WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “I am a seeker after cities and souls.”
TED MORGAN: “The Burroughs family had an old Irish cook who was like one of the witches in ‘Macbeth.’ She taught Bill how to call the toads. He made a sort of hooting sound, and the toad that lived under a rock in the pond in his backyard would come out. She taught him the curse of the blinding worm, how to bring the blinding worm out of rotten bread. You took some moldy bread and ran a needle through it in a certain way, and you buried it under a fence post in a pigsty, and you said, ‘Needle in thread, needle in bread, eye in needle, needle in eye, bury the bread deep in a sty.’ And the worm would go into the eye of the person you were cursing and blind that person. To ward off the curse, you had to say, ‘Cut the bread and cut the thread, and send the needle back on red.’ His nanny, Mary Evans, was Welsh, and the Welsh are known to dabble in magic. She taught him another curse: ‘Trip and stumble, slip and fall, down the stairs and hit the wall.’”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. Why do you spill things? Why do you drop something? You have the equipment there not to drop something. Why isn’t that capacity being used? Something is preventing it. And you come down to some sort of basic dualism. There isn’t one person out there, but two. Acting against each other.”
TED MORGAN: “One day when Bill was in Forest Park with his brother in the late afternoon he looked into a grove of trees and saw a little green reindeer, very delicate, with pale thin legs. The reindeer, he later reflected, was his totem animal, which is revealed to you in a vision and which you must never kill. Another time he woke up after having made a house of blocks and saw little men playing in the house, moving very fast.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone else wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason. Among primitive people they say if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.”
TED MORGAN: “Bill explained to Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg that he was working on a method for getting rid of unwanted callers. Being polite, he would invite them in, and then he would stare at them while repeating to himself, ‘I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you,’ and usually they became so uncomfortable they left. If that didn’t work, he would visualize their spirit outside the door, and if the picture was strong enough the body soon followed.”
TED MORGAN: “Lucien Carr felt that Joan and Bill had an understanding on some deep level that people rarely achieve, something on a psychic level that you could actually feel. Sitting in the living room of their small apartment, he watched them play their favorite game. They sat at opposite ends of the room, and each one took a sheet of paper and divided it into nine squares, and drew a picture in each of the squares, and when they had finished they compared the drawings, and there was an uncanny correlation – they had both drawn a scorpion, they had both drawn a bottle, they had both drawn a dog – about half the drawings were the same. To Lucien, this degree of telepathic communication was spooky, and it seemed to him that if either of the two was psychically stronger it was she, that if any signals were being sent, they were coming from her.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “We assume that everything happens by accident. My attitude is that nothing happens by accident. Of course if you put a curse on someone it may boomerang, but you take the chance. It’s like the Old West, if you shoot somebody, there are gonna be ten people looking for you. You may have to do it in self-defense. It’s nothing to be undertaken lightly, but in many cases it has to be done. Another thing about curses, often they don’t hit the person they’re aimed at. As for me, I’ve won some and lost some.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”
BRION GYSIN: “Burroughs wheeled into the exhibition, arms and legs flailing, talking a mile a minute. We found he looked very Occidental, more private-eye than Inspector Lee; he trailed long vines of Bannisteria Caapi from the upper Amazon after him and old bullfight posters fluttered out from under his old trench coat instead of a shirt. An odd blue light flashed around the rim of his hat. All he wanted to talk about was his trip to the Amazon in search of Yage, the hallucinogenic drug. It was said to make you telepathic. I felt right away that he didn’t need too much of that stuff.”
BRION GYSIN: “The raw material for ‘Naked Lunch’ overwhelmed us… Burroughs was much more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another, than occupied with editing the monster manuscript.”
TED MORGAN: “Brion Gysin was essentially that recurring archetypal figure, the consigliere. One can see him down the ages, whispering in the doge’s ear, drafting designs for the king’s gardens, official astrologer to the czar – conjuring up ideas and prophecies, always presented with perfect pitch for the attentive ear… Of particular interest to Burroughs was Gysin’s identification with the 10th century ruler Hassan i Sabbah.”
JOHN GEIGER: “Hassan i Sabbah reigned from the fortress of Alamut. With its mythical garden of paradise and great library – purportedly the greatest of the ancient world – Hassan i Sabbah would provide his followers with a glimpse of paradise, slipping massive doses of hashish into their food. Then some time later they would be led into the garden, with extraordinary flowers, lights, soft pillows, music, and young women. Devotees would be freed of want, of need, but also from the state or church, attaining absolute personal freedom. The men would spend an unforgettable time there, and then, when the devotees awoke from their dream in their barracks, Hassan would tell them, ‘if you die in the course of your duties, you will return to paradise.’ Their devotion was fearsome. He could dispatch his assassins and direct their actions at targets even from great distances. While modern scholars dispute the very existence of the garden and library, Burroughs maintained that, ‘The garden was not a three dimensional place, but a vision to which Hassan had the key.’”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “Brion was just an alien eruption, there was something dangerous about what he was doing.”
BRION GYSIN: “While I was running the 1001 Nights restaurant in Tangier, I kept some notes and drawings meaning to write a recipe book on magic. My Pan people were furious when they found out. They poisoned my food twice then resorted to more efficacious means to get rid of me… While getting the restaurant ready one day I found a magical object, an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each in a little package along with a piece of writing. When deciphered we didn’t even want to touch it, because of its magical qualities, which even educated Moroccans acknowledged. The message was written from right to left across the paper, which had then been turned and inscribed from top to bottom to form a cabbalistic grid calling on the devil of smoke to ‘make Massa Brahim leave this house as smoke leaves the fire, never to return…’ and within a very short time, I indeed lost the restaurant and everything else.”
TED MORGAN: “One day Burroughs bought a keychain in a magic shop called La Table d’Emeraude, with a small stainless steel ball on the end, which he hung from a nail on the wall of his room. Brion came in an started staring at the ball rather fixedly, and suddenly recognized something he saw. Burroughs joined him, looking over his shoulder, and said, ‘Why, yeah, it’s your restaurant in Tangier, but where are those people coming from?’ A group of Moroccans were coming down the staircase carrying a corpse, as in a Moslem funeral, and passed through the doors and went out. Since they had both seen the same thing, it could not have been based on suggestion. This must be what the Elizabethans called scrying, Brion thought.”
TED MORGAN: “Burroughs next decided to experiment with mirror-gazing. The idea was that you could see your former incarnations and be in better touch with yourself. You had to keep staring without closing your eyes, paying no attention to the tears streaming down your cheeks. Brion at first saw 19th century scientists in their laboratories. Obviously something momentous was happening in their experiments. Then the scene shifted, and he was much more ancient figures, like a horde coming off the Asian steppes, great chieftains wearing amazing headdresses, with deeply scarred and tattooed faces, fierce warriors, hundreds of them, perhaps from Siberia. Finally they disappeared entirely, and Brion found himself looking into a space that was at the same time limiting and limitless – was it an enormous room, or was it a landscape? There was a layer of blue-gray cloud about waist-high, breathing, moving, pulsating, and that was the end – it was like looking at the void.”
TED MORGAN: “When Burroughs tried mirror-gazing, he saw his hands in the mirror with the fingers amputated, looking completely inhuman, black-pink and fibrous, with long white tendrils growing where the fingers should have been. As he was mirror-gazing, a young resident of the Beat Hotel named Jerry Gorsaline came into the room and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Bill, what’s happened to your hands? They look all thick and pink.’ Another young American, Nick Smart, walked in one day and exclaimed, ‘Oh, shit!’ Burroughs was looking into one of the mirrors, but reflected in the mirror was someone else’s face. Smart swore that the room smelled of sulfur.”
TED MORGAN: “One time Brion was wearing a djellabah, so that only his face was visible. He went into a trance as Bill Belli, Jerry Gorsaline and Burroughs watched. The features of his face began to lose their distinctiveness. They began to melt and merge so that his face became blurred. He was standing against the window, and for an instant his face vanished, so that you could see the curtains behind it. Then it came partially back, like an out-of-focus image you’re trying to adjust in your binoculars, then it flickered again, disappeared. Suddenly Brion was visible and he fell to his knees, short of breath, exhausted. Bill Belli was a bit of a skeptic, and the next evening he went down alone to Brion’s room and said, ‘Hey, Brion, I was impressed, but can you do it again? But this time don’t get into a djellabah and don’t look in the mirror, just sit right here in front of me.’ Brion sat on the bed and crossed his legs and started to go into a trance. The muscles on his face twitched and his face began to dissolve, like a person with brain damage, whose personality does not show on his face. The ‘Brionness’ of the face was gone and in its place was a fleshy formless mass. But that was as far as he got and he said, ‘I can’t do it tonight.’ He told Belli he had learned the face-vanishing technique from a nomadic tribe in the desert.”
KENNETH ANGER: “Burroughs, and I think Gysin with him, were seriously working on putting spells on the astronauts in outer space in the space stations, with the idea that these people who were in space would be contacted by entities.”
TED MORGAN: “Allen Ginsberg was in India, and one day Burroughs said to Howard North, ‘Allen’s always talking about attaining an egoless state through Indian meditation. Hell, I can do that anytime.’ ‘What do you mean?’ North asked. ‘Well, man, like your personality disappears and you’re not in your body. Look – watch.’ Burroughs stood up and his eyes went dead. His face was blank. Norse felt as if he was looking at an Egyptian mummy. He called, ‘Bill, Bill,’ but there was no reply. Finally, Bill looked at him and said, ‘See what I mean?’”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “There is a way of seeing the paintings of Brion Gysin: you look at the picture, let your gaze drift, and then it happens. You can feel it, a shift in the visual field, a movement and concentration of attention, and the images take on magical forms… I see in his painting the psychic landscape of my own work… He regards his painting as a hole in the texture of so-called ‘reality’ through which he is exploring an actual place existing in outer space. That is, he moves in to the painting and through it, his life and sanity at stake when he paints.”
TED MORGAN: “Jacques Stern sat in on some of the sessions in the Beat Hotel and saw various changes wash over Burroughs’ face. Once Burroughs turned into Paul Bowles, and another time he turned into Khrushchev, with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth. Once Stern felt Burroughs touch his arm across six feet of space. Once Burroughs saw a creature in the mirror wearing some sort of green uniform, its face full of black boiling fuzz; Brion and Stern also saw it.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without (as if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer). I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded. And for this reason the possessor shows itself only when absolutely necessary.”
JOHN GEIGER: “Burroughs and Gysin were almost spooky. Burroughs wrote Allen Ginsberg that ‘many people have commented on my growing invisibility…’ Roger Knoebler, a young American resident of the Beat Hotel, was witness to the disappearing acts. He twice saw Gysin disappear. They would all be stoned and Gysin would have Jajouka music playing, when he would move in front of a curtain in his room and gradually become integrated with it.”
ROGER KNOEBLER: “Brion disappeared before my eyes, for periods of ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, and then he’d come back… I can assure you it’s one of the least astonishing stories you’ll ever hear about Brion Gysin!”
TERRY WILSON: “Gysin had had enough of me in Paris at one point and wanted me to go back to London and I didn’t want to go back, so every day I was still turning up. I was about a week over due from leaving, and Brion didn’t say anything. Suddenly, everything that I touched in his apartment – glass, windows – would break. Every time! Flowers in vases, you know. Obviously it was getting quite scary, but there could be no doubt who was responsible. And at the same time he was wrecking his own apartment! Oh, he was a devil with things like that!”
BRION GYSIN: “I’ve spent more than a third of my life in Morocco where magic is or was a matter of daily occurrence ranging from simple poisoning to mystical experience. I have tasted a pinch of both along with other fruits of life and that changes one’s life at least somewhat. Anyone who manages to step-out of his own culture into another, can stand there looking back at his own under another light… magic calls itself the other method… practiced more assiduously than hygiene in Morocco.”
DJ SPOOKY: “These guys were kind of looking at the world as the particle physics of language, where if you had access to the right codes you could access all sorts of distant realms, interstellar space, cosmic realms, magnetic pulses, you name it. So there’s a kind of magic realism going on with Burroughs and Gysin.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “I am trying, like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.”
TED MORGAN: “As Burroughs got deeper into cut-ups, he came to believe that his accidental combinations of words were prophetic subliminal announcement, coming to him from a collective, extratemporal consciousness. In other words, through the cut-ups he had become a medium for the disclosure of events about to happen. This was another breakthrough, since the guiding principle of fiction was ‘once upon a time.’ But Burroughs’ cut-up principle was ‘once in future time.’”
JOHN GEIGER: “In 1963 Burroughs produced a cut-up: ‘1,000 mile per hour wind here, storms… crackling sounds… dry and brittle as dead leaves.’ Years later scientists announced high wind velocities found on the surface of Mars, suddenly vesting Burroughs’ cut-up with prophetic meaning.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “I couldn’t read the cut-ups a second time as they produced a certain kind of very unhappy psychic effect. They were the sort of texts that you might use for brainwashing somebody, or you might use them for the control of an enormous number of people whom you drove mad in one particular way by one sort of this application of this dislocation of language, where by sort of breaking off all their synaptic attachments to language you would maybe acquire a social dominance over them which one considered completely undesirable.”
TED MORGAN: “Paul Bowles came to visit Burroughs in his splendid penthouse, which had a distinctly nautical look, with porthole windows and leather chairs, and a huge balcony like the deck of a ship. All around the living room there were shelves, and each one was piled with large folios filled with newspaper clippings and photographs and bits of pasted-up prose. ‘I’ll show you how I work,’ Burroughs said, and Paul followed him around the room as he dipped form notebook to notebook. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘New York Times, April 16, 1917, yeah, uh-uh, tornado in Illinois.’ Then he picked up another and said, ‘Herald Tribue, March 5, 1934, tornado in Oklahoma.’ ‘See,’ he explained to Paul, ‘I get them all put together. I collate them.’”
BRION GYSIN: “William followed the cut-ups into the ground, literally. He has a gimlet-type mind and enormous powers of concentration. When he concentrates on something, he burns a hole into it, like someone concentrating a beam of light through a magnifying glass. He is corrosive. He pushed cut-ups so far with variations of his own that he produced texts which were sickeningly painful to read, even to him, mind you. These were texts which had to be wrapped in sheets of lead and sunk in the sea, disposed of like atomic waste.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “All novelists of any consequence are psychic assassins in a very literal sense.”
TED MORGAN: “Burroughs decided to retaliate against the Moka Bar by putting a curse on the place. On August 3, 1973, he took pictures and made recordings, in plain sight of the horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife, and his slack-jawed son. Then he strolled over to the Brewer Street Market and recorded a three-card monte game – now you see it, now you don’t. He came back to the Moka Bar several days later to make new tapes over the first tapes and take pictures. The idea was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position. When the Moka Bar closed down on October 30 and was replaced by the Queen’s Snack Bar, Burroughs was sure that his curse had worked.”
GENESIS P. ORRIDGE: “William sometimes used two cassette recorders, one in each hand and occasionally even added his own voice repeating an incantation he had written to intensify the focus of his spell: Lock them out and bar the door, lock them out for evermore, nook and cranny, window, door, seal them out for evermore. On one page he had stuck two pictures. One was a black and white photograph of the section of the street buildings where the café was. Beneath it was a second shot of the same section of street, or so it seemed at first glance. However, upon closer examination he had very neatly sliced out the café with a razor blade.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: “The door to another dimension may open when the gap between what one is expected to feel and what one actually does feel rips a hole in the fabric. Years ago I was driving along Price Road and I thought how awful it would be to run over a dog or, my God, a child, and have to face the family and portray the correct emotions. When suddenly a figure wrapped in a cloak of darkness appeared with a dead child under one arm and slapped it down on a porch: ‘This yours, lady?’ I began to laugh. The figure had emerged from a lightless realm where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply. There is no light to see them by. It is from this dark door that the anti-hero emerges.”
