Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  I was interested in this because it was 1950 or so, and this is Burroughs’s take on the beginnings of a whole new generation of hippies that were slowly beginning to coagulate in the United States.

  I remembered the way Marvin used to pass out every time he took a shot. I could see him lying on the bed in some cheap hotel, the dropper full of blood hanging to his vein like a glass leech, his face turned blue around the lips.110

  This is precise writing. I could never understand how Burroughs got so smart in that way. “The face turning blue around the lips.” Who would know that except somebody who had some real intelligent medical experience? Also, “the dropper full of blood hanging to his vein like a glass leech.” I can see him lying on the bed, so it’s a visual image that he has, a visual impression.

  Detective prose is reflected all through the prose of Junkie. In those days it was not considered a classic as it is today, it was considered some kind of confessional work. They thought it might sell copies if they put a horrible cover on it of a wild-looking addict slashing at the arm of a young pretty girl with big tits. Then on the other side is a companion volume, Confessions of a Narc, just so the publisher wouldn’t get into trouble, they were literally afraid of censorship. They even put in a little footnote saying, “Reputable professors or doctors do not agree with the statements of the author.” You would never do that in a book now.

  CHAPTER 20

  Burroughs and Korzybski

  In 1945 I got into a long, long discussion with Lucien Carr about “What is art?” My idea was that art had to be social, because I was sort of a young communist. Lucien said that art was for art’s sake, that art was self-ultimate. For weeks at Columbia we argued about the proposition, “If somebody carved a walking stick, was it art? And if you carved it and it was put on the moon and nobody ever saw it, would that be art? Or does art need someone to see it to be art?” We spent weeks arguing this over, consulting Kerouac, and finally we took it to Burroughs, and he said, “This is the most stupid argument I ever heard in my life. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Art is a three letter word, [it is] whatever you define it as. If you want to define that as art, then you define it as art. If you don’t want to use that word for that situation, then you don’t. But to argue whether the thing is art, or isn’t art, is obviously a confusion in terms.”

  It shows how people get tangled up in language and think that problems are real which are just verbal constructions. People think they are unable to untangle them, because they have gotten confused and think that the words have a real reference.

  Burroughs was always smart like that. He had studied with Alfred Korzybski, the author of Science and Sanity, which is a basic text, a foundation of the study of semantics. Bill gave me a copy of the book and it all boiled down to the fact that you mustn’t confuse the word with the thing it refers to and get tangled up, because if you do then you can get into all sorts of [trouble]. Korzybski founded the theory of general semantics, which is the simple Zen thing of the word not being the same as the thing it represents. This [pointing to a wooden table] is not a table, table is T-A-B-L-E, a five-letter word. The word “table” is not identical with this [pointing again to the table]. Most questions like, “Is homosexuality natural?” are like that. What do you mean by the word “natural” and what do you mean by the word “homosexuality”? To begin with, the Moral Majority people, when they use the word “natural,” mean something entirely different from biologists. Most arguments turn out to be purely semantic confusion. That was the smartest thing about Burroughs.

  If you’re liberated from language, you no longer confuse language, words, with the things they represent. Then words become independent objects floating in your brain and you can combine them in amazing unreasonable combinations, like Gregory [Corso] does in making discords. Forget about the world and just mess around with words, that gives a certain amount of freedom. Since most of our thinking process is in words, our thinking about reality is built into the way we’ve been taught words. Our vision of the universe is pretty much what the words in our head say it’s supposed to be like. Two and two’s four, good is good, bad is bad, a stove is a stove, a stove is not on the roof. What happens to consciousness if you cut loose from words, if you begin to loosen up the words or the arrangement of words as they have been arranged in your consciousness?

  CHAPTER 21

  Burroughs and the Visual

  The reason I brought that out was that I had a conversation with Burroughs about how he thought. He said the reason he was so much into the Korzybski idea was that he himself thought primarily in pictures rather than in words. Now, I think primarily in words, “subconscious gossip,” as the Buddhists call it. Many writers write from that gossip. Burroughs instead writes from pictures. Things like “I could see him lying on the bed in some cheap hotel, the dropper full of blood, hanging to his vein like a glass leech, his face turning blue around the lips.” His thinking process is primarily visualization rather than verbalization, so his writing is cinematic. He’s always been having pictorial flashes, or a cinematic montage in his head, rather than ideas. Rather than composition of ideas or beautiful sounds as in Kerouac, Burroughs’s mentality is picture mind.

  William Carlos Williams said that what he’d like to do was to squeeze pictures down into little lines. Poetry to him was taking a picture and squeezing it into short lines. At the moment of writing Kerouac said, “Don’t stop to think of the right words, stop to see the picture better.” Don’t stop to think of the words, because then you just get tangled up in words. Stop to see the picture better, the words will rise accurately and spontaneously to relate to the picture. This is a useful thing for writers if you’re writing about something palpable, something that you can actually see. It serves as a corrective to bring you back to some dimension of reality that exists visually, rather than tones, attitudes, abstractions, or generalizations. The tendency toward generalization and nonpictorial generalization is the curse of writing. The discipline of coming back to precise sensory evidence and data, whether picture, sound, smell, taste, or touch, is the right direction. Toward tangibility is the right direction. Burroughs is one hundred percent tangible, visually tangible.

  In 1961, Bill was at his typewriter in Tangier, gazing into space with his hands poised over the keys, and I said, “What are you thinking about, Bill?” And he said, “Hands pulling in nets from the sea.” It was mystifying, because Bill had always contended from the forties on that, although most people thought in words, he himself thought in pictures. He said there are different modes of thinking. Some of Burroughs’s green Venusians think in vibration tones or colors, for example.

  When he said “hands pulling in nets from the sea,” I thought this was some high metaphysical thing about God pulling in the nets of souls from the eternal ocean. I was curious and said, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Oh, every morning the fishermen come down to the beach before dawn and pull in their nets.” He was just remembering hands pulling in nets from the sea.

  It sounded like something out Kahlil Gibran or Beethoven, it sounded more cosmic than it was, though the actuality’s just as cosmic as anything else you can imagine. Burroughs thinks in pictures. Gregory Corso was thinking, let us say, in discords. Gregory’s imagination strays, verbally, into opposites and discords. Kerouac broke up the solidity of phenomena by the constant realization that everything was phantom and so everything became transparent to him. Rigid language no longer dominated.

  CHAPTER 22

  Burroughs and The Yage Letters

  In the early fifties, Kerouac and I thought that Burroughs’s prose letters were brilliant and should be published. We all got together to read them over and edit them. I had my first acquaintance with South American politics through these letters.

  Jan. 30, 1953, Hotel Niza, Pasto

  Dear Al,

  I took a bus to Cali because the autoferro was booked solid for days. Several t
imes the cops shook down the bus and everybody on it. I had a gun in my luggage stashed under the medicines but they only searched my person at these stops. Obviously anyone carrying guns would bypass the stops or pack his guns where these sloppy laws wouldn’t search. All they accomplish with the present system is to annoy the citizens. I never met anyone in Colombia who has a good word for the Policia Nacional.

  The Policia Nacional is the Palace Guard of the Conservative Party (the army contains a good percentage of Liberals and is not fully trusted). This (the P.N.) is the most unanimously hideous body of young men I ever laid eyes on, my dear. They look like the end result of atomic radiation. There are thousands of these strange loutish young men in Colombia and I only saw one I would consider eligible and he looked ill at ease in his office.

  If there is anything to say for the Conservatives I didn’t hear it. They are an unpopular minority of ugly-looking shits.111

  This is a private insight, which doesn’t get into the newspapers, that the cops or the local government are an unpopular minority of ugly-looking shits. My whole view of Latin America was completely straightened out in that one sentence, instead of big arguments over who was liberal versus conservative and socialist versus dictators.

  At one custom stop I met a nacional law who had fought in Korea. He pulled open his shirt to show me the scars on his unappetizing person.

  “I like you guys,” he said.

  I never feel flattered by this promiscuous liking for Americans. It is insulting to individual dignity, and no good ever comes from these American lovers.112

  These are just nice photographs and snapshots and glimpses and vignettes and travel accounts, picaresque amusements, disillusioned to begin with.

  February 28, 1953

  Dear Allen:

  On my way back to Bogota with nothing accomplished. I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man).113

  He completely disillusioned me overnight about South American witch doctors.

  May 24

  Ho hum dept. Rolled again. My glasses and a pocket knife. Losing all my fucking valuables in the service.

  This is a nation of kleptomaniacs. In all my experience as a homosexual I have never been the victim of such idiotic pilferings of articles no conceivable use to anyone else. Glasses and traveller’s checks yet.

  Trouble is I share with the late Father Flanagan—he of Boy’s Town—the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.114

  Then a footnote. “Enclose a routine I dreamed up. The idea did come to me in a dream from which I woke up laughing,” Burroughs wrote. He thought it was funny and when I read it I thought that it was funny too. This first routine he sent was “Roosevelt After Inauguration.” I was a liberal in those days and still am a commie pinko of some sort, but when I got this, it was just outrageous and obviously funny. It was like Alfred Jarry’s Docteur Faustroll or Ubu Roi. It has some element of the school joke, but on the other hand it’s amazingly prophetic in terms of what actually goes on in politics.

  Another precursor of Naked Lunch and his later development is found in a letter from July 10, 1953. It was a letter that Robert Creeley thought was absolutely amazing and that Philip Whalen thought indicated that Burroughs was some extraordinary poet like Rimbaud or Saint-Jean Perse. It’s an account of an experience with yagé, an hallucinogenic vine.

  Dear Allen,

  Last night I took last of Yage mixture I brought back from Pucallpa. No use transporting to U.S. It doesn’t keep more than a few days. This morning, still high. This is what occurred to me. Yage is space time travel. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized passes through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants sprout out of the Rock and vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of the body), across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.

  Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle. A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass or play cryptic games. Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes in your room any time. The Chief of Police is Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the toothpick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-colored faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunk heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm.

  Behind them, through the open door, tables and booths, and bars and rooms and kitchens and baths, copulating couples on rows of brass beds, criss-cross of a thousand hammocks, junkies tying up, opium smokers, hashish smokers, people eating, talking, bathing, shitting back into a haze of smoke and steam.

  Gaming tables where the games are played for incredible stakes. From time to time a player leaps up with a despairing inhuman cry having lost his youth to an old man or become Latah to his opponent. But there are higher stakes than youth or Latah. Games where only two players in the world know what the stakes are.115

  That’s somewhat of an echo of his relationship with me. “Games where only two players in the world know what the stakes are.”

  Whenever you get blackout drunk you wake up with one of these diseased faceless citizens in your bed who has spent all night exhausting his ingenuity trying to infect you. But no one knows how the diseases are transmitted or indeed if they are contagious. These diseased beggars live in a maze of burrows under the City and pop out anywhere often pushing up through the floor of a crowded cafe.

  Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades doodling in etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, cut antibiotics, Tithonian longevity serum . . .

  Tithonus was granted immortality by the gods, but not eternal youth, so he was reduced to a mound of dust in a bottle with a consciousness still talking, “I want to die.” Tithonian longevity serum. Latah is a schizophrenic condition, where you break out screaming or cursing, or you do something that someone else does. If someone moves their hand, you move your hand in the same way.

  Tithonian longevity serum; black marketeers of World War III, pitchmen selling remedies for radiation sickness, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit taken down in hebephrenic shorthand, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states; a lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Begagut, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy; sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for the raw materials of the will; doctors skilled in treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human hosts, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit.

  A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities waiting for a live one.116

  A live one is the mark, the john, the host to the virus. That’s an amazing piece of prose, I always thought. You have almost all of Naked Lunch and all of his subsequent writing in this one brilliant section called “Interzone.” It’s amazing, the phrasing in it is brilliant, “their faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm.”

  By 1953 Burroughs had already developed the first embryonic routines that were later
to become the passages of “Interzone,” all about a future city of totally degenerated civilizations. Many forms of civilization were mixed up, somewhat like Tangier, crossroads not just east and west, but crossroads of future and past. “Interzone” was first conceived on East 7th Street as Burroughs looked out of the window of my apartment. He had seen a lady reach out of her window and start pulling in the laundry across backyard courtyards on lines going from building to building. He began to imagine a futuristic city which would [consist of] catwalks and boardwalks and fire escapes, a great labyrinth where people would all live in different alleyways, hallways, bathrooms, broom closets, a city so old that it had been rebuilt layer upon layer and one building was built upon another building. That developed into the notion of a city which was like the sound of a vibrating soundless hum, and many larval entities waiting for a live one, unborn.

  There is an inspiration for this, a precursor, which is Anabase [i.e., Anabasis, in English] of Saint-John Perse. This is where Burroughs got the method. If you are familiar with Rimbaud you will recognize some of that and then Rimbaud’s follower in the twentieth century, Saint-John Perse, who wrote a book called Anabasis translated by T. S. Eliot. It is prose poetry and you may get some sense of Burroughs’s theme from it. Burroughs’s whole method comes straight from Rimbaud and Saint-John Perse in Anabasis.

  As you may remember one of the Transcendentalists in the nineteenth century, Bronson Alcott, brought back all sorts of oriental texts as well as hermetic writings, which are comparable to Buddhist texts. Whitman cites from the selection. The Transcendentalists took their name from the study of Indian religion, Hindu, Muslim, transmigration of all things. You had that same extensive expansiveness and vastness as a motif in Walt Whitman. Then, amazingly, all through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are references to Krishna, to Arjuna, to basic Buddhist notions. At the end of the poem we hear Sanskrit chanting eighty years after the Transcendentalists, which was oriental mind changed into Yankee letters. Remember the end of The Waste Land is “Give, sympathise, control.”