Better get out of the neighborhood, that hick is likely to call the law. He walked fifteen blocks, sweat running down his body. There was a raw ache in his lungs, his lips drew back off his yellow teeth with a snarl of desperation. I got his door somehow, for I had some decent clothes. Daddy saw a suitcase standing in a doorway. Good mother. He stopped and pretended to look for a cigarette. Funny you thought, no one around. Inside maybe, phoning for a cab.
The corner was only a few miles in the way. Danny took a deep breath and picked up the suitcase. He made the corner another block, another corner, the case was heavy. I got a score alright, he thought maybe enough for a sixteenth in a room. Danny shivered and twitched, feeling a warm room and heroin amputating into his vein. Let's have a quick look. He stepped in the morningside part. Goin' around. Jesus, I never saw the town this empty.
He opened the suitcase, two long packages and browns wrapping. Took one out, it felt like meat. The door of the package opened at one end, revealing a woman's naked foot. The toe nails were painted with purple-red polish. He dropped the leg with a snare of disgust. Holy Jesus, he claimed. The routines people put down these days. Legs! Well, I got a case anyway. He dumped the other leg out, no blood stains. He snapped the case shut and walked away. Legs, he muttered.
Welcome to our fourth episode about William Boroughs, an influential American writer of the 20th century who influenced the beat poets, who popularized heroin, among others, who left a huge impact on American culture and died in the 90s, which makes him a very exciting figure of the time. Today Jonas is the main moderator and Mimi and I are limited to throwing in useless comments. Hello, I'm working on Boroughs today, or we are working on Boroughs today.
I would first introduce the biography, his life, which is very exciting. He lived in many different countries. Then I would go into aspects of his work that have been less considered so far, but are probably not unimportant for interpretation. Probably even essential. His spirituality, his belief in magic. Let's start with his biography. He was born in St. Louis in 1914. His father had a gift and antique shop and his mother was a housewife.
He didn't have any money problems because his grandfather invented the calculator. He founded a company and it went quite well, obviously. His grandfather simply invented the calculator. How crazy is that? A real calculator with a lot of keys, like a huge typewriter. Many of the other computers at the time made a lot of mistakes. Boroughs grandfather spent seven years in the bank checking the calculator.
He hated the job and after moving to St. Louis he took over a small factory and invented a huge calculator, a kind of pre-protocomputer, with which relatively reliable calculations could be carried out. They used all banks in America relatively quickly, up to 1890 as small pages. He came from a wealthy family. They had a house with several servants, a gardener, two cooks, a little girl and a butler. Of course, he was not to be missed. He grew up quite well, you could say.
Most of the time he was like that. However, he had a life in his early years. When he was four years old, he had an incident that probably shaped his entire life. He can only remember some of it. He was four years old. He had a little girl, with whom he had a great understanding. When he was a little boy, she took him to a friend of hers and her husband, who was a veterinarian. Anyway, the four-year-old boy encouraged the veterinarian to blow him up. What?
Yes, that was his punishment. He had to blow up an animal doctor. I don't think it was a punishment. It's a bit unclear. His memory of it is... It was certainly not a reward, right? It was certainly not a reward. I don't think so either. He told his brother about it, about what happened. And they thought, should we tell our parents about it? They never did. It just happened and they didn't talk about it anymore.
Interestingly, about a year later, he also had his first visions, I would say, and also panic attacks, probably triggered by the event. For example, when he played in the forest with his brother, he saw a green reindeer with very thin legs that jumped through the trees. His brother also said it, but he didn't see it, he ignored it, because he knew, oh, William, he always talks a lot and sees things that others don't see. And he just ignored it.
So he had access to these, I would say, intermediate worlds and beings that he had seen as a child. His early childhood definitely shaped this experience and also his writing, as we will see in the future. He went to school, very normal, and during that time he discovered that he was gay. swarms for boys in his diary books, with eleven or so, which he then, when that was not repeated, he burned them all. At that time, that was the 20s, 1920s, discovering that you are gay is not that easy either.
And I think he never really said it publicly, he never really said that he was gay. It was known, but he never really said it. But he definitely felt attracted to men. I have to go back to his childhood girls, because they probably also gave him the first contact with drugs, with substances. So he brought him into contact with them. Did his parents vote for him?
Yes, he was then sent to his first school, because he probably tried sleeping pills with a few classmates during the break, how that works. And that then flew up, he had to change school, but then he also finished school in St. Louis. And after he was done with school, he went to Harvard and studied English literature. He also completed that, did a bachelor's degree. And when he was done with his studies, he then went on trips, as is common today. He looked at the world a little bit.
Money has never been a problem in his whole life, because he, I can already mention that, because he always got pocket money from his parents, about 200 euros a month, and you could live off of that at some point. It comes down to the 200 dollars in the 20s. So 200 dollars in the 1920s are, I'll take a quick look at it scientifically. A great amount. 200 dollars in the 1920s are worth 3,000 dollars today.
Yes, so he could live off of that, just from his pocket money, that he was granted, because, his mother really honored him. She once told him when he was already an adult, that she kisses the floor on which his feet go, so she was really fond of him, and they also had a connection between the occult and the magical, because his mother also believed in it, and that he was so close to them.
His father was a little more distant, but he didn't really hold back his wife from worshipping her son, and in fact he always had him out of difficult situations. I have no idea, if he was in conflict with the police, he got him out of there, so he always had support, in any case. And also with his homosexuality, they came to be, because through their antiquities, they were apparently in contact with gay people.
From the art scene, theater scene, I have no idea who needs props for performances, but they went there, so they were familiar with it, and that's why they didn't find it that bad. They were probably also more well-read, average personalities of the time, they heard the story, where there was a completely different reference to it, and if you sell naked Greek statues all day long, I mean... yeah, you can't have a problem with that.
He first traveled to Europe, after he had finished studying English literature. He then enrolled in Vienna for a medical studies, but he never finished that, but he enrolled because he was interested in human bodies, and he traveled all over Europe, including Croatia, where he met Ilse Klapper, a Jew who fled from the Nazis, and they decided to marry so that she could go to the US. So they entered a marriage so that she could live in safety. And I think she's...
Against the will of Boros' parents. Against the will of Boros' parents, yes. That's right. Gay, okay, but Jewish? Yeah. You have to draw the line in this time. It would be crazy if it was open. You can't be too liberal in the 1920s. You have to think about it. Yes. Not yet, it will be dangerous. She lived in the US for six years, until 1945, and then she came back. And the marriage was then separated. While she was in the US, they met regularly, they were always in contact.
When he was back in the US, maybe I can say that in Europe he had explored the gay scene a bit, in Europe. In Vienna, too. And he gained some experience there, probably more than in the US. And when he was back, he enrolled for a study in archeology and ethnology. What was important for his writing, especially the Maya, and their mythology, fascinated him a lot. He studied a lot with it, read all the Maya codices. They are very nice, and you can look at them online as a scan.
The Vienna Library has them online, I think. In different European libraries, there are very nice Maya codices available on the website. That's a good tip. Thanks for the introduction. He was supposed to be, because the Second World War was still in full swing, enrolled, but he was then demoted due to his unstable psyche. No wonder what happened to him until then. Or since childhood. He was not accepted, then he was deported to New York. A little conspiracy theory.
He was actually demoted, and then he wrote letters to his mother. And then his mother asked him to meet with a friend in a psychiatric hospital and set him free. You could also interpret it as a privilege of the upper class, the late Vietnam War. You have contacts, and you can get your son out if he's sitting in a barrack and doesn't want to go. He sat there for a few weeks and then his mother, as a boy, came out and didn't have to go to the Pacific War. Yes. That's not unlikely, I would say.
He was often kicked out and could fully play out his privileges. In any case, he came to New York, and that's the first important station in his life where he also met people who accompanied him to the end of his life. For one, Allen Ginsberg, with whom you became friends until death, he was also a little in love with him. Again and again. It wasn't completely repeated, but it actually had an impact on their friendship. We definitely have to make an episode about Allen Ginsberg.
That would be very exciting. It's later on to the light-shape hippie movement. And then to the light-shape of the pedo movement. The pedo movement. That's a bit more in another episode, but imagine him as an old, white, bearded, long-haired hippie man in the 70s, at least. And he wrote wonderful poems. The Howl is. That's probably why you know him. But I don't want to go into the Pete Generation in that case, but they met for the first time.
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, of course, and William Burroughs. Those were the three writers. And there was also Lucien Carr. So, Neil Cassidy, people who didn't write, but who provided the food for the stories. Who took a lot of drugs. Who took a lot of drugs, had a lot of women. Many soldiers who returned from the Second World War and didn't fit into society anymore. Many traumatized soldiers who decided against civic life and the American Dream and were looking for an alternative.
And thus laid the foundation for counterculture in America in the coming years. Exactly. Maybe you can summarize the generation. Maybe Burroughs was much older than Ginsberg and Kerouac. I think they were almost 10 years apart. He was older than almost everyone. He was the pioneer. Exactly. And he was in New York. He didn't really like the university. For him it was all an English thing. Everything was made up in England. Everything was fake. He didn't like the fake people.
Anyway, in New York he met Jack Kerouac's wife, Edie Parker, his second wife. That was Joanne Vollmer. She lived with Kerouac's girlfriend. And she was brought together with Burroughs by this mutual friendship. They got along well. They were two people who thought alike. I think Burroughs appreciated her intelligence. And she had influence on his books. She gave him ideas. She was a muse. And her role in the Beat Generation is probably too short. You don't find so much about her.
Exactly. He met Joanne Vollmer. And they got together. Joanne Vollmers was married. And she had a daughter. They weren't together anymore. They were more or less in love. If we're in New York, I should mention that a friend of Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsburg, committed a murder. I think it was Lucien K. He had a lover who... Oh, that was Burroughs' lover who moved to St. Louis with him. He was a friend of Burroughs. He was as old as Burroughs. They were friends. His name was David Cameron.
He looked at Lucien K. He stalked him. You could say that. He stalked him. And that was very stressful for Lucien K. He stabbed him. They didn't show the murder. Burroughs noticed it. But he didn't show the murder. So they got into a conflict with the law. Burroughs' parents bought him out. So it wasn't a problem for them. There's also a film, Kill Your Darling, where you can read about it. And there's also a book written by Burroughs and Kerouac. And the hippos were boiled in their tanks.
It describes this murder. It's a story. If you're interested, you can check it out. In New York, he became heroin addicted. Yay! I was just waiting for that. Finally! We're finally in the heroin addiction. A little bit. When he got a little addicted to what happened, and then he got dizzy and didn't think much, the problem with heroin is that you only have it for a few months. You're still trying to satisfy your addiction without feeling any effect. Yes, he describes that very well in his books.
He became addicted to heroin and also dealt with it to finance his addiction. He took on various shit jobs as a camp hunter, as a private detective. Detective elements are also present in many of his books. You can imagine that he felt like a detective. Absolutely. He wrote down his first heroin experience in New York in his first novel, Junkie. That was probably the most accessible novel because it was fairly linear.
He read very well and had an extremely deep insight into the drug scene, the even smaller drug scene that developed for heroin and also for weed and other things in New York. He describes very well how he tried to deal with weed and how people got annoyed because they wanted to sit at his place for hours and always smoked joints. When he changed his heroin, people came and wanted their stuff and disappeared. It's great to sell heroin and be a drug dealer.
He also popularized many terms like smack and junk for heroin and also the term junkie itself. He was the first to do that in a literary way and thus presented the scene and the terms in a literary way for the first time. Burroughs has a few terms that are important, including heavy metal. The band Steely Dan has its name from Burroughs. Steely Dan is a huge steel dildo in Naked Lunch. His influence on pop culture was and probably still is big.
He was in New York addicted to heroin and met his wife, his second wife, Joan Folmer. He noticed the murder of David Cameron and didn't report it. He got into a conflict with the law. His parents kicked him out. He spent some time with his parents. Joan Folmer became addicted to drugs with Burroughs. Both of them didn't give up. It wasn't just heroin, but alcohol in particular. The others were more into the band. Ashlandorff, Burroughs, also liked speedballs, a mixture of cocaine and heroin.
Various amphetamines he could get in the pharmacy with fake recipes. When he came back to New York, he decided that he and Joan had to leave the city and moved to a farm in Texas. Spent by his parents. Of course. When they lived in Texas, their son William Burroughs Jr. was born. Creative naming for an author. Burroughs was also named as a grandpa. He probably said that. I'm telling you all the time about his second wife, Joan Folmer. He had a son. He was gay at the time. Joan Folmer knew that.
It probably led to conflicts in the relationship. Burroughs was gone with his young son and got used to it. He was able to satisfy his needs. That was clear. But it still led to conflicts. They had a classic ancient Greek marriage. The woman is the leader of the household and the man is happy with the young people in the high school. In Texas, Burroughs also started marijuana. The police found out about it because they caught a letter sent to Ginsburg. The letters weren't well coded.
If you read them today, you think, guys use code. At least a little. You know there's censorship. But no. Yes. Of course, he was sentenced to death. Burroughs didn't want to do that. His family probably couldn't get him out. So he fled with his family to Mexico City and wanted to stay there for five years until the crimes were over. In Mexico, he was enrolled in college. Archeology. Still. He was in Mexico and was close to the Mayas. He was interested. I could say more about the Maya thing.
When I read my text collection, his influence on the Maya apocalypse. In 2012, the world was under and they made it really known that Terrence McHale was the one who wrote the text. But they all read Burroughs. Burroughs knew about the codices and in 1960, he wrote the exterminator from the end of the insect era and then continued in other novels. He was definitely a pathfinder. He knew that at some point certain consciousness had to happen because of an apocalyptic state.
For him, it was something psychological. A change of consciousness. A shift of consciousness. The whole Beat Generation was, as it was later, looking for higher truths in search of this change of consciousness. A bit like John Dee and Edward Kelly from our last episodes. That you can get higher truths, that you can reach wisdom. A bit like Joe Rogan and his Ayahuasca. There is his constant DMT talk.
And at the same time, they were also children of the Cold War and were therefore apocalyptic like John Dee and Edward Kelly. And before that, they were also children of the Second World War. They are people who experienced the Second World War as adult people. And twenty years later, the great powers of the world want to bounce back from the universe. Bomb. And yes, the atomic destruction of the planet is currently at stake. So apocalyptic visions are certainly possible in this area.
Or are certainly understandable. And the solution of the Beat Generation was more of a retreat from society. To say, we take drugs. And to do something different. And something different is everything that is forbidden. So we do magic drugs and wild ebbs. For the 50s understanding of the Americans. Where there was a lot of white magic and American Dream. When I'm in Mexico right now, it fits well with the Mayans. And his Mayan... As I said, in The Exterminator he had already written that.
And he was very successful in writing it in 1960. It's probably the least known term. But he also took up this whole Mayan theme in The Soft Machine. That's the first part of the Nova Trilogy, as it's called. All cut-up works. And there's also a chapter that's called The Mayan Chapter. And in which the narrator hires a corrupt doctor to get him a special drug that will enable the narrator to travel into the past and take over the body of another person.
And after he's taken the drug, the narrator travels back into the Old Mayan period, takes the body of a simple field worker and reports the following. I quote it. I translated it into German. Of course, it's different in English, but I think it should fit. I have explained that the control system of the Maya depends on the calendar and the codex, which contain symbols that represent all states of thought and feeling which human beings can feel under such limited circumstances.
These are the instruments with which they turn and control thought units. I think it's a very interesting way of thinking. These codexes and calendars are instruments of control for the Bureau, of thought control with which the rulers keep their subjects in order.
After the narrator has entered the temple and this telepathic and telepathic machinery – it's all about thought control, according to the Bureau – and after the machine has been sabotaged and the thousand-feet priest have been destroyed, the final sentences of the chapter come and they are as follows. A great weight fell from the sky. Winds of the earth crushed palms to the ground. Rolls over the Maya control calendar.
And it describes what is apparently in the Dresden Codex where it is mentioned that this apocalyptic event, this shift of human consciousness is represented by a god who pours water on the earth. Like a great flood which is also shown in the Bible, in the Gospels, in the Gospels, in the Bible, etc. It's everywhere. He has certainly influenced this 2012 apocalyptic event. We are still in Mexico in order to locate where Burrosin has fled after he has built marijuana in Texas.
And there he has continued to study and to deal with the Maya and their mythology. And Mexico City is also the place in the world where the most significant event of his life took place. If it is not that this sexual abuse was in his childhood, then it was definitely the eliseness that I will tell you about in a moment. He and his wife were at a party with a friend in Mexico City. Both of them were already very drunk.
And they then had the wonderful idea probably, well, you don't know exactly why, there are different sources that describe the whole process a little differently. On the one hand, it means that, well, maybe I should tell you what exactly happened. They wanted to recreate the apple scene from Wilhelm Tell which is very famous where Wilhelm Tell shoots the apple from the head of his son with a bow.
They wanted to recreate it with a glass on Joann's head and William Burroughs, who I haven't mentioned yet, was a great weapon lover, generally a very American character. He was very close to a great weapon, always slept under a pillow with a weapon, always wore a... A big drinker. He always wore weapons, bite on his body, knives, pistols. Yes, he always had to defend himself or at least be prepared. Sounds still pretty paranoid. Yes, very paranoid, very American.
Anyway, they wanted to recreate this apple scene in an extremely drunk, very drunk state. And yes, that went wrong, of course. He shot her in the forehead and she died. Later, I think, Burroughs told the investigators in America the story that he wanted to show his friends his great weapons and then his pistol fell out of his hand or from the table and then fell on the floor and then the shot and she was standing there stupidly and everyone shot her in the face.
But it actually sounds more like a story aftertaste. Oh, his hand went around in a circle. Yes, the gun fell very stupidly, you know. But it didn't hit her as much as the woman from Burroughs. Yes. Tadaam! He said that maybe because Joanne was also addicted to drugs and maybe it was also a death wish of her own but I don't know if that's a criminal offense. I think so. I think Burroughs got away very well. He was only 14 days in prison in Mexico and then his parents bought him out again.
And he was stamped off as an accident. What it probably was. But I can't say. You could talk about a fatal death if you were drunk in Wilhelm Tell and probably on heroin and other drugs in a room with your wife to impress any friends. That's at least fatal if you're careful. But I think it's a very serious crime. I think it's a very serious crime. At least fatal. Probably with a statement. He got away very well. Let's put it this way.
If Wilhelm Tell had killed his child instead of getting an apple Switzerland would either be a different country or he wouldn't be the national hero of Switzerland. Yes. What he killed his wife took him very well with it. He couldn't explain how he was capable of getting it to this point. How the universe could allow it. How the universe could allow it. He was such a good shooter.
In the introduction to Queer he writes again He says in principle that he would never become a writer without the death of his wife. That that was driving you in a certain way. And that of course he says that he takes when he wrote that he was possessed by a bad spirit that went into him and that he didn't leave him until the end of his life. Does the evil spirit mean heroin? No. But the ugly spirit, the ugly spirit is always called, he didn't give the name to the creature himself.
That came from Brian Geiss, who we will also talk about later, an important figure in his life. But he assumed that he was possessed and that this evil spirit brought him to miss the shot. Well, he hit him. That was evil. He tries to write something out of it and of course he tries to find an explanation for it. Why this happens and what is the evil spirit that went into him. So possession, also in his books, plays a central role. Ghosts or that you enter another body and control it.
That's how he explained this miss shot. He also had several exorcisms done to get rid of this spirit. So really, until the end of his life he tried to get rid of this spirit. Whether it was in the swiss huts with Sioux shamans or through his own experiments, we will come back to that later. It all starts when he has shot his wife. Does he have to leave America first? Does he have to process it somehow? Does he have to understand what happened? Because he doesn't do that in any way.
That's why he goes to South America first. He heard about a miracle drug called Yahweh, today called Ayahuasca. Are you Joe Rogan? He is definitely the one who was so ahead of Joe Rogan with all this talk. It's unbelievable. He is definitely the direct precursor. Definitely. He then hoped to reduce his obscenity through the experience with Ayahuasca. And also to process the whole tragedy with his wife, to make new spiritual experiences. During this time in South America he wrote two novels.
I think it was the first novel he published. And also Queer, in which he negotiates his homosexuality. It was published later, a few decades later. In Junkie, this search for this miracle drug is teased. And in Queer, it is followed as a side storyline. Exactly. And while he was in South America, he also wrote many letters to Elginzberg. They were also published, the Yahweh letters. You can also read these correspondence. And he then made the first experience.
He probably popularized Ayahuasca as one of the first white, one of the first old-fashioned men who had Ayahuasca in it. If he had had it, he would have filmed it for his channel. Since then, he has to write letters to Elginzberg. He traveled a bit through South America. I think he was especially in Columbia, in Putamayo, right? Putumayo. Exactly. Interestingly, the McKenners, for example, all went to Putamayo. They all read the Bureaus. And yes, it's very interesting to follow this series back.
Exactly. When he was done with South America, his desire for travel was still not stopped. He was on the road a lot, in general. Then he went back to Europe, to London, to Paris. In Paris, it was called the Beat Hotel. Yes, it was in Paris, and then he started writing Naked Lush. 1959, just as an orientation. We are now in the late 50s. He then traveled to Tanga, Morocco, over Europe. At that time, still an international zone, i.e. internationally managed.
It was a paradise for drug addicts, for smugglers. It was not controlled much, it was cheap. You write today's Maoco relatively well, I think. Yes, he could live without problems from his pocket money, that his parents gave him. And he lived on stubborn boys and heroin. That was all he consumed in that time. Yes. Love and air. Yes, love and air. Oh my God. It always means that he wrote so much while he was on heroin. But you don't write on heroin, so you probably don't do anything.
But he did write a lot of letters, right? He wrote letters his whole life, like books, I think. He wrote a lot of letters, but he also published some books. So... Eh. There was no SMS or something like that. I don't know if he used that, probably. But I never see him on Twitter. I see him on Ed Kuhn. He was actually very shady or darknated and not on the road. On very, very funny forums he borrows. Yes, yes. So he was there in Tanshan.
There he also met the painter Brian Gysin for the first time. They actually had similar interests. They both wanted drugs, mythology, the paranormal. But at the beginning they didn't get along well with each other. And so they first separated. I think Gysin went to Paris. He first had a restaurant in Tanga that was closed. He believes because he was cursed. So he was also superstitious like Borrows. He went back to Paris. And in Paris they met again. And this time it worked out between the two.
They then got along very well. So they took drugs together, conducted consciousness experiments. Which Borrows also did in New York with Joe and Folmer, with Ginsburg. So telepathy experiments and everything that concerns the paranormal. To get in touch with some creatures, with ghosts. And they did that in Paris and Tanga. Gysin was also enthusiastic about Scientology. The Trance music, the Master Musicians of Tachukal are perhaps some of the terms. They played in his restaurant.
So it's Berber music, Trance-like. Scientology was also a completely new invention at that time. After the Second World War. That's a new, aspiring movement. Yes. So Bill Borrows and Brian Gysin conducted consciousness research. And they also mixed things wildly together. They took psilocybin, set themselves up by stroboscopic light. And added three radios on white noise. To have three different types that penetrate your consciousness. And yes.
If you've ever taken such substances, you might be aware that it's not the best environment. Flashlight and white noise sounds. Borrows had a lot of horror trips. And his opinion of psychedelic drugs has also had a lot of influence. He always thought it was shit. So not good. Then also the Dream Machine was developed. And he called it his flicker induction device. You have to imagine it like a plate plate. And then it was like a piece of paper. Or it could also be metal with holes in it.
Different shapes. A light in the middle, a horn. And then it turned and you had a kind of light game. So you could look inside. And then you should expand your consciousness. And take other things into account. Hypnotize. You look inside with closed eyes. Because through the eyelids you can see something. And as I said, they also combined other drugs with it. And then the effect is probably enhanced. Yes. What did this result in with all the experiments? In fact, yes.
Both Borrows pushed themselves a little. The more the relationship with Geisen intensified, the more esoteric experiences Borrows had. Both pushed themselves a little. It's like in the last episode, the and Edward Kelly maybe. Geisen was a bit like his medium, his guru. The whole group, also Ginsburg, popularized the whole thing a bit. Also the gnostic trends that he slowly took on. I haven't gotten to talk about that yet.
They really have mirror work, tell-telling, telepathy experiments, trance, induced by whatever, through music, dance and so on. They apparently did that every day. And then they threw in munter, hashish, mescaline and other substances. And yes, sometimes they then... The devil suddenly appeared in their room, dressed like a Swedish gentleman from the 18th century and walked around. And Borrows was very enthusiastic about it.
He then wrote to Ginsburg, I have made such incredible discoveries in the field of psychological research. What is happening now is that I am literally transforming into someone else. Not into a human creature, but human-like. He wears a kind of green uniform. His face is full of black, boiling fumes and what people would call evil. I would like to read another quote from Borrows where he describes what they did in the world of Tanga and Paris.
All these experiments that were supposed to be there. And he writes, We all thought we were interplanetary agents who were involved in a deadly battle. Slaves, codes, detainees. Back then, everything seemed real. From today on, who knows. They promised us a transport from the area, from time and into space. Everything had a purpose. The danger and the fear were real enough. If someone tries to kill you, you know it. If someone tries to kill you, you know it. So, yes, they were in a fight.
So they believed that they were agents in an esoteric war against demyurgy. And that also appears in Borrows' novels. Often, against some... So, in his novel, the Archons are... I wanted to talk about that later. In his novel, the Archons... Demyurgy is a bad god. And there are gods who keep people from the transcendence. These are the Archons. It's described in the Gnosis. There are different currents. But that... Demyurgy is not necessarily evil. He is the creator of the world.
He brings the world into being. And he stands for wisdom, for knowledge, for spirit. He can be experienced by people. So, the Gnosis is a mystical current. It developed especially in the Urchristian era. There are many apocryphal writings. There are also many Gnostic communities today. The Yesibs are, as you can see, Gnostic. Or whoever calls them Gnostic. There is Mandaea. Manichea. There are also incredibly interesting religions.
The term Gnosis is, however, a scientific collection of drawings for all these Urchristian currents. And it goes back to the Greek term Gnosis, for your information. And all these currents, summarized under this term, are closely related to the concept of wisdom and divine knowledge. And that's what Burroughs tried to achieve in these seances, in these parapsychological, mystical experiences. But I have to add something, Jonas.
Because most of the time, Demyurgy is often the creator of the world. And because we live in an imperfect world, we are considered an imperfect god, or an imperfect creator of worlds. Who gave us wisdom, but not enough. And Gnosis is striving to get away from the world into a better one. So this paradisiacal idea that there is the perfect world has a strong influence on Christianity and the belief in life after death.
But Demyurgy is definitely not the good god, that we know from modern Christian religion. Maybe a short sentence about Gnosis or Gnostics. Many believed in Demyurgy, but that there is a good god who loves you, above Demyurgy. That's what Burroughs didn't believe. I read some papers by Tommy T. Cowan, who called it Archonism. And that's probably more correct. Archons are in Burroughs works, mostly insect overlords, scorpions, thousand-feet-long-trails.
Probably all creatures that he saw on his trips, into these horror worlds where he was catapulted. And beside that, in Burroughs works, the body is something that has to be overcome, destroyed in most cases. He strives to... Many of his romans play in an in-between world where bodies don't really exist. And another important Archon in his work is the language itself. He believes that language is a virus, that it stops the human being from perceiving things as they are. I saw a nice diagram.
There is a virus, the language itself is the virus, that has affected the human being. And the language, in turn, controls our perception of the mind. What is true, is determined by the language. And with that, he also influences the French post-structuralism, the literary and philosophical postmodernism a lot. He also gives a great criticism of the language. He says that the language is something like a curse that affects us humans, that lies between us and reality.
Jacques Lacan also says that we, through the entry into the symbolic universe, through the learning of a language, actually remove ourselves from the world and no longer perceive it with children's eyes, as we would perceive it before we learned it. And through the language we learn, we are bound into a culture that dominates us more and more, that makes us unhappy and confuses us into complexities. And actually nothing is a veil that lays over the world.
And seeing a veil wanted to break through burrows. Exactly. I also noticed something else about the bodies. On the one hand, they overcome, on the other hand, the bodies are also ambivalent, because sex is also a way to escape the body. It is also a form where you can transcend and break out. So on the one hand, the body is a prison and on the other hand, it is also possible to somehow reach this transcendence with the body and escape the Archon. Did Alistair Crowley read all of this?
Because it sounds very much like his sex magic, where he also tried to channel all of the sexual energy that is released in the orgasm and thus... I'm sure that Burrows read Crowley. Wilhelm Reich definitely read the orgasm. I haven't read Reich, so I can't say much. But he also deals a lot with sex. And in Burrows, he explains that it causes over-sex for bodies. And brutality, a lot of fighting, a lot of murder, a lot of beatings, a lot of violence. But all of this has its own meaning.
The Archons have to be fought. But that sounds very much like Scientology. He was also briefly at Scientology, but he didn't get along with them. He was briefly at them, but he didn't get along with them. I don't know why. You have to become a straight edger. You have to be very tough against drug consumption. And that doesn't fit at all to Burrows' daily routine. To subordinate the hierarchy, I don't see the little Willy either. No. He quickly makes a Wilhelm Tell. In no case.
The basic idea was maybe good, but he's more of a the real deal. Fight aliens? Yes. Refuse to ask? No. Back to Tanga, to Geisen and Burrows. We were just speaking as Archons. And it's great that we can follow the cut-up method developed by Burrows and Geisen. Burrows writes to Geisen that he's the inventor. But even Tristan Zahra with his Dada poems has already introduced this cut-up style. It was then further developed by Burrows.
The idea is that you cut a text or several texts into pieces, and then put them together again. I also learned it not by chance, because you still have a certain way of putting the pieces together. And for him it was often seen as an anti-authoritarian method to tear up language, to create intertextuality. But in all literary criticism it became so indistinguishable, this cut-up method has an indistinguishable meaning. Unfortunately, that's over. His esoteric is not serious enough.
For him, the magic was what he used to cut up the language. The cutting of the language was probably the same in fighting, I would say. And then in Tanga in Paris he wrote a lot. He called the whole thing the world-horde. The word-hound, the word-herde, if you will. It must have been a lot. And from this big text body four books were created. One was Naked Lunch and then the Nova Trilogy. The Nova Trilogy are pure cut-up books. Not so easy to read. Not easy at all to read. It's a fight.
But everything you get when you read a cut-up book is a floating association. Small words that you can hang around often very beautiful metaphorically, allegorically. They're solving something in one go. But there's no reading flow. There's not this feeling of sinking into a book. You're still in your head at the same time to understand every single sentence what this sentence can mean. You're thrown back to a completely different context, to a completely different association.
You're jumping in your head all the time and this reading has something disturbing, something mystical, because you're used to to want to find a logic, to want to interpret a text and to want to interpret the text. But this doesn't work here. And that's what breaks my idea that a book should be built up linearly, contains truths and yeah. I can maybe give a quote from him.
He said or said it sensibly that these exercises to expand the consciousness should teach him to think in association spots instead of in words. And that is exactly what happens with cut-up. You have to... He also dealt with the hieroglyph systems, the Egyptian hieroglyph system, the Maya. I think he assumed that the picture was in front of the word, I think he said that. That's why he wanted to go back to these association spots, as he called it.
And he also meant that the words or at least the way we use them can be in the way of what I call non-physical experience, he said. And that it's time to think about leaving the body behind us. So here again that we step out of the body. Again a motif that appears in the postmodern again and again, especially in the Leus Guattari and the famous Antonin Arthor with the theater of terror.
In general, all the Plemiscan currents finally live from leaving the body and the material world behind and coming into the transcendent state of mind where you communicate with absolute truths and recognize truths that may not be expressed by language.
And what he might mean that the language stops you from doing so is probably also related to terms like mystic or esoteric or paranormal that question the experience itself in a certain way and that prove with a word that this experience is already pre-ordered and integrated without such experiences or creative input the attention and significance of the language. What kind of beings are they? And it was quite good to cut the texts to reorder to reveal new meanings that were previously hidden.
In general, control is also a big concept in his books and everything that controls you. Whether it's drugs, violence, sex these are also forms of control with which the body is also penetrated, attacked. But interestingly as I said, sex is also a way to escape the body in his books, just like drugs. So everything is ambivalent in him. And even violence can be used to escape it. I'll try to find the right place because I found it quite good. Exactly.
You could also see Birol's books as dead books as well as the Egyptian dead book or the Tibetan dead book because in the books they often find between worlds between life and death between these worlds and most of the protagonists have to fight against some evil evil. I think there are also some tests in the Egyptian before the heart is weighed and then transcended. This is also seen in his books that you have to fight through it and that's why there is also a lot of violence in his books.
You could even see it as a guide. A guide that he wrote for us for the readers, how we can survive in this in-between world and for that you can read the books. And that is that his writing is thought as a weapon you could say that can be used in this land between life and death. So it's a metaphysical fight. It goes quite well together with this change of consciousness that Birol maybe also wanted to call through his books. He believed in the magic and also the magic of the words.
Exactly, and Birol then tries to prepare the reader, if he should be there, to prepare. And eventually the violence in his own life that he experienced could play a central role and of course the guilt feelings that he had because of the death of his wife. It's very interesting.
Maybe Birol also had the desire to prepare other people for this spiritual fight this fight in the spirit in an in-between world not only that you find a form of freedom of transcendence, but also a moral resolution for himself a kind of goodwill. And also his belief in fate in predestination because in the magical universe nothing happens without meaning and everything happens for a good reason and if you step on the snake and the snake bites you to death, then it's not a good thing.
And in such a universe there are also his own circumstances or maybe the frames of life that are easier to to strengthen or to classify as a coping mechanism. But I don't think that it was about to process it rationally. What you meant is that it somehow follows this. It doesn't follow it at all.
In a completely irrational way the irrational thing that is going on in his head is trying to process the incomprehensible symbolically with the growth of aliens, the argons of some supernatural forces that of course are not... But these are all rationalizations, his fear and his paranoia. But I don't think there was such a linear logic that he tried to break in his cut-ups. The exciting thing in these years is that Boris is already an established writer in the 60s.
He was already there in the first hour. That means that Summer of Love takes place in the 60s and then very quickly the Hells Angels and the heroines appear in the hippie scene in San Francisco and the whole thing falls a little bit on it.
So Boris is an established personality just like Ginsburg and in the 70s Boris took a lot of heroin with other people and never was infected with anything so no HIV, no other diseases because he was always the one who as the heroine's guru was always the one who was always the one who got the first one and then the needle went round. That means that if someone got something then probably from Burroughs as the first one.
But he himself was relatively long in the clear and he also experimented more and more over his life. I think in the late I don't want to go too far but in the late 80s he was blinded because heroin sprayed his eyes in Kansas. I don't think he's blinded. I think his wildest phase was actually Tanga so the time with Brian Guyson they definitely took it especially when it comes to psychedelic substances heroin he was never free of it.
He tried it a lot and maybe he was free of it for a while but I think he also often said to the TV that he believes that if you're addicted once then you're always addicted and that definitely hit him. I wanted to say something about his belief in the magical universe because he actually said something about it that also speaks very explicitly where he says I believe in the magical universe where nothing happens, unless you want something to happen.
And what we see is that not one god but many gods who are in conflict with each other are at power and also that time is not so big. So it could have been based on the past and it had an influence on what happened now. So two cause-aloon events with this big text body that he created he couldn't have done without the help of Ginsberg and Kerouac they helped him a lot to put it in shape and that's how Naked Lunch came about. Naked Lunch is always assumed to be a cut-up novel.
There are a few pages where it's clearly cut-up, everything else. It's not a cut-up novel. The three novels that follow that came out of the same text body are cut-up texts cut-up novels. But Naked Lunch is probably his most famous work. You could think it's a cut-up but it's just a whir. It's just a whir if you want it that way. But he describes more or less the time he spent in Tanga and in the in the in-between worlds. Exactly. Naked Lunch was then in the USA.
Some states wanted to ban the novel because of obscenity. So we're now at the end of the 50s, 59. It was then rejected. Ginsburg also took part in it. He also appeared in court. Why does it have a literary value? And luckily, you have to say, it was decided Naked Lunch is not obscenity and may be published. The novel gave him a lot of attention.
It was one of the last big, before the Panic, maybe later, but one of the last big censorship, classic censorship processes in American literature history. And it generated so much publicity that it was then made less, I think. It was a basic argument. What is literature allowed to do now after the war and in the new era? What does Freedom of Speech mean for the writers in America? Exactly. Naked Lunch was then also filmed by David Cronenberg, I think in the 90s.
So the film does not describe what happened in the book, but rather describes the origin story of the book. But you can watch it. In any case, it is a good film. Then in the early 60s he went to London. He also worked on texts. From this other books were created, for example The Wild Boys. What was also filmed for a long time, or at least the book served as a template for a film, rather in the 80s and 90s he really became an icon of pop culture. I would like to cut that short.
The 70s is not that exciting. That was briefly with Scientology. Maybe I will just jump into the 80s and 90s, where he actually became an icon of pop culture. He had a lot of famous musicians, also writers, esoteric people who sought contact with him. Probably because they also read his books and he was this well-known figure. He also had appearances in films, small KBOs, and he worked with Tom Waits in a theatre play.
He also appeared more often, as spoken word, he read his texts because he has a very, very pregnant voice, very slow, and yes, you have to listen to him. You don't forget his voice. You also hear his voice with the many drugs and all the experiences. It's a sad, beautiful kind of sing-song. There was a short introduction. I just read it. In 1978, there was a reading in New York about the southern Ginsburg Smith Frank Zappa, who jumped in for Keith Richards because he had a legal problem.
And Timothy Leary and Robert A. Wilson, about whom we will also follow. All of whom were inspired by Burroughs. Exactly, with whom he had discussions. That means that Tom Leary met him. I also have a whole list of people who he influenced. For example, J.G. Ballard, the writer Hunter S. Thompson, Alan Moore, the comic writer, and also the bookseller, for example, The Watchmen, Chuck Palaniuk, Fight Club, Nick Land, philosopher, Timothy Leary, of course, and many other musicians.
The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, with whom he also recorded an album. He was also on the album cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles, which probably speaks for its iconic status. He also hung out with the Beatles when they recorded the album. That's why he's also on the cover. And then of course his influence on these esoteric and New Age movements, on the Chaos Magic scene, even on the rave culture, punk.
He's been a little bit in every way. He's influenced many people around him. In high age he moved to the countryside to Lawrence, Kansas. There he also did a little bit of art in his old age. Didn't he shoot with shotguns on a paint canister? Exactly, something like that. He connected his love for weapons with art. His shotgun pictures, I don't think, are very detailed. Action art, people. I hope you understand.
There's also a nice documentary A Man Within, where you also have footage of how he as an old man, the old, violent man, runs around with his shotgun and shoots paint cans. his secretary and his People came to him. He also managed his secretary his secretary and his his secretary and his his secretary and his secretary and his secretary. He got visitors over and over. He had an argon battery in his garden which he wanted to use to accumulate the argons. They were apparently good for his body.
I think you can also find them in Wilhelm Reichsuche. I'm not sure. It was supposed to be good for everything, against cancer and so on. It was just a wooden box that had metal inside. And then he was there in 1997, when he became the oldest of the whole Beat Generation, despite the fact that he probably consumed the most drugs of all. And even though he was the oldest, he still lived the longest.
I made a very short introduction from 1993, before you end your life, from the ministry of front singer Al Jurgensen. We were hanging around in Burroughs in 1993, and he went to his house. He decided to spray heroin on us, and he took out this belt full of syringes. Huge old-fashioned syringes from the 1950s. I have no idea how an 80-year-old man would find this, but he knew what he was doing. So we were all hanging around, and then I noticed the post on the couch table,
a letter from the White House. I said, hey, that looks important. And he said, no, that's probably just junk mail. I opened the letter, and it was from President Clinton, who invited Burroughs to a reading of a poem in the White House. I said, wow, do you have any idea how important that is? He said, what? Who is the president these days? I think he didn't even know that he had a son. Oh, his son is right, he's a little bit out of it now. We forgot that, too.
Just like Burroughs, we neglected his son. I could say something about that. After he shot his wife, the daughter who wasn't his, the one before him, she came to his wife's grandparents. And his son is... I think he grew up with his parents. He had very little contact with him. He was a real shit father. We have to imagine this from the situation of the little boy, who lives in the living room, how his father shoots his mother.
Before that, the father was very dependent on ruin all the time, and probably not for the family anyway. I also suspect that the child plays such a small role in junkie and queer because Burroughs wanted to be the personality rights of his child, because he had never been protected by anyone else in his environment. It was probably more about the fact that he didn't have such a relevant role in his life, and that's very sad for the child. I think he died at the age of 30.
He was very eager about his father. He also wrote. He also processed his experiences, especially when he had to experience how his mother was shot. He also took a lot of drugs, because he probably wanted the attention of his father, which he didn't get. And I think he died at the age of 30 because he gave up his liver. How unfair is life? The father takes 15 times as many drugs and somehow becomes so old with his incredibly low life cycle and the son dies at the age of 30.
So you can definitely see that Burroughs is probably too well off in today's reception. He probably wasn't a very pleasant time-friend. He was admired by many, but he did so much shit. And for that he was fired for the guilt he had with himself, which somehow also set his writing on fire. And then of course what he experienced as a child is of course not to be neglected, but he gets away pretty well, I would say. And he has his privileges.
So he would have had a different skin color if he had been in jail, for sure. But he was an old white man. So you should emphasize that again. No, and he was rich, especially if he had been poor. He had all the privileges. He didn't have to go to the Second World War, because his mother had kicked him out. He could use his spare time somehow to take drugs in Morocco and to carry out experiments himself.
And probably Burroughs, when you read his books, he doesn't seem particularly happy, but he was definitely driven. He was a demurk himself. He created new worlds and influenced the world sustainably. He withdrew and left behind the world he created and left us humans. He was an inspiration for many artists and philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. A light switch in the shadows is his story. That's a good ending note to the podcast. Let's go.
If you're standing here now and it's like a dead man, then you're really mean. What? I'll just buy you. You mean... You