Burroughs Month: Making a hole in time

Question: In Cities of the Red Night, you deal with cut-ups as a form of psychic research. Is that based on any research or experience of your own?

Burroughs: Oh, yes, it’s based on research of my own, naturally. If you take, say, a time segment and start cutting it and playing around with it, often quite interesting things will emerge.

Q: The method in the novel was to read and then have sounds interspersed —

B: Yes.

Q: What would be the theory behind that? Synchronicity?

B: No theory behind it, it’s just a fact. Just a phenomenon.

Q: In The Job, you cited a case where you displaced a restaurant that had served bad food by your use of tape recordings. How did that work?

B: I don’t know why it works. You simply make recordings in front of the restaurant, and you take pictures as you make the recordings. Then you play the recordings back in front of the place and take more pictures —

Q: In front of the owners, or the workers?

B: It doesn’t matter.

Q: Is it necessary to distort the recordings?

B: Not necessary at all. What you’re doing, actually, you’re sort of making a hole in time. People are hearing what happened yesterday, and they think it’s happening right now, so it makes a hole in time through which something can cause a disruption.

Q: How did you stumble upon this method?

B: It came from a series of experiments with actual street recordings, making recordings and playing them back in the streets. When you do that, you find that very interesting things will happen.

Q: I think people are still uncomfortable with this sort of acausal view of the world.

B: I’ve never subscribed to cause and effect.

(1984 interview.)

The third time I read through Burroughs’ explanation of how to perform the psychic cut-up to make the restaurant disappear, something clicked: I turned a mental corner and found myself forming the thought, “Of course — the pictures being the same on both days confuses the recording and that makes the hole.” I actually still know what I meant, and that thought description does not fully explain it, but I ought not think about any of this because I’m crazy enough already and have got to actively dissuade myself from burning down the Wendy’s on a monthly basis*, plus I’m not feeling so hot today to boot, so I’m going to go lay down with a book.

All pictures not of Mr. Burroughs are via Square America.

*At night, when there is no one there to be hurt. I’ve given it loads of thought.

Goin’ on a tiger hunt

I guess I should mention in case things go haywire in the next nine or ten days that I won’t be here — haven’t been for almost a day now, actually, I think. It’s all ghost posts for the next week and some odd days.

I’m taking my hips on a gold road trip to the Old Home. It will bring good and bad. I will be stopping at several points along the way there and back for some painful purposes, and at other times for what I hope will be crazy-joyful occasions of reunion.

The only way out is through.

(Geneen Roth.)

This quote puts me in mind of a memory that is tied closely to the trip I am about to make. A long time ago, when I used to live where I am going, my aunt — the one who is a nun, not to be confused with my bereaved aunt who is reading Kubler-Ross and about whom I talk all the time, nor my chic deaf aunt who lives on a cliff — used to sing to me this song called “Goin’ on a tiger hunt,” some variant of which you have doubtless been taught in church youth group or some scout camporee or perhaps by a cartoon. Animaniacs was surprisingly educational at times.

If this picture of a little girl making a wish on her birthday candles some fifty years ago does not make you accuse the room of being dusty you have no soul. I hope every one of her dreams came true and she has lived a long and happy life.

The main thing of the song — which sitting on the steps of my grandparents’ house by the highway singing with my aunt is one of my happiest memories — was this syncopated repetitive chorus whenever the hunter would encounter an obstacle. You would chant back and forth while clapping rhythmically, “Goin’ on a tiger hunt. * But I’m not afraid. * Cause I’ve got a gun. * And bullets at my side. — What’s that up ahead?” and Aunt B would respond, “A tree! / Tall grass! / A fence! / Mud!” Then you must say,

Can’t go over it * (can’t go over it)
Can’t go under it * (can’t go under it)
Can’t go around it * (can’t go around it)
Gotta go through it.

And then you would delight in making squelching noises for mud, slidey hand sounds for grass, creaking like a gate, etc. *

You went with delcious slowness through the first part of the song, forgetting really in the process that your whole job in this call-and-response game of foley artistry is to hunt a tiger and catch him with bullets all while not feeling fear, and then suddenly when you asked “What’s that up ahead,” Aunt B would shout, “THE TIGER!” and your heart would pound and you’d hastily run backward through all of your previous sound effects trying to go as fast as possible while keeping in the proper order and lastly mimic the final sound of the slam of the gate behind you. Then you would say, “But I’m not afraid.”

In Girl Scouts we played it as “Going on a Squeegee Hunt” and we just skipped the guns and bullets part. I’m not sure what a-changing times lead to the substitution of the made-up “squeegee” monster for the visceral image of the tiger — whether it was less scary than the tiger or whether it was less encouraging of poaching a potentially endangered species — but in any case I feel like with the whitewashing the song lost its sizzle.

I am going on a tiger hunt, and I am afraid, and I do not have a gun, nor bullets at my side. But I cannot go over, under, or around what comes next — I will go through what painful obstacle stands in my way because that is simply the only choice I have. Which, as that is the case, it can only be meant to be and I therefore have double reason to persevere.

I must maintain this mindset. Wish me luck.



*For the tree, I believe we said, “Gotta climb it,” the only deviation in the song’s demandingly strict meter — why not just omit the tree in favor of a thing which might be gone through? It is scarcely true that you cannot go around a tree, and climbing it is the same as going over it. Really the only thing in the words of the chorus that you can not do when faced with the tree in this song — besides obviously the impossibility of going through it as is evidenced by the replacement of “go through it” with “climb it” — is tunnel under it, but even that is only for lack of time or machinery. You technically could go under it as well as around and over it. “Through it” is wholly out, and thus it destroys the fundamental message of the repetition of the chorus. A puzzling lyric.

Has anyone ever been taught to chop it down? Get back to me if you have. Now I’m ten kinds of curious.

Goethe Month: Inaugural ed., “Elective Affinities”

AB + CD → BD + AC.

“I think I can briefly sum up in the language of signs. Imagine an A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise related to a D; now bring the two couples into contact: A will throw itself at D, C at B, without our being able to say which first deserted its partner, which first embraced the other’s partner.”

(Die Wahverwandtschaften / Elective Affinities, 1809: p. 44.)

“With the alkalies and acids, for instance, the affinties are strikingly marked. They are of opposite natures; very likely their being of opposite natures is the secret of their effect on one another.”

(Ibid., 39)

“They seek one another eagerly out, lay hold of each other, modify each other’s character and form in connection an entirely new substance.”

(Ibid., 39-40.)

“…And those are the cases which are really most important and remarkable — cases where this attraction, this affinity, this separating and combining, can be exibited, the two pairs severally crossing each other; where four creatures, connected previously, as two and two, are brought into contact, and at once forsake their first combination to form into a second.”

(Ibid., 42.)

“In this forsaking and embracing, this seeking and flying, we believe that we are indeed obsrving the effects of some higher determination; we attribute a sort of will and choice to such creatres, and feel really justified in using technical words, and speaking of ‘Elective Affinities.’ ”

(Ibid., 42-43.)

The title is taken from a scientific term once used to describe the tendency of chemical species to combine with certain substances or species in preference to others. The novel is based on the metaphor of human passions being governed or regulated by the laws of chemical affinity, and examines whether or not the science and laws of chemistry undermine or uphold the institution of marriage, as well as other human social relations.

(the wiki)

In the book, people are described as chemical species whose amorous affairs and relationships were pre-determined via chemical affinities similar to the pairings of alchemical species. Goethe outlined the view that passion, marriage, conflict, and free-will are all subject to the laws of chemistry and in which the lives of human species are regulated no differently than the lives of chemical species.

(Ibid.)

You may imagine that it ruffled some feathers upon its publication, as I think you can tell just from those excerpts that it sailed quickly into unpopularly murky waters in its critique of human sexuality and the social institution of marriage as it stood in Goethe’s time. The two chief protagonists, Charlotte and Eduard, are a married and like-minded couple obsessed by logic and reason. Both are on their second marriages, having been widowed by their first, arranged spouses.

With their original, societally-enforced family and financial obligations taken care of by their first marriages, Charlotte and Eduard were free in their second marriage to tie the knot with someone they actually like and to whom they are attracted: they married out of love and sexual desire. But now time has passed and they confirm to one another that they’re a little bored. As an experiment, they decide to invite two attractive, single friends — the Captain, an old acquaintance of Eduard’s, and Ottilie, Charlotte’s young cousin — to their rural mansion for the summer and see how things shake out.

Racy stuff that is peppered with sometimes-depressingly accurate evaluations of human behavior and theories of brain chemistry as it exhibits itself in romance. The novel is still studied because it continues to resonate as a touchstone for debate today between the theories of free will and biological determinism.

All these candid pictures come from the same set of found photos of a swingers’ party c. 1970s, on Square America.

PS: Explanation — It’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Month. For brevity, we’ll call it Goethe Month.

June is bustin’ out all over — time to jump along with it

Today has gone about as I expected, but with weirdly more zen-like contentment and even restrained happiness.

The principal as much as said at the interview that she would have to go with the more experienced teacher to fill the position at the school where I’ve been working as an aide and substitute, no matter how she felt personally about me, due to parent demand for fully credentialed teachers, as I had anticipated. I assured her I understood that with the parents, it is always a delicate balance and I appreciated that she was in an awkward position. We agreed it was a shame that I can’t in good conscience take out a loan and pursue my credential until I have a job to finance that academic endeavor, and the promise of one in my own field is worth holding out for, but I can’t secure a position like that without proof I am at least beginning an effort to be in a credential program, which puts me in this awful Catch-22.

Brigitte Bardot photographed by Phillipe Halsman, 1951.

But overall it was a really positive, loving, and upbeat interview, and it accomplished my chief goal, which was to demonstrate the sincerity of my committment to the little community she has created at her school. She was really nice and spoke glowingly of things she hoped we would be able to do in the near future. She said frankly that she wanted me on her staff and that once this position was filled according to tradition and political appeasement, there would not be pretty much any competition for whatever new openings may arise next year. It was a good talk.

via Square America.

So. Happy thoughts. Great things happening in my life with these tutoring jobs for the Scamps and kidlet finishing up kindergarten tomorrow, plus my Katohs graduates high school tonight, and all in all I’ve got a million things to be thankful about and a new season in which to celebrate them. And I have decided — no more hiding and tossing in my sleep. No more anxiety and self-doubt constantly wracking me. No more tearing at my fingernails and spitting them out while my mind hashes through all the ways things can go wrong and obsesses over my bank account.

Audrey Hepburn photographed by Philippe Halsman, 1955.

Time to start leaping a little. Let’s do it!