Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Layout: the format of newspapers and magazines can be decided in advance. The TV programs to be used in juxtaposition with news broadcasts can be decided in advance.

  The news to be played up and the news to be played down: ten years ago in England drug arrests were four-line back-page items. Today they are frontpage headlines.

  Editorials and letters to the editor: The letters published are of course selected in accordance with preconceived policy.

  Advertisements: So the modern ceremonial calendar is almost as predictable as the Mayan. What about the secret calendar? Any number of reactive commands can be inserted in advertisements, editorials, newspaper stories. Such commands are implicit in the layout and juxtaposition of items. Contradictory commands are an integral part of the modern industrial environment: Stop. Go. Wait here. Go there. Come in. Stay out. Be a man. Be a woman. Be white. Be black. Live. Die. Be your real self. Be somebody else. Be a human animal. Be a superman. Yes. No. Rebel. Submit. RIGHT. WRONG. Make a splendid impression. Make an awful impression. Sit down. Stand up. Take your hat off. Put your hat on. Create. Destroy. Live now. Live in the future. Live in the past. Obey the law. Break the law. Be ambitious. Be modest. Accept. Reject. Plan ahead. Be spontaneous. Decide for yourself. Listen to others. Talk. SILENCE. Save money. Spend money. Speed up. Slow down. This way. That way. Right. Left. Present. Absent. Open. Closed. Entrance. Exit. IN. OUT, etc., round the clock. This creates a vast pool of statistical newsmakers. It is precisely uncontrollable automatic reactions that make news. The controllers know what reactive commands they are going to restimulate and in consequence they know what will happen. Contradictory suggestion is the basic formula of the daily press: “Take drugs everybody is doing it.” “Drug-taking is WRONG.” Newspapers spread violence, sex, drugs, then come on with the old RIGHT WRONG FAMILY CHURCH AND COUNTRY sound. It is wearing very thin. The modern control calendar is breaking down. Punishment now overbalances reward in the so-called “permissive” society, and young people no longer want the paltry rewards offered them. Rebellion is world-wide. The present controllers have an advantage which the Mayan priests did not have: an overwhelming arsenal of weapons which the rebels cannot hope to obtain or duplicate. Clubs and spears can be produced by anyone. Tanks, planes, battleships, heavy artillery and nuclear weapons are a monopoly of those in power. As their psychological domination weakens modern establishments are relying more and more on this advantage and now maintain their position by naked force—(How permissive is the “permissive society”?)—Yet the advantage of weaponry is not so overwhelming as it appears. To implement weapons the controllers need soldiers and police. These guardians must be kept under reactive control. Hence the controllers must rely on people who are always stupider and more degraded by the conditioning essential to their suppressive function.

  Techniques exist to erase the Reactive Mind and achieve a complete freedom from past conditioning and immunity against such conditioning in the future. Scientology processing accomplishes this. Erasure of the R.M. is carried out on the E Meter a very sensitive reaction tester developed by Mr Hubbard. If an RM. item reads on the E Meter the subject is still reacting to it. When an item ceases to read he is no longer reacting to it. It may be necessary to run the entire RM. hundreds of times to effect complete erasure. But it will erase. The method works. I can testify to that through my own experience. It takes time, at least two months of training eight hours a day to learn how to use the E Meter and how to run the material. It is expensive, about three thousand dollars for the training and processing that leads to erasure of the Reactive Mind. A reconstruction of the symbol system that must underlie the Reactive Mind would open the way for more precise and speedy erasure.

  Two recent experiments indicate the possibility of mass deconditioning. In one experiment volunteers were wired to an encephalographic unit that recorded their brain waves. When alpha brain waves, which are correlated with a relaxed state of mind and body appeared on screen, the subject was instructed to maintain this state as long as possible. After some practice alpha waves could be produced at will. The second experiment is more detailed and definitive: Herald Tribune, January 31,1969: “U. S. scientist demonstrated that animals can learn to control such automatic responses as heart rate, blood pressure, glandular secretions and brain waves in response to rewards and punishments. The psychologist is Doctor N. E. Miller. He says that his findings upset the traditional thinking that the autonomie nervous system which controls the workings of the heart, digestive system and other internal organs is completely involuntary. Doctor Miller and his co-workers were able to teach animals to increase or decrease the amount of saliva they produced, raise or lower their blood pressure, increase or decrease their intestinal contractions, stomach activity and urinary output and change their brain wave patterns using as a reward direct electrical stimulation of the so-called reward areas of the brain when the desired response occurred. Rats were able to learn to raise or lower their heart rates by 20 percent in ninety minutes of training. Retesting showed that they remembered their lessons well, Doctor Miller said.” In what way does this experiment differ from the experiments by which Pavlov demonstrated the conditioned reflex? I quote from Newsweek, February 10, 1969: “Until now most psychologists believed that the autonomie nervous system could be trained only by the advancement of knowledge.” Mr Hubbard’s overtly fascist utterances . . . (China is the real danger to world peace, Scientology is protecting the home, the church, the family, decent morals—no wife swapping . . . national boundaries, the concept of RIGHT AND WRONG) against evil free-thinking psychiatrists can hardly recommend him to the militant students. Certainly it is time for Scientology to come out in plain English on one side or the other if they expect the trust and support of young people. Which side are you on Hubbard which side are you on?

  from the adding machine

  IT IS NECESSARY TO TRAVEL. . .

  “It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.” These words inspired early investigators when the vast frontier of unknown seas opened to their sails in the fifteenth century. Space is the new frontier. Is this frontier open to youth? I quote from the London Daily Express, December 30,1968: “If you are a fit young man under twenty-five with lightning reflexes who fears nothing in heaven or on earth and has a keen appetite for adventure don’t bother to apply for the job of astronaut.” They want “cool dads” trailing wires to the “better half” from an aqualung. Dr. Paine of the Space Center in Houston says: “This flight was a triumph for the squares of this world who aren’t ashamed to say a prayer now and then.” Is this the great adventure of space? Are these men going to take the step into regions literally unthinkable in verbal terms? To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.

  The last frontier is being closed to youth. However there are many roads to space. To achieve complete freedom from past conditioning is to be in space. Techniques exist for achieving such freedom. These techniques are being concealed and withheld. We must search for and consider techniques for discovery.

  REMEMBERING JACK KEROUAC

  Jack Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote. Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers and they can’t write, like a bullfighter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been there or he can’t write about it. And going there, he risks being gored. By that I mean what the Germans aptly call the Time Ghost. For example, such a fragile ghost world as Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age—all the sad young men, firefly evenings, winter dreams, fragile, fragile like his picture taken in his twenty-third year—Fitzgerald, poet of the Jazz Age. He went there and wrote it and brought it back for a generation to read, but he never found his own way back. A whole migrant generation arose from Kerouac’s On the Road to Mexico, Tangier, Afghanistan, Indi
a.

  What are writers, and I will confine the use of this term to writers of novels, trying to do? They are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or where they would like to live. To write it, they must go there and submit to conditions that they may not have bargained for. Sometimes, as in the case of Fitzgerald and Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written. In other cases, there may be a time lag. Science fiction, for example, has a way of coming true. In any case, by writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible.

  To what extent writers can and do act out their writing in so-called real life, and how useful it is for their craft, are open questions. That is, are you making your universe more like the real universe, or are you pulling the real one into yours? Winner take nothing. For example, Hemingway’s determination to act out the least interesting aspects of his own writing and to actually be his character, was, I feel, unfortunate for his writing. Quite simply, if a writer insists on being able to do and do well what his characters do, he limits the range of his characters.

  However, writers profit from doing something even when done badly. I was, for one short week—brings on my ulcers to think about it—a very bad assistant pickpocket. I decided that a week was enough, and I didn’t have the touch, really.

  Walking around the wilderness of outer Brooklyn with the Sailor after a mooch (as he called a drunk) came up on us at the end of Flatbush: “The cops’ll beat the shit out of us . . . you have to expect that.” I shuddered and didn’t want to expect that and decided right there that I was going to turn in my copy of the Times, the one I would use to cover him when he put the hand out. We always used the same copy—he said people would try to read it and get confused when it was a month old, and this would keep them from seeing us. He was quite a philosopher, the Sailor was . . . but a week was enough before I got what I “had to expect. . .”

  “Here comes one . . . yellow lights, too.” We huddle in a vacant lot. . . . Speaking for myself at least, who can always see what I look like from outside, I look like a frightened commuter clutching his briefcase as Hell’s Angels roar past.

  Now if this might seem a cowardly way, cowering in a vacant lot when I should have given myself the experience of getting worked over by the skinny short cop with the acne-scarred face who looks out of that prowl car, his eyes brown and burning in his head—well, the Sailor wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would a White Hunter have liked a client there to get himself mauled by a lion.

  Fitzgerald said once to Hemingway, “Rich people are different from you and me.”

  “Yes . . . they have more money.” And writers are different from you and me. They write. You don’t bring back a story if you get yourself killed. So a writer need not be ashamed to hide in a vacant lot or a corner of the room for a few minutes. He is there as a writer and not as a character. There is nothing more elusive than a writer’s main character, the character that is assumed by the reader to be the writer himself, no less, actually doing the things he writes about. But this main character is simply a point of view interposed by the writer. The main character then becomes in fact another character in the book, but usually the most difficult to see, because he is mistaken for the writer himself. He is the writer’s observer, often very uneasy in this role and at a loss to account for his presence. He is an object of suspicion to the world of nonwriters, unless he manages to write them into his road.

  Kerouac says in Vanity of Duluoz: “I am not ‘I am’ but just a spy in someone’s body pretending these sandlot games, kids in the cow field near St. Rota’s Church. . . .” Jack Kerouac knew about writing when I first met him in 1944. He was twenty-one; already he had written a million words and was completely dedicated to his chosen trade. It was Kerouac who kept telling me I should write and call the book I wrote Naked Lunch. I had never written anything after high school and did not think of myself as a writer, and I told him so. “I got no talent for writing. . . .” I had tried a few times, a page maybe. Reading it over always gave me a feeling of fatigue and disgust, an aversion towards this form of activity, such as a laboratory rat must experience when he chooses the wrong path and gets a sharp reprimand from a needle in his displeasure centers. Jack insisted quietly that I did have talent for writing and that I would write a book called Naked Lunch. To which I replied, “I don’t want to hear anything literary.”

  Trying to remember just where and when this was said is like trying to remember a jumble of old films. The 1940s seem centuries away. I see a bar on 116th Street here, and a scene five years later in another century: a sailor at the bar who reeled over on the cue of “Naked Lunch” and accused us—I think Allen Ginsberg was there, and John Kingsland—of making a sneering reference to the Swiss Navy. Kerouac was good in these situations, since he was basically unhostile. Or was it in New Orleans or Algiers, to be more precise, where I lived in a frame house by the river, or was it later in Mexico by the lake in Chapultepec Park . . . there’s an island there where thousands of vultures roost apathetically. I was shocked at this sight, since I had always admired their aerial teamwork, some skimming a few feet off the ground, others wheeling way up, little black specks in the sky—and when they spot food they pour down in a black funnel. . .

  We are sitting on the edge of the lake with tacos and bottles of beer. . . . “Naked Lunch is the only title,” Jack said. I pointed to the vultures.

  “They’ve given up, like old men in St. Petersburg, Florida. . . . Go out and hustle some carrion you lazy buzzards!” Whipping out my pearlhandled .45, I killed six of them in showers of black feathers. The other vultures took to the sky. . . . I would act these out with Jack, and quite a few of the scenes that later appeared in Naked Lunch arose from these acts. When Jack came to Tangier in 1957,1 had decided to use the title, and much of the book was already written.

  In fact, during all those years I knew Kerouac, I can’t remember ever seeing him really angry or hostile. It was the sort of smile he gave in reply to my demurrers, in a way you get from a priest who knows you will come to Jesus sooner or later—you can’t walk out on the Shakespeare Squadron, Bill.

  Now as a very young child I had wanted to be a writer. At the age of nine I wrote something called Autobiography of a Wolf. This early literary essay was influenced by—so strongly as to smell of plagiarism—a little book I had just read called The Biography of a Grizzly Bear. There were various vicissitudes, including the loss of his beloved mate . . . in the end this poor old bear slouches into a valley he knows is full of poison gases, about to die. . . . I can see the picture now, it’s all in sepia, the valley full of nitrous yellow fumes and the bear walking in like a resigned criminal to the gas chamber. Now I had to give my wolf a different twist, so, saddened by the loss of his entire family, he encounters a grizzly bear who kills him and eats him. Later there was something called Carl Cranbury in Egypt that never got off the ground, really . . . a knife glinted in the dark valley. With lightning speed Carl V. Cranbury reached for the blue steel automatic . . .

  These were written out painfully in longhand with great attention to the script. The actual process of writing became so painful that I couldn’t do anything more for Carl Cranbury, as the Dark Ages descended—the years in which I wanted to be anything else but a writer. A private detective, a bartender, a criminal. . . . I failed miserably at all these callings, but a writer is not concerned with success or failure, but simply with observation and recall. At the time I was not gathering material for a book. I simply was not doing anything well enough to make a living at it. In this respect, Kerouac did better than I did. He didn’t like it, but he did it—work on railroads and in factories. My record time on a factory job was four weeks. And I had the distinction to be actually fired from a defense plant during the War.

  Perhaps Kerouac did better because he saw his work interludes simply as a means to buy time to write. Tell me how many books a writer has written . . . we can assume usually ten times t
hat amount shelved or thrown away. And I will tell you how he spends his time: Any writer spends a good deal of his time alone, writing. And that is how I remember Kerouac—as a writer talking about writers or sitting in a quiet corner with a notebook, writing in longhand. He was also very fast on the typewriter. You feel that he was writing all the time; that writing was the only thing he thought about. He never wanted to do anything else.

  If I seem to be talking more about myself than about Kerouac, it is because I am trying to say something about the particular role that Kerouac played in my life script. As a child, I had given up on writing, perhaps unable to face what every writer must: all the bad writing he will have to do before he does any good writing. An interesting exercise would be to collect all the worst writing of any writer—which simply shows the pressures that writers are under to write badly, that is, not write. This pressure is, in part, simply the writer’s own conditioning from childhood to think (in my case) white Protestant American or (in Kerouac’s case) to think French-Canadian Catholic.

  Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we’d have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would all be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Kerouac understood this long before I did. “Life is a dream,” he said.

  My own birth records, my family’s birth records and recorded origins, my athletic records in the newspaper clippings I have, my own notebooks and published books are not real at all; my own dreams are not dreams at all but products of my waking imagination. . . . “This, then, is the writers world—the dream made for a moment actual on paper, you can almost touch it, like the endings of The Great Gatsby and On the Road. Both express a dream that was taken up by a generation.