6 word life story? :

Wake, washing machine, sleep. Repeat cycle.

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Story for Burrough's Zine, un-cut-up:

 

THE KENOSIS PARADIGM

 

     Kim Carson’s kenosis is the word become only sound again, kenosis - kenosis - kenosis, a musical chant; the word wrenched free from the meanings meant, by the work of austere men throughout the ages, to reverberate now alongside its cadence.  From this blank beginning Kim chooses to retrieve the Greek original ⎯ κένωσις ⎯ meaning “emptying.”  Continuing his chant, alone in a bare white-walled room, with the sunlight emphasizing absence, Kim chooses to summon also a sense, vague for now, of the divine within this word; this word whose meaning (before its own emptying by Kim) was a complex, tangled knot of conflicting interpretations about the divine nature of rood-ready Christ, the essence of God, and the role of humanity within the Divine.  Kim has cut the rope either side of the knot and is performing the magician’s trick ⎯ no, not trick, but magic in fact ⎯ Kim is performing the magic act of reassembling the rope into a smooth braided noose undone. 

     This is just a minute component of Kim’s battle against the word virus, joined with his struggle against the “nonsense of Christianity” (which was chronicled in The Place of Dead Roads).  In the expanse of New Mexico’s desert nothingness Kim meditates upon how the history of this word, kenosis, might have been altered were it not for the vext nightmare of a rocking cradle. He knows: Never let words mean what you first believe they mean or the battle is lost!  Shift the meanings and shift your consciousness.  

Amidst all possibilities Kim draws out and enacts within his own present a living, alternative meaning for kenosis.  It entails the simultaneous ideas of a god pouring himself out, emptying himself out, into his own creation and of a man emptying himself so as to become filled with the Divine.  

 

Off stage the producers are clarifying: This ain’t your typical god, god dammit! No beardy white haired fellas allowed.

 

     “Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods.  In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way” (42 PDR).  Kim’s kenosis is the human drive ⎯ the evolutionary manifested drive ⎯ that will attain this.  Swallowed within the black maw of its meaning are the two primary and conflicting drives of human nature, their deified bodies stalking across each flesh landscape: Eros brandishing a quivering hard-on beside his bow and Thanatos, wreathed in blood-red poppies.  The drive to be empty of it all, edging towards oblivion, even as your emptying is itself an act of creation, the vessel spilling a pattern of spattered paint out onto the cosmos-canvas as it prepares to be filled again ⎯ this is kenosis.  . . . but to be filled again with what?  Or is the pure absence of kenosis the Divine beginning and the Divine end?

     1.989 x 10^30 kg, nearly two nonillion kilograms, of gases burning amid nuclear reactions set on the New Mexican dessert, drawing soft purple shadows over Kim’s white-washed hut.   This is his last night in New Mexico.  In the morning he will head west to California.  Livermore, in point of fact.

 

*     *     *

 

     Carried in with a spring current from across the pacific, black storm clouds japan the sky over Kim’s head as he arrives on the outskirts of Livermore.  A gushing fallout of heavy rain sweeps Kim into the first motel he can find, a dilapidated single-story building with peeling wall-paper and the no-smell of death stalking through its unlit hallways.  After unpacking his clothes hastily and his revolvers with care ⎯ a long barreled .22 and a three year old, 1952 model Enfield ⎯ Kim heads outside, his black-leather brief case in hand.  Heavy raindrops explode on the pavement and parked cars as he hurries across the quiet road to the nearest bar, The Cut-Up Joint.  The Enfield is clearly visible in the snug holster on Kim’s right side but no-one in the bar pays it any mind, apart from a skittish junky who looks like he stepped out of a painting by Egon Schiele and into the further horror of time.

     Kim orders a neat whiskey and sits down at corner table to write out the principles behind the Kenosis Paradigm:

 

--- Kenosis as a concept is best expressed by the opening glottal stop that sings BEGINNING! within its own momentary silence.  When kenosis is achieved their is an enveloping “blast of silence” (TTE).  This enveloping produces a letter that will be sent, address unknown.

--- Kenosis as an real imagined inhabitable place is a port city with innumerable free-ways leading into it.  Words can be the exploding tickets that take you there (if you continually reassemble the fragments) or the unreferential map that is mistaken for the territory itself.

--- “Each page is a door to everything is permitted.  The fragile lifeboat between this and that.  Your words are the sails” (My Education 49). . . . and you, you are at once the vessel and the shivering wake of ocean that dreams of dissolution.  

--- Kenosis, it should be remembered, is only a word, not the process it proposes to be.  The process is itself nameless (or many named) and produces no static result.

 

     After finishing his whiskey, Kim tears the sheet from his notebook and ignites it on the table’s solitary candle.  He places the crumpled, burning page in his empty glass and watches it becoming ash.  The act of writing out the principles had served it’s purpose, altered Kim’s consciousness, altered his understanding, but the principles themselves must always be reformulated. . . . And it would be dangerous also if the page were to be discovered by the wrong person.

     Kim is aware he is being followed.  Not long after leaving New Mexico, he began to notice the rotating cast of black cars that would trade-off duties while trailing his own junker Oldsmobile.  And in each car were two men in dull, grey three-piece suits.  Employees of the government obviously, and they made no effort to conceal this fact.  In truth, the effectiveness and authority of such men is generally increased by their being obvious.  They make themselves known once or twice and can fall back into lazy observation as the original objects of surveillance instill the sense of control within themselves and follow their own acceptable dictums.  

     Kim, however, is not concerned that the men following him will be able to affect his behavior in such a manner.  He must however, prevent them from discovering anything about the Kenosis Paradigm ⎯ for now, at least.  Tomorrow it will become apparent, to the government flunkies and many others, what the Kenosis Paradigm was truly about.  For now “the forbidden knowledge passes from Johnson to Johnson, in freight cars and jails, in seedy rooming houses and precarious compounds, in hop joints and rafts floating down the great rivers of South America, in guerilla camps and desert tents” (PDR 105).

     As Kim is about to get up and leave The Cut-Up Joint one of the grey-suited men enters conspicuously, his facial features jagged and worn, betraying a torment of consciousness that has slowly drained down into his grisled visage.  Could Kim win him over to this other side?  Bring him out of the fold and into the open expanse?  He considers it a moment, sliding back onto his chair.  The contest plays out easily in Kim’s mind.  First he would draw the Enfield and lay it plainly on the table, beckoning the man towards him.  How could the man but come?  And as he sat down beside Kim, how could he but play the civilized role?  Their symbiosis is so well established.  The man might even listen to Kim. “Maybe that would be the first step . . yes if we could learn to listen and not to talk” (TTE 114).  And what would Kim say? . . . “what is the medium corresponding to air that we must learn to breath in? The answer came to Kim in a silver flash. . . . Silence” (PDR). 

     But the man’s knowledge of the Kenosis Paradigm is based solely on unfounded speculation.  What he imagines inside Kim’s suitcase is a detestable, dangerous collection of propaganda; plans that have an unlimited potential to destroy the controlled order so well set up.  The grey-suited men might be able to take out Kim at the present moment and burn the materials they image he possesses, but they want to know where those materials are headed, so that they might also take down the followers, the receivers.  It is this unending quest for increased control that will eventually lead to their plot’s failure.  

     Kim himself has relinquished control, and so his plot is developing as it needs or is needed to.  He knows he the author of his own script by not proposing to write it.  He has forgotten about the grey-suited man for now, dwelling instead on his own being.  “I am a recording instrument . . . I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity” . . . [. . .] “Possession” they call it . . . [. . .] . . . Wrong! I am never here . . . Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves . . . [. . .] . . . No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straitjacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection . . . [. . .] . . . [. . .] . . . Doors that only open in Silence” (NL 184-85).

     As Kim thinks this last thought he notices the door to The Cut-Up Joint swing open amid a violent dissipation of sound.  In traipses an old man with a shock of gleaming black hair atop his seven-foot figure; a figure shrouded by a deep-maroon and rain-sodden trench coat.  Kim can tell immediately that the old man has walked in from out of time; the ghosting presence of Hassan i Sabbah is immediately perceptible as an emanation from dip within this figure’s bones.  Hassan is “the only spiritual leader who has anything to say to the Johnsons who is not a sold-out P.R. man for the Slave Gods” (PDR 170).  Exiled to Egypt for leading the underground Ishmaelite sect, Hassan learned that “paradise actually exists and that it can be reached.” It is the Western Lands placed at the end of the most dangerous road.  It is the Garden, though “there are not just one garden but many gardens, an infinite number” (PDR 171).  And Hassan i Sabbah found the key to this garden, ensuring his own immortality.  Not the vampiric immortality of a  static self perpetuated throughout time, but rather the grace of immortality that recognizes that the “illusion of a separate inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time.”  With this immortality, this non-selfness, the flux of your spirit may live through others.  “Let’s face it, you are other people and other people are you” (ME 133).

     Kim feels a tremor of awe reverberate up through his thighs and across his chest, but the impulsive attraction of his body to the Hassan cannot diminish what he knows he must do.  The old man, with something like menace aflame in his eyes, is approaching the grey-suited flunky.  The maroon trench coat is swung open and the old man moves his right arm gracefully across his abdomen as if to draw a saber from it sheath.

     “Hassan i Sabbah!” shouts Kim into the smoke and silence filled room.  The old man halts his movements then turns around to face Kim.  Allowing the silence to become enveloping before he speaks again, Kim takes his shooting stance, twenty paces from the reborn presence of the one spiritual leader who has something to say him and his Johnson men.  Hassan himself then pulls the trench coat back from his other side to reveal a holstered pistol; he will be shooting left-handed.  

     “You are Hassan i Sabbah,” says Kim. “Is this not true?”

     “Nothing is . . .” begins the old man. 

Kim motions as if to draw his pistol causing Hassan to rush firing off a shot that misses over Kim’s left shoulder and shatters the face of a grandfather clock.  

     “Nothing is true.  Everything is permitted.  So I feel too” sympathizes Kim.  He then draws his Enfield, aims with precision, and graces the inside of Hassan’s forehead with a bullet.  As this one of Hassan’s bodies falls backwards with an emptied head Kim bows in respect, then places the still warm gun back into his hip holster.  The grey-suited man, grateful and bewildered, sits blank-faced as thin trails of Hassan’s splayed blood run down through the furrows of his wrinkles.

 

*     *     *

 

     As he leaves The Cut-Up Joint Kim notices a boyish youth with sandy-brown hair and reptilian green eyes push aside the remainder of his mojito and follow him outside.  Storm clouds continue to cast out their burdensome rain, and the sudden breaking of thunderclaps emphasizes the empty street’s otherwise silent stillness.  The fine-featured and slender youth sidles up to Kim, introducing himself as Asher.  He soon begins asking how Kim knew the old man was Hassan i Sabbah.  But Kim knows well the role he is meant to play, and so kindly acts disinterested, allowing the youth to press him further with a few questions until they reach Kim’s motel.  Unlocking his door, Kim mentions the Kenosis Paradigm, but the youth seems already to have intuited all knowledge of Kenosis; from reading Kim presumes.  “The old method of handing it down by word of mouth, from master to initiate, is now much to slow and too precarious.” So in the past Kim has “concealed and revealed the knowledge in fictional form.  Only those for whom the knowledge is intended will find it” (PDR 115).  In the morning the knowledge Kim has to pass along will find an even newer form of expression.

     Under the the flickering of a diminished blue lamp light Kim and Asher perform their rituals of simple movement and gesture.  Asher slips off his leather sandals first, and then removes his high-collared shirt and jeans, taking care to fold both before he places them on the lonely beside table.  All the while Kim waits patiently, stripped to reveal his hard-on and his undisguised longing.  And after so much waiting they fall into it like a fever, fucking as though this were to be the last of days, fucking until Kim, as silver flashes blossom in front of his eyes, is gripped by “a vertiginous feeling of being sucked into a vast empty space where words do not exist” (CRN 128).  “It is possible to resolve the dualistic conflict in a sex act” (PDR 172), and it is possible also to resolve the conflict of singularity, for the sex act allows the inhabitation of some other, empty space; absent bodies in the same vacant expanse.

     Falling into sleep not long before two in the morning Kim is dimly aware he must be up again in less than three hours, and so will have to save his dreaming until after he reaches the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory’s testing site.  And so to will he have to leave only an empty space beside Asher.  Before fading into unconsciousness Kim decides also to leave his brief case and its secret contents with Asher.  If the government grey-suits find the briefcase and possess it after all, they will may find they we’re right to be wary of its contents: materials capable of shattering the order they follow ⎯ blank, white pages. Pages upon pages, sheafs upon sheafs, of an absent space.

 

*     *     *

 

     With darkness still successfully resisting the first glimmers of sunlight, Kim reaches his intended deserted plot of land on the morning of the Livermore lab’s fourth nuclear test.  The security of the lab is tight, but all that surrounds the testing location is an electric fence and barbed wire.  The numerous “Danger: Livermore Nuclear Testing Site” signs are considered the most adequate methods of keeping people at bay, and generally they are, but Kim, without hesitation, barrels his Oldsmobile through the fence, sending a shower of sparks flying through the dark early morning air.  Kim’s car cuts a path in the muddied soil, leaving a clearly visible trace that the grey-suited government men might follow once they determine where he disappeared to in the night.  

 

Half an hour’s drive into the barren landscape, Kim stops the car and begins to walk further into the absent territory as sunlight begins to wash over everything in sight.  In the distance the fence looks like a line of ants marching across the horizon.  Kim checks his watch: 6:27.  The testing blast is scheduled for 7:00 AM.  Kim settles down into the mud, assuming the lotus position, and allows the sleep he deprived himself of earlier to ebb slowly back into his body.  By 6:48 the dreaming yoga begins, and Kim is brought once again into the company of the Johnsons.  A South American landscape unfolds around Kim like a lily, and he has the sensation of swinging over the void in hammock.  Soon he can feel his body beginning to dissolve, as feeling of absence creeping out through his bones, emptying.  This is Kim’s Kenosis. 

     Kim opens his eyes to see his fingers fading vaguely into nothingness, and glance quickly at his watch before the spreading absence makes its way up his arm: It is 6:58.  In less than a minute Kim becomes enveloped by the zeroing absence, and as he becomes invisible, trembling with divine delight, he becomes also clearest at his most dissipated point: his navel, a soft zero shape.

     When the explosion comes, at 7 on the dot, Kim hitches a ride of dissipation, spreading out in all directions with the mushroom cloud, ready to be carried out in minute particles across the western landscape.  In downpours of rain and in rushes of wind, in the silence of evenings and in the trembling heat of afternoons, the many Johnsons, and those who dream of becoming Johnsons too, will be able to breathe in the imperceptible forms of Kim, intuiting his Kenosis wisdom from within themselves.  In the last of his dissipation, Kim sees one of the testing-site signs.  The word Livermore appears before him, then explodes from the center outwards.  The 'r' shatters into nothingness and the two halves of the word fall apart, a testament to Kim's project.

 

 

 

 

W. S. Burroughs Blog

 

Palimpsest Voices

 

I found it interesting that, in Naked Lunch, Burroughs constructs scenes by having characters quote other characters. Occasionally this leads to a pile-up of quotations. Take, for instance, this passage (which I won’t add my own quotes to):

 

“ ‘ “I got the ingrowing toe nails, Pop. I’m in agony,’ ” he says.

“ ‘ “Well,” I says, “I gotta be careful. [ . . .” ’ ” ]

 

Here the narrative voice is quoting Arch (the County Clerk) who is quoting Doc Parker who is quoting both an addict and then himself. The intriguing effect of this is the near complete obfuscation of the original speaker (Arch), especially in the second line, when the seemingly first person “I says” is actually still Doc Parker ⎯ confusing! Looked at from the context of The Ticket that Exploded, though, which deals more with the idea of the word virus, this passage takes on the resonances of a spreading virus, for the language perpetuates itself freed from the original speaker and becomes a palimpsest of voices collapsed together.

 

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To quote one of those difficult French lit-critics/philosophes of whom I know shockingly little besides this quote . . .

 

“To write is to arrange language under fascination and, through language, in language, remain in contact with the absolute milieu, where the thing becomes an image again, where the image, which had been allusion to a figure, becomes illusion to what is without figure, and having been a form sketched on absence, becomes the unformed presence of that absence, the opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.” --- Maurice Blanchot “The Essential Solitude”

 

In my reading and in our class discussions, which have touched upon such a wide variety of topics, the two subjects that have most infected my thoughts concern Burroughs’ portrayal of absences, voids, nothingness, etc.* and his meditations on language, words and writing. As my contribution to the zine, I would like to trace these two concerns throughout his writings (primarily Naked Lunch for now) and see how they connect.

 

For instance, in “the market” section of Naked Lunch the Saint character, in his diatribe about religious figures, describes “some old white-haired fuck” who possesses a “Word Hoard” (lifting the phrase from Beowulf, I think) that only he can unlock. The Saint then goes on to say: “So I got an exclusive why don’t I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct . . . It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence . . . (97). In addition to echoing (and prefiguring) Derrida’s différance, this section seems to make the claim that language because of its slippery, shifting meaning (defined as it is by absence) can lead to enlightenment. I find this particularly interesting since some meditation uses words stripped of their meaning to induce enlightened awareness. Additionally, enlightenment in some Buddhist traditions (of which I also know shockingly little) is tied to an imagery and a conceptualization of absence. Might it be also in Burroughs?

 

While some of what I write might resemble a typical essay, I also want to “cut-up” and reassemble (more consciously selective than Burroughs’ original method) parts of Naked Lunch to try and draw out these connections more ⎯ (and then possibly re-interpret those cut-ups as well?).

 

Since this project is somewhat vague now, and (as always) the potential for its failure is considerable, I would also like to contribute a “cut-up”/re-contextualized/collaged image or two of Burroughs to the zine (made using photoshop) --- fitting I think, since he once said “If I cut you up in a certain I cut up the universe.”

 

Any comments / critiques / thoughts will be appreciated, thanks. --DH

 

 

• Hence, I liked the minstrel’s post about Zero: “The concept of zero, of nothingness is perhaps the most sublime feeling of all. Impossible to describe, impossible to even comprehend (infinite is much easier to as least symbolically represent in a visual sense), both terrifying and somehow appealing. For if there can be nothing, then does that not make the somethings, the subjective infinities, all that more precious and beautiful?” --- ( ala Gravity’s Rainbow perhaps? ) --- I think in Burroughs’ writing the idea of absence, of nothingness, (of a zero) resonates with some such sublime feelings, and can be tied to a sense of either possible enlightenment or possible oblivion. I’ll explore that more in the zine project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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WORD AUTHORITY FORMS AND FAILS THE HABIT

 

Similar to many others who have written accounts of their drug experiences, Ludlow often uses religious terms to depict his Hasheesh-induced visions and experiences, be they heavenly or hellish in nature. In “The Hour and the Power of Darkness,” for instance, he writes of hearing “a chant of the most terrific blasphemy” and seeing “demons” with pitchforks. No doubt, Ludlow’s immersion in a culture infused with the symbols and language of religion leads his mind to create such a fantasy. However, even Hasheesh-inspired feelings that do not correspond directly to what would seem to be religious imagery are described with religious terminology ⎯ hence, in “Under the Shadow of Esculapius” Ludlow writes: “A godlike sublimity swallowed up my soul. I was overwhelmed in a fathomless barathrum of time, but I leaned on God, and was immortal through all changes.”

 

It seems to me that this is a prime example of Word Authority (at least according to how I comprehended the phrase). In order for the intimacy of direct experience to be translated for the benefit of reader, a description of Ludlow’s experiments with Hasheesh, necessitates, to a certain extent, the use religious language, since the Hasheesh visions/experiences evoke feelings beyond the traditional realm of human experience and understanding. The language and rhetoric of religion, after all, is one of the only means available for attempting to describe what is felt in essence to be inexpressible. (According to Susan Sontag the language of pornography is the other one, if you were interested.) Our language, therefore, by creating habitual, even inescapable, patterns of description, dictates the terms of our experiences.

 

To be fair, Ludlow occasionally acknowledges the inability of his language to describe his Hasheesh experiences. In the same section of “The Hour and the Power of Darkness” quoted above, Ludlow writes of the blasphemous chant: “I still remember the meaning of the song, although there is no language yet coined which will convey it, and far be it from me even to suggest its nature.” By and large, though, the prevalent and somewhat necessary use of religious language to describe the sense of self-transcendence afforded by Hasheesh leads Ludlow to perpetuate modes of thinking which would seem antithetical to the true implications of Hasheesh use. For instance, in “The Night of Apotheosis” Ludlow writes: “Let us not assert that the half-careless and uninterested way in which we generally look on nature is the normal mode of the soul's power of vision. There is a fathomless meaning, an intensity of delight in all our surroundings, which our eyes must be unsealed to see. In the jubilance of hasheesh, we have only arrived by an improper pathway at the secret of that infinity of beauty which shall be beheld in heaven and earth when the veil of the corporeal drops off, and we know as we are known.” The final sentence, which regards the body as a burden that must be overcome in order to achieve spiritual apocalyptic insight, seems so much just a simple rehashing of how the body is viewed in Christianity. Far from perpetuating the troubling dissociation between body and spirit that is found in Christianity, it would seem that the implication of Hasheesh should assert the primacy of the body in the construction of spiritual experience, for it is the marvelous biological intricacies of the human mind (whether it is coupled with a drug or not) that allows the experience of what our Word Authority deems we describe as Spirituality. -- DH