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your meat raw I know my folly
I despise William Burroughs, the only man who has ever managed to make hallucinations sound completely uninteresting. A man whose prose robs the events he describes of any value or impact whatsoever, as if to say all life is random and meaningless and that nihilism is the only regime that makes any sense. I dislike that philosophy in humans, and I dislike it when expressed or realized in prose.
When someone tells me that life is essentially meaningless, my first impulse is to shoot them so they can see if they were right or not. My marginally politer impulse is to say, "Well, then, it doesn't matter whether you have a conversation with me or not, does it?" and walk away. I don't care whether our sense of purpose is an illusion or not; it has to be there, and we must all agree never to look behind the curtain, or else why haven't we committed mass suicide and left the planet to the animals?
You may think I'm being hard on Burroughs. Perhaps I am. Perhaps you don't even consider Burroughs nihilist. Perhaps you think I'm misusing the word. Fine. Burroughs glorifies the culture of drinking or drugging yourself to the point of departing this reality. That alone would be enough for me to find reading him unpleasant - the same reason I will not read Hunter Thompson. I don't mind getting out of your head via chemistry every now and then, but there are limits.
Burroughs is extremely tedious to read - like listening to descriptions of someone else's dream (the single most boring thing on earth) told over and over again in a droning voice by the madman sitting in the last seat on the subway who never gets off at any of the stops.
I despise Burroughs, most of all, because there appears to be this cult which has formed around his work, yet he is neither especially innovative nor very good at what he does. If you want hallucinations or disjoint prose or experimental forms, I can point you to writers who do all of those things better - and in some cases did it first.
Take, for example, the Cutup Machine.
The Cutup Machine is an interesting and entertaining idea. It also happens to be an idea that I associate primarily with the Dada movement (now those were people who knew how to be random and nihilistic and still interesting to watch), and especially with Tristan Tzara, who practically made it his life's work to cut up bits of other people's texts and rearrange them in random order and call them his own. Tzara, along with other Dadaists, was fascinated by the idea of how much one had to alter or "improve" an existing idea before it became a fresh idea, a fresh creation. If you draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Dada claimed, it was a new painting, an original work of art by the person who drew the moustache. I disagree, of course - but the idea is presented so provocatively that I can't help but roll it around in my head for a while.
If Burroughs has ever been fascinated by an idea, I cannot find the evidence of it.
The comments about technique on the site above note that
Although Burroughs has credited Gysin with discovering the cutup, he has also acknowledged similar literary experiments in the works of Tzara, Stein, Eliot, and Dos Passos ...
That's awfully big of him, don't you think? In what sense of the word did Gysin "discover" this technique (in the late Fifties, decades after some of these other folks got to it)?
Yes, this is probably the most meaningless of the many meaningless gripes you've ever seen in these pages. I don't know why it bothers me.
Maybe it's just that I haven't had a really good literary argument in a while. Maybe this whole entry is flame-bait for all those Burroughs fans.
No matter who you credit, I like the cut-up technique. I've been doing this to my prose for years. I also like feeding prose to other algorythms that scramble and shift it in various ways. The results generally contain at least one or two surprises.
I fed Lies Beneath The Skin to the Cutup Machine today. Here are some excerpts from what I got back:
to watch you eat. I believe you are wrong. I wake, and the sheets have gone cold on your side, as if being reborn. You never looked back at what lay on the ground without a second thought.
Stepped from it, pulled it apart cleanly as if being reborn. You never looked back at what lay on the ground without a second thought. Stepped from it, pulled it apart cleanly as if you were never there, and sometimes - sometimes in my haste to touch it. I hold it to my skin, hugging it like a hidden tapestry.
...
It is that you are no longer you. And I know you still like to eat your meat raw I know my folly I know my folly I know my folly I know I am aware of my perfection, aware it is unnatural. It frightens me. I do not want this. This is not my life. And yet - and yet I could almost bear it, were it not .... In the back of the wardrobe. Hung across its rear wall like a bird pierced with an arrow in mid-flight. I am lying on the bed again suddenly, lying beneath it.
...
In the back of the enchantment has left an indelible mark upon me. Will I grow old in the normal way Will you Will we remain perfect until we hate each other I almost hate us both already. No, no, I did not think that. No. To my wardrobe. Vestments rich and strange. I know you wish to see this. I know you take it out again. I should be in eternal bliss - isnt that the way its supposed to be back on my farm.
It is that you believe I do not want this.
© Columbine
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This entry is, in an extremely roundabout way, Tom Hartley's fault. Go read "Bullwinkle's Eyes." You'll be glad you did. I think.
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