Last Words. William S. Burroughs
whole evil of which the War Against Drugs is one factor. Mark it to its place: it’s EVIL and it means no good for anything
Homo (experiment) Sap can or will create of value. It is here to exterminate.
For I shot a comrade sleeping
nine hundred of the hive, and
the swarm’s disgrace.
Now they’ve halted it by a disposal unit on the ground.
“These are the unsightly tricks before high heaven, that make the Angels weep—”
When whales and seals and elephants weep, I cannot suppress the deadly Sin of Anger.
Always the cloth: “Toro! Toro!” and one charges again and again—
Let it go, like the men carried up by balloon ropes and couldn’t get the thing in time to turn loose.
Brothers and Sisters, this sermon is about turning loose in time. Which means turning loose of all your body jerks—clutch. Too late. A hundred feet up.
Brothers and Sisters, turn loose while there is still a [milli] second of time.
Can a [milli]second take 3-D form?
A boy wished his brother dead, and his father in the package.
When this wish emerged in his “life review,” he said:
“I would rather sacrifice my own life.”
And of course he meant it, but he didn’t feel it. So he don’t even get a whiff of grace.
In despair he threw himself somewhere, and was saved by his love for cats. No priest or psychiatrist could do it. It was Brion Gysin, and:“meow meow meow.”
Is there any final honesty of character?
Not with the Other Half—sprawled through a man.
Yeah, men in sensory withdrawal often felt like “another body was slobbed across them.
“Well, it sure was.
So take a good look at what is sprawled through you. Does it have your best interests in mind?
“Fuck no.”
(Use them and lose them.)
December 23, 1996
(A boat in lake.) I was afraid it would turn over at high speed.
Dreams less and less interesting.
December 24, 1996
With two boys. Jumped off cliff to show how one could float down. First jump-off-cliff dream in some time. Things are hotting up in L.O.D. No-breakfast dreams a few days ago.
So: How To Discover Past Lives.
Well, write one. Sure, I could write a batch, but easy:
Paris 1830 or so—Charles Baudelaire. Everything clear and sharp, the smell, the cats, the opium feel I know so well. I too had syphilis.
The horror. Je m’y connais—I know the sickness. It has come back.
The restaurants, cafés, the food, music—“jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres”—Verlaine, Rimbaud, they run into each other—Paris—pissoir.
“Simon, aimes-tu le bruit des pas, sur les feuilles mortes?”
And this from a pissoir wall:
“J’aime ces types vicieux, qu’ici montrentla bite.”
“I like the vicious types who show the cock here.”
Me too.
Back to Paris. So many pharmacie—
“Codethyline Houdé?”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
Verlaine: “an old faun in terra-cotta, foreseeing no doubt an unfortunate sequence (une suite mauvaise) to these hours that pass to the sound of tambourines.”
I was never a King. An advisor—a Machiavelli—yes, but not the Prince.
I always had contempt for them. They are stupid.
Scribe, Priest, advisor, artist, yes.
Back deep are horrors that I cannot yet face. So we start with the easy ones like Paris.
Et puis? Well, Soldiers of Fortune in 1920—and earlier—doesn’t hold water. Just film.
No smells, food, feeling. No gun really jumps in my hand. So where the—
December 26, 1996
The touchstone is a feeling of lyric joy.
A scene in a dream, intricate and large building, colors, water, two men talking. I find it in Conrad, in the banal reflections of Almayer on the unhealthy conditions on the east bank of the river.
I am there. The muddy river flows by—often the joy lasts only for a few seconds—
When people blather about “happiness,” like some permanent medium you can accrete around yourself and never want for anything again. The archetype swindler’s line.
“Greeve,” in The Heart of the Matter, lists three types can be happy:
(1) The Unaware. Don’t see. Won’t see—some insulated with $$$
(2) The Coarse. Hard, evil, like Bugsy Siegel—looks pretty well satisfied with himself, and a horrid sight it is, the ugliness bursting through—
“Bugsy!”
Two 30-30S in swelled head. What a sorry hero type to emulate.
Go in any Chicago bar. The clerks, the other loutish jerks, all trying to look like mobsters. Show me what they want to be, and I will tell you who they are: wretched failures at wretched jobs. Always, of course, “unfairly treated” by superiors.
Especially postal workers. Just yesterday another disgruntled mail carrier killed the supervisor—two shots in the head—
(all Postal Supervisors [should be] armed at all times)
Saturday, December 28, 1997.
Vague dreams.
Well, tried some exercises to uncover past lives. A few nibbles—a voice, a bit petulant and put-upon says:
“Well, I’Ve been instructed to show you this.”
And showed me very little.
The old Senseney house at Walton and Pershing. It was Mrs. Senseney who said of me:
“Stay away from it. It is a walking corpse.”
Well, it isn’t every corpse can walk. Hers can’t.
And this walker can still talk.
(Hers can’t, and this corpse can still walk.)
Oh well, not much light. I hope—about lives past or future or present to be found in this tawdry, snobbish, cruel—
How she could toy with a climbing Jewess:
“Oh, Mrs. Senseney, I had such fun at the Wallace party.”
“You were very fortunate, weren’t you.”
The dining room was always cold and dank. The bedroom where she slept, and crept and leapt on some poor Jewess—the stink of it was pure Death. That is, it had no stink at all.
Don’t know how I have such a clear picture of this room—and a blue kimono and blue coverlet, on untidy bed.
These are gloomy glimpses. Bits of vivid and, fortunately, vanishing details. The St. Louis bourgeois....
“Well, I had a fine dinner, enjoyed