He walked through—Summer dust—stirring St. Louis schoolrooms—a brass bed—Cigarette smoke—urine as in the sun—Soccer scores and KiKi when I woke up—Such wisdom in gusts—empty spaces—Fjords and Chimborazi—Brief moments I could describe to the barrier—Pursuits of future life where boy’s dawn question is far away—What’s St. Louis or any conveyor distance? St. Louis on this brass bed? Comte Wladmir Sollohub Rashid Ali Khan B Bremond d’Ars Marquis de Migre Principe di Castelcicale Gentilhomo di Palazzo you’re a long way from St. Louis. . . . Let me tell you about a score of years’ dust on the window that afternoon I watched the torn sky bend with the wind . . . white white white as far as the eye can see ahead a blinding flash of white . . . (The cabin reeks of exploded star). . . . Broken sky through my nostrils—Dead bare knee against the greasy dust—Faded photo drifting down across pubic hair, thighs, rose wallpaper into the streets of Pasto—The urinals and the bicycle races here in this boy were gone when I woke up—Whiffs of my Spain down the long empty noon—Brief moments I could describe—The great wind revolving lips and pants in countries of the world—Last soldier’s fading—Violence is shut off Mr. Bradly Mr.—I am dying in a room far away—last—Sad look—Mr. Of The Account, I am dying—In other flesh now Such dying—Remember hints as we shifted windows the visiting moon air like death in your throat?—The great wind revolving lip smoke, fading photo and distance—Whispers of junk, flute walks, shirt flapping—Bicycle races here at noon—boy thighs—Sad—Lost dog—He had come a long way for something not exchanged . . . sad shrinking face. . . . He died during the night. . . .
CLOM FLIDAY
I have said the basic techniques of nova are very simple consist in creating and aggravating conflicts—“No riots like injustice directed between enemies”—At any given time recorders fix nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons—Like this: Collect and record violent Anti-Semitic statements—Now play back to Jews who are after Belsen—Record what they say and play it back to the Anti-Semites—Clip clap—You got it?—Want more?—Record white supremacy statements—Play to Negroes—Play back answer—Now The Women and The Men—No riots like injustice directed between “enemies”—At any given time position of recorders fixes nature of absolute need—And dictates the use of total weapons—So leave the recorders running and get your heavy metal ass in a space ship—Did it—Nothing here now but the recordings—Shut the whole thing right off—Silence—When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running—The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or to answer—Don’t answer the machine—Shut it off—
“The Subliminal Kid” took over streets of the world—Cruise cars with revolving turrets telescope movie lenses and recorders sweeping up sound and image of the city around and around faster and faster cars racing through all the streets of image record, take, play back, project on walls and windows people and sky—And slow moving turrets on slow cars and wagons slower and slower record take, play back, project slow motion street scene—Now fast—Now slow—slower—Stop—Shut off—No More—My writing arm is paralyzed—No more junk scripts, no more word scripts, no more flesh scripts—He all went away—No good—No bueno—Couldn’t reach flesh—No glot, Clom Fliday—Through invisible door—Adios Meester William, Mr. Bradly, Mr. Martin—
I have said the basic techniques creating and aggravating conflict officers—At any given time dictate total war of the past—Changed place of years in the end is just the same—I have said the basic techniques of Nova reports are now ended—Wind spirits melted between “enemies”—Dead absolute need dictates use of throat bones—On this green land recorders get your heavy summons and are melted—Nothing here now but the recordings may not refuse vision in setting forth—Silence—Don’t answer—That hospital melted into air—The great wind revolving turrets towers palaces—Insubstantial sound and image flakes fall—Through all the streets time for him to forbear—Best be he on walls and windows people and sky—On every part of your dust falling softly—falling in the dark mutinous “No more”—My writing arm is paralyzed on this green land—Dead Hand, no more flesh scripts—Last door—Shut off Mr. Bradly Mr.—He heard your summons—Melted into air—You are yourself “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin—” all the living and the dead—You are yourself—There be—
Well that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks . . . fresh southerly winds a long time ago.
September 17, 1899, over New York
July 21, 1964
Tangier, Morocco
INSPECTOR LEE: NOVA HEAT
inspector lee: nova heat
by james grauerholz
From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, Burroughs’ work was splintered between his cut-up experiments, his novel-length prose works, and his contributions to magazines. He had two chief concerns: to explain his artistic method as clearly as possible, and to foster and enlarge the kind of cultural and political revolution to which he was an eyewitness in the latter 1960s. This period of exhortation was a logical extension of Burroughs’ literary work of the early 1960s, but it took him away from book-length fiction. In keeping with his visionary stance at this time, Burroughs focused on publishing his literary “experiments” and his opinions, responding to growing editorial interest.
Throughout the period 1962-65, Burroughs kept up a wide correspondence with “underground magazine” publishers in the U.S., England, and Europe; Joe Maynard and Barry Miles’ bibliography (University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 1973) lists sixty-nine little-magazine first appearances in those four years. These and other occasional pieces from the early 1960s would be gathered in various collections, such as The White Subway (Aloes Books, London, 1973), Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (Urgency Press Rip-Off, Brighton, 1973), and Die Alten Filme (The Old Movies) (Maro Verlag, Augsberg, 1979).
Currently, the definitive collection of this material is The Burroughs File, published by City Lights in 1984. It includes White Subway, Die Alten Filme, a selection of Burroughs’ early-1960s scrapbook collage pages, The Retreat Diaries (City Moon, New York, 1976) and Cobble Stone Gardens (Cherry Valley Editions, New York, 1976). Six short excerpts from The Burroughs File are here, including the “St. Louis Return” article that was rejected by Playboy and later published in The Paris Review’ “Writers at Work” series, along with an interview by Conrad Knickerbocker.
In 1964 and 1965, Burroughs lived mostly in New York, working with Brion Gysin on The Third Mind. Richard Seaver, Burroughs’ editor at Grove Press, was disheartened to realize that Grove could not afford to publish this four-color artbook. But by late 1978 Seaver was at Viking Press, and Burroughs and Gysin agreed to allow him to publish the texts of The Third Mind with only a few of the collage pages, in black and white. Flammarion had published a similar edition in Paris in 1974, as Oeuvre Croisée. The four texts included here present the fundamentals of the Burroughs-Gysin cut-up theory.
Here also are several key passages from The Job, a work which began in 1968 as a series of interviews with the French writer Daniel Odier, but which Burroughs elaborated with numerous additional writings before the U.S. publication in 1970 by Grove Press. Everything included here is from Burroughs’ added texts; none of the interview material is used. Burroughs’ “Electronic Revolution” is a media-desensitization and counterattack manifesto, an open call to arms against the Control Machine. (One may refer back to “the invisible generation” chapter in The Ticket That Exploded, for the origins of these ideas in 1961.)
In The Job, Burroughs stakes out his most explicitly misogynistic theories, and in the most absolute terms. Burroughs did prefer the society of men and the sexuality of adolescent boys, and his childhood experiences with his Welsh nanny probably poisoned his perception of women. But it was his partnership with Brion Gysin that developed this philosophy to its ultimate extreme, for Gysin was a true misogynist. In the 1970s, when Burroughs
returned to the U.S. and Gysin remained in Paris, Burroughs retreated considerably from the stark misogyny of this period.
“Remembering Jack Kerouac,” written after Kerouac’s death in October 1969 (and collected in The Adding Machine), shows Burroughs’ affection and respect for his old friend and his appreciation of Kerouac’s achievement. Kerouac never foresaw, nor did he welcome, the cultural movement that formed around his work, but Burroughs saw it clearly enough, and he approved of it; after all, he had self-consciously launched a movement of his own. But the cut-ups were a self-limiting literary technique, and before long Burroughs realized he had written himself into a corner. Through the late 1960s he was developing a new approach as he worked on The Wild Boys. “The Bay of Pigs,” a fragment written in 1970-72 and not published in the U.S. until 1984 (in The Burroughs File), presents characters and story ideas that point the way to his next period, the Red Night Trilogy.
A few essays were collected in 1979 in City Lights’ Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities. “When Did I Stop Wanting to Be President?” was one of Burroughs’ favorite reading pieces in the late 1970s; his no-nonsense answer to this roundup question (“at birth, certainly, if not before!”) was published in 1975 in Harper’s magazine alongside the responses of several other people, none of whom had ever stopped wanting to be president—including Ronald Reagan. And Burroughs’ new, mid-1970s introduction to the 1953 “Roosevelt” routine offers an explicit statement of his central moral paradox: the metaphysical innocence of survival at any cost, as in the animal kingdom.
Soon after Burroughs’ return to New York in early 1974, the editors of Crawdaddy invited him to contribute a monthly column to the rock magazine. “Time of the Assassins” (named after a poem by Arthur Rimbaud) ran for two years. From these columns, the texts for Burroughs’ CCNY classes in spring 1974, and some lectures he gave at Naropa and in Europe in the early 1980s, The Adding Machine was assembled in 1982; it was published by Seaver and Calder in 1986. These latter pensées hint at Burroughs’ stylistic evolution during the early period of his work on Cities of the Red Night and the early drafts of The Place of Dead Roads.
from the burroughs file
ANCIENT FACE GONE OUT
Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police: “Mr. I & I Martin turned out to be very small potatoes indeed, to be in fact exactly what he appeared to be: a broken down vaudeville actor on the heavy metal. Obviously this mind could not even think in Nova terms. He did, however, have the courage to give us at least one of the basic identities of Mr. D. The man he named was a doctor, a psychiatrist. As always he had the most impeccable references. He was opposed to shock therapy, lobotomy, forcible confinement. “The free will,” he said, “is never destructive.” Quite a statement when you come to think about it. At first the doctor blandly and humorously denied any connection with the Nova Mob. But faced by Mr. Martin, trailing thousands of other informants in his wake like the Pied Piper, a vast squealing host, all in a state of unbelievable terror (in all my experience as a police officer I have never witnessed such total terror), all asking our protection on absolutely any terms, and all fingered the doctor as the Mr. D, the man who gave the orders. Mr. D, also known as Great Amber Clutch, also known as Iron Claws. . . . No the doctor did not “break down and confess.” Iron cool he sat down and stated that he had indeed given the order to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first step in his Nova plan.
“Mr. D, would you care to make a statement?”
“A statement. Any ‘statement’ I might make would be meaningless to you who cannot think in terms of white hot gas, nebulae, light years and anti-matter. Your technicians can write the formulae I dictate but they cannot think in these terms. My statement, if complete, would be incomprehensible.”
“Please make an attempt, Mr. D.”
“Very well but if you are to understand even partially you must suspend all human feelings and value judgements. Your so-called feelings are not relevant here. I don’t feel. I think. And all my thinking is directed towards Nova. Why? you ask. Why? Why? Why? There is no why. Understand this: I have no motives. I act appropriately and automatically. And all my automatically appropriate actions extending through millions of minds and bodies are precisely directed towards Nova. The man, the so-called doctor, sitting here simply happens to be the most suitable brain I could use. That is, he carries out my orders without any emotional static or distortion. Once the atom bombs were dropped I had the necessary pain photos to stop anyone who considered to interfere. Nova was in machine terms inevitable on planet earth.
“Now a few basic principles: Any word, any image is defined, that is precisely shaped like wax in a mold by what it is not. I am the mold. I am at all times precisely what you are not. So every movement every thought every word or picture must have my shape. You live in a mold and I am that mold. Image is organism. Any form of life with an image whether human or nonhuman is an organism. Now consider the limits of what you call organic life. Narrow limits. Temperature—(Believe me this is the most important. Key image of heat under all my power)—Water. Sustenance. Oxygen. You can of course easily conceive organisms with wider limits, built to endure higher or lower temperatures, breathe different gases, eat different food, and such organisms exist, millions of them. Once I start the proliferation of image there is only one end to that. Now all organisms are by definition limited and precisely defined by what they are not. And I am what all organisms are not. I only exist where no organism is. I only exist where no life is. I only exist where you are not. Mr. Gysin speaks of rubbing out the word and the image. Why do I oppose this? The answer comes before the question. I am opposition. The opposition that defines all organism. And let me take this opportunity of replying to my creeping, sniveling, organismic opponents on this world or any other. I am not a parasite. You do not give me anything I need. I need nothing. I need zero. Parasites are organisms I use. Such parasite organisms are of course basic to the Nova formulae. Actually the Nova formulae is number. Image is time. Time is radioactive. Take your own planet. Now let us say I heat up the mold that surrounds you. I heat it up to a point where you cannot exist. I squeeze the mold tighter and tighter. SPUT. The mold explodes in a white hot blast. The mold now contains nothing. I am.”
“Mr. D, may I uh venture to say that what you have just told us, interesting and uh enlightening as it may at first appear, is not altogether convincing? You begin by telling us we will not understand your uh statement, go on to make a statement that I for one found quite understandable in the course of which, however, you uh indulge in what can only be described as uh fabrications quite as blatant as the uh fabrications I detected in the statement of Mr. Martin. The uh misrepresentations of Mr. Martin are now quite obvious as the uh maneuvers of an uh poker player. He pretended to be the leader of the Nova Mob, indulged in uh wildly provocative behavior, his uh mighty half nelson descending again and again with carefully contrived awkwardness spelling out of course: ‘SOS. For God’s sake come and get me!’ In short Mr. Martin summoned the Nova Police. He was not stupid enough to believe your promises. Nor did we of the Nova Police believe for a moment that Martin actually was the leader of the Nova Mob though we pretended to believe this.
“May I venture to suggest, doctor, at the risk of wounding your uh pride that perhaps somewhat the same situation obtains in your case as in the case of Mr. Martin? That is to say an uh difficult and not in all respects satisfactory uh interpersonal relationship between Doctor R and Mr. uh D? You say you oppose Mr. Gysin because you are opposition? I cannot speak for my uh colleagues in the department but I for one find this answer not in all respects candid or complete. May I suggest that you opposed Mr. Gysin because you had no choice? That you were irrevocably committed to, in fact I might say addicted to, the uh orders of Mr. D? That you are in fact even more of an addict than Mr. Martin? That you are, if I may be allowed to mold a phrase, an ‘orders addict’? And may I suggest further that your uh statement is incomplete because you d
o not know the answers? We know that Mr. D never told any of his agents any more than the uh minimum consistent with the uh performance of their uh duties and that this Minimum Information—M.I.—was expressed in mathematical formulae. We know that Mr. D lied to all his agents. I suggest that he also lied to you, doctor. I suggest further that you are not the Mr. D. That the Mr. D. in fact does not exist but is simply the uh hypothetical quantity at the end of an infinite series of which you and Mr. Martin are actually the uh lower integers. I uh must apologize Mr. uh D if my statement or rather should we say the uh colorless question of an uh rather special police officer is uh meaningless to a being of your uh seemingly irrevocable commitments. I am uh unaccustomed to formulate in uh verbal terms or any other and my uh performance is therefore unrehearsed and I do not propose to uh offer an uh repeat performance.”
“Ahab, last flag flaps on appropriate actions extending through Board Books. The past is refuse precisely directed. Wind past remote doctor sitting here. Simply happens the Yankee brain I could use. He has a long and ancient face gone out. He is now without motives trailing vines in mucus of the world. Without any emotional static answers your summons. Bombs were dropped and I had the necessary broken books to interfere. Nova was fading and silence to planet earth adrift in sunlight before body. He could not order his own place where the story ended, the appropriate button. Henceforth to interrogate him he knows is written. It was not necessary to tell him. Understood in any case.”
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Page 40
