Interview with William S. Burroughs

(Originally appeared in Journal For the Protection of All Beings, 1961)

By Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg

Gregory Corso: What is your department?

William Burroughs: Kunst und Wissenschaft.

Gregory Corso: What say you about political conflicts?

William Burroughs: Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

Gregory Corso: Who manipulates the cloth?

William Burroughs: Death

Allen Ginsberg: What is death?

William Burroughs: A gimmick. It’s the time-birth-death gimmick. Can’t go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

Gregory Corso: Do you feel there has been a definite change in man’s makeup? A new consciousness?

William Burroughs: Yes, I can give you a precise answer to that. I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.

Allen Ginsberg: And if they are removed, what step?

William Burroughs: The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms — this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color. We can translate word and letter into color — Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote “words” can be read in silent color. In other words, man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.

Gregory Corso: How does one take that “forward step,” can you say?

William Burroughs: Well, this is my subject and is what I am concerned with. Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you — in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to. Now try breaking up part of the page like this:

  Are there      or just we can translate many solutions       for example color word color in the soft typewriter                               into political conflicts             to attain consciousness monopoly and control

Gregory Corso: Reading that it seems you end up where you began, with politics and it’s nomenclature: conflict, attain, solution, monopoly, control — so what kind of help is that?

William Burroughs: Precisely what I was saying — if you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it’s strictly from the soft typewriter.

Gregory Corso: What kind of advice you got for politicians?

William Burroughs: Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

Gregory Corso: What if people don’t want to change, don’t want no new consciousness?

William Burroughs: For any species to change, if they are unable and are unwilling to do so — I might, for example, have suggested to the dinosaurs that heavy armor and great size was a sinking ship, and that they do well to convert to mammal facilities — it would not lie in my power or desire to reconvert a reluctant dinosaur. I can make my feeling very clear, Gregory, I feel like I’m on a sinking ship and I want off.

Gregory Corso: Do you think Hemingway got off?

William Burroughs: Probably not.

(Next day)

Allen Ginsberg: What about control?

William Burroughs: Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better. All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect — emotion. Any machine tends to absorb, eliminate, Affect. Yet the only person who can make a machine move is someone who has a motive, who has Affect. If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever. Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.

Allen Ginsberg: What kind of organization could technological society have without control?

William Burroughs: The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control. Elimination of all natural sciences — If anybody ought to go to the extermination chambers, definitely scientists. Yes, I’m definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves — they’re reality-addicts, they’ve got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it. We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled — in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works — the mass media — unparalleled opportunity.

Allen Ginsberg: Who do you think is responsible for the dope situation in America?

William Burroughs: Old Army game, “I act under orders.” As Captain Ahab said, “You are not other men but my arms and legs –” Mr. Anslinger has a lot of arms and legs, or whoever is controlling him. Same thing as the Eichman case: he’s the front man who has got to take the rap. Poor bastard, I got sympathy for him.

Gregory Corso: Could you or do you think it wise to say who it will be or just what force it will be that will destroy the world?

William Burroughs: You want to create a panic? That’s top secret — want to swamp the lifeboats?

Gregory Corso: O.K. How did them there lifeboats get there in the first place?

William Burroughs: Take for instance some Indians in South America I’ve seen. There comes along this sloppy cop with his shirt buttons all in the wrong hole. Well then, Parkinson’s law goes into operation — there’s need not for one cop but seven or eight, need for sanitation inspectors, rent collectors, etc.; so after a period of years problems arise, crime, dope taking and traffic, juvenile delinquency. So the question is asked, “What should we do about these problems?” The answer as Gertrude Stein on her deathbed said, comes before the question — in short before the bastards got there in the first place! That’s all —

Allen Ginsberg: What do you think Cuba and the FLN think about poets? And what do you think their marijuana policy is?

William Burroughs: All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. “There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here,” that’s what they always say. “Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around.” “As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers.” Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

Gregory Corso: I feel capitol punishment is dooming U.S.A.

William Burroughs: I’m against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift’s Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book. Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation — not attempts to prevent suicide.

Allen Ginsberg: What advice do you have for American youth who are drawn to political action out of sympathy for the American revolution?

William Burroughs: “I wouldn’t be in your position” — old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they’d have us.

Gregory Corso: What about the Arab peoples — how are they faring?

William Burroughs: They’re stuck back thousands of years and they think they’re going to get out with a TV set.

Gregory Corso: What about the Negros, will they make it — not only the ones in the South, but everywhere?

William Burroughs: Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy — always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups — the largest race is the Mongoloid group. In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations. The country with a low birth rate and low death rate will be hardest hit — and so the poor may indeed inherit the earth, because they’re healthier.

Allen Ginsberg: What do you think of White Supremacy?

William Burroughs: The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children’s children’s children might be a different color is something very alarming to them — in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image. The attempt to maintain a static image, even if it’s a good image, just won’t work.

Gregory Corso: Do you think Americans want and could fight the next war with the same fire and fervency as they did in World War II?

William Burroughs: Undoubtedly, yes — because they remember what a soft time they had in the last one — they sat on their ass.

According to Maynard & Miles, this is the first published interview with William Burroughs. It appeared in the 1961 issue of Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a periodical edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and published by City Lights Books in San Francisco. (Maynard & Miles E1)

This electronic edition is a mirror of a text that used to be available at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Transcribed by Flesh in 1992. Proofread and corrected to match the text in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs.

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A Word Is a Word Is a Collage (1965)

A Profile of William S. Burroughs (1965)

By Bill Butler

Bill Butler was an American poet who served as one of the influential managers of London’s independent bookstore Better Books. In 1967 he moved to Brighton and founded Unicorn Books, which was subject the following year to a nasty obscenity trial involving its edition of J.G. Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan and other works of the underground that were being offered for sale. Butler was friendly with William Burroughs and interviewed him for this previously uncollected profile, first published in the Guardian newspaper on 27 November 1965.

Voice dry as the voice of T.S. Eliot droning from a recording, accent still American after years away from America. Appearance as anonymous as a bank clerk’s, forgettable as a bank robber. Writer of books compared with Kafka, Joyce, and dirty postcards. His bruised readers nurse a sense of outrage and assault after trips through the Burroughs landscape, a desert of screams.

All the time he talks he moves around the room, or groping for cigarettes, or gesturing with nervous hands. He lines the cigarette pack up with invisible parallels, rearranges the ash pattern in the ash tray. His work is sentences from newspapers, conversations, other authors, the title of something he is reading, things he hears, what is happening around him; it all makes a sort of collage. “Brion Gysin first suggested the collage technique to me in 1960. I had been working toward something like the cut-up method on my own. Naked Lunch is partially a cut-up. Gysin said that writing was fifty years behind painting and why shouldn’t something else be done.”

“He had started something he called ‘permutating points.’ When you start moving ‘time,’ the word, around, you get many different meanings. We have quite a few different words in the English language such as ‘Two – to – too,’ ‘I – aye – eye,’ ‘there – they’re – their. Once you move them around, change the word order slightly, meanings change, new things come out. Just by changing the punctuation you can have: ‘We are there. Two know,’ or ‘We are their two. No,’ or ‘We are there to know.’ Words intersect in unfamiliar ways. Change the word order and ‘We are too there. No.’ You can’t do that with French — the whole effort of the academy has been to make a language with no permutations, no interest in it.”

From a pile of newspapers on the bed he picked up and waved the Daily Express: “The English papers are amazing. Lok at the variations in headlines, here in the Daily Express it says: ‘2 A.M. ANXIETY GROWS FOR IKE,’ right here on the front page, the top story. But in this other paper they’ve put it way over on the back page, down at the bottom. Just not the same story.”

He reads a lot of newspapers. For information: “I once knew a junkie that would hold [sic] up with the newspapers, a couple of packages of cigarettes, and some candy bars and read them through from first to last page. Everything. And remembered it too. If he got the chance he’d reel the whole thing back at you, every word of it. I spend most of my time editing and filing. Some of the files are here with me, but not all of them. I couldn’t travel everywhere with them.”

“For ten published pages there are fifty pages of notes on file and more on tape. I use a tape recorder, camera, typewriter, scissors, scrapbooks. From the newspapers and from items people send me I get intersections between all sorts of things. Plane crashes, for example. They come in sequence. A plane piloted by a Captain Clark crashed in California. Now the crash was caused by a crazed passenger, Frankie Gonzales, who shot Captain Clark. The next major plane crash was at Clark Air Force Base in Manila, no survivors. Frankie Gonzales came from Manila. On the plane once, on the Gibraltar-to-Tangier run, the pilot was Captain Clark. Over the loudspeaker came, ‘Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.’ Things like that. They all tie up, there are connections, intersections.”

“If people keep their eyes open they’ll notice these peripheral things around them. Newsweek magazine some time ago ran an advertisement which said: ‘Read by 1,700,000 families in 186 lands.’ Two weeks later the ad came out: ‘Read by 1,600,000 families in 166 lands.’ Why? I’d like to know what happened to those 100,000 families and twenty countries.”

Word Falling, Photo Falling

In his books William Burroughs constantly repeats: “Word falling, photo falling.” He explains it: “I expect to see the formation of an ideographic language. You know Marshall McLuhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy says that a syllabic language conditions thought. Words and photographs are used by vested interests as a control machine to manipulate humanity. But their manipulation depends on people being able to read; so we have universal literacy promulgated. Theocracies, on the other hand, such as the Mayans and the Egyptians, were dependent on an illiterate population where knowledge of even such information as seasonal times for planting rested only with the priesthood. Their control was through ignorance, whereas we today are controlled through the word which we can read.”

“We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not the image of the thing itself. Try reading something silently without saying the words subvocally. It’s hard to do. Gertrude Stein’s statement: ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,’ is true only if written down; but as Korzbyski says, a rose (flower) is, whatever is it, not a rose (word). So a rose (word) is a rose (word) is a rose (word) is a rose (word). No flower.”

Burroughs’ only published books in England so far are Naked Lunch and Dead Fingers Talk, both published by John Calder. When it came out Naked Lunch was greeted in the English press with a near-total retch of disgust. Those critics who actually read the book are answered in this passage from Nova Express, to be published in February by Jonathan Cape:

Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer — I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so-called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine. Their drugs are poison to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens — Stay out of the Garden of Delights…

Asked who his “they” are, he answers, “The vested interests. Time / Life / Fortune is one. The Luce magazines are nothing but control mechanisms. They’re about as human as a computer. Henry Luce, himself, has no control over the thing now, it’s grown so large. Yet all it would take to bring it down is one technical sergeant fouling up the works, just one technical sergeant. That’s why the ‘Word falling, photo falling’ image. We’ve got to break down the police organization of words and images. I haven’t had time to do it yet but one possibility would be a color alphabet — using colored dots. Obviously it would be impossible to use 26 colors; but a combination using nine colors and a series of dots, based on the syllable and not on the letter — colored dot symbol for ‘ing,’ ‘ed,’ ‘ch,’ ‘wh,’ and so forth would be an improvement. Or an ideographic language like the Mayan or Chinese systems used in addition to the spoken language.

Unlike most authors, whose personae in books and in flesh are different, Burroughs is completely consonant with his writing, quoting from it occasionally; but more generally he simply uses similar wording to express ideas which he is working out in the books. He regards the weapons of the “machine” as varied: “They use sex as an addiction for control, just as they use alcohol and drugs — a program of systematic frustration in order to sell this crock of sewage as immortality, a garden of delights, and love. In our civilization alcohol is the other accepted narcotic since it also induces sleep. And as a crime-producing ‘drug’ it has no rival. This is the world they want to make us live in and like, where they can use the word, the photo, sex, narcotics, and alcohol. And power addiction, many policemen are addicts for power, if it got taken away from them they’d go through agony. Those are their weapons. And the monopoly has records pertaining to anybody that they feel could be of use to them or who might endanger them.”

In Soft Machine, to be published next year by Calder and Boyars, William Burroughs summed himself up with pretty fair accuracy… “So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers, and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air…”

Written by Bill Butler, originally published in the Guardian on 27 November 1965, and posted to RealityStudio on 28 June 2011.

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“I Always Have Three Weapons on Me”: 1981 Interview with William Burroughs

 

“I Always Have Three Weapons on Me”: 1981 Interview with William Burroughs by Alain Pacadis

Uncollected 1981 Interview with William Burroughs from Le Palace Magazine

This interview by Alain Pacadis appeared in French in Le Palace Magazine 5 (1981). An eBay seller very kindly provided a scan of it and RealityStudio translated it into English. It is not to be found in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of Wiliam S. Burroughs.

William Burroughs has impressed a generation of Americans with his warped universe: expeditions to Mexico in search of Yagé in the company of young boys who offer their bodies for a few dollars; decrepit hotel rooms; the invention of nonlinear writing, “the cut-up” with Brion Gysin, whom he met in Tangiers in an atmosphere reminiscent of the Thousand and One Nights; Soft Machine and the Ticket That Exploded. Walking in circles in New York, Lexington Avenue, looking for a guy dressed in black. Burroughs was in Paris for two days and I met him at his old friend Gysin’s place.

Pacadis: Your first book Junkie has made a mark on young people.

Burroughs: Yet when it came out, everyone rejected it.

Pacadis: Then there was Naked Lunch which David Bowie would like into make a movie…

Burroughs: Yes, Brion wrote the screenplay, and David is very interested. I saw him in the play The Elephant Man. He is an extraordinary actor. I would like to see the film get made.

Pacadis: Then you traveled to Mexico, the Amazon, and Morocco…

Burroughs: Yes, that’s where I met Brion — in Tangier. There was an exhibition of the sketchbooks he made in hommage to Delacroix while traveling in the Sahara. I told him about my research into Yagé. He was very impressed and I stayed five years in Tangier.

Pacadis: You were there at the same time as the Rolling Stones.

Burroughs: Yes, I got to know Brian Jones when he was recording the pipe players of Jajouka but I didn’t talk much to the other Stones.

Pacadis: Then you lived in Paris with Brion Gysin.

Burroughs: In the early 1960s, I lived in the hotel Gît-le-Coeur [the Beat Hotel]. I paid $26 a month for my room. There was a gas stove where I cooked up paregoric. It was the beginning of the beatnik movement. Now the same room is worth $26 a day.

Pacadis: What’s your next book?

Burroughs: My next book will be published in March [1981]. It will be the longest of all of them: 400 pages. Usually my books are about 200. It will be called: Such Is the Red Night. [sic — Cities of the Red Night] It’s a story about pirates in the 18th century. People will be confounded.

Pacadis: You wrote The Third Mind in collaboration with Brion Gysin, how did you work on this book?

Burroughs: We wrote a chapter each. Gradually the writing grew more fragmented. We realized that by dismembering a poem of Rimbaud we could arrive at another poem, different but just as beautiful. It was the “cut-up.” Then we cut up newspaper titles and parts of our own books in the same way, but it was a long time ago… We experimented with the cut-up from 1959 to 1965.

Pacadis: You are considered the greatest “gay” writer.

Burroughs: After being married for a long while to a woman, I turned to boys.

Pacadis: Do you like to stay with the same boy for a long time?

Burroughs: It ranges from one or two nights to a few months. I have often stayed six months with the same boy.

Pacadis: Do you prefer to be with young boys?

Burroughs: Between 18 and 25 years old. I do not like boys too young.

Pacadis: In New York, you live in an apartment…

Burroughs: I live in a loft on the Bowery, eight blocks from St Mark’s Place. I love this part of New York, near Little Italy, Chinatown.

Pacadis: Do you like living in New York?

Burroughs: Yes, it is an extraordinary city but extremely dangerous. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I live on the Bowery which is a dangerous neighborhood and I only travel by subway. I always have three weapons on me: a cane, brass knuckles, and a can of tear gas. If I am attacked, I quickly take out a weapon, and in general the person, seeing that I am determined, runs away. So far I have not had to use my weapons. One day a guy attacked me on a street corner. He wanted money and said he had a revolver in his pocket. I touched his jacket and saw that he had nothing. I took out my tear gas and he ran off. When I walk in New York, I always have my weapons on me. Nothing can happen to me. A can of tear gas costs only three dollars and it can come in handy. Everyone should have one. I tell all my friends.

Pacadis: You have to take the plane tomorrow morning for New York, you like to travel a lot?

Burroughs: Yes a lot, I come to Europe three or four times a year to sign contracts or give readings. I’ll be back in a month…

Original interview published in French in Le Paradis Magazine 5 (1981). Posted to RealityStudio on 18 November 2017.

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1984 Interview with William S. Burroughs

On the Occasion of the Publication of The Place of Dead Roads

by William Weiss

Abe Frajndlich, William Burroughs Close-Up, 1984 (© Abe Frajndlich 1984/2013)

William Burroughs smokes Players and manipulates them with a hand that is thin and pale and missing the last terrible joint of the fifth digit. We’re drinking coffee and talking and eating almond pastries around a glass-topped table in a room full of rich, soft couches, objets d’art, books… sun’s in the morning window. His presence is attentive and genuine, though his eyes sometimes sweep about furtively in response to questioning. When he wants to emphasize a point, the orbs fix and stare into you, searching: “Do you understand, dear?”

He is 70. In a league with Swift, Orwell, Huxley. I feel like Sweet Pea applying for a sorceror’s apprentice vacancy.

In 1977 he taught a class in screenplay writing at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado. He taught us all he dared of time, synchronicity and carefully measured self-confession — handfuls of that “unutterable earth.” “Time is that which ends” or “Art, like REM sleep, is a biological necessity” or “The only thing worse than a cop lover is a cop hater” and so on and so on, sitting there, unfathomable, an alien blitzkrieg.

But now we talk about his work with Laurie Anderson on her haunting Mister Heartbreak album… about .357 magnums and 9mm handguns… about the possibility of Soviet missile bases being built on the border if the U.S. abandons Central America… soon we’re into crossbows and machetes… I suggest that a sabre is the ideal weapon for slashing… he reminds me when using mace to be sure of proper pressurization and always spray directly in the face. “Nothing worse than a weapon that fizzles,” he drawls.

It’s his latest book, The Place of Dead Roads, that I’m after, a strange and wonderful novel whose protagonist — Kim Carsons — journeys through time and space exploring possible avenues of mutation and shooting it out with the shits of this planet, who want to keep the Great Illusion rigged for their own diabolical insect purposes. As a western, Roads is tough and dusty, and Kim gunfights his way into your heart. As satire, it is a well-conceived stage where many of Burroughs’ most characteristic reproaches of Western Civilization achieve formidable delirium hilarity. 

WEISS: “Sir, I quote from The Place of Dead Roads: ‘When the fog lifts you can see their fucking church sticking up… ‘ You use this image several times in the novel and it reminds me of something out of a John Ford western. Ford would show a church steeple or the shadow of a church upon the Duke’s entry into a town — you know, civilization here. Has Ford had any influence on your work?”

BURROUGHS: “Of course, as soon as you start writing a western, you see, all the old westerns come back, but I can’t think of any particular one… ”

WEISS: “How about Francis Coppola? I remember you saying something about Colonel Kurtz [Apocalypse Now] and how, indulging in extreme experience, he had set up a romantic 19th century time capsule, and that was why the CIA wanted him exterminated with extreme prejudice. I got an idea of homo sapiens actually engineering a reality, a temporal situation.”

BURROUGHS: “Well, you know, there’s nothing very mysterious about that. It happened in the early days of the Vietnam war… it was literally a return to the 19th century colonial configuration. These CIA operatives would go back there and set up their headquarters in the jungle somewhere — set up a center of power. You’ve read Heart of Darkness?”

WEISS: “Yes.”

BURROUGHS: “Set up the same sort of small center of power. As the war got more serious, those people were out.”

WEISS: “So the CIA felt threatened.”

BURROUGHS: “Well, yes. They didn’t want these people kicking around, doing God knows what out there.”

WEISS: “Cinematic techniques are sometimes so obvious in your novels. For instance, the first line of The Wild Boys: ‘The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture… ‘”

BURROUGHS: “Those are alright on the printed page. I make use of supposed cinematographic techniques — techniques that wouldn’t work at all on the screen.”

WEISS: “You once said that you thought you had ideas that would revolutionize the film industry, but they turned out to be not even good ideas. Like mixing black and white and color, and using the same actor for several different characters.”

BURROUGHS: “All those things. A writer doesn’t immediately realize just how different the mediums are. You attempt to write a beautiful film script, forgetting that a film script isn’t supposed to be read. It’s supposed to be put on the screen.”

WEISS: “I know you were wrestling with adapting Junky to the screen.”

BURROUGHS: “Oh well, yes, that went on and on, but nothing has ever come of it. Of course, a film project is never on until it’s on the screen… for example, Midnight Cowboy was kicked around for seven or eight years… ”

WEISS: “That was an excellent film.”

BURROUGHS: “Yes.”

WEISS: “I remember a short interview by Allen Ginsberg wherein you discussed the continuity of your work — Soft Machine  and Nova Express overflowing out of Naked Lunch, The Job overlapping The Wild Boys, etc. And I can see that the Venusians are at it again in The Place of Dead Roads, which stylistically and architecturally continues nicely where Cities of the Red Night left off. But besides the works themselves, there is the matter of a ‘continuity’ of characters — we’ve seen that ‘sheep killing dog’ Carsons before. How Carsons is perhaps acquitting his various karmas, book by book, and in the progress of your oeuvre assaulting the last frontier, storming the citadels of heaven. Are the journeys of Carsons, for just one example, a kind of fictionally encoded modus operandi that we, as prisoners of time, should study carefully?”

BURROUGHS: “I would say, in general, that for anyone who wants to get out of time, any kind of art is useful. That’s what art is all about. That’s what it’s for, to get you out of time… Shakespeare, Conrad… some writers are much more attuned to space… well, for example, there’s much more in Conrad than there is in Maugham. In Maugham there’s almost no space perspective.”

WEISS: “Yes, you mention Maugham in The Place of Dead Roads. Are you speaking of, in a sense, a kind of sacramental reality that can be recalled?”

BURROUGHS: “No. I would say our destiny, if we’re going anywhere, by and large our spiritual destiny is in space — and there are dreams, myth and art, writing, painting, film, sculpture — any form of art… ”

Kim knows that the first step toward space exploration is to examine the human artifact with biologic alterations in mind that will render our H.A. (Human Artifact) more suitable for space conditions and space travel… We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air wondering how we can survive in that alien medium… Kim reads all the science fiction he can find, and he is stunned to discover in all these writings the underlying assumption that there will be no basic changes involved in space travel.

My God, here they are light-years from the Earth, watching cricket and baseball on Vision Screens (can you imagine taking their stupid pastimes light-years into space?). Yes, sir, the fish said, I’m going to shove a little aquarium up onto the land, got everything I need in it.

–from the Place of Dead Roads

Abe Frajndlich, William Burroughs Seated, 1984 (© Abe Frajndlich 1984/2013)

WEISS: “The photograph that appears on the cover of The Place of Dead Roads is interesting. How did you go about choosing it? For some reason I’m reminded of Charles Gatewood‘s mannequin pistoleer on the inside cover of Sidetripping.”

BURROUGHS: “Now, the photograph, that was a picture taken in black and white of Pima Indians, taken about 1884. Photographer unknown — at least not credited. From the archives of the Colorado Historical Society. We tinted it. It’s a very good picture and I’m surprised it doesn’t have a credit. Whoever it was, the picture is very carefully posed.”

WEISS: “I was reading the latest issue of Smithsonian, and I thought that Kim Carsons might like to know that the American artist James Whistler once shot a dog for no other reason than that the animal had placed itself badly in relationship to the landscape. He also once remarked that his nature needed enemies. 

BURROUGHS: “Well yes, the less dogs I have around the better. I don’t like dogs. I don’t like the noise they make.” 

WEISS: “They’re very very territorial and they’re very vocal about their territoriality.” 

BURROUGHS: “Well no, excuse me, but that’s what they’re for. The principal service a dog performs, besides hunting, is to give notice of approach. They can tell someone’s coming from 300 yards away. I’ve seen in Morocco that’s what they’re used for… to let you know someone’s coming. A friend of mine got a dog… a German shepherd. He had it a month and it bit three of his friends and killed one of his cats. I’d rather take my chances on burglary than have a dog around… apparently something awful happens to a dog when they’re domesticated.”

“Cut ’em loose,” Kim tells the driver. The driver leans down with a knife and the dogs leap out running.

Boy gets one from behind with the shotgun. The driver nails another with a spine shot. They are crawling around screaming and dragging their broken hindquarters. But the third dog doubles back and leaps for Kim’s throat. Kim throws up his left arm and the dog grabs him just below the wrist and Kim blasts the stock-killing beast with his .44 an inch from the left side, singeing off a patch of hair, blowing dog heart out of the other side with scrambled lungs and spareribs. Just as the dog spirit is on the way out, the dog clamps down hard for a fraction of a second before he drops off stone dead.

Kim massages his arm.

“Fucker nearly broke my wrist.”

“It was a brave dog. Un perro bravo.”

“It was.”

— from The Place of Dead Roads

WEISS: “The exposure of control systems is a central element in your work. Now, Annie Dillard has said that narrative collage is well-adapted to a universe where time and space have come to be defined by quantum mechanics, and I think of your cut-ups and mosaics — you know, sort of short-circuiting the old determinist whining con of ‘behavior is a function of the stimulus’ and ‘for every action there is an opposite but equal reaction.’ I was wondering whether you had considered that the physicists are the high priests of our reality. That the dissolution of the control systems implicit in the old Newtonian ordered language that is accomplished by cut-up is a natural manifestation of a universe with new rules. The collapse of the old order being inevitable, of course, according to the ‘bigger picture’… ”

BURROUGHS: “Well, of course, the physicists are way, way ahead of social scientists, all those very imprecise — they aren’t sciences, you know. Then you get a field theory, like Einstein’s… Probably there is something beyond it, but we certainly haven’t got anything yet… ”

WEISS: “No Unified Field Theory… ”

BURROUGHS: “He (Einstein) came as near as possible to making a statement about the basic nature of the universe: that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light… Of course, they’re much closer to really talking about something, like the Principle of Uncertainty. The fact that by measuring something you alter its properties… ”

WEISS: “Heisenberg… the quantum mechanical view of the universe suggests a much more precise description of human behavior than Skinnerism or determinism.”

BURROUGHS: “Oh absolutely, absolutely… ”

WEISS: “And that’s the context in which I was thinking about your experiments with cut-up and narrative collage.”

BURROUGHS: “Well, it’s Brion Gysin’s idea, of course. It’s a painter’s idea. He said that writing was fifty years behind painting… ”

And there was the dirigible ahead, moored to a tower… The Commander waved to them…

“Well climb aboard, you blokes… We’re all revved up and ready to go… ”

Two Malay servants helped them carry their gear up the ladder and deposited it in their luxurious cabins…

“You understand the Big Picture, old thing. We are retracing our steps in time like a film running backward, breaking the immutable rules of the universe and all that rot… ”

“And about time too.”

Dinner was kulan steaks…

“They are practically extinct, you know,” Tony told him between mouthfuls. 

“Bring on the whooping crane,” Kim whooped.

“And a dodo-egg omelette… ”

The Commander laughed heartily and twirled his mustache. Kim stretched luxuriously, savoring the vintage Burgundy like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy on holiday.

Tom shot him a reproving look.

“Well I am going backward, aren’t I”

“Yes, but observe the speed limit.”

–from The Place of Dead Roads

WEISS: “Here’s one for Clem Snide, private asshole [Cities of the Red Night and The Soft Machine… ]. Tell me what you think. Suspect a projection murder — you know, sorcery. Looks like a suicide. Our boy kicks in the door to the overpowering smell of natural gas. Stove on, pilot light out. Windows taped up. Body’s cold. Only clue to foul play is a diary that says for several weeks before his apparent self-snuff the deceased was subject to a recurring nightmare. I quote from the hypothetical diary:

Next to my bed is a door that opens out to a porch. Always leave it open in the summer. Nice moons on my pillow. Only lately before I go to sleep I’ve been hearing this tap tap tap and all I can think of half asleep is some evil insect stinger dragging on my sheets. So I get up and turn on the light and there’s never anything there. I fall asleep and always dream of a spider, a huge fucker with a web like rope over my bed. He works on it for awhile and I feel like shitting my sheets. Then it drops on me and I sit up screaming and the room is light! There’s no light on, but I can see plain as day. I jump out of bed and turn on the real light looking around frantically realizing that I’ve sparked over and’ve been dreaming with open eyes again. I can never get back to sleep after the nightmare…

Abe Frajndlich, William Burroughs’ Hat and Cane, 1984 (© Abe Frajndlich 1984/2013)

“Have you ever dreamed with open eyes, sir? Where does the light come from?”

BURROUGHS: “the light comes from the brain itself, consciousness being an electromagnetic phenomenon… this has happened to me many times.”

WEISS: “You refer to Don Juan in your work occasionally and I’m assuming you’re talking about Carlos Castaneda… ”

BURROUGHS: “Oh, of course. Yes, I’ve read them all. Well worth reading. As to whether Don Juan actually exists or not seems to me an academic question. You take the book as it is. For example, this book In His Image, about cloning. Whether the cloning actually took place or not is not really a vital point. The point is that cloning is well within the reach of modern technology. The interest has been there, the technical data presented. Also, the outcry from the scientists, who are really, by and large, extremely bigoted, extremely naïve when it comes to metaphysics — very imprecise minds.”

WEISS: “In The Place of Dead Roads, when the Wild Fruits committed suicide, they had already been cloned… ”

BURROUGHS: “Yes.”

WEISS: “Do you think there is a transferral of the soul in an operation such as cloning?”

BURROUGHS: “That would seem extremely likely. You see, what animates the body is an electromagnetic field, probably a number of electromagnetic fields, and those can be transferred, given sufficient knowledge, from one place to another, from one body to another. And the more similar the body was, the easier the transfer would be. It would be like (you’ve got science fiction) a crude concept would be transfer of the whole brain from one body to another. We know, more or less, where the ego center is. It’s probably in the mid-brain. So that would be transferred. It’s a very crude modus operandi, because it isn’t just the brain, it’s the whole body involved. If you just transferred the brain, it’s hard to say what sort of position the transferred ego would find itself vis-à-vis its new quarters.”

WEISS: “Is that the Right Center that you mention in The Place of Dead Roads?”

BURROUGHS: “Probably. It’s a possibility.”

WEISS: “So, are the voice and genital replications that you mention in the cloning process that occurs in the novel a way of ensuring that the soul’s transfer will be easier?”

BURROUGHS: “Well, yes, as I said, the closer you can come to replicating the previous receptacle, the more likelihood you will succeed.”

WEISS: “Well I’m certainly as interested in ways to transcend this ‘precarious aqualung existence’ as you are.”

BURROUGHS: “Yes.”

Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods. In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way. 

— from The Place of Dead Roads 

WEISS: “Forgive my ignorance, but can I ask you what these pins on your lapel represent?”

BURROUGHS: “Yes, this is the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This is the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government. And incidentally, you will be put in jail if you wear that [pointing to the French honor] without being entitled to it. But I can wear this [pointing to the American honor and chuckling] with no fear. The French take this rather seriously. Practically anybody can get into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Very loose.”

Written by William Weiss. © 1984. Interview took place in Cleveland on April 12, 1984. First published by the Cleveland Edition and posted by RealityStudio on 25 February 2013. Photographs taken on the occasion of the interview by Abe Frajndlich, © 1984/2013.

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