The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.
Overweening Generalist
Showing posts with label William S. Burroughs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William S. Burroughs. Show all posts
I'll try to make this short, 'cuz I've been taking up too much of your time lately and I don't want ya to feel I ripped you off. Besides, I reward myself for doing a blog post by getting a tad baked. But then again I reward myself with weed after peeing, too...
George Carlin
"Carlin had been smoking 'shit' habitually since he was thirteen years old. 'I'd wake up in the morning and if I couldn't decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I'd smoke a joint to figure it out,' he once admitted. 'And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, 'Do you get high to go onstage?' I could never understand the question. I mean, I'd been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it'" 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin, James Sullivan, p.107
David Bowie
"According to an interview David Bowie gave to Playboy in the mid-seventies, he only got stoned on pot once, when he was turned on by Ronnie Wood and he spent hours staring at the sidewalk having visions. A couple of years later, Bowie was busted, along with Iggy Pop, in Rochester, New York, for possessing several ounces of marijuana...blame it on Iggy." Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs, R.U. Sirius, p.91
Steve Almond
"I was pushing forty and had smoked the equivalent of a large marijuana tree the previous decade." Not That You Asked, Almond, p.252
Allen Ginsberg, 1963, 64, or 65. Photo by Benedict J. Fernandez
Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, in the late 1960s. Pound had been profoundly depressed, realizing he'd been an idiot with his antisemitism, and that he'd hurt everyone he loved. Ginsberg told Pound, basically, So you fucked up...you influenced everyone with your aesthetic ideas. At one point Ginsberg talked to Pound about "modern use of drugs as distinct from Twenties opium romanticism." Pound replied, "You know a great deal about the subject." What Thou Lovest Well Remains: 100 Years of Ezra Pound, ed. Richard Ardinger, p.37
Robert Anton Wilson
"The 'funniest' experiences I've ever had with drugs all involved pot, and none of them seem comic when I try to write them down. Apparently words, which cannot convey 'mystical' experiences, also fail to communicate hilarious drug experiences.
"For instance, a friend and I took a little too much hash one night and both got lost in stoned space. We knew who we were and where we were, but we couldn't remember the last 30 seconds. We spent what seemed like an hour saying things like:
"Jesus, I can't remember what we were talking about."
"What did you just say?"
(Interlude of spasmodic laughter by both of us.)
"I think I'm having a...what? What did you say?"
"I can't remember...What were we trying to remember?"
(More spasms of laughter)
"We're trying to...What are we trying to do?"
As the effect modified with time, we understood what was happening, and one of us described it as "a visit to the islands of micro-amnesia." Pot Stories For The Soul, edited by Paul Krassner, p.68
Aleister Crowley
"The action of Hashish is as varied as life itself, and seems to be determined almost entirely by the will or the mood of the 'assassin' and that within the hedges of his mental and moral form."
-originally in The Equinox, 1909, found in Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, Hakim Bey and Abel Zug, editors, p.444
William S. Burroughs
"Hashish affects the sense of time so that events, instead of appearing in an orderly structure of past, present and future, take on a simultaneous quality, the past and future contained in the present the moment."
-found in Writing on Drugs, by Sadie Plant, p.152
"Mezz" Mezzrow
"It's a funny thing about marihuana - when you first begin smoking it you see things in a wonderful soothing, easygoing new light. All of a sudden the world is stripped bare of its dirty gray shrouds and becomes one big bellyful of giggles, a spherical laugh, bathed in brilliant, sparkling colours that hit you like a heatwave. Nothing leaves you cold any more; there's a humorous tickle and great meaning in the least little thing, the twitch of somebody's little finger or the click of a beer glass. All your pores open like funnels, your nerve ends stretch their mouths wide, hungry and thirsty for new sights and sounds and sensations; and every sensation, when it comes, is the most exciting one you've ever had. You can't get enough of anything - you want to gobble up the whole goddamned universe just for an appetizer. Them first kicks are a killer, Jim."
-from Really The Blues, 1946, found in Artificial Paradises, ed. by Mike Jay, p.152
Okay: I did the same thing. I know exactly where she's coming from. My aunt had a boyfriend (this was around 20 years ago) who grew his own, and it was good. My sweetheart and I spent the Fourth of July with them. The aunt's boyfriend said I ought to try his brownies, which he'd just taken out of the oven. I tried one. Then he said have another. I ate that. You know the rest: about 45 minutes later, I feel IT come on. And on. And on. And more. More. I start to feel very uneasy. The level of stoned-ness was increasing, it seemed, so quickly, that it was like the feeling you get when the stereo radio was on very low and you're talking with your friends, then some song comes on that you all love and the conversation stops, you turn it up loud. And someone says "Louder!" and pretty soon the windows are shaking and you and your friends are smiling, rocking out, laughing inaudibly.
I got so stoned that, on the drive home, I confessed to my sweetheart I was freaking out. She said - she was driving, thank goddess - that I'd seemed sorta weird. I just let loose and described The Fear.
So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming, "I got the fear!" and ran out of the house.
-very early tableau from Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs. ("Tea" here is cannabis.)
I remember expressing regret. Sweetheart said it would probably subside in a few hours. Meanwhile, "Witchy Woman" by the Eagles came on the car radio and when the solo came up, I "saw" the guitar being played: a Gibson Les Paul with a sunburst finish. It just had to be. Yea, you read that correctly: I was trippin' balls so big-time I "saw" the guitar I was hearing on the radio, a tune that was recorded 25 years earlier. I'd heard the song a thousand times. Now, the dude's vibrato was overwhelmingly psychedelic. At the same time, this was a Bad Omen: I'm trippin' on "Witchy Woman"? At this rate, Bartok would probably melt my brain. The Mahavishnu Orchestra would flatline me. Liszt would lay me out; the Goldberg Variations could prove grave. Maybe Terry Riley's In "C" could calm me, but I didn't have it and couldn't cop.
Home, sweetheart asked me to air out our camping tent, because we were due to head out to the Sierras and the Sequoia National Park the next day. It's one of those tents that are lightweight hi-tech and so easy to put up a 12 year old could do it in 90 seconds. I gave up after what seemed like an hour. I couldn't figure it out. Cannabis is really really RILLY bad - for me, at least - in executing step-by-step "rational" action. This was ridiculous. Later, I sat in an empty room in the dark, trying to enjoy it all, wishing I had some sort of antidote. I tried listening to Ustad Shujaat Kahn doing a raga, but it was too intense.
I woke up the next day still stoned. We drove four hours into the Sierras, and I was still stoned. What a nightmare! The amount of quality bud that was dumped into the brownie mix must've been just insane.
The next day I'd returned to something like my "baseline" "normality." But I felt adrenaline-poisoned, because of the stress of having to cope with the world stoned, because clearly, I hadn't planned for such a series of psychological hurdles.
Now: I've read four or five articles about Colorado's first few months of legalization, and this seems a significant problem: the word must get out about edibles: you cannot titrate if you're new to the stuff. Of course we must keep this away from the chilluns. You think you know what a candy bar is; they've always been such comfy familiar friends.
Ingesting cannabis seems completely different to me than smoking it, and ever since this Bad Trip, I've stayed away from edibles.
I want to jump all over Dowd - who I admit I have disliked since around the Lewinsky scandal, when I first became aware of her - for being a typical East Coast pop-liberal NYT overrated pretentious idiot-journalist. She and David Brooks and Thomas Friedman make me long for a speedy, agonized Death of Giant Corporate Journalism, or their kind, at least.
Dowd was TOLD to watch it with edibles. But her Bad Trip resonated with me; I felt a sympathetic kinship when I read about her fear in her hotel room. We need massive education about this stuff. You smoke too much really good weed and have a panic attack? It will be over in an hour or two. You EAT too much powerful weed? You might be in for a doozy, friends. Eat a teeny, tiny bit, and then wait at least an hour before deciding whether you need more.
DIGRESSION: In Terry Southern's short story, "Red Dirt Marijuana," a young white kid from the South is talking with his much older friend, a black man. They have found a big flowering pot plant on a farm. The kid has tried pot before but it made him "sick"; the wizened black man tries to explain to the kid why he couldn't handle cannabis before, but might be able to now:
"Now boy, don't you mess with me," said C.K., frowning, "...you ast me somethin' an' I tellin' you. You brain is young an' unformed...it's all smooth, you brain, smooth as that piece of shoe-leather. That smoke jest come in an' cloud it over!" He took another drag. "Now you take a full-growed brain," he said in his breath-holding voice, "it ain't smooth - it's got all ridges in it, all over, go this way an' that.' Shoot, a man know what he doin' he have that smoke runnin' up one ridge an' down the other! He control his high, you see what I mean, he don't fight against it..." -Terry Southern, Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, pp.8-9
[This seems neurophysiologically suspect, but poetically true: both Dowd and I probably needed more ridges in our brains to handle it. - OG]
The other problem in Colorado seems to be exploding houses, because of people trying to make hash oil, and butane volatility. This part seems maddening to me: are you trying to tell me all the smokable Dogshit Orgasm and Jack Herer and Purple Kush isn't doing it for you? You need to risk your life and your neighbors' houses to get that righteous buzz from "dabbing"? If so, you've probably got a problem, pal. Seek help. Get outside. Stop getting high for six months, and feel the "high" of your short-term memory roaring back; dig all the complex nuances and edges of "everyday life" that you hadn't realized you'd gradually caked your cerebral cortices up with bong resin thicker than manhole covers. I've done it. When you come back six-ten months later and take a small hit of something like Kali's Shaven Vulva Grapefruit Surprise sativa (I actually made that one up...I think?), you'll really enjoy it. And you'll be acting like a decent - if freaky - Responsible Citizen.
So far, the Colorado experiment seems a smashing success, and the winds are blowing in our favor in other states. The problem with edibles is about public education. The problem with ditzy hash oil explosions seems more troubling to those of us who want more political gains with cannabis, not a roll-back. Hash-oil house explosions are bumming me out. Quit it you guys! (<----Do you think this will work?)
A Jungian psychoanalytic riff that, to me, feels intuitively right (<----A-HAAA!) is that, if we see insects as mindless robotic beings, generating at a cartoonishly fast rate relative to our own generations, we probably subconsciously see the Six-Legged Majority as a force or threat to our reason. We seem to have some predilection for Mind, what we think Minds ought to be.
On good days - most days - I'm mesmerized by the variety and intricacies of insect life, morphology, and their modes of making their ways. I enjoy entertaining the thought that that insect there, the one over your shoulder and near the drapes? He's of some sort of Alien Mind. I mean, just look at Him.
[At this point I'd like to interrupt for a commercial and tell you good folks about James K. Wangberg's book Six-Legged Sex: The Erotic Life of Bugs, copiously and deviously illustrated by Marjorie C. Leggitt. It'll easily make it into your Top Ten books of the year 2013 to feature actual science with chapters like "Bug Bondage and Insect S&M" (chapter 18) or "Insect Sex Hangouts" (chapter 8), all featuring the coincidentally-named Leggitt's illustrations. Top 10, easy. Sure to start conversation as a coffee table book, the cover alone worth the price of admission. And I do not receive a kickback from Amazon, where most of our favorite bugs live. I'm plugging this book simply for Art's Sake. Back to our show.]
I think it was JBS Haldane the great English intellectual and geneticist who, when asked about God and nature and creation, said that if there is a God, He seems to have an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles. There are an enormous number of beetles in the world, indeed. (Aldous Huxley knew Haldane; Haldane's ideas about eugenics influenced Brave New World, and in Aldous's early 1920s novel of ideas, Antic Hay, a character modeled on Haldane is too wrapped up in his biology studies to notice his friends are fucking his wife, but there's my digression...)
Kafka
Regarding the idea of insects overtaking ourselves and the works of Kafka, I will simply submit your own reading(s) of The Metamorphosis. While I nominate Joyce as the greatest novelist of the 20th century, arguably Kafka captured the tenor of the century better: modernist society, the machinery and bureaucracy of everyday life, the Authoritarian State, the sociobiological anthill of overpopulated cities and your number tagged to your name. It speaks to the absurdity of everyday life in the 20th century up to, oh, at least April of 2013. Inadequacy, guilt, glaring inequality, alienation, isolation, anxiety. Knowledge of genocide and the atomizing threat of human extinction due to squabbles over territory, material, and ideology. (All of this - Kafka - informs the deep structure of film noir too, but I can't get into it here, now...)
From the cognitive science/psycholinguistics and the-primary-mode-of-communication-is-as-metaphor POV: in the bureaucratic State, I feel as if I'm a bug that can be squashed, at any minute, unannounced, for any "reason."
Why does Kafka have Gregor Samsa wake up as a giant bug? Could it be he intuited the threat to his own sense of rationality versus what a monolithic State seemed to have in mind? Well, yes, but Franz's father was fairly brutal, and Kafka wasn't sure if his identity was as a Jew, a German, or a Czech. But he does seems to see fascism coming...in 1915? (This riff on insects and great writers seems to lend another level of meaning to Ezra Pound's "artist" being "the antenna of the race.")
Pound
Speaking of Pound, in Cantos XIV and XV, his Dantean "Hell" Cantos, we see imagery of politicians:
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes, Addressing the multitudes in the ooze, newts, water-slugs, water-maggots
[I'd like to add as a gratuity, war profiteers and bankers "drinking blood sweetened with shit/And behind them [...] the financiers lashing them with steel wires."]
More insect imagery, and need I exhort you to NB the context?:
The petrified turd that was Verres bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria! black-beetles, burrowing into the shit, The soil a decrepitude, the ooze full of morsels
Ain't life grand? But wait! There's more:
Ez is really letting London have it ("The great arse-hole/broken with piles/hanging stalactites/greasy as sky over Westminster"), after WWI, in Canto 14, and in the midst of a blast of righteous vituperation:
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities, the soil living pus, full of vermin, dead maggots begetting live maggots, slum-owners, usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority
WHO is Pound putting in these delightful hellholes? Bankers, war-profiteers, politicians, journalists who repeat State propaganda, and anyone who obstructs the free flow of vital knowledge. There's more, and I'll quote this snippet because it shows how Burroughs really was influenced by Pound, something that's not often noted, though WSB said in more than a couple places that Ez influenced him:
And Invidia, the corruptio, foetor, fungus, liquid animals, melted ossifications, slow rot, foetid combustion, chewed cigar butts, without dignity, without tragedy, . . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles, monopolists, obstructors of knowledge, obstructors of distribution.
And that's just Canto XIV. I think the condom full of black beetles proto-Burroughs. It shows up again - as if a "cut-up" reinserted? - in Canto XV. I have not checked to see if some hot heavy metal band has taken to calling themselves "Liquid Animals," but if not, it's not too late! And "Invidia" in Latin means envy or jealousy, but here it appears as a malevolent, demonic force or Spawn of the Demiurge.
In Canto XV Ez really lets loose. We get the usual flies and maggots, but now the ruling class and their lackeys are deep in the shit, face-down, money-grubbing in the farting ooze, but they themselves appear insectoid, "all with their twitching backs/with daggers and bottle ends/waiting an unguarded moment."
For the possibly uninitiated: Pound had declared he intended to cause a revolution in art, poetry and aesthetics. And some of his best revolutionary-artist friends died in the War of 1914-1918. He has a right to be pissed to this level, eh?
To contrast Kafka with Pound seems too easy, but Pound's insectoid imagery accompanies natural habitats for insects: hovering on, in or around human- caused Decay brought on by, among other things, Greed. With neither Pound nor Kafka do we get a sense they consciously loathe insects. Let us say each uses insectoid imagery as a concomitant to the projection of their feelings of fear and loathing over the state of things after the period often referred to as "World War I," but which I think of as The Period of World War from 1914 to 1918; there's been nothing but wars ever since, and I wish Steven Pinker would pay more attention to his teacher Chomsky's political writings and less on his linguistics...
Two Popular Scientific Sources of Early 20th C. Insect Imagery: Haeckel and Fabre Ernst Haeckel died in 1919. He knew Darwin. He was a very Germanic professor (there is a unity to all living things), a physician, an embryologist ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), and just a jaw-droppingly great artist. I marvel at his drawings of tiny living things. Check out his Art Forms In Nature; it's one of my favorite Art books: psychedelic and accurate, beautiful and intellectually provoking. I love looking at it when I'm stoned. No doubt many 20th century writers saw Haeckel's work and were inspired. It's easy to imagine the French filmmakers Nuridsany and Perennou (see 1996's Microcosmos!)(trailer HERE) were steeped in their Haeckel. But also: Jean-Henri Fabre. He died in 1915, and Darwin admired his work, although Fabre was an early French thinker against theory, and check out his "A Dig At the Evolutionists," chapter viii from his book More Hunting Wasps. (The translation by Alexander Teixeira De Mattos, F.Z.S. seems utterly fantabulous to me: fans of Joyce and Nabokov and Stevens? check out that short Chapter 8, "A Dig At The Evolutionists.") Also see the list of scanned materials in that Wiki article. Fabre etait un virtuose merveilleux!
Burroughs
Insect imagery runs through much of WSB's massive oeuvre, but if you've only seen Cronenberg's celluloid interpretation of Naked Lunch you might get the feeling Burroughs was obsessed with insects. He wasn't. But like Kafka and Pound in their own ways, insects seem aligned or contributive to: Control, Authority and State Power. Oddly: State Power and Control are theorized by Frankfurt School types as fatally in thrall to overweening instrumental rationality - techne without telos - simply "more and better" for its own sake, without "human" values as much of a consideration; for Burroughs, Pound and Kafka, insects - as non-humanly non-rational as any of the creatures on the planet? - represent a rationality that has completely transcended the values of the individual as subject within the Modern State apparatus. Human warmth, love, patience, nurture - the Divine Feminine - seem an antithesis to Instrumental Rationality...although with Burroughs's well-known misogyny, he obviously represents a slightly different case.
In Naked Lunch an agent wonders who another agent is working for: it could be for similar people as himself, or "It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy." Here insects literally function as ETs. But a more common Burroughsian insect trope is insects as instrumental rationalists with no regard for any human values. And let's hone in further: WSB had some major suspicions about the wielding of Power by the AMA and the modern Western medical establishment in general. Here's an appropriately phantasmagorical passage from Naked Lunch before I hightail it outta here for some of majoun's popular accomplices:
Doctor "Fingers" Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, rises and turns on the Conferents his cold blue blast of this gaze: "Gentlemen, the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column. The brain, front, middle and rear must follow the adenoid, the wisdom tooth, the appendix...I give you my Master Work: The Complete All-American Deanxietized Man... Blast of trumpets: The Man is carried in naked by two Negro Bearers who drop him on the platform with bestial, sneering brutality...The Man wriggles...His flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in green mist, unveiling a monster black centipede. Waves of unknown stench fill the room, searing the lungs, grabbing the stomach. -p.87
I feel compelled to add that Allen Ginsberg's testimony about Burroughs - that he was a satirist on par with Swift - is something I agree with on one major level. So here I'd like The Reader to also consider the comedic aspect of such a passage as rhetoric about the elements of Control that WSB did indeed seem menaced by, but at other times he simply seems to be the proto-punk artist-intellectual and heir to part of a fortune, sneering derisively. Burroughs at one time trained towards the M.D, but his homosexuality was officially a "sick" existential mental state to the State. And yes, he was a heroin addict, and his family was well-off. We're interested (just a little bit?) in insect imagery in three of the great figures of Modernism.
Were Kafka, Pound and Burroughs paranoid weirdos? Of course. But so am I. Why else am I sitting here, seeming to argue their cases?
Here's a bit from a 1970s "documentary" that wants to argue that insects will inherit the Earth. Anyone remember The Hellstrom Chronicle? It's campy and sorta shrill and won the Oscar. (Watch Microcosmos first?)
On Feb 5, WSB would've been 99. What follows is a hodgepodge of Burroughsianiac musings.
For virtually all of his life, WSB was at odds with the trans-societal forces he eventually labeled Control. (On the Wiki page for WSB it says he was turned down by the OSS, and IIRC that was in Morgan's bio, but I digress already.) I've always found it interesting that Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud who used Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses in the new "science" of Public Relations, had as an early competitor Ivy Lee, who was WSB's uncle via marriage. Lee was the epitome of Control, and just before he died of a brain tumor at age 57 in 1934, Congress had begun investigating Lee's ties to the Nazis and IG Farben.
In Ezra Pound's Canto 74, he mentions the stark fact that the Allies bombed the hell out of Germany, but somehow they missed the Farben plant.
WSB, the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs adding machine corporation, was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school and college prep for rich kids that was influenced by the Boy Scout code, around 1930. He hated it. Later the US government bought the school and all the surrounding land, for the secretive Manhattan Project. Gore Vidal had also gone to Los Alamos Ranch, and in his autobiography Palimpsest he compared WSB to Pound (p.228) WSB was influenced by Pound (and Joyce). The NY artist/critic Richard Kostelanetz asserted that Pound's The Cantos was the last great poetry collage, while WSB's Naked Lunchwas the last great prose collage. (Kostelanetz: ABC of Contemporary Reading, p.53)
Pound was found "insane" by the US for his very poor use of First Amendment ideas on behalf of Mussolini and "the US Constitution" and other things.
If this had anything to do with explaining the avant aspects of WSB and his art, it seems almost too ironic, as he, under the influence of a course of study with Korzybski, developed the idea that language was a virus that had commandeered humanity's minds; we are language's "host."
[The great Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky on toxoplasmosis. Some of you hardcore Pound and Burroughs exegetes might want to invest 25 minutes of your time to listen to this guy, keeping in mind those writers' love for cats. Has anyone else pointed this out? I wonder if toxo can make someone sort of "half-schizo," where they are really weird, but creative, and not bothered by auditory hallucinations and the complete consort of the full-blown paranoid schizophrenic? Pound went around Rapallo feeding the feral cats despite not having any money; WSB was horrified at the prospect of nuclear annihilation because it would mean his cats would die. If there's something to it, then maybe we can venture that a protozoa has had a huge influence on Literary Modernism. OR: the OG is a cat lover: maybe I'm toxo-infected and what it does is give you grandiose ideas about unforeseen connections?]
This reminds me of an essay called "The Aliens Are Among Us," by Nathan Wolfe, who founded the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. He's talking about viruses: "Viruses operate along a continuum with their hosts and other organisms they interact with: some harm their hosts, some benefit their hosts, and some - perhaps most - live in relative neutrality with them, neither substantively harming nor benefiting the organisms they must at least temporarily inhabit for their own survival." (p.191 of What's Next: Dispatches From the Future of Science)
The Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris said that Burroughs himself was like a cultural virus: "Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a 'meme.' : 'a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically 'alive.' If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive parasitic self-replication. The viral programme 'simply says' "Copy me and spread me around." This is Burroughs: 'all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.'" (from Harris's essay, "Can You See A Virus?: The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs")
Speaking of viruses from space, language as virus, cats infecting human brains, and memes: Scientology has been in the news a lot lately. And Burroughs had his fling with it. See here. This is another aspect of WSB that fascinates me.
Still one of the best biographies of WSB is, in my opinion, Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw. Last year Morgan wrote an article about why WSB hated Morgan's book. In Morgan's book he pointed out that, in Naked Lunch WSB seemed to foresee AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic asphyxiation becoming common, the crack epidemic. I'd add that WSB seemed, very early on, around 1961, to suspect the CIA would be behind LSD flooding the streets of Unistat, and they would be doing it in an effort to staunch a youth rebellion.
I think WSB also foretold Kenneth Starr sexual fascism, but maybe that's for another day.
Oh yea: there's a wild little book called The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, by Tom Clark. In it he asserts that the antics of Chogyam Trungpa are like WSB's character "Dr. Benway."
Not long ago I went looking for the origin of a line WSB repeated: "And beside, the wench is dead." It looks like he got it from Christopher Marlowe via TS Eliot. (See Lives of the Poets, Schmidt, p.606)
Robert Anton Wilson: two passages around WSB:
"My friend, novelist William S. Burroughs, liked to say that 'anything which can be accomplished by chemical means can also be accomplished by non-chemical means.' I have personally found this to be true. There is no area of new perception and expanded awareness discoverable by peyote (or LSD or similar drugs) that cannot also be reached by techniques well-known to Oriental yogis and Western occultists. The sensory withdrawal techniques pioneered by Dr. Lilly and the new biofeedback machines also duplicate most of this expanded awareness." -pp.32-33, Sex, Drugs and Magick
From a 1992 interview:
Q: And what are some of your memories of that whole scene at Millbrook at that time?
RAW: Well, I'm sorry to sound like an advocate, but my impression was that Leary was one of the most brilliant people that I've ever met. Very much like my impression when I first met Buckminster Fuller and William Burroughs. The three people who gave me the sensation that I am in the presence of higher intelligence.
Q: And would you elaborate a little bit on why you put William Burroughs in that company? What do you see in Burroughs's writing, or his particular brand of intelligence that put him in that company?
RAW: Well, it's the choice of words. I first read Seventeen Episodes From Naked Lunch in a magazine called Big Table, and I felt no writer since James Joyce was able to put words together so efficiently and effectively to create the exact images and emotional overtones that he wanted. And I began to notice that not only was he a great prose poet, but he had a lot of interesting ideas, too.
Q: Had you also had the familiarity with Alfred Korzybski at that point?
RAW: Yes. That's one thing that Burroughs, Leary, Bucky Fuller and I all have in common - we all have familiarity with Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics.
(-from transcript of radio interview for Off The Beaten Path, see near the end. The person that transcribed the interview was quite unfamiliar with names mentioned, so I corrected the gross misspelling of Korzybski's name in the original.)
- In an effort to induce altered states without using drugs, Burroughs, in collaboration with Brion Gysin (the main brain behind the Thing) and Ian Sommerville, they came up with The Dream Machine, which uses flickering light patterns to interact with the eye/brain rhythms. You sit in front of it with your eyes closed and it does things to your brain. See the 2008 documentary by Nik Sheehan. Anyway, here's a brief:
WSB on art and making people aware of what they didn't know that they knew:
But before I get to that, a smattering of critical takes on ideas about criticism that are by and about and surround some of my favorite artists: Ezra Pound, Mezz Mezzrow, Marshall McLuhan,William S. Burroughs, and George Carlin:
Pound
Ol' Ez had a gazillion things to say about criticism, and often it was aimed at some sort of mass pedagogy for the "man" who still wants to learn; a "man" who has found himself alienated from the Bewildered Herd and would like some guidance from a no-nonsense tough-guy aesthete. Pound was happy to play the part. Here's some advice from Pound to one of these "men":
It seems there are many cognate quotes like this from Pound in his voluminous oeuvre; I liked this one because it seems to capture the experimental Pound: a writer who tried to find structures and forms that worked on the mind of the Reader on more than a few levels. A critic can break habitual associations in the reader only with some sort of ju-ju that approaches a magickal operation, it seems to me. A simple way to unpack this: when Harold Bloom used the term "strong poetry" he meant someone (scientists and political revolutionaries included) who could use metaphors so well that they make the reader see the world in a new way. No mean feat; no small shakes, that.
Any criticism that accomplished this level must, it seems to me, attain to something like "literature" itself?
Mezz: not the greatest player ever, but good enough, and he loved playing stoned. His book Really The Blues was influential in many ways.
Mezz Mezzrow
"Suppose you're the critical and analytical type, always ripping things to pieces, tearing the covers off and being disgusted by what you find under the sheet. Well, under the influence of muta you don't lose your surgical touch exactly, but you don't come up evil and grimy about it. You still see what you saw before but in a different, more tolerant way." - from Really The Blues, pagination lost in my notes because I was probably stoned?
No comment here; Mezz's observations about "muta" (cannabis) seem self-evident to me.
McLuhan on Burroughs
The New York intellectual Alfred Kazin had quasi-dismissed Burroughs's writings as a "private movie theatre." Here's McLuhan:
"It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home." - originally from "Notes on Burroughs," The Nation, December 28, 1964; collected in William S. Burroughs At The Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989
Let me just say that the current way I see McLoon's meaning here is that we ought to look first at the performativity of Burroughs's bits, the way he tries to accomplish whatever he's trying for (saving Western civ), and not so much the garish content of his visuals alone.
Professor Carlin: On Film Criticism
"I'm never critical or judgmental about whether or not a movie is any good. The way I look at it, if several hundred people got together every day for a year or so - a number of them willing to put on heavy makeup, wear clothes that weren't their own and pretend to be people other than themselves - and their whole purpose for doing this was to entertain me, then I'm not gonna start worrying about whether or not they did a good job. The effort alone was enough to make me happy." - from When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?, p.106
Bobby Campbell's portrait of RAW and burger. Campbell is easily the best artist who has ever tired to capture Wilson's vibe: he's steeped in RAW's work and has a mesmerizing, psychedelic style that fits RAW's work isomorphically. When I look at this piece, I think of the Discordian admonition: "Don't just eat a hamburger...eat THE HELL out of it!"
Two Writers: Very Different Takes on Criticism
First up, my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson, interviewed at his home overlooking the campus at Berkeley, possibly Spring of 1981, by Dr. Jeffrey M. Eliot:
Eliot: Are you affected by the critics? Do their opinions concern you?
RAW: As William Butler Yeats said, "Was there ever a dog that loved its fleas?" Critics have been very kind to me, personally. Of all the reviews of my published books, something like 90 percent have been highly favorable, so I have no personal grudge against critics. On the other hand, in an impersonal
way, I have a strong moral objection to critics. Whenever I see a critic tearing a writer or actor or any artist to shreds in print, I feel a sense of revulsion. I write a lot of criticism myself, but I only review things I like. I don't admire the desire to tear other people apart. I can think of two unfavorable reviews I've written in my whole life, and I regret them. One was about a book in which a woman gets raped and is said to enjoy it; the other was a review of a very dogmatic book on UFOs, in which the author described those who disagreed with him as neurotics. People who like to write witty, nasty
things about other people are not generous or charitable, to put it mildly. We should all try to give out as much good energy to other human beings as we possibly can. I honestly believe that every bit of bad energy we put out has adverse effects that go on forever. This is the Buddhist doctrine of karma. The
Buddhists believe that every bit of anger, resentment, hate and so on that goes out passes from one person to another, without stopping. The same is true of good energy: every bit of good energy one puts out makes someone else feel a little bit better. I think if people were really conscious of this
psychological fact, they would try to put out nothing but good energy, no matter what happened to them. They would certainly not be so casual about passing on bad energy. All the bad energy in the world builds up like a giant snowfall, until we have a huge war. Nowadays, it can mean total nuclear
Armageddon. This is traditional Buddhism, as I say, but I think it's materialistic common sense, too. One only needs to study human behavior to realize it. I regard those people who make a career out of being nasty as emotional plague carriers.
-from an interview in Literary Voices #1, p.54
Near the end of his life, RAW saw fit to re-publish snippets of various interviews he'd given over the years in his book Email To The Universe. The above was included in that 2005 book (albeit RAW edited it using E-Prime), see p.216. RAW wrote that his wife Arlen read the interview and she guessed he was stoned at the time. On p.216 of Email, which includes this bit on Buddhism and criticism, RAW included a footnote which reads: "Yeah, Arlen got it right: I must have toked a bunch o' weed before delivering myself of that sermon."
Aside from RAW's take on criticism here, his overall view on the subject was far more complex (he was not able to remain emotionally distant from unfriendly reviews), and someday I will try to flesh it all out a bit. Moving on...
Nonetheless: let us take Robert Anton Wilson(1981) as one view of critics. I would like to contrast this with Lawrence Grobel's interview with James Ellroy, who once described himself as the "demon dog" of literature.
Grobel asks Ellroy in 1998:
LG: Kirkus Reviews called you the comic-book Dos Passos of our time.
Ellroy: I never read Dos Passos. Kirkus can suck my dick. Fuck them up the ass with a faggot pit bull with an 18-inch dick and shoot a big load of syphilitic jism up Kirkus's ass.
-from Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives
Here's Ellroy on Brit TV from not long ago. He's always creeped me out in an entertaining way. If you ever get a chance to see him do a reading, even if you're not into his stuff, CANCEL everything else and see him read. Trust me on this. Also, as disparate from Robert Anton Wilson as I find Ellroy's bearing and attitude towards...life, note they have one musical love in common. This will take about 2 minutes of your space-time:
The fine non-fiction writer Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) wrote a book about radical biologists who climbed the tallest redwood trees in the most remote areas of Northern California. This book was titled The Wild Trees. Think of climbing a tree that's 350 feet high. There, above the old-growth redwood canopy the tops of the trees knitted together and one could walk around, there were new species to discover, an entirely new niche. And Preston writes of the overwhelming silence up there, only windsounds if any. Sound, time become warped. Space-sky and perception, silence overwhelming. John Cage, with one of his Nocturnes from 1948 in background, talking about sound. How much more zen-masterishly can you get? It's 9 minutes. It might slow your cells down and make you forget Mitt Romney and Barack Obama:
"Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity of his nature. A violent wind does not last for a whole morning; a sudden rain does not last for a whole day. To whom is it that these (two) things are owing? To Heaven and Earth. If Heaven and Earth cannot make such (spasmodic) actings last long, how much less can man!" - Tao Te Ching, from chapter 23, Lao Tze, James Legge trans.
The firebrand schoolteacher and critic of public schools John Taylor Gatto thought one thing schools do to kids is a "manufacture" of "restless anti-solitude" and that schooling stood in the way of the problem of "solitude's mastery." Kids in Unistat grow up not knowing how to be alone with their thoughts.
Morris Berman, another radical critic of Unistat society, thought corporate consumerism and advertising militated against a possibly dangerous to the social order solitude among citizens. He quotes the great literary critic George Steiner, that we live in a "systematic suppression of silence."
"It can't get too quiet for me." - William S. Burroughs
"The marvelous and mysterious which is peculiar to night may also appear...in the remarkable silence that may intervene in the midst of lively conversations; it was said, at such times, that Hermes had entered the room..." - Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods
The poet Gary Snyder once wrote of eustacy, which looks like ecstasy, but he defined the former as "silent, solitary illumination."
When we're in very unpleasant mental states, it seems the last thing many of us want is silence, solitude. Or as my friend Mari L'Esperance put it in a line in one of her poems, "Silence ticking like something alive."
Wine-hearted solitude, Our mother the wilderness, Men's failures are often as beautiful as men's triumphs, but your returnings Are even more precious than your first presence. -Robinson Jeffers, "Bixby's Landing"
The aforementioned Burroughs (was he joking?) thought silence was once the primary reality. In this he probably was using Alfred Korzybski's idea about silence at the event-level of phenomenal experience, pre-verbally. Burroughs took this idea and made brilliant variations on the theme: language as a virus. We talk because the word-virus had found a host: us. I find this one of the funniest and most amusing ideas of the 20th century.
Marshall McLuhan, riffing of one of his favorite themes, the relation of figure/ground:
"New media are new environments. That is why the media are the message. One related consideration is that antienvironments, or counterenvironments created by the artist, are indispensable means of becoming aware of the environment in which we live and of the environments we create for ourselves technically. John Cage has a book called Silencein which, very early in the book, he explains that silence consists of all of the unintended noises of the environment. All of the things that are going on all the time in any environment, but things that were never programmed or intended - that is silence. The unheeded world is silence. That is what James Joyce calls thunder in the Wake. In the Wake all the consequences of social change - all of the disturbances and metamorphoses resulting from technological change - create a vast environmental roar or thunder that is yet completely inaudible."- "Address At Vision 65," p.225, The Essential McLuhan
And the Greek irony: McLuhan the Great Talker suffered a stroke that pretty much knocked out his ability to speak. Oy! (see Philip Marchand's bio of McLuhan, pp.281-287 for the horrible, profoundly moving deets.)
Ez Pound's silence was self-imposed. He'd fucked up everything with his idiotic antisemitism, he'd hurt everyone he loved, he'd been a damned fool, his entire life was botched, like the civilization he thought he was trying to save. And Allen Ginsberg visiting him in Rapallo, singing Hari Krishna, playing Pound his Bob Dylan records, trying to get Pound to realize that sure, his antisemitism was his "fuck-up," but his poetic revolution had been a success; he'd influenced everyone, etc. Ginsberg to silent Pound, about Julius Orlovsky, "Manichean who wouldn't speak for 14 years because he believed all the evil in the universe issued from his body and mouth." - What Thou Lovest Well Remains, p.33
Pythagoreans and silence. Leary reading Gravity's Rainbow in solitary confinement. Buckminster Fuller, ready to commit suicide because of failure-feeling, deciding he didn't have the right to: he belonged to Universe. Bucky goes silent for a year to see if language was tripping up basic golden thinking-in-pictures. But once Bucky began speaking again, he never stopped. One wonders about the experiment of silence and his prose style.
I'm not sure if any of these thought-snippets on silence made any sense, and 57% of me doesn't care.
Purple Prologue
Of late I'd been reading scads and scores of articles and sections of books on "declinism," both in Unistat and for humanity, versus a much more upbeat and optimistic literature of forecasts and futurology, when my mind was drawn - strangely attracted - to a basin of philosophical thought that felt so wonderfully odd I thought I had to share it with someone. But my comments on the current viruses that carry the catastrophic deep into our amygdalas will take up too much space, and I'll get to this Weird Basin of thought tomorrow. Still, I think this blogspew ends on a funnier note, which was required, lest I end up throwing another wet blanket on our already cold and sopping selves.
But first I had to extricate myself from the situation, and with the aid of WD-40, a hacksaw, some twine, and some well-chosen neurochemicals, I broke loose and here I am, somewhat scathed but with a fortified imagination. On with it.
Popular Catastrophe, or: The Timeless Secular Jeremiad
Are you an adrenaline junky? Do you love nothing more than a good melodrama, with yourself in the middle of it? Are you one loathe to easily dismiss the Mayan prophecies, or the risk of being Left Behind? Would you describe the planet Earth as both "late" and "great"? Are you still scarred from 1989 worries that the Japanese rising sun will crush you economically? Do you suspect radical Islamic "sleeper cells" are biding their time pretty much "in every damned burgh in the country"? When you get into a political discussion, do you usually use the phrase "tentacles around our necks" within the first two minutes? Do you like to pretend either you or others, despite the dizzying complexities, can predict the future? Then the literature of Catastrophe is your thing (I confess it's often mine, too), and there is no end of it. It's inexhaustible. Some of my favorite articles from the past 48 hours include:
Jed Perl's article on declinism in the Arts, from The New Republic. It's "pernicious" to talk this way about Art, Perl declares. He leans wisely on Isaiah Berlin's long essay "Historical Inevitability," which I highly recommend to all conspiriologists, and I use that term in as much of a neutral sense as you can possibly imagine. Perl drops Oswald Spengler's name, seen on his parents' bookshelf, seemingly for weight. He observes that there's an odd comfort in the notion of decline, that it's "almost cathartic." Perl also asserts that decline is about inevitability, of which I'm not completely sold, not in the context that Perl's writing about, at any rate, Isaiah Berlin notwithstanding. Near the end he gets off a good line about flirting with "dystopian hyperbole" which seems to feed the authoritarian imagination. Yes!
Maybe.
What's funny about Perl's essay is that he skirts the entire issue of valuation in Art, which is to me the story of Art since the end of what we like to call "World War II." Recently the Unistat TV show 60 Minutes did a piece on money and the valuation of modern art. Watch it and then talk about "decline," Perl. If you watch the Morley Safer bit - wry-eyed codger Safer seems to think most recent Art that goes for millions is a sham - make sure you note the chart comparing the Art Market vs. the Stock Market. It's like tulipmania or something.
In the Winter 2012 ish of The City Journal, endorsed by such heavyweight intellects as Rudy Giuliani, Clarence Thomas, George Will, Gambling addict and chain smoker and former Drug Czar and Mr. Virtue William Bennett, Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, and Mona Charen, we are encouraged to find that Unistat's economic decline has been greatly exaggerated. Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar admit the feelings of decline are "stark" in what they tellingly call the Anglosphere. Folks 'round here be gettin' all worked up 'cuz "we" ain't "dominant" anymore. Well, Kotkin and Parulekar have some numbers and pie charts and graphs to show we're still in the game. Sure, it looks bad. But first: the Anglosphere.
It's made up of Unistat, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, and tack on The Philippines and Singapore, who speak a lot of English and seem to have tagged along with Australia; they speak English there and, help the Anglos keep an eye on China.
The Sinosphere (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau) makes up 15.1% of global GDP
India makes up 5.4%
"Other" (how convenient!) makes up 53.4%
But the Anglosphere makes up 26.1% and has overwhelming military superiority, and we're - sez Kotkin and Parulekar - numero uno in biotech, software, aerospace...and they even stoop to entertainment, mentioning how great Hollywood is, and Lady Gaga's name comes up, among others. I have nothing against Lady Gaga, but this seems like a "reach."
Sorry, but the olde timey conservative Superior White Race crap I've seen from these people my whole life hasn't changed. Just think of how they conceive of economic "reality" and humans in general. I do not share their values. They say our "fundamental assets" are political, demographic, and cultural. I need more specifics. "The Anglosphere future is brighter than commonly believed." If you guys say so...
In one of those pieces that really bum me out, Morris Berman is interviewed by Nomi Prins for Alternet about his new book, Why America Failed, and, while I consider Berman to deliver consistently the best of the secular jeremiads (although that rubric probably doesn't fit because it's been Game Over as far as Berman's concerned since, oh, around 2000, as I read him...a Doom-Sayer?), he's also my kryptonite; I read every Berman book and find it hard to dismiss him. (I've riffed on, mentioned, written about Berman HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.)
Confession: after reading this one, I took an intellectual standing eight count, but I will note he mentions John Ruskin's ideas about wealth and that the basic problem in Unistat history has been ontological, which I have found I agree with - that we have an ontological problem - more and more over the last 13 years or so. I don't know: read the interview for yourself.
Many authors of articles on declinism (the word supposedly coined by Mr. Clash of Civilizations Samuel Ellsworth Huntington in an article in Foreign Policy from Winter 1988-89?) remind us that these books and articles play on the basic chord progressions laid down by the Old Testament and the prophet Jeremiah, and to the New Testament's book of Revelation: You/We/They have fucked up royally, but it's not too late to reform or repent!
(But maybe the better-selling books assert it's too late to reform or repent? Sometimes I think I oughtta just collect a brooding welter of factoids about How Bad Things Are and then write a book with a title like The Unavoidable Coming Collapse and the Demise of Hope; history has shown folks tend to go for that stuff...but I consider it immoral, which I hope to explain later.)
We can live in smaller self-contained communities, get much-needed banking regulations, drive smart cars, go all-out for solar, live in eco-friendly architecture, and scale back our military budget and we'd still probably be overwhelmed by the historical epoch we find ourselves in. Morris Berman has been saying for a long time: it's too late. Become a New Monastic Individual and keep the torch burning for the next renaissance, because it's Dark Ages now, folks! Talk about ruining my buzz! But he's a serious intellectual, very astute, and I challenge any reader of the OG to grapple with him.
At the same time, my epistemology says that the "future"is far, far too complex to be so sure about any outcome. It looks bleak now, but let's not lose our senses of humor. And besides, the difficulty of prophecies, you may have noticed, is that they're often wrong. Almost always wrong. Why is that? I think the fractal nature suggested by the mathematics of complexity is a compelling answer. We may be in a historical bottleneck right now, and by 2050 we'll all be laffing at the Doomsday predictions from 1970-2015. Or we'll be dead. Or Unistat or (Name Your Country Here) has gone from First to Third World in but 20 years. Or things could be really great, surprisingly good in some areas, and horrible on others. I stand in awe at the cajones of the endless line of writers who wrote fat books proving we'd be dead by now, or wishing we were. To contemplate the single-minded negative mental and emotional energies required to turn in 400 pages seeking to prove Why We're All Doomed! I call that determination!
Finally: The Poetic Dark Humor of Artists and the Apocalyptic Imagination
It seems like an odd idea to want to go to a horror film to "enjoy" ourselves, but many of us do. Why? Because it addresses something we feel - there are some things that could possibly happen, but we'd rather not think of them. It's safe to watch it on a screen, happening to other people. We don't want the hellaciously awful things to happen to those people, because they're a lot like us, but the stuff does go down, and we're...purged? Aristotle thought so. Maybe it just fucks us up even more, I'm not sure. It probably depends on who's watching.
I admit I'm pretty much with guys like Morris Berman (or Chris Hedges, there are many more) at odd hours throughout any given week. However, because of my obstinate and remedial doubt about nailing the future, I think there's something to be said for looking the harsh facts (as best as we can tell) square in the face and saying "non servium" to the moody brooding. A viral memetic optimism might be as potent as its mirror image, and I'm with Robert Anton Wilson, who thought foreclosing on hope was immoral, especially if you're involved with younger people's lives. That makes sense to me. I may be a damned fool. But most of the time I choose to think we can make it.
Another way to deal with fear and anger of apocalyptic horror, catastrophic accidents, human error on a monumental scale, and other Delightful Things is to poeticize your imagery (William Burroughs, with the music, IIRC, from the vaults of the NBC Radio Orchestra? Anyway, I have it on my CD, Dead City Radio), or to make your fears into a hilariously overblown cosmic apocalypse (the 6 plus minute clip of George Carlin, memory of a true bard in old age).
Here's Professor Carlin's darkly humorous take on the end humanity while we're trying to be environmentalists:
Relax and listen to Old Bill Burroughs and the action when Pan is let loose upon the world:
First: A Gnostic: Simon Magus
In Jacques Lacarriere's little gem of a book, The Gnostics, he's discussing the diffusion of gnostic ideas "along the great routes of the Orient," on "the road to Samaria," and the wonderfully odd figure of Simon Magus, one of history's uber-heretics. His ideas contradicted the ideas of the Apostles quite radically. For what would turn out to be the orthodox view, the Apostles said a human's soul is immortal, no matter what he or she does; we are all condemned for eternity to burnish or tarnish that soul, know the depths of hell, or paradisical delights. Simon preached, or railed rather thus: We all have a fragment of God in us. We are special creatures because, for example, we can use language and reason. But these are potentialities, not eternal. We must use it or lose it. (In the 20th century, we found that if a child was not exposed to any language by age seven or so, their brain's innate language acquisitive feature soon dissipates. And who really "reasons" much even these days?) Simon says: we have the capacity for speech, grammar, and geometry...but it's up to use to seize the day and work that stuff, get really good at it. The point is: we have the capacity. Simon seemed to think we also had the capacity for immortality, but time's a wastin': let's get to it, figure it out...
We must cultivate an attitude towards our aptitudes. That spark of he Divine in us is not eternal. It can only become eternal if we feed that spark, make it into a fire. Otherwise, we revert to nothingness.
And here's how the eloquent Lacarriere unpacks Simon Magus's heretical view of immortality: "For the gnostic, the die is cast, here, before death. (No wonder Simon Magus was hated by the orthodox! - the OG) Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to the melancholy Jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening on to immortality or the void." (p.49)
Another gnostic heretic, Valentinus, is quoted: "Make death die."
It is because of the Gnostics, the Sufis, the Taoists, much of Buddhism, some mystical Judaism, and some Hinduism and certain Christian mystics that I find a line of the so-called "new atheism" interesting, and that line says something like, "Religion is too important to be left to the believers, the faithful." See Alain de Botton's views in this article, which also mentions Nassim Taleb.
It would seem the Extropian/Transhumanist manifestoes echo certain things some gnostic sects were already groping towards, in the first two centuries of the Common Era.
A Quick Thought and/or Inchoate Koan
Let's say the worldwide army of scientists working on the Death Problem solve it. A few huge key findings fall into place, the rest is like knocking over dominoes, and WHAM!: we've got immortality. Is this something like Sisyphus pushing his stone all the way to the top of the mountain, and over the edge, finally, wiping his hands and going home?
Burroughs and Vico
After Norman Mailer published his book Ancient Evenings, Burroughs, from roughly 1972 till death, showed a Mailer influence with an Egyptian-based death as mythic antagonist, which comes out in unique Burroughsian full-force with his use of the "seven souls" one has and must deal with correctly in the afterlife, largely derived ultimately from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here, have a listen to Ol' Bill reading from his novel The Western Lands, accompanied by the fantastic electronic-world music of Bill Laswell's band Material:
Here's the lyrics as WSB reads them; he added a few bits here and there as improv, like "Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama." I confess the first time I heard this piece I went into an altered state, and when WSB says the first three souls are immortal and go back to heaven for another vessel, but the last four souls must "take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead," I was floored. O! The primal poetry of it all!
My blogging colleague Oz Fritz is all over this soul-after-death bardo trip, and I eagerly refer to his recent post HERE.
Throughout Burroughs's dazzling oeuvre, there's an obvious obsession with memory and vital, sexual young men (some of this for obvious reasons); but he also liked to remember himself as young and vital when he was an old man. He thought and wrote about death in ways that few of the candidates for Great American Novelist did. And apparently, from at least around the time of the appearance of the book that would make him famous, Naked Lunch, in 1959, he'd dreamed about afterlives. Personally, I do not think much about an afterlife, possibly because of my overweening materialism and non-religiosity. But I'm fascinated by what cultural anthropologists have told us about the various beliefs about death. Someone once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize." When it comes to religious ideas about life and death I see them as sort of collective artworks, and who knows? Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, and some of these ideas are "right"? How hilarious! How ironic! How...marvelous to contemplate.
Back to Burroughs.
In his book from 1995, (he died in 1997), My Education: A Book of Dreams, WSB recalls a dream he'd had right after Naked Lunch was published:
Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of the intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-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."
The semantics of "education" seem vital here: by 1959 WSB had long dropped out of Harvard, where he studied medicine and anthropology, and had travelled and written a couple of novels and many later-to-be-published letters of literary delight to weirdos like myself. Aside from formal education, he had earlier astonished young Ginsberg and Kerouac with his erudition, and shaped their thinking - and other notable "Beat" types - mostly via his learning of Arcane Things and WSB's spectral presentation of himself. It's easy (and valid, methinks) to surmise the dream's semantics of education had to do with imagination/narrative/tapping into post-terrestrial circuits of brain/magick/experimentation.
It was much later that WSB began to concentrate on the cosmi-comic high drama of Death as the Adversary, like a character in multifaceted forms. And he drew from many sources regarding this, not just the Egyptians. Emotionally, a very strong actuating force for his thoughts about death had to do with his beloved cats. I recall reading once - I forget where - that Burroughs thought nuclear annihilation would be particularly horrible because then his cats would die.
(At this point in my rambling little blogspew I'm quite tempted to link to articles on cats and taxoplasmosis and its potential to make humans quite a bit odder than they would've been, if only for the irony of someone I thought was maybe Unistat's greatest writer during the second half of the 20th century, and who used the metaphor of language-as-virus extensively, but I will just link this and you go ahead and make of it what you will. Hmmm...Ezra Pound loved cats too, feeding them all over Rapallo...)
Yes, but what about Vico? He had something to say about immortality and the afterlife too? Of course he did.
Vico thought a looming large and distinctive feature of human law, as opposed to natural law, was that we humans bury our dead. And with ceremony. (We have good reason to believe Neanderthals did too, but there was no way Vico could've been on to that.)
Vico:
Let us imagine a brutish state in which human corpses are left unburied as carrion for crows and dogs. Such bestial behavior clearly belongs to the world of uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities, in which people wandered like swine, eating acorns amid the rotting corpses of their dead kin. This is why burials were rightly defined in a lofty Latin phrase as "the covenants of the human race," foedera humani generis, and were characterized less grandly by Tacitus as "exchanges of humanity," humanitatis commercia."
Then Vico enumerates many books he's had the privilege to get hold of, about peoples from far-flung areas of the world. What all these books prove is that "all pagan nations clearly agree in the view that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and wander around their corpses: which is to say, souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal." Vico doesn't have much at all to say about what happens to anyone's soul after death. But I do like his proto-ghost/zombie vision idea. I like it in the same way Burroughs talks about the at-times treacherous roads to the Western Lands. I don't "believe" it, but it makes for tremendous poetry.
The end of the section of The New Science in which Vico here discusses burial as a human law, culminates with this quote from Seneca:
"When we discuss immortality, we must grant considerable importance to the consensus of humankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the underworld. I follow this general belief." (section #337)
Nietzsche On This Topic...
...Seems to lead us by some sort of circumambient commodius vicus of recirculation to Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and back to a quasi-Simon Magus-like gnostic view. In section #58, Fred N. rails against the quasi-Neoplatonic "life is better up there" crowd, where the real immortality lies. For these weak, unimaginative folk, the Good Life is to be found after death. And before orthodox Christianity became the master of Rome, Epicurus had already battled against these types. I will leave it to the better minds who know the gnostics (such as Simon Magus) and Nietzsche to say just where and how they diverge with regard to immortality, but clearly, in The Antichrist, Fred N. doesn't dig the Christian version either:
"One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but "Christianity," by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation."
Final Thoughts: Professor George Carlin
"When I die I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I want to be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away." - N&S:9
"If I had my choice of how to die I would like to be sitting on the crosstown bus and suddenly burst into flames." - N&S:10
"Isn't it time we stopped wasting valuable land on cemeteries? Talk about an idea whose time has passed: 'Let's put all the dead people in boxes and keep them in one part of town.' What kind of medieval bullshit is that? I say, plow these motherfuckers up and throw them away. Or melt them down. We need the phosphorus for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious." - N&S:79
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