the fascination and beauty of certain Third Mind works, they are technical plans, resource materials, spin-offs of a way of thinking and being in the world which cannot be aesthetically or intellectually recuperated. 

Strange Powers

Laura Hoptman has created an excellent retrospective and homage to Brion Gysin, and she seems the perfect curator and critic to have put this show together. In 2006 she co-curated with Peter Eleey the show “Strange Powers” which dealt with the esoteric, supernatural potential of art, and the connections between the practices of art and the occult — something that is absolutely central to Gysin’s entire oeuvre. That show took place on the second floor of an East Village tenement in New York, reputedly haunted, and 23 artists and collaborators attempted to channel psychic energies and contact spirits from the Other Side. Artworks treated as power objects, the artist as medium, art practice as psychic divination and magical projection — Gysin and Burroughs both believed that this was the true purpose of art, the manifestation of Will, the conjuring of healing and diabolic forces, the exploration of other states of consciousness and being. Art should address the mysteries of life and death — or be worthless. If some critics found the “Strange Powers” show unconvincing, an “acting out” of the shamanic rather than the “real thing,” they forgot that art and shamanism both operate through artifice and the “acting out” of desire — the impersonation of other states of being in order to procure them, enter, and become immersed. Gysin and Burroughs and their collaborators explored these dark places and these mystical realms in the Beat Hotel, and while it was not all kept secret, behind closed doors, as the tape-projection-painting performances of 1960 and the promotion and polemicization of the cut-ups and the Dreamachine show, other things would certainly remain unspoken, unwritten… incommunicado. Still, they would have recognised the necessity and value of these contemporary artists risking the kind of public invocations and summonings which they had performed themselves at the ICA and the Domaine Poétique. They would also have recognized in the “Strange Powers” show some of the tools and techniques they’d employed themselves in the Beat Hotel — not only the crystal balls, the ouija board and automatic drawings, but the tapes of the Swedish artist Friedrich Jurgensen who operated in the area of Electric Voice Phenomena (EVP). Those voices of the dead, manifesting on factory fresh tape, described and analysed by Konstantin Raudive, fascinated both Burroughs and Gysin, exemplary as EVP was of the conjunction of the machine and the occult. They’d picked up weird voice effects on tape themselves, unaccountable sudden electronic signals, transmission glitches that sounded like fetches coming through the white noise, and then discovered Raudive’s book Breakthrough in 1971 — though they had known in the 1960s about Jurgenson’s book, Voices From Space, 1964, which had inspired Raudive. Gysin and Burroughs equated the rotations of the tape machine with the cycles of reincarnation and, by extension, they sought to transcend the desire and suffering inherent in the technological continuum — even if it was possible to make contact with a spirit otherworld, it was then necessary to walk away from the turning reels of endless machine rebirth… “Nothing here now but the recordings.” Gysin’s work featured in the “Strange Powers” show, including a drawing he made in 1965 on LSD, which combines word permutation and the calligraphic transposition and reversal of alphabetic letters — “I GIVE YOU / YOU GIVE ME / ME GIVE YOU I . . .” — it is a paean to hallucinogens, and to the inspired beneficence of being psychically open.

Reading Script

Laura Hoptman writes that “Magic, and its ability to conjure other worlds beyond conventional perception, was an abiding interest of Gysin, and also of Burroughs… Rather than creating a reflection of an already visible object, the artist wills into materiality something that has never existed before. Equally, the casting of spells is meant to conjure, but it is also meant to cause things to disappear.” Hoptman also emphasizes that Gysin’s “art” processes were “less beholden to the manipulation of formal conventions than to the occult.” In fact, his art is occultist but he used modern stylistic devices for his own ends, in ways prophetic of the post-modern and the new psychic artists. Hoptman understands that Gysin’s calligraphic script was not designed to be interpretable or transposable, but, as she says, “notwithstanding, many of Gysin’s paintings can in fact be read.” At the same time she disputes Burroughs’ reading of a painting in which he could make out the phrases “yes, crying” and “not crying” — because Gysin had “playfully” asked Burroughs to read the picture, and because the script was not ostensibly, alphabetically interpretable, Hoptman concludes that Burroughs’ interpretation can be credited to “fanciful enthusiasm.” Actually, if Burroughs said that he could see those phrases, then he did indeed see them — his experience cannot be mitigated or nullified in this way, especially as Gysin himself, on the same tape, proceeds to verify the readability of the text himself. Likewise, it’s true that Gysin’s “personal script,” developed 1958-9, is “based not on Arabic letters or Japanese kanji, but on two letters from the English alphabet, BG — the monogram of the artist repeated with some variation of letter shape and orientation.” However, this stops well short of tracking the complexity and potential generated by this script — the “BG” letters are stretched, broken, meshed, funnelled in scale, and reconfigured in ways that suggest bodies in motion, figures in combat, falling, bending, bowed. The script transcends those intitial ciphers of self and produces a permutated vocabulary of hybridized forms, fluidly moving from the alphabetic to the biomorphic and figuratve. The letters were generative as if the “me” of “BG” was the beginning of the “meme” of exponential creation — an infinity of variable signs of self. It is both a literal and coded version of the Renaissance maxim Ogni dipintore dipinge se (“Every painter paints himself”) but with this difference — the artist here felt he did not, could not know “himself.” His cipher “BG” is a multiplicity, a scattering, a running-through of proliferating, mutating referents, self-portraits of the “Man from Nowhere.” Gysin would see in his drawings and paintings scenes he had not deliberately put there but which were subsequently disclosed to him — which actually did not mean that “he” hadn’t put them there. Who else had done so? Gysin knew his script but he did not know what the script would create, and certain suggestive, evocative figurative scenes emerge from the supposedly abstract script in the eyes of the beholder — shapeshifting phenomena in mutational guise. In 1961 Gysin wrote to Burroughs of his work — “it looks like an immense revolutionary demonstration in a backward country with my stuff up as street barriers.” And he may have had in mind the important gouache and ink drawing “A Trip from Here to There” of 1958. This work, prophetic of his final painting “Calligraffiti of Fire,” also connects with George Mathieu’s calligraphic re-enactments of historical battle scenes — the gestural forces describing the topographics of warfare. It’s a reminder that Gysin’s iconoclasm and revolutionary zeal are not restricted to the Third Mind collages, but are discernible in his pictures — those riot conditions can be seen, incendiary letter figures trailing calligraphities of flame. 

Euphonics

“BG” is Gysin’s monogram, but as a sound poet and as an artist who used letter and calligraphic forms, he was aware of the symbolism of these two letters and their combinatory resonance, their euphonic expressive meaning. Gysin had read Plato’s Cratylus, a Socratic dialogue on the creation of words through appropriately sounded letters, and he would have paid close attention to the work’s subtitle, “On the Correctness of Names,” because he felt that his own name was not correct, and he would struggle for years to write it right. For example, he would sign his work “Brion” followed by a monogram or motif or ideograph for “von Listel,” signifying “from Listel,” in Switzerland, after his grandfather. Then he ditched the symbol, before signing himself “Brion Gysin,” only later, in many cases, to write simply “Brion” over the top of the previous signature. In 1958 he might sign a work “Brion Gysin,” but in 1959 this would be reduced to “Brion” with the von Listel motif returning, while in 1960 he signed a number of works with the minimal “BG.” Terry Wilson remembers seeing a 1940s copy of Harpers or Vogue in which, in the society pages, there was a picture of Gysin and Felicity Mason attending a party or reception for Beni Montessore, and Gysin was identified in the text as “Brion Gysin von Listel,” using what Burroughs would later mock as his “phoney ‘von’.” But Gysin’s confusion with his name went far beyond the imposture of the aristocratic. If his evident dissatisfaction and awkwardness with his own name seems surprising in an artist now known for placing his own name, as it were, center stage in his own creations, it testifies to a profound discomfiture that was at the heart of the process of questioning his “mistaken identity,” without which the script of his “true name” would never have been developed. His problem signature, with its continual variations, influenced the creation/discovery of his “signature script” of proliferating, calligraphic “BG”s — as if the sign for “self” that was self-consciously blocked on the quotidian level, could be unleashed and run rampant on another plane of signification. Gysin would sign works “BG” too, but this does not mean that his feelings for his own initials were unambiguous, or simply an expression of ego — on the contrary, it was precisely the undoing of these representations of identity, their physical mutability over their semiotic fixity, that he pursued. Even when his “signature script” was in place, it functioned both as a confirmation and a dispersal of the integrity of the name. Gysin explored the idea that a word resembles, indeed embodies, in its shape and sound, through alliteration and visual associations, what it describes — that meaning is influenced by the shape and sound of individual letters, and by their combinatory effects. Language was magical because, although a word is not the thing it names, it may have a visual and sound resemblance to it, and it is this euphony that is vital in poetry. Gysin deconstructed syntax through cut-up and permutation, he coined portmanteau words and he painted texts and wrote on paintings and he created his own personal script — in all these ways he attacked and played with language, both spoken and written, revealing meanings hiding in language and at the same time revelling in his mockery of the fixity of linguistic referents. In the case of his use of his own initial letters, this reaches a terminal paradox — he undoes his own name in the work, deconstructs and permutates and explodes it, and then signs it with those very same letters, in his own name. The one who signs himself with the singular “BG,” who authenticates an image of multiple “BG”s, is both related to and yet quite separate from the one who strews his emblematic initials through calligraphic script — that confirmatory signature is of a different written order to the swarming plethora of signs in the image, and not only because of the distinction between art and its validation, or between writing as image and writing as sign/ature. The “BG” of the picture is “open,” to use Gysin’s terms, open, that is, to interpretation and multiple readings, whereas the signatory “BG” is “closed” and functions as a legal and professional verification of authorship. The two exist and operate in different dimensions — though they seem to occupy the same plane, they function on quite different planes of reference. They testify to the gulf between an art of signing and the signature as artistic guarantee — in fact, it is the calligraphic script of the image which is the absolute artistic guarantee, not the appended lower right corner appellation. The calligraphic “BG” is the mark of the self-created, the notarised “BG” is the problematic identity of the woman-born. There is another fracture in Gysin’s sign: “B” and “G” rhyme, they are sound-related, but otherwise, the two letters are at permanent war, and Gysin, for whom these initials were of vital significance, surely knew this. To homage John Michell and his charming book Euphonics — “B” is the letter of the physical Body, the Blooming and Bucolic, it knows no Bounds, while the “G” is disGusted by this BiG Buffoon, it wants to cloG it, Grease it up, Gum it, and then Gash its Binary Bubbles with the savaGe horizontal pointed stroke of its Graver, its Greve, the Balloon of the “B” punctured by the Gravity of “G.” Further, even as Gysin brought the two letters together in a supposed singularity of identification, he knew that “B” opens and “G” closes “the B-eginnin-G” of his own existence, and his own signifying script as it repeatedly inscribes the brief trip from “B-irth” to the “G-rave”. 

The Raising of Abramelin in Marrakesh

It was at the Hotel Toulousain in Marrakesh in the 1960s that William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Mikey Portman attempted to raise the spirit of Abramelin the Mage. No record was left, and there are only a very few references to this episode — Christopher Gibbs, for example, mentions the invoking of “the Abramelan demon” by the three men, some time during the hippie “Marrakesh Express” years. Terry Wilson, a close friend of Brion Gysin, also knew Portman, and there is no doubt that the Magical Working took place. Was the operation successful? Well, they apparently raised something… The ritual was a continuation by other means of the Third Mind project and the “psychedelic summer” of 1961, reviving the “fighting spirits” and dangerous psychic currents which the three had experienced in the course of taking psilocybin in Morocco. The ceremonial invocation for the Raising of Abramelin requires an oil made from aromatic plants, adapted from the Jewish anointing oil of the Tanakh, and it was almost certainly an Aleister Crowley recipe which they used — Portman would become an absolute Crowley fanatic and it’s possible that the seeds of this fascination had been sown in his teens. Crowley’s recipe is in fact a corruption based upon MacGregor Mathers’ mistranslation of the medieval grimoire — in the mixture of Cinnamon, Myrrh, Galangal, and Olive Oil, the Galangal should actually have been Calamus. But no matter, other ingredients were certainly used — majoun, kif, hallucinogens, and alcohol — in an invocation designed to procure love and treasure, and to acquire extraordinary powers including the gifts of shapeshifting and invisibility, and the ability to raise an army of followers and to generate storms… Crowley wrote that if the oil is placed on the forehead “it should burn and thrill through the body with an intensity as of fire,” and Gysin may have had good reason to remember this when, desperately ill, he wrote his terrifying text “Fire” in 1977, and when he painted his great final work Calligraffiti of Fire in 1985, the year before his death. The rite requires a lengthy preparation and lasts for 18 months, but it may indeed have been understood by the three men as a continuation and attempted fulfilment of magical practices carried out in the Beat Hotel in the preceeding years. If Ian Sommerville was the “technical sergeant” of the Third Mind, Portman was almost certainly the medium for the Abremalin rite, and is referred to as such on a number of cut-up tapes. In 1961 Paul Bowles had expressed his disapproval of the supernatural obsessions of the “Tribe,” and the quest for magical, out-of-the body experiences, telling Burroughs “I am perfectly content to stay here with shit inside me” — words that would have resonance for Gysin 13 years later when he underwent a colostomy. Bowles insisted that he had “never had a psychic experience,” and Burroughs’ response is revealing of his own “supernatural superserious” attitude, his pragmatic view of the paranormal: “Nonsense, Paul, everyone has psychic experiences, it’s part of life.” A number of years after the “Marrakesh Working,” Terry Wilson visited Mikey Portman in Montague Square in London. Portman was whipping himself with a leather belt, shouting,”Victory to Aleister Crowley!” while decorators painted the walls and sashes, wearing ties beneath their overalls — they were, after all, decorators to the gentry… They regarded Portman’s antics with complete indifference. It’s the lesson eventually learned by all occult practitioners and takers of certain drugs — the results are one thing, the consequences quite another. . . What happened in the Beat Hotel? What was the Third Mind all about? Promulgation of the cut-up technique? Scissors? It was an occult operation — the conjuring of apparitions, the making and breaking of hermetic codes, the search for transcendence, alternate states of consciousness procured and explored through magical processes and hallucinogenic drugs, and through the systematic détournement of tape and film and stroboscope technology — treating the machine as a magical apparatus for the creation of new life out of chaos. It was a Dark Art Manifestation of psychic and psychotic manifestations — a throw of the bone dice, the weighing of words and the soul, negotiations in advance of the Great Devourer. 

The Magical Squares of Abramelin the Mage

The Abramelin ritual was based on Aleister Crowley’s interpretation of S.L. MacGregor Mathers’ translation of the 15th century grimoire The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage by Abraham of Wurzburg, a work including talismanic Magical Squares which Gysin must have perused with some interest. Unlike traditional magical squares which employ numbers, these contain letters which may be read acrostically and acronymically. In “MAIAM,” for example, from the Hebrew and Arabic for “water,” used in the Abramelin ritual for acquiring the power to breathe and walk underwater, Gysin would have seen a perfect symmetrical echo of his own permutation of the Divine Tautology, “I AM THAT I AM.” The word “MAIAM” may be read forwards or backwards, and from the central I to the left or to the right. Gysin’s letter and word permutations operate magically in this way — he would take the last three letters of his first name, “ION,” and link these with the first three letters of Ian Sommerville’s name, “IAN,” and permutate these through letter combinations at the heart of which lies “I/AM” — merging Gysin and Sommerville’s identities in a “joint singularity.” Gysin used “the ION” in his name to signify an atom or molecule with a negative or positive electrical charge, and its letter-by-letter permutation into “I/AM” signifies the contact and conduction, the manifestation and recognition, created by sign and referent in the act of writing, while his positive/negative sense of his own identity is equally “charged.” Crucially, variant spellings of “IAN” are “EION’, “EON” and, yes, “ION” — magical connections for Gysin, the letters dancing and flipping from word to word like a Saul Bass film title sequence, or the opening graphics of an episode of Sergeant Bilko in which an out-of-line sloppy soldier suddenly wakes up and jumps into his allotted place… It’s a shifting alphabetic flow of emerging meanings and reflections, and it has its fun side too. Ian Sommerville was the “Technical Sergeant” of the Third Mind, and much more besides — a key collaborator and inventor, and he was affectionately referred to by Burroughs and Gysin as “Electrical Ian,” “Electric Ian,” and “Electronic Ian,” while in his writing Gysin called him “ION MILLION WATTS,” which actually plays upon “IAN WILLIAM WATSON,” hermetically referencing Sommerville, Burroughs, and Alan Watson. One Million Watts is the Megawatt, or MW, used in generators, aircraft carriers, locomotives, and submarines, and the term “megawatt electrical” is employed in the electricity industry where it is written as “Mwe,” a neat condensation of “Me” and “We” in the Gysin/Sommerville symbiosis. In The Last Museum, 1986, Sommerville disappears from the “Watt/What?” image, gone into the white electric light of the Dreamachine and the white light death tunnel — a million becomes a billion, a “light like a billion-watt bulb floated up through the bars on my window. The Great White Light! The Ineffable Light the Tibetans were always talking about.” “ION” also connects both Gysin and Sommerville with the Ionosphere — Udo Breger gave Gysin an article on the Ionosphere in the early 1980s which Gysin fixed in one of his notebooks, acknowledging Udo’s gift. Gysin was interested in those electrically-charged atoms and molecules surrounding the earth. Sommerville, through his training, knew about the significance of radio propagation in the Ionosphere, and how it was affected by free electrons, and so “ION” homages “IAN,” but the ionosphere also seems to have suggested a model for Gysin’s approach in his art — the play of positive/negative in the electrically charged particles of his script, the dynamics of his art moving through propulsion / attraction / splitting / recombination. The 1960s term,”going stratospheric” is rewritten by Gysin — he was going into his own sphere, the IONosphere. He treated the letters of his own name as positive ions and negative electrons — as in the “Unitled (Roller Poem)” of 1977 in which the “I” is not a stencilled letter at all but indicated, inferred by a short vertical grid line. We read this as a repeated “I,” but it is not a letter like the other letter forms in the piece, it is rudimentary, a vestigial stand-in, a cut — the presence of the “I” is read into this mark of absence, and the negative becomes charged with meaning, through a writing which Gysin equated with both electromagnetism and magical “energy signs.” Gysin’s magical grids, crucial for the workings of the Third Mind scrapbooks, transcend their apparent modernist format — they are magical squares, mystical nets for occult conjuration and projection, like the Taoist Talismans and diagrams which Gysin had studied and understood as forms of practical magic. Laszlo Legeza wrote that these talismans reveal “not a succession of separate moments, or an infinite number of separate ‘things’, but a seamless web of eternal change,” and Gysin’s own talismanic squares are sectional cuts through the continuum.

I Am Ion That Ian Am I

Gysin told Terry Wilson that in The Ticket That Exploded, 1968, Burroughs misread or mistakenly transcribed “Iam” for “Ian,” but the repetition of the phrase shows that Burroughs decided to preserve and use the error — “in the beginning there was no Iam,” “stale smoke of dreams it was Iam” — because it so effectively merges and yet undermines the naming of existence. Gysin had already seen in 1961 that “IAN” was implicit in “I/AM,” and he used the insight in the slide projections he made with Ian Sommerville — “I/AM/IAN” accorded absolutely with the merging of the Third Mind collaborators’ identities. “I AM THAT I AM” becomes “IAN THAT ION” — a refutation of both the fixity of the singular Name and the identity it supposedly incarnates. Rather, “IAN/ION” and “BRION/ION” are linguistically shapeshifting in ways which are true to the beneficial friendship and creative linking of the two men, working through an “EON” — a time that cannot be measured, a process without limit. More than mere word games, these transformations of meaning lie at the heart of Gysin’s written art, and are embedded in the paradox of his personality dissociation — a paradox because he seemed so entirely, definitively realized as “himself” to those who knew him. Eliot’s question was omnipresent for Gysin — “But who is that on the other side of you?” His shapeshifting powers and invisibility tricks were also revealing of his sense of disconnection and separation — a body-mind dichotomy which promulgated a lifetime of out-of-the-body experiments and experiences. His birth certificate reads “Brian,” and though he would talk vaguely about some accidental mix-up with the spelling of his name on official documents, as if it had nothing to do with him, it just happened, he almost certainly changed it himself in 1944 when he was 29 years old and in the Canadian military. Biographer John Geiger calls this letter change an “affectation,” but it went far beyond any desire to impress others. Rather than being feigned or trivial, it had great personal significance for Gysin and would have a profound effect on his art — his letter acronyms and combinations clearly reveal this. In the mutation of Gysin’s own “ION” into Sommerville’s “IAN,” we can see that hidden in plain sight is the transformation of his chosen “BR/ION” from, and back into, the original “BR/IAN” of his birth certificate. The scratching of these names on images of Sommerville and himself are accompanied by permutations from the Divine Tautology — “AM I THAT I AM?” and “AM I THAT?” In this way both the original birth name and the self-chosen name of the self-elected and self-created are thrown into question, as is the relation between name and body image. Gysin would have appreciated the French hip hop group known as IAM, whose name stands, among other things, for “Invasion Arrivée de Mars,” Mars being a shorthand punning on the group’s city of origin, Marseilles — the “IAM” of an alien, immigrant other. He would have approved, too, of the title that the artist Irene Andessner gave to her 2003 retrospective of shapeshifting, multiple, fictional photographic identities — I AM… And he would have been delighted by the formulation of the name of the Black Eyed Peas singer — Will.I.am… For Gysin, “I AM” would always imply “I AM NOT,” except, significantly, when he wrote of himself as an artist and of his aims as an artist, for in that context he was most definitely and assuredly and revealingly “I AM” — the vocation of artist was the ultimate vouchsafing of his existence, the valedictory purpose of being here. At the same time, Gysin’s dissociation of self becomes not only the subject or apparent content of his visual “Machine Poetry,” but is submitted to the machinic process — he clearly enjoyed subjecting his image and name to electronic distress, splitting, splicing, superimposing his problematic image and the name of the impossible “self.” The letter and name scratchings are handmade, but are projected, and become white light — dematerialized signifiers, divine and discorporate. At another level, the inner dialogue, the gibbering “Voice Inside” of self-referential consciousness, profoundly bound up with projected notions of “self,” is détourned in these works, letting the machine do all the permutated talking — the dialogic voice inside becomes a projected written interrogation “out there,” or a tape recording in which the speaking subject recites computer permutations autonomously. Gysin spoke of the slide works as expelled breath, not dependent on the “in-breath” of human inspiration, and they are attempts to breathe out the problematic self and make it electronically operational, outside the body, outside the psyche, the artist watching illusory versions of “BRION GYSIN” come and go — his bodies, his names, but free of “self,” given up to an instrumental agency. At the same time, it’s usually ignored that in all the machine processes used by Gysin, Burroughs, Balch and Sommerville, apart perhaps from the computerised permutations, the intervention and redirection of the systems and their orderly functions was physiological — they treated the machine as both a cybernetic extension of man and as an autonomic apparatus, now one, now the other. The machine was a rotating respirator, transmuting the breath of inspiration, and a piece of total junk, both magical and degradable — a technological idiot savant to be systematically and perversely deranged and screwed up by hand. For Burroughs and Gysin, the machine was to be made to function as a means and a source of magical invocation. Professor of physics Richard Jones wrote earlier this year: “Sober scientists working in nanotechnology would argue that their work is as far away from magical thinking as one can get. But amongst those groups on the fringes of the science that cheer nanotechnology on — the singulatarians and transhumanists — I’m not sure that magic is so distant. Universal abundance through nanotechnology, universal wisdom through artificial intelligence, and immortal life through the defeat of aging — these sound very much like the traditional aims of magic… And in place of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (and no doubt without some of the OTO’s more colorful practices), transhumanists have their very own Order of Cosmic Engineers, to ‘engineer ‘magic’ into a universe presently devoid of God(s).’”

O Canada / Io Pan!

What does it mean to change your name, even by a single letter, having read and written that name for 29 years? Well, it certainly indicates dissatisfaction, a gap, a problematic, and the desire for a new beginning, as well as necessitating a certain period of practice in the writing of the new name — writing it over and over again, until the flow is seamless, and the name becomes second nature, a highly suggestive scenario for Gysin’s later scriptural art. Gysin changed the spelling of his name from “Brian” to “Brion” two years before he received American citizenship in December 1946, at which time the new spelling was officially recognized. But the change coincided with Gysin’s unhappiness at not having received American citizenship in 1944, and his subsequent requested honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in order to transfer to the Canadian Army. His father had fought with the 8th Canadians, the “little Black Devils,” and died at Thiepval Ridge at the Somme in 1916, eight months after his son’s birth. Gysin fabricated his father’s Swiss nationality (he was British, as Gysin later well knew) and was haunted by this absence which he expressed in visual terms — “He saw me once before I had my eyes open. I never saw him.” As Gysin made the letter change when he was in the Canadian military, like his father, and it was wartime, there is a possibility, however sentimental, that the national song of Canada (which would become the national anthem) may have played a part — “O Canada,” with “O” as a plea, a wish, an expression of wonderment and awe, and an invocation which he took within himself, as a sign of identity. “O Canada… True patriot love in all thy sons command.” The “O” would in this way show the transference of his allegiance from Britain and America to Canada, bound up with thoughts of his father and his father’s death. That “O” may be read as a circumscribed absence, it’s something Gysin felt he needed in his name, to be registered and recognized by himself and others as true to his name. It suggests his unknown, always missing father implanted in his Own spOken and written name as a signal character — the missing in actiOn resurrected in the fOrm of a vOid letter, remembrance instituted as a signifier of permanent lOss. This was not the first time he’d put his father into his own name, his own life. In 1942 when he worked as a welder at the East Coast Shipyard in New Jersey, his name appears on his ID and his bus pass as “John C.B.L. Gysin.” “Brian” was actually his third registered Christian name while that initial “L,” which Brion Gysin inserted into his own name, and is not on his birth certificate, stood for “Leonard,” his father’s name — the father whose body was never found. Leonard Gysin was awarded three medals posthumously, and Brion Gysin commented that “it would have been much better if his body had been found.” As a child, Gysin would pray for his father’s miraculous return, adding “whoever he may be,” and this sense of both loss and bewilderment was compounded by a comment which Leonard Gysin had written beneath a photograph of himself in a family album — “the one I knew least of all.” Clearly, the unknown father had felt that he did not, could not know himself — and this created a double unknowability for the young Brion Gysin. Gysin could not forget that photographic portrait, its essential identity undermined by the subject’s accompanying handwritten text, and it was the progenitor of Gysin’s 35 mm slide self-portrait projections with their scratched question marks and undoing of body-image and belief in a knowable self through palimpsest and palindrome — “AM I THAT I AM?” In The Process Gysin would write — “I considered enclosing a street photographer’s shot of me taken in the Socco Chico crush and scrawling across it, perhaps: ‘Which one is me?’” His own personality disassociation surely had its origins in the compensatory projections created in childhood around his father’s living absence — the person never seen who nevertheless disappeared, the body never found which prayer might resurrect, the life and the personhood reassembled through fragmented, embellished stories and through snapshot images in photograph albums, the invocation for the return of the unknown person thrown into question by that “posthumous” declaration of definitive inscrutability. The loss of the never-known, the permanent absence of the inscrutable other — Brion Gysin was fated to be born to mourn a phantom father, and his continually changing, fabulated, embellished stories and dissimulations about this ghostly figure were attempts to recreate his dead father for himself, to make him live, to bring him back from the abyss. These “fabrications” cannot be separated from Gysin’s story-telling prowess, nor from his meta-fictional writing which both helplessly and strategically mythologizes a life already experienced and lived and spoken of as “a tale I am telling myself.” “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” — Gysin knew Sabbah’s razor long before he discovered it. Later, Gysin would wryly quote sports commentator Jimmy Cannon’s philosophic and not entirely ironic invocation of the Father — “In nominee pater, kid, as Jimmy Cannon used to say.” Burroughs liked and used this too, but in Gysin’s case the word “kid” is especially telling, hidden in a casual, amusing aside — because that “kid” would always remain, in the name of the father. . . So, what’s in a letter? A vestigial presence as a reminder of intolerable, perpetual absence. There are wounds — there are words — which never heal. And there are names which must be summoned and recited as in a lullaby, a litany of the lost, to be restored through whispers and song. Henri Michaux — “It was enough for an Indian to pronounce the name of the god he worshipped, for the god, by order of the word, to appear. What we learn from demonology seems now quite clear: that the name is everything.” Michaux adds, significantly, that the god will appear, summoned and created by the name, “even if he does not exist” — the summoning process itself makes the “god” manifest. Relations between Gysin and Donald Cammell, director of Performance, were frosty, but they shared the pain of dissociation. Gysin spoke of the “Open” Brion Gysin, and the “Closed” Brion Gysin, while Cammell spoke of the “Uncensored Don” and the “Censored Don” — both felt that the liberated, free, open and uncensored personality was realized through creativity, through art, though Cammell’s condition would nevertheless become intolerable to him, and suicide would be the only possible release. It’s worth noting that both had been sexually abused when young. Brion Gysin may indeed have had complex reasons and feelings about the change of “Brian” to “Brion” which he did not try to unravel or analyse at the time, but that single letter switch made possible sequences of word permutations in his name which would become symbolically talismanic for his art — the “O,” not the original “A,” would become vital, generative in his developing sense of himself as an artist, making possible semantically what could be developed in his personality and through his personal mythology. The letter of loss would become the letter of difference and plenitude, for the Orphan and the hOmOsexual. There is one other connection which may have been both influential and prophetic. The “IO” is important in Gysin’s acronymic anagrams — the inserted “O” in conjunction with the “I” creates “IO,” one of the moons of Jupiter, and the mythological priestess of Hera, but it is a quite different “IO” which Gysin surely recognized in his new name — the invocation used by Aleister Crowley in his greatest, and once famous and much admired poem, “Hymn To Pan,” first published in 1913 — “O Pan! Io Pan! / Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Pan / I am a man: / Do as thou wilt as a great god can… ” This invocative “IO,” raising the spirit of the great goat god Pan, is prophetically, divinely appropriate for Gysin who would become fascinated by the rites of Bou Jeloud in Jajouka, and who would identify the spirit of Pan as psychically at the center of his own art and being, as the essence of visionary fertility. The placement of that “O” put Pan in Gysin’s name, and in his life. It’s also worth noting that Crowley, a real word spinner, also plays upon the possibilities of alliterative permutation, not only in the manner of Tennyson or Swinburne, but deriving from his own use of Magical Squares and the conjuration of the word hidden within the word – his “Hymn to Pan” includes “Mannikin, Maiden, Maenad, Man,” a series in which the lifeless model becomes a living virgin and then a wild, orgiastic Dionysian acolyte — the final term is the “Man of Pan” who is semantically and sexually active in the series, both the fertilizing principle and the “Man” who is sexually fulfilled through the spirit of Pan, validated by his possessed virility. It should be noted, however, that Gysin, in his later years, was certainly no fan of Crowley — he regarded him as an Old Queen Bee, and his devotees as drones. Portman he didn’t like particularly, either — but then Gysin was a very orderly person who performed even the most trivial act with care and precision, whilst Portman was a lover of chaos and always left an unholy mess in his wake. Kenneth Anger once opened up his briefcase of magic tricks for Gysin, and that’s exactly how Gysin saw it — a stage magician’s amusing music hall act. It was magic, of a kind, yes, but it wasn’t on the “Gysin Level.” Gysin said that magic was “one of the fruits of life,” it was part of the sensual relish of being alive and key to a continuing awareness of the mystery of existence. It was also a performance, as he himself often demonstrated, a form of mystical teaching which included his own humorous takes on freakish occurrences. But it was decidedly not an entertainment. 

Me Not Julian

Gysin’s tape-text “Dilaloo” was begun in the late ’60s as an attempt to convey the initiation process which he had undergone in Jajouka, circa 1955 — it’s a recapitulation of human existence from the primordial soup to his own tormented mortal span. It includes extracts from Burroughs’ writing which passed unnoticed and uncredited in the transcript made after his death, but this is actually a good thing — after all, “Who owns words?” Gysin asked, and he loved Burroughs’ cloacal writing so much he felt it in his own blood and guts. The Third Mind did not differentiate authorship and ownership of creativity and insight, it was symbiotic, and only later was it obliged to submit to the legal requirements of publishing copyright. “Dilaloo” ends — “Me I’m here / ME / Not Julian… ” “Julian” was Gysin’s other, his fictionalised, heterosexual stand-in, the name he gave himself in his 1946 story, “The Foundering Ship,” which gained him entry to the “spooky offices” of The New Yorker — what a different life and career he might have had if he’d accepted the magazine’s offer of a job as an editor, but that was one detour he just could not take. In the story, the character Tilda smooths a bed cover “with automatic hand,” itself a smooth reference to the “Fire Sermon” section of Eliot’s The Waste Land of 24 years earlier, and there are other knowing allusions and paraphrases, to Shakespeare’s Richard III and to Thomas Nashe, though the story is really a Fitzgerald homage, a brittle marriage breakup for New Yorker sophisticates. When Julian thinks of the “new, boundless freedom” of his life without Tilda, it seems a “useless freedom, a bare waste of time ahead; a desert as big as a house. His spirit sagged at the view of this Sahara.” New Yorker editor Howard Moss wrote to Gysin’s literary agent that Gysin did not explain the reason for the marriage crack-up — “its full implications he fails to justify.” That was because Gysin simply could not do so — the text is a set-piece, with no history and no future, the heterosexual marriage as a tragedy of manners, a psychological “screen story” for Gysin in every sense. One thing to note, however, is the “wildly dancing orange light” of the fire at the end of the story, with its tongues of flame and burning coals, the fire that ran through Gysin’s life and work, and which here culminates in the prophetic line — “The constant flicker began to hypnotize him,” suggesting the origin of the Dreamachine not in sunlight flickering through leaves, but in the ancient manifestation of alpha waves discovered through dancing flames. “Julian,” of course, is also a premonition — it is “JUL/IAN,” an encoding of “BR/IAN.” The name which an author gives himself as a character in his own fiction is certainly worth scrutinising and this “Julian” is as carefully and knowingly designed as the rest of the text — it refers to the Emperor Julian, Constantine’s nephew, who tried to bring back paganism as the official religion of the Roman Empire. It signifies that the Julian of the story is an apostate — in this case, someone who has renounced the true faith by sublimating his homosexuality. Likewise, in The Process, Gysin’s protagonist, who is both “Gysin” and his “other half,” is called “Ulysses O. Hanson.” That “O,” we are told, stands for “Othello” — but it also combines the reappearance of the letter “O” in a version of Gysin’s name, and the insertion, once again, of a significant initial, into the “unreal” name. The “O,” to quote John Michell, is, tautologically, “the shape of the mouth producing the round O sound,” and this is the key letter of the book since the different characters speak and tape record their stories, stories which are themselves eminently circular — it is the very image of an open mouth and a tape reel and an ouroboros tale which swallows its own tail. Michell –“O is old, a proto-sound, symbol of the original womb or of the oval world-egg (ovum, oeuf).” In this sense, the “O” is inter-uterine and its adoption in a name symbolically signifies birth, or re-birth — the desire to return to the mother. At the same time, Michell catches the polarization incarnated in the letter — “It dominates words meaning either the whole or the hole, totality or void.” The “O” of Ulysses O. Hanson and the “O” of “BRION” represent both the self-enclosed, autonomous world of the self, the ego cosmos, and the “O” through which the sand of time pours out, the Great Desert which, as Gysin/Hanson says, “gets us all in the end.” But meantime, “Let’s face the music and dance… ” Gysin was a profoundly serious man, but he also possessed the great gift of light-heartedness, and his name-change linked him, as he liked to point out, proudly and ironically, with Haut-Brion, the Premier Cru Classé from the Gironde — and that fine wine really cost. Gysin knew that to drink Haut-Brion is to toast the wine itself, and the earth and the sun, raising a glass to the pleasures of life. “I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop / But if, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top!”

Polysemic Polytheism

Gysin’s calligraphy was written to be read from right to left, and then he turned the picture in four 90 degree stages creating a multi-directional lattice, and so his script runs and reads across, up and down, and diagonally. Originally discovered by Gysin when he combined left-to-right Arabic calligraphy with vertical Japanese script, he would later associate it with the rotated, written curses of Moroccan magic, and it’s certain that this aspect fuelled his calligraphic grids and word permutation grids — they are spells because what is written is latticed, superimposed, and the message is hermetically hidden in rotated layers but cannot be entirely deciphered, decoded. It is a writing which symmetrically composes an essential unreadability — the graphic threat of the unknowable. Related to this are his rollered or stencilled letter forms which become anagrammatizing, acrostic, acronymic. In an untitled drawing from 1970, an ink on silver paper, Gysin’s name is stencilled in black but half the letters, whilst delineated, are not inked-in — they signify whilst revealing their own incompleteness. The letters run in four strips vertically, and several letters are upside down — they play upon presence and absence of sign and referent, readability and reversibility of meaning. Reading multi-directionally, we can see the jumping “ORGY BOYS” emerge from the scrabble conjunction of letters — the title of one of Gysin’s tapes. And the “SIN” in “GYSIN” and the “BRIO” in “BRION,” and the “GRIO(T)”… the poet, praise singer and wandering musician, while “GYS” is an acronym for “Graveyard Shift.” Gysin linguistically extrapolates and playfully cross-references his allusions, but it’s important to understand that the letter works invite the viewer to play along, to use personal associations and to go semantically deeper — whilst in many cases the possible permuted readings are laid down in the works themselves, and we follow those paths set out for us, we are also free to engage with the process and to read and to see what we can find for ourselves in the spilling and breaking of his name, like Timothy Leary’s “Don Juan Lord Brion of Git-le-Coeur.” “BR” is an abbreviation of “Brother,” “GY” is an abbreviation of “Gray,” and Burroughs was Gysin’s “Gray Brother” — he appears, “retroactively prophetic,” in Gysin’s name. The rescrambled “RNB” of “BRION” is the “RiBoNuclease” of “Rhythm and Blues” that breaks down DNA, it’s the musical rhythm that shakes the genes, the “Jean Genie/Jean Genet” semantic and phonetic shift… Gysin would take the last four letters of his first name, “RION” and write this as “NOIR” — then reading from right to left we see the black “RION” / “RIEN’, the “Nothing That Is,” the negation that appears in the “B”-headed name. It’s clear that Gysin’s calligraphic grids were designed to be read in ways comparable to the mystical teaching squares of Abramelin — they are magically “crossed” word puzzles, philosophic permutations of letters in layers, hermetically coded boxes… What’s in a name, a three-letter word? For Gysin, it was the infinite roll and scroll of permutated meanings, a process which undermines the “LAW” of “GOD.” In the beginning was the Word, and it was “THE” Word, the definite / definitive article of universal recognition, and the “GOD” word of Monotheism, as in “THE ONE.” Gysin’s permutations are heretical — their very polysemy is implicitly polytheistic, they explore the simultaneous existence of several different meanings created by moving a single letter, and transposing the words in phrases, and this infinite mutability and polysyllabic playfulness is antithetical to the “ONE GOD”, the forever-fixed meaning of “THE” Word and “THE” paternalistic “LAW” of language, logic and “THE” Godhead. The cut-up technique, and Korzybski’s attack on the definite article, come together in Gysin’s multi-signification, in the continual displacement of one signifier by another, shifting referents refuting that the word is “THE” Word — meaning is made through radiating sequences of interpolation and interpretation, it is always unstable, shifting, multiple, continually undone and remade. The letters are read as both mechanical and made by hand — they exist at an interface between a systems permutation and a human intelligence which interferes and manipulates, and the art lies in that gap where it is impossible to differentiate between human intentionality and linguistic permutation, that space where the qualitative terms may be reversed. There were many influences behind Gysin taking this direction in his work. One was his friend John Latouche’s speed and dexterity and wit at punning, as when he wounded Gysin by commenting on his friend’s work in 1947, “The Impotence of Being Ernst.” — changing a few letters to perfectly devastating, mortifying effect. Another was the cover of Nicolas Calas’ Confound The Wise, 1942, for which Gysin designed the cover, using one of his decalcomania paintings. The image was reversed on the back cover of the book, and so too was the title and author lettering — this means that the first example of Gysin’s work produced, effectively, by a right-to-left, backwards, or reversed reading, was not a calligraphic work at all, but a printed alphabetical text. Further, it has been assumed that Gysin’s alphabetic letter art works came later than his calligraphies, and that the permutated letter blocks were derived from the process of reverse reading in the calligraphy, but this is not the case. The Calas cover predates Gysin’s study of Japanese by many months, and though he had seen Arabic calligraphy in Algiers in 1938, his own calligraphic art was years away. The name “NICOLAS CALAS” reads as “SALAC SALOCIN” on the back of Confound The Wise, and 35 years later, in Gysin’s text Alarme, the letters of “SALOCIN” may be glimpsed in his calligraphic permutations of “SECONAL” — the past leaking through drug disorientation and pain, the letters shimmering in delirium. Alarme merges the two written forms of Gysin’s art — and we read both the alphabetic letter permutations and the calligraphy simultaneously, both forwards and backwards, and up and down, just as in his personal calligraphic script in which the alphabetic initials of his name are encoded and dissimulated through the “automatic hand.” Flip through Alarme, and read the flicker of the pages, and look at the text reflected and reversed in a mirror. There are people who have a natural ability to write and read in reverse, and this is because they have language centers in both halves of the brain, though the condition is most often related to dyslexia. Rather than an inherited gift, Gysin taught himself to read and write backwards, and this was bound up not only with Arabic writing, but with his knowledge of esoteric transmission, such as the Bektashi order of calligraphy in the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and other magical hermetic practices of passing on secret knowledge from “the other side” to the initiated. Gysin also pursued this other direction because it signified the reverse of the natural, of how he had been taught, and it shows his determination to create in reverse, to be as perverse as he believed himself to be, to make the image run backwards, inside out, back to front — never as told. He wanted to express states of consciousness which required the destruction and rerouting of predictable forms and conventions of visualization, and reversal and superimposition and cutting were vital to this, as his streams of splitting, shapeshifting signs challenge cognition and interpretation, embodying the rushes and intertwinings of hallucinogenic states, as with Michaux — “you find yourself in a situation that nothing less than fifty different, simultaneous, contradictory onomatopoeias, changing every half-second, could adequately convey.” 

The Great Dance of the Magic Mushrooms

Gysin’s work is genetically mapped by his drug experiences — with altered states of consciousness, psychic phenomena, and optic, hallucinogenic effects. This is not something happily dealt with by an art criticism which is still bound to formalist aesthetics and issues of the picture plane, or with ideological and material practices, and it is also extremely difficult to write about. There is, too, the risk of consigning Gysin’s works to the abused generic of the “psychedelic.” However, Gysin’s art simply cannot be understood without grasping its profound debt to psychedelic experiences, illusive and tangled as that history has become. Gysin’s important text “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” became the title for the influential collection of cut-up and permutated texts edited by Jan Herman in 1973, Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, a vital “companion” to Burroughs and Gysin’s Exterminator. However, it was this text’s appearance in 1975 in Peter Haining’s anthology The Hashish Club: An Anthology of Drug Literature, Volume Two that contextualised and defined what was ostensibly a “cut-up” work and an explanation and philosophic extrapolation of the artist’s work, as crucially inspired by, and evocative of, drugs. Haining’s anthology was republished in 1998 as The Walls Of Illusion: A Psychedelic Retro, and that last term literally spells out the danger of situating Gysin’s painting in a largely 1960s retrospective, retroactive trip of “brilliant colors and swirls of psychedelic art,” as the publishers sell it — words from the “stoned age.” At the same time, “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” may well be linked to the creative inspiration which Gysin found in drugs — Haining writes that it “brilliantly evokes memories of [Gysin’s] kif-fuelled maze of adventures in North Africa,” and those “little blue hills” are certainly in the text. But then Haining inserts, as epigraph and introduction, before the text proper, a section from Gysin’s novel The Process (1969) in which the narrator, Ulysses O. Hanson, Gysin’s “other,” described by Haining as “a devotee of kif smoking” speaks not of kif but of psychotropics: “Of course there was mushroom-magic, I assured him… ,” and refers to LSD, DMT, STP, and “a flat packet of very tiny pink pills marked PSILOCYBIN. I picked up a paper on psilocybin in the lab… ‘extract of mushrooms’. It had been a long time. I could hardly wait to try them to see if theirs were as good as my old granny’s and mine.” This is a reminder that Gysin had taken magic mushrooms with Native Americans in Canada when he was young — and the phrase “I go back to childhood” and variants, are indeed repeated throughout “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In”, suggesting an evocation of those early mushroom experiences as well as the kif of the Moroccan Hills. This affixed “note” crucially determines the reading of the text that follows in ways that are historically wrong and contextually misleading, whilst by default opening up an area of importance for understanding Gysin’s art and its creative connection with drugs. 

Psychotropic Vision / A Smoker’s Art

“Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” was recorded and played at the ICA in London in December 1960 (“I talk a new laugh — the 1960”), and Gysin did not receive and take the psilocybin pills, sent by Timothy Leary, until 1961 — Gysin would remember this as “the mad summer of 1961” but he had already been taking the pills, while Burroughs was away in Tangier, when Ginsberg arrived in Paris in the April of that year. So Haining effectively contextualises the text as psilocybin-related — though Gysin had taken mushrooms and mescaline in earlier decades, it is actually prophetic of what was to come only a few short months later. It is the quotation from The Process employed by Haining which draws upon Gysin’s 1961 psilocybin experiences, as Gysin himself confirmed in 1977. The 1961 psilocybin episodes reveal Gysin’s contradictory nature, the “veritable split” between his methodical, careful side and his desire to go further, and take risks — a conservative anarchism of personality which mirrored Burroughs’ own. The psilocybin tests were part of a Harvard University research project, formally sponsored, however unorthodox, and Gysin duly replied to Leary, documenting his experiences, which had been pleasant but not earth-shattering. — Gysin described his first experiences to Leary in a letter as “sneaky little out of the corner eye effects of covert awareness which went on for some hours.” But when a second package of pills arrived for Burroughs, who was away in Tangier, Gysin argued to himself that Burroughs was anti-mushrooms and unsure, even antipathetic about Leary and his intentions, and so he took the drugs himself — however, his professed and repeated justifications strongly suggest that he just couldn’t resist. Nothing quite reveals Gysin’s “Gemini Complex” so clearly as what he did next — he decided to arrange his room and order his paints and brushes and cards and materials so that he could record the experience and recline on his bed in security and relative comfort. He appears to have behaved, initially, according to the kind of advice he would give in his 1977 text “Psacré Psilocybin and Magic Mushrooms” in which he instructs prospective trippers to “arrange things so that you’ll be sheltered from any worry. Protect yourself against attack from outside. Avoid any untimely interference in your life that day.” But this sound advice is immediately compromised and undone by his admission that “the great journey in a bed never did much for me. In extreme conditions, I like to wander, seek out adventure and make it happen rather than endure it like a mollusk.” In fact, both attitudes were played off each other throughout Gysin’s life, as he demonstrated next when, having created the secure conditions and orderly ambience for the trip, he then proceeded to take 23 of the 24 pills — four times the maximum dose. Although this extreme act was accompanied by a note: “If anything happens to me cable [Harvard] for instructions,” it’s difficult to imagine what Leary might possibly have been able to do from back in Harvard… But if the note was a cavalier gesture, a pastiche of (ir)responsibility, and cocked a snook at fate, the experience was, we can say, decisive: “For more than three days and two nights, the psilocybin had complete hold over me and I did not sleep. I was out of commission except for three great flurries of artistic activity that shook me like hurricanes. Galaxies of mushrooms danced around my worktable leaving their traces upon my little cards. Spouts of mushrooms flowed from my fingers sketching mycologic forms over my Bristol boards in three orgasmic ejaculations.” These “mycologic forms” would carry and mutate Gysin’s signature initials and his “bean sprout” ideograph from that point onwards — his own signatory mark, the “BG” of “me,” would sprout from and turn into a plenitude of mushroom forms — the permutated signs of the self contained within, and emerging and shooting forth from the mycologic pods or embryonic vessels. The tiny pink pills from Sandoz Laboratories were genetically, psychically transformed into ideographic “B” caps and “G” stalks, mycological mutations of Gysin’s own calligraphic signature. The two signs, infinitely variable, of mushroom and “Brion Gysin,” become interlinked and intertwined, continually merging and then breaking and dispersing — manifestations of the immersion and dispersal of self, the discovery and loss of the “I” in the psilocybin experience. These can be seen in many works from 1961-63, and their origins glimpsed in works from 1959-60. One drawing, “Untitled (Psilocybine) 1961,” shows a different take — ideographs as jumping, spinning sprites in a cartoonish animation. . . These double markers, twinned sigils of psychotropic dissolution and the remaking of the psyche, lie at the heart of Gysin’s subsequent work and reveal its visionary sources and continuing impetus — the inspired rush of creation which Gysin experienced, the transformation of psychic upheaval into the extension of “tactile vision” with the artist as both creator and witness to the act of creation, suggest that the creative experience would become for Gysin an analogical extension and process of psilocybin’s transports . . Gysin wrote that although he was the artist who was sketching, what it was he was putting down in ink and watercolors — what, or who, was the subject, and likewise, the agency — was beyond him… He was witnessing, he later wrote, the mushrooms “leaving their traces” — through him, through his art. This is not to suggest that this was a eureka moment, but to recognize that it had brilliant consequences. Neither is it to say that Gysin hadn’t already developed the essential means and vocabulary of his art… No, it’s that the experience confirmed what he had already written in “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” — recognition of the artist possessed, and the artist’s desire to possess the eyes of the audience. His would be a shamanic art, with the artist as trickster, healer and prophet — this is not a hagiographic interpretation, but an accurate, literal and analytic reading of Gysin’s actual works and words. His mission statement was validated by that trip he took a few weeks later, and his art would be at the service of those “spaces” opened up by hallucinogenic drugs. What is seen doesn’t just enter the eye, it’s projected and returned in an endless loop of seeing in which the psyche and the nervous system are producing the visual in symbiosis with the light. The act of looking becomes awareness of one’s own creation of what is being seen, stimulating and triggering responses which in turn change, even transform the image and the perceptual field… “When you learn to look, you see that everything is alive,” in Burroughs’ words — and beyond that awareness of seeing, of receptivity and activation, there is losing oneself in the gaze, caught up and forgetful of self, immersed in the creation and receptivity of the seen. It’s mirror projection — we invest ourselves in the images Gysin incarnated, which we activate — we see his vision, and our own, merge and pull apart and recombine. Those dancing sigils of light lie always in wait, ready to be called forth — “spirits of the magic mushroom” as Gysin called them, recognized through psilocybin but also through kif and other drugs. Even though he would look back and see “all those drugs” as a fateful, disastrous thing, those trips elsewhere helped Gysin immeasurably to bring forth the living, hidden mind, what he had actually seen and experienced. His pictures are psychotropic — something other than the recycling of mycologic ciphers as connotative signifiers or stand-ins for the experience or some kind of shorthand flashback. Gysin’s text “Cut Me Up * Brion Gysin,” published in 1960, into the title of which he again strategically inserts the author’s name, begins with an explicit drug disclaimer: “Nothing here was written ‘under marijuana’ or ‘under’ anything else. Billie Holiday and Baudelaire have borne witness that nothing was ever written or sung better under any drug.” And Burroughs said “I have made cut-up highs without chemical assistants. [sic]” But the disappearing act of the cut-up self is bound up with the cutting of kif and its smoke rings, the losing of the boundaries and certainties of self… Just as Burroughs would croon an ayahuasca chant while cutting up, both he and Gysin understood very well the process and effects intertwining cut-up and drugs — a reminder that this most material of procedures was from the start a smoker’s art.

Sweet Sister Seconal / No Good Baby

Terry Wilson recalls Gysin, towards the end of his life, saying to Burroughs in the apartment in rue Martin, “Maybe to’ve opened ourselves up to all those dreadful spaces with all those drugs wasn’t such a good idea… ” Burroughs’ reply was unflinchingly pragmatic: “When it finally happens I expect to kick my habit in one concerted moment of excruciating withdrawal… ” If, for Burroughs, death was the terminal kicking of the life habit, Gysin wondered if taking drugs so as to explore out-of-body states and the spaces of alternate consciousness as a preparation for death, wasn’t misguided but just plain wrong. Maybe “it was a bad move to give ourselves the idea that such spaces actually existed.” This volte-face on Gysin’s part is explained by Wilson: “Fear of ultimately radical reality, fear of non-existence, trying to hold on and let go at the same time… ” It may be that Gysin was in fact warning Wilson not to follow where he was going, into the Duat, or into Oblivion, and that his disavowal that drugs provided access to the magical spaces was a dissimulation, testament to his distress that these anterior states were fascinating lures and enticing traps, the vortex of illusion funnelling into the absolute void. He wanted total non-being as a terminal release — and at the same time, he dreaded it, as only a very few do not. Burroughs may have found hallucinogens “instructive,” but he did not enjoy them, while Gysin had been favourably disposed, but certainly in his last years he felt obliged to make a pause and to consider the delusion and damage of these drugs. Gysin’s 1977 calligraphic text Alarme — Udo Breger published an extract in his journal Soft Need in 1977 — is a viscerally drawn poem of “agony, shame and despair.” And it’s a “flicker book” — rifling its pages produces calligraphic letter and word streams. It’s also a delirious version of the lexical games of word tennis and letter ping pong, in which French and English words permute in an ineluctable Dance of Death — noir / espoir / dortoir, adieu / tender / pendre, eine / seine / pleine, rats / rants / traps, bed / red / dead, heat / breath / death, hand / sand / end / send / rend / tender. The implications are complex — “NOIR” is “BRION” read backwards with the “B” chopped off — his beginning is both there and not there in his ending. As he looks back on his past, that blackness, black as his ink, is immediately, consonantly linked to a contradictory “ESPOIR” / “DESPAIR” in the monastic cell of the hospital — “DORTOIR.” The calligraphy and letter / word permutations are accompanied by a singularly appropriate musical homage — during Gysin’s mortal meditation, a song by Mick Jjagger, Keith Richards and Marianne Faithful runs through his head and Alarme plays upon “Sweet Sister Morphine” and its lyrics: “Here I lie in my hospital bed… turn my nightmare into dreams… I’m fading fast… clean white sheets stained red… ” In Gysin’s text the word “BED” becomes “RED,” “NEMBUTAL” becomes “NUMBUTAL,” and the “SECONS” tick by in “SECONAL,” culminating in a page which reads: “SWEET SISTER BREAT(H)/SWEAT SECONAL,” as if the song itself is fading in and out of Gysin’s numbed consciousness, the psychedelics and kif of careless psychic exploration now replaced by barbiturates depressing his nervous system, and by sedative hypnotics unable to calm the surgically cut-up patient. Welcome to drugs as pain control, and the cocooning of alarme — while that rock blues echoes down the years, a 1969 prophecy of his distress, his fear of his own consciousness of death. Gysin’s usual playfulness and delight in the use of synonyms, transpositions and permutations, his exploitation of the resources and richness of language, turns deathly here, and expresses his anguished helplessness — black ink runs down the page like rain, and pulsates across the page like a time sequence on an electrocardiogram as he tries to convey an anguish beyond all word play, beyond calligraphic art. “BRUTAL NEMBUTAL” can be read, but only through the merging and reading across of calligraphic strokes and letter forms — line becomes letter and letter passes into line without referent, a graphic morphing and pulling-apart of sign and gesture. The puns of Alarme are painful, in every sense, and Gysin’s recourse to the resource of words testifies to a terminal linguistic dispersal. “LIFE IN THE DEATH” reads one page, and one can make out the letter forms of “LIFE” strategically hidden in the word “DEATH” — but this is a written word-illusion and surely signifies quite otherwise, because the Death that once lay hidden in Life is now omnipresent. Likewise, none of the synonyms of “Alarme” — frayer, inquiétude, angoisse, panique, anxieté, tocsin, effroi, appel — can help the one in danger, as death approaches. Terry Wilson once quoted part of a key line from one of Gysin’s own permutated poems back to Gysin. “Junk is no good,” said Wilson. Gysin instantly snapped back, “Drugs are no good, baby” — significantly changing one word, and supplying another that was missing. One permutation would read, “NO DRUGS ARE GOOD BABY.” Before the life runs out, the words run out. And then, at last, the morphine drip is disconnected. 

Artist Sells Himself / Whore Magic

“Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” is crucial in Gysin’s career — a paradoxical manifesto of the disembodied self, it was psychologically acute in ways not understood at the time. It insistently declares that Gysin’s art and his words operate on the one who looks and reads his works in ways akin to the effects of drugs — “Your own interior spaced out,” “You-time I rub out,” “My own Interior Space music own your head,” “Your own Interior Spaced the Word in you.” To inhabit, to transform — this is art manifesto as magical enlightenment, turning the possessor of the pupil, the center of the iris, into a pupil of psychic possession. It is also a knowing, parodic routine, and Gysin’s promotion of his own artistic wares and abilities in his own version of Burroughs’ “How To” style in the prefatory “Deposition” and the concluding “Atrophied Preface” of Naked Lunch — an instructive ironic enticing carnee sales pitch, step right up, now listen to me sell you this once-in-a-lifetime guaranteed good thing — promising, seducing, (“Come out: you can.”), whilst at the same time warning of the dangers — “There will be harrowing in my magic picture.” Like Burroughs, Gysin casts himself as salesman, but what he is selling, like Burroughs, is enlightenment itself — this is hucksterism of the real thing, self-declared chicanery in earnest. Gysin reiterates his own name — “Gysin is not dead,” just as Burroughs had done — their names are on the products, the books, the manifestos, the pictures, theirs, branded. It’s called selling yourself, by any other name. This text, allied to Gysin’s cut-up explanations and promos, is the art polemic as personal manifesto, and it was risky back then in the art world to write your own blurb, however protectively ironic. This is the man who would write in 1977 of how during an experience of datura, “The force of my gaze as an illuminated man had struck him down.” This sense of the artist who knows his own visionary power — that’s all very well, my dear, but did you really have to say so? Gysin did say so, though this was at odds with the man who so worried and suffered for the fate and value of his art — it’s the shaman who declares his powers, and then wonders if he’ll be remembered at all. Gysin’s entire oeuvre and its processes are evoked and prophesied in this cut-up — mirror-gazing, painting, projecting images, spoken word, permutation… “Mirror magic and the writing that is you,” “Projected demon-wreck pictures” and “Projected demons,” words as “locks” and “spells” and invocations, words rubbed out, the “I” rubbed out, images disappearing, the artist himself disappearing, words as pictures, pictures in words… The cut-up process of the text reveals that Gysin’s art is “visual magic” but it is also “whore magic” because it gets around, makes no distinction about who gets inside it. The text invokes the “Interior Space” and the “Transducer” and the breathing of Inspiration, that breath which would become the “BREATH/DEATH” of his emphysema agony. “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” may seem addressed by Gysin to the reader and viewer of his work, but it is also Gysin addressing himself, cutting himself up, cutting up his declaration of inspiration to see what it really might mean, and telling himself that this is who the artist “Brion Gysin” is, or must be, the artist’s role revealed through the process of declamation. The text actually predates by several years “CUT-UPS: A Project For Disastrous Success” and yet is a much more significant document of his total vision and artistic purpose. 

A Thousand and One Performances

The calligraphic art is a special form of that ritualized performance which was clearly essential in Gysin’s art and life — creation was a physical act, both knowing and casual, requiring grace of movement, a learned and practiced skill rising to a level where it became effortlessly stylish, and then quite miraculous. The cut-up technique was described in detail by its creator as a form of performance, insisting upon the physical act and its ritual stages, and though no audience was required in this case, in other areas it was precisely an audience which Gysin desired in order to demonstrate the process of creation, the manifesting performance of art, rather than the objects created — art as literally a way of being in the world, in which Gysin’s body and mind, image and spirit, could be harmoniously resolved. A Dreamachine may be used by several people simultaneously, and Gysin enjoined others to make their own and see the whirl, just as he encouraged them to practice cut-ups, while akin to this were his collaborations with Burroughs and Ian Sommerville and Ramuntcho Matta, among others — participatory and collaborative projects were embraced by Gysin, they were extensions of his philosophy of creativity, in which the mystique and power of the individual artist were not compromised but enhanced through processes of the Third Mind. The spectacle combining music and dance and light which Gysin produced in his restaurant in Tangier, the Thousand and One Nights, is especially revealing of his view of art as the sensual, aesthetic exercise of skill, the creative act as a bravura demonstration of prowess, and a contribution to a group enterprise. For Gysin, the restaurant was a theater, with a specially created and decorated environment and ambience — a dream palace for the pleasure of the senses. But he also found himself in an ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable role — as the proprietor he was at a social disadvantage with the wealthy, aristocratic elements of the clientele. Extremely sensitive to the nuances of class and social standing, his own aspirations to be in society, including his phoney “von Listel” imposture, were compromised by his commercial, functionary status and the stigma of “trade.” The Tangerine social scene was Proustian in the extreme, and Gysin was respected and admired and yet dismissed as declassé by those who patronized his restaurant, while for the diehard bluebloods Burroughs would be absolutely persona non grata. Even Yvonne and Isabelle Gérofi of the Librairie des Colonnes, 54 Boulevard Pasteur, saw Burroughs as an invisible man defined by a ratty old raincoat rigid with filth — “Burroughs était sale à un point inoui . . . Son imper se serait debout de crasse . . .” This is an exemplary case of the social elite literally looking down their noses — and they didn’t like Genet’s leather jacket much either . . . By comparison, Gysin’s was a suitably class act in Tangier, in every sense, but nevertheless he was a businessman, a manager and a majordomo, and despite his erudition and perfect manners, and his talent for intrigue, he would never be entirely “socially acceptable.” He was mentioned in the Tangier Gazette, for example, but as a restaurateur supplying pastries to a cocktail party. He hobnobbed with the great and the good, he was known in high society and to the nouveau riche Hollywood types, but his market value was in fluctuation, his style impeccable but his background and credentials somewhat murky or a little too fantastic . . . In fact, he found himself caught between a class and a culture, to neither of which he belonged by birthright, although he aspired to be accepted by both — he really was the Man From Nowhere, the one who put on a show for the aristo expats and wealthy travellers, the paid facilitator holding aside the velvet curtain, providing entry to the magical world of another culture and time, whilst feeling a biological trick had been perpetrated on him, a screw-up in the birth lottery. The dancing boys and musicians performed in true Moroccan style, but this was a theater of illusion and deception in every sense, and could be seen as merely a costume cabaret of cultural otherness put on for the wealthy white social set — the procured spectacle could not be separated from its colonialist and economic context, while Gysin would be characterized as a “purveyor of Moroccan exotica.” Although Gysin was the impresario, he was also inamorata about the nightly performances, and for him the Thousand and One Nights was always more than a commercial venture, it was artistic, inspired, transporting — which may explain how he came to lose the business. For Gysin, this was a lesson to learn for his future art career — the artist discovers the magic, presents the most captivating show, welcomes his wealthy patrons . . . and gets out with the shirt on his back. Nevertheless, the musicians and dancers created a brilliant experience which reinforced his appreciation of art as physicality, sensuality, dexterity, illusionism, excitement, pleasure and laughter. In November 1955 Christopher Isherwood visited the restaurant and wrote in his diary:

The boys were very interesting to watch — their negligent grace, their vague yet exact gestures, their delicately mocking salutes, when you gave them money, which they tucked in their turbans. Their hip movements and flirtatious play with their scarves is exquisitely campy and yet essentially masculine: this is in no sense a drag show. In the most beautiful of the dances, the boy carries a whole tray of glasses and lights on his head. Later the boys sang with one of the musicians, and I felt they were really enjoying themselves.

(Burroughs’ negative description of the dancing boys refers to a later incarnation of the place, when Hamri and the original musicians and dancers had quit.) The impresario enjoyed himself, too, though his creative investment was doomed. It may be that Gysin’s performances with Sommerville at the Domaine Poétique and the ICA and elsewhere were sublimated homages to the Thousand and One Nights — movement, art, music, color and light combined in the creation of a magical environment, where one could forget oneself and be lifted up, moved and fired through all the senses. The restaurant had been a disaster, financially and emotionally, it was a place where “some unforeseen, complex, cataclysmic catastrophe” occurred practically every night, Gysin said — well, of course it did, and he loved it, the chaos and the intrigue, the rising and falling waves of the Pipes of Pan, the pirouettes and floor-rolls of the dancers, the cloakroom full of mink coats, the thin beams of light streaming from the perforations of Moroccan brass lanterns retroactively prophetic of the Dreamachine, the fated beauty of it all . . . When he was expelled from his Eden, the true magic of the Thousand and One Nights disappeared before the “Under New Management” sign went up. But here’s the trick: he took it with him, he never lost that feeling, and the rapture stayed with him, long after the lights went out. . 

Performance

When the tape of “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” was played at the ICA in December, 1960, Gysin “painted a picture 6 X 6 feet,” he later noted, in front of the audience, and then, paying homage to “the ancient Chinese precedent” that recurs in his text, he “quietly disappeared,” leaving his picture behind. Did he “bow an aural bow?” Well, he did so in a contemporary performance at the Domaine Poétique in Paris — Lawrence Lacina wrote that “Brion finished his painting/performance, took a bow… ” Certainly, the execution of the picture was in accord with the text’s specifications — “Painting a picture re time and 6 X 6 during the act of an invocation.” In fact, the text and the act of painting were part of a performance which is revealing of Gysin and Burroughs’ desire at this time to extend the Third Mind into the public domain — to put at least some of their techniques and theories into operation. Gysin would later simply note that the text “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” was “Recorded & played” at the event, but Barry Miles would recall in his book London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945, “a cut-up tape by Burroughs called ‘Brion Gysin Let The Mice In,’ featuring, in addition to Burroughs’s flat Midwestern voice, radio static and distorted Arab drumming.” This poses a significant question: is “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” a text by Gysin, or “a cut-up tape by Burroughs?” The answer is — both. The tape was a cut-up by Burroughs of the words that had been written / hand cut-up and arranged by Gysin, and it was treated, like the performance itself, as a manifestation of the Third Mind. The text as it appears in Haining’s anthology is titled “Let The Mice In,” without the preceding “Brion Gysin,” and Haining also writes that the text was “written for Evergreen Review in 1969,” which is also incorrect. It is possible that Gysin edited and rewrote parts of the text between its aural performance and its later publication, but it is essentially a work from 1960. Its equivocal status as a text — written / cut-up / recorded / cut-up / performed / published, and including treatments and words by Burroughs — is also testament to its singular importance as a key example of the Third Mind combinatory process, personal and technological. The alternation of first and third person viewpoints in the text perfectly embodies the symbiotic fluidity of mediated authorship — “Gysin paint Me, too,” “edited voice of Wm. Burro him,” “Gysin in forever audible home-sprint” — with Gysin writing of himself as another through the spoken voice of Burroughs. The text was created specifically for public performance and for edited tape playback, and is a statement of artistic inspiration and intent, a performance piece, produced in order to be spoken and heard in public. It includes a description — again, recorded in advance of the event in which it would feature — “There will be projections in all dimensions while the recorded voice of Wm. Burroughs reads an incantation spelled out by him.” That is, this “manifesto” is a “program” in both senses. Careful study of the published text shows that although it is attributed to Gysin, whose “voice” and style are evident throughout, it includes elements by Burroughs in the final two pages. Miles appears somewhat dismissive of the actual performance, writing that Gysin “pranced about the stage, painting a vigorous sloppy abstract on a huge sheet of paper,” but he has explained to me that what he intended to convey was the splashing of the paint medium through the air, while Gysin’s physical actions were shamanically pantomimic. Certainly, the photograph of Gysin in action at the Domaine Poétique at the Paris Biennale, taken only a few months later, reveals a brilliant calligraphic painting in process. Miles writes of a performance at the Heretics Club at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, before the ICA show: “This was an attempt by Gysin — the principal organizer — to produce the ‘derangement of the senses’ that he and Burroughs had spent long hours discussing, by combining painting with sound poetry and light projections in a theatrical performance.” This was one of a series of collective manifestations of the Third Mind and Ian Sommerville’s contribution was significant — his light projections involved slide projectors and an epidiascope he’d made to project 35-mm double exposure slides. As with the performances at the Domaine Poétique in Paris that year, the Heretics event was an attempt at sensory overload which would culminate five years later at a second ICA show with Ian Sommerville ecstatic that a Burroughs tape of “pneumatic drills, radio static and wailing Moroccan flutes” drove half the audience out of the building, in the venerable tradition of the succès de scandale. But the performance was also a method of creating Rimbaudian correspondences, the synesthetic merging of word, image, action, recording, light and sound, as well as dissociative states and alienation effects. These performances demonstrated the processes of created illusion — the written word was spoken and cut-up on tape and played back, the solitary act of creating a painting became a public demonstration, while the slide images blurred the distinction between the living and the projected — a homage to Man Ray and Lee Miller’s projection of a hand-tinted Méliès film onto guests at the 1930 White Ball of Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt, an event Gysin would have known about and which he may even have talked about with Man Ray himself. These performances made the invisible, static art of painting dramatic, and turned recitation, the publicly spoken word, into a spliced multi-layered recording, while the face and body of Gysin, the performer, became a screen for the projection of images of himself — “I played into my own image, and out of it.” In these ways, Gysin pushed the contradictory nature of live and recorded, spontaneous and manipulated art processes and experiences, so that the audience “could no longer be sure what was real and what was not.” Not only does the text promote Gysin the painter, it links his visual art with the spoken word, with the light and image projections, and with the machine processes of the actual performance — and this is why the text features phrases such as “I will make an audience” and “The audience, too, appear into the picture.” Both at the ICA in 1965 and at earlier shows in Paris, under the rubric of the Domaine Poétique at the Galerie de Fleuve and at the American Center on Boulevard Raspail, Gysin dedicated his invocations to the Goddess Kali, and ended performances by slashing and tearing his paintings into pieces — acts which never failed to upset and appal the audiences. “There’s no creation without destruction,” said Gysin, “there’s no destruction without creation.” This destruction was certainly in keeping with the Third Mind’s concern with processes and states of being, rather than with finished “artworks” — the painting, however beautiful, was absolutely not the object of the exercise, though the torn fragments of one such work from 1961 would be reconstituted in 1968. It would not be the only example of “auto-destructive” art to be recuperated and framed and hung on a wall — the distressed, dark age ex voto of the Kali Yuga. 

Marabouts / Wu Tao-Tzu / The Modern Delphic Oracle 

Those magical powers promised by the rites of Abramelin were recognized by Gysin as quite attainable — he’d witnessed and studied comparable powers in the 1950s, extraordinary feats demonstrated with great élan by those marabouts venerated by the Berbers. These inspired performances included fire walking, levitation, healing through trance, as well as the swallowing of a real Naked Lunch of living, wriggling snakes, scorpions and lizards. What was the Crowley invocation but another method for acquiring baraka, the mystical power of those dervishes, those holy marabouts whose self-mutilations and disappearing acts, whose scorning of the physical body and dissolution of the human image would be invoked in Gysin’s lacerated slides, the disfiguring and cutting up of his own human image . . . Gysin and Burroughs and Portman would have seen, in the Djeemaa el Fna in Marrakesh, the professional penmen with their calligraphic samples along with the herbalists chanting their mantras and spells, summoning the Word and imbuing their papers and powders and potions with healing powers, as they performed their ordinary miracles side by side with magicians eating fire and floating through the air and becoming invisible . . . In Gysin’s philosophy, magic is a material practice which really works, the staged illusion which is actually a cover for the true exercise of mind over matter, of divine will over cause and effect. For Gysin the artist was a magician and this was more than a role to be acted out — the artist’s powers were supernatural because the created work could not be explained by skill, talent, or aesthetic value . . . Something other, inexplicable and marvellous, emerged from the creative process, manifesting the psyche in material form. When, in “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In,” Gysin invokes those Chinese artist-sages disappearing into their paintings, he is specifically referring to Wu Tao-tzu, a painter of the Tang dynasty, who, according to legend, looked at a mural he had just finished painting, clapped his hands, and then entered through the temple gates which he himself had conjured — the gates then closed behind him and he was never seen again. This famous story encapsulates the idea of art as an entrance to another world — through his work the artist creates an illusion into which he willingly enters, so that his own divine creation engulfs him, eclipses his earthly being. This myth, beloved of Borges, is not merely paid lip service by Gysin — it epitomizes his magical philosophy of art, in which the creative act is absolutely concomitant upon the willed giving up and erasure of self. Burroughs originally intended Cities of the Red Night to actually end with Gysin vanishing in just this way, disappearing — “disprairie”, to use Gysin’s cut-up term — into his own painting, and, in effect, into the book which his pictures had inspired. Different versions and interpretations of the Wu Tao-tzu story exist — painting a door on a mountain, or painting the mouth of a cave, and “sadly the door shut and he was lost forever,” or “the cave entrance closed and the whole mural faded away and only the wall remained.” It is not Renaissance perspective or trompe l’oeil optical illusionism which leads the artist into the picture — it is the creative act itself which makes transcendence possible. The meaning of the tale is that the artist is consumed by the process of creation, and becomes so entranced by his own powers of evocation that he cannot return to the quotidian realm of existence. Wu Tao-tzu’s life seems archetypal, an Eastern progenitor of the romantic, bohemian artist of the West — he used alcohol as a stimulus, painted his exquisite calligraphy “with the force of a whirlwind,” broke all the social and artistic rules, was inspired, possessed, and doomed — there was no magical disappearance to end his life, rather he died penniless and delirious, of cirrhosis of the liver . . . This is the painter Gysin paid homage to in his Third Mind performances, and he would have appreciated one story about Wu Tao-tzu which links the skill of painting with the art of swordsmanship. When Wu Tao-tzu portrayed General P’ei Min, he did so not by arranging his “sitter” in a pose, but by painting the General as he danced his famous sword dance, capturing at speed the flashing movements of the sword, equating the brushstroke with the potentially lethal cut of the blade . . . Not all of Gysin’s magical invocations are so rarefied, in fact in life and in his art he sometimes played upon the more lowly idea of “the Magician’s role” which he’d recognized as his destiny in the 1930s — he’d come on like a stage illusionist or mere theatrical entertainer, a knowing dissimulation of his profound belief in magic, employing, in effect, the professional conjurer’s “distraction technique” to deflect from his true purpose. Gysin was knowledgeable about the history of stage magic and the floating head seen in his slide works and in the torso photograph he had taken in Greece, were versions and variations on the theme of the mirror trick created by Thomas William Tobin in 1865 — advertised as “The Modern Delphic Oracle,” this illusion derived in turn from “The Sphinx” illusion, and it appeared to produce a bloody, decapitated head, rolling its eyes and whispering its last words to the horrified, paying audience. It was a macabre play on the fascination and fear induced by the guillotine, and significantly, this memorable production was performed not in a theater but in a Parisian wax museum — it was theater as side show, a dungeon entertainment for sensation seekers, part of a tradition that the surrealists would draw upon in the 1920s and ’30s (and witnessed by Gysin), turning the modern art show into a tunnel of horrors, a carny cabaret, a gothic grotto, a hellfire cavern. Likewise, the Domaine Poétique and Gysin and Burroughs and Sommerville’s multimedia shows a hundred years after “The Modern Delphic Oracle,” were strategically sensational events, invoking and summoning spirits, projecting apparitional bodies, scrambling voices from the ether, while the slide shows, like the Dreamachine, drew upon the prehistory of the cinema, its origins in magic lantern shows and séances . . . Gysin’s recorded text, “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In,” was itself a modern version of the Delphic Oracle, a series of rhythmic chants and pronouncements of possession and secret knowledge, as disembodied cut-up riddles issued not from a fissure in the earth but from a tape recorder — the voice as the ghost in the machine, prophecy on rewind and playback, technology as a spirit trap. The spoken text was insistent, declamatory in its delivery, the voice of an adept addressing initiates and neophytes, assuring them that he would penetrate and transform their spiritual, psychic, “Interior Space,” continually repeating the phrases, “I demonstrate,” “I talk new,” “I summon,” “I bow,” a liturgical litany as in a religious rite, assuring those addressed that “You will understand,” that the spark of divine creation would be transmitted through the power of the Word, through white light, sound overload, sensory disorientation. In fact, it isn’t Apollo at his shrine at Delphi on Mount Parnassus that Gysin invokes in this text, it’s Pan running free on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, while winter (Pan’s time in the Greek legend of the Oracle, when Apollo was in Delos) becomes spring and Parnassus becomes the Little Green Hills of Morocco . . The Third Mind performances were attempts to create psychic communion through a pandemonium shadow show, prophesying a coming age of expanded consciousness, subjecting the nervous system to sensory overload, a multimedia onslaught drowning out and cutting up habitual patterns of perception. As with Klein and Mathieu, the dramatic entertainment, however blatant or kitsch or ad hoc, was a good cover act — the shaman, as ever, is a showman, while the mystery is strategically disguised, the ritual invocation hidden beneath all the hoopla. The essential truth of magic resides in secrecy, and the magician, as Gysin knew so well, is an actor who must go masked — Larvatus prodeo . . . 

Three Hours Underground in New York

The Third Mind performance at the Heretics Club was titled Action Painting and Poetry Projection. The appellation “Action” seems both convenient and strategic, referencing and playing upon Harold Rosenberg’s 1952 term for the New York School’s gestural style and the performative, public nature of the event — it was “Action Painting” painted “in action.” Gysin was in part paying homage to Yves Klein’s “Anthropometry” performances in Paris, February-March 1960, but he was also clearly indebted to Georges Mathieu, who was already renowned and castigated for his public displays of Tachisme in action during the late 1950s. Mathieu would actually paint one of his greatest works, “The Victory of Denain,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, on the eve of the opening of his 1963 retrospective — a demonstration of his skill, speed and prowess. But by then he had painted in public on many occasions, and this performativity became synonymous with his name and integral to his artistic practice. He would dress up for the public painting of a picture — in Tokyo in 1957 he wore traditional Japanese Samurai costume for the painting of his picture “The Battle of Hakata.” Dominique Quignon-Fleuret wrote of Mathieu’s gesture that it was “like the flash of the razor in the opening of the cut,” and in the Third Mind performances the calligraphic gesture and the cut-up technique were equated as magical invocations, and as methods of making, as Miles puts it, “a giant tear in conventional reality.” Gysin’s destruction of the pictures which he created during his performances, may have been inspired in part by descriptions of Mathieu “executing his work in public.” Mathieu studied the history and topographics of the battles he painted, and the seemingly spontaneous creation of these paintings was actually based on a reconstruction of military strategy, battle formations and troop movements. Likewise, Gysin knew the format and process and structure of the painting he would perform — one photograph shows an underlying grid over which his calligraphic signature script is fluently unfolding. Further, “Brion Gysin Let The Mice In” actually describes the process of painting within a multimedia performance, indicating the crucial sources, themes, imagery and aims of the work — the painting, however inspired the process and the resulting image, followed a structured and iconographic programme. Gysin liked Mathieu and his work, and Gysin’s calligraphic paintings may seem superficially allied to Mathieu’s in their energy and élan, and in their distribution and layering of gestural strokes on a colored ground, but the two artists are quite distinct. Despite his successful performances in Japan, Mathieu was not interested in Japanese calligraphy and always claimed that it had no influence on his art — Oriental calligraphy was symbolic and meaningful, and imbued with the mystical, whereas his own gestural art, which he termed “Lyrical Abstraction,” was based entirely upon speed of execution, and on his abstracted renderings and evocations of historic battles and the lives of military and aristocratic personages. Gysin’s art, on the contrary, was personally iconographic, issued from the study of Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and, above all, did not record or transmute events of the past, but sought to fix the fluidity of transient moments of consciousness. Gysin learned something about Mathieu in the late 1950s which may have had a bearing on his reluctance ever to relocate to New York from Paris in order to push his career as an artist. It’s a story which would sum up the art world “in action” for Gysin, and it was both an amusing and a cautionary tale. On the 27th of August, 1957, Mathieu flew to Japan where he painted, in public, 27 canvasses, and a screen, as well as making a number of drawings and gouaches. He was in New York in October, ready for action, but his dealer, Samuel M. Kootz, knew that a public demonstration of Mathieu’s virtuosity, and the resulting stacks of wet canvases, would not go down well with either critics or with prospective purchasers in the United States, despite the American admiration for speed and efficiency. How could the high prices of Mathieu’s pictures be justified, given the very few minutes required for their execution? It would look like printing money. The image of “Action Painting” in America was that of the tortured soul labouring and agonizing for months and years over a single encrusted canvas — seeing Georges in impeccable Nineteenth Century dandy dress exponentially knocking his stuff out with barely a pause would have sunk his market value for sure. So… on October 9th, a Wednesday, the artist was taken to the fourth basement level below the former Ritz-Carlton Hotel at 400 Madison Avenue, where Kootz had rented a space so that Mathieu could paint the pictures for his imminent New York show in the utmost privacy. Surely, there must have been studios available in New York, with windows and light? Apparently not. Mathieu would have to work underground, literally — 45 feet underground, absolutely alone, in a room reached, remembered Mathieu, “at the end of long prison corridors… the most Kafkaesque experience of my life.” This was about as far from the public performance of painting as one could get, and absolutely no one would be able to say — “But it only took him five minutes to paint that!” Except later, when Mathieu, typically, couldn’t help confessing proudly — “I painted 14 canvasses in three hours.” Clearly, he’d wanted to get out of that place at speed. Gysin would stay in Paris, where the pace was slower and the art could be as fast as it liked. 

The Razor’s Edge of Time

On June 17th 1939 Brion Gysin witnessed the public execution of the multiple murderer Eugene Weidmann in the Paris suburb of Versailles, 10 miles from the center of the capital. Shortly after 4 a.m. Weidmann was guillotined in front of a crowd of one thousand people outside the prison Saint Pierre, rue Georges Clémenceau 5. Reports that the guillotine had not been correctly adjusted — the bascule on which the condemned man was strapped was set at the wrong height and so his neck did not lie correctly in the lunette — and descriptions of drunken, joking spectators jostling for a good view lead to public outrage. But what really brought an end to the spectacle of the public execution were the photographs taken clandestinely of the decapitation — the widespread publication of these images in newspapers outraged the authorities, as if it was the image, and its reproduction, rather than the act itself that was obscene, a public incitement. These furtively taken photographs appeared in newspapers alongside descriptions of the crowd’s scandalous behaviour, which included eyewitness accounts of women breaking through the police cordons and rushing forward to soak their handkerchiefs in Weidmann’s arterial blood, mixing modern fandom and ancient fertility rite, before officials hosed the bloody cobbles and threw down sand — Gysin would dryly cite the women’s behaviour as a perfect example of hysterical aberration. A fellow member of that crowd was the 17-year-old Christopher Lee, the now celebrated actor, who found himself accidentally but literally on the set of a real horror film — because, in addition to the photographs taken by onlookers, cameramen filmed the execution from apartments overlooking the scene. We have become progressively immune to the mediated spectacle of killing, but the very idea of filming an execution was viewed at the time as utterly repugnant. Gysin would never forget this event, nor the irony that the executioner’s assistant, who was obliged to try and pull Weidmann’s head into the correct position for decapitation, was popularly known by the nom-de-plume le photographe — that is, the one who shadows and witnesses the executioner. Gysin was aware of the power of photography through media, and its historical importance, but his own work with photographic images over 40 years shows above all his awareness of the ways in which death is inscribed in the image — the photo as memento mori, as relic, testament to the world’s vanishing act. It’s the great truth of photography, that the image is always necessarily the record of something which once happened, of someone who once existed, now gone forever — caught and lost as time slid definitively over the razor’s edge, and lopped off another precious living moment. Gysin also recognized that pictures of Weidmann could be imbued with a profound, fetishistic significance, as was the case with Jean Genet. Gysin and Genet met in 1968 in Tangier — Genet had been given a letter of introduction from Burroughs in Chicago. Actually, Gysin remembered having met Genet before, in the 1930s and again in 1949, but Genet professed no memory of these meetings. However, together they recalled a number of mutual friends, and enemies, from those dim doomed decades, including a boy they had both known who went by the name of Fatalitas — so-called because he’d had that word tattooed around his neck. According to Gysin, the tattooed word indicated “where the chopper was gonna fall when his head was put under the guillotine.” There was a limited but understandable fashion for this kind of nihilistic decoration among sailors and convicts — both Gysin and Genet had also known the sinister Marcel, a protégé of Jean Cocteau, and later a manservant to Christian Bérard and Boris Kochno, a young man who’d had “Pas de chance” (“no luck”) tattooed around his neck at a naval prison in Corsica, and lived his life accordingly, in a condition of perpetual expectancy of imminent catastrophe, with little breaks of spite and vengefulness. When, in 1969, Genet took to visiting Gysin’s apartment at 59 bis Musa ben Nusair in Tangier, the two men were already linked by the stories of these “unfortunate ones” who were marked by “the necklace of doom,” but Gysin and Genet were also connected by their appreciation of the photograph as a mystical talisman, its power as an erotic icon, and as a source of magical and aesthetic self-projection — and by the fact that the man who Gysin had seen beheaded thirty years before, had become, through photography, Genet’s revered muse. On the 16th June 1939, the day before Weidmann’s execution, Genet had been apprehended for vagrancy and locked up, but he followed Weidmann’s case in the papers and the executed man would haunt his novel Our Lady of the Flowers, written in jail in 1941-2, a book which would become seminal for the Beats — in fact, the very first word of the book names the victim, and the opening passage crucially invokes his photographic image and the power of its reproduction and dissemination: “Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded aviator… His handsome face, multiplied by the presses, swept down upon all of France… Beneath his picture broke the dawn of his crimes… ” Genet is referring to a photograph of Weidmann, head swathed in bloodied bandages — he’d been subdued by a seventeen stone policeman who gave him three head blows with a carpet-laying hammer as he resisted arrest. The photograph had first appeared on the cover of Détective magazine on 16 December 1937. This photograph became the definitive icon of Genet’s spiritual pantheon, an image of enchantment and adoration which he carried with him for the rest of his life. Whatever fleabag hotel room he fetched up in, the photo of “a bloodied archangel,” as he described Weidmann, was ceremoniously fixed to the wall — the criminal spirit incarnated as household god. Genet gave copies of the photo to Cocteau and to Olga Kechelievitch — the image had become his most precious possession, and he’d so invested it with a sense of outlaw fraternity and shared martyrdom, that to give a copy to a friend was to give profoundly of himself, his mystic core. That Gysin had actually seen Weidmann decapitated constituted an intense, personal and historical bond between Genet and Gysin. Gysin himself was in no doubt about Genet’s genius and the sublime beauty of Our Lady Of The Flowers — and he had seen with his own eyes the terrible, bloody termination of its incandescent source. Genet would rescue the corpse from those “earthly policemen,” as he called them, and make Weidmann immortal through the greatest art, deifying the excoriated one, turning the foreign “liar, pervert and monster” described by the prosecution into a criminal saint… Writing this, I think of my friend, the late Donald Harris, who worked at the Royal Court in London in the 1960s and was involved in the production of Genet’s play The Blacks. He danced with Genet in a club in Earl’s Court and told me that Genet smelled “very clean,” but he couldn’t remember the record that was playing, the song they’d moved around to on that tiny, basement dance floor. The scene is distressed footage, hand held in black and white, images from someone else’s memory, the soundtrack missing.  

Madame Guillotine / What’s in a Femtosecond

Gysin was fated to be haunted by “Madame Guillotine,” also known as “The National Razor,” and acts of decapitation and cutting would become central to his oeuvre. An ill-advised remark by Dr Guillotine — “With my machine, I’ll cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you won’t feel it!” inspired a popular song of the 1790s, the joking morbidity of which greatly appealed to Gysin whose own songs are similarly savage, comic elegies, paradoxical celebrations of loss and death. Images of the guillotine, the razor, the scimitar, the blade that definitely severs, run throughout Gysin’s writing. In The Last Museum — “Look, there is the guillotine and some young lady is having her head cut off by the executioner. Do you all see what I see? He is holding her head up for everyone to see.” One femme “whips out an old-fashioned straight razor… a cut-throat,” while another is skinned “with a double-edged Blue Gillette razor blade held between thumb and middle finger.” A bull has a “razor-sharp horn,” but the bullfighter thrusts his own blade into the animal “up to the hilt.” The blade is an instrument of threatened castration in these scenarios, but Gysin’s writing also invokes the guillotine blade as the mechanical tool of the spectacle of death, and he cuts seamlessly from an old Arab in a hamam smoking three sebsis of kif and shaving his genitals with “an open razor” to Dr. Guillotine “testing his device” on bleating sheep in a courtyard of Le Quartier Latin. What appalled and fascinated Gysin was the idea that the brain lived on after decapitation, the victim conscious for eternal seconds, aware of being a bodiless, severed head, mute testament to a condition of being which definitively mocks Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” The report of Doctor Beaurieux, examining the corpse of the executed Henri Languille in 1905, had suggested that the victim might remain sentient for an unspecified period of time after the blade cut him in two, and it is this horrific idea of the living, severed head that lies beneath Gysin’s choice of a passage from Othello for the epigraph to his novel The Process, lines which refer to the Anthropophagi, the headless cannibals “whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” A few years before the execution, when he was in Greece, Gysin had himself photographed with a skull positioned on his right shoulder and with his left hand resting on a second skull. His torso is naked, and there are discs drawn on his closed eyelids – the image homages Jean Cocteau, in particular photographs taken of Cocteau in 1927 by Berenice Abbott. But there is something else in this image — the deep, extensive shadow cast by the head entirely separates the head from body, obliterates the neck, so that Gysin’s “living” head floats free of his body, and takes on the severed status of the skulls attached to the abandoned torso. It is indisputably an image of headlessness — decapitation designed and posed for the camera. Gysin’s decalcomania paintings were made in 1941, two years after Weidmann’s execution, and one example, in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, an ink on paper, shows, at the top of the picture, the chapiteau, or top crossbar of the guillotine, and the mouton, or weight, with the diagonal blade, while below these, at the bottom of the picture, there is a bleeding, skull-socketed, grimacing, severed Janus head — a mockery of Janus, since both knowledge of the past and the future are definitively separated by the fraction of a second required by the blade. The decalcomania technique involves the impressing of paint or ink from one surface onto another, and Oscar Dominguez proselytized the process as “having no preconceived object,” but both he and Gysin worked on the results of their compresses, delineating and highlighting the manifesting, suggestive images, and so the guillotine’s appearance in Gysin’s painting at this time seems both spontaneous and apparitional, and yet recognized and drawn out. It is hard not to see this work as a reverberation of Weidmann’s death, shudders and smears and blotches of ink revealing a double death’s head, a ghastly memorial to that festive early morning when, as onlooker Tennyson Jesse recalled, “the great blade crashed down and rebounded from its own force and weight.” The crescent of the lunette and the shape of the crossbar or chapiteau of the guillotine apparatus appear repeatedly throughout Gysin’s roller grids, made by the lifting of the roller from the paper. Again, this might be seen as accidental, a mere resemblance, but its sheer recurrence and Gysin’s study of the latent meanings in his own mark-making, suggest quite otherwise, as does an examination of the context and operations of the grid works themselves — the effect may have been fortuitous, but its meaning cannot have escaped Gysin who employed it repeatedly by design. In the mid-thirties Gysin had lived close to rue Git-le-Coeur, just round the corner from the future Beat Hotel where he would live in the ’50s and ’60s, and from his window he’d had a “perfect view” of the place where, he believed, between 1789 and 1792, Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotine’s proposed “beheading machine” was tested on live sheep and on human corpses procured from L’Ecole de Médicine — so for Gysin that area of the quartier was itself bound up with the history of the death machine. In the grids we see images of rooms in the Beat Hotel, severed with scissors or cut out on an artist’s guillotine, so that the Beat Hotel itself, the very place of cutting, is represented through the process of cutting — the images so produced take up their occupancy in a grid structure that suggests the floors and rooms of the hotel, a structure that may also be read as a series of guillotines with the vertical squares as stages in the descent of both the decapitator and the cut-up blade. This is clearly seen in Third Mind collage prints of 1965 — in “23 Die In Saigon,” for example, the lunette appears with a photograph of corpses placed directly above it, a cut-up homage to the guillotine. In Gysin’s “Self Portrait Jumping” of 1974, the severed image of Gysin is frozen in mid-air, and contained within a vertical armature, the image bright against a dark ground with runs and drips of blood-like ink — the descent of the silvery cut-out image mimics the blade about to fall. The hotel plan and the diagrammatic guillotine structure merge and move back and forth in the grids — they are parts of the scaffolding of the Paris set, on which the collagist hangs his paper, those textual and visual distressed materials removed from their original published contexts, but they also signify the material operations and the actual sites of chopping up and cutting through the human body-image, the Beat Hotel and the good doctor’s death machine both hiding in plain sight in Gysin’s “bright scaffolding.” He slices through texts, severing the referent “head” from the “body” of the sign, he cuts up tape and contact sheets and removes the fragments from chronological time and linear coherence, he turns his permutations of “I AM THAT AM I” into bodiless oracular recordings, and projects images onto his torso, from which his own head emerges in a “veritable split” — these are guillotine procedures, severing language and logic, body and mind, and demarcating the organic and the technological. Gerard Reve wrote in his inimitable style, “you can never decapitate him another time again,” but in his work Gysin did just that, in words and images, in coded and dissimulated and inchoate forms, he re-staged that decapitation. In The Last Museum, the guillotining turns out to be a “Deceptual Art Show,” like the staged hangings on a film loop in Naked Lunch, while photography was seen by Gysin as just such a serial reenactment, providing millions and millions of chopped-out death images — nothing less than decapitated life, courtesy of the camera shutter as guillotine blade, each image a little death, an orgasm for Thanatos, as another fraction of a second slides over the razor’s edge of time. Gysin projects the “time out” of an orgasm as a femtosecond, or one quadrillionth of a second, or one millionth of one billionth of a second, a femtosecond being to a second what a second is to around 31.7 billion years… The notion is frightening, ludicrous, unimaginable, and a good way to turn your brain inside out… This “little death,” described by Burroughs as the “flash bulb of orgasm,” is an escape from time, a fractional “out of Time” of non-being, but you return only having “lost the time you were ‘out'” — that moment out of time is the godhead for Gysin, is immortality itself, and in his metaphysics the trick is to enter that moment and stay there… “not to be born back into the same Time, not to be born back at all,” avoiding the rebirth “out of Time and back into Time again.” In this metaphysical scenario, photography is Black Ops, a deadly Black Art — it removes a fraction of a second from time, but that immortal moment, taken out of time and “frozen,” is the negative, in both senses, of immortality because it puts back into time a preserved, fixed ghost image which stands in relation to immortality as 1 : 1,000,000,000,000,000. In the photo grid works of the 1970s, Gysin arranges the cut-out contact images in vertical shafts, the figures descending in successive stages to the chopping-off point — each image has been cut “out of Time,” but has been rearranged and reinserted “back into Time again,” so that these people who once existed are reborn, but as the living dead, as ghosts of the terminal image apparatus. Incidentally, operated by an expert, someone who really knows what he’s doing, the guillotine blade will slice through a human neck in 0.005 of a second. The executioner and his assistant, le photographe, got just one shot at Weidmann, but film of the decapitation, taken from a seat in the balcony, may now be viewed on YouTube.

What’s in a Name

Gysin had certainly read the coverage of Weidmann’s trial before the execution, and knew that the extremely good-looking, masculine Weidmann was homosexual, or “versatile in his choice of sexual partners.” The press coverage was unprecedented, not only because Weidmann had strangled a young dancer and shot five people in the nape of the neck, (there were almost certainly other victims), but because Weidmann’s evident confusion, solitariness, charm and beauty were appealing, and suggested a martyred alien, “a fallen creature of another race,” one who had “committed the crime of being born.” Colette covered the trial for Paris-Soir and Maurice Chevalier, never slow on the uptake, managed to get himself photographed in court with a woman barrister — there were celebrities in court every day, and Weidmann himself was now a celebrity, a progenitor of our own times, a poète maudit by default, a surrealist manqué, an existential icon before the fact. Intellectuals and Roman Catholic novelists wrote letters and signed petitions for clemency, while Colette commented, with the sympathetic unflinchingness of the truly adopted Parisian, “Pity he’s got to be guillotined. He’s a good-looking kid.” This was France, and the French language played a crucial part, though no one picked up on it at the time, despite Weidmann’s own inchoate testimony that his name was mutable, and that he could assume the identity of a young woman by learning to sign her name. The French press gallicised Weidmann’s Christian name, replacing “Eugene” with “Eugène,” changing the pronunciation. In fact, Weidmann’s name “Eugene” was pronounced to rhyme with “Gene,” and so was homophonous with “Jean,” the name of his first victim, Jean de Koven. Weidmann claimed that he killed Jean for her passport so that he could cash travellers’ cheques, because “Jean” was also a man’s name in France, and he was called “(Eu)Gene,” so no one would question him, especially as he had applied himself to imitating her signature . . . But this, and other stories he told, simply did not stand up to scrutiny (he did not cash those checks, by the way). It’s possible, as Rayner Happenstall believed, that the homophony of names was enough to unleash Weidmann’s psychosis. He was self-destructive, he was suicidal, so he killed “Jean” — but it was the wrong “Gene.” Gysin may have recognized in the personality enigma of Weidmann, in both the murderer’s explanations of his crimes and in psychological profiles of the time, an extreme version of the kind of disassociation of identity, bound up with linguistic ambiguity, that he felt within himself. The writer Georges Bernanos described Weidmann as “the very image of supernatural abandonment,” and it became apparent that Weidmann’s father had been “permanently missing” from his life, something which Gysin would surely have noted. Throughout the trial Weidmann was described as a mythomaniac, for whom every truth was a fiction, and every fiction true, and perhaps the title of Gysin’s lost manuscript of the early 1940s unconsciously echoed that repeated phrase, the diagnosis of a terminal storyteller — Memoirs of a Mythomaniac. No matter, what Gysin did know was that immediately after the blade fell, “a geyser of blood” shot out of the neck, as Marcel Montarron reported, and Weidmann made his last sound on earth. Tennyson Jesse — “The voice that had been so beautiful, so soft, so gentle in the courtroom, was stilled for ever. There only came a last exclamation from Weidmann — and that was involuntary — the whistling that always sounds when a head is cut off. For the neck gives a snap as the last breath of air leaves the lungs, though the head be already in the basket.” For Gysin, breathing would become the very art of living, not just the automatic process of staying alive, although hooked up to oxygen cylinders he would get to know all about that — it would become the In-breath of Inspiration and the Out-breath of Creation in his philosophy, the very breath of awareness of existence pulsating through the mortal body. This mindfulness could only make the memory of Weidmann’s expiry, his final expiratory gasp, the physiological whistle of extinction, truly abominable, atrocious, a crime against the human spirit. But then, as now, outrage is useless, fury futile. As Tennyson Jesse wrote at the time, “It is the man’s windpipe and not his tongue that protests.”  

The Torso Of 1960 and the Torso of 1939

Gysin’s first one-man show had opened in Paris at the Aux Quatre Chemins gallery on May 19, 1939. Weidmann, a German national, was executed on June 17, 1939. Ten weeks later, on September 1, Germany invaded Poland and two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. Gysin had already left Paris and at the time of the declaration of war he was living off his wits, style, and flair with a group of aristocrats in exile, in a luxury hotel on the lakefront at Laussane. His Paris career seemed over, and in June the following year he would arrive in New York with $22 to his name. In one of his 1939 sketchbooks he had drawn a nude male torso, and this headless body was prophetic — his own torso would be the site and screen for the projections at the Domaine Poétique and the ICA in the early ’60s, photographs of which call attention to the clear demarcation of head and body. In one image, taken by Nikolas Tikhomiroff, Gysin holds a sheet from his neck, while the projected image on the sheet shows his arms hanging at his sides — it creates the illusion that someone is standing behind him, holding a shroud around his neck, pulling it back from the neck, or a shadowy magician is holding the sheet from which a disembodied head is about to float up into the air… The section of Gysin and Wilson’s Here To Go dealing with these projections is titled, “The Torso of 1960,” but through the projected images and through all the years we may glimpse the torso of 1939 — Weidmann’s headless corpse, his white shirt pulled down over his back and shoulders, released from the bascule and rolled off the death machine with superb timing into the waiting coffin.  

Continue on to Burroughs-Gysin Excursus

Tim Head interviewed by Joe Gilbert, 2 a.m. December 5th 1968

Introduced by Ian MacFadyen

The 1969 issue of Package magazine consisted of several A3 stiff paper sheets folded and encased in a white paper bag featuring an ink drawing of a sailor from Battleship Potemkin by Brian O’Toole. It included a text on Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, one on Jean-Luc Godard, and an interview with artist Tim Head called “Return to Peyton Place — A Word to the Wise Guy.” The interview was conducted by Joe Gilbert. The art editor was Andrew Morley, and the editors of the magazine were Gordon Sharp and Mike Jones.

The interview is charming and funny and sometimes silly but also very pertinent in its fascination with Burroughs’ image. A rather typical 1968 self-conscious faux Warholian aesthetic is apparent in the piece, but it’s also a real Roshomon in disguise in which an indefatigable interviewer pushes his source to the point where the latter begins to doubt his own encounter with the phantomatic Mister B. It’s definitely, even if somewhat unintentionally, revealing of how Burroughs was/is seen/not seen.

The magazine included a reproduction of a postcard from Burroughs to Joe Gilbert, the interviewer, which reads: “Dear Mr Gilbert, I thank you for the reality studio photos which I found most helpful. Sorry for the delay in answering, I have been in Morocco. All the best to you from William Burroughs.” The card is dated 23 August (23!!!!!) 1968. The interview has been transcribed exactly, although RealityStudio has added line breaks to facilitate reading.

Return to Peyton Place

Joe: I hear that you met William Burroughs.

Tim: Yeah, that’s right.

Joe: Where?

Tim: The intersection of Broadway on Grand Street, downtown New York.

Joe: When?

Tim: Sometime this summer.

Joe: Precisely when?

Tim: Sunday, September 1st at 16.28

Joe: Were you alone?

Tim: Yes. No.

Joe: Were you alone?

Tim: Um Lee Lorenzo was with me.

Joe: Who’s he?

Tim: She.

Joe: Who’s she?

Tim: A painter.

Joe: What’s she paint?

Tim: She’s great.

Joe: Did you recognise William Burroughs first?

Tim: Yes.

Joe: What did you say?

Tim: Hey that man looks just like William Burroughs.

Joe: What did she say?

Tim: That is William Burroughs.

Joe: What did you say?

Tim: No kidding.

Joe: What did she say then?

Tim: Nothing. [laughing] Do you want some more cake?

Joe: Thanks. And after the no kidding?

Tim: We walked on to the edge of the pavement.

Joe: Then?

Tim: I said shall I go up and say something and she said why not.

Joe: Go on.

Tim: I just went up.

Joe: What did you say?

Tim: Excuse me are you William Burroughs?

Joe: His reply?

Tim: Yes.

Joe: What did you say then?

Tim: Um I said rather inanely I like what you’re doing.  I don’t remember his reply. I asked him what he was doing at the moment, he said he had just finished the new The Ticket That Exploded I think. I asked him how he liked London as I knew he’d . . . and he said something like London’s a dead scene, I prefer New York. I know what he meant.

Joe: Was that the end?

Tim: Probably.

Joe: Do you know what he was doing there?

Tim: He was hanging round by a phone booth, I think a friend was phoning someone.

Joe: What happened after that?

Tim: I moved off. No I shook hands with him — no that was when I first met him.

Joe: What can you remember of his dress?

Tim: He seemed very smart in a seedy way just like you’d expect.

Joe: Any details?

Tim: New large, pale felt hat.

Joe: Crazy. Suit?

Tim: Pressed pin stripe suit dark blue or black. Dark blue I think.

Joe: Shoes?

Tim: Brown.

Joe: Tie?

Tim: Yes. Maybe he was wearing a coat, no that’s not very likely it was too hot.

Joe: Was he carrying anything, books, a briefcase, a camera?

Tim: No.

Joe: Did you record the experience?

Tim: Yeah for fun. I took two photos of where he’d been standing to see if I could recapture his image on my instamatic. Maybe I should have used infra red.

Joe: How did meeting him differ from meeting anyone else?

Tim: That’s a bugger isn’t it?

Joe: No comment. What was the duration of the meeting?

Tim: Twenty seconds — two minutes — two days.

Joe: What would you like to have discussed with him?

Tim: His methods of time travel using his camera and his documenting of experiences in his journal.

Joe: Did the meeting motivate you to do anything?

Tim: Thinking about writing an article about it which I never got round to. It was going to be a piece of pure fiction.

Joe: Who would you most like to meet?

Tim: The Duke of Edinburgh. It doesn’t really matter what I say.

Joe: What do you associate with the meeting, words, images, colours?

Tim: Dust, greyness, withdrawn kind of warmth.

Joe: That is just how I see him.

Tim: Some sort of receding image.

Joe: What do you think it’s like to be William Burroughs?

Tim: Crippling. No, not really. Exciting.

Joe: Why am I asking you these questions?

Tim: Because I can’t be bothered to write an article.

Joe: For me Burroughs is a unique mixture of extreme toughness and sensitivity. Were either of these attributes apparent?

Tim: I think that’s a fairly accurate description of what it appears that he’s like. It’s quite interesting to meet people on this surface relationship. Maybe it tells you a lot. I don’t believe in depth.

Joe: You imply he’s not as he appears.

Tim: I don’t know.

Joe: What was the most important thing about meeting him?

Tim: Meeting him.

Joe: How do you feel about my asking you these questions?

Tim: I’m sure it will be more interesting than most of the crap in this magazine. In any case it saves me writing that article.

Joe: Sounds like you’re more intelligent than me!

Tim: No just less conscientious.

Joe: What would you like me to ask you?

Tim: [hesitates] Ask me if I’ve been honest.

Joe: O.K.

Tim: Yes. “If my memory serves me well.”

Joe: What is the value of our conversation to the reader do you think?

Tim: It has the value of not giving him a clue as to what Burroughs is about.

Joe: What is Burroughs about?

Tim: I’m not going to tell you.

Joe: Me neither. He wouldn’t. Would it be nice to say yes or no to all this?

Tim: Don’t see it makes any difference. I’ve not said anything anyway.

Joe: Without knowing he was a writer, what would you have taken Burroughs for?

Tim: A writer.

Joe: Did he look nondescript or a character?

Tim: Kind of unusually nondescript.

Joe: Sinister?

Tim: Yes, but that was romanticism on my part.

Joe: Did you like him?

Tim: Yeah, seemed more pleasant than I thought he would be. [yawn]

Joe: Describe his general physical appearance.

Tim: He looked surprisingly well.

Joe: Why surprising?

Tim: Suppose I expected to see signs of [pause] results of use of drugs.

Joe: What did his face look like?

Tim: It wasn’t exactly . . . it was halfway between sunburnt and unhealthy yellow . . . no . . . what do you call somebody who just looks pale and yellow . . . not sallow . . . just pale and yellow. He had very hard eyes. Not harsh just — cold? No.

Joe: Remote?

Tim: Remote and . . . and . . . remote and . . . remote but . . . observant.

Joe: Did his face look tense?

Tim: Yeah, fleshy at the jowels but very economic.

Joe: Emaciated.

Tim: No. More fragile than I’d have thought. I must contradict this because I’m not sure how it was. Frail? Maybe that’s an illusion.

Joe: What was the scene of your meeting?

Tim: By an empty parking lot, a bus had just gone by down Broadway.

Joe: Weather?

Tim: Warm, grey, sultry, quite hot.

Joe: Ginsberg describes Burroughs as ‘reserved and dignified’ . . . Was this your impression?

Tim: Yeah.

Joe: Conrad Knickerbocker found his manner ‘didactic . . . forensic’. Did you?

Tim: No.

Joe: What was your impression of William Burroughs?

Tim: Fleeting.

Joe: He has been mistaken for a British diplomat.

Tim: Not portly enough.

Joe: Did he smile?

Tim: I think so. He was friendly anyway. Yes he did smile.

Joe: How about his voice?

Tim: Thin, reedy, like his eyes. That’s a bit absurd.

Joe: Why do we like William Burroughs?

Tim: One word answer?

Joe: If you like.

Tim: Because he knows.

Joe: Yeah I know. Where were you going when you met him?

Tim: To see Dan Graham, a writer. He said Burroughs was the most important person I was likely to meet in New York.

Joe: What was your reaction to meeting him?

Tim: At the time or afterwards?

Joe: Both.

Tim: Strange.

Joe: Yeah?

Tim: Just strange.

Joe: What did you think as you walked away?

Tim: I was thinking about not getting run over.

Joe: From what source did you recognise him, obviously photographic?

Tim: It’s funny. He was standing with his back to me. It wasn’t his face. Just the way he was standing there.

Joe: Did the meeting confirm your preconception?

Tim: Yeah but it was over in such a short time it was like I made it up. I got to thinking maybe it wasn’t Burroughs at all, maybe it was [consults book] Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare. Or someone. It made a good interview anyway.

Joe: Yeah I enjoyed it.

Paintings by Phil Wood

Merging

The live reading of Naked Lunch at St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York this October (2009) focused attention on the book as profoundly oral both in its origins and effects. Readers have long been inspired to spontaneously read the text aloud, and Naked Lunch contains a number of ideally, insistently performative monologues, each with its own rhetorical style — the routines of Lee, Benway, the County Clerk — but it is simply not the case that these voices are distinct and discreet. Rather, they move from the individual to the generic and merge and blur as they continually imitate and quote and parody and reference one another, mixing argots and breaking rhetorical modes, undermining and disrupting both narrative coherence and the ostensible stability of character and any notion of the fixity of identity. Though the voices of many of the characters are described specifically in terms of tone and register and inflection, the hybridisation of discourse is paramount — it embodies Burroughs’ concept of language as invasive, osmotic and parasitic, possessing and autonomously speaking through the dehumanised subject.

Mouthing

The Queen Bee’s fruit “talks out of one side of his face,” the lips of the Eskimos and the Shoe Store Kid turn purple, the commandante drools while Lee wipes his own mouth with distaste, the Mugwump is “catching termites with his long black tongue,” the toothless Egyptian eunuch shows his gums in a bestial snarl, Mugwumps have “purple-blue lips over a razor-sharp beak of black bone,” the junkies grunt and squeal and slobber and gibber, “Fats” Terminal has a “lamprey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow, black, erectile teeth,” froth gathers at the corners of the Expeditor’s mouth, the Cobra lamp woman vampirically licks a drop of blood off her finger, the Arab boys are “Toothless and strictly from the long hunger,” sperm hits the Javanese dancer on the mouth and the boy pushes it in with his finger, electric drills are clamped on the victim’s teeth and hooked up to a switchboard, the safety pin leg hole is like “an obscene festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress,” and don’t forget to buy biting-fresh amident toothpaste — the latter derived from ‘amide’, ammonia, a household cleaner. These are just a few examples of the fearful orality and predatory debasement of the mouth which are everywhere evident — whether speaking or snarling, dabbed with a napkin or bursting into gristle and bone, the mouth is both shockingly vulnerable and rapine, and the fear and disgust it invokes in Naked Lunch are inseparable from its speech — it is the cool remote mouthpiece of headquarters and the jabbering orifice that never shuts up, it is always opening and closing pneumatically with a will and intent all its own, discharging, dribbling, eating / speaking in undifferentiated profusion, uncontrollable, helplessly suctional, the biomechanical instrument of logomania, ravishment and possession — For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. The mouth of subjugation speaks only to condemn itself to the trauma of being finally unable to speak. Fear and pity the poor mouth.

Switching

Benway’s voice and persona are now indissolubly bound up with Burroughs’ own filmed and recorded performances, but the bloody, abominable surgical episode gives only one facet, if the most brilliant and darkly memorable, of that character. Several times Benway’s voice is precisely described in all its ambiguity and ethereality, it “drifts into my consciousness from no particular place . . . a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street.” The voice is like the opening bars of East St Louis Toodle-oo which is also described as “at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street.” And it isn’t just Lee who experiences this effect — during his demoralising psychological examination, Carl hears Benway’s “voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street,” a record on continual replay in the jukebox of memory, Benway’s voice grooved into the shellac, crooning abjection and loss. But the doctor’s voice changes dramatically from scene to scene — in one of its manifestations it is described as “strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice,” like the “dead, junky whisper” in which the Sailor sometimes speaks, before it explodes into a scream of rage. The doctor’s voice turns on a dime — he abruptly shifts from “a tone of slightly condescending amusement” to speaking “in a crisp voice,” now “chuckling,” then whispering, then suddenly shooting up “to a pathic scream,” shattering his suspect professional cover, the “bona fide croaker” routine. The extreme unpredictability and instability of Benway’s speech reveal his derangement while at the same time he systematically employs the schizoid voice as an audio-surgical instrument, he plays with the subject’s psyche through a technique of rapidly alternating threat and empathy, the internalisation in a single character of the Hauser / O’Brien, soft cop / hard cop routine. Benway is the genius version of the low-life Sailor, and the doctor and the junky both require psychic access, to see what they can make use of, turning a kid on and turning his psyche inside out, oscillating between threatening insinuation and glacial disdain, implicit malevolence and friendly persuasion — it’s the voice as cold-calling salesman coming on like your only true friend, your conscience and confessor, putting down that old Pavlovian punish-and-reward routine.

Ventriloquizing

Lee turns away in disgust from the County Clerk’s evil shit, but he stands still for Benway’s fascist science, as that indefatigable voice of authority insinuates itself, becomes the voice inside. Benway claims he is “restrained by my medical ethics” and that he is “a reputable scientist” whilst referring repeatedly to his “learned colleagues” as “nameless assholes” and though he protests against the “vile slanders” perpetrated against his own good person, he blithely confesses to ethical malpractice, including “performing cutrate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets.” His is the voice of unshakeable self-belief and unquestionable authority, but he is equally anarchic, splenetic, deranged, he’s possessed by ideas for transcending the speaking subject, but he himself will never be part of that program — “I digress as usual,” he admits, while one of his disquisitions is introduced with “Benway has this to say,” and he surely does. It is crucial that the Talking Asshole is described in a Benway routine — the Asshole does not speak for itself, it is quoted, that is, it is supposedly remembered by Benway, it’s part of his talking auto-hagiography, and in this fantastic reminiscence he effectively ventriloquizes the Asshole’s words, apparently letting it speak for itself, whilst those words are nevertheless transmitted through his own mouth. In this way Benway becomes both the guy who taught his asshole to talk and the Talking Asshole itself, the entire package in one — the ventriloquist galvanised and possessed by his own performance, by his own “thrown” demonic voice, the asshole routine is his routine, and he is helpless to speak otherwise. Benway’s deranged will-to-power is projected through the Asshole’s megalomania, and vice versa — the Doctor doesn’t just recount its story, he literally gives it voice, he speaks through it, just as the Asshole speaks through him. Benway isn’t one of those “nameless assholes” because his asshole has its own name — it’s his name. A variant of the Talking Asshole routine is delivered by the County Clerk when he recalls Doc Scranton’s prolapsed asshole with its travelling intestine — “it go feelin’ around lookin’ for a peter, just afeelin’ around like a blind worm.” That anal mouth is more than a routine device, a subject of the routine, it is the anterior locus of the routine’s creation, the vocal apparatus which brings everything low, the true scatological source, as in, You’re talking shit, You’re talking out of your ass, Just listen to that total asshole, You’re shitting me, I don’t need to listen to this shit, Will someone please tell that asshole to shut the fuck up. Benway cannot converse, he can only speechify and justify every cruelty and abomination through a logorrhoea of logic that bypasses deductive and inductive argument as well as all human empathy and feeling. Like the Talking Asshole, Benway won’t shut up, he can’t shut up, he whispers and titters and he croons an old song mocking disappeared synapses and brain-dead patients, he hectors and harangues, lectures and reprimands, demands and excoriates, screams and rages — and even when his voice becomes “barely audible,” it persists, like the hum and drone of a phone off the hook, the voice ineluctable, quite regardless of the pickup.

Demonizing

Whatever is consumed or injected in Naked Lunch brings on derangement and death, possession is both narcotic and demonic and turns the body into a host for linguistic contagion — to be spoken through. The Pythagoreans placed a taboo on the eating of beans because they believed that flatulence caused nightmares, giving access to the souls of the dead who would then invade the sleeping body. Porphyrios — “As we eat, they enter into us and settle in us and thus they pollute, not by divine interference. They generally delight in blood and filthiness and invade the possessed. In a word, compulsion of greed and desire, and general excitation cloud rational thinking and unintelligible sounds connected with them and also flatulence cause man’s breakdown which satisfies the demon.” Wilhelm Roscher commented on this passage — “The unintelligible sounds most probably refer not only to belches and flatulence but to the inarticulate shrieks of the victim tormented by the nightmare.” Benway attempts to describe the Asshole’s voice and he says it’s “a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell,” the spirit of possession farting out the words while the possessed human victim screams at it in torment to shut up, before his mouth and his fate are literally sealed. It’s those old nightmare demons, their voices bubbling and babbling away at “gut frequency.” In demonology they’re known as larvae, diakka, embryonats, necromantic assimilators, and like Ryam’s “furious sprites that dwell in the waste,” they enter through the passage of the digestive tract and take up night residence, sending out their filthy spells from the unspeakable place.

Hamming

Benway’s voice has entered popular culture. He was the first recognised persona posted in 1973 on the Community Memory Board BBS, the first electronically accessible bulletin board system. The message took the form of an imitation of the most recognizable aspect of the Benway voice, the crazed doctor of control demanding drugs and typically taking over the technology for his own swell purpose — “DOC BENWAY HERE . . . NURSE SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE OF LAUDANUM . . . USE AUTHORIZED DATA BASE ACCESS PROTOCOLS ONLY . . . SENSUOUS KEYSTROKES FORBIDDEN . . . DO NOT STRUM THAT 33 LIKE A HAWAIIAN STEEL GUITAR . . . SEND NO REPLICA. BENWAY OUT. TLALCLATLAN.” The voice of Benway the monomaniac and autodidact has surpassed the performances of Doctors Frankenstein, Jekyll, Mabuse, Moreau, Strangelove, and Faustus in the popularity stakes and, however corrupted, the voice has truly “risen up off the page” and now speaks through his legion of admirers, and in particular through his filmed reenactments — because Benway went into the movies. He haunts Stuart Gordon’s 1985 film Re-Animator, a retake on HP Lovecraft — “Prepare to meet Dr. Herbert West, the sickest man in science!” And we can catch him in Timothy Leary’s stab at a mad scientist in the 1981 Cheech and Chong movie, Nice Dreams. Or there’s Donald Sutherland playing an inmate who takes over an asylum in Rebecca Horn’s 1991 film, Buster’s Bedroom. Paul Morrissey reconnects Benway and his Gothic progenitor in the bloody camp of his 1973 Flesh For Frankenstein, while Doctor Benway is paged in the hospital ward in Alex Cox’s 1984 Repo Man, and in Larry Charles’ 2003 Masked And Anonymous, his allegory of American decline and fall, inspired by and starring Bob Dylan, you’ll find Doctor Benway’s office located in the Midas And Judas Building. However tacky or arty, that’s where you’ll find the good doctor — hamming it up on DVD. Benway’s character is also osmotic within the text of Naked Lunch — both he and the German doctor have performed appendectomies with a rusty sardine can, and the German Doctor is a variation of the Benway character, a version of the role played by Benway in a phoney “von” accent. Doctor Benway — his voices really do the rounds.

Shapeshifting

The characters dramatically quick-change accents and parlance, while speech is wildly inconsistent and volatile in delivery and manner. Lee puts down a con routine, next thing he’s some kind of beat poet on the road, then the detached agent filing his reports, the cruelly gloating junkie, the noir criminal-as-victim, the metaphysical time traveller, and his discourse shape-shifts accordingly — it depends entirely upon where he is, who he’s with, and what role and genre he’s been cast in this time around. The fake radio prophet and the Professor and the Sheriff all switch to convincing impersonations of the County Clerk’s Texas drawl, and the mouth in Naked Lunch is a mosaic — the voice grafted on, speech pieced together out of disparate, cannibalised parts. Accents and speech styles of period and place are brilliantly achieved and conveyed by Burroughs, the vernacular and demotic transcribed with elocutionary exactitude, but consistency is repeatedly undone by the mutability and disruption and “schlupping over” of voices — one speaks as many, many do as one. Salvador impersonates a Texas accent but when he gets excited he speaks in a broken English of possible “Italian origin” before breaking into “a hideous falsetto.” A.J. likewise “is actually of obscure Near East extraction” but had an English accent “which waned with the British Empire,” though he is now ostensibly an American . . . Voices are as hybridised and osmotic as the racial and cultural origins of the characters, fake or otherwise, and their improvised accents and dialects vocally shape-shift with the action which is always the con and the put-down, the dissimulation inherent in selling something / anything is always necessarily an act of verbal imposture, the multiple voices of the confidence man flipping through counterfeit cover stories. The Inspector speaks cod Nordic, the Moroccan street boy jive-talks just like the NY Rock ‘n Roll Hoodlum — vocal imposture is the rule of the game. Whether delivering the verbal goods at maximum volume, “louder and funnier!,” or in insinuating sibilants, these our actors are always pitchmen, salesmen, conmen, their business is showbiz, their politics hoopla, their voices mixing in the melee, a great closing-down sale — language’s Last Few Days.

Jiving

The German doctor begins by addressing Carl in film-Nazi-SS English then “goes on smoothly in his eerily unaccented, disembodied English” before finishing “in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk.” A German practitioner of Technological Medicine, his clipped English is a villainous Teutonic von Stroheim act — “You can get by vit one kidney . . . They need lebensraum like the Vaterland.” This vocal switcheroo, mimicry and deceit is omnipresent in the book — there is no authenticity of utterance, the one who speaks is always dissimulating, or passing on some second-hand story, or knows not of what he speaks. It’s a husking bee for queer corn, a convocation of jabbering bird brains, and what is said is patently as fake as how it is said — like the Islanders who claim in unison, “We are Breetish . . . We don’t got no bloody dealect.” Identity here is always a cover story, but the discourse stops in its tracks, is unaccountably severed, the personality pitch unravels through dry, flat statements of meaningless or questionable facts, lascivious taunts and sly but insistent demoralization, or deranged monologues full of filth and fury. Words are instruments of betrayal and terror, and then again, they’re just so much jiving around — words, they really couldn’t care less. This is the place where “all agents sell out” — and to speak is either to lie or inform, and it isn’t just the stool pigeons who are hexed, every speaker is a helpless performer in a cursed echolalia.

Propositioning

The propositions of Naked Lunch, whether philosophical, sexual or mercantile, are always losing propositions, the characters forever shooting under an Indian sign — every plan is a corrupt selling opportunity, every deal rigged, each statement of fact conceals an immoral invitation, and every theorem is patently untrue, because to speak is to lie and talk is cheap, it’s cut, unfailingly dismissive, mercenary and hostile. It’s attack language — “Find the weakest” . . . “Fuck off you!” . . . “make with the smile” . . . “I hate everybody” . . . “disgust me already” . . . “what an angle” . . . “Take a walk” . . . The mouth is aggressive in Naked Lunch, while the ear is passive, and the damage is perpetual, it reverberates, feeding on the acoustic violence. Salvador’s criminal aliases and his police informer monikers suggest his transformative vocal inflections — he “picks up a Texas accent” along with 23 passports, and his spurious identities take in Mexican and North African, Bronx and Irish, adopting Jewish, Queer and cowboy talk as the occasion demands. We’re told that he “reads and speaks Etruscan” — it may be an obsolete language, but what else is being said and sold around here but terminally used-up words and goods, and actually, the words are the goods — the true merchandise of the addictive selling routine. The words of the characters, and the text of Naked Lunch itself, are traded, bartered, bantered, exchanged, and both expeditiously and blatantly moved around in the book’s debased word economy — the wheedling or straight-talking or authoritarian voices are all in ironic counterpoint to the true nature of the deals going down, whether psychic, sexual, narcotic, monetary or combination of same. But what the sharp or confidence trickster really wants to see in the mark’s face is not stupidity, it’s vulnerability, absolute loneliness, and then that insistent, wheedling voice inside will be the rube’s final and only friend — like “that unspeakable blood-joined twin” described by Donald Newlove, the smiling psychic fetch, the resident djinn who whispers, “I’ll come too, buster.”

Staging

The voices are mediated, incorporating advertisements, popular songs, psychoanalytic and medical jargon, business spiel, hipster jive talk, junkie lingo, candy butcher and carny pitches, film and TV voice-over narration, radio announcer and newspaper columnist shtick, legal jargon and officialese, literary and anthropological references, viral and cybernetic terminologies, switching and combining quite different parlances while the source material shifts from old radio serials to dime-store comics and pulps, noir to sci-fi to horror and western film scenarios and teen gang flicks, characters flipping between quite different discourses and scenarios in a cultural hullabaloo which is all echoes — dubbed, spliced, ventriloquized, post-synchronized. The book’s showbiz scenarios mock theatrical and film prototypes and stereotypes — the revolving cast and their scrimshank plaster-of-Paris mise-en-scene go round and round on the book’s gigantic turntable, a shambolic revue, a whirlwind farce . . . Despite the dissolves and the cuts, and the exploding, collapsing sets, the skits are unstoppable and the performers are always on, even though they may sulk and pout and complain about the indignity and grossness of what they have to put up with in showbiz, before they do it all over again — because for Burroughs, the ringmaster, this “show” biz is life itself, or what passes for it, and something other than a satire on popular culture. As Raymond Chandler said, “Maybe you had to be absolutely shameless to be a good comedian. That was a thought.” John Fuegi has written of those “theatrical facades [that] have hidden the most deadly realities” in the 20th century — the concentration camp disguised to look like “a model of open-minded penal reform,” the fake Treblinka railway station, the shower rooms waiting for the Zyklon-B. What lies behind Burroughs’ blatantly theatrical sets, his foregrounding of genres and their stereotypical discourses? He would accept the role of satirist and yet maintain he was “making a little skit is all,” while readers and critics continue to seek moral justification and profound satiric purpose in his relished pastiches. It may be that Burroughs did not wish the creative, improvised performativity of his text, and his own delight in his prowess as skit-maker and master puppeteer, to be buried beneath weighty analysis, to be taken so seriously by those with no sense of humour or spirit of anarchy. All those characters, writes Burroughs at the end of the book, the doctors and junkies and authority figures and shills and majordomos, they are multiples of themselves and shape-shifting versions of one other, and “subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances that is to be the same person . . .” And that “common vocal apparatus” must, we feel, be the author “himself,” the writer who “sees himself reading to the mirror as always . . .” — it’s the Great Ventriloquist, his study a backstage dressing room, and he reads and acts out his scenarios to a mirror while he writes, like Charles Dickens whose writing room was furnished with a mirror for just this purpose, the author literally reflecting and dramatically acting out his characters because “every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage” — as Burroughs wrote in “Word,” “The author has gathered his multiple personalities . . .” Burroughs’ actors read and perform from a script — and several sections, like Dr. Berger’s Mental Hour, the Luncheon of the Nationalist Party, and Chez Robert are presented in dialogic screenplay format. These are the actors’ lines, and you read that script along with them, and reprise lines which recur in variant form throughout the text and which are passed back and forth . . . This is script writing, written for the voice, so can we just run through it one more time? Like Billy Wilder’s directorial technique when he rehearsed actors on set, whenever Burroughs does a pickup, another read-through or replay of the dialogue, he doesn’t bother to get the characters to read back entire lines, he just wants them to deliver those words and phrases which he needs for the next cut. The effect is that the characters, though that appellation defies even a minimally realist representation of identity and motivation, may seem to be continually dissimulating as they edit and elide their own spoken words — but those words are not “their own” words, and they were definitively cut, in every sense, from the very start.

Examining

Police and analysts force or seduce the subject to speak, treating him as irredeemably criminal and perverse, the investigation or the therapy having the same objective — not to discover what is being hidden by the subject from himself and from the Law, but to inculcate that shameful knowledge, instilling a fearful awareness of subterfuge and the consequences of exposure. The examination is always an interrogation seeking a confession and takes the form of a dialogue, a Q&A stimulus-response set-up, in which the answers are strategically procured, testing the reactive mind of the subject, and implanting the desired responses of shame, fear, self-loathing, paranoia. Reply, remember, repeat, recant, reinstate — every response is part of a conditioned act of self-betrayal and loss, every belief and every protestation of innocence or incomprehension is compromised at source, and for this the subject will become eternally grateful, like the grovelling Young Reporter who clasps the foul-smelling hand of the Inspector, protesting the “unspeakable pleasure” of the interview. Benway tests the reflexes of an irreversibly brain-damaged man with a chocolate bar, and he employs drugs, electronics, hypnosis, and physical torture, but his principal weapon of humiliation is language, the voice of the interrogator launching the “assault on the subject’s personal identity.” Benway’s voice seems to emerge from the psyche of the listener who can only helplessly submit to its galvanic incantations and insistent refrains, like the version of his voice which repeatedly, insinuatingly addresses Carl by name — “Well, Carl . . . And now, Carl . . . Yes, Carl . . . You are frank, Carl . . . And now, Carl . . . And so Carl . . . Yes, of course, Carl . . . Where can you go, Carl? . . . The Green Door, Carl?” Benway’s voice comes on like false memory syndrome masquerading as the return of the repressed, fading in and out of consciousness along with the buried memories of distress and shame which Benway purports to reveal even as he implants them in the psyche.

Desanitizing

The radio prophet broadcasts his delirious hokum over the airwaves, his religious shtick delivered rock’n’roll hoodlum style, alternating between parodic faggotry, the 1950s Mad Ave sell, cracker auctioneer spiel and hipster jive with a significant pinch of the County Clerk’s porch vernacular — “And he was a lovely fellah, too” — thrown in along with other varieties of the “Impersonation Act,” including advertising breaks — “Today I’d like to talk about the importance of being dainty and kissin’ fresh at all times . . . Friends, use Jody’s chlorophyll tablets and be sure.” Janet Malcolm has written of “the soap and deodorant advertisements of the 1940s and ’50s in which the words ‘dainty’ and ‘fresh’ never failed to appear” and Burroughs gets Ahmed’s spiel right on the money, it’s a summa of Mad Ave sales speak. As with so many of the staple lines and song lyrics replayed in the book, the advertising pitch is skewed and subverted, deliciously détourned — like the Technician’s “hideous parody of a toothpaste ad,” and Lovable Lu’s dildo tips — “Confidentially, girls . . . it’s more hygenic that way.” Ahmed croons a colon cleanser like a toothpaste, blithely conflating anus and mouth, the established advertising pitch for oral hygiene flipping into advice on analingus, just as Burroughs détournes an advert for a grippe remedy into a sinister, literary junkie pitch, “Sore throat persistent and disquieting as the hot afternoon wind?” — and the smooth, soothing mellifluous sell has a mouthful of sand in it. Burroughs is jubilant in his overthrow of the sanitized and decorously civilised, but it would be wrong to take his scatological scenarios as merely satiric of man’s bestial nature. On the contrary, it may be that it is the super-clean transparent Horn and Hardart food dispenser and the mix-master housewife’s kitchen antisepsis, and the 1950s de rigeur “kissing dainty” deodorant slogan which most truly appall him, fueling his violations of the sanitary code and his contempt for the sanitization of the wildness and unpredictability of life, the shutting-out of biology in the raw. The Cincinnati Anti-Fluoride Society wants to “sweep this fair land sweet and clean” and the rider, “as a young boy’s flank,” is, of course, spectacularly détourned. The congregants drink a toast in pure spring water and naturally all their teeth fall out on the spot. It’s a pet Burroughs bugbear — nothing so terrible as the word “purity” in the mouth of a puritan, nothing so sterile as that hygienic existence in which, as Raymond Chandler noted, the all-tile bathroom becomes the basis of civilisation. It’s the terrible desire for the cleanliness of the mouth, synonymous with the cleaning-up of speech, the religio-consumerist purity trip, upon which Burroughs pours his spleen, driven to despoil the pristine gleaming surface with so-called unmentionable dirty words like blood and Kotex and sperm and shit — Benway literally splatters that tiled wall with blood, the lavatory turned into a filthy operating theatre and dripping corrida. Bataille believed that the abattoir “is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains and in which, subject to the ineradicable obsession of shame, they are reduced to eating cheese.” Burroughs celebrates unseemliness, insists upon leeches in an old tin can, shit wrapped in comic books, and Gains and Iris and other characters keep up the flow of unmentionable bodily excretions and embarrassing medical conditions, reinstating the baseness, the cloacal lowliness of the speaking base body against the civilized, sterilized literary grain.

Broadcasting

Ahmed’s a jacked-up shape-shifting voice artiste, a specialist in diverse locutions, switching and ditching personas at speed — he’s all mouth, nothing but a mouth, a motor mouth imitating and scrambling and inter-cutting the cultural trash and sales talk of other voices, morphing and mixing other stations, the dial whooshing between channels. Like the section Have You Seen Pantopon Rose, his broadcast anticipates the Atrophied Preface and Burroughs’ unleashing of his “own word horde” which is itself a scrapbook of quotations full of cross-echoes and ready-made phrases, a pile-up of fragmented speech taken from many sources including variant replays of voices taken from elsewhere in the text, re-spliced and rebroadcast. Throughout the book, the human voice is plugged into the media machine, it’s broadcast by radio, TV and film, transmitted via switchboard and loudspeakers, short-wave and walkie-talkie, singing telegram and telephone, it’s taped and played back, shouted through a megaphone and through a dustbin, telepathized and surgically implanted, prosthetically and biologically mutated, it’s recorded, amplified, distorted, splintered, copied, mixed, and degraded into gibberish and noise, “a rising crescendo of grunts and squeals and moans and whimpers and gasps,” and even as the voice dies to a whimper rather than a scream, it’s described as “rising to a deafening whine,” as if amplified in the book’s echo chamber.

Remembering

The fragmented speech patterns of the radio prophet and Sailor and Bill Gains resemble the scattered elliptical phrases of Burroughs’ final “word horde” — and that misspelling is entirely apposite, the “hoard” of amassed words becomes a “horde” of insects seething in a mass and spilling “off the page in all directions,” un-containable and ungraspable. Burroughs’ “own” written discourse is a maelstrom, a cacophony of discordant competing voices, and it comes on as a transcription of spoken fragments from memory — muttering, humming, pleading, complaining voices, banal and aphoristic and apocalyptic, insistently oral, with toothless gums and a taste of metal in the mouth, mangling the asp speech from Anthony and Cleopatra and other scraps in a show of “second-hand . . . titillation.” There are many direct speech quotations in the final five pages, a convocation which includes the voices of Sailor, Eduardo, the American Tourist, the blonde usherette, Lee, the Chinese druggist, old junkies, Lola La Chata — ghost voices called back through the ether to reprise an elegiac line, to leave their parting ironic and apocalyptic funereal words, to fall from the air, not as brightness but as “soft mendicant words falling like dead birds in the dark street . . .” — words as stark as a street begging routine, and their axiomatic, gloating refusal: “Wouldn’t feel right fucking up your cure.” The Atrophied Preface resembles a method of cryptomnesia — the mediumistic channelling of voices which Theodore Flournoy, at the beginning of the 20th century, called “teleological automatisms.” Flournoy understood such spirit voices to be beneficent, and though Burroughs’ discarnate voices are far from that, it as if their cryptic utterances promise the uncovering of the repressed, the writer cast as the medium at a séance, the channeler of discorporate voices and decoder of mysterious messages emerging from the ether. Burroughs’ final pages repeat and re-order and re-layer memories, and his method of re-transcription here suggests the metaphor of geological strata used by Freud when explaining how memories are transformed in the unconscious and preconscious systems of the psyche — “our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances — to a re-transcription . . . memory is present not once but several times over . . .”

Elegizing

Scott Bukatman, writing about the later cut-ups, notes that “relations among signifiers are lost, each now exists in glittering isolation,” and this analysis of the individual, fragmented sentence or phrase applies equally to the concatenated passages of the “Atrophied Preface,” a collage which preserves its material splices and cuts, the jumps and disconnections of its constituent parts. The old queen “gets the knee from his phantom” and there are “phantom twinges of amputation” in this ghostly burlesque. The “Dilapidated Diseuse in 1920 clothes . . . dead weight of the Dear Dead days hanging in the air like an earthbound ghost,” from the Campus of Interzone University section, reappears as a guy in a 1920 straw hat, while the earthbound ghost and atrophied gangster from the And Start West section return in disembodied form to repeat their ghost mantras . . . The book’s ending is a fitting mass epitaph for a Book of the Dead, the voices speaking their Last Words as the flame goes out, the shot is blown, and the “smell of death” and the “skeleton grin” are left to preside over the discorporate world . . . The cut-and-paste editor of these “raw materials of death” threatens to “terminate my services” as items on serial killers, immolation, overdoses, and infection find their random but fated places in the crumbling marble index, a terminal bricolage of entropy and planetary doom. It’s a death chant, a ticker-tape funeral oration, a scrapbook of autopsy reports, cuttings from a newspaper morgue. As Oliver Harris has noted, this litany echoes a moving and resonant passage in Interzone, a meditation on the deaths of people Burroughs had known, and on his own fated survival.

Terminating

Terry Wilson has pointed out that the book ends with a vocal impersonation by Burroughs — of writer Sax Rohmer‘s inscrutable Chinese shopkeeper. Burroughs always claimed to detest Rohmer, but “No glot . . . C’lom Fliday” replays and homages the voice of Rohmer’s inscrutable racial other, the Yellow Peril stereotype — “We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship with a civilized shaving salon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair. A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations. From behind a curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and, advancing, shook his head vigorously. ‘No shavee, no shavee,’ he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes. ‘Too late! Shuttee-shop!'” The druggist at the end of Naked Lunch is addressing Bill Gains and every other junkie con artist, and this transcription of broken pigeon English concludes the book with a kind of definitive inarticulacy, a terminal abridgement, the refusal to deal is also a refusal of language to engage beyond its essential minimal requirements, because there is literally nothing else to be said ever again in this alien tongue. As the Sailor says, with a nod to Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go back no more” — and that longed-for score and that far-off “Fliday” will never come.

Eliding

Fragments of speech, strung out on ellipsis, are used throughout the book, signalling, for example, the stuttering disconnection of the Sailor’s furtive old junky discourse which is “slowed down with twenty goof balls,” Benway’s strategic pauses creating maximum unease and fear, Bill Gains fading in and out of his con stories as each one surfaces only to fail to hit the mark, the practised fake amnesiac digressions in the County Clerk’s memorialising monologue in which old-timers like him, gone ancient before their days, are forgetful-like. But these spaces between words, these gaps and elisions and breaks in discourse also signify the unsaid — some things must remain hidden, should not be disclosed, or they cannot be said, they are unknown, unknowable. Still, when the words run out or break down, we may wonder what runs through and beneath the caesura? It seems something other, something more than the transcription of the rhythms of natural speech, the marking of pauses or inarticulateness . . . It might be ennui, it might be dissimulation, but when spoken pauses are transcribed on the page, they textually signify that it is here, in these fissures, not in the characters’ filthy, blasphemous utterances, that the literally unspeakable resides, as if the Beat aesthetic of saying it all, letting it all out, has its limits, and so the unspeakable remains, a signalled absence — “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Stefan Hertmans has noted that “anyone complaining about unspeakability is bound to enter an insoluble paradox. For the subject is spoken about and referred to.” Naked Lunch is filled with gaps and cuts and caesura, empty places where the words run out or are severed, left hanging — the text elides, fractures, fails to articulate and grasp something which is half-recognized but cannot be named or described and must be passed over in silence . . . “I’ll give it to you in the ass,” “Now, baby, I got it here to give,” “So I put it on him,” “the school motto: ‘With it and for it’” — here and in song lyrics détourned by Burroughs, the “It” word sustains cynical double entendres conflating sex and narcotics, while elsewhere it signifies a taboo which cannot be broken and cannot be spoken — even though Burroughs writes that “You can write or yell or croon about it,” the taboo is crucially unnamed, unnameable. That poor, unspecific, dehumanized, stand-in pronoun must suffice, suggesting some ultimate point of despair or transcendence, the death of someone who really existed, or an unbearable, unimaginable, overwhelming regret, which must remain forever beyond identification or expression.

Telegraphing

Bill Gains nods out while trying in vain to con the Panamanian Chinese druggist, like he’s put himself to sleep with his endless recitation by rote of ludicrous sob stories, each one fixated upon crude bodily needs. His flat-liner delivery erases all unnecessary participles and connectives — well, who needs syntax anyway? He’s laying it down on a Chinaman in any case so only the key words, the really happening parts of the con need be uttered in his disembodied stupor, he can hardly make the effort is all — fill in the blanks yourself. He’s laid down those inane tales of woe countless times, and the druggist has heard it all before too — the dying racing dogs routine, the mother’s piles, the wife’s menstrual cramps . . . Bring it on, and let it go. We can read this ellipsis as an authorial edit, removing the longeurs and narrative bridges from Gains’ interminable pitches to score, or perhaps he actually does talk this way, fading in and out of consciousness and speech before snapping his head up and cutting to the chase. In either case, it lets the key elements, the real base elements do all the signification, literally strung out on a skeletal narrative line — “Kotex . . . Aged mother . . . Piles . . . raw . . . bleeding.” We see the con like a telegram — the whole interminable rigmarole condensed into a few words, to cut the cost, in every sense, of the sent communication, which the listener may reconstitute, if so inclined. Burroughs later laments the waste paper of written narrative spent “getting The People from one place to another,” and so the Atrophied Preface adopts and adapts the Gains Method at the end of the book, while the voices of Naked Lunch either fill available airtime with verbiage or what they say is cut down to a few phrases, uttered with a minimum of effort — “You sabe shit?” Gains and the druggist will wait forever, and much of the talk in Naked Lunch comes from that special kind of waiting around, for the script in both senses — the RX to be filled, and the words to be spoken, until they are terminally done with.

Explicating

Burroughs would claim that an author is his characters, but at the same time he would maintain that the author is not responsible — he creates and speaks through them, and then they escape his control. Critical discourse often helplessly repeats Burroughs’ own concepts and metaphors, figures and tropes, but in this case there is no choice — the alien mouth which betrays and rebels against and usurps its creator appears in Benway’s famous routine, but it is the key mechanism of spoken discourse running in variations throughout the book. The characters are always treated as ventriloquist dummies and then they are real talking assholes — they are spoken through, mouthpieces of corrupt authority and criminal, immoral subterfuge, and they rant and rave with a doomed will to autonomy and power. The inflexible mouthpiece of authority and the raw mouthing orifice return the reader endlessly to Burroughs’ obsession with possession and its manifestation in the form of the mouth. He insists upon the literality of his metaphors — language is not “like” a disease, it is the disease. In the Deposition Burroughs writes of that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” and he maintains that this interpretation is exactly what the title Naked Lunch means — it means, he says, “what the words say,” that is, they accord with his own explication, as well as suggesting, on the contrary, that those words speak autonomously, “for themselves.” But there is no literal, transparent, self-evident meaning for those words — the author’s definition is only one of many possible interpretations, and this authorial insistence is a consequence of the adoption of a polemical voice which is profoundly suspect and at odds with the refutations of intentionality within the text itself. But it is this very voice of insistent explication and knowing certainty which, through oral performance, would become synonymous with the essentially autodidactic “Burroughs voice.”

Reminiscing

The routine is a form of compulsive reminiscence with the memorialist as possessed fantasist — putting on other people, putting other people on. It’s always another suspect story, another’s story that is being re-told and re-sold, the impersonation of an impersonation, the replaying of the words of some absent party, and so doubly unreliable. If conversation in Naked Lunch requires recourse to quotation, like the English colonial: “So the doctor said to me . . .,” then the routine comes on entirely like dictation from another source, it takes the form of a series of spiralling and tangentially connected narratives and stories-within-stories in which one thing immediately recalls or suggests something else which supposedly, incredibly, actually happened, even though the routine continually morphs from the past tense into the present tense, betraying the intertwined processes of recitation and reinvention — this is reminiscense as the reliving of fantasia. For the listener/reader, the underlying connections may be bafflingly unapparent and infuriatingly ungraspable, whilst simultaneously deliriously captivating. The routine may be a two-minute skit, picked up and soon abandoned, like the Throckmorton Diamond scenario, but it’s exponential in its improvisatory combinations, its Proustian derivations. As soon as that “I recollect when . . . ” goes down, we fear the running out of time, and the running on of the monomaniacal mouth. Neither Benway nor the County Clerk are willing to be distracted or interrupted in the flow of their indefatigable soliloquies, their endless extemporization — if it’s better to die in silence than to start to say something and get cut off, then there’s still the alternative of never shutting up in this life and continuing to transmit from the afterlife, like the voices of the dead in the atrophied preface. “Now if you’ll take care, young feller, till I finish what I’m saying . . .” The Old Man says, “I am subject to tell a tale” and he is utterly subjected to that tall tale telling, his being entirely caught up and consumed by the “endless saga” he launched upon so many years ago.

Travelling

Reminiscence in Naked Lunch literalizes time travel, and that trip down Memory Lane takes the form of a guided tour of the hinterland — it’s the travelogue as monologue, with many detours and linguistic dérives, and necessary stopovers to score. “Now I happen to remember,” “I recall, me and the Fag,” “Recollect when I am travelling with K.E.,” “I was travelling with Irene Kelly,” “Recollect when I am travelling with the Vigilante,” etc. And then you’re in that car, you’re the passenger along for the language ride, the verbal dérive, and the voice in the driving seat takes you there, to all the places and times lost forever — like a voiceover to a moving route line on a B-movie road map. To travel in Naked Lunch is always to flee the heat of an unnamed crime, an unbearable situation, to quit a scene gone bad, and these escape trips ineluctably merge with the quest for drugs, and take the form of tour-guide directions for scoring, dowsing for the words of procurement, a litany of drug locations from the log book of memory — “North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park,” “Dolores Street . . . Exchange Place.” It’s a verbal drift off the beaten track, seeking possession, feeling out the hot milieus and those trails gone cold, reciting the magical topography of connections, picking up on a ghost itinerary of remembered scores. The scenes we pass through are given in slide-show format, like a junky projectionist in a cold-water flat talking us through his shots of streets and tenements and vacant lots. The jumps and cuts and intersections create a fractured map, disorienting and re-routing the reader, revealing the book’s structure as a series of fatal arrivals and desperate departures. To speak is to name and remember, to recover and re-conjure the past, bring it back into existence, keep saying it and it shall be so — the past is the longed-for connection, and memory will furnish the final fix.

Repeating

The Sailor’s voice is described as “feeling” because it is searching its way through the listener’s psyche, where it “reassembles” the spoken words “in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers,” imprinting words on the brain, leaving its neural traces, the old junkie voice palpating the cortex through remote control like fingers moving over a soft typewriter keyboard, spelling it out, tapping out the junk patter letter by indelible letter on the psychic writing pad. Sailor speaks and the word becomes script, transcribed in the brain of the listener, like a screenwriter’s dialogue or a noir detective’s report taken down by a stenographer. Sailor’s own seemingly improvised and fragmented discourses are essentially scripted, the phrases worn smooth through time, and they include popular song lines and hackneyed sayings — “Every day I die a little” . . . “Right down the middle” . . . “When the roll is called up yonder” . . . “You can’t go back no more.” These clichés and pot-boilers apparently require minimal effort to utter, a lugubrious junky homespun, they’re stand-ins, fill-ins to keep the talk show on the road, Jack, just plugging the gaps, just something to say to keep the voice in play while waiting for the next thought to materialise, so to speak — but at the same time their very banality elides their implicit threat, hiding the Sailor’s deadly agenda in plain site, because every one of those well-worn phrases, crooned and whispered and hummed like a lullaby, contains its own phased warning, like a colour cancer picture on a pack of cigarettes you just bought and already smoked. “Order in The Court!” “Sauve qui peut.” “Zut alors.” “Son cosas de la vida.” “Do yourself a favor.” “Let’s get out of here.” “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.” “I’ve heard everything now.” “Isn’t life peculiar?” The most conventional expressions occur repeatedly in Naked Lunch — they’ve been around a lot those lazy locutions, lolled on the tongue or uttered peremptorily, called upon and duly passed around almost thoughtlessly through so many mouths over so many years — saves a lot of time, of course, and they even appear to have the quality of maxims, pithy and self-evident truths casually remarked, but repartee they decidedly are not. The voices are ostensibly cutting down on the “waste paper” of getting from A to Zee, but look again at this aphoristic shorthand, this proverbial telegraphese — it says nothing, and then it just gets a whole lot worse, saying the nothing that is being said.

Infecting

Sailor doesn’t like the word “agent,” he says he prefers “vector,” and he means the word in the sense of a mosquito or a tick which transmits disease from one person to another, or from an animal to a human. Everything he says or signals, whispers or touches is part of his desire to spread the infection, to disseminate the disease — to get inside a host and consummate truly biological, micro-organic, blood-sucking communion. The richness of language and the verbal pyrotechnics of Naked Lunch are at the service of repulsion and fear, opening up the word wound, the language lesion — like the punctum described by Barthes, the element which “breaks away from the scene,” the word which is a stab wound, a cut, a hole, the thing which seizes you and injures you. Words linked to invasion, possession, poison, lust, and disgust are deployed and scattered throughout — shame, filthy, massacre, fuck, cunt, cock, jism, asshole, castrate, murder, spurting, ooze, sucking, tumor, purulent discharge, sick, slime, squirt, festering . . . These words are the base material which reveals the pestilence of language as it is spread mouth to mouth — pass it on. It’s what Lawrence Lipton described in 1959 as the “oral revolution against the Geneva Code . . . ritual words for . . . the Jazz Canto art form,” even if this necessitated “a lot of filty words without literary merit.” Authorial advice on terrible and fantastic diseases is itself suspect, ersatz, and those word vaccinations and handy hints on psychic self-protection just won’t take — if there are words of healing in this book, they are hard to find. Whatever the nature of the infection, there is no cure for the condition of being verbally poisoned and Burroughs means it literal, he’s a signed-up Korzybzkian who knows that inoculation by word is doomed — to stick with his tropes, the vaccine is so powerful it boosts the full-blown language disease. In perfect, deadly circularity, the words turn upon those who utter them, and Burroughs’ writing seems locked into its own self-referential oral fixation and verbal contamination, relentlessly voicing disgust at the speech act whilst repeatedly auto-infecting.

Mutating

Breaking open his pen, the Sailor cuts open a lead tube inside the pen — it releases a “black mist,” a “black fuzz” upon which he feeds, his mouth undulating on a long tube. The stuff hidden inside the writing implement — the pen/is — ejaculates ectoplasmic ink and inhaling that orgasmic emission, “a silent pink explosion,” sucking it in through his mouth, will fix the Sailor for a month, fueling his dead junky whisper as it recycles broken reminiscences and elliptical, endless junk talk, hitting on a boy. Sailor operates and communicates on a number of levels and he has laughter “like a bat’s squeak” which vibrates through the human body — the Talking Asshole and the Sailor both have the ability to operate on a literal “gut frequency,” getting deep inside the body of the listener. Elsewhere Sailor makes flat dead statements of meaningless fact of the kind employed by Iris and Bill Gains and by the conference speaker who adopts “a flat shop-girl voice” — the voice literally falls flat, but it’s one of the Sailor’s stock devices when he’s feeling around for the right vocal pitch and in any case it exemplifies his world-weary, seen-it-all-kid, cynical operator mode. Sailor will use whatever it takes to break and enter the next host party, shilling his fugazi to some patsy, and these husks of thought, these dry distillations and laconic observations, are strategic — take it or leave it, see I got nothing to hide, or so he seems to say, or says to seem. He’s the procurer as under-executioner, a Tantalus in a dirty overcoat, and he has the liar’s bait down pat, too pat — even when he tells it like it is, he’s suspect. In Naked Lunch the mouth is always the locus of distaste and disgust, the cavity from which language stems — and the mouth itself shoots out on a long quivering tube, an undulating feeder with a life of its own, the rapine mouth on a laryngeal, intestinal stalk, as in the case of the Sailor, or Willy’s “blind seeking mouth” which “sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm.” Counterparts are the long slug which “undulates” out of the orifice of Lee’s right eye and writes on the wall in slime, and Doc Scranton’s anus which moves around the street on several feet of intestine “like a blind worm.” Mouths break their physiological limits, driven by appetite and lust, sprouting sex organs grown through undifferentiated tissue, mutating and prosthetically extending, verbal concupiscence become body-sucking consumption.

Gesturing

The Sailor’s voice may also be understood as signed — spelled out in gestures as if for the deaf, his raps and reminiscences visually telegraphed through touch and finger and hand gestures like those of the 19th century Neapolitan poor who used the gestural communication of ancient pantomime to sign words like “fuck off,” “cunt,” “cash,” “idiot,” “beg,” and “cunning.” Sailor is a member of the basso populo, the low life who would employ a signing code for criminal purposes, a language which Joe and Sailor understand perfectly — “Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug.” Burroughs would later posit the idea that writing came before speech and he may have known the Egyptologist Joseph Barois’ belief that the origins of language were dactylogical, that hand and finger shapes and gestures and their drawn equivalent signs were the proto-phonetic letters of the spoken alphabet. Burroughs’ interest in hieroglyphic writing, in the use of picture language to communicate mystical and transcendent thinking was already established before the writing of Naked Lunch, but he was familiar also with the “hieroglyphic” communications of the junky and criminal “brotherhoods” and understood that hand gestures form a silent coded language, as loaded and threatening and as dirty as spoken words, a potent vocabulary communicated by initiates in secret. Gesture and touch are silent and dream-slow in Naked Lunch, and like Freud’s analogy of dream interpretation and the decipherment of hieroglyphs, latent meaning is traced out by a finger — the tactility of the speaker who touches as he speaks is replaced by touch alone, while gestures are both ritualised and technologically functional, so that “Benway traces a pattern in the air with his hand and a door swings open.”

Touching

The Sailor’s spoken voice moves like Benway’s from “remote and blurred” to “loud and clear,” but Sailor really likes to communicate by touch, placing a finger “on the dividing line below the boy’s nose” or putting a finger “on the boy’s inner arm at the elbow,” or “feeling along the boy’s vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger” — the junky’s touch is slow, proprietorial, creepy. Sailor’s spoken words are as tactile as they are oral, physically traced, indelibly printed on the brain — “His hands moved on the table, reading the boy’s Braille.” It’s dictation by touch — a finger-tapping tattoo, morse code vibrating into the psyche. Sailor’s not alone. We see Lee “dreamily caressing a needle scar on the back of Miguel’s hand, following the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh.” Fats, too, “feels for the scar patterns of junk.” The junky “feels around” when taking a shot, and this exploratory tactility seems to drive the characters’ dreamy, invasive touching. The Shoe Store Kid palpates the mark with slow fingers, “feeling for him” like Blind Pew, while the President is fixed through touch — “we make contact, and I recharge him.” The touch is both erotic and predatory, physical intimacy is feared but may be necessary, for a while — “All personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process.” The commandante takes the letter that Carl hands him and whispers “through it, reading his lips with his left hand,” and he taps the table with one finger while he hums — orality and tactility are interwined, words are felt, and touch is read. The German doctor touches “Joselito’s ribs with long, delicate fingers” but those “long, delicate fingers” are suddenly transformed into “dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt,” real junky fingers. Doctors and junkies put their hands on the body — “Read the metastasis with blind fingers” — checking out the spreading tumour with their special knowledge and shared expertise. “Fingers” is Doc Shaffer’s affectionate moniker and the German doctor is “seedy and furtive as an old junky” — both have the psychic touch, and Sailor even picks up the feel of a score from the door of the trap where the stuff is stored, he touches “the door gently, following patterns of painted oak . . . iridescent whorls of slime.” This touch is as sinister and fatal as The Word (the divine rational principle of truth) — which in Naked Lunch has the power to cut off fingers.

Haunting

It is as if a personal signatory voice has left its traces in the interstices of this palimpsest, inscribed with a haunting particularity, an intense feeling of wonder and profound sadness which transcend the book’s rhetorical devices, a fragile humanity which the reader can easily pass over in the riot repertoire and vaudeville fireworks of the author’s otherwise splenetic, messy show. Burroughs’ own readings of the text and especially his Benway incarnation, mean that we hear the text to a degree through his own relished performances of it, but at certain moments we can pick up on something quite different coming through the noise overload and asinine chatter, a voice which is not at all performative, a voice we know from earlier Burroughs texts — wistful, nostalgic, tender and melancholy, which registers a moment of quietude or regret, a moment of serenity which seems to occur off-set, the unattended moment out of time. The moon floats in a blue sky, a warm spring wind turns cold, it’s a cold spring morning with plaintive leaves turning in the wind, everything is slow and serene as the snow begins to fall, and these scenes are haunted and voiced by “a ghost in the morning sunlight,” his memory diorama disappearing like his physical being in light. Like the “plaintive boy cries” of Joselito, Paco, Pepe and Enrique whose voices, redolent of innocence and loss, “drift in on the warm night,” this distant voice is carried through the maelstrom, the voice of someone from way back when, he was so young then, and it was so many years ago — and then it all came down.

Dutch Poet and Burroughs Associate, RIP 12 July 2009

by Ian MacFadyen

Singer and writer Eric Andersen, artist Alison Harper and myself visited Simon and Edith Vinkenoog in Amsterdam in 2008. Simon and Edith were most gracious in their welcome and hospitality and showed us some wonderful books and artworks from their collection. It was a lovely few hours. Simon talked about his extraordinary life with passion and humour and was delighted to meet Eric. We discussed the Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays book on which I was then working with Oliver Harris, and we talked about William Burroughs, whom Simon knew well and whose writing he very much admired.

Burroughs was important for the culture of the 1960s, Simon believed, because the startling color imagery and revolutionary technique of his writing exemplified a new way of experiencing consciousness. Burroughs was inspirational through his creative opposition to conventional mores and pieties, his image and his words running through the samizdat little magazines of Europe and the USA and inspiring a younger generation to experiment beyond conventions, beyond art and literature, to refute and then recreate the social conditions of living through a psychedelic experience of multiple “realities.” Simon described Burroughs as the progenitor of a demolition philosophy which promised liberation — and though it failed, apparently, it was a great experiment which continued and would never die away. Simon liked Burroughs personally and was very pleased that the Naked Lunch@50 book was being done. He felt that Naked Lunch was still astonishing and without rival, a brilliant tour de force, a courageous exploration of the psyche.

It was a precious moment in time, the warm February sunlight pouring into an apartment filled with the treasures of a life lived in art, and an art dedicated to life and the adventures of the mind: “After you. Go ahead. / Keep on. Stand firm. / Take heart. Muster courage. / Heed council. / Every hour then living, / every moment in eternity, / purify the eye / that sees the light.” (“Magic”) Simon signed my copy of his book Poolshoogte/Approximations “with love from Amsterdam.” His name will be forever synonymous with that city through which Alison and I later wandered, sheltering from a sudden downpour in a little bookshop where we found a beautiful copy of his O BOZE BOOM i.m. Norma Pater, and his Zonneklaar with its epigraph from D.H. Lawrence, so prophetic of the 1960s counterculture in which Simon played an important part — “If you make a revolution, make it for fun, / don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,/ don’t do it in deadly earnest,/ do it for fun.”

Simon was the very incarnation of the inspired poet who lives an inspiring life, profoundly concerned with libertarian values, a translator and performer of international stature, delighting in the loves and pleasures of the world, and exploring states of consciousness beyond the quotidian fabric of existence. His many books of poetry will remain — powerful, tender, unique, inviolate. We send our sincere condolences to Edith Vinkenoog, to Simon’s family, and to his many friends and admirers. Simon quoted these great lines of Ezra Pound in his book Zonneklar — “What thou lovest will remain / The rest is dross. / What thou lovest shall not be / Reft from thee.” And in his text “High Season,” published in The Book of Grass: An Anthology of Indian Hemp which he co-edited with George Andrews in the 1960s, Simon wrote of “the realm of the archetypes, eternally renewed” — and that is the realm in which his spirit now resides.

They just don’t make guys like that anymore.

Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire

by Ian MacFadyen

The exhibition of Brion Gysin’s Calligraffiti of Fire at the October Gallery in London is a major event. This is the first time the artist’s legendary final work, executed in 1985, has been shown in Britain and the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to experience the painting in the context of the artist’s small calligraphies and grid works whose fusion — the integration of order and chaos, the mechanical and the free-form — is absolutely crucial to the main painting. Curated by Kathelin Gray, a friend of Gysin”s, the show reveals the originality, power and beauty of Gysin’s art, and also includes photographs of William Burroughs taken by Gysin on the launch day of Naked Lunch in Paris, and versions of the Dreamachine which the artist developed with Ian Sommerville — reminders of the key collaborations and radical explorations of different media which would inform Gysin’s visual art. 

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, Exhibit Postcard

Calligraffiti is based upon the Japanese foldout makemono, and the hanging of the work at the October Gallery is a perfect solution to the painting’s length and “concertina” format — the beginning and end panels (Gysin intended the picture be “read” from right to left in the manner of Arabic writing) have been angled to suggest the opening up and closing of the whole, while leaving the rest of the sequence flush with the wall. The structure of the makemono had a philosophical significance for the artist — “I Am the Artist when I Am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.” — and this process of unfolding is effectively captured in the display. The painting was previously shown in Paris at the Sammy Kinge Gallery, and in Edmonton, and has also been exhibited in the context of Islamic art, but for fans and afficianados, and for those who truly care about painting, this is a very special celebration of Brion Gysin hosted by a unique gallery which has supported his work over many years.  

The Big Picture

Gysin had made a very few large works before Calligraffiti, including the great paper roll of gridded skyscrapers which he is seen painting in Antony Balch’s film Cut-Ups — Burroughs left this painting in his apartment and it subsequently disappeared. There had also been the meter-long A Trip From Here To There, “my first Big Picture with stone-ground Japanese ink and British watercolours”, painted in Morocco, as well as the “performance” painting which he made at the Domaine Poetique in the early sixties, a calligraphy executed with three wide Japanese brushes and an engraved roller on a large roll of photographer’s background paper. Lawrence Lacina recalled the denouement of this event: “Brion . . . took a bow, then cut the painting off the frame, letting it curl up on the stage floor. He then picked it up, unrolled it and tore it into pieces (loud groans from the audience) and left the stage.”  

Calligraffiti Of Fire was based upon a small ten-panel fold-out makemono, upon which Gysin had drawn with Japanese oil pastels. Both the form and the theme of this work, Summer Fires 1965, were decisive, but in attempting to make a final large work — “I had always wanted to paint a big picture” — Gysin was seeking to transcend the earlier picture and to leave a definitive statement of his vision and his powers, a permanent, lasting work in paint on canvas which would make up for the exigencies and vagaries of fate, and his own auto-destructive proclivities. This time, the work would remain, as evidence and validation. It would be the artist’s final work, a summa which would stand as testament to a visual art which had been an illustrious vocation rather than a glittering career. Gysin’s lack of a studio and his financial problems had made the painting and storing of large works impossible and Calligraffiti of Fire is inevitably a form of redress — see what might have been, if life had been less arbitrary, and fate more kind. The painting would exemplify everything which prosaic, cruel circumstance had denied — big enough to fill a gallery, large enough to encapsulate a life. 

The Late Brion Gysin

Terry Wilson recalls the atmosphere of secrecy which surrounded the execution of the work in 1985 and Gysin’s reluctance to discuss the painting apart from his admitted uncertainty about whether he had the strength and energy to realize his intentions. Gysin’s great friend and supporter James McCann made the painting possible, generously providing the artist with materials and assistants and, for the first time in his life, a proper studio in Paris. This was the place and the space where a boundless vision and the physical limits of the body would meet. It would be absolutely the last possible work, and its very scale would challenge the suffering of the body, the fear of death, and the judgement of posterity. Gysin was known to a cognoscenti as an exquisite miniaturist, but his desire to create a big painting was inevitably a way of taking on the large-scale works of the Abstract Expressionists and calligraphic tachistes such as George Mathieu. Despite his disdain and defensive hauteur, Gysin wanted to be in that arena, if not of that company, although it is the length of Calligraffiti of Fire (1640 cm), rather than its height (130 cm) which is so striking — the work cannot be visually encompassed from a single viewpoint and must be traversed and “read” through space and time as an unfolding sequence, like walking down the corridor of a moving train. Gysin was aware of the contradictions inherent in the project — after all, imagining a future mankind in space, free of earthbound objets d”art, he had noted, “I can”t see anyone taking any huge museum-size canvases along.” Well, he himself was going into space, and he would leave both his body and a museum-size canvas behind — the mortal and immortal remains of the late Brion Gysin. 

Kali Graffiti

Calligraffiti of Fire is much more than the form and theme of Summer Fires 1965 rendered on a large scale. When Burroughs looked at a Gysin painting and glimpsed, “a lot of people on fire . . . streaming with gasoline on fire across the whole picture . . . “, he was divining a paradoxical theme which runs throughout Gysin’s life and work: fire as incendiary liberation, symbolic of creative powers, and fire as immolation and obliteration — now one, now the other, and finally the same: the spirit of life and its nemesis, gathered and burned out in the same flame. Crucially, Lacina describes the painting and destruction of the image at the Domaine Poetique as a homage to the Goddess Kali, observing: “There’s no creation without destruction; there’s no destruction without creation — Kali.” In Tantra it is imperative to confront one’s fear of death and the curse of chaos and discorporation — and by his creative and auto-destructive act, Gysin was attempting to placate the Great Devourer by taking upon himself the obliteration of his own work, eviscerating his own striving for transcendence and his pride in his own accomplishments. Although Lacina had rescued the dismembered picture and with Gysin’s help restored it, it would nevertheless remain an essentially eviscerated work — the sutured body parts of a sacrificial rite, memento mori of an act of artistic suicide.

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, Painting, 1985

Bring Me My Arrows of Desire

Kali was very definitely not the Divine Mother as far as Gysin was concerned, but a fearful and ferocious consumer of time. In his auto-destructive act, Gysin casts himself as Shiva who throws himself at Kali’s feet in order to pacify her and halt destruction by simulating self-sacrifice — Kaligraffiti. Lord Shiva is often depicted as an archer destroying the Tripura fortresses of the Asuras. Gysin knew Eugen Herrigel’s 1948 Zen In the Art of Archery and in his work he incarnated the zen philosophy of bypassing conscious control in the execution of the artistic act. But there is another specific and profound connection between Calligraffiti and archery. In the 1930s Gysin and Denham Fouts had fired burning arrows from a Tibetan bow from a hotel window down the Champs Elysées — a performance which terrified the extremely cautious Paul Bowles. This symbolic, mystical act — which was also a thoughtless piece of high jinx and youthful stoned anarchism — would resonate for Gysin in unsuspected ways: the trail of fire and smoke left in the air by the blazing arrow was in itself a perfectly self-destructive calligraphic gesture, as inspired as it was doomed, as memorable as it was transitory. “Art is the tail of a comet”, Gysin would later claim, suggesting a creative act which burns itself out in space, and those flaming arrows of desire would become the trajectories of brushes and paint through space, leaving glowing traces of the actions which had fired them, concentration and effort unleashed at hazard. This analogy between calligraphy and fire, and between the flame of inspiration and the dangerous creative act, is present in the tradition of Taoist fire paintings, in which the character for a blaze, made with four strokes of the brush, may be exploded in the act of painting, creating an “Enbu” (dance of flames), embodying a fire running out of control, expressing the idea of fire through the destruction of the signifying radical or name, and projecting the feeling and experience beyond the conceptual understanding or referential signification . . . The word or emblem for “fire” is consumed by the very act of its own writing, which paradoxically conveys its meaning with extraordinary intensity, with power and heat. Likewise, Gysin’s own personal ideogram, his calligraphic signature, is torn apart in Calligraffiti of Fire — the “radical” or character of his own “personal fire” is fired, time and again, across the ten canvases, distorted, sundered, obliterated, leaving trail flames blown down the boulevard of time. 

The Great God Pan Is Dead

Gysin’s sign takes the form of a phallic bow, as if echoing the instrument with has impelled it — the arc of the brush through space before it shoots — fires — ejaculates its prima materia. Like Francis Bacon, Gysin even includes in the Calligraffiti a long thin flick and trail of white paint terminating in a strategically accidental drip, a petrified spermatozoa, the tail of a falling comet, and an onanistic offering to the fertility of vision. James Hillman has described Pan, the great Goat God, as the archetype of masturbation, an act which has creative significance “regressively far from consciousness”, and Gysin’s homage to Kali was also understood by Lawrence Lacina as significantly bound up with the music and rites of Pan in JouJouka: “The brush with yellow paint made sunny dancing glyphs; the orange brush splashed hairy swaths like Bou Jeloud in all his fury, brandishing his branch wand.” It is this ancient Moroccan dance of Pan which Calligraffiti commemorates, a ritual which Gysin connected to the Roman Lupercalia, when boys in goatskins ran down the Palatine Hill, lit by flaming torches. Gysin was psychologically steeped in the myths and magic of Pan, and as well as a procession of torches, the Roman phantasmagoria, Calligraffiti may be read as conjuring Pan’s true time of day, the blaze of noon, when the fields of grain shimmer and ripple in the heat and the air becomes a hot, flickering mirage, and yet time itself seems to stand still. This is the uncanny moment out-of-time which, as Hillman says, exemplifies nature at its most spontaneous and unaccountable, “headlong, heedless, brutal and direct, whether in terror or desire . . . all life at the moment of propagation or all death in the panic of the herd . . . Spontaneity remains an experience . . . outside ordering systems of explanation.” Gysin and Burroughs both mourned the passing of Pan and “The Great God Pan is Dead!” was for them the exemplary elegiac of the extinction of nature and the eradication of the ecstatic feeling that everything in the world is alive, a single self-devouring, but self-recreating nervous system. In his last visual apotheosis Gysin links the spontaneity of calligraphy with the risk and riot of Pan on the run. Hillman: “The spontaneous panic out of noon’s stillness reappears in the kobold, or little demon . . . said to cause panic and nightmare. This being too has a sexual connotation: it is phallic, dwarf-like, fertile, both lucky and fearful.” In Calligraffiti it is Gysin’s calligraphic personal sign which becomes the kobold, jumping and leaping through the picture space, the demonic essence of the psyche stretched and broken and transmogrified. These “creatures of the secret name” emerge in the bright light of day, monstrances derived from those secretive, miniature sprites who had danced through his drawings, his “jungle gyms”, and the little creatures he once tried to point out to Terry Wilson as actually existing in the world, but who are so terribly hard to see. Gysin saw them, they were as “real” to “him” as “you” and “I”. But like the little people of the desert encountered through hallucinogens, in Calligraffiti they are also fleeing the psyche, escaping the human domain, “fading out with demoniacal grimaces, shaking their fists. A great blast of sand sweeps down from the dune and envelops us all.” In this sense, the exuberant Pan dance of Calligraffiti is also, necessarily, a funeral march. it commemorates as it celebrates a vanishing spiritual dimension. Gysin wrote, “Music, little Pan, not dead . . . It proven Pan not dead.” But he also admitted, “There will be harrowing in my magic picture.” 

Incendiary

In his writing Gysin often evoked the heat and blaze of the desert and the Moroccan mountains in summer, the mythic Mediterranean and the islands of Greece, light flashing through the window of a bus, a field of burning grain seen from a darkened doorway, and transcendent visual hallucinations triggered in the nervous system by apocalyptic heat and light — “a swarming sting of the sun . . . burning bright to a fiery rose on the dunes running like molten orange gold. The day tortured eye.” And: “the sun wrenched itself from the sky and fell sickeningly over the edge of the world . . . a rattle of fire across the Sahara.” Hypnagogic heat visions, optical flares, summer landscapes on fire and running past the eyes like a burning film, a match head igniting, exploding white and blinding the eyes — these may all be glimpsed and felt in Calligraffiti of Fire with its hot, searing palette. An irregular grid of small yellow and orange squares is broken by a central void through which the calligraphy runs, a series of flames jumping from canvas to canvas, burning through the emptiness of space left by the fragmented grid patterns. The grid was used by Gysin to suggest the appearance of buildings and structures, the creation of a world of solidity and matter, while the illusory nature of this dimensionality is continually emphasised in his work — it is a game of Maya, of illusion, revealing mistaken perception and the deception of appearances, an endless process of undoing what has been created. In Calligraffiti parts of the calligraphic strokes show roller patterns of superimposed yellow grid lines, emphasizing the surface and facture of the painting, declaring its illusory construction, as if the desire to create and build appearances will continue after the destruction by fire. . . Or perhaps this is terminal, and these are the glowing ghosts, the last vestiges of Gysin’s “jungle gyms” caught in the furnace at the final moment before they are extinguished. Calligraffiti is indebted to the 1950s and early 1960s Gold Paintings and Fire Paintings of Yves Klein, an artist Gysin admired greatly at a time when many in the art world considered Klein a charlatan and a buffoon. The two artists had a shared fascination with different esoteric traditions, from zen to alchemy and Taoism, and they both combined regular grid structures with the directed yet random act of the gestural mark. Calligraffiti suggests a summation of Gysin’s own merging of the grid and the calligraphic, and a hybrid homage to Klein’s brilliant grids of gold leaf and to his calligraphic strokes literally burned into boards with an acetylene torch — the transmutation of art into gold, and the human body recorded as a burn mark.  

Sabbah

Calligraffiti embodies heat in a different sense — calligraphy as subversive act, the gesture as embodiment of revolutionary fire and fervour, the art of incendiarism, of inflammatory writing. Burroughs identified Gysin’s calligraphy with the “silent writing” of Hassan i Sabbah — that is, writing which may be ‘read’ but cannot be decoded or spoken, a vehicle for the transmission of an esoteric knowledge for initiates and adepts. The connection with Sabbah is crucial because Gysin’s calligraphy, existing between painting and writing, is interpreted by Burroughs as a secret weapon, an incendiary instrument which carries a radical, heretical message, and this would actually become part of the work’s intent. Like the mysterious transmissions sent out from Alamout to the Assassins, a renegade “telegraph” system inspiring acts of subversion and revolt, Gysin’s “silent writing” would be understood as the magical communication of political subversion, inspiring the overthrow of the orthodox and the status quo. It may be read as a form of invective, like the language which blazes forth from Gysin’s Uher and the written page, a splenetic outpouring, lacerating, vituperative, an unleashing of rhetoric — language impelled by the desire to attack, a version of the scurrilous Roman psogoi. Gysin and Burroughs’ use of the Sabbah model was both metaphoric and literal but what is certain is that the notion of polemical power became an inextricable component of Gysin’s visual art, and in Calligraffiti the Old Master sends out his final heresy, his terminal call-to-arms: “Towers Open Fire!” The picture, full of attack and abandon in its fiery gestures, its forms coiling and unleashed, incarnates the spirit of the Hash Heads of Alamout as they sally forth on a suicidal murder mission. 

Ian MacFadyen and Dreamachine, 2008 (Photograph by Jonathan Greet)

Flicker

Nik Sheehan’s excellent documentary film FLicKeR has been shown as part of the October Gallery’s Gysin exhibition and visitors also have the opportunity to view two new versions of the Dreamachine. It’s clear that Gysin’s flaming calligraphy is symbiotically connected to the unfolding patterns created by flicker, a phenomenon which may be experienced as flames shooting out of the rotating cylinder, while the form of Calligraffiti, with its calligraphy running on continuously from panel to panel, is itself suggestive of the continuum of the Dreamachine. In Sheehan’s film Kenneth Anger speculates that hallucinatiory vision and the creation of art both originated in the contemplation of fire and in the receptive dreaming state produced by the inexhaustible flicker of flames in which no flame repeats itself — the plenitude of fire, as described by Gaston Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Certainly, to view Calligraffiti after using a dreamachine is to gain insight into the genetic links between Gysin’s art forms and in particular the absolute primacy of rhythm throughout his work. In calligraphy, prose, poetry, song and the Dreamachine, it is the experience of variety and permutation through a continual run-on and runaway measure which is so striking, an endless turning and unfolding, repetition and superimposition, the creation of a self-engendering, self-perpetuating experience of flux which is implicit in the form of the work and mirrored in the firing neural patterns of the brain. The cut-up too is part of this matrix in which art works appear to become autonomous and escape fixity — and the razor’s cuts, too, create a rhythm, a mechanical staccato like a train running over tracks or a film reel rattling around and around on a spool. Gysin’s greatest achievement was not in the disembodied creation of machine art, but in the setting free of the work, the pleasure and fascination inherent in seeing and feeling patterns and words and images take on lives of their own. His procedures both make the observer and reader conscious of the acts of looking and reading, and allow them to become immersed and lost in the experience, caught up and mesmerized. Such is the process — the sundering of boundaries and categories, the privileging of the play and metamorphosis of form, and the intuition of limitlessness wonder beyond grasp and meaning. 

Seed Pod

“. . . the sprout is the spring of green life . . . From the centre of ME within the grain, I shoot up one bursting letter written in that air which is nothing till I write it.” Gysin’s calligraphy derives from the cursive grass script, and he pursued this botanical and aesthetic analogy as he searched for his own, unique, talismanic, calligraphic signature, finding it in the bean sprout, the soya “whose explosive power can overturn monuments.” He understood the calligraphic gestures which emerged from this seed pod, an emblematic device transforming his written name into an image of contained explosive power, as the shooting and burgeoning tendrils of an uncontainable life force linked to the hallucinatory properties of plants. Describing the datura plant, he wrote: “. . . that flower had just bloomed and was still full of its rocketing strength. When I plucked it, it emitted a cry! . . . I appreciate plants quite differently since then. Immediately all around me I saw the entire garden alive. Everything, everything, all the flowers and plants and even each blade of grass was turning toward the setting sun by small sudden clicks. Everything was alive like me on this earth, everything was breathing.” His discovery and adoption of the seed pod motif which bursts and rockets with flowering arabesques of life, crystallized the equation between plant life and sound: the smoking of kif would evoke the music of JouJouka, cannabis synaesthetically conjuring the rhyhms of the riata, gimbri and lyre, while the the smoking of hashish suggested visions of the lush Paradise Garden of Hassan i Sabbah. The calligraphic script, the rites of Pan, hallucination, riot and music are all connected through the myth of Pan who made a pipe from a split weed in order to woo Syrinx. The calligraphic sign, the music, the dope — all derive from the plant world and so lead Gysin to make correspondences between myth and the natural world, art and botany, sound and visual hallucination, and to systematically explore their synaesthetic relations. The musical analogy is fraught with contradiction — as ever with Gysin: he believed music was a war machine and the music of joujouka was at some level for him not only a healing music, an invitation to trance, but a call to arms, the inspiration of usurpation, the very rhythm of revolt.  

Guillotine

The calligraphic gesture is a cut through space and time, and Gysin would recall witnessing the last public execution by guillotine in Paris, the definitive act of slicing through life. The ‘Way of the Brush’ was also for Gysin a form of shamanic dismemberment — the magical passes of the brush cut through space, leaving slashes and wounds and deep cuts through which the ink or paint bleeds into the surface of the reliquary paper or canvas, and the very gestures made by arm and wrist and fingers are ‘immortalized’ by these fatal, fateful lesions. Tony Balch’s film Cut-Ups shows Gysin literally attacking the picture surface as well as coaxing and caressing it — it is an erotic physical act, as violent as it is tender, as percussive as it is a series of brief or lingering strokes. The brush hits and strikes and is then dragged and twisted or lifted in a long carress, tapering away or cast off before resuming a different course, a variation, a permutation — always unique, but part of an eternal sequence of possible strokes and flicks, dashes and flourishes. Rhythm is all — and Gysin’s calligraphy inviting a ‘reading’ beyond literal decipherment, is linked to his incantatory but broken, improvisatory yet metred song raps and word plays. It is the visceral rush of inspiration, the physical body in action, and the play of variation which Gysin relished in all its forms — visual, lexical, aural, and their libidinal congress and synaesthetic communion. 

Infamy Infamy They’ve All Got It Infamy!

All those great stories about bad luck and hexes, personal disasters and losses — Gysin broadcast these as a litany of lamentation. Fleeced of his restaurant 1001 Nights, out with just the shirt on his back — that was his story. Kicked out of the Surrealist movement, his article on Alamout rejected by Rolling Stone Magazine, the failure of the Dreamachine to sell a million . . . Burroughs’ “Project For Disastrous Success” perfectly captures Gysin’s martyrdom and woe, athough this was done almost always with great style and gusto, an enjoyable immolation, yes, and of course there was always some truth to it, a real case to be answered. Perhaps the truly splenetic is always at some level self-lacerating, and Gysin was a master of both self-abnegation and the terminal put-down. Rubbing out the word was a way of rubbing out the self, erasing his own name and sign, and necessarily a masochistic act of self-subversion at some level, a confusion about his own identity and very being. If, as Terry Wilson has said, “Contradiction was their Method,” then in Gysin’s case this included the undermining of his own reputation. Burroughs told me, “There was a step which Brion would not take . . . ” Perhaps the default mechanism was a kind of perverse self-preservation, never to relinquish the special domain of outsiderhood, invention and playfulness. Reputation and status weigh heavy on the shoulders of born mischief-makers and though Gysin’s reputation is assured, it’s always, as ever, only just so far, and then never, ever enough. He will remain a painter’s painter, as we used to say, way back when, before the art was on the money, and the serious money was on the less-than-serious art. He is fated, as he certainly knew, to appeal to a certain esoteric constituency, forever branded the man who did too many things, and did them all too well. His attacks on the vulgar market place were too true not to rebound upon him with a vengeance, and if his refusal to be co-opted went hand-in-hand with the desire for fame and fortune, in the end he was reconciled to having done what he could — and a lot more besides! In this sense, Calligraffiti is the double consummation of Gysin’s name — a consummate act, and one consumed by fire, the name rubbed out, and the name immortalized. The name will be remembered because he did indeed erase it — the double act of a true master of paradox. 

Francesco Rimondi, Terry Wilson and Ian MacFadyen with Dreamachine, 2008 (Photograph by Jonathan Greet)

Celebration of an Auto Da Fe

With a big brush Gysin stabbed the canvas, pulled and twisted his magic wand in space, catching desire by the tail, shooting forth the phallic sign of sexuality for its own sake, an erotic Pandemic beyond procreation, the pleasure principle above the biological imperative. But this painting is as elegiac as it is festive, a paradoxical work of profound mourning which is carnivalesque in its exuberance and brightness. These inspired, dancing, bold calligraphic strokes are literally the final traces, the Last Words and Testament, the Dance of Fire performed as a death rite, a real Bonfire of the Vanities, taking us from primordial chaos to a great and terminal immolation . . . Everything in the artist’s creative life is subliminally referenced in this painting which travels horizontally through the Bardo and consigns the body and the body of work alike to the fire. “A death trip?”, Gysin liked to ask, “what other kind of trip are we on?” Calligraffiti of Fire was the last dream of a dying mythomaniac, the seduction of Pan and the destruction of Kali become one, and cancer at the door with a singing telegram. This should be heard as a Blues rendition of Really Bad News — Gysin’s favourite music was the duende of black culture, jubilant and broken-hearted, hot and sexy, soulful and full of suffering and protest, playful, direct, moving and extraordinarily sophisticated. He incarnated the same qualities of celebration and despair and artfulness in his own songs and art and writing, he recognized himself in that culture of otherness which he also heard in the swirls and blasts of the Moroccan riata. It really was Everything or Nothing for Gysin — to become other, and to disown one’s self, whoever or whatever that might be, to confound race and sex and genes and nationality, that was the impossible death-in-life process which he pursued through work which reverses the accepted idea of art as self-realization — his aim was the erasure of personal identity, to disappear entirely into the creation, the illusion, especially when playing and punning on his own given Christian name and the name of the Father. However often he proselytized the heretical in all its variations, or employed it as creed or manifesto, it is as if Gysin could not access the true meaning or purpose of his perverse desire to unmake and undo himself — as if the process of deconstruction was a pure form of transcendence and free from any psychopathological motivation, a detached experiment devoid of causal contamination. It is significant that Gysin diagnosed Burroughs as suffering from possession by an Ugly Spirit, the malign entity of a traumatized past, but was unwilling or unable to discover any such comparable daemon in his own psyche. But his desire to become another was more than a homage to Rimbaud and his own declared program of spiritual demolition is suggestive of nothing less than a fated, pre-emptive strategy for outwitting death, an abnegation which rebounded in his long drawn-out, pain-filled demise. As ever, the final acceptance of mortality always leaves a space for denial, a remaining, absolute, biological incomprehension. If not to survive, then to leave a trace of having existed. And at some level, that is what the grand gesture of Calligraffiti is all about. By his mark shall you know him, and thereby remember him. Graffiti on a wall: Brion Gysin Was Here. 

Inferno

At the same time, naturally: total annihilation of the individual, a terminal disappearing act. “I mean to get out of here and come back again never!” Radical dispersal: gestures as magical passes caught at the critical moment between implosion and explosion. Oblivion, as big as he could paint it, as he stared right into it. A testament of despair, written in letters of fire. “A story like this can have no happy ending. Or can it?” Gysin loved Dante’s Inferno and if he found his own transcendent Sahara transformed by Dante into a Hell, then he recognized that it had always been that way — ring doves and snakes, beauty and terror, life and art created and consumed in the same inner spiritual flame. Calligraffiti of Fire is the celebration of an Auto Da Fe, a long last sweeping look at the blazing summer panorama, fields rippling with light and life, that moment of awareness and arousal and acceptance when everything is just waiting to begin, the spinning, ecstatic, disoriented view from a darkened but sun-dazzled doorway of the plenitude and possibility and mystery of life opening out like a makemono, blinding white page upon page — and then the sun goes out and eyes close forever. It was all a kif dream, after all, wasn’t it? Yes, a beautiful illusion, a Paradise Garden now reduced to the stone ruins of a renegade fortress. Archers, prepare your arrows of fire! The Golden Elixir is acrylic paint on a picture which could be worth a truly considerable sum one of these days, though then again, don’t bank on it — as Brion Gysin knew only too well, and as we’re finding out right now, money is the greatest illusion of all, the one we are helplessly invested in. Gysin painted and wrote illusion, because that was both the key and lock of his philosophy : All is Maya, and long may Maya reign, and here’s Brion Gysin’s version of the whirl . . . He had written and painted as he had lived — flamboyant and careful, classical and revolutionary, narcissistic and self-loathing. Calligraffiti is the contradictory bittersweet farewell of a misanthropist who loved life, an artist who recognized beauty and suffered the anguish of the abyss, doomed to live and love, and blessed to die. It is a paean and a conflagration, a hymn to the fire of inspiration sung with ashes on the lips:

And slowly, slowly dropping over all
The sand, there drifted down huge flakes of fire . . . 
Even so rained down the everlasting heat,
And, as steel kindles tinder, kindled the sands,
Redoubling pain . . .

Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire
11 December 2008 — 7 February 2009

October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street
London WC1N 3AL

RealityStudio sent the text of Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview to a few friends and scholars for input. While everyone made helpful comments, Ian MacFadyen — currently working on the introduction to the volume of essays that will comemmorate the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch — replied with a spirited, insightful letter. RealityStudio thought that it formed a perfect complement to the overview, particularly since it adds further evidence documenting the Miller-Burroughs relationship and interprets RealityStudio’s evidence in a different way. Mr. MacFadyen kindly agreed to allow RealityStudio to post his letter.

Your essay on Miller and Burroughs is very good, and a model of clarity and precision. A comparison of the two writers and an examination of the possible influence of Miller on Burroughs is long overdue. This is an area which has interested me for a long time and I hope the following comments and suggestions are useful.

Although, as you show, Burroughs always denied any influence, and even though there is the question of the (non) availability of Miller’s work in the U.S., I have always believed that Burroughs did indeed know Tropic of Cancer — certainly in Tangier if not before. We know that Miller sent a first edition copy of Tropic of Cancer personally to William Carlos Williams (who was among many other writers in Britain, France and the States to get a copy inscribed by the author — an attempt to promote the book and raise its pedigree. Williams was the translator of Philippe Soupault and had met Miller in Paris). That’s only one of a number of possible, tantalising connections (Williams-Ginsberg-Burroughs) — but what are the chances that Burroughs did not read it? Those are truly impossible odds.

Although we cannot know where and when (or how closely) Burroughs read Tropic of Cancer (and/or other writing by Miller), there is, as you put it so beautifully, a felt connection between Miller’s text and Naked Lunch: “If you place Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch side by side, the books do seem to exhibit a secret rapport, like the telepathy of twins…” This rapport, as you say, is structural and thematic: “‘pornographic’, non-linear, autobiographical and bristling with black humour.” But I also think it is a linguistic and, crucially, a methodological rapport. Parts of Tropic of Cancer were cut and filleted from previous manuscripts and inserted and woven “into the fabric of his book” (George Wickes, Henry Miller: Down and Out in Paris, 1969) just as Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg in 1957: “But I never know whether something will fit or not until it fits into the narrative as an organic part of the structure.” The following, for example, is one of a number of passages cannibalised from Miller’s ‘Bistre and Pigeon Dung’ for the opening of Tropic of Cancer:

The rails fall away into the canal, the long caterpillar with sides lacquered in Chinese red dips like a roller-coaster. It is not Paris, it is not Coney Island — it is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. Railroad yards spread out below me, the tracks looking black, webby, not ordered by engineers but cataclysmic in design, like those giant fissures in the Polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.

This brings to mind Burroughs to Ginsberg from the same letter quoted above (October 28, 1957):

In a sense the action occurs in a superimposed place which is South America, U.S.A., Tanger and Scandinavia, and the characters wander back and forth from one place to another. That is a Turkish Bath in Sweden may open into a South American jungle…

“A crepuscular melange of all cities” and the Interzone’s “superimposed place” are related in generic and visionary terms — (if not geographically exploding in the same directions) — and were assembled by both writers from earlier manuscript materials and, importantly, from letters. (See Oliver’s Secret of Fascination and his edition of the Letters for Burroughs’ own use of same ). George Wickes: “Although somewhat self-conscious as literary compositions, the Paris letters marked an important stage in Miller’s writing. They were good exercises, and they provided him with plenty of material that he was soon to use in his own way… He hoped his impressions might amount to ‘something popular, saleable, palatable.’ Unwittingly, he was already at work on Tropic of Cancer. The letters contain the earliest writing that was to go into that book.” The evident correspondences (forgive the pun — no, please, approve it) here between Burroughs’ desire to write “saleable product” and Miller’s pitch, between their shared methods of “unwittingly” and consciously utilising the writing of letters in processes which would be instrumental in generating later ‘literary’ material — well, it is quite extraordinary, and, I believe, unparalleled. In the two years before it was published, Miller revised the Tropic of Cancer ‘manuscript’ many times (it was always, already, multiform and absolutely unstable as an entity), cutting about two-thirds of the material, a process of cutting and addition which he described as “Weeding out the useless shit. Putting in new shit.” But the new shit was very often the old shit re-digested and redirected. Merde! We are imagining real material fingers-on stuff. Messy. Very. The manuscript of Cancer, like Naked Lunch, was an octopus in osmosis throughout this period, and the physical elements and their manipulation or random merging were instrumental in the final creation and structure of the book ‘itself’ — the books themselves: pages and draft sections, letters and notations, phrases and variations burned and stained and shuffled and shuttled back and forth, rewritten, abandoned, spilled, trodden on, forgotten, rediscovered, congealed, chopped up, continually shifted and sifted and thrown away and recovered and overwritten and manipulated and allowed to blow out from the ceiling fan to arrive like manna in the typewriter’s roll — Hey, Presto! — and it was all good. (But some of it had to go). Both books were materially created — constructed — through a “crepuscular melange”. It is something which I will be drawing attention to in the Introduction to NakedLunch@50. Its importance cannot be stressed enough in regard to the comparable effects (textual and structural) which resulted.

Miller’s letters include both those to Emil Schnellock and others which are really articles-in-disguise — again, the differences between these and the letters from Burroughs to Ginsberg are as important as their resemblance in terms of the purpose to which they were put. Breathtakingly, Miller even wrote of his belief in the mainstream commercial and popular success of Tropic of Cancer in Hollywood and on Broadway, just as Burroughs would work with Brion Gysin and Tony Balch (‘Friendly Films Limited’) for several years on a film version of Naked Lunch and would later discuss the possibility of a Broadway production with Frank Zappa. In both cases one is left both bemused and moved by the two writers’ apparent blindness to the feasibility — not to mention the crazed delusion — of such dreams being realised at the time. Again, this is something which will be considered in an essay in the NakedLunch@50 book as a result of access to the archives of Terry Wilson. This material — including a number of important screenplays, drafts and outlines, as well as legal documents and personal and business correspondence — reveals Burroughs’ desire and commitment to bring Naked Lunch to the screen. So they can SEE it, on the end of that fork…? But there were, indisputably, other reasons… Read all about this in 2009. A doomed film is nothing new, but the doomed project of Naked Lunch — that is quite something else. Remember where you heard it last.

Wickes, in his delightfully written little book, refers to Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit as “another episodic autobiographical novel that dwells on all that is vicious, treacherous, sadistic, obscene, diseased, and repulsive in human nature.” In fact, Miller didn’t read Céline’s book until he’d finished the first version/draft of Tropic of Cancer, but he subsequently revised the m.s. (several times) which must have been influenced by his determined reading of Voyage (slow work, alone in a hotel room with a dictionary and a little opium and vin ordinaire to ward off the dawn chill). Wickes also refers to Céline’s “gallows humour” — which Burroughs provides so literally in Naked Lunch, but as well as Céline, Miller and Burroughs are linked through the carnivalesque tradition and through the work of Spengler. Frances Wilson writes in her excellent Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (1999):

Henry Miller’s is a grotesque body, open at both ends, and his aesthetic is carnivaleque, as the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtian would describe it . . . in Henry Miller we find a writing that ‘celebrates the anarchic, body-based and grotesque elements of popular culture, and seeks to mobilise them against the humourless seriousness of official culture.’ (Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought, 1994).

Wilson quotes Miller from Black Spring, where he wrote that the sound of the name Swift “was like a clear, hard pissing against the tin-plate lid of the world.” Miller is in fact Rabelaisian rather than Swiftian, and his humour and earthiness and vagabondage, his “unquenchable appetite for the fundamental realities” (Robert Nye) are essentially Whitmanesque as well as deriving from Villon’s celebrations of lowlife and Pierre Mac Orlan’s Villes. Literary influence is, of course, a board game without possibility of a winner, but any reader worth his or her salt can still really feel it — without Miller, who is Charles Bukowski? And that is how Miller’s ethos and style became beat and cool again. It’s an intriguing question: “Why was Bukowski ‘acceptable’ in the ’70s when Miller was derided, in fact, beyond the pale? Write on both sides of the paper. You have 45 minutes”. But, really, why? Actually, Bukowski is more ‘sexist’ (yes, it’s possible) and yet… These are the issues no one will engage with because you are going to get it in the horse’s neck, absolutely.

But a comparison between Miller and Burroughs is very productive in terms of their shared relish for the ‘grotesque body’, the carnivalesque and the burlesque and the crudely satiric, and also because they utilise these disgraceful modes in quite different ways. Interestingly, both Miller (as you note) and a number of critics have denied that his work was in any way ‘perverse’, whereas Burroughs, I would maintain, is both wilfully and strategically so, in all senses. Bataille comes to mind, though Burroughs was never philosophical and intellectual in that way, Bataille’s speculations on amputated fingers and the ‘Solar Anus’ notwithstanding. Burroughs is excoriating, emotionally damaged, psychologically fractured, psychopathological from the fucking bone, and he is “open at both ends” in ways which more than ‘radically challenge’ Miller’s deceptive but omnipresent humanism — his writing despises and derides it and completely fucks it over. Despite Miller’s confession to Michael Fraenkel that Tropic of Cancer was written out of “hatred and vengeance”, and despite his passion for Dostoevskian soul-searching, Miller’s delighted irreverence and sheer indefatigability always contradict his attempts at a doomed philosophy. But Burroughs is the very last word from the “windy, bodiless rock”. Miller’s shroud is a covering cloth: beneath it, it’s an orgy, boys. But the boys aren’t there. The ‘Ovarian Trolley’ is on the night-shift – despite protests from one particular male participant, actively engaged…

Another comparison between the two writers would be in regard to charges of misogyny (especially in relation to Sexus in Miller’s case), which is an area worth exploring from their very different heterosexual and queer perspectives. (Interestingly, when I dealt in books — a lovely phrase — in the 1970s, I visited a Gay Women’s bookshop where I was provided with a free list of authors whose works they would not stock under any circumstances — Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and William Burroughs topped the list. I guess there is nothing so different that it isn’t the same when looked at from the right angle.). Miller’s commercial pornography, which includes male homosexuality, raises some very interesting questions. (By the way, Brion Gysin always maintained that Miller was at the very least bisexual and that this was… understood at the time). Burroughs blurbed the 1984 Opus Pistorum, the $1 per page written-to-order 1941 pornographic novel by Miller: “Miller at his buoyant bawdy rollicking best — a spicy whiff from the 1920s.” This quote is useful actually because it does indeed show Burroughs actually appreciating Miller’s writing and very carefully picking exactly the key words to show what he thought was “best” about Miller’s writing. The use of “buoyant” is particularly telling. The quote — admittedly a blurb — goes some way towards mitigating Burroughs’ previous reluctance on the subject. But note that Opus Pistorum is a work of apparently hack commercial pornography, albeit pornography written for an educated elite of Hollywood Directors such as Wilder, Mankiewicz, and Julian Johnson — connoisseurs of limited edition erotica, “by hand”. But in the 1984 publication there is absolutely no differentiation readily apparent between this work and Miller’s ‘real’, ‘literary’ writing — we are told he wrote it for a dollar a page at the beginning of this ‘official’ ‘recognised’ version, but ‘pornography’ is not mentioned until one reaches Luboviski’s little Epilogue on page 287. And neither does Burroughs’ blurb recognise or suggest a distinction. There is a case to be made for looking at this work in detail and comparing it with Miller’s contemporary ‘literature’ — we get the sex and the humour and the vicious pen portraits, but melancholy and Spengler are totally out of the mix. How do we place this ‘production’ in Miller’s oeuvre? There is certainly more to it than meets the eye of the beholder, or the holder of the organ itself.

Above all, few would charge Miller with misanthropy — despite his Spenglerian world-view and his suffering, despite the cruelty of his ‘portraits’, his literal hunger and his rhetorical lambasting, he is inescapably a writer of appetite and relish who loves life and people — despite everything. (This can be shown, for example, by looking in detail at passages from the Tropics in which there is an extraordinary contradiction between the linguistic appetite (adjectival and adverbial) and the apparent squalor and the professed nihilism at work.) “Always Happy and Bright.” Well, not always, but more than most. Despite the melancholia in Cancer, there is little resembling Burroughs’ haunted isolation, driven repugnance, and visceral terrors. Something crucial happens in the few years between the publication of Cancer and Lunch, between these writers’ Paris lives, between a kind of Dostoevskian pre-existentialism and an unremitting psychotic fury… Despite the similarity of their methods, and their shared loathing of bureaucratic collectivism, an enormous chasm opens up — and leaves Miller as an almost apologist for the medieval. The unimaginable BEGINS HERE. “A word to the Wise Guy…”

“– long before he met [Michael] Fraenkel, Miller was steeped in the thinking of Oswald Spengler, whose apocalyptic view he had taken as his own. Miller had in fact reread the first volume of The Decline of the West since coming to Paris and in doing so had concluded that Spengler was the greatest of contemporary writers…” (Wickes). Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were readers and admirers of Spengler over many years and identified themselves as the fellaheen of disintegrating Western civilisation, waiting for the Apocalypse. As Kerouac wrote in 1950 in The Town And The City: “All the neurosis and the restrictive reality and the scatological repressions and the suppressed aggressiveness has finally gained the upper hand on humanity — everyone is becoming a geek!” I believe that it was their shared readings and discussions of, and their enthusiasm for The Decline of the West which connects Cancer and Lunch — both books are clearly indebted to Spengler and I hope to make this clear in the Introduction to NakedLunch@50. The Miller-Fraenkel ‘Hamlet’ correspondence is extraordinary, by the way. Do you know it? The breadth of reference and philosophic, psychological and social analysis certainly validate Miller’s serious intellectual concerns, even though these ideas are regularly eclipsed in Cancer and his other literary works by his exuberant style and sensuality. (The 1962 third printing of the Correspondence Called Hamlet by Edition du Laurier/Carrefour is an unusual production, bound with red ribbons which pass through holes drilled in the thick, uncut pages. I looked for this edition for a long time — pre-Internet — and finally found it in a junkshop in South London which disappeared the following week. It was an exemplary and fortuitous conjunction absolutely in accord with my extension of Iain Sinclair’s cosmic theory of book dealing, which runs as follows: a). you spend twenty years looking for ‘it’; b). you find ‘it’ and ‘it’ costs 10 pence; c) the ‘bookshop’ is bulldozed into a crater of ash as you depart the premises; d). you now REFUSE TO SELL IT, under any circumstances, including starvation, death, and eternal torture. Congratulations, you just got a real Beat Bargain.

Again, I really like your essay and hope the above is of interest. By the way, it may still be the case that Burroughs did not wish the comparison with Miller and especially Tropic of Cancer to be made and so he disclaimed (too silently). The writer Terry Wilson (who knew Burroughs well) believes that Burroughs was very influenced by Charles Hoy Fort, but when the subject came up, Burroughs would always show annoyance or indifference. Burroughs didn’t want the link to be made, Terry felt, because he feared being perceived as some eccentric as portrayed by the academic intelligentsia, a weirdo with boxes of data and piles of scrapbooks in a city attic… As well as that might be, I still think it inconceivable that Burroughs — and Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bowles, Ansen, Gysin, Girodias, Sinclair Beiles, etc, etc (and so, by extension, Burroughs himself) — did not know Tropic of Cancer BEFORE Burroughs went to Paris. I think you have captured a degree of dissimulation in the record — and of course this is an important question in itself: Why Deny? One thinks of Burroughs and Gysin at the time of the cut-ups, refusing all comparisons with Tzara, the Surrealists, the Lettrists, indeed all ‘literature’. (Though they did refer to all the latter). Why Deny? Because it was necessary to do so, just as Miller protested, “This is not a book . . .” — in his own book. Miller projects “a gob of spit in the face of Art” in Tropic of Cancer while hoodlums throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face in Naked Lunch… perhaps that’s both the resemblance and the difference: from spit to acid.

Very Best Wishes,

Ian XXXXXX

And please use or follow up any of the above if it’s useful.

PS. Always something else and another place to go. One important connection between Miller and Burroughs is in their use of cancer as a metaphor — this is present both in their letters and in their great books (indeed it is punned in Miller’s title of course). Curiously, when Gerard Malanga asked Burroughs about his “theory of cancer” (which Robert Creeley had mentioned to him) Burroughs couldn’t remember what it was. But there is a generalised, ad hoc and yet sometimes telling employment of the metaphor which connects them. Entropy of course is also there in both (it was reading Miller that generated Pynchon’s story of the same name and related work) but there is more to be said about the history of this Cancer with a really big ‘C’ — and it is not to be found in Sontag’s otherwise excellent essay, ‘Illness As Metaphor’.

PPS. And there is Miller’s The Time of the Assassins — 1946, New Directions. This was a crucial book of its time, with Rimbaud — “the wandering spirit in revolt” — praised as apocalyptic prophet of the Atomic Age. And significantly, Miller is entranced by… Rimbaud’s early Letters. But of course. (If memory serves, this work by Miller was used in a cut-up by Brion Gysin… I will have to check on that).

PPPS. And then there is exile, expatriation, the remittance man — Miller in Paris, and Burroughs in Paris. And of course Burroughs was aware of all that and didn’t wish to be cast in that light — or in that shadow. But both writers, returning to the U.S. at the end of their lives, shared a nostalgia for the Paris which each had known — different, but in crucial ways the same. Burroughs’ essay ‘Paris Please Stay The Same’ is an elegy for a vanished place and time and a love letter to the City of Light which is unashamedly lyrical and evocative of loss and brings to mind Miller’s 1927 trip to Paris and the view of the city from the dirty window of a shabby hotel’s pitch-black third floor toilet — a view which was “so sweepingly soft and intoxicating it brought tears to my eyes.” Robert Ferguson in his engaging biography of Miller (A Life, 1991) comments on this epiphany: “This experience of his, mingling the smells of the toilet with a sensation of ecstatic reverence for his ancient and grimy surroundings, sounded the keynote of the long love-affair with Paris on which he was about to embark. Indeed, it may have been the moment at which he actually fell in love with the city.” When Miller was “putting… new shit” in the manuscript(s) of Tropic of Cancer, it was truly the shit of Paris — the old, human, intimate and intoxicating odour and raw stuff of streets, sex and sewers. And that’s where Burroughs’ “spicy whiff” comes from. Little wonder that Miller expressed his loathing of U.S. ‘civilisation’ through the term air-conditioned nightmare. “Me, I can’t even smell that I’m alive.”

PPPPS. The works of both Miller and Burroughs must now suffer the rectitude and prudery of political correctness — but really, this is fine, it is absolutely as it should be – Miller and Burroughs’ provocations and delirious humour are still finding their appropriate targets. Disgust and outrage and heart attacks lie in wait for the moral arbiters of p.c. — their hypocritical prurience will be generously rewarded. AS INTENDED. That is the litmus test of these books’ longevity — “The Mark Inside was coming up fast…” Fast, furious, and forever. HIT THEM WHERE IT HURTS — the solar plexus, the Sexus, the Very Seat of Laughter. “Darling, I nearly died. Could hardly toddle home…” That was always the kill in view: give those suckers exactly what they deserve. Miller and Burroughs had that, at least, as their shared ‘programme’. Give them what they (don’t) want… it will (in any case) destroy them. So: CHOOSE.

How do we locate misogyny and how do we resist the dangers of explaining it away through “that was then, this is now”? And how can we avoid censoring its history without ‘correcting’ a masterpiece? Is it truly hatred that we encounter in the words of a writer like Miller from so many decades ago, and if so, what to do about it? The ‘debate’ about Miller’s misogyny is not going away, ever, even though his ‘case’ has been superseded by an industry of oppression. We should look and think but above all read again — because it is not necessarily so. But if it is so, then we must recognise and address it. Because: Calla Otorga (see below). This is still an area which should trouble us when it comes to Beat Studies and related histories. Those writers, straight or gay or every which way, who so delight us but whose writing, as it is said, demeans and degrades women — if that is the case, do we merely acknowledge the ‘fault’ and then continue to read with relish or with detachment, ‘correctly’ or critically or otherwise, warily or regardless? And doesn’t this note itself assume at some level that the readers of ‘problematic’ texts such as Miller’s are always necessarily men?

There is a lot more still to be discussed in this fascinating area, but what you have written is excellent and we should definitely CORRESPOND about this. Sometimes one just knows that it’s going to be… interesting.

MAL ANDA MAL ACABA
As you live so must you die

DA PRIMERO DA VOS VECES
He who hits first hits twice

CALLA OTORGA
Silence gives consent

HACE UN CESTO HACE CIENTO
He who does something once can do it a hundred times

Ciao — Ian XXXXX