Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, says that certain words and word combinations can produce serious illnesses and mental disturbances. I can claim some skill in the scrivener’s trade, but I cannot guarantee to write a passage that will make someone physically ill. If Mr. Hubbard’s claim is justified, this is certainly a matter for further research, and we can easily find out experimentally whether his claim is justified or not. Mr. Hubbard bases the power he attributes to words on his theory of engrams. An engram is defined as word, sound, image recorded by the subject in a period of pain and unconsciousness. Some of this material may be reassuring: “I think he’s going to be all right.” Reassuring material is an ally engram. Ally engrams, according to Mr. Hubbard, are just as bad as hostile pain engrams. Any part of this recording played back to the subject later will reactivate operation pain, he may actually develop a headache and feel depressed, anxious, or tense. Well, Mr. Hubbard’s engram theory is very easily subject to experimental verification. Take ten volunteer subjects, subject them to a pain stimulus accompanied by certain words and sounds and images. You can act out little skits.

  “Quickly, nurse, before I lose my little nigger,” bellows the southern surgeon, and now a beefy white hand falls on the fragile black shoulder. “Yes, he’s going to be all right. He’s going to pull through.”

  “If I had my way I’d let these animals die on the operating table.”

  “You do not have your way, you have your duty as a doctor, we must do everything in our power to save human lives.”

  And so forth.

  It is the tough cop and the con cop. The ally engram is ineffective without the pain engram, just as the con cop’s arm around your shoulder, his soft persuasive voice in your ear, are indeed sweet nothings without the tough cop’s blackjack. Now to what extent can words recorded during medical unconsciousness be recalled during hypnosis or Scientological processing? To what extent does the playback of this material affect the subject unpleasantly? Is the effect enhanced by scrambling the material, pain and ally, at very short intervals? It would seem that a scrambled engram’s picture could almost dump an operating scene right in the subject’s lap. Mr. Hubbard has charted his version of what he calls the reactive mind. This is roughly similar to Freud’s id, a sort of built-in self defeating mechanism. As set forth by Mr. Hubbard this consists of a number of quite ordinary phrases. He claims that reading these phrases, or hearing them spoken, can cause illness, and gives this as his reason for not publishing this material. Is he perhaps saying that these are magic words? Spells, in fact? If so they could be quite a weapon scrambled up with imaginative sound-and-image track. Here now is the magic that turns men into swine. To be an animal: a lone pig grunts, shits, squeals and slobbers down garbage. To be animals: a chorus of a thousand pigs. Cut that in with video tape police pictures and play it back to them and see if you get a reaction from this so reactive mind.

  Now here is another. To be a body, well it’s sure an attractive body, rope the marks in. And a nice body symphony to go with it, rhythmic heart beats, contented stomach rumbles. To be bodies: recordings and pictures of hideous, aged, diseased bodies farting, pissing, shitting, groaning, dying. To do everything: man in a filthy apartment surrounded by unpaid bills, unanswered letters, jumps up and starts washing dishes and writing letters. To do nothing: he slumps in a chair, jumps up, slumps in chair, jumps up. Finally, slumps in a chair, drooling in idiot helplessness, while he looks at the disorder piled around him. The reactive mind commands can also be used to advantage with illness tapes. While projecting past cold sore on to the subject’s face, and playing back to him a past illness tape, you can say: to be me, to be you, to stay here, to stay there, to be a body, to be bodies, to stay in, to stay out, to stay present, to stay absent. To what extent are these reactive mind phrases when scrambled effective in causing disagreeable symptoms in control volunteer subjects? As to Mr. Hubbard’s claims for the reactive mind, only research can give us the answers.

  The RM then is an artifact designed to limit and stultify on a mass scale. In order to have this effect it must be widely implanted. This can readily be done with modern electronic equipment and the techniques described in this treatise. The RM consists of commands which seem harmless and in fact unavoidable . . . To be a body . . . but which can have the most horrific consequences.

  Here are some sample RM screen effects . . .

  As the theater darkens a bright light appears on the left side of the screen. The screen lights up

  To be nobody . . . On screen shadow of ladder and soldier incinerated by the Hiroshima blast

  To be everybody . . . Street crowds, riots, panics

  To be me . . . A beautiful girl and a handsome young man point to selves

  To be you . . . They point to audience . . .

  Hideous hags and old men, lepers, drooling idiots point to themselves and to the audience as they intone . . .

  To be me

  To be you

  Command no. 5 . . . To be myself

  Command no. 6 . . . To be others

  On screen a narcotics officer is addressing an audience of school boys. Spread out on a table in front of him are syringes, kief pipes, samples of heroin, hashish, LSD.

  Officer: “Five trips on a drug can be a pleasant and exciting experience . . .”

  On screen young trippers . . . “I’m really myself for the first time”

  ETC happy trips . . . To be myself. . . no. 5 . . .

  Officer: “THE SIXTH WILL PROBABLY BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF”

  Shot shows a man blowing his head off with a shotgun in his mouth . . .

  Officer: “Like a fifteen-year-old boy I knew until recently, you could well end up dying in your own spew” . . . To be others no. 6 . . .

  To be an animal . . . A lone Wolf Scout. . .

  To be animals . . . He joins other wolf scouts playing, laughing, shouting

  To be an animal. . . Bestial and ugly human behavior . . . brawls, disgusting eating and sex scenes

  To be animals . . . Cows, sheep and pigs driven to the slaughter house

  To be a body

  To be bodies

  A beautiful body . . . a copulating couple . . . Cut back and forth and run on seven second loop for several minutes . . . scramble at different speeds . . . Audience must be made to realize that to be a body is to be bodies . . . A body exists to be other bodies

  To be a body . . . Death scenes and recordings . . . a scramble of last words

  To be bodies . . . Vista of cemeteries . . .

  To do it now . . . Couple embracing hotter and hotter

  To do it now . . . A condemned cell. . . Condemned man is same actor as lover . . . He is led away by the guards screaming and struggling. Cut back and forth between sex scene and man led to execution. Couple in sex scene have orgasm as the condemned man is hanged, electrocuted, gassed, garrotted, shot in the head with a pistol

  To do it later . . . The couple pull away . . . One wants to go out and eat and go to a show or something . . . They put on their hats . . .

  To do it later . . . Warden arrives at condemned cell to tell the prisoner he has a stay of execution

  To do it now . . . Grim faces in the Pentagon. Strategic is on its way . . . Well THIS IS IT . . . This sequence cut in with sex scenes and a condemned man led to execution, culminates in execution, orgasm, nuclear explosion . . . The condemned lover is a horribly burned survivor

  To do it later. . . 1920 walk out sequence to “The Sunny Side of the Street” . . . A disappointed general turns from the phone to say the President has opened top level hot wire talks with Russia and China . . . Condemned man gets another stay of execution

  To be an animal . . . One lemming busily eating lichen

  To be animals . . . Hordes of lemmings swarming all over each other in mounting hysteria . . . A pile of drowned lemmings in front of somebody’s nice little cottage on a Finnish lake where he is methodically going through sex positions with his girl friend. They wake up in
a stink of dead lemmings

  To be an animal. . . Little boy put on pot

  To be animals . . . The helpless shitting infant is eaten alive by rats

  To stay put. . . A man has just been hanged. The doctor steps forward with a stethoscope

  To stay down . . . Body is carried out with the rope around neck . . . naked corpse on the autopsy table . . . corpse buried in quick lime

  To stay up . . . Erect phallus

  To stay down . . . White man burns off a Negro’s genitals with blow torch . . . Theater darkens into the blow torch on left side of the screen

  To stay present

  To stay absent

  To stay present. . . A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures . . . Cut to face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch

  To stay absent. . . Sex fantasies of the boy . . . The black slumps dead with genitals burned off and intestines popping out

  To stay present . . . Boy watches strip tease, intent, fascinated . . . A man stands on trap about to be hanged

  To stay present . . . Sex fantasies of the boy . . . “I pronounce this man dead”

  To stay present. . . Boy whistles at girl in street. . . A man’s body twists in the electric chair, his leg hairs crackling with blue fire

  To stay absent . . . Boy sees himself in bed with girl . . . Man slumps dead in chair smoke curling from under the hood saliva dripping from his mouth . . .

  The theater lights up. In the sky a plane over Hiroshima . . . Little Boy slides out

  To stay present. . . The plane, the pilot, the American flag . . .

  To stay absent. . . Theater darkens into atomic blast on screen

  Here we see ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday jobs and diversions . . . subways, streets, buses, trains, airports, stations, waiting rooms, homes, flats, restaurants, offices, factories . . . working, eating, playing, defecating, making love

  A chorus of voices cuts in RM phrases

  To stay up

  To stay down

  Elevators, airports, stairs, ladders

  To stay in

  To stay out

  Street signs, door signs, people at head of lines admitted to restaurants and theaters

  To be myself

  To be others

  Customs agents check passports, man identifies himself at bank to cash check

  To stay present

  To stay absent

  People watching films, reading, looking at TV . . .

  A composite of this sound and image track is now run on seven second loop without change for several minutes.

  Now cut in the horror pictures

  To stay up

  To stay down

  Elevators, airports, stairs, ladders, hangings, castrations

  To stay in

  To stay out

  Door signs, operation scenes . . . doctor tosses bloody tonsils, adenoids, appendix into receptacle

  To stay present

  To stay absent

  People watching film . . . ether mask, ether vertigo . . . triangles, spheres, rectangles, pyramids, prisms, coils go away and come in in regular sequence . . . a coil coming in, two coils coming in, three coils coming in . . . a coil going away, two coils going away, four going away

  A coil straight ahead going away, two coils on the left and right going away, three coils left right and center going away, four coils right left center and behind going away

  A coil coming, two coils coming in, three coils coming in, four coils coming in . . . spirals of light. . . round and round faster faster, baby eaten by rats, hangings, electrocutions, castrations . . .

  The RM can be cut in with the most ordinary scenes covering the planet in a smog of fear . . .

  The RM is a built-in electronic police force armed with hideous threats. You don’t want to be a cute little wolf cub? All right, cattle to the slaughter house meat on a hook.

  Here is a nostalgic reconstruction of the old-fashioned Mayan methods. The wrong kind of workers with wrong thoughts are tortured to death in rooms under the pyramid . . . A young worker has been given a powerful hallucinogen and sexual stimulant. . . Naked he is strapped down and skinned alive . . . The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time . . . The Oaub Bird stands there, screams, watching through his wild blue eyes. Others are crabs from the waist up clicking their claws in ecstasy, they dance around and mimic the flayed man. The scribes are busy with sketches . . . Now he is strapped into a segmented copper centipede and placed gently on a bed of hot coals . . . Soon the priests will dig the soft meat from the shell with their golden claws . . . Here is another youth staked out on an ant hill honey smeared on his eyes and genitals . . . Others with heavy weights on their backs are slowly dragged through wooden troughs in which shards of obsidian have been driven . . . So the priests are the masters of pain and fear and death . . . To do right. . . To obey the priests . . . To do wrong? The priest’s very presence and a few banal words . . .

  The priests postulated and set up a hermetic universe of which they were the axiomatic controllers. In so doing they became Gods who controlled the known universe of the workers. They became Fear and Pain, Death and Time. By making opposition seemingly impossible they failed to make any provision for opposition. There is evidence that this control system broke down in some areas before the arrival of the White God. Stelae have been found defaced and overturned, mute evidence of a worker’s revolution. How did this happen? The history of revolutionary movements shows that they are usually led by defectors from the ruling class. The Spanish rule in South America was overthrown by Spanish revolutionaries. The French were driven out of Algeria by Algerians educated in France. Perhaps one of the priest Gods defected and organized a worker’s revolution . . .

  The priest gods in the temple. They move very slowly, faces ravaged with age and disease. Parasitic worms infest their dead fibrous flesh. They are making calculations from the sacred books.

  “Four hundred million years ago on this day a grievous thing happened . . .”

  Limestone skulls rain in through the porticos. The Young Maize God leads the workers as they storm the temple and drag the priests out. They build a huge brush fire, throw the priests in and then throw the sacred books in after them. Time buckles and bends. The old Gods, surfacing from the immemorial depths of time, burst in the sky. . . . Mr. Hart stands there looking at the broken stelae . . . “How did this happen?”

  His control system must be absolute and world wide. Because such a control system is even more vulnerable to attack from without than revolt from within. . . . Here is Bishop Landa burning the sacred books. To give you an idea as to what is happening, imagine our civilization invaded by louts from outer space . . .

  “Get some bulldozers in here. Clear out all this crap . . .” The formulae of all the natural sciences, books, paintings, the lot, swept into a vast pile and burned. And that’s it. No one ever heard of it. . .

  Three codices survived the vandalism of Bishop Landa and these are burned around the edges. No way to know if we have here the sonnets of Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa or the remnants of a Sears Roebuck catalogue after the old outhouse burned down in a brush fire. A whole civilization went up in smoke . . .

  When the Spaniards arrived, they found the Mayan aristocrats lolling in hammocks. Well, time to show them what is what. Five captured workers bound and stripped, are castrated on a tree stump, the bleeding, sobbing, screaming bodies thrown into a pile . . .

  “And now get this through your gook nuts. We want to see a pile of gold that big and we want to see it pronto. The White God has spoken.”

  Consider now the human voice as a weapon. To what extent can the unaided human voice duplicate effects that can be done with a tape recorder? Learning to speak with the mouth shut, thus displacing your speech, is fairly easy. You can also learn to speak backwards, which is fairly difficult. I have seen people who can repeat what you are saying after you and finish at the same time. Th
is is a most disconcerting trick, particularly when practiced on a mass scale at a political rally. Is it possible to actually scramble speech? A far-reaching biologic weapon can be forged from a new language. In fact such a language already exists. It exists as Chinese, a total language closer to the multilevel structure of experience, with a script derived from hieroglyphs, more closely related to the objects and areas described. The equanimity of the Chinese is undoubtedly derived from their language being structured for greater sanity. I notice the Chinese, wherever they are, retain the written and spoken language, while other immigrant peoples will lose their language in two generations. The aim of this project is to build a language in which certain falsifications inherent in all existing Western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The following falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language.

  The IS of Identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,” because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All naming calling presupposes the IS of identity. This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS in the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb to be can easily be omitted from any language and the followers of Count Korzybski have done this, eliminating the verb to be in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain in force so long as the unchanged language is spoken.