The embalmer, Gold Skin, has discovered a method by which a thin sheet of metal can be applied to a mummy by coating the mummy with charcoal and immersing it in a vat of gold, copper or silver salts activated by a device which was his closely guarded secret. Wrapped in the Golden Skin, one need not fear the encroachment of extraneous insects or scavengers, of time or water. However, the initial mummification must be doubly rigorous, lest one be sealed forever in the vilest corruption of liquefied flesh and bones and maggots.
Gold Skin leaves a small orifice capped by an airtight seal. Every year, on the conception date of the deceased, the Breathing is observed: the seal is broken, and the assembled dignitaries advance and sniff. If there is evidence of mortification, the embalmer is cut into small pieces, which are consumed in a very hot fire with ten Nubian slaves at the bellows so that every fiber of his being is utterly vaporized, until nothing nothing nothing remains as the ashes blow away with the afternoon wind to mix with sand and dust. It’s the worst thing that can happen to an embalmer with mummy aspirations . . . got his condominium in the Western Lands all picked out and paid for.
It sometimes happens that a business rival, a disgruntled former employee or a malicious prankster may gain access to the tomb, make an opening in the gold skin, and squirt in an enema bag of liquid shit and rotten blood and carrion with a goodly culture of maggots selected from a dead vulture. He then seals the opening and polishes the metal so that his intervention is undetectable.
This is the Fifth Breathing, and a goodly crowd is there. On previous occasions a sweet, spicy smell wafted out and there was an appreciative sigh from the guests. This time, as he unscrews the cap, it is torn from his hands and a geyser of stinking filth cascades out, spattering the dignitaries with shit and writhing maggots.
Gold Skin was saved from execution, since the Pharaoh and the High Priest recognized the handiwork of the dreaded demon Fuku, also known as the Mummy Basher for his vicious attacks on helpless mummies.
Fuku is the God of Insolence. He respects nothing and nobody. He once screamed at the Pharaoh, Great Two House 9, “Give me any lip and I’ll jerk the living prick offen your mummy!”
Creature of Chaos, God of pranksters and poltergeists, dreaded by the pompous, the fraudulent, the hypocritical, the boastful. . . wild, riderless, he knows no master but Pan, God of Panic. Wherever Pan rides screaming crowds to the shrilling pipes, you will find Fuku.
Cut-rate embalmers offer pay-as-you-go plans, so much a month for mummy insurance. If you live fifty years or die tomorrow, your future in the Western Lands is assured. (An old couple with their arms around each other’s shoulders stand in front of their modest little villa.)
The Western Lands are now open to the middle class of merchants and artisans, speculators and adventurers, pimps, grave robbers and courtesans. The Priests wring their hands and warn of a hideous soul glut. But Egypt is threatened by invasion from without and rebellion from within. So the Pharaoh decides to throw the biggest sop he’s got to the middle classes, to ensure their loyalty. He will give them Immortality.
“If we alienate the middle classes, they will take their skills to the partisans and the rebels.”
“It is true what you say, Great Outhouse. But I likes the old ways.”
“I too. It was a good tight club in those days. If things get rough, we can always liquidate the excess mummies.”
The Embalming Conclaves are able to offer cheap rates because the embalming is done on a moving belt, each team of embalmers performing one operation: remove brains, remove internal organs, wind the wrappings. They become extremely dextrous and quick. What used to take a month can now be done in a day.
“These changes are too fast for Khepera,” moans the High Priest. (Khepera, the Dung Beetle of Becoming, is seen rushing frantically about, faster and faster. He throws himself on his back in despair, feebly kicking his legs in the air.)
Three hours and twenty-three minutes from Death to Mummification: an hour to gut it out good, an hour in the drying vats, an hour in the lime-cure vats, internal organs stashed in tasteful vases, wrap it up and store it in the communal vaults, which are carefully controlled for humidity and temperature and patrolled by armed guards at all times.
“You see, Great Outhouse, things have gotten out of hand.”
“True. Things always do, sooner or later.”
Even the lowly fellaheen carry out home embalmings in their fish-drying sheds and smokehouses. Practically anybody xan get into the Western Lands.
The young question the mummy concept:
“To keep the same asshole forever? Is this a clarion call to youth?”
“It stinks like petrified shit.”
“Have you something better to offer?” says a serious young Scribe. “We know that mummification can ensure a measure of immortality.” He turns to Neferti. “And what can you offer that is better than such precarious survival?”
“I can offer the refusal to accept survival on such terms, the disastrous terms of birth. I can offer the determination to seek survival elsewhere. Who dictates all this mummy shit?”
“The Gods.”
“And who are they to impose such conditions?”
“They are those who succeed in imposing such conditions.”
“To reach the Western Lands is to achieve freedom from fear. Do you free yourself from fear by cowering in your physical body for eternity? Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore, or sell it if you can find a fool. . . it’s full of holes . . . it’s full of holes.”
June 6, 1985. Friday. I am in Iran someplace, looking at a map to see if the secret place of Djunbara, where Hassan i Sabbah took refuge from his enemies, is on the map. It was somewhere north of the capital. It was not supposed to be on the map, but it was quite clearly marked.
Now I see a cleft in a block of limestone, and through the cleft I can see an old man of great strength, a stone man, his arms and legs of smooth marble.
The Stone Man gave HIS a base of power to shut out his enemies and regroup his shattered forces.
Danger is a biologic necessity for men, like sleep and dreams. If you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal. For the Western middle classes, danger is a rarity and erupts only with a sudden, random shock. And yet we are all in danger at all times, since our death exists: Mektoub, it is written, waiting to present the aspect of surprised recognition.
Is there a technique for confronting death without immediate physical danger? Can one reach the Western Lands without physical death? These are the questions that Hassan i Sabbah asked.
Don Juan says that every man carries his own death with him at all times. The impeccable warrior contacts and confronts his death at all times, and is immortal. So the training at Alamout was directed toward putting the student in contact with his death. Once contact has been made, the physical assassination is a foregone conclusion. His assassins did not even try to escape, though capture meant torture. By the act of assassination they had transcended the body and physical death. The operative has killed his death.
To modern political operatives, this is romantic hogwash. You gonna throw away an agent you spent years training? Yes, because he was trained for one target, for one kill. The modern operative, then, is doing something very different from the messengers of HIS. Modern agents are protecting and expanding political aggregates. HIS was training individuals for space conditions, for existence without the physical body. This is the logical evolutionary step. The physical body is not designed for space conditions in present form. Too heavy, since it is encumbered with a skeleton to maintain upright position in a gravity field.
Political structures are increasingly incompatible with space conditions. They are inexorably cutting our lifelines to space, by imposing a uniformity of environment that precludes evolutionary mutations.
The punctuational theory of evolution is that mutations appear quite quickly when the equilibrium is punctuated. Fish
transferred from one environment to a totally new and different context showed a number of biologic alterations in a few generations. But when more fish were brought in, uniformity was reestablished. Alterations occur in response to drastic alteration in equilibrium in small, isolated groups. All isolated groups are inexorably assimilated into an overall uniformity of environment.
I am the cat who walks alone, and to me all supermarkets are alike. Yes, and the people in them, from Helsinki to San Diego, from Seoul to Sydney.
What did Hassan i Sabbah find out in Egypt? He found out that the Western Lands exist, and how to find them. This was the Garden he showed his followers. And he found out how to act as Ka for his disciples.
At death the Ren, the Sekem and the Khu desert the body, soon to be a sinking ship. The Ka is stuck with his boy. He is a front-line officer taking the same chances as his men, day after day, not just once like Jesus. If his boy dies in the Land of the Dead, he dies too. Forever. So your Ka is your only guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands, the most dangerous of all roads, since you are facing Death itself. Don’t believe the Christian God or Allah or any of that second-rate lot, in their sleazy heavens of pearls and gold with their houris, gods for slaves and servants, with lying promises . . . the Slave Gods.
In present-day Egypt, or in the areas of the Mayan and Aztec ruins, one encounters truncated history, where the present-day reality has lost all connection with the historical past, to create a solid time-block. So the last place to look for clues to ancient Egypt is in Egypt itself.
Specifically, I want to reach Egypt about a thousand years ago, when Hassan i Sabbah was there. The concept of salvation through assassination is taking shape. The first real clue is the Egyptian concept of Seven Souls. HIS sees that the Ka, the Double, is the guide to the Garden. However, the Ka must kill the False Ka in carnate form. And the False Ka, the Feku, mustprcscnt itself when the true Ka takes full possession of the human organism. This is the function of the human organism, to serve as a receptacle for the true Ka. So the enemies of HIS are various carnate manifestations of false, parasitic Kas.
The Feku have the advantage of being infinitely prolific and virtually interchangeable, like a virus. The Feku invades the Ka and immediately starts creating falsified copies. These bear some relation to the original, as cancerous liver cells are made from liver cells. Looks like the real thing but cannot survive contact with the real thing. A cancerous cell and a healthy cell cannot occupy the same space.
Religions are weapons, and some of them act quite rapidly. Witness the explosive expansion of Islam to the gates of Vienna, up into southern Spain, east to Persia and India, west to the Pillars of Hercules and deep into black Africa. In truncated time areas like Egypt, a diving-bell approach is indicated. Time has backed up here and solidified.
“Batten the hatches, Mr. Hyslop, we are going down.”
Back through layers of newspapers, cheering crowds, down through Nasser to Farouk, a fat, sad clown, down through the stuffy dining rooms in the Shepherd Hotel that was burned by rioters, flames of the burning hotel snuffed to candlelight on British Colonials, sure of themselves as actors in roles of quiet privilege and self-possession . . . down through the prayer calls, the suffocating stagnation of the Arab world, back to an explosion of energy sweeping up to the gates of Vienna, up into southern Spain, over to the Atlantic, then KLUNK. And Allah hits a thousand-year writer’s block.
“Sun cold on a thin boy with freckles,” Burroughs repeats for a thousand years.
Allahu Akbar . . . Allahu Akbar . . .
So Allah overwrote a thousand years, and now he can’t write anything better than Khomeini. I tell you, those old mullahs got a terrible look in their eyes. It’s a cross-eyed look, up and to the left, with a completely disagreeable expression. A dead wooden texture to these faces. This is nasty writing, Allah, and speaking for the Shakespeare Squadron, we don’t like it.
* * *
The most severe visitation of writer’s block has fallen as my narrative comes to Hassan i Sabbah in Egypt, where he presumably learned the secret of secrets that enabled him to attract followers, establish himself at Alamout and control his assassins from a distance.
I realize that my whole approach to HIS has been faulty. I have put him on a remote pedestal; then, with a carry-over of Christian reflexes, have invoked HIS aid, like some Catholic feeling his saint medal. And when I was defeated I felt betrayed. I did not stop to think that he was also defeated, that he is taking his chances with me. Instead of asking about the juicy secrets, I asked another question: Did HIS have as bad a time in Egypt as I had in the Empress Hotel? Immediately I knew that the answer was Yes!
I am HIS and HIS is me. I am not an agent or a representative, to be abandoned when the going gets tough, or disowned by some Chief in a distant office. That is what HIS training achieved. The Ka of his assassins merged with HIS Ka. From that moment on, he is in as much danger, in fact exactly the same danger, as his assassins.
HIS realizes that his ill-fated attempt to become the Sultan’s Vizier derived from a deep feeling of vulnerability. Some would call it cowardice. He desperately needed protection against his enemies, who hate him for what he is, but more virulently for what he could achieve. For HIS is the ultimate threat to their parasitic position. The voice of self-evident spiritual fact.
Hell is to fall into the hands of such enemies, and he had barely escaped.
The Land of the Dead: a long street with trees on both sides that almost meet overhead. He walks to the end of the street, where there is an iron stairway going down. On the stairs he finds money, which he dutifully deposits in a trash receptacle as he intones, “Littering is selfish and dirty. Don’t do it.”
In the Land of the Dead quantitative coinage is worthless, and anyone proffering such tender would reveal himself as totally unchic. But at the bottom of the stairway, which leads to a stone promenade by a river, I spot a coin about the size of a silver dollar. The coin is of silver or some bright metal. Two shoulder blades in bas-relief almost meet in the middle of the coin, just as the shoulder blades of a Russian Blue cat almost meet if the cat is a star. This is a Cat Coin, more specifically a Russian Blue Coin, for in the Land of the Dead coinage is qualitative, reflecting the qualities the pilgrim has displayed during his lifetime. A Cat Coin will only be found by a cat lover.
There are Kindness Coins: the bearer has helped someone without consideration of payment, like the hotel clerk who warned me the fuzz is on the way, or the cop who laid a joint on me to smoke in the wagon. There are Child Coins. I remember a dream child with eyes on stalks like a snail, who said, “Don’t you want me?”—“Yes!”
There are Tear Coins, Courage Coins, Johnson Coins, Integrity Coins.
Are there things you would not do for any amount of money? For any consideration? For a young body? The Integrity Coin attests to the bearer’s inaccessibility to any quantitative bribe. The coin certifies that the bearer has definitely refused the Devil’s Bargain.
A coin cannot be stolen or transferred to anyone who has not earned the right to use it. They cannot be counterfeited. A stolen coin will often tarnish and blacken. It will always ring false on the fork. Every shop and innkeeper has a tuning fork to test the coins proffered in payment. A true Cat Coin will ring out harmonious purrs. A false or stolen coin will hiss and spit. So each coin rings with its special quality.
The Coin of Truth, on which is inscribed the Chinese character of a man standing by his word, rings with truth. You don’t need a receipt. If false, it rings hollow and false as Jerry Falwell. The lies slither out.
“Receipt please.”
“I’ll put it under your door.”
“Excellent. I will give you the money at that time.”
Certain coins are prerequisite for obtaining certain other coins. Only the coinage of cowardice, humiliation and shame can buy the Coin of True Courage. Child and Cat and Kindness Coins can only be bought with Tear Coins, and Cat and Child Coins
can, in turn, buy the very rare Contact Coin. This coin attests that the bearer has contacted other beings. There are coins attesting to Cat Contact, prerequisite for the Animal Contact Coin.
Coins of the Long Chance, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up at the count of nine to win by a knockout, Samson pulling the pillars of the temple down. The expendables, the last desperate gamble, the Coin of Last Resort. It’s a one-time coin.
So many coins, and none that can be bought with money or any quantitative factor. The Devil deals only in quantitative merchandise.
“Anything you wouldn’t do for money? For a young body? For Immortality?”
“Yes—dig out a cat’s eye . . . and a lot of other things.”
Immediately the deal is off. “Well, if you are going to be like that.”
I am. I’d rather slug it out in my seventy-year-old body than agree to some shabby fool’s bargain.
Another store is there. Kiki, what house? Half-club interruptions. Renew an alliance which does not amuse?
Acquaintance circumstances a police informer.
(Pause for word from me.)
The dream pensions whisper out from Mexico to Paris . . . dust of nights without sleep.
(The Indian is out.)
Lymphatic grey winter walk in the season of pause.
I go in for rat thick boy.
“Hisss.” Animal slob planet.
Hummingbird spirit, you have made no fruit.
(A little cold snigger.)
They are gone away, leaving a shutter clattering in the wind.
Tire tracks in freezing mud.
A bandana stiff with jissom in a dry drawer of the empty hotel with the desiccated corpse of a cockroach.
Rain in cobwebs, empty lavatories of summer schools.
Eggshells, wet bread crusts, hair combings.
A large empty loft: a dust of plaster falls on my shoulder like the first stirring of a sail in a storm gathering out of dead sick calm. Plaster is falling all over the room now. Get out quick!
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Page 75