Introduction

It would be beyond countenance to ignore the context of the times we’re living in for framing this essay. A year into a global pandemic, our lives have been dominated by a virus, and never before has — thanks to the all-pervading media, social and otherwise — the collective consciousness been so preoccupied with the mode and rate of viral transmission and variant mutations.

On a number of social media forums, I have observed threads around questions of ‘what would William Burroughs make of all of this?’ Scrolling through the rather predictable responses speculating on how he would be critical of the authorities in their handling of the situation and whether or not he would wear a mask, I experienced a surging sense of deflatement and apathy. Blunt as it may seem, my initial reaction was ‘who cares? What does it matter?’.

After some pause for reflection, I came to realise that it did matter, and that there is some proper discussion to be had around the topic: after all, virus was a central theme through much of William S. Burroughs’ writing. As such, it’s very much worth exploring the way in which Burroughs’ writing on virus foreshadow the present, in particular the way his cut-up works extrapolate his theories on virus — and to ask the question ‘how much has changed?’ This essay will consider some of the revelations that emerged through the cut-ups and evaluate them in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic, with a view to exploring just how ‘prophetic’ Burroughs’ writing may have been. For reasons which will become apparent, my focus will largely be on his cut-up works, as well as interviews, predominantly as contained in The Job. 

The Future Leaks Out: Cut-Up Prophecies

I’ve personally questioned the merits of reading the literature of the past through the filters of contemporary theoretical perspectives — for example feminist readings of Shakespeare, and postmodern interpretations of Jane Austen — which strike me as redundant. For while they present a certain novelty, one has to question the relevance and benefits of projecting the values of the present on the past, when the present has no possible conception of the future. With Burroughs, however, there is a clear and specific case for making an exception, given his preoccupation with prediction, future, and foreshadowing, and in the context of the virus-laden planet we find ourselves trapped on, it seems appropriate to unravel and decode the messages embedded within his work.

‘When you cut into the present, the future leaks out,’ Burroughs wrote in the essay ‘Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups,’ which he read at Boulder’s Naropa University in 1976. Much has already been made of this quote, both as a signifier of the ‘prophetic’ nature of Burroughs’ writing, and as a key theory about the cut-ups. In the same talk, he explained, ‘When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time, some of the cut and rearranged texts seem to refer to future events’.

For the purpose of this discussion, I will specifically focus on the details that connect the cut-ups to Burroughs’ wide-ranging theories around virus. I have no intention of stretching so far forward to suggest Burroughs predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, but shall instead draw out parallels that exist between the time when Burroughs was most deeply immersed in his cut-up practices and evolving his ‘word virus’ theory and the present. My aim is simply to address the speculation that fills so much dead air on social media. Perhaps there is no need to speculate as to what Burroughs would have made of the current situation, and perhaps many of his ideas and theories can be found within his texts: in much the same way as Nostradamus’ works foretold the future, so we can scrutinise Burroughs’ work for the leaked futures he believed were embedded there.

The Real Meanings

Burroughs drew on a wide range of source material spanning Shakespeare, newspapers, and science journals, for his extensive cut-up experiments, which spawned three full-length novels in the form of The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express, a number of collections, including Exterminator and The Third Mind, as well as a plethora of short-form pieces published in a host of underground magazines. He also found that political speeches proved a particularly fertile source of exposure through cutting up. “Quite often,” he remarked in an interview with George McFadden and Robert Mayoh in 1974, “you’ll find that some of the real meanings will emerge. And you’ll also find that the politician usually means the exact opposite of what he’s saying.”

A noteworthy example of this can be found in Nova Express: ‘Now you are asking me whether I want to perpetuate a narcotics problem and I say: “Protect the disease. Must be made criminal protecting society from the disease… Maintaining addict cancers to our profit — pernicious personal contact — Market increase — Release the prosecutor to try any holes.’ While the disease in question this time is different, the way this passage can be unravelled to show that it ‘reveals that the antidrug rhetoric of the fifties and sixties served merely to cover up the real intention of the government agencies assigned to tackle the problem: to “Protect the Disease” of addiction’, it does offer clear parallels with the attempts by some governments to ‘tackle’ coronavirus, which may not be all they seem. “A text may be ‘found out,’ exposed as empty rhetorical gesture or as a system of manipulations,” explains Robin Lydenberg.

Many political speeches made since the outbreak have contained either considerable obfuscation or a lack of clarity that serves to undermine their own stated meaning without the need for cutting up. Take, for example, the following statement from British Health Secretary Matt Hancock:

They’re [the] rules that need to be in place, and everybody must follow them and stay at home wherever possible… we’ve set those rules, we’re enforcing against those rules, and we reiterate those rules, because that is the best way to be able to bend the curve down and stop the spread of the virus.

When Boris Johnson announced a strategy based on cultivating a ‘herd immunity’ in the UK, it’s perhaps not surprising that many questioned the rationale, given that such an approach would almost certainly result in tens of thousands of deaths, and particularly given that the emerging virus seemed to be most dangerous to those who are older or with underlying health conditions, i.e. the demographic of the population which cost the government the most in healthcare and other benefits, from a government who had previously made swingeing welfare cuts under their ‘austerity’ programme, in response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

If anything, distrust in politicians has deepened considerably since then, and with Donald Trump being the first US president to be impeached twice in just a single term in office, the English government being reported as being ‘the most corrupt place on earth’, and the suppression of information being rife at the hands of the Chinese and Russian governments who control the state-owned media, the reasons why require little qualification. It’s perhaps small wonder that there is a large minority who believe that governments have a secret agenda steering their management of the pandemic, with the British government being under particularly strong scrutiny for their questionable strategies — from what some see as a plan to reduce the elderly population in order to reduce the cost of state pension benefits and the amount of funding required by the NHS to service an ageing population, to a strategy to run the NHS into the ground and therefore justify its privatisation and a move to a US-style ‘insurance-based’ healthcare system. And, despite the damage long-term lockdowns have had on the global economy, with the retail, leisure, and hospitality industries being particularly badly affected, the world’s top 15 hedge funders are reported as having made £17 billion in the twelve months to February 2021. That Chase Coleman III, the founder of Tiger Global Management (TGM), the best performing hedge fund manager, making $3 billion in performance management fees and gains on his personal investments in the fund, is also a major donor to the Republican party is just one example of why the pandemic has come to be so politicised.

In a climate of such deep distrust, it’s not difficult to understand why a large number of people are suspicious of not only the handling of the pandemic, but its origins, the term ‘plandemic’ providing a snappy catch-all that encapsulates the view that while people are dying in their hundreds of thousands around the globe, and many countless more are suffering mentally and financially and in myriad other ways as a consequence of the pandemic, there is a minority — many of whom are in government or other positions of power — who can be seen to be benefitting from the situation.

Burroughs was of the belief that the entire system was based on vested interests, and explained that ‘the police have a vested interest in criminality. The narcotics department have a vested interest in addiction. Politicians have a vested interest in nations. Army officers have a vested interest in war…’ 

Writing in Psychology Today, David Ludden identifies ‘the desire for understanding and certainty,’ as one of the three leading reasons people subscribe to conspiracy theories. ‘We don’t just ask questions,’ he writes. ‘We also quickly find answers to those questions—not necessarily the true answers, but rather answers that comfort us or that fit into our worldview. It’s raining because I always have the worst luck. She gave me the cold shoulder because she can’t stand it when she doesn’t get her way. You can’t understand what I’m saying because you’re just not listening.’ In short, people need a sense of narrative, and when coming from a place of fear and uncertainty, will likely gravitate to a narrative that conforms to their established perspective. For many, then, it’s easier to believe, as the planet’s dominant species, that COVID-19 is man-made and part of some dark plot, than the fact that as a species, we are always at the mercy of nature, and that it was ever thus.

Word Virus and Control

Based on their initial discoveries with the ‘revelations’ revealed through their initial cut-ups, Gysin and Burroughs began to formulate numerous theories concerning the capabilities of the cut-ups. A number of these theories revolved around the ideas of language preconditioning and control, word as virus and the revision of existing texts. Central to this was Burroughs’ exploration of what he believed to be the most powerful instrument of control of all: language — or, in Burroughs’ terms, ‘Word’. The idea that ‘Word is Virus’ provided a central theme to Burroughs’ middle-era work.

My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

Citing the research of others, notably the fictitious Dr Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz, who also supposedly theorised that the human ability to speak has a viral origin, and that ‘the word was a virus of… “biologic mutation” affecting a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed’, Burroughs expounded his Word Virus theory in great detail. He postulates that a virus illness could well have caused alterations on the inner throat structure of apes, and that these virally-induced biological changes facilitated the capacity for speech.

The cut-up trilogy sees Burroughs pursue his viral control theory through the portrayal of the Nova Mob — so named because they came to Earth after causing the supernova which formed the Crab Nebula — alien invaders who have controlled life on earth for 3,000 years by assuming the form of a parasitic virus which exploits the body’s weakness for addiction. And so begins Burroughs’ ‘mythology for the space age’, with the Nova Mob serving as both an explanation and analogy for the word-as-virus theory which forms one of the trilogy’s central themes. Jenny Skerl comments that “Burroughs’s Nova myth is parodic… it is not invested with belief; it is not a symbol of transcendent reality. Rather, it is an analysis and criticism of myth whose aim is to destroy the power of myth, leaving the reader free of its linguistic control.” 

Later in Burroughs’ career, we see a subplot in Cities of the Red Night, involving Virus B-23, a mysterious disease, caused by radiation, the symptoms of which are ‘fever, rash, a characteristic odor, sexual frenzies, obsession with sex and death.’ Addiction to opiates provides some resistance to it. Written before news of the AIDS epidemic had become widely known, Burroughs writes with prophetic intuition of a sexually transmitted virus. In what is partly a detective story, partly sci-fi, characters debate ‘the wisdom of introducing Virus B-23 into contemporary America and Europe. Even though it might quiet the uh silent majority, who are admittedly becoming uh awkward, we must consider the biologic consequences,’ and whether ‘any attempts to contain Virus B-23 will turn out to be ineffectual… because it is the human virus.‘ 

As such, Burroughs can be seen to attribute human behaviours to viral mutations, and even indicates that the survival of the species is contingent upon continued mutation, rather than evolutionary development. Significantly he also returns to the idea of the virus, identified as having a specific source of origin — the Cities of the Red Night — being subject to laboratory containment and considered for use against the population. Cities of the Red Night is, of course, a work of fiction, yet it reads very like some of the key aspects of popular conspiracy theories about COVID-19. So what has happened for this to transpire?

Conspiracy conundrum

The connotations and implications of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ seem to have changed significantly post-millennium, giving rise to the era of ‘post truth’ and ‘fake news’. Burroughs was, unquestionably, a conspiracy theorist, in his deep mistrust of authority, specifically politicians and his belief that in using — and manipulating — language, politicians obfuscated their true motives and intentions. 

Matthew J Hornsey distinguishes between a ‘conspiracy’ and a ‘conspiracy theory’, writing that ‘the emerging norm is to use the term ‘conspiracy’ to refer to actual, substantiated events, and to reserve the term ‘conspiracy theory’ for beliefs that seem, on face value, to be unreasonable or highly speculative.’ He continues ‘Given the number of converging, credible, and independent reports to this effect, it seems reasonable to argue that there was a conspiracy within levels of Chinese government to cover up emerging medical advice of a strange new virus that was causing deaths in Wuhan in late 2019. But it would be a conspiracy theory to argue, like Bronwyn Bishop, that COVID-19 was part of a Chinese government plan to reduce the state’s burden of care by culling vulnerable people.’ 

There is no shortage of evidence to suggest that Burroughs was prone to extreme paranoia, something common among addicts and heavy drug users. Ted Morgan’s biography, Literary Outlaw, recounts how in the early 1960s, ‘more and more, Burroughs was operating under the conviction that his writing placed him in danger, that he was surrounded by enemies who were out to do him in. He had a kind of “it’s-them-or-us” siege mentality… [he] now was himself as one of his characters, inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police. He began to wonder whether Mikey [Portman, a friend] was an agent sent to perturb his existence.’ His suspicious nature extended to all aspects of his life, and Burroughs was not averse to what can now be seen as problematic misogynistic views, saying that love was ‘a virus, a hoax perpetrated by women.’ True to form, Burroughs had a snappy one-liner which has been paraphrased to become an Internet favourite: ‘A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to is actually going on.’

Then again, Burroughs had some justifiable cause for paranoia, writing against the backdrop of the cold war, Watergate, and a period when the CIA were conducting covert experiments including MK Ultra, and classified documents covered all sort of things from the public. When Burroughs was writing, he was not seeking to propagate unfounded theories as fact, but was instead exploring the mechanisms of control and how truth and facts were obfuscated by authority. 

Moreover, Burroughs was, first and foremost, a storyteller, and one with a penchant for tall tales, as exemplified by a great many of his ‘routines’, the likes of which provided the main fabric of Naked Lunch. While the narrative style of these is relatively ‘straight’ the routines tend to serve a dual purpose: first, to entertain, and second, to convey a point. The story of the ‘talking asshole’ in Naked Lunch, Dr ‘Fingers Schaffer’s All-American de-anxietised man’ which transmogrifies into a giant centipede, and the carnival of hangings and supporting cocks depicted in the section ‘AJ’s Annual party’ are amusing and grotesque in equal measure, and all serve to present some form of sociopolitical commentary, with ‘bad science’ and the barbarity of public execution as a form of ‘entertainment’ being central themes within the novel. No-one reads these passages literally, and since Burroughs’ works are littered with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, precisely how seriously we should take them is questionable at best. Burroughs often sought to satirise through his writing, and defended the contents of Naked Lunch as a satire ‘in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal’ when it was tried for obscenity.

Even when Burroughs presents his theories in such a way as to appear serious, it’s important to bear in mind the dryness of Burroughs’ humour. Having experimented extensively with myriad narcotics, Burroughs would have been fully aware that nutmeg is not a viable marijuana substitute, and nor is its consumption in any quantity likely to prove fatal, despite the claims he made in the article ‘Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs’, published in The British Journal of Addiction in 1956. Therefore, his oft-cited claim that ‘Language is a virus from outer space’ and that ‘Word is literally a virus’ (my italics) it’s reasonable to question precisely how literally he meant, versus how far he was pushing an extended metaphor, particularly given that the ‘word virus’ theme is central to the cut-up trilogy of the 60s. 

In the current scenario, then, it may be quite plausible that Burroughs may espouse an idea whereby a pandemic planned by major pharmaceutical companies, hedge fund operators, and governments working in cahoots in order to inject the world’s population with a microchip — but as a metaphor for control and the manipulation of the masses by those in power, rather than literally.

Prisoners of the Earth Come Out

The last twelve months have seen — if the news media is to be believed — an increase in protests, globally, over a host of issues, perhaps most prominently around the result of the US election, and Black Lives Matter, which, in a time of enforced social distancing may seem somewhat shocking, but perhaps equally no more shocking than scenes of gatherings in streets and parks. But again, as an indication of just how politicised the handling of the pandemic has been, we have witnessed numerous anti-mask protests, particularly in the US and UK. In context of protests against oppression, these make some kind of sense. As for Burroughs, he was a keen supporter of direct action and protest: when asked his position on student rioting and violence against police and state control and specifically nuclear weapons, Burroughs told Daniel Odier ‘there should be more riots and violence. Young people in the West have been lied to, sold out, and betrayed.’ 

He also said, ‘I don’t believe in nonviolence. The people in power are not going to throw themselves out. You don’t give flowers to the police, except in a flower pot from a high window.’

Is all protest political? To a certain extent, most definitely: protest tends to only happen when people feel their voices are going unheard and there is a collective sense of injustice. For Burroughs, the problem was politics itself. Again speaking to Odier in The Job, Burroughs said of the ‘problem’ facing American politics was that ‘the whole thing is unworkable… and I think the most likely change would be some form of extreme right fascism, a takeover by the army… Contrary to what Marx believed, industrialised countries go fascist, and it’s the unindustrialised countries that go communist.’ This observation holds true, as China’s rapid industrialisation followed its move to communism in 1949, while the remaining four communist countries — Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba — are unindustrialised, while recent years have seen many developed countries within Europe, notably England and France, as well as North America, make a substantial shift towards right-wing populism.

In Naked Lunch, Dr Benway also expounds a theory which likens social structures to that of a viral mutation:

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organizations. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on the opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus.

As the world remains firmly in the grip of both COVID-19 and political systems, that complete parasitism seems palpable.

Vaccination and Vested Interests

As we find ourselves in the next stage of pandemic management, the vaccination programmes have become another subject of intensely heated debate, which once again tap into numerous conspiracy theories. Such debate, while denounced by many, particularly governments, may still serve a desired purpose, for Burroughs observed that ‘all monopolistic and hierarchical systems are based on keeping people in anxiety.’

As to the question of the vaccine itself, Burroughs’ scepticism toward conventional medicine is well-documented. This scepticism largely centres on the vested interests of the pharmaceutical companies rather than being specifically questioning of the products themselves. This he articulates nowhere more clearly than, once again, in The Job:

Vested interest of power and/or money is perhaps the most potent factor standing in the way of freedom for the individual. New discoveries and products are suppressed because they threaten vested interests. The medical profession is suppressing Reich’s orgone accumulator and his discoveries relative to the use and dangers of orgonic energy… They are suppressing the use of massive doses of Vitamin E for the prevention of heart disease, the use of massive doses of Vitamin A for curing the common cold. (I have used this simple remedy for thirty years and it works. Everyone I have passed it on to has found that it works either to abort or modify the course of a cold. At the first soreness in the throat which presages the onslaught of a common cold you take 500,000 units of Vitamin A. Vitamin A alone. Not Vitamin C which is quite worthless for a cold. At one time I had thought to market this remedy but was told it could not be marketed because the American Medical Association is opposed to self-medication. The AMA is opposed to self-medication if it works).. The medical profession has a vested interest in illness. 

This passage is particularly interesting, as it perhaps highlights in the sharpest relief just how disparate and wayward some of Burroughs’ ideas and theories were, and how he was given to placing pseudoscientific conjecture on an equal footing to genuine research. It would be difficult to refute that pharmaceutical companies, as profit-driven capitalist organisations, operate to produce maximum profit for themselves and their shareholders, especially given the pricing practices of some: for example, Martin Shkreli, during his tenure as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, increased the price of AIDS treatment Daraprim, the only US-approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, by 5,000%, from $13.50 (£9) per pill to $750 (£490) overnight. 

Burroughs’ scepticism also seems entirely appropriate when considering the response of the UK government in its allocation of contracts for various supplies, including the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE), of test-and-trace and other tracking programmes, amongst other things during the pandemic. Burroughs appears to support the idea that a mass-vaccination plan may be a part of some strategy to increase their level of control by taking advantage of the situation and the climate of fear: ‘Power is not unlimited. They must have pretexts. They must have an excuse to proceed. They couldn’t start things like that without a pretext of war or some extreme emergency.’

In what may appear to be a rather unusual turn, Professor Andrew Lees, a leading Parkinson’s researcher, has been inspired by Burroughs’ radical thinking in his study on treatments for Parkinson’s disease, as chronicled in his book Mentored by a Madman (Notting Hill Editions, 2016).

In an article in Parkinsons Life, Susanna Lindvall demonstrates how Lees echoes Burroughs’ sentiments: ‘Some of the useful, cheap drugs that had been approved … like amantadine, benzhexol and Sinemet, kept inexplicably disappearing from pharmacies all over the [UK],” he writes. “Once a drug had become cheap and unprofitable, it was at risk of abandonment even when it was the best available remedy.’

It’s therefore not entirely unreasonable that the machinations of large pharmaceutical companies are less the domain of conspiracy theory, and can be seen to amount to a capitalist conspiracy of sorts. 

But what of the vaccine? Would Burroughs have considered it a conspiracy of control? I would argue not. Writing in 1960 for the appendix to Naked Lunch entitled ‘Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness’, he wrote ‘The smallpox vaccine was opposed by a vociferous lunatic group of anti-vaccinationists’. The mass media’s tireless labelling of the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘unprecedented’ has also seen the anti-vaxx movement, as it has now come to be known, described by the BBC as ‘a loose group of fringe campaigners against immunisation’ as being a recent phenomenon which has grown following the MMR controversy — but if history, and Burroughs, tell us anything, it’s that nothing is ever entirely new.

The Future Is Also the Past

Having taken a journey through the key parallels that link Burroughs’ commentaries on viral contagion, politics, control and conspiracy theories, the one thing that stands out — perhaps not entirely surprisingly, given Burroughs’ prophetic’ reputation (much of which, it must be said, was of his own creation) — is just how contemporary and relevant his writing seems now. But, I would argue that as much as the cut-ups enabled the future to leak out for Burroughs, an understanding of history is the most assured way to foretell the future, and the future is also the past, leaving us to muse on, ultimately, how little has really changed.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Ted Berrigan review of Nova Express from Kulchur 18 (1965)

It is a thousand years since anyone had intercourse with a delicacy — the least attempt thought of possessing such a delicacy and it is “back to the branches, kid” — But what about in the house? “The house is a photo.” But what about the house itself? “Lost their enemy — permutate at different pressure — Slow the house merged created in silent concentration of the workers from The Land of Silence where speech is impossible –”

“Lucky bastards,” Bill always said as he walked around smoking Havanas and directing the work in color flash language of The Silent Ones — showing his plans –

“Know who I am?”

The Technician mixed a bicarbonate of soda surveying the havoc on his view screen — it was impossible to estimate the damage — anything put up till now like pulling a figure out of the air –

You have to be free to remember he was under sentence of death in Maximum Security Birth Death Universe. So he sounded the words that end “Word” —

Eye take back color from “word” —

Uranium Willy The Heavy Metal Kid. Also known as Willy the Rat. He wised up the marks. His metal face moves in a slow smile.

To speak is to lie. To live is to collaborate. “But what is he painting?” Arrgh, it’s a theater full of people suffocating. “I got you — keep it practical and they can’t — ”

“I am dying, Meester?” Shift coordinate pint. Half your brain being blind turned off the lights — could give no information other than wind identity fading out — a long time between clock hands and rose wallpaper rooms of dead flesh — money he gave me to buy equipment — and being blind may not refuse the maps to by blood whom I created — “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin” Dec. 7 1941, Sept. 18, 1899 —

Breakthrough in the grey room! Order total weapons — board books — Photos falling — Word falling — Storm the reality studio! Shift the scanning pattern of reality — hallucinogen drugs shift the scanning pattern of reality so that we see a different “reality” — “Reality” is simply more or less a constant scanning pattern –

Fade out to a shabby hotel near Earl’s Court in London. Uranian Willy, The Heavy Metal Kid, now known as “Willy the Fink” to his former associates, is posing as a writer. He has written a so-called pornographic nvoel called Naked Lunch in which the Orgasm Death Gimmick is described. He was not out of the Security Compound by a long shot he had rubbed off the word shackles –.

Never look back. Word dust everywhere now like soiled stucco on the buildings. Word dust without color drifting smoke streets. John is lost in about 5000 men and women — Everyone else is on The Grey Veil — Flesh frozen to particles called “Good Consciousness” irrevocably committed to the toilet — Reverse instructions — Calling partisans of all nations — Cut word lines — shift linguals — Vibrate tourists — Free doorways — Word falling — Photo falling — Breakthrough in The Grey Room —

The underground is made up of adventurers who intend to outthink and displace the present head — protected by heat and the brains armed now with The Blazing Photo — the brains under His control are encased in a vast structure of steel and crystal spinning thought patterns that control whole galaxies thousand years ahead on the chessboard of viewer screens and juxtapositions formulae —

How do you make someone feel stupid? You present to him all the times he talked and acted and felt stupid again and again any number of times fed into the combo of the soft calculating machine geared to find more and more punch cards and feed in more and more images — the images have electro-magnetic patterns — that is any situation that causes rage will magnetize rage patterns and draw around the rage word and image recordings-

The counter move is very simple — This is machine strategy and the machine can be redirected — Record for ten minutes on a tape recorder — Now run the tape back without playing and cut in other words at random — where you have cut in and re-recorded words are wiped off the tape and new words in their place — You have turned back Time ten minutes and wiped electro-magnetic word patterns off the tape and substituted other patterns — You can do the same with mind tape — The old mind tape can be wiped clean — (this takes some experimentation) — Magnetic word dust falling from old patterns — Word falling — Photo falling —

“A Deposition:”

Time to move on — Word is flesh and word is two and that is the human body is compacted of two organisms and where you have two you have word and word is flesh — Loneliness is a product of dual mammalian structure — “Loneliness,” “Love,” “Friendship,” all the rest of it — I am not two — I am one — But to maintain my state of oneness I need twoness in other life forms — Other must talk so that I can remain silent — Hassan i Sabbah has wised up the marks —

The Gimmick of The Death Dwarf: supersonic imitation and playback so that you think it is your own voice — (do you own a voice?) — You know you are in the right — in the “write” — so long as you have the inside your speech center say “I am in the right” — So Rot flashes around the world —

A Technician learns to think and write in association blocks which can be manipulated according to the basic laws of association and juxtaposition —

Does not take part in nor instigate experiments defining pain and pleasure thresholds — the Technician used abstract reports of the experiments to evolve the formulae of pain and pleasure association that control this planet — had material form purge trials and concentration camps and reports and photos from Nagasaki and Hiroshima — Photo falling — Word falling — With most precise data coming from Lexington, Kentucky report on the withdrawal experiences of drug addicts — with pain and pleasure limits defined and the juxtaposition formulae set up it is fairly easy to predict what people will think in a thousand years or as long as the formulae remain in operation —

Thinking in association blocks instead of words enables the operator to process data with speed of light on the association line — Certain alterations are of course essential —

Incidentally in this area the only reason one Technician ever contacts another Technician is for purposes of assassination — break into his grey room — make one into two — remain One — We’re Number One — Host empty —

Now let’s just take a critical look at our host — switch on a few mind tapes recently tuned in to his Latest News — here we go

One of the Ten Best — A Smash — The Ugly Spirit — A Deposition — Very Big — A Laugh Riot — Blessedly Real People — A Sizzling Merry-Go-Round — Rejoice — American Music at its Best — Nothing but Pleasure — A Pain — A Truly Hilarious Romp — I was Captivated – Breakthrough in the Grey Room – Far and Away The Most Significant Play in the Galaxy — The Laughs Roll On and On — The Greatest Story Ever Told — New York Times — Last Words Anywhere — Sports Vacation Travel Show — A Regular Cut-Up — Better Than Mary Mary — This Was Burlesque — Fade Out-Fade In — Recital Management- I Had A Ball — Catch Me If You Can — Best Shopping From Sixty Centuries — How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — World Premiere — Photo falling Word falling — My Favorite Musical Comedy —

Are These Experiments Necessary?

Changed place of years in the end is just the same — Don’t Answer — Silence — You are yourself — don’t answer the machine — shut it off — The Chinese character for enemy means to be similar to or to answer —

Well, that’s about the closest way I know how to tell you — My writing arm is paralyzed — had enough slow metal — And I go home having lost — so get your heavy metal ass in a space ship rustling across city desks — you yourself are Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin — you ever had a delicacy? — know who I am?

September 17, 1899

Ted Berrigan

by William Weiss

… Consider an animal cell over which is running a river of cellular fluid, perhaps lymph or plasma. A virus particle appears in the flux and is carried over the cell surface. Both the cell surface and the virus particle are thick with spikes that reach out into the streaming fluid. When the spikes of a virus and an animal cell touch, they bond, and the virus is drawn down onto the surface of the cell like a piece of flotsam snagged with a boathook. Some viruses, when they reach the cell membrane, pass directly through the cell wall like a ghost; others are engulfed, eaten, enfolded by the wall as though they were a delicacy of some kind.

Once inside the cell the number of ways a virus can go about its business explodes. Building complex parts in a cell, including complete copies of viruses, is in some ways just like building a machine on a factory floor; it requires tools — the biochemical equivalent of ripsaws, drills, soldering irons, screwdrivers, rolls of tape and the like. For example, MIT molecular biologist Jonathan King … and his colleagues were the first to determine that the “tail” of one type of phage is assembled inside a cell. First a “scaffold” protein is made. Then, building-block proteins are added one at a time until a “measuring tape” protein determines that the length is right. With the structure complete, the scaffold protein detaches, to be used again. Some viruses, like the herpes virus, come in with a hardware store of their own; others, such as the tobacco mosaic virus, make use of the cell’s tools almost exclusively. Nobody knows why this difference exists or what it means.

Some viruses, when they enter a cell, are not infective — they have only one strand of nucleic acid and require two. Yet, for reasons that are still a mystery, the host cell immediately and obligingly repairs the virus allowing the infection to begin. And finally, in what is certainly the ultimate in hospitality, there are hosts that integrate viral genes right into their own DNA so that thereafter, whenever the host cell replicates, a copy of the virus is made too. This type of virus is known as a retrovirus… AIDS can result from one member of this family. The gene responsible for feline leukemia is thought to have entered the cat gene line millions of years ago as an infection by one of these retroviruses …

— Fred Hapgood, “Viruses Emerge as New Key for Unlocking Life’s Mysteries,” Smithsonian, 10.87.

Language is a virus from outer space. 

— William Burroughs

Burroughs is (not) writing, in Nova Express, a science fiction / detective story. In order to engineer the construction of a particular text that will stand ready to submit to whatever the hybrid genre “sci-fi / detective” requires to define itself, Burroughs has to exploit specific strategies of containment. Such a procedure constitutes, in many ways, a species of fiction itself, for, as we have been informed (by Barthes, Derrida, Jameson, et. al), the text is a tissue. (Any construction that Burroughs achieves in the way of genre or allegory is always, as we shall see, in tense opposition to the deliriums of cut-up, parody, and irony.) It would seem, though, that the readers of science fiction and the readers of detective stories have come to expect certain things. This is contingent upon a conditioned mode of perception. Burroughs is aware. (We deliberately simplify by not considering what it might be that “makes” a novel, or what the readers of satire or autobiographical fiction have become comfortable with.) The Burroughsian sci-fi / detective landscape functions simply as a psychological tuning apparatus (as, in its way, does Stelarc’s — we shall meet his art shortly — exploitation of the gravitational landscape). The idea is to place the reader in a familiar context where he might exhibit behaviors that will facilitate Burroughs’ ends. We are being conned, set up. And once hooked, the reader immediately finds himself awash in a vicious Burroughsian parody of the genre(s). (Burroughs’ singularly distorted representation of familiar constructs has effects beyond reinforcing his infamous brand of gallows humor. Parody relies on certain distancing and differencing properties to assert itself, properties in many ways not unlike those of allegory. Later in this text, Nova Express’ articulation in/of space will be described in terms of the figure “matrix.” Nova Express [un]folds out in a number of directions attempting to establish a radical space which “knows” time. Parody participates in this unfolding.) But Burroughs’ primary destination in the engineering of the novel is a variegated allegorization of the complex relationship between man and language. It is here that the real power of the book lies: 

Let me explain how we make an arrest — Nova criminals are not three-dimensional organisms — (though they are quite definite organisms as we shall see) but they need three-dimensional human agents to operate — The point at which the criminal controller intersects a three-dimensional human agent is known as “a co-ordinate point” — And if there is one thing that carries over from one human host to another and establishes identity of the controller it is habit: idiosyncracies, vices, food preferences … a chain smoker will always operate through chain smokers, an addict through addicts … a single controller can operate through thousands of human agents, but he must have a line of co-ordinate points … ¹

Virus defined as the three-dimensional co-ordinate point of a controller — Transparent sheets with virus perforations like punch cards passed through the host on the soft machine feeling for a point of intersection … What does virus do wherever it can dissolve a hole and find traction? — It starts eating — And what does it do with what it eats? — It makes exact copies of itself … A vast tapeworm of bring down word and image moving through your mind screen always at the same speed on a slow hydraulic-spine axis like the cylinder in the adding machine.²

The basic nova mechanism is very simple: always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts — This is done by dumping life forms with incompatible conditions of existence on the same planet — There is of course nothing “wrong” about any given life form since “wrong” only has reference to conflicts with other life forms — The point is these forms should not be on the same planet — Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the Nova Mob to see that they remain in present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts  that lead to the explosion of a planet that is to nova — At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons … ³

What scared you all into time? Into shit? I will tell you: “the word”. Alien word “the.” “The” word of Alien Enemy imprisons “thee” in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the words forever. In you I cancel all your words forever. And the words of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel.⁴

It is a peculiar movie which Burroughs wants to exploit. He wants to exploit exploitation. Look, Inspector J. Lee is Burroughs (and he is not): “One of our agents is posing as a writer. He has written a so-called pornographic novel called Naked Lunch …”⁵ (As Paul De Man makes clear in his essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” a self-conscious author “disrupts the fictional illusion” and ensures the integrity of an allegorical truthing phenomenon.⁶) The good inspector tells us, in so many words, that language is control. Who wants to control? The Nova Criminals. Who are they? Liars. Parasites. What is their motive? They want TIME and BODIES for more lies. (“I would like to sound a word of warning — To speak is to lie — to live is to collaborate …”⁷) With what do the Nova Criminals hope to gain control? With the Board Books: “We had the plan, what they call the Board Books to show us what is what on this dead whistle stop: Three life forms uneasily parasitic on a fourth form that is beginning to wise up. And the whole planet absolutely flapping hysterical with panic. The way we like to see them.”⁸ (Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, written some forty years ago and feeling for a point of intersection here, indirectly suggests that what we have in the Nova Mob may be the allegorization of the collective will to dominate the individual and ultimately all that which cannot be explained or annexed by the Enlightenment. The Nova Mob is perhaps the fear and bad conscience of the Enlightenment. Language is merely an instrument of reason [and self-preservation]. The self, “the reference point of reason,” thus becomes the perfect host for the virus.⁹) And so you’re reading this static-gun-movie-projector-virus-mechanism science fiction story that has some Inspector character doing his ironic damnedest to turn you on to the fact that you are being manipulated into a construct in which there is a Nova Mob using language/image to push the planet into unstoppable nova:

“Recollect when I was traveling with Limestone John on the Carbonic Caper — It worked like this: He rents an ampitheatre with marble walls he is a stone painter you dig can create a frieze while you wait — So he puts on a diving suit like the old Surrealist Lark and I am up on a high pedestal pumping the air to him — Well, he starts painting on the limestone walls with hydrochloric acid and jetting himself around with air blasts he can cover the wall in ten seconds, carbon dioxide settling down on the marks begin to cough and loosen their collars.”

“But what is he painting?”

“Why it’s arrg a theater full of people suffocating — ”      

So we turn the flops over and move on — If you keep it practical they can’t hang a nova rap on you … ¹⁰

This passage is most ironic for it is, of course, the author-reader relationship which is being stripped down. (De Man believes that allegory and irony — I would add parody as well — are very similar in that they both reveal truth by forcing the self into an intimate examination of its screaming predicament in the toothy maw of Time. Allegory establishes itself in the homonymity between two ontologically and temporally distinct sign systems. It prevents the self from identifying with that which the self clearly is not by insisting upon a distance and a difference from its own origin: allegory inhibits the virus from making exact copies of itself in the host. Associated with the phenomenon of irony, there is an inevitable and instantaneous fall of the self from its cocky self-assurance, an existential tailspin, a quick glimpse of the self engaged in fooling itself into sleeping soundly in a room which is floating on nothing but maya.¹¹) The fact that signification is being contracted to off signification is the novel’s crowning irony.

Now, cut-up, a technique used extensively in Nova Express and many of Burroughs’ other important works, is a mechanical manipulation of text specifically designed to circumvent the control systems, the strategies of containment, that catch like hooks in the moving meat of the signifying creature (for an interesting discussion of the physics of fishing, see Derrida’s “The History and System of Scripts,” Of Grammatology¹²). The irruption of a random element into the text is, of course, the introduction of delirium and the interruption of the virus mechanism. What Eliot lamented, Burroughs champions:

… Only by the form, the pattern
Can words or music reach
The stillness …
     … Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, 
Always assail them …¹³

But even Eliot understood:

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, 
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been… ¹⁴

Delirium, or the demonic, enforces humility — but not in men. It cripples the will to power of the logos. That is why we say that Burroughs “champions” chaos. The power of words over men is of the same genus as the power of fascism over men. In order for such powers to become manifest, to possess a body, we must desire it to be so. We must desire to be possessed. Indeed, this has been the great project of civilization — to convince men that they must be controlled, that they are unable to control themselves.

Consider the age of civilization. Consider the history of logos, the history of history: insignificant, even when only compared to the age of the hominids. The latest studies of human and pongidae DNA reveal that man separated, bifurcated from the apes only five to ten million years ago! (And rare: we were so very rare.) Before that there were countless generations of singular sentient creatures, ancestors who existed independent of the logos, old stones that cannot be deciphered. (Imagine antedating the logos!) The history of the fascism of the logos is thus the history of a Hitler — short, brutal and with consequences that have forever changed the planet.

Cut-up is a weapon of the resistance. It is resistance. And do not call it a symptom of a new romanticism. Remove either component from the yin yang and you have the sound of one hand clapping. We are terrified of the sound of our desire clapping. We haven’t much of a rapport with the unconscious anymore, with the howl of nature.

The backward look behind the assurance 
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror … ¹⁵

Patterns abound in nature. It is a commonplace to cite the sunflower, the conch and the Milky Way as examples of the vastly divergent entities the same pattern may inhabit. Pattern is essential to life. But there is no life in stasis, without motion and without mutation. This force is integral.

The detail of the pattern is movement
As in the figure of the ten stairs … ¹⁶

Cut-up is change, the inexorable. There is as much use in opposing change as there is in opposing death. Just as there is no triumph over entropy, except fleetingly, in the pattern which is forever new.

But I speak not to men. I make words against words. There can be no other way for art now.

Consider Foucault’s account of the spatio-temporality of language which a Classical order makes possible. Foucault develops the idea of a tropological space, language’s primary locus. Without such a space in which words and the thought they represent unfold according to the “logic” of rhetoric, the temporal dimension of language would not exist for there would be no common names upon which a predicative relation could operate.¹⁷ The disjointed space which cut-up engenders is a space where the possibility of predicative relations (and thus, time?) has been put into serious jeopardy. Words, which depend upon a precisely articulated sequence and difference for their ability to effect what Foucault calls the “simultaneity of representation,” find themselves cut loose, ambiguously differentiated and capable of an almost infinite array of behaviors. Where would Newton’s billiard game be if when he took a shot the balls refused to react, if balls disappeared and in their place came balls and ballistics belonging to other games, if the table itself dissolved and a basketball court took its place?

The earliest analogue in painting is Cubism (where collage first gained real currency — cut-up is only a violent form of collage). The real trouble began with Cézanne, though, who understood, in a way that no one had before, that there are no outlines around figures in real life — this is only a convention of painting. A kind of suffusion of forms in his work ensued. Then, of course, Braque and Picasso proceeded to fracture pictorial space and further develop Cézanne’s practice of rendering objects from different perspectives simultaneously. Stasis was out; space became continuous with its happening contents. Eventually the objects themselves “disappeared” in an iconoclasm which began to treat the painting itself as an object. (What was rendered obsolete was a Classically-ordered mimesis.¹⁸) John Berger, who argues convincingly that we live still within the Cubist “moment,” writes:

Cézanne’s incredible struggle was to find some system of order which could embrace the whole of nature and its constant changes. Against his wishes this struggle forced him to abandon the order of the static viewpoint, to admit that human consciousness was subject to the same dialectical laws as nature. And the Cubists continued from where he stopped, rejecting the Renaissance because they were aiming at the same end with quite different means. Even today the process is incomplete, the solution only partial.¹⁹

All of this makes Brion Gysin’s statement, “Writing is at least fifty years behind painting,” appropriate. Burroughs’ likening of the modern reaction against cut-up to the attacks Parisians once made upon Cézanne’s canvasses is also logical.

Burroughs is aware that no matter how cut up a virus is, it is quite good at reassembling itself. He often filters his texts through several cut-up procedures. Of course, in the end, cut-up may prove to be only the most provisional of measures. And always they’re screaming: “DON’T FUCK with the tissue, Dr. Frankenstein!” (The artist Stelarc suspends himself in the air by hooks inserted into the body. His is a stretched-skin suspension art. He claims that the grotesque, stretched epidermis achieved in such works is “proof of the body’s unnatural position in space.”²⁰) But we are now well acquainted with Burroughs’ consuming desire to somehow gnaw his way back, like a trapped animal through its own flesh, to a bone of pre-recording:

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly —

(Signed) Inspector J. Lee,
Nova Police²¹

“Now you understand about time? After a certain point you can’t go on feeding the past; too much past and not enough present because ‘present time’ is the point where the image virus of past time finds traction in the present host.”²² “To achieve complete freedom from past conditioning is to be in space … I would say our destiny, if we’re going anywhere, by and large our spiritual destiny is in space … “²³ So, what of the weapons of the Nova Police? Of the good Inspector? How are they allegorized? E.g.:

… “First we would have to synthesize the apomorphine formulae [Apomorphine is a derivative of morphine and affects the hypothalamus in such a way as to stabilize the metabolism.] — As you know it is forbidden to do this.”

“And for very good reason is it not, Winkhorst?”

“Yes — Apomorphine combats parasite invasion by stimulating the regulatory centers to normalize metabolism — A powerful variation of this drug could deactivate all verbal units and blanket the earth in silence, disconnecting the entire heat syndrome.”

“You could do this Mr. Winkhorst?”

“It would not be easy — certain technical details and so little time … the disposal problem of radioactive waste in any time universe is ultimately insoluble.”

“But if we disintegrate verbal units, that is, vaporize the containers, then the explosion could not take place in effect would never have exist.”

“Perhaps — I am a chemist not a prophet …”²⁴

Burroughs’ research into an apomorphine elixir, as bottled in Nova Express, consists of cut-up and a large measure of vintage allegory and parody cut with irony which has the effect of calling into question, moment by vertiginous moment, the very (un)reality of the allegorical and parodical matrix that serves as its ground. A number of oblique lines of tension are drawn by these devices and their contrasting modes of time truthing coexisting in and co-defining / destroying the sci-fi / detective genre space (the hook). Of course, accenting these very special potentials of “narrative time” and putting them to the specific task Burroughs does exposes the virus. Burroughs’ apomorphine solution blocks any crippling congealing of time or image by relentlessly exposing the con, and what is finally created is a wholly artificial mirror space or field (more precisely a mirror fashioned by artifice, reflecting only that which is virtually present, namely, the cognizant reader) wherein the wised-up self might observe itself ricochet from one ridiculous existential horror to the next, where what’s “next” might be anything from that which has already been introduced subliminally via cut-up to being suddenly possessed by the “I” of a character created novels ago in the Burroughsian corpus to some in-parody denouement. “To achieve freedom from past conditioning is to be in space…”

Nova Express is a cage that rattles itself. It is a construct that deconstructs itself. It is a (post)modern experiment that aims at liberating the body (Stelarc refers to that aspect of his self that participates in the stretched-skin suspension works as “the body”) from infection. It is quite simply one of the finest allegories and satires ever conceived.

Endnotes

1 William Burroughs, Nova Express (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 54.

2 ibid., p. 68.

3 ibid., p. 52.

4 ibid., p. 12.

5 ibid., p. 54.

6 Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 218.

7 Burroughs, op. cit., p. 14.

8 ibid., p. 17.

9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1944), pp. 20, 21, 29, 40.

10 Burroughs, op. cit., p. 21.

11 De Man, op. cit., p. 226.

12 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 280.

13 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 19.

14 ibid., p. 26.

15 ibid., p. 39.

16 ibid., p. 19.

17 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 114-115.

18 I am indebted to the following works for some of the ideas contained in this paragraph: Alan Bowness, Modern European Art (Singapore: Hudson and Thames, 1972), and Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson”, in Representations, No. 18, Spring, 1987 (California: University Press).

19 John Berger, “The Cubist Moment”, Permanent Red (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Inc., 1960), p. 172.

20 C. Carr, “Before and After Science”, Village Voice, 31 July 1984, pp. 77-8.

21 Burroughs, op. cit., p. 14.

22 Burroughs, “Who is the Third that Walks Beside You?”, The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1984), p. 44.

23 Daniel Odier, The Job (New York: Grove Press, 1970), Preface.

24 Burroughs, Nova Express, pp. 40-41.

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

New York: Grove Press 1964, first edition and one of 10,000 copies, hardbound in dust jacket. Maynard & Miles A10a. A new work, part of which was written in collaboration with Ian Sommerville, and part of which uses the “fold-in” method of rearranging text, a variation of Gysin’s cut-up method.

New York: Black Cat 1965, first wraps edition, Maynard & Miles A10b.

London: Jonathan Cape 1966, first British edition and one of 10,000 copies, hardbound in dust jacket. Maynard & Miles A10c.

London: Panther Books 1968, first British softbound edition. Maynard & Miles A10d.

_____ 1969, second UK softbound printing with new wraps design. Maynard & Miles A10e.

_____ 1972, third UK softbound printing with new wraps design. Maynard & Miles A10f.

London: Granada 1978, first thus British edition in wraps.

London: Panther 1982, new British edition in wraps.

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

William S. Burroughs

Biologic Agent K9 called for his check and picked up supersonic imitation blasts of The Death Dwarfs — “L’addition — Laddition — Laddittion — Garcon — Garcon — Garcon” — American tourist accent to the Nth power — He ordered another coffee and monitored the café — A whole table of them imitating word forms and spitting back at supersonic speed — Several patrons rolled on the floor in switch fits — These noxious dwarfs can spit out a whole newspaper in ten seconds imitating your words after you and sliding in suggestion insults — That is the entry gimmick of The Death Dwarfs: supersonic imitation and playback so you think it is your own voice — (do you own a voice?) they invade The Right Centers which are The Speech Centers and they are in the right — in the right — in thee write — “RIGHT” — “I’m in the right — in the right — You know I’m in the right so long as you hear me say inside your right centers ‘I am in the right'” — While Sex Dwarfs tenderize erogenous holes — So The Venusian Gook Rot flashed round the world —

Agent K9 was with The Biologic Police assigned to bring the Dwarf Plague under control by disconnecting the dwarfs from Central Control Station: The Insect Brain of Minraud enclosed in a crystal cylinder from which run the cold wires to an array of calculating machines feeding instructions to The Death Dwarf In The Street — The brain is surrounded by Crab Guards charged from the Thermodynamic Pain and Energy Bank — Crab Guards can not be attacked directly since they are directly charged by attack — K9 had been in combat with The Crab Guards and he knew what can happen if they get their claws on your nerve centres —

K9 left the café and surveying the street scene he could not but feel that someone had goofed — The Death Dwarfs had in many cases been separated from the human host but they were still charged from Central Control and yacked through the streets imitating words and gestures of everyone in sight — While Sex Dwarfs squirmed out of any cover with a perfunctory, “Hello there,” in anyone who stood for it, dissolved erogenous holes immediately attacked by The Talk Dwarfs so that in a few seconds the unfortunate traveller was torn to pieces which the dwarfs snatch from each other’s mouth with shrill silver screams — In fact the noxious behavior of this life form harried the citizens beyond endurance and everyone carried elaborate home-made contrivances for screening out the Talk Dwarfs and a special plastic cover to resist erogenous acids of the Sex Dwarfs —

Without hesitation K9 gave the order: “Release Silence Virus — Blanket area” — So The Silence Sickness flashed round the world at speed of light — As a result many citizens who had been composed entirely or work went ape straight away and screamed through the streets attacking the passers-by who in many cases went ape in turn as The Silence Sickness hit — To combat these conditions, described as “intolerable,” political leaders projected stern noble image from control towers and some could occupy and hold up the ape forms for a few days or weeks — Invariably the leader was drained by the gravity of unregenerate apes, torn in pieces by his relapsing constituents, or went ape himself on TV — So the Survivors as they call themselves lived in continual dread of resistant dwarfs always more frantic from host hunger — Knowing that at any minute the man next to you in the street might go Mandril and leap your your throat with virginal canines — K9 shrugged and put in a call for Technicians — “The error in enemy strategy is now obvious — It is machine strategy and the machine can be redirected — Have written connection in The Soft Typewriter the machine can only repeat your instructions since it can not create anything — The operation is very technical — Look at a photomontage — It makes a statement in flexible picture language — Let us call the statement made by a given photomontage X — We can use X words X colors X odors X images and so forth to define the various aspects of X — Now we feed X into the calculating machine and X scans out related colors, juxtapositions, affect- charged images and so forth we can attenuate or concentrate X by taking out or adding elements and feeding back into the machine factors we wish to concentrate — A Technician learns to think and write in association blocks which can then be manipulated according to the laws of association and juxtaposition — The basic law of association and conditioning is known to college students even in America: Any object, feeling, odor, word, image in juxtaposition with any other object feeling, odor, word or image will be associated with it — Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content — We express these statements in Juxtaposition Formulae — The Formulae of course control populations of the world — Yes it is fairly easy to predict what people will think see feel and hear a thousand years from now if you write the Juxtaposition Formulae to be used in that period — But the technical details you understand and the machines — all of which contain basic flaws and must be continually overhauled, checked, altered whole block of computing machines purged and disconnected from one minute to the next — fast our mind waves and long counts — And let me take this opportunity of replying to the criticisms of my creeping opponents — It is not true that I took part in or instigated experiments defining pain and pleasure thresholds — I used abstract reports of the experiments to evolve the formulae of pain and pleasure association that control this planet — I assume no more responsibility than a physicist working from material presented to an immobilized brain — I have constructed a physics of the human nervous system or more accurately the human nervous system defines the physics I have constructed — Of course I can construct another system working on quite different principals — Pain is a quantitative factor — So is pleasure — I had material from purge trials and concentration camps and reports from Nagasaki and Hiroshima defining the limits of courage — Our most precise data came from Lexington Ky. where the drug addicts of America are processed — The pain of heroin withdrawal in the addict lends itself perfectly to testing under control conditions — Pain is quantitative to degree of addiction and stage of withdrawal and is quantitatively relieved by cell-blanketing agents — With pain and pleasure limits defined and the juxtaposition formulae set up it is fairly easy to predict what people will think in a thousand years or as long as the formulae remain in operation — I can substitute other formulae if I am permitted to do so — No one has given much thought to building a qualitative mathematics — My formulae saw to that — Now here is a calculating machine — Of course it can process qualitative data — Color for example — I feed into the machine a blue photo passes to the Blue Section and a hundred or a thousand blue photos rustle out while the machine plays blues in a blue smell of ozone blue words of all the poets flow out on ticker tape — Or feed in a thousand novels and scan out the last pages — That is quality is it not? Endingness?”

“Green Tony squealed and I’m off for Galaxy X — ”

“The whole mob squealed — Now we can move in for some definitive arrests — Set arrest machinery in operation — Cover all agents and associations with juxtaposition formulae — Put out scanning patterns through coordinate points of the earth for Mrs. & Mrs. D — Top Nova Criminals — Through mind screens of the earth covering coordinate points blocking D out of a hand a mouth a cold sore — Silver antibiotic handcuffs fitting D virus filters and — Lock — Click — We have made that arrest — You will understand why all concepts of revenge or moral indignation must be excised from a biologic police agent — We are not here to keep this tired old injustice show on the road but to stop it short of Nova — ”

“Nova — Nova — Nova — ” shriek the Death Dwarfs — “Arrest good kind Mr. D? — Why he paid for my hernia operation — ”

“That did it — Releases Silence Virus — Blanket Area — ”

“Thinking in association blocks instead of words enables the operator to process data with the speed of light on the association line — Certain alterations are of course essential — ”

William S. Burroughs

They do not have what they call “emotion’s oxygen” in the atmosphere. The medium in which animal life breathes is not in that soulless place — Yellow plains under white hot blue sky — Metal cities controlled by The Elders who are heads in bottles — Fastest brains preserved forever — Only form of immortality open to the Insect People of Minraud — An intricate bureaucracy wired to the control brains directs all movement — Even so there is a devious underground operating through telepathic misdirection and camouflage — The partisans make recordings ahead in time and leave the recordings to be picked up by control stations while they are free for a few seconds to organize underground activities — Largely the underground is made up of adventurers who intend to outthink and displace the present heads — There has been one revolution in the history of Minraud — Purges are constant — Fallen heads destroyed in The Ovens and replaced with others faster and sharper to evolve more total weapons — The principal weapon of Minraud is of course heat — In the centre of all their cities stand The Ovens where those who disobey the control brains are brought for total disposal — A conical structure of iridescent metal shimmering heat from the molten core of a planet where lead melts at noon — The Brass And Copper Streets surround The Oven — Here the tinkers and smiths work pounding out metal rhythms as prisoners and criminals are led to Disposals — The Oven Guards are red crustacean men with eyes like the white hot sky — Through contact with oven pain and captured enemies they sometimes mutate to breathe in emotions — They often help prisoners to escape and a few have escaped with the prisoners –

(When K9 entered the apartment he felt the suffocation of Minraud crushing his chest stopping his thoughts — He turned on reserve ate dinner and carried conversation — When he left the host walked out with him down the streets of Minraud past the ovens empty and cold now — calm dry mind of the guide beside him came to the corner of 14th and Third –

“I must go now,” said the guide — “Otherwise it will be too far to go alone.”
He smiled and held out his hand fading in the alien air — )

K9 was brought to the ovens by red guards in white and gold robe of office through the Brass and Copper Street under pounding metal hammers — The oven heat drying up life source as white hot metal lattice closed around him –

“Second exposure — Time three point five,” said the guard –

K9 walked out into The Brass and Copper Streets — A slum area of vending booths and smouldering slag heaps crossed by paths worn deep in phosphorescent metal — In a square littered with black bones he encountered a group of five scorpion men — Faces of transparent pink cartilage burning inside — stinger dripping the oven poison — Their eyes flared with electric hate and they slithered forward to surround him but drew back at sight of the guard –

They walked on into an area of tattoo booths and sex parlors — A music like wind through fine metal wires bringing a measure of relief from the terrible dry heat — Black beetle musicians saw this music out of the air swept by continual hot winds from plains that surrounded the city — The plains are dotted with villages of conical paper-thin metal houses where a patient gentle crab people live unmolested in the hottest regions of the planet –

Controller of the Crab Nebula on a slag heap of smouldering metal under the white hot sky channels all his pain into control thinking — He is protected by heat and crab guards and the brains armed now with The Blazing Photo from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — The brains under his control are encased in a vast structure of steel and crystal spinning thought patterns that control whole galaxies thousand years ahead on the chessboard of virus screens and juxtaposition formulae –

So the Insect People of Minraud formed an alliance with the Virus Power of the Vegetable People to occupy planet earth — The gimmick is reverse photosynthesis — The Vegetable People suck up oxygen and all equivalent sustenance of animal life — Always the colorless sheets between you and what you see taste smell eat — And these green vegetable junkies slowly using up your oxygen to stay on the nod in carbon dioxide –

When K9 entered the café he felt the colorless smell of the vegetable people closing round him taste and sharpness gone from the food people blurring in slow motion fade out — And there was a whole tank full of vegetable junkies breathing it all in — He clicked some reverse combos through the pinball machine and left the café — In the street citizens were yacking like supersonic dummies — The SOS addicts had sucked up all the silence in the area were now sitting around in blue blocks of heavy metal the earth’s crust buckling ominously under the their weight — He shrugged: “Who am I to be critical?”

He knew what it meant to kick an SOS habit: White hot agony of thawing metal — And the suffocating panic of carbon dioxide withdrawal –

Virus defined as three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller — Transparent sheets with virus perforations like punch cards passed through the host on the soft machine feeling for a point of intersection — The virus attack is primarily directed against affective animal life — Virus of rage hate fear ugliness swirling round you waiting for a point of intersection and once in immediately perpetrates in your name some ugly noxious or disgusting act sharply photographed and recorded becomes now part of the virus sheets constantly presented and represented before your mind screen to produce more virus word and image around and around it’s all around you the invisible hail of bring down word and image –

What does virus do wherever it can dissolve a hole and find traction? — It starts eating — And what does it do with what it eats? — It makes exact copies of itself that start eating to make more copies that start eating to make more copies that start eating and so forth to the virus power the fear hate virus slowly replaces the host with virus copies — Program empty body — A vast tapeworm of bring down word and image moving through your mind screen always at the same speed on a slow hydraulic-spine axis like the cylinder gimmick in the adding machine — How do you make someone feel stupid? — You present to him all the times he talked and acted and felt stupid again and again any number of times fed into the combo of the soft calculating machine geared to find more and more punch cards and feed in more and more images of stupidity disgust propitiation grief apathy death — The recordings leave electromagnetic patterns — That is any situation that causes rage will magnetize rage patterns and draw around the rage word and image recording — Or some disgusting sex practice once the connection is made in childhood whenever the patterns are magnetized by sex desire the same word and image will be presented — And so forth — The counter move is very simple — This is machine strategy and the machine can be redirected — Record for ten minutes on a tape recorder — Now run the tape back without playing and cut in other words at random — Where you have cut in and re-recorded words are wiped off the tape and new words in their place — You have turned time back ten minutes and wiped electromagnetic word patterns off the tape and substituted other patterns — You can do the same with mind tape after working with the tape recorder — (This takes some experimentation) — The old mind tapes can be wiped clean — Magnetic word dust falling from old patterns — Word falling — Photo falling — “Last week Robert Kraft of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories reported some answers to the riddle of exploding stars — Invariably he found the exploding star was locked by gravity to a nearby star — The two stars are in a strange symbiotic relationship — One is a small hot blue star — (Mr. Bradly) Its companion is a larger red star — (Mr. Martin) — Because the stellar twins are so close together the blue star continually pulls fuel in the form of hydrogen into an incandescent figure eight — One circle of the eight encloses one star — The other circle encloses the other — supplied with new fuel the blue star ignites.” — Quote, Newseek, Feb. 12, 1962 –

The Crab Nebula observed by the Chinese in 1054 A.D. is the result of a supernova or exploding star — Situated approximately three thousand light years from the earth — (Like three thousand years in hot claws at the window — You got it? -) — Before they blow up a star they have a spot picked out as many light years away as possible — Then they start draining all the fuel and charge to the new pitch and siphon themselves there right after and on their way rejoicing — You notice we don’t have as much time as people had say a hundred years ago? — Take your clothes to the laundry write a letter pick up your mail at American Express and the day is gone — They are short-timing us as many light years as they can take for the getaway — It seems that there were survivors on The Crab Pitch who are not in all respects reasonable men — And The Nova Law moving in fast — So they start the same old lark sucking all the charge and air and color to a new location and then? — Sput — You notice something is sucking all the flavor out of food the pleasure out of sex the color out of everything in sight? — Precisely creating the low pressure area that leads to nova — So they move cross the wounded galaxies always a few light years ahead of the Nova Heat — That is they did — The earth was our set — And they walked right into the antibiotic handcuffs — It will readily be seen that having created one nova they must make other or answer for the first — I mean three thousand years in hot claws at the window like a giant crab in slag heaps of smouldering metal — Also the more novas the less time between they are running out of pitches — So they bribe the natives with a promise of transportation and immortality –

“Yeah, man flesh and junk and charge stacked up bank vaults full of it — Three thousand years of flesh — So we leave the bloody apes behind and on our way rejoicing right? — It’s the only way to live -”

And the smart operators fall for it every fucking time — talk about marks — One of our best undercover operators is known as The Rube — He perfected The Reverse Con — Comes on honest and straight and the smart operators all think they are conning him — How could they think otherwise until he slips on the antibiotic handcuffs —

“There’s a wise guy born every minute,” he says. “Closing time gentlemen — The stenographer will take your depositions -”

“So why did I try to blow up the planet? — Pea under the shell — Now you see it now you don’t — Sky shift to cover the last pitch — Take it all out with us and hit the road — I am made of metal and that metal is radioactive — Radioactivity can be absorbed up to a point but radium clock hands tick away — Time to move on — Only one turnstile — Heavy planet — Travel with Minraud technicians to handle the switchboard and Venusians to make flesh and keep the show on the road — Then The Blazing Photo and we travel on — Word is flesh and word is two that is the human body is compacted of two organisms and where you have two you have word and word is flesh and when they started tampering with the word that was it and the blockade was broken and The Nova Heat moved in — The Venusians sang first naturally they were in the most immediate danger — They live underwater in the body with an air line — And that air line is the word — Then the technicians spilled and who can blame them after the conditions I assigned to keep them technicians — Like three thousand years in hot claws — So I am alone as always — You understand nova is where I am born in such pain no one else survives in one piece — Born again and again cross the wounded galaxies — I am alone but not what you call ‘lonely’ — Loneliness is a product of dual mammalian structure — ‘Loneliness,’ ‘love,’ ‘friendship,’ all of the rest of it — I am not two — I am one — But to maintain my state of oneness I need twoness in other life forms — Other must talk so that I can remain silent — If another becomes one then I am two — That makes two ones make two and I am no longer one — Plenty of room in space you say? — But I am not one in space I am one in time — Metal time — Radioactive time — So of course I tried to keep you all out of space — That is the end of time — And those who were allowed out sometimes for special services like creating a useful religious concept went always with a Venusian guard — All the ‘mystics’ and ‘saints’ — All except my old enemy Hassan I Sabbah who wised up the marks to space and sad they could be one and need no guard no other half no word –

“And now I have something to say to all you angle boys of the cosmos who thought you had an in with the Big Operators — ‘Suckers! Cunts! Marks! — I hate you all — And I never intended to cut you in or pay you off with anything but horse shit — And you can thank The Rube if you don’t go up with the apes — Is that clear enough or shall I make it even clearer? You are the sucker cunts marks I invented to explode this dead whistle stop and go up with it –‘”