Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Mr. French concludes his article . . . “The use of modern microelectric integrated circuits could lower the cost of speech scramblers enough to see them in use by private citizens. Codes and ciphers have always had a strong appeal to most people and I think scramblers will as well. . . .”

  It is generally assumed that speech must be consciously understood to cause an effect. Early experiments with subliminal images have shown that this is not true. A number of research projects could be based on speech scramblers. We have all seen the experiment where someone speaking hears his own recorded voice back a few seconds later. Soon he cannot go on talking. Would scrambled speech have the same effect? To what extent are scrambled messages actually unscrambled by experimental subjects? To what extent does a language act as an unscrambling device, western languages tending to unscramble in either-or conflict terms? To what extent does the tone of voice used by a speaker impose a certain unscrambling sequence on the listener?

  Many of the cut/up tapes would be entertaining and in fact entertainment is the most promising field for cut/up techniques. Imagine a pop festival like Phun City scheduled for July 24th, 25th, 26th, 1970, at Ecclesden Common, Patching, near Worthing, Sussex. Festival area comprised of car park and camping area, a rock auditorium, a village with booths and cinema, a large wooded area. A number of tape recorders are planted in the woods and the village. As many as possible so as to lay down a grid of sound over the whole festival. Recorders have tapes of prerecorded material, music, news broadcasts, recordings from other festivals, etc. At all times some of the recorders are playing back and some are recording. The recorders recording at any time are of course recording the crowd and the other tape recorders that are playing back at varying distances. This cuts in the crowd who will be hearing their own voices back. Play back, wind back, and record could be electronically controlled with varying intervals. Or they could be hand operated, the operator deciding what intervals of play back, record, and wind back to use. Effect is greatly increased by a large number of festival goers with portable recorders playing back and recording as they walk around the festival. We can carry it further with projection screens and video cameras. Some of the material projected is pre-prepared, sex films, films of other festivals, and this material is cut in with live TV broadcasts and shots of the crowd. Of course, the rock festival will be cut in on the screens, thousands of fans with portable recorders recording and playing back, the singer could direct play back and record. Set up an area for traveling performers, jugglers, animal acts, snake charmers, singers, musicians, and cut these acts in. Film and tape from the festival, edited for the best material, could then be used at other festivals.

  Quite a lot of equipment and engineering to set it up. The festival could certainly be enhanced if as many festival goers as possible bring portable tape recorders to record and play back at the festival.

  Any message, music, conversation you want to pass around, bring it prerecorded on tape so everybody takes pieces of your tape home.

  Research project: to find out to what extent scrambled messages are unscrambled, that is scanned out by experimental subjects. The simplest experiment consists in playing back a scrambled message to subject. Message could contain simple commands. Does the scrambled message have any command value comparable to post-hypnotic suggestion? Is the actual content of the message received? What drugs, if any, increase ability to unscramble messages? Do subjects vary widely in this ability? Are scrambled messages in the subject’s own voice more effective than messages in other voices? Are messages scrambled in certain voices more easily unscrambled by specific subjects? Is the message more potent with both word and image scrambled on video tape? Now to use, for example, a video-tape message with a unified emotional content. Let us say the message is fear. For this we take all the past fear shots of the subject we can collect or evoke. We cut these in with fear words and pictures, with threats, etc. This is all acted out and would be upsetting enough in any case. Now let’s try it scrambled and see if we get an even stronger effect. The subject’s blood pressure, rate of heart beat, and brain waves are recorded as we play back the scrambled tape. His face is photographed and visible to him on video camera at all times. The actual scrambling of the tape can be done in two ways. It can be a completely random operation like pulling pieces out of a hat and if this is done several consecutive units may occur together, yielding an identifiable picture or intelligible word. Both methods of course can be used at varying intervals. Blood pressure, heart beat, and brain-wave recordings will show the operator what material is producing the strongest reaction, and he will of course zero in. And remember that the subject can see his face at all times and his face is being photographed. As the Peeping Tom said, the most frightening thing is fear in your own face. If the subject becomes too disturbed we have peace and safety tapes ready.

  Now here is a sex tape: this consists of a sex scene acted out by the ideal sexual object of the subject and his ideal self image. Shown straight it might be exciting enough, now scramble it. It takes a few seconds for scrambled tapes to hatch out, and then? Can scrambled sex tapes zeroing in on the subject’s reactions and brain waves result in spontaneous orgasm? Can this be extended to other functions of the body? A mike secreted in the water closet and all his shits and farts recorded and scrambled in with stern nanny voices commanding him to shit, and the young liberal shits in his pants on the platform right under Old Glory. Could laugh tapes, sneeze tapes, hiccough tapes, cough tapes, give rise to laughing, sneezing, hiccoughing, and coughing?

  To what extent can physical illness be induced by scrambled illness tapes? Take, for example, a sound and color picture of a subject with a cold. Later, when subject is fully recovered, we take color and sound film of recovered subject. We now scramble the cold pictures and sound track in with present sound and image track. We also project the cold pictures on present pictures. Now we try using some of Mr. Hubbard’s reactive mind phrases which are supposed in themselves to produce illness. To be me, to be you, to stay here, to stay there, to be a body, to be bodies, to stay present, to stay past. Now we scramble all this in together and show it to the subject. Could seeing and hearing this sound and image track, scrambled down to very small units, bring about an attack of cold virus? If such a cold tape does actually produce an attack of cold virus we cannot say that we have created a virus, perhaps we have merely activated a latent virus. Many viruses, as you know, are latent in the body and may be activated. We can try the same with cold sore, with hepatitis, always remembering that we may be activating a latent virus and in no sense creating a laboratory virus. However, we may be in a position to do this. Is a virus perhaps simply very small units of sound and image? Remember the only image a virus has is the image and sound track it can impose on you. The yellow eyes of jaundice, the pustules of smallpox, etc. imposed on you against your will. The same is certainly true of scrambled word and image, its existence is the word and image it can make you unscramble. Take a card, any card. This does not mean that it is actually a virus. Perhaps to construct a laboratory virus we would need both camera and sound crew and a biochemist as well. I quote from the International Paris Tribune an article on the synthetic gene: “Dr. Har Johrd Khorana has made a gene-synthetic.”

  “It is the beginning of the end,” this was the immediate reaction to this news from the science attaché at one of Washington’s major embassies. “If you can make genes you can eventually make new viruses for which there are no cures. Any little country with good biochemists could make such biological weapons. It would take only a small laboratory. If it can be done, somebody will do it.” For example, a death virus could be created that carries the coded message of death. A death tape, in fact. No doubt the technical details are complex and perhaps a team of sound and camera men working with biochemists would give us the answer.

  And now the question as to whether scrambling techniques could be used to spread helpful and pleasant messages. Perhaps. On the other hand, the scrambled words
and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will. More to the point would be to discover how the old scanning patterns could be altered so that the subject liberates his own spontaneous scanning pattern.

  New Scientist, 2 July, 1970 . . . Current memory theory posits a seven second temporary “buffer store” preceding the main one: a blow on the head wipes out memory of this much prior time because it erases the contents of the buffer. Daedalus observes that the sense of the present also covers just this range and so suggests that our sensory input is in effect recorded on an endless time loop, providing some seven seconds of delay for scanning before erasure. In this time the brain edits, makes sense of, and selects for storage key features. The weird déjà vu sensation that “now” has happened before is clearly due to brief erasure failure, so that we encounter already stored memory data coming round again. Time dragging or racing must reflect tape speed. A simple experiment will demonstrate this erasure process in operation. Making street recordings and playing them back, you will hear things you do not remember, sometimes said in a loud clear voice, must have been quite close to you, nor do you necessarily remember them when you hear the recording back. The sound has been erased according to a scanning pattern which is automatic. This means that what you notice and store as memory as you walk down a street is scanned out of a much larger selection of data which is then erased from the memory. For the walker the signs he passed, people he has passed, are erased from his mind and cease to exist for him. Now to make this scanning process conscious and controllable, try this:

  Walk down a city block with a camera and take what you notice, moving the camera around as closely as possible to follow the direction of your eyes. The point is to make the camera your eyes and take what your eyes are scanning out of the larger picture. At the same time take the street at wide angle from a series of still positions. The street of the operator is, of course, the street as seen by the operator. It is different from the street seen at wide angle. Much of it is in fact missing. Now you can make arbitrary scanning patterns—that is cover first one side of the street and then the other in accordance with a preconceived plan. So you are breaking down the automatic scanning patterns. You could also make color scanning patterns, that is, scan out green, blue, red, etc., insofar as you can with your camera. That is, you are using an arbitrary preconceived scanning pattern, in order to break down automatic scanning patterns. A number of operators do this and then scramble in their takes together and with wide angle tapes. This could train the subject to see at a wider angle and also to ignore and erase at will.

  Now, all this is readily subject to experimental verification on control subjects. Nor need the equipment be all that complicated. I have shown how it could work with feedback from brain waves and visceral response and videotape photos of subject taken while he is seeing and hearing the tape, simply to show optimum effectiveness. You can start with two tape recorders. The simplest scrambling device is scissors and splicing equipment. You can start scrambling words, make any kind of tapes and scramble them and observe the effects on friends and on yourself. Next step is sound film and then video camera. Of course results from individual experiments could lead to mass experiments, mass fear tapes, riot tapes, etc. The possibilities here for research and experiment are virtually unlimited and I have simply made a few very simple suggestions.

  “A virus is characterised and limited by obligate cellular parasitism. All viruses must parasitise living cells for their replication. For all viruses the infection cycle comprises entry into the host, intracellular replication, and escape from the body of the host to initiate a new cycle in a fresh host.” I am quoting here from Mechanisms of Virus Infection edited by Dr. Wilson Smith. In its wild state the virus has not proved to be a very adaptable organism. Some viruses have burned themselves out since they were 100 percent fatal and there were no reservoirs. Each strain of virus is rigidly programmed for a certain attack on certain tissues. If the attack fails, the virus does not gain a new host. There are, of course, virus mutations, and the influenza virus has proved quite versatile in this way. Generally it’s the simple repetition of the same method of entry, and if that method is blocked by any body or other agency such as interferon, the attack fails. By and large, our virus is a stupid organism. Now we can think for the virus, devise a number of alternate methods of entry. For example, the host is simultaneously attacked by an ally virus who tells him that everything is all right and by a pain and fear virus. So the virus is now using an old method of entry, namely, the tough cop and the con cop.

  We have considered the possibility that a virus can be activated or even created by very small units of sound and image. So conceived, the virus can be made to order in the laboratory. Ah, but for the takes to be effective, you must have also the actual virus and what is this so-called actual virus? New viruses turn up from time to time but from where do they turn up? Well, let’s see how we could make a virus turn up. We plot now our virus’s symptoms and make a scramble tape. The most susceptible subjects, that is those who reproduce some of the desired symptoms, will then be scrambled into more tapes till we scramble our virus into existence. This birth of a virus occurs when our virus is able to reproduce itself in a host and pass itself on to another host. Perhaps, too, with the virus under laboratory control it can be tamed for useful purposes. Imagine, for example, a sex virus. It so inflames the sex centers in the back brain that the host is driven mad from sexuality, all other considerations are blacked out. Parks full of naked, frenzied people, shitting, pissing, ejaculating, and screaming. So the virus could be malignant, blacking out all regulation and end in exhaustion, convulsions, and death.

  Now let us attempt the same thing with tape. We organize a sex-tape festival. A hundred thousand people bring their scrambled sex tapes, and video tapes as well, to scramble in together. Projected on vast screens, muttering out over the crowd, sometimes it slows down so you see a few seconds, then scrambled again, then slow down, scramble. Soon it will scramble them all naked. The cops and the National Guard are stripping down. LET’S GET OURSELVES SOME CIVVIES. Now a thing like that could be messy, but those who survive it recover from the madness. Or, say, a small select group of really like-minded people get together with their sex tapes, you see the process is now being brought under control. And the fact that anybody can do it is in itself a limiting factor.

  Here is Mr. Hart, who wants to infect everyone with his own image and turn them all into himself, so he scrambles himself and dumps himself out in search of worthy vessels. If nobody else knows about scrambling techniques he might scramble himself quite a stable of replicas. But anybody can do it. So go on, scramble your sex words out, and find suitable mates.

  If you want to, scramble yourself out there, every stale joke, fart, chew, sneeze, and stomach rumble. If your trick no work you better run. Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down a nice even brown color. Scrambles is the democratic way, the way of full cellular representation. Scrambles is the American way.

  I have suggested that virus can be created to order in the laboratory from very small units of sound and image. Such a preparation is not in itself biologically active but it could activate or even create virus in susceptible subjects. A carefully prepared jaundice tape could activate or create the jaundice virus in liver cells, especially in cases where the liver is already damaged. The operator is in effect directing a virus revolution of the cells. Since DOR* seems to attack those exposed to it at the weakest point, release of this force could coincide with virus attack. Reactive mind phrases could serve the same purpose of rendering subjects more susceptible to virus attack.

  It will be seen that scrambled speech already has many of the characteristics of virus. When the speech takes and unscrambles, this occurs compulsively and against the will of the subject. A virus must remind you of its presence. Whether it is the nag of a cold sore or the torturing spasms of rabies the virus rem
inds you of its unwanted presence. “HERE ME IS.”

  So does scrambled word and image. The units are unscrambling compulsively, presenting certain words and images to the subject and this repetitive presentation is irritating certain bodily and neural areas. The cells so irritated can produce over a period of time the biologic virus units. We now have a new virus that can be communicated and indeed the subject may be desperate to communicate this thing that is bursting inside him. He is heavy with the load. Could this load be good and beautiful? Is it possible to create a virus which will communicate calm and sweet reasonableness? A virus must parasitise a host in order to survive. It uses the cellular material of the host to make copies of itself. In most cases this is damaging to the host. The virus gains entrance by fraud and maintains itself by force. An unwanted guest who makes you sick to look at is never good or beautiful. It is moreover a guest who always repeats itself word for word take for take.

  Remember the life cycle of a virus . . . penetration of a cell or activation within the cell, replication within the cell, escape from cell to invade other cells, escape from host to infect a new host. This infection can take place in many ways and those who find themselves heavy with the load of a new virus generally use a shotgun technique to cover a wide range of infection routes . . . cough, sneeze, spit and fart at every opportunity. Save shit, piss, snot, scabs, sweat stained clothes and all bodily secretions for dehydration. The composite dust can be unobtrusively billowed out a roach bellows in subways, dropped from windows in bags, or sprayed out a crop duster. . . . Carry with you at all times an assortment of vectors . . . lice, fleas, bed bugs, and little aviaries of mosquitoes and biting flies filled with your blood. . . . I see no beauty in that.

  There is only one case of a favorable virus influence benefiting an obscure species of Australian mice. On the other hand, if a virus produces no damaging symptoms we have no way of ascertaining its existence and this happens with latent virus infections. It has been suggested that yellow races resulted from a jaundice-like virus which produced a permanent mutation not necessarily damaging, which was passed along genetically. The same may be true of the word. The word itself may be a virus that has achieved a permanent status with the host. However, no known virus in existence at the present time acts in this manner, so the question of a beneficent virus remains open. It seems advisable to concentrate on a general defense against all virus.