their radar screen picking up José and me coming back from the Methadone Clinic. Funny thing, that cop never looked at me. Never asked José what in hell Burroughs Communications was? And I would have to stand forth and say:
“I am William Burroughs. I communicate.”
How often on undercover [assignment] on this planet is one tempted to use “Deadly Force.”
Get a hold on yourself, young man, and lie straight. What they call truth here is lie there—their lie.
“Our sacred truth. We’ll die for it if given the chance.”
Sorry, they aren’t fitted even for the hawg-pen of Creation.
Wednesday November 20, 1996.
Dream of sex that cannot be realized for some reason. No connection with waking consciousness.
“That old feeling.” Complete with self-pity.
“That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.”
Hmm. Who was it. Composite, I guess.
Every time I put out three cat pans instead of four, the death of Calico hits again—or I see the place [where] she used to eat, beside the sink. All the empty places. The memory of what has been and never more will be. Killed by a car, she left with me all the places she used to be and never more would be.
If I thought the driver did it deliberately—if then I could find him—I have a catalogue here advertising a vial of Road Kill. A touch in his ear, on the porch, sent in envelopes under his door.
Well, can it. This is going nowhere, like the man whose child suffocated in an icebox HE himself had left out, chopping the box to pieces with an axe.
You don’t get off that easy, pal. Who left the icebox out there?
Film—
A series of short takes—headlines—“Flight 800 lost over Atlantic.”
Switch to airport: “Flight 800 now boarding at Gate 23.”
Precognitive fear—now we come to the mushroom cloud that darkened the earth—Hiroshima.
Paul Bowles’s dream: “Off the track! Off the track!”
Psychics, experts, scientists say the Earth will go out of orbit in the year 2000. Idiocy, War on Drugs—fear hanging over the planet. “The Man.” “Yellow Peril”—etc.
Short, short cuts.
Plane—Pop singer takes shot in head. Shots in other times and places. (We see blood blossom in a million syringes, and hit home.)
Cuts to Doctor Kent—Painless Cure.
“Very dangerous.”
The sickness of the world is junk—fear of, attempts to control and to spread, for excuse to control—
It’s all so obvious—intelligent opposition from the Drug Policy Letter.
On plane—sleeping passengers—dream flashes.
“My creeping opponents say that I am trading on my reputation as a writer to gain notice as a painter. Of course I am. In this life, one is well advised to play the cards one has for all they are worth.
“If one is lucky enough to be born with a beautiful face and the corresponding physical attributes, instead of moaning ‘Oh people only want me for my face,’ play your face card. Youth plays the cards of youth and vitality—in youth, play your youth cards. In old age, claim the privileges of age, and get your snout in the public trough before it dries up.
“I want to thank all those who have made this show possible and contributed their expertise as performers, as curators and organizers. And in particular Robert Sobieszek, for a magnificent job [of] selecting and presenting the material at the L.A. County Museum of Art, the same show that is here now.
“And I thank sincerely those who have come here to perform this evening, and all of you who are here tonight.”
November 29, 1996. Friday
“So laughable,” she says.
It’s the banishing ritual—ho ho ho, hum hum hum.
“Whatever comes …!”
Herr Professor Federn. Sure, it worked sometimes, back in the age of hysteria, dissociation, multiple personalities. Don’t work now—like penicillin—
See “mental illness” as a vast organism dedicated to fuck up the Sapiens Project. How can an illness be “mental”? What [does] it feed on?
So for “mental” in the books, substitute “don’t know” or “soul sickness.”
So? I wonder.
Back at Chestnut Lodge. If I had stayed? Where would I be now?
Qui vivra verra.
It was not to be.
I like a weapon close to me
Because I am so cowardly
I have seen Fear
and Fear has made me free
Who lives will see
To look Death in the eye
With no Kamikaze lie
Wrap no flag around me
Who lives will see.
Man can be alone with Death
Will receive a second breath.
Café Lipp—hiking thru tall grass. I had forgotten my gun and [holster]. I was with someone indistinct—rummaging thru drawers, found only the .25. A deep wood drawer, completely empty.
“A Nothing Man” at the 1962 Writers Conference in Edinburgh. Put me on the literary map, thanks in part to Mary McCarthy, my spiritual sister—more than that—
What a job [she did] on the worst of the male sex: “The Young Man”—
A hospital for minor surgery. Hears screams in the night.
“The cancer patient at last!”
And he sang out lustily:
“Cast a cold eye on life, a cold eye on death—Horseman, pass by!”
No wonder for no apparent medical reason the surgeon could ascertain the young man’s heart just stopped in mid-surgery.
I think for no reason to continue his lusty singing and to debase the human image by a hundred cuts. So horrible beyond realization—a shattered, falsified picture of a non-being. What force could so deform a man? Sucking screams off cancer patients, not even.
To nurse: “I heard screams last night, was that the cancer case?”
Nurse: “You’ll never hear a sound from Mr. Miller, must have been in maternity.”
“Oh.”
The young man deflates like a pale green balloon.
“Oh, oh, oh.”
“Well, it’s time for your pre-operative medication.”
Young man in a sudden panic.
“I, uh, well …”
Darkness creeps up from the front of his bed.
“I am the Captain of my soul,” he mutters, as the stretcher slides down the hall, into an elevator—to the O.R.
In Tangier, my typewriter in hock to buy Eukodol, a chemical derivative of codeine, many times stronger. Dihydro-oxy-codeine—finally outlawed, owing to side effect of euphoria, hits like a speedball, Kid.
Guess I used all of it up in Tangier—but it’s still out there in Quevedo, Ecuador, on a dusty back shelf, covered with mildew on a South Sea island—