Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  A flourishing black market in parts grows up in the gutted cities devasted by part riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Breughel and Bosch are re-enacted . . . misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling with maggots supported on crutches and canes, in wheel-chairs and carts. . . . Brutal as butchers, practitioners operate without anesthetic in open-air booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws . . . the poor wait in part lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth nameless things in bottles—that they think are usable parts. Shameless swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.

  And here is Mr Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to another requires months of shifting and checking computerized plans and alternate routes to avoid the possibility of an accident. His idiotic cowardice knows no bounds. There he sits, looking like a Chimu vase with a thick layer of smooth purple scar tissue. Encased in this armor, his movements are slow and hydraulic. It takes him ten minutes to sit down. This layer gets thicker and thicker right down to the bone—the doctors have to operate with power tools. So we leave Mr Rich Parts, and the picturesque parts people, their monument a mountain of scar tissue.

  Mr Hubbard said: “The rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely wrong.” I wrote “wrong” for “long” and the slip is significant—for the means by which immortality is realized in science fiction, which will soon be science fact, are indeed infinitely wrong, the wrongest wrong a man can be, vampiric or worse.

  Improved transplant techniques open the question as to whether the ego itself could be transplanted from one body to another. And the further question as to exactly where this entity resides. Here is Mr Hart, a trillionaire dedicated to his personal immortality. Where is this thing called Mr Hart? Precisely where, in the human nervous system, does this ugly death sucking, death dealing, death fearing thing reside . . .? Science can give a tentative answer: the “ego” seems to be located in the mid-brain at the top of the head. Well he thinks couldn’t we just scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEE. So he starts looking for a brain surgeon, a “scrambled egg” man, and he wants the best. When it comes to a short order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley . . .

  Mr Hart embodies the competitive, acquisitive, success minded spirit that formulated American capitalism. The logical extension of this ugly spirit is criminal. Success is its own justification. He who succeeds deserves to succeed he is RIGHT. The operation is a success. The doctors have discreetly withdrawn. When a man wakes up in a beautiful new Bod, he can flip out. It wouldn’t pay to be a witness. Mr Hart stands up and stretches luxuriously in his new body. He runs his hands over the lean young muscle where his pot belly used to be. All that remains of the donor is a blob of gray matter in a dish. Mr Hart puts his hands on his hips and leans over the blob.

  “And how wrong can you be? DEAD.”

  He spits on it and he spits ugly.

  The final convulsions of a universe based on quantitative factors like money, junk and time, would seem to be at hand. . . . The time approaches when no amount of money will buy anything and time itself will run out. In The Methuselah Enzyme by Fred Mustard Stewart, Dr Mentius, a Swiss scientist, has found the youth enzyme, which he calls Mentase. As it turns out, Tithy, for Tithonus, or Suave, for sauve qui peut, would have been more apt. Young kids secrete this elixir and senior citizens need it special. Mentase is gradually phased out of the body from about the age of twenty-five to sixty. The keyword is extraction. Mentius is a long way from the synthesis of Mentase but to use an untested substance extracted without their knowledge or consent from young people on old people? He feels a distinct twinge in his medical ethics. But Mentase he says grimly must not be lost to humanity. Mentius is regarded as a brilliant lunatic by his medical colleagues: where can he turn for funds? He takes on four rich clients who will bring the young donors . . .

  “He must have blacked out in the immersion tank, Bill reflects. Later he found a tiny sticking plaster up near the hair line. . . .” The kids don’t know they are giving their Mentase to the elderly sponsor and here is one old creep who brings his own adolescent son to the clinic and sucks all the youth and goodness out of him. So the oldsters are getting younger and the kids . . .

  “Hugh dear those interesting freckles . . . What are they?”

  They’re liver spots. The doctor has to admit he has made a real dummheit all around. The old farts don’t produce any Mentase of their own all they have is what the doctor gives them. And now an emergency, a shocking emergency, quite unlooked for has arisen. The doctor reels ashen faced from his microscope. He knows that if the injections of Mentase are cut off the aging process will recommence at a vastly accelerated rate. The stricken senior citizen would age before one’s eyes. “While still alive, and aware of what was happening, you quite literally disintegrate,” he tells them flatly. “The only relief you could possibly have would be to go insane.”

  And the good doctor has some news for the kids who are already comparing liver spots.

  “By cutting off part of your pineal gland we seem to have uh halted your production of Mentase and the result is in plain English that you are aging a hundred times as fast as normal,” the doctor admits lamely.

  Acute shortage of Mentase. The key word is Extraction. The aging kids, now as lost to shame as their elders, in fact rapidly becoming elders, that is to say coarse, ugly, and as shameless as they are disgusting, go out to recruit more kids for the Mentase . . . paid in Mentase, of course, and each recruit must in turn recruit more donors. Think how that could build up in five years bearing in mind the extremely short productive period of the donors.

  Puts me in mind of the old fur farm swindle. You invest $500 and buy a pair of mink. The farm is usually in Canada which has always been a center for mail fraud. The farm will take care of your mink who will breed every six months producing a litter of eight or more mink who in turn will pair and breed at the age of six months. Get a paper and pencil . . . and that’s not all . . . some of the mink will be mutants green and blue and albino, and sea shell pink or maybe you hit the jackpot with rainbow mink $2,000 a pelt. As you luxuriate in rack after rack of ankle-length mink coats a letter edged in black arrives from the farm: regret to inform you your two minks died of distemper.

  The ravening Mentase addicts need more and more and more. Any purely quantitative factor is devalued in time. With junk money Mentase, it takes more and more to buy less and less. Maybe Mr Hart has a warehouse full of Mentase to obtain which he has depopulated a continent; it will run out in time. But long before it runs out he will have reached a point where no amount of Mentase he can inject into his aging carcass will halt the aging process.

  Mentase is a parable of vampirism gone berserk. But all vampiric blueprints for immortality are wrong not only from the ethical standpoint. They are ultimately unworkable. In Space Vampires Colin Wilson speaks of benign vampires. Take a little, leave a little. But they always take more than they leave by the basic nature of the vampiric process of inconspicuous but inexorable consumption. The vampire converts quality, live blood, vitality, youth, talent into quantity food and time for himself. He perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit. And that’s the wrongest wrong a man can be. And personal immortality in a physical body is impossible since a physical body exists in time and time is that which ends. When someone says he wants to live forever he forgets that forever is a time word. . . . All three-dimensional immortality projects are to say the least ill-advised, since they immerse the aspirant always deeper into time.

  The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangea
ble precious essence that is greedy old MEEEEEE forever. The Buddhists say there is no MEEEEEE no unchanging ego . . .

  What we think of as our ego is a defensive reaction just as the symptoms of an illness . . . fever, swelling, sweating are the body’s reaction to an invading organism, so our beloved ego, arising from the rotten weeds of lust and fear and anger, has no more continuity than a fever sweat. There is no ego only a shifting process unreal as the Cities of the Odor-Eaters that dissolve in rain. A moment’s introspection will demonstrate that we are not the same as we were a year ago, a week ago. This opens many doors. Your spirit could reside in a number of bodies, not as some hideous parasite draining the host, but as a helpful little visitor “Roger the Lodger. . . don’t take up much room . . . show you a trick or two . . . never overstay my welcome.”

  Some of the astronauts were peculiar people. I think it was Grissom who was killed in the capsule fire . . . well he always ate two meals. And Randolph Scott is described as being notably well developed and heavily muscled and here’s a nice little visitor just for you

  Heavily muscled Randy Scott

  You’re my favorite astronaut

  Hunky Scotty oh yoo hoooo

  I’m going to hitch a ride with you.

  This happens all the time. You think of someone and you can hear their voice in your throat, feel their face in yours and their eyes looking out. You will notice that this happens more with some people than with others. And some are more there in voice. I have but to think of Felicity Mason, an English friend, and her clear clipped upper-class British accents fairly ring through the room. And Gregory Corso has a strong absent voice. Let’s face it, you are other people and other people are you. Take fifty photos of the same person over an hour. Some of them will look so unlike the subject as to be unrecognizable. And some of them will look like some other person: “Why he looks just like Khrushchev with one gold tooth peeking out.”

  The illusion of a separate inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time. You live in other people and other people live in you; “visiting” we call it and of course it’s ever so much easier with one’s Clonies. When I first heard about cloning, I thought what a fruitful concept, why one could be in a hundred different places at once and experience everything the other clones did. I am amazed at the outcry against this good thing not only from Men of the Cloth but from scientists . . . the very scientists whose patient research has brought cloning within our grasp. The very thought of a clone disturbs these learned gentlemen. Like cattle on the verge of stampede they paw the ground mooing apprehensively. . . . “Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human nonselfness is terrifying.”

  Terrifying to whom? Speak for yourself you timorous old beastie cowering in your eternal lavatory. Too many scientists seem to be ignorant of the most rudimentary spiritual concepts. And they tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work. The unfairness of it brings tears to his eyes as he peers anxiously through his bifocals. He is reading a book In His Image by David Rorvik. In this book a rich old eccentric wants to get himself cloned and contacts the author who, being a scientific reporter, knows all the far-out researchers. In fact he knows just the doctor for the job who is named Darwin. But before he fixes Max up with Darwin, Max has to promise to be ethical about the whole thing. Absolutely only one clone at a time. Max must swear to abstain from any clonish act that could be construed as a take-over by cold-eyed inhuman clone armies.

  A group of identical youths stand on a rocky point overlooking a valley. One farts. No one smiles or alters his expression. One points. In a blur of movement all in perfect synch they gather their packs and rifles and move out.

  A close-up as they move down a mountain trail shows that something is lacking in these faces, something that we are accustomed to see. The absence is as jarring as if the faces lacked a mouth or a nose. There is no face prepared to meet the faces that it meets, no self-image, no need to impress or assert. They blend into the landscape like picture-puzzle faces.

  In the book Max refrains and settles down to watch his little clone grow. In my fictional extension he is more venturesome.

  At this point I was engaged in another assignment which took me away for a year. When I returned, Roberto the chauffeur met me at the airport with new clothes and an expensive wristwatch. As we drove towards the hospital I saw that the Facility was now an impressive complex of buildings. When we reached the expanded Facility he led me into a lounge where I observed about fifty boys engaged in theatricals. Some were in clerical garb intoning “Interfering with the designs of the Creator.” “Each of us has a right to a special yet unique relation with the Creator . . .”

  Others were got up as doddering scientists meandering in senile dementia. “We cannot ethically get to know if cloning is feasible.” “Precipitating an identity crisis.”

  A hideous scientist croaks out like some misshapen toad. “Differences of appearance reinforce our sense of self and hence lend support to the feeling of individual worth we seek in ourselves and others.”

  “The thought of human non-selfness is terrifying!” screeches a snippy old savant. He ducks into his study and recoils in horror. A replica of himself is sitting at his desk going through his notes. I realize that the boys are mocking the opponents of cloning. At this point Max comes in with Doctor Darwin. Darwin is a changed man. Gone are his petulance and hesitation, his prickly ego. He glows with health and confidence. The boys greet him boisterously.

  “How many you kill today Doc?”

  Max seizes both my hands and looks deep into my eyes with a quiet intense charm.

  “Good to see you.”

  The boys have stripped off their makeup and they are all perfect specimens of young manhood.

  “Boys,” Max announces like a circus barker. “The Immaculate, the Virgin birth is at hand.”

  He leads the way to a maternity clinic got up as a manger where fifty girls are in labor. I notice they are wearing decompression suits . . .

  “We got it down to a few minutes now,” Darwin tells me.

  “They pop out. . .”

  Even as he spoke there was a popping sound like the withdrawal of a viscous cork and a medic held up a squalling baby.

  “Yipppeeeee!” a boy screamed. “I’m cloned!”

  I pointed out to Max that all this was in flat violation of our agreement.

  He doesn’t hear me. “All the resources of Trak are now channeled into clone factories. . . . All over the world they are popping out. . . . My little poppies I call them . . .”

  Roberto does a chick breaking out of the shell act as he sings in hideous falsetto:

  “PIO PIO PIO YO SOY UN POLLITO!”

  And Max bellows with laughter. “No I am not mad. Nor is this ego gone berserk. On the contrary, cloning is the end of the ego. For the first time the spirit of man will be able to separate itself from the human machine, to see it and use it as a machine. He is no longer identified with one special Me Machine. The human organism has become an artifact he can use like plane or a space capsule.”

  John Giorno wondered if maybe a clone of a clone of a clone would just phase out into white noise like copies of copies of a tape. As Count Korzybski used to say:

  “I don’t know, let’s see.”

  I postulate that true immortality can only be found in space. Space exploration is the only goal worth striving for. Over the hills and far away. You will know your enemies by those who attempt to block your path. Vampiric monopolists would keep you in time like their cattle.

  “It’s a good thing cows don’t fly,” they say with an evil chuckle. The evil intelligent Slave Gods.

  The gullible confused and stupid pose an equal threat owing to the obstructive potential of vast numbers.

&nb
sp; I have an interesting slip in my scrapbook. News clipping from The Boulder Camera. Picture of an old woman with a death’s head false teeth smile. She is speaking for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

  “WE OPPOSE CHILD ABUSE, INTEMPERANCE AND IMMORTALITY.”

  The way to immortality is in space and Christianity is buried under slag heaps of dead dogma, sniveling prayers and empty promises must oppose immortality in space as the counterfeit always fears and hates the real thing. Resurgent Islam . . . born-again Christians . . . creeds outworn . . . excess baggage . . . raus mit!

  Immortality is prolonged future and the future of any artifact lies in the direction of increased flexibility, capacity for change and ultimately mutation. Immortality may be seen as a by-product of function: “to shine in use.” Mutation involves changes that are literally unimaginable from the perspective of the future mutant. Cold-blooded, non-dreaming creatures living in the comparatively weightless medium of water, could not conceive of breathing air, dreaming and experiencing the force of gravity as a basic fact of life. There will be new fears like the fear of falling, new pleasures and new necessities. There are distinct advantages to living in a supportive medium like water. Mutation is not a matter of logical choices.

  The human mutants must take a step into the unknown, a step that no human being has ever taken before.

  “We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea.”

  “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

  Recent dream research has turned up a wealth of data but no one has assembled the pieces into a workable field theory.

  By far the most significant discovery to emerge from precise dream research with volunteer subjects is the fact that dreams are a biological necessity for all warm-blooded animals. Deprived from REM sleep, they show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. Continued deprivation would result in death.