William S. Burroughs had an essentially metaphysical approach to life and writing. This is sometimes overlooked or ignored by scribes and students of his written work when his cut-up method is analyzed blandly as a dry, stand-alone technique. The cultural history and psyche of where it came from are pushed aside or given a purely rational, secular edge. To gain a full appreciation of the method itself as he used it, the two can't be separated.
The man himself could be described as brilliant, eccentric, hedonistic, weird, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic but never boring. In some ways his life as lived is not that remarkable — but his internal life (which occupied most of his time and energy) is the story worth telling. A friend described him as never noticing much going on in the places he lived and visited, but “always cerebral”. What was going on within, was where the true creative action was and it was constant.
Burroughs had an abiding interest in the occult. It could be traced back to his childhood, his first published essay, Personal Magnetism — revolved around telepathic mind-control. He mentioned seeing apparitions, including a tiny green reindeer:
“When I was four years old I saw a vision in Forest Park, St. Louis … I was lagging behind and I saw a little green reindeer about the size of a cat … Later, when I studied anthropology at Harvard, I learned that this was a totem animal vision and knew that I could never kill a reindeer.” (1)
His world view was of a “magical universe”:
“In the magical universe, there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason. Among primitive people, they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that…Since the word ‘magic’ tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by ‘magic’ and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of ‘will’ as the primary moving force in this universe — the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me, this has always seemed self-evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same material, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the room is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy.” (5)
His famous cut-up writing technique included the principle of coincidence and divination:
When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time you find that some of the cut-ups in re-arranged texts seemed to refer to future events. I cut-up an article written by John-Paul Getty and got, “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.” This was a re-arrangement and wasn’t in the original text, and a year later, one of his sons did sue him…Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out. (5)
I remember a film called Dead of Night where the ventriloquist dummy starts talking on its own. Well a writer must encourage this phenomenon - create a dummy and induce it to talk on its own. Now this is known as an ear for dialogue in the trade. But you see writing is in fact a magical operation. If you know the right spells - and what are spells, but the words you can call all writers living and dead to work for you. The use of cutup is a key - what better way to invoke a writer than to cut and rearrange his very own words. Like all keys to be used with caution - sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Somebody changed the lock on that door. (2)
Major Influences:
Gysin the occult artist: Brion Gysin was a British-born painter and poet who Burroughs first met in Tangier and later at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Gysin's influence on him was monumental and pivotal, it was he who first developed the cut-up technique which Burroughs extended and made famous. Gysin was also interested in occultism and introduced him to themes he would use in his writing. Gysin absorbed some local occult ritualism around the middle east, including “cursing” and “being cursed”, which figured large in Burroughs’s thinking and writing.
Scientology:,
“Scientology was useful to me until it became a religion” — William S. Burroughs.
“Burroughs is a great thinker, a searching critic of things in his field. I have no faintest wish to attack him. The world needs their William Burroughses” — L. Ron Hubbard (in response to a written satirical, public attack by Burroughs).(6)
Burroughs was first introduced to Scientology through Gysin or associates of his in the late 50s. It was a perfect fit for his peculiar inclinations. At the time it was seen by some avante-garde thinkers as a radical form of self-empowerment and catharsis via a new technology and philosophy — E-meter and engrams.
Burroughs relished the idea of dissolving his internal torments —he struggled lifelong with personal trauma and conflict and always sought a means to dissolve these qualities — by the use of a technology which purported to achieve the aim of psychoanalysis via a simple, effective mechanical device. All this before Scientology became to be seen as it is today.
Burroughs was drawn to many technologies that promised to both reveal and interfere with what he perceived as the primary control mechanism, that in his view stood external to our own wills and kept us unconscious and driven.
It began with the cut-up method which from his perspective had something of this quality, continued with the E-meter. Later the Dreamachine (inspired by a waking vision of Gysin), audio manipulation via tape recorders and later still a device named the Wishing Machine that purported to engage the user in psychometry.
Burroughs continued to be fascinated with the E-meter right through the 1960s even after publicly denouncing Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. He ran hot and cold with Scientology and often contradicted former statements.
In all of this Burroughs was driven by obsessions and a paranoid view of being controlled by an external force whose control he was determined to find and break. The great tragedy of his life — accidentally shooting his common-law wife in the midst of a drunken spree — could only (in his view) be explained by possession by a dark spirit he referred to as the Ugly Spirit.
Themes and Obsessions:
The complexity of Burrough’s internal life and the many obsessive themes that ran through it, nearly all related to some form of metaphysics, oddball psychism or psychological ideology, do not make for a tidy summation. Some of these are listed.
- Reich and Orgone accumulators.
- Korzybski : General Semantics.
- Mayan calendar.
- Hassan i Sabah.
- Egyptian, Aztec, Mayan ciphers.
- The number 23.
- The secret, external controlling factors in life, which he named, the “Control Machine”.
- Spirit possession.
- Spells and curses.
Riding on his “Beat” reputation, he was cut huge intellectual largesse by his fans over the years, anyone else may have been sidelined for being outrageously over-the-top, obsessed, quaintly nutty, and more than eccentric. He wore his own psyche in full view throughout his literature, interviews and lectures, unashamedly and successfully. It is reported he found some peace with his internal demons in later life. He died in 1997, before the advent of neurofeedback technology. I’m sure he would have done something interesting and creative with this technology had he lived long enough.
References : (5)The Magical Universe Of William S. Burroughs and (6)Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the “Weird Cult”. Both books are worth reading for anyone interested in his fascinating internal life.
