February 5 2024 William S. Burroughs, on his birthday February 5

Celebrate with me today the works of a pivotal figure of my youth, one of my father’s Beatnik friends who among the writers, artists, musicians, and film and theatre people he collected was all of those as well as a magician and scholar of the occult, and a wise and kindly mentor.

What does William S. Burroughs teach us about the value of transgression in bringing change to authorized identities and systems of oppression, the violation of normalities, the role of vision in the reimagination and transformation of imposed orders of being and meaning, and revolutionary struggle to seize ownership of ourselves from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue?

An encyclopedic and phantasmagorical body of work, full of dark satire, science fiction tropes, chaos, magic, songs of anarchy and freedom, and a beautiful unbounded transgression, William S. Burroughs wove revolutionary socio-political insights together with the glorious madness of Dionysian ecstatic vision.

Combining in his person Existentialism and Surrealism, his work is driven by two great themes; rebellion against Authority and the dreamquest of a magician to become a god.

The first of these themes being Sartrean Authenticity and a Promethean rebellion versus Control, a personification of all forms of thought control and normalcy, referential to Camus, Genet, Nietzsche, the English Romantics, de Sade, and most of all Georges Bataille, whose post-Freudian analysis of sociocultural forces and institutions, developed within the theoretical framework of Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, indict Authority as a means of dehumanizing and shaping us into the tools of our own governmental, religious, and economic enslavement. The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated.

His second major theme is ecstatic vision and transcendence as a path of liberation from the material world, a sublimity achieved through the derangement of the senses; sex, drugs, violence, and the pursuit of the extreme and the bizarre. As in the early novels of his direct model Jean Genet, a major theme in this is the seizure of power and authenticity through transgression of the Forbidden.

This includes the many magical subterfuges and arcane disciplines he practiced, first among them being the cut-up method of randomization to reveal hidden truths invented with Brion Gysin and intended as a ritual of prophecy derived from the I Ching, the inspiration for which Burroughs once told me was Leibniz’s famous claim to have invented binary mathematics when reading the I Ching in his hunting lodge in Bavaria when he had the primary insight that the whole universe can be constructed of combinations of one and zero.

The works of William S. Burroughs may first be read as an interrogation of the four principles of Leibniz, Non-Contradiction, the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the Principle of Bivalence, as illuminated in the conversations of Aristotle, al Farabi, Avicenna, Aquinas, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carroll, and Korzybski, and playing the other side of the board Heraclitus, Nagarjuna, al Ghazali, and Hui Shi.

Second is the technique of juxtaposition developed from Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Monet’s principle; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, and the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world that we see.”

Here in juxtaposition is a praxis of his values in the second dimension of Burrough’s thought, his context within the lineage of Romantic Idealism; Prometheus and Milton’s rebel angel, Shakespeare in The Tempest, Byron and his sources Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller, then Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Keats, Blake, and Coleridge, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Third we must recognize that William S. Burroughs is primarily a mystic and Surrealist, obsessed with experiments with telepathy, precognition, shapeshifting, out of body travel to other dimensions and times, curses and psychic conflicts with malign and alien forces which reflect those of H.P. Lovecraft, and a unique and personal spiritism akin to that of voodoo which I would call Jungian shadow work. In this aspect he resembles Philip K Dick, prophet of the transhuman, Carl Gustave Jung, Vladimir Nabokov in Ada, and all of his fellow Surrealists.

Of direct influences among Surrealists we must count Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, Ionesco’s Rhinoceroses, Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, Reverdy’s The Thief of Talant, Michel Leiris‘ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

As to his language and style we must trace his origins in the Surrealist poets and their influences and references; Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and de Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Phillip Lamantia.

All of William S. Burroughs’ works may be read as conceptual art representing surrealist films in the tradition of Cocteau, Artaud, Dali, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Guillermo del Toro.

He began along this path as a child when he became the avatar of a chthonic being conjured by his Welsh nanny in the rite of Calling the Toad; and thereafter sought transformation and transcendence in forms ever more strange. This he claimed was the toad that Nietzsche feared he must swallow, which was transferred to him as a spirit guardian and oracle of wisdom, a succession of bearership as a mystery initiation into which he inducted me through storytelling as ritual. Upon each completion we would recite together Prospero’s line in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”.

This canon of stories, possibly invented on the spot and told over some time intermixed with fabulous and strange versions of Grimm’s Fairytales, now seems to me similar in intent to Ted Hughes’ reimaginations of mythology attempting to construct and reawaken a lost faith. He never wrote them down, unfortunate as unlike his books they were suitable for young adults if not children and coherent in a way his novels, constructed of episodes he called turns as in vaudeville acts, are not. One day I may do so for him.

I wrote my first story, Dream of the Toad, when I was twelve and immersed in Frazier’s Golden Bough and other myths, folklore, and fairytales, inspired by the wonderful stories he told of growing up stepping back and forth between our world and a parallel, magical one, filled with living figures from fairytales and myths in delightfully bent and off-center versions of their stories, as he and my father played chess of an evening and the coals of the fire burned low, enveloping us in the gathering darkness.

To me, William S. Burroughs will always be a kindly and urbane but tormented gentleman, a Trickster figure and Guide of the Soul, bearer of hidden signs and wounds, a charming rascal and unofficial uncle steeped in classical literature he could recite from memory, full of mischief and secrets and whom you could trust with your own.

Years after his time as a figure in our home, I first read his books as a teenager immersed in the grimoires of medieval magic, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as guides to universal principles of creating ourselves through language, when I discovered the stunning vistas of his transgression and disruption of gender, as he had never said or signaled anything inappropriate within my sight or hearing as a child. So also with his anarchism and reimagination of Marx in fiction as the Algebra of Need.

He always liked my Dream Labyrinth wall, a floor to ceiling collage of Hieronymus Bosch and other strange images opposite my bed which I changed and elaborated constantly throughout my teenage years. Bizarre drawings like cinematic storyboards would be found added after his mysterious arrivals and departures. He loved illusions, grand entrances and ghostly exits, and above all humor, by which to keep the world off balance and step nimbly by its obstacles.

His books are also a Dream Labyrinth, which together form maps of the unknown and of possibilities of human meaning and being, as well as topologies of transformation as an anarchist Hall of Mirrors in a surreal and Absurd universe; one which is the reverse face of C.I.A. Director of Counter-Intelligence Angleton’s controlling metaphor of intelligence work as falsification and thought control as a Wilderness of Mirrors. This chiaroscuro was intentional on the part of Burroughs, who cast himself as a nemesis of Authority; liberation to counter balance tyranny. And all of this laden with dense symbolism and multilayered historical references, especially from suppressed paradigms and antique systems of myth.

William S. Burroughs remains an important vehicle of transmission of the whole western mystery tradition, indebted as he is to Philippe Soupault for his interpretation of William Blake and to Georges Bataille for his interpretation of Nietzsche and Freud.

One can also speak of Burroughs the magician of poetic vision and ecstatic trance in terms of Dionysius and Orpheus, and the literature of ceremonial magic as was Jung, immersed in Gnosticism, Theosophy, Rosicrucian occultism, Egyptian mythology, shamanism, tarot as he gave me my first deck of cards which I have to this day and taught me their use, I Ching, Kabbalah, alchemy, and all of this through Aleister Crowley whom he claimed as a source of discipleship and interpreted through his direct model, H.P. Lovecraft, of whom he once said; ”I wish Lovecraft wrote fiction. Some truths are too terrible to invoke by their names.”

Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and the heroic Jacques DeMolay.

Naked Lunch is a masterpiece and classic of literature; Junky and Queer are among his other autobiographical novels modeled on those of Jean Genet. Like those of Genet, his stories are parodies and subversions of sacred rituals intended to liberate us from authority and free the creative imagination to forge an authentic humankind.

The Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, further explores addiction as a metaphor of social control and the destructive nature of capitalism. His idea of the Ugly American as a malign intrusive alien entity and force which must be exorcised parallels and is referenced by Malcolm X’s personification of heroin addiction as a White Man who must be cast out.

One of the most accessible of his works is his book on the gangster Dutch Schultz, a dialectical journal in the classical form of a Jesuit report recording the actual last words of the gangster in one column and Burroughs’s commentary in the other- complete with cinematography notes.

America, a trilogy including Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands which reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a triumph of Surrealism in epic form and a masterpiece, has a clarity of prose and the imprint of a master artist at the summit of his powers. As a prank I once switched them for the actual American History textbooks in a high school class; strangely no one objected and I had to go right on teaching through the semester with it as myths of national identity. I think we had more fun with this subject than is usual.

The Revised Boy Scout Manual is a brilliant parody and a manual of anarchist revolt and the overthrowing of governments. Along with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom it is among the finest classics of direct action and guerrilla warfare one might consult.

The Cat Inside is a delightful and precious allegory of freedom and rebellion, a meditation on values which extends Nietzsche’s analysis of master- slave psychology to a philosophy of anarchist liberation, which references Nietzsche’s interpreters Karl Jaspers, Maurice Blanchot, C.G. Jung, and Gilles Deleuze.

The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil. As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. It is also filled with episodes from the glory days of his youth and set in Mexico and Morocco as imaginal realms.

When I asked him, at the age of ten or thereabouts, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”

The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine.

The Black Rider: the casting of the magic bullets, a theatrical collaboration with director Robert Wilson & the magnificent Tom Waits, is a can’t miss.

Exterminators collects thirty short stories, the Collected Interviews 1960-1997 edited by Lotringer are fascinating, as is The Adding Machine: essays.

Interzone is a travel journal, but only on the surface to the Marrakesh of Beatnik glory, as it also recounts the Lovecraftian plot to enslave humanity through heroin by fascist insects from Venus.

All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of Anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.

All true art defiles and exalts.

Go ahead; swallow the toad.

William S. Burroughs: 100 Years film with Barry Miles