The Mark Inside

"Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat. The Mark Inside." William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959).

Being that today is the 109 birthday of author, drug addict, and probable murderer William Seward Burroughs, who wrote the infamous homoerotic, avant-garde nightmare of a "novel" NAKED LUNCH (1959), I thought it would be meet and proper to say a few words about it. Quite unfortunately though I found...I haven't a veritable "word horde" inside myself to convey upon this singular tome. (Which, by the way, I've read three times in my life.)

It's a very dark, disgusting book. Assholes begin conversations with their owners, before growing over with "undifferentiated tissue" and closing up wordlessly; street boys in Tangiers sell themselves for junk; characters dressed as cowboys and vigilantes ("who copped as a schizo possession case") go on murder rampages, while Rock N'Roll Hoodlums that will "cut your throat you white motherfucker," complain that something I can't quite recall is as "dry as grandmother's cunt."

Mysterious Mugwumps hang and rape male victims to death; a malignant entity calling itself "Benway" controls a totalitarian state called "Annexia" on behalf of "Interzone Inc." a company that controls the black market on defective and dangerous goods, as well as junk, which is an infiltrating alien agent used like a vast cosmic chain, and stretching from the blissful infinitude of our incarnation to a "sick junkie [...] coughing and hacking in the junk-sick morning."

There are memories of Mexico and Morroco, Day of the Dead, New Orleans, the "Dead Museum," and Lupita, who sits "like an ancient Aztec Earth Goddess, doling out her little papers of lousy shit." The novel, by the end, descends into an inscrutable (a word Burroughs often utilized to significant effect) series of cut-ups, nearly non-sequitur ramblings of a mind gone to crackers by the alien transmissions of the junk frequency, through which these writings were channeled.

It is no accident (as it says in the film Naked Lunch, "There are no accidents") that Burroughs was fascinated by the cut-up technique, by Raudive Voices (called in modern times, "electronic voice phenomena"). "Only dead fingers talk in braille." For, what else is Naked Lunch but an alien transmission; an outer space jargon from the future slave masters, sent by way of the telepathic junk frequency of Burroughs, who ends in Tangiers after killing his wife (doing a "William Tell Routine") and narrowly escaping prison in Mexico?

In Tangiers, he "hones in on the frequency," telling us stories, and tall tales, painting satirical images of Willy the Disk ("...his mouth had many erectile hairs surrounding it [...] he had a long, snake-like tongue... "), or Bradley the Buyer, who is "setting up voodoo dolls of me in Leavenworth." The world of junk and junk dealing and using has its code of superstitious black magic rituals, its lore, a thousand different seamed and aged faces in rumpled leather coats, dunking poundcake with dirty fingers, "palpating me with fingers of rotten ectoplasm." Wow.

William Burroughs, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs Adding Machine (which could "multiply geometric") grew up in the early part of the last century, living a life of undeniable privilege that was always going to be a cage for a man with an alien soul and a maverick heart. He left for New York City, for the Beat generation and his associations with Ginsburg and Kerouac, Herbert Hunke, Gregory Corso, and suchlike composers of the ratty literature lurking beneath the green, well-clipped Blue Velvet lawns of suburban post World War 2 America. Them there Eisenhower Years of Baby Boom opulence, wherein people, especially young people, began to question the value and meaning of life in a world where the atomic bomb waited, like a seething basilisk of destruction, beneath the surface of an outwardly fertile, green planet. And they found escape by...escaping.

Burroughs left New York for New Orleans, then to Mexico, finally killing his wife, Joan Vollmer, in an "accidental" shooting that occurred September 6th, 1951. Of the facts, there is little dispute. Joan placed a glass on her head at a party. Burroughs ("Bill") attempted to shoot it off. She died. Why, is another question entirely. Bill's lawyer told him not to "say anything." He didn't. Next, he's smoking hashish and shooting morphine in Tangiers (his "Interzone," although that phrase is pregnant with possibilities as to what he is referring to, as far as geographical locales).

In Naked Lunch, Bill's alter-ego is Lee the Agent, of Interzone Inc. Just what his agency entails, we are uncertain. The novel erupts into long, surrealistic, semi-satirical bouts of pornographic absurdity, picturing lesbians dressed as Lady Liberty, belting out "Oh Say Can You See?", while doctors perform chest operations on patients using toilet plungers, and "Hassan's Rumpus Room" becomes a veritable orgiastic descent into the bottom realms of depraved, sadomasochistic, homoerotic murder fantasies. All the better to satirize the "ugly" thing at the heart of the American lynching mentality; the same mindset that fuels conservative pundits to scream, like wounded castrati, for the blood of every two-bit thug unlucky enough to be at the mercy end of a system built and succored on bloody hypocrisy. Burroughs, while outwardly and intellectually seeming as if he were unconcerned with the ethical and moral devaluation of a declining society, like Sade, in fact, used the power of his perverse, sickening prose as a pointed weapon, aimed at the hypocrites who deign to spill the blood of the single guilty man, and yet, murder thousands, if not hundreds of thousands (and even millions) in wars and conflicts fueled by avarice and a malicious, predatory lack of empathy for fellow human beings.

There are passages here so unbelievably raw and sexualized they defy the reader or listener to stomach their details; often an act of sodomy is punctuated by strangulation. Blood and body fluids, mutation and homicidal racism, all the ugliest and most vile and most absurd excrescence of humankind are foisted on the reader, who is liable to be overwhelmed, or even bored, by a succession of literary dadaisms that coalesce and cohere, only to fall again into schizophrenic word-salad and incomprehensible meaningless and arcane characterizations. (Who, for instance, is The Sailor? Why is he "in the City, buying up Time"? it's a beautiful, meaningless, cryptic phrase, a part of the mediumistic, internal dialog of Burroughs, that his readers must unlock if they can, if only partially. There are long passages that are quite eerily beautiful, too, in their poignancy.)

But Naked Lunch is a satire. As well as poetry and a paen for paranoia. ("I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons.") It slings the archaic argot of another age, bringing forth the communications implicit in the interaction between members of the condemned class. Burroughs once said he felt he was an agent of the "billboards, street signs, advertising slogans." Only dead fingers talk in braille IF you're that schizoid. But that doesn't mean, of course, they aren't after you.

Bradly the Buyer, Willy the Disk, Clem and A.J.--the narcs and crooks, and con men of Burroughs' world of predatory powers, of alien minds, foisting the perception of grim, junk-slavery upon the soul of man. And not just slavery to junk, but slavery to ALL forms of con artistry, from political puffery and nationalistic manipulation to small-town murderous racism, to the religious idolatry and self-delusion offered up by holy confidence tricksters--to crooked salesmen that will sell you your death, little by little, on the installment plan.

These perceptions of reality (this is a man that also wrote a book of his dreams) may originate somewhere from the same source that he is attempting to "rise" through the aegis of "cutting into" reality, into the normal, linear patterns of speech and thought that render "language a virus from outer space." To flush that virus, to get at the real meat of the communication, is to break the cycle of control that language, much as Orwell postulated, is used for against the human species: utilized as another chain, like junk, to put around the neck of mankind; to shackle the human being's arms and legs to a vast conspiracy of perception that can always be altered, simply by cutting the flow of transmission, scrambling it, so that it gets through in the original, submerged, yet deeply important, coded form.

"When You Cut Into the Present, Sometimes the Future Leaks Out."

During one of his lectures at Naropa, William S. Burroughs, in his infernally nasal, nearly insectile delivery, said, with the typically flat, bored affect that, while cutting through a newspaper article on Rockefeller, he rejoined the cut-together pieces of the article to read the phrase, "It's a bad thing to sue your own father." This is what happened re: the Rockefeller clan. Burroughs felt this piece of mediumistic coincidence was significant. It's why he spoke on tape, rewound, erased what he wrote, and began in the middle of his last train of thoughts. Somehow, "progressing geometric," between the "angled spaces between" (as H.P. Lovecraft might say) lurks the "hidden truth, the hidden message, the buried music of what is truly invisible, yet to be conveyed. Cutting things up and relying on the logic of random patterns is an artistic technique, but to Burroughs, it was much, much more. It was a key to the great secret heart of the mystery, which he sought just as well, in dreams, in the subconscious mind, and in the "realm of the unreal."

Cats

Like Lovecraft, Burroughs was a cat man. Cats are mystical creatures whose significance was recognized as far back as the Pharaohs. In European witch lore, they are the traditional familiars, the form which the devil takes to aid and abet the witchery of his servant.

If Burroughs sought occult knowledge, then this is one of the only things about his character that makes a kind of rational sense. He was a renegade who presented himself as a gentleman, a hero to the disaffected and disillusioned; yet, he was no anarchist and seemed to believe in the healing power of art and creation to exorcise whatever demons ("the Ugly Spirit") that invaded his being, that pulled the trigger, that penned the words that have shocked and sickened and offended so many minds.

In his later years, popular alternative musicians such as Ministry and Nirvana utilized him in music videos on MTV. (Nirvana vocalist, the late suicide Kurt Cobain, even produced a one-off album single with Burroughs, Bill doing the narration of "The Priest They Called Him." Cobain was a heroin addict.) The last most noticeable image of him is from Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" video from 1994, where Burroughs is depicted hanging on a cross.

Writers as diverse as J.G. Ballard and Norman Mailer hailed him as "conceivably, literature's only living genius." (At least Mailer did; Ballard though, would hardly have disagreed.)

In 1997, he died. What is his legacy? His oeuvre is largely unreadable, an inscrutable communication as harsh and arcane, and excessive as Sade's.

I'm not certain. He will continue to be adulated by a certain cult, one supposes; by the disaffected and the rebellious (though there are damn few intelligent rebels left). The late Roger Ebert referred to him as "one of the saddest of all literary figures." (Not a quote exactly, but you get the idea.)

I'm not certain of the provenance of this article, except that I dreamed of Burroughs unexpectedly, the night before his birthday. His 109th. I've read Naked Lunch three times, and also Junky, Word Virus, Queer, The Yage Letters, Ghost of Chance, Blade Runner: A Movie, etc. What is the scope of his vision trying to impart? Did I receive a small message of communication from that Greater Intelligence that he is now a part of, that he worked for as an "agent?" The same Ugly Spirit that invaded him, killed Joan Vollmer during a senseless, stupid act, and then attempted nullification through drugs, and exorcism through literary excess?

No.

No good.

No Bueno.

Hustling myself.

"...The subway moves by with a black blast of iron."

William S. Burroughs: The Possessed.