Notes on Burroughs' Western Lands, art and salvation

Joe is tracking down the Venusian agents of a conspiracy with very definite M.O. And objectives. It is antimagical, authoritarian, dogmatic, the deadly enemy of those who are committed to the magical universe, spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. The universe they are imposing is controlled, precidtable, dead.
(The Western Lands, 59)

Joe saw cancer as just another milepost. Cancer came into its own with the Industrial Revolution, a cancer model dedicated to reproducing identical replicas on an assembly line. The analogy carries over to human cells and replication, as solid as auto parts, tin cans, bottles and printed words. Joe didn't give a shit about cancer. He wasn't there to save human lives. He was there to alter the human equation.
(WB TWL 61)

A cancer cell, a virus has no destiny, no human purpose beyond endless replication. It has no work to finish and no reason to die. Give it a reason to die and it will. The ultimate purpose of cancer and all virus, is to replace the host. So instead of trying to kill the cancer cells, help them to replicate and to replace host cells.
(WB TWL 60)


“Have you something better to offer?” Says a serious young scribe. “We know that mummification can ensure a measure of immortality.” He turns to Neferti. “And what can you offer that is better than such precarious survival?”
“I can offer the refusal to accept survival on such terms, the disastrous terms of birth. I can offer the determination to seek survival elsewhere.”
...
(Nef.) “To reach the Western Lands is to achieve freedom from fear. Do you free yourself by cowering in your physical body, for eternity? Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore, or sell it if you can find a fool...it's full of holes...it's full of holes.”
(161-2)

Neferti and the Breather stand before a door of fossilized honeycombs...He will teach Neph to ride the smells.
“Stand there.” The Breather stands six feet infront of Neph and gives him a full breath of carrion. As instructed, he lets the smell come in. The feeling is like eating a very hot pepper or breathing smelling salts, a violent clearing and purging of the head, a lightness, a lift as you breathe death and confront his smell, his corruption, without flinching, for you are breathing in your death.
Breathe in your death.
Death you're in. Breathe.
You're in. Breathe death.
In breath. You are death.
(162-3)

Look at their Western Lands. What do they look like? The houses and gardens of a rich man. Is this all the Gods can offer? Well I say it is time for new Gods who do not offer such paltry bribes. It is dangerous even to think of such things. It is very dangerous to live my friend, and few survive it. And one does not survive by shunning danger, when we have a universe to win and absolutely nothing to lose. It is already lost. After what we know, there can be no forgiveness. Remember, to them we are a nightmare...
We can make our own Western Lands.
We know that the Western Lands are made solid by fellaheen blood and energy, siphoned off by vampire mummies, just as water is siphoned off to create an oasis. Such an oasis lasts only so long as the water lasts, and the technology for its diversion. However, an oasis that is self-sustaining, recreated by the inhabitatns, does not need such as inglorious vampire lifeline.
We can create a land of dreams.
“But how can we make it solid?”
“We don't. That's precisely the error of the mummies. They make spirit solid. When you do this, it ceases to be spirit. We will make ourselves less solid.”

Well, that's what art is all about, isn't it? All creative thought, actually. A bid for immortality. SO long as sloppy, stupid, so-called democracies live, the ghosts of various boring people who escape my mind still stalk about in the mess they have made.

(164-5)

(Breather) “I can jet my way about like an octopus. You see, I'm a reverse vampire. Take a little, give back a lot. More than they can use, in fact. Keep moving is my motto. Only way to live. Now, one-way grounded vampirism, worst thing can happen to a man. I mean maintaining a permanent image with stolen energy. Some run it into the ground hot and heavy, moaning in a bloodless desert. Others take a little, live and let live- but by the terms of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave. The error here is a fixed image.
“In fact, a fixed image is the basic mortality error, a ME that cannot be allowed to change, certainly not to change color...”
(158)



Two threads running through this, on the levels of this world and the next. Magic, alive, unpredictable universe contrasting with the authoritarian, controlled, cancerous one. Plays out through book as theatre around the set of the Western Lands, leading to a question of what is immortality going to be like? Whose immortality?
Artistic, creative types question immortality in the form of heaven, rich man's set. B raises fluid sense of immortality, based on loosing the fixed image, learning to ride the scent of death.
Here B.'s looseness, bid for immortality of magic, comes in context of revulsion to the controlling aspect but also other's attempts at art. This revulsion can be read as contortions of the subject, Burroughs as Burroughs in subjective reflection while the experience of Burroughs, shining moments of transgression, fluidity and dissolution, shadow passing over desert sands, alive, dripping into and drying up, quenched by subject Burroughs.
So the immortality, the Western Lands, that one can know is a fluid one, beyond senses of self and fixity in time and space, one that manifestly is already...
This raises the question of whether artists, those awake to the magic of the universe, will every be satisfied by the only type of being that can ever be achieved through this type of practice; that of the fluid, the magical, the momentary clearing.
This sense of salvation is in something like presence, in the awareness of mountains and rivers, it comes in riding 'with' presence. Burroughs appears to seek it through riding death, through becoming cancer, as if in an attempt to dissuade that which seeks to kill and control by becoming its poison...this is not the only approach though.
Also we can see in Burroughs the last throws of the artist in motion, pushing, carrying a movement on his shoulders, reveling in drugs and homosexuality while they still offered the resistance that enables speed, the will, to ground itself. “Speed needs both smoothness and a surface,” without the resistance of the surface, speed begins to lose itself in its own inertia, nihilism. Artists now facing task of addressing the clearing, perhaps art and zen, zart? Potential of increased stillness as impetus towards movement dies away?

eh? eh?

In the bath

Too Tall and the Cripple are sitting in the bath. Too Tall's talking about our culture's drive towards expansion, the will to power clothed in physico-mental spatiality and theres beeswax solid dripping down into the tub from hollow brass holders.
The bath's small and there's wood panelling glowing in the last of day's light but mostly just flesh pressed together, sunburnt, goosebumped, wet, dry, lucky.
She's wondering how there can be such a drive towards movement and expansion when things can be so still so good. The trixy insatiable will, driving, driving always past its destination, onwards.
The Cripple's wondering again if realization of the hollowness of our expansion might lead to a stepping back, a falling back on the fullness of experience...trough the window theres leaves blowing in the sun. Some lady's talking about beaches and freshness over violins in the other room.