The Past is Here

"The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born." (William Faulkner)

If the past had been left behind I’d admit to its being the past, but here it is, right where everything else is, right here where I am. I carry it with me in a storage medium which has some relationship to holograms. I can string it out on a time line, but that’s an illusion. It all exists in one location. It always did. It always will. That’s what timeless means. String it out on a timeline, forward or back, cause to effect or effect to cause, but that’s not the composition. That’s the performance.

My mind touches images like fingertips on piano keys, melancholy, because the longing wasn’t there when I lived it. I created it, like music, on the other side of living it. I want to make something out of it that time can’t erase. The hard part is giving up being right. Burroughs called it the right virus.

The other day I posted a YouTube video of Burroughs reading about the “Do rights.” I think it’s comic gold, and if you know me very well you know that I think Burroughs isn’t just a comic genius, but the greatest satirist since Jonathon Swift.

In 1962, Norman Mailer famously declared William S. Burroughs “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” While initially dismissive of Naked Lunch, Mailer changed his view during the book’s obscenity trials, ultimately recognizing Burroughs as a challenging, essential, and avant-garde literary force. (Google)

He belonged to the American upper class, which he satirized without mercy. If the bohemian identifies with the classes below, instead of the ones above, then Burroughs was the Prince of Bohemia. He was an heir to the Burroughs adding machine fortune, and was given an income by his family in return for staying away from them. He wasn’t respectable, and sullied their good name. He studied medicine, and flirted with joining the CIA, both of which he viciously satirized.

Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: “I don’t give them time to die,” he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. “Fucking undisciplined cells!” he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.

His writing is visual. The only advice he was willing to give on writing, is that, “if you can’t see it, you probably can’t show it to somebody else.” His satire strips away the mask of social respectability, which makes people uncomfortable if they are wearing it.

https://www.youtube.com/@thirdmind.studio

William Faulkner, in a speech at the University of Virginia — probably in the fifties — said the problem with modern man isn’t that he’s evil, but that he’s paltry, because he has abstracted himself out of existence. He identified, the desire for respectability, as the most abstracting force in modern life. Respectability is a carefully curated mask, justified by selected evidence. This is Essentialism, that essence precedes existence. Essence is already there when you show up. Your life purpose is conforming to the template. “Keep your hand upon the throttle, and you eye upon the rail.”

The alternative is Existentialism, in which essence is something you have to bring into existence, yourself, through self-observation. But it’s easy to get distracted by hats. (referencing the Monty Python skit below).

According to Carl Jung, hats in a dream are significant symbols representing the persona—the social mask or “clothing” a person wears to present themselves to the world. In Jungian dream analysis, a hat often indicates how an individual is presenting their personality or identity to others. (Google)

Burroughs was born in 1914, so he was immersed in existentialism. It was the intellectuals in this movement who realized, after WWI, that evil is not going to be defeated by good in some final battle for supremacy. Good and evil exist side by side in each person, so evil has to be handled on an individual level, not a collective level. Each person has responsibility for their share of it.

The horrors of World War I and World War II accelerated the popularity of existentialism, with philosophers like Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir developing its central themes between 1930 and the 1960s. (Google)

Existentialism was turning Essentialism on its head, declaring that essence is something you create, a story with the dark and light mixed together in a creative, and hopefully, entertaining, fashion. James Joyce said it’s the combining of dark and light into art which creates the moment of esthetic arrest, or unification. Pornography, he said, is when you make a character who is liked by the reader because he or she fits the essentialist mould, or, disliked, because they do not fit the mould. There is no art involved in a knockoff, and it has little value. There is no esthetic arrest, no unification of seeming opposites.

In the Monty Python skit, “People aren’t wearing enough hats,” one of the executives has been assigned the topic of, the meaning of life. What he has learned, he says, is that the soul doesn’t exist until it has been brought into existence by guided self-observation, which is very existential. You don’t begin with your essence, or soul, you have to create it yourself. Terry Gilliam, who wrote the segment, is using the terminology of the Gurdjieff school of personal development.

Gilliam played a role in Peter Brook’s 1979 film Meetings with Remarkable Men, which is based on Gurdjieff’s life and his search for esoteric knowledge. His interest in Gurdjieff is often mentioned in discussions concerning his work in the late 1970s, a period when he was broadening his creative range beyond his work with Monty Python. (Google)

His interest in the Gurdjieff school is not as public as that of John Cleese, who told a biographer that his favorite books are Maurice Nicoll’s “Commentaries,” collected lectures on the teachings of Gurdjief and Ouspensky. At the core of this school, based in esoteric Christianity, is freedom. Freedom is defined as being under the fewest possible laws. The more laws and rules required, the more mechanical the person.

Not so long ago, I had to confront my own desire for respectability, and have the experience of being paltry. I was high when my grandson and one of his friends came by to see me at the San Francisco apartment. I had been reading from, “The Western Lands.” I enthusiastically recommended it. Then I began to think how young these guys were, just out of high school and right into college. Being a queer junky might not counterbalance genius. Or maybe they are way ahead of my generation, and their father’s, having been exposed to Mr. Monk and Hannibal Lecture. Both are possessed of genius, but with caveats.

I picked up the book, and began to read passages. There were raw images of homosexuality and heroin and depravity, a man without any desire for respectability. I thought, “What will my son think about my recommending this? What kind of grandpa am I?” When I was my grandson’s age, I was in the Navy, reading Henry Miller, and The Marquis de Sade, along with Homer and Chekov, but this young man was playing Lacrosse and studying physics. He might find this book disgusting. “Jesus Christ, grandpa. Who are you?”

I had to remember, once again, that I have to integrate the shadow to get to the knowledge. Burroughs describes the “Road to Wagdhas” as involving, among other things, having to wade through a river of shit. Waghdas is the City of Knowledge. In Wagdhas, it’s true if you can prove it, and you have permission to the limits of what you can prove. Beyond Waghdas, there’s Ghadis and Naufana, the twin cities of illusion, where everything appears in double aspect. Here, nothing is true, therefore, everything is permitted.

I have a feel for double aspect. When something wants to come to consciousness it will appear in double aspect in dreaming. The physicist knows there are two aspects while a particle remains unmeasured, but, with measurement there is materialization, or, the splitting of time. One aspect is erased from existence in the material realm.

“Essentially, before a particle ‘materializes’ as a single entity, it exists in a state of potentiality (superposition) or as a pair (in the case of pair production) that has not yet been resolved by interaction or measurement.” (Google AI)

Before the materialization it is unmeasured. There is no way to know anything in the realm prior to measurement, as all possibilities are extant. “A different medium and a different light. It has some relationship to holograms.”

“We can create a land of dreams.

“But how can we make it solid?”

“We don’t. That is precisely the error of the mummies. They made spirit solid. When you do this, it ceases to be spirit. We will make ourselves less solid.”