Interview with
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs was born February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine company. Burroughs grew up in St. Louis, where his upper-class midwestern background did not suit his tastes. In his early thirties he travelled to New York and decided to pursue freedom by joining the city’s gangster underworld. He became a heroin addict quite intentionally, in the process meeting a crowd of young nonconformists studying at Columbia University, that included Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was older than them, but they were impressed by his obvious intelligence and worldly cynicism. Kerouac described him as “Tall, 6 foot 1, strange, inscrutable because ordinary looking (scrutable), like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thinlipped cold bluelipped face.”
Later Burroughs wandered the world from South America to Tangier. While living in Tangier he wrote what was published in the book 'Naked Lunch’, widely considered his best work. He would go on to write many more books, plays and film scripts.
Many rock musicians, attracted by Burrough’s strong emphasis on personal freedom, cite him as an inspiration. In 1992 Kurt Cobain of Nirvana released an album with Burroughs, ‘The Priest They Called Him’ in which Cobain plays electric guitar over Burrough’s spoken voice. In 1999, Burroughs passed away.
The following is an extract from a 1961 interview with William S. Burroughs, conducted by Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, that originally appeared in the Journal For the Protection of All People.
Q: What do you say about political conflicts?
A: Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.
Q: Who manipulates the cloth?
A: Death
Q: What is death?
A: A gimmick. It’s the time birth death gimmick. Can’t go on much longer, too many people are wising up.
Q: Do you feel there has been a definite change in man’s makeup? A new consciousness?
A: Yes, I can give you a precise answer to that. I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
Q: What kind of advice have you got for politicians?
A: Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
Q: What if people don’t want to change, don’t want no new consciousness?
A: For any species to change, if they are unable and are unwilling to do so - I might for example however have suggested to the dinosaurs that heavy armor and great size was a sinking ship, and that they do well to convert to mammal facilities - it would not lie in my power or desire to reconvert a reluctant dinosaur. I can make my feeling very clear, Gregory, I feel like I’m on a sinking ship and I want off.
Q: What about control?
A: Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better. All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of AFFECT - emotion. Any machine tends to absorb, eliminate, affect. Yet the only person who can make a machine move is someone who has a motive, who has affect. If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine the machine will slow down and stop forever. Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.
Q: What kind of organization could technological society have without control?
A: The whole point is I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control. Elimination of all natural sciences. If anybody ought to go to the extermination chambers definitely scientists, yes I’m definitely anti-scientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as, the real and only universe, the Universe of scientists themselves - they’re reality-addicts, they’ve got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it. We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - paralleled opportunity.
Q: What do you think of White Supremacy?
A: The essence of white supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children’s children’s children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of static image. The attempt to maintain a static image, even if it’s a good image, just won’t work.
Q: Do you think Americans want and could fight the next war with the same fire and fervency as they did in World War II?
A: Undoubtedly, yes - because they remember what a soft time they had in the last one - they sat on their ass.
The above article appeared in
New Dawn No. 32 (September-October 1995) |
