Allen gave Jean a copy of The Annotated Howl. “What is this?” asked Debbie, admiring the beautiful coffee table volume.
“It’s his greatest hit,” said Jean.
“As you can see, Jean Michel is a sensitive scholar,” said Allen.
After wolfing down an excellent Morrocan stew specially prepared by Steve Mass the majority of us returned to our seats around the coffee table and I put on some music. “Oh shit, who is this person singing?” asked Bill.
“Elvis Presley,” Allen replied, and they both joined in momentarily. Unfortunately Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein had already left or we might have had a unique nouveau beat recording. I quickly put on Debbie’s hit single “French Kissing in the U.S.A.” Allen then added a few lines to Jean’s and Bill’s drawings while Jean Michel rushed out to buy some dessert. I asked Bill if he would like a joint and he said, “I wouldn’t mind at all. I do smoke joints.”
“At your age?” queried Allen.
“Yes! I do! I do! I do!” laughed Bill, “But I won’t share it with you young people.”
“Young people?” cried the incredulous Al, “A sixty-year-old hippie!”
“Oh, it won’t hurt me,” said Bill.
“You’ll break out in spots all over!” Allen snapped.
Returning from the store with a large container of ice cream, some fudge cake, and a box of donuts(!), Jean Michel proceeded to concoct a scrumptious dessert, and we ended the meal listening to Lou Reed singing a scrapy version of his great song “Rock ’n’ Roll” on the latest Velvet Underground album.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS: COOL CATS, FURRY CATS, AND ALIENS, BUT NO PURRING
Lawrence, Kansas, 1991
VICTOR BOCKRIS: Were you ever in your life a frightened person?
WILLIAM BURROUGHS: [sitting up straight and shooting a hard, almost petulant look across the table] Are you mad?!
VB: Well, no, I don’t think of you as frightened at all.
WB: Like most people, I live in a continual state of panic. Most people do if they have any sense. Maybe they think they’re not, but they are. We’re threatened virtually every second. The nineties are a very unfunny decade, a very grim decade. Grim and nasty.
We are sitting around the table in the living room of William Burroughs’s house in Lawrence, Kansas—James Grauerholz, a new aide, Bill Rich, Burroughs, and myself. William always works from the center of a small group. Grauerholz, who has been his amanuensis since 1974, is a hardened veteran of campaigns too numerous to account; Rich is a local man. Cats sit in our laps or sprawl on the floor. This is William’s cocoon and GHQ from which, since 1982, he has issued a series of books and paintings that have expanded the international audience he has continued to astonish since publishing Naked Lunch in 1959. In the 1980s, Burroughs broadened the scope of his activities considerably. A successful new career in painting led to numerous international shows. Contact with other artists led to collaborations with Robert Wilson and Keith Haring and visits to, among others, Whitley Strieber. The night before the interview, William thrust a copy of Strieber’s Majestic into my hands. In 1989 he visited the author, seeking to make contact with the aliens Strieber wrote about in Communion and Transformation.
VB: How did you get to know Whitley Strieber?
WB: It was simple. I was very interested in his first books and I was convinced that he was authentic. I felt he was not a fraud or fake. Then Bill here—who is very, very skeptical—I gave him the books to read, and he said, “After reading them I believe every word.” I said I was convinced they were about a phenomenon. On the basis of that I wrote a letter to Whitley Strieber saying that I would love to try to contact these visitors. His wife, Anne Strieber, wrote back saying, “Well, we have to be sure—we get a lot of crank letters—that you are really you.” And I wrote a letter back saying, “I am indeed really me.” When she wrote back she said, “We, after talking it over, would be glad to invite you to come up to the cabin.” So we spent the weekend there. I had a number of talks with Strieber about his experiences, and I was quite convinced that he was telling the truth.
VB: What does he look like?
WB: Well, he’s quite tall, six feet two inches, medium build. The strange thing about him is that this part of his face [from the forehead to below the nose] has a sort of masklike effect.
VB: Does he have a tranquil presence?
WB: No, it’s not very tranquil at all, although it’s not disquieting. In the first place he’s a man with tremendous energy, and always busy. Since I’ve seen him he wrote a whole book, Billy, which apparently is going to be made into a movie. He’s always working, always busy, walks around the property, a very active person, quite clear, quite definite. He seems a very hospitable and sensible person. I can’t say that I experienced anything. He told me that when you experience it, it is very definite, very physical; It’s not vague, it’s not like a hallucination. They are there. I didn’t see anything like that.
VB: [dismissive] There’s no way you would have under those circumstances.
WB: What! What do you mean!
VB: You were a visitor going into the neighborhood as a journalist. [The interviewer, suffering from several days on the road in the role of journalist, starts screaming.] You were part of the press!
JAMES GRAUERHOLZ: [soothingly] Right.
VB: You’re always talking about the press. “I hate the press!” You were the press!
WB: [calmly] I was not.
VB: [sneering] Yes you were. You were the journalist in the situation, and those people wouldn’t come down and even talk to you.
WB: [dignified] I have never been a journalist.
VB: Well come on, you’re always talking about the press, the press, the fucking press.
WB: You’re crazy, man!
VB: Of course I’m crazy! But there’s relevance to what I’m saying.
WB: No, no, no.
VB: No, but William, excuse me—
JG: William was a seeker; he was looking too hard.
VB: Of course he was!
JG: Look too hard and you can’t find it.
VB: No, what I am imagining is you came to him as a writer; he obviously knew you as a writer. Under those circumstances it seems to me unlikely that some great thing would happen.
JG: It’s like they’re like, watching, they’re in the saucers, they’re …
VB: Yeah, if we really accept Whitley Strieber’s account, which I am certainly open to accepting, why the fuck would they rush out when some writer comes up for a couple of days?
WB: For every reason. Every reason why.
VB: What do you mean? [sneering again] Man, you really think they’d recognize who you are?
WB: I think I am one of the most important people in this fucking world—
VB: [jumping in] Well, I agree with you—
WB: —and if they’d had any sense they would have manifested themselves.
VB: I agree with you.
WB: So that’s all I’m saying.
JG: Well, they did manifest themselves to Strieber.
VB: That’s the crux of my argument! I say, Hey! If up comes X character, really open, saying, “I am coming here to connect,” and he does not connect … Let us ask ourselves what this means!
JG: I think it means the swami has a headache.
VB: No, I don’t think that’s what it means.
WB: Now, wait a minute—
VB: That’s bullshit, man, that’s a bullshit answer.
WB: —wait a minute now, hold on. Don’t be so stupid and unattractive. It may mean all sorts of things. It may mean it was not propitious for them to come and pick me at that particular time. It may mean that they would contact me at a later date, or it may mean that they look upon me as an enemy.
VB: [devotedly] I don’t see any way they could do that.
WB: Well, why not? We don’t know who they are. We have no way of knowing what their real motives are. They may find that my intervention is hostile to the
ir objectives. And their objectives may not be friendly at all. Just like when the great white gods, the Spaniards, came to the Indians in Central America. The Indians said, “Here they come,” and the Spaniards cut their hands off. So you don’t know what their intentions are.
VB: I would have thought that William’s intentions were fairly clear. I would have thought any aliens who visited the planet would have been open to William’s visit.
WB: Not necessarily. You are thinking that they think like we do, like I do. We have no idea how they might think or how they might evaluate or what they want! We haven’t a clue. One of the aliens in Strieber’s books said, “We are recycling souls.” We’re proceeding with no information.
VB: No, listen, man, you don’t have to persuade me. I’m a complete—
WB: [quietly] All right.
VB: [raising voice] But—
WB: [speaking slowly and clearly in the calm, patient, but firm voice of a doctor] Calm down, man, calm down. You’re getting way too excited, way too strident. I think that you should just calm down and take it very, very easy. You’re obviously concerned and upset about this whole subject. Now, let’s calm down and talk calmly, you are getting—
VB: I’m upset about the whole invasion thing, because I have a very strong sense of being invaded.
WB: Who doesn’t? You are no more invaded than the rest of us. When I go into my psyche, at a certain point I meet a very hostile, very strong force. It’s as definite as somebody attacking me in a bar. We usually come to a standoff, but I don’t think that I’m necessarily winning or losing.
That’s why I told you to calm down, because I know you’re troubled. Now, listen, just [whispers] calm down. Bring it to me. [shrugs] I am the old doctor. After all, I’ve been … Listen, baby, I’ve been coping with this for so many years. I know this invasion gets in. As soon as you get close to something important, that’s when you feel this invasion, and that’s the way you know there’s something there. I’ve felt myself just marched up like a puppy to go and do something that would get me insulted or humiliated. I was not in control. Then the ultimate dream I had, I saw my body walking out of the room—this is in Chicago—bent on some deadly errand, and I’m just up on the ceiling sort of fading out, with no power at all. That’s the ultimate horror of possession. There are all degrees of possession. It happens all the time. What you have to do is confront the possession. You can do that only when you’ve wiped out the words. You don’t argue. You don’t say, “Oh, I … It’s unfair! Blah, blah, blah.” You confront the invasion. If you are firmly in control, that will—
JG: You admit it, you allow it to challenge you so that you can repulse its challenge. You have to admit it. As long as it has you flailing, keeping it away from you, you never confront it.
WB: The last thing the invading instance wants to do is confront you directly, ’cause that is the end of it. But invasion is the basis of fear; there is no fear like invasion. Now, look, you have, for example, a guardian angel who tells you what to do or what not to do: “Don’t go in here, don’t do that.” There’s nothing worse than a reverse guardian angel who is inside you telling you all the worst things to do and getting you into the worst situations, of course.
VB: The only way I know how to fight it off is to say, “No, no, no, no.”
WB: “No, no, no” [laughs] doesn’t work. You have to let it wash through. This is difficult, difficult; but I’ll tell you one thing: You detach yourself and allow this to wash through, to go through instead of trying to oppose, which you can’t do. Everyone has to sort this out themselves, if they can, and very few can. All right, here’s the whole liberal position: well, people are possessed, but their intellect is not possessed, so they can oppose that which is right in there possessing them; they can oppose it intellectually. But this does not deal with it at all on the whole, should we say, psychological and, finally, molecular level. You can’t oppose something intellectually that is overwhelming you emotionally. The chain of command, or the chain of action, comes up from the viscera to the back brain and then finally to the front brain. But the front brain cannot reverse this and give orders to the back brain and the viscera; it just doesn’t work. “Pull yourself together!” [laughs] they say. Well, you can’t. The more you try to pull yourself together the further apart you get. You have to learn to let the thing pass through. I am a man of the world; I understand these things. They happen to all of us. All you have to do is understand them or see them for what they are, that’s all. So don’t think you’re alone, because you are not. Pot is very helpful to confront and allow you to detach yourself. That’s why it’s so heavily put down. There was a town in Georgia where some people were giving yoga sessions, and the town stopped them. They said, “Well, if you relax your mind the Devil will come in!” It wouldn’t occur to them that, my God, the Lord might come in. Oh, no, the Devil comes in! If you relax your mind for a minute, in comes the Devil! [Aside to one of his cats, who has just scampered into the room: “Now, how did you get in here, you little beast? That’s Spooner.] There’s been a tremendous process of a rightist takeover in this country. All right, the rightists don’t march in the streets, but they march. And they’ve stolen the march on the, um, liberals, or whatever they’re called. I hate that term, “liberals.” It sounds so vague. I just think liberals are, well, Johnsons—reasonable people who have some sort of sense of moderation and common sense and are not in some state of hysterical, self-righteous anger.
VB: Do you think that you may have done some things that shocked your system and made you look at yourself in a way that caused you to be creative?
WB: Well, of course. I think this is, I would dare say, pretty much a universal phenomenon with anyone creative. Creativity comes from a series of shocks in which you are forced to look at yourself. That’s what it all is. Everything outside is inside and vice versa, but you are making these aspects of yourself available in painting, writing, filming, or whatever. But that results from a series of these shocks, when you find yourself doing something that’s absolutely awful.
VB: But you don’t do really awful things that many times in your life.
WB: You do; you do them all the time. Everyone does. They may just be your thoughts. You don’t have to massacre millions or drop nerve gas. But how many people in Saddam’s place would do that and worse if they had the chance? Wherever people like that are, they’re doing their little worst. They don’t criticize their own behavior, because they are completely possessed by the feelings they have, these hatreds. When you find yourself acting like these people, then you are forced to examine yourself in every particular. Such examination and recognition is an integral part of the whole creative process.
VB: Is fear part of that process?
WB: Of course. It is an integral part of the process, because possession is the most extreme form of fear. When you feel yourself possessed to do something that you regard with the most profound horror or repulsion or disgust, that’s the basic fear. It comes down to a question of courage.
VB: The courage to be yourself, to do what you’re going to do?
WB: Yes, the courage to reject them.
VB: Is that a conscious-mind fight against the possession?
WB: Heavens, no! The conscious mind is one of your puniest weapons. You have to marshal whatever forces you’ve got not just here [points to his head] but throughout the whole organism. See it in its full psychic potential. We have fourteen souls, the Egyptians say.
VB: Do you think you’ve learned a lot from living with your cats? [One of the most significant changes in William’s life since moving to Kansas has been his relationships with a number of cats. At any given time during the last few years he has had up to five cats living with him.]
WB: Oh, heavens! I’ve learned immeasurably. I’ve learned compassion. I remember when I was out at the stone house, Ruski sort of attacked one of the kittens. I gave him a light slap and then he disappeared. He was so hurt. And I knew where he was. I went ou
t into the barn and found him sulking there, picked him up, and carried him back. Just the slightest slap like that. This was his human; his human had betrayed him. Oh, heavens, yes, I’ve learned from my cats. They reflect you in a very deep way. They just opened up a whole area of compassion in me. I remember lying in my bed and weeping and weeping to think that a nuclear catastrophe would destroy them. I could see people driving by saying, “Kill your dogs and cats.” I spent hours just crying. Oh, my God. Then there is constantly the feeling that there could be some relationship between me and the cats and that I might have missed it. Some of this is in The Cat Inside [a limited-edition book written by William and illustrated by Brion Gysin]. Some of it is so extreme that I couldn’t write it. People think of me as being cold—some woman wrote that I could not admit any feeling at all. My God. I am so emotional that sometimes I can’t stand the intensity. Oh, my God. Then they ask me if I ever cry? I say, “Holy shit, probably two days ago.” I’m very subject to violent fits of weeping, for very good reasons.
VB: Do you have any memories of or reflections on Jean Genet? [Genet was one of the few writers whom Burroughs felt some connection with.] Did you know, for example, that during the last six years of his life Genet was writing a great book, Prisoner of Love? He was hanging out with the young soldiers in Syria and Jordan.
WB: No, I knew nothing of this; this is fascinating. The last time I saw him was in Chicago in 1968. But Brion saw him after that; he was in Tangier and they had quite an encounter. But I know nothing about his love for Syrian soldiers. Tell me, tell me.
VB: Well, I’ll make sure to send you the book. It’s a beautiful meditation on the plight of the young soldier.
WB: Do I admire that man being able to keep up an almost adolescent interest. It’s really great. [William gets up and leaves the room. Coming back minutes later, he is glowing, gliding across the room.] I just had such a tremendous feeling of Genet coming in as I walked into the toilet to take a piss. Genet, Genet, Genet. Oh, my God, it was overwhelming!
With William Burroughs Page 24