Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The Big House at Los Alamos. God it was cold on those sleeping porches. “Get down and waddle like a duck!” says the counsellor, who directs fifteen minutes of exercise before breakfast. Wind and dust. . . where the balsam breezes blow . . . Los Alamos. A vast mushroom cloud darkens the earth.

  Ashley Pond is still there. Joe is catching a trout, a big trout, twelve inches. You eat the meat off the back . . . trout bones.

  A whiff of incense. He used to burn incense in his room at Los Alamos and read Little Blue Books.

  Back in the 1920s, looking for an apartment in the Village. I am wearing a cape and hold a sword in my hand, a straight sword three feet long in a carved wooden sheath with a brass clip. Will it go on the right side, so I don’t have to take my belt all the way off?

  A sword: “Je suis Américain, Catholique et gentilhomme. I live by my sword.”—“The Golden Arrow,” by Joseph Conrad.

  To wail the fault you visualize. What form would surface with an explosive separate being, desperate last chance? The 12-gauge number 4 or never explosive honesty. You see that comes from sincerity the punch-drunk fighter commitment at the count kid. Bang and your hybrid is there, speed of light splat. Ace in the hole the cats scrap way buried your own laws of nature we create our layout trigger by will. Some of HIS blew up in the sky what of the hybrid? Yes nodded primitive unthinkable not time. Guardian is the saddest shot has a tear in it. Big Bang shotgun art an orgasm of any solid only one of its kind. Chance the hopeless message flashes with the sky final desperate gamble Ruski blow the house layout challenge the immutable results as simple as squeezing energy directed accented brush work.

  I want to reach the Western Lands—right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It’s a frozen sewer. It’s known as the Duad, remember? All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black-lace against a grey sky. A flash of joy.

  How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he “wants”?

  You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair.

  The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then? “British we are, British we stay.” How long can one hang on in Gibraltar, with the tapestries where mustached riders with scimitars hunt tigers, the ivory balls one inside the other, bare seams showing, the long tearoom with mirrors on both sides and the tired fuchsia and rubber plants, the shops selling English marmalade and Fortnum & Mason’s tea . . . clinging to their Rock like the rock apes, clinging always to less and less.

  In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the Mountain.

  “Hurry up, please. It’s time.”

  LATE WORK

  late work

  by james grauerholz

  In 1988-89, Burroughs tried to slow down—but retirement did not come naturally to him. He was still traveling to his painting vernissages around the world, and beginning a new period of work, in films and on record albums. In October 1988, he went to Portland, Oregon, to act in Gus Van Sant’s first feature film, Drugstore Cowboy. At a story meeting in Burroughs’ hotel room, the “older junky” character was discarded in favor of “Father Tom Murphy,” a version of his time-tested junky-priest character (as in “‘The Priest,’ They Called Him”). Burroughs’ enigmatic but plain-talking performance drew attention to his profound opposition to the sinister hypocrisy of the so-called War on Drugs.

  Burroughs became fascinated with lemurs, and he traveled to North Carolina to visit the Duke University Primate Center. His interest in prosimians went back to the 1940s, but now he saw them face-to-face. Something about these creatures, not so distantly related to Man, resonated in his heartstrings and his imagination, especially in the context of Burroughs’ new emotional involvement with his cats. He thought back to a character from Cities of the Red Night: Captain Mission, the quasi-historical seventeenth-century pirate libertarian who established a bisexual pirate colony on the subcontinent of Madagascar, the lemurs’ homeland.

  Already Burroughs had written, toward the end of The Western Lands, about the moral lessons he felt his cats were teaching him; now he wrote a novella called Ghost of Chance (High Risk Books, 1996). A limited edition, with art by Burroughs’ friend George Condo, was published in 1991 by the Whitney Museum. In Ghost he depicted the ancient split: from a prelapsarian world of innocence to our world of human cruelty and suffering. This text also finds Burroughs struggling mightily with the ambiguous heritage of Christianity. Despite his ingrained anticlericalism, Burroughs had a soft spot for Catholics dating from his travels in Central and South America, when the local priests offered him better hospitality and company than did the Protestant missionaries. But Burroughs never converted to the Church.

  Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon arrived in Lawrence in late 1988 to record Burroughs’ voice for the music-accompanied Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie albums (Island Records, 1990 and 1993). A year later, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits came to Lawrence to work with Burroughs on the story sessions for The Black Rider, a postmodern opera based on an eighteenth-century German folk legend about a young suitor who picks up the Devil’s never-erring bullets, but at the price of his true love’s life. Burroughs spent a week in Hamburg, working on the final drafts of his libretto, and the Black Rider opera premiered to resounding success at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater on March 31. This European trip was Burroughs’ last great tour for his painting; our colleague, the art curator José Férez, organized exhibitions in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Rome, Paris, and London in March-April 1990.

  Still looking for a way “out of Time and into Space,” Burroughs became interested in accounts of alien abduction. He was very affected by Whitley Strieber’s book on the subject, Communion, and he traveled to upstate New York to visit Strieber and his wife, Anne. Staying with the Striebers during a fierce blizzard, Burroughs hoped for an alien encounter, but was disappointed. Back in Lawrence, Burroughs began to work on an unfinished project that was to have linked scenes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost with an operatic presentation of the “Visitor” experience and the hysterical reactions of the military and scientists.

  In February 1991, Burroughs traveled to Toronto to assist the publicity for Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, which was already filmed. On this outing, Burroughs experienced severe chest pains for the first time, and when he returned to Kansas, his physician discovered coronary arteriosclerosis. After an unsuccessful balloon angioplasty, Burroughs underwent triple-bypass surgery in July. While recuperating in hospital, he somehow got out of bed and fell, breaking his left hip and requiring a second operation, which he dreaded even more than the first. Medicare wanted Burroughs to sue the hospital over his broken hip, but he declined, saying the accident was his own fault.

  Michael Emerton’s alcoholism had worsened; after a suicide attempt, he went through an alcohol treatment program and lived in Kansas City for most of 1991. He returned to Lawrence after Burroughs’ bypass to help him recuperate from surgery. But Emerton was drinking again, and he was very ill. In 1992, on September 17 (a portentous date in Burroughs’ work), he was driving Burroughs to Kansas City and they went off the road in a rainstorm, totaling the car. Although neither of them was seriously injured, Emerton was miserably ashamed. A few weeks later, in his Lawrence apartment, sometime in the early hours of November 4, 1992, Michael Emerton shot himself fatally. Burroughs loved Emerton deeply, as did I, and we were profoundly depressed all that winter and much of the next two years.

  Burroughs could not rest from writing; he continued to handwrite his dreams and ideas, typing them up a few days later. He was assembling a series of file folders from his voluminous dream diaries and the notes he had amassed during and after his composition of The Western Lands. One of our colleagues, the Kansas poet Jim McCra
ry, retyped these notes for him. Burroughs referred to this as “the dream book,” but as he neared completion with its editing, in late 1994, he decided to call it My Education: A Book of Dreams, and he dedicated the book to the memory of Michael Emerton.

  Not long after he had first moved into the Learnard Avenue house, Burroughs postulated another version of his street’s name: “Learn Hard.” He was interpreting his dreams as signposts to the lessons he had yet to learn in life, and in this, his penultimate book, William Burroughs wrote about almost everyone he knew who had died; in his dream journeys through the Land of the Dead, he encountered them all. Truly, although Burroughs never lacked for loving companionship in Lawrence in his final years, his departed friends now outnumbered his living ones.

  from the cat inside (SELECTIONS)

  I have become in the last few years a dedicated cat lover, and now the creature is clearly recognized as a cat spirit, a Familiar. Certainly it partakes of the cat, and other animals as well: flying foxes, bush babies, the gliding lemurs with enormous yellow eyes that live in trees and are helpless on the ground, ring-tailed lemurs and mouse lemurs, sables, racoons, minks, otters, skunks and sand foxes.

  Fifteen years ago I dreamt I had caught a white cat on a hook and line. For some reason I was about to reject the creature and throw it back, but it rubbed against me, mewling piteously.

  Since I adopted Ruski, the cat dreams are vivid and frequent. Often I dream that Ruski has jumped onto my bed. Of course this sometimes happens, and Fletch is a constant visitor, jumping up on the bed and cuddling against me, purring so loud I can’t sleep.

  The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don’t buy love for nothing. Like all pure creatures, cats are practical. To understand an ancient question, bring it into present time. My meeting with Ruski and my conversion to a cat man reenacts the relation between the first house cats and their human protectors.

  In 1982 I moved into a stone farmhouse five miles outside Lawrence. The house had been modernized with bath and propane heat and air conditioning. Modern and convenient. It was a long, cold winter. As spring came I glimpsed occasionally a grey cat shadow and put out food, which disappeared, but I could never get close to the grey cat.

  Some time later I got my first clear glimpse of Ruski. Coming back from the barn with Bill Rich after a shooting session and he pointed: “There’s a young cat.” Glimpse of a lithe, purple-grey shape jumping down from the back porch. He was about six months old, a grey-blue cat with green eyes . . . Ruski.

  I don’t remember exactly when Ruski first came into the house. I remember sitting in a chair by the fireplace with the front door open and he saw me from fifty feet away and ran up, giving the special little squeaks I never heard from another cat, and jumped into my lap, nuzzling and purring and putting his little paws up to my face, telling me he wanted to be my cat.

  But I didn’t hear him.

  Notes from early 1984: My connection with Ruski is a basic factor in my life. Whenever I travel, someone Ruski knows and trusts must come and live in the house to look after him and call the vet if anything goes wrong. I will cover any expense.

  When Ruski was in the hospital with pneumonia I called every few hours. I remember once there was a long pause and the doctor came on to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Burroughs” . . . the grief and desolation that closed around me. But he was only apologizing for the long wait. . . . “Ruski is doing fine . . . temperature down . . . I think he’s going to make it.” And my elation the following morning: “Down almost to normal. Another day and he can go home.”

  August 9,1984, Thursday. My relationship with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance. When a barn cat finds a human patron who will elevate him to a house cat, he tends to overdo it in the only way he knows: by purring and nuzzling and rubbing and rolling on his back to call attention to himself. Now I find this extremely touching and ask how I could ever have found it a nuisance. All relationships are predicated on exchange, and every service has its price. When the cat is sure of his position, as Ruski is now, he becomes less demonstrative, which is as it should be.

  I don’t think anyone could write a completely honest autobiography. I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was an Evil River.

  August, 1984. James was downtown at Seventh and Massachusetts when he heard a cat mewling very loudly as if in pain. He went over to see what was wrong and the little black cat leapt into his arms. He brought it back to the house and when I started to open a tin of cat food the little beast jumped up onto the sideboard and rushed at the can. He ate himself out of shape, shit the litter box full, then shit on the rug. I have named him Fletch. He is all flash and glitter and charm, gluttony transmuted by innocence and beauty. Fletch, the little black foundling, is an exquisite, delicate animal with glistening black fur, a sleek black head like an otter’s, slender and sinuous, with green eyes.

  After two days in the house he jumped onto my bed and snuggled against me, purring and putting his paws up to my face. He is an unneutered male about six months old, with splashes of white on his chest and stomach. I kept Fletch in the house for five days lest he run away, and when we let him out he scuttled forty feet up a tree. The scene has a touch of Rousseau’s Carnival Evening . . . a smoky moon, teenagers eating spun sugar, lights across the midway, a blast of circus music and Fletch is forty feet up and won’t come down. Shall I call the fire department? Then Ruski goes up the tree and brings Fletch down.

  I have said that cats serve as Familiars, psychic companions. “They certainly are company.” The Familiars of an old writer are his memories, scenes and characters from his past, real or imaginary. A psychoanalyst would say I am simply projecting these fantasies onto my cats. Yes, quite simply and quite literally cats serve as sensitive screens for quite precise attitudes when cast in appropriate roles. The roles can shift and one cat may take various parts: my mother; my wife, Joan; Jane Bowles; my son, Billy; my father; Kiki and other amigos; Denton Welch, who has influenced me more than any other writer, though we never met. Cats may be my last living link to a dying species.

  Joan didn’t like to have her picture taken. She almost always kept out of group photos. Like Mother, she had an elusive, ethereal quality.

  For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chastains in St. Louis. “Sometimes she recognizes me. Sometimes she doesn’t,” my brother Mort reported. During those four years I never went to see her. I sent postcards from time to time. And six months before she died I sent a Mother’s Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling “vaguely guilty.”

  This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer’s past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.

  from my education: a book of dreams

  (SELECTIONS)

  Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a grey woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a grey-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. “Flight sixty-nine has been—” Static . . . fades into the distance . . . “Flight. . .”

  Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: “You haven’t had your education yet.”

  This dream occurred approximately thirty-five years ago, shortly after the publication of Nuked Lunch with the Olympia Press in Paris in 1959.

  Recall a cartoon in The New Yorker, years ago: Four men with drinks, at a table, and one insisting on telling a dream he dreamed: “You were in it, too, Al, and
you were a little white dog with an Easter bonnet. Ha ha ha . . . Now isn’t that funny?” Al doesn’t think so. He looks like he would ram a broken glass into the dreamer’s mouth, if he wasn’t a neutered male in a New Yorker cartoon.

  For years I wondered why dreams are so often so dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple—like most answers, you have always known it: No context . . . like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.

  The conventional dream, approved by the psychoanalyst, clearly, or by obvious association, refers to the dreamer’s waking life, the people and places he knows, his desires, wishes, and obsessions. Such dreams radiate a special disinterest. They are as boring and as commonplace as the average dreamer. There is a special class of dreams, in my experience, that are not dreams at all but quite as real as so-called waking life and, in the two examples I will relate, completely unfamiliar as regards my waking experience—but, if one can specify degrees of reality, more real—by the impact of unfamiliar scenes, places, personnel, even odors.

  The two non-dreams are also unique in my dream experience. They are both flying dreams but unlike other flying dreams I have experienced. In most flying dreams I find a high cliff or building and soar off knowing that this is a dream and I won’t fall and kill myself. In another flying dream I flap my arms and manage with some effort to attain an altitude of fifteen or twenty feet. In a third type I am jet-propelled at great speed across the sky. In the two dreams that follow I find myself lighter than air. I float up, airborne, controlling both direction and speed.

  I’m in a room with a high ceiling and a door at one end. The room is full of light and has a feeling of being open and airy. I float up to the ceiling and bob along to the door and out. There is a porch or balcony over the room and now I am up under the porch about thirty feet off the ground. I move out from under the porch and pick up speed and direction.