Sexy Prescience - Fiasco Press: Journal of Swarm Scholarship

Fiasco Press www.fiascopress.org Journal of Swarm Scholarship

Fiasco Press: Journal of Swarm Scholarship

— - —Issue #1

Sexy Prescience

Rendering Realities by Nauman Humayun


Fiasco Press is a journal of swarm scholarship - the literary product of

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Having no barriers to entry, access, or success, Fiasco Press will

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Dedicated to Mom, Dad, and Popop.


Contents:

A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson - Interview by Jesse Hicks

On Vortex Particles - A Knot Theory by David Saint John

Celestial Events - Flash Fiction by Andrew Winegrad

Cracking the Oyster / Shaza - Swahili Poem by Ahmed Sheikh Nabahani translated by Richard Prins

Composing the Sacred - A Fiction of Philosophy by Alex Broudy

Reply - Poem by Zalie Troumpec

The Enzensberger-Baudrillard Mass Media Debate Reexamined: Temporal Models and theDialectic - Philosophical Critique by Jack Kredell

On Green - Poem by Sheila Squillante

Plato’s Dialogical Structure and Socrates as the Physician of the Soul - Philosophy of Medicine by Jafar Al-Mondhiry

An ensemble of Inter-Galactic Techno-Tribal Saltimbanques - Art Critique byNauman Humayun

The Soft-Boiled Egg - Short Story by Katrina Voss

Party - Flash Fiction by Peter Matyskiela

Shadows Out Of Time and Space: The European Avant-Garde and the Future of the Blues - Musical Critique by Shuja Haider

We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves Of Hiroshima - Philosophical War Critique by Devin William Daniels

The “Phenomenology” of Dissolution / Disillusionment - Poem by Shafni Awam

Painting with Illegible Title - Painting by William S. Burroughs


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A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson

Interview by Jesse Hicks

The Illuminatus! Trilogy seems to keep finding new generations of fans since its

publication. How would you describe it to someone who's yet to read it, and what do you

think explains its enduring appeal?

I like to call it guerilla ontology. If people look blank, I explain that it's a Zen riddle in the

form of a detective story. In other words, a mystery without a solution. What keeps it in print? I

imagine that every generation a few clear-thinking people discover that the governments that rule

us just do not make sense rationally. And then they hear about this weird book that knocks down

every attempt at a reasonable explanation of how this planet operates and proves 1001 ways that

only insanity does explain it. Incidentally, as if to prove this, sales have improved every year

since George Bush got appointed president. Sanity cannot fathom such a sinister joke, but

Illuminatus buffs can.

How does the world of Illuminatus! compare to the "real" world these days? Much of the

book satirized politics on The Planet of the Apes; lately you seem less oblique about the

state of American politics, calling Dubya "exactly the ideal president for this time in

history. Most of the public is made up of C-students who are incurious and uninformed.

What Bush says makes sense to them because they don't know any more about the world


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than he does." Do we live in a Wilsonian satire?

I'd like to think so. The only alternative would hold that we live in a Kafka allegory.

Since my "paranoia" contains more humor than his, I appeal to a less morbid audience.

Kafka's "There is hope, but not for us," definitely appeals to a darker sense of humor. How

do you maintain a sense of optimism?

Pessimism seems to me a luxury I can't afford. For instance, at age four, I became

crippled with polio for the first time, and got cured, or mostly cured, by the Kenny method.

Pessimism just would not have helped at any stage in my therapy. We don't walk on our legs but

on our will, as the Sufis say.

At 69, the damaged muscles quit on me and I got crippled a second time. Once again,

pessimism and whining would not have helped.

My second partial cure proceeded nicely for four years --until last month, when I

suddenly landed on the floor and stayed there conscious but unable to move a muscle, for 30

hours before my daughter found me and called an ambulance.

Pessimism has great value if you want the praise of New York intellectuals, but I prefer to

fight my battles rather than whine about them. I'll probably never get reviewed in the bon ton

literary journals, but I might get into the Guiness Book of World Records as the first man to learn

to walk four times.


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You mentioned the Kenny Method for polio treatment. How did your early encounter with

an "unorthodox" cure lead you to question "orthodoxy"?

Well, I grew up with hard evidence -- every step I took -- that the Kenny method worked,

while all the Experts continued to denounce her as a quack and a charlatan. That did not

encourage ardent faith in Experts....

And did that lead into Maybe Logic?

Partially, but it could have led to a single heresy -- the Kenny method -- in a brain

otherwise still confined to dogmatism.

I know many people like that-- they believe in one unorthodox idea, but remain stuck in

either/or logic. Maybe Logic came from reading some scientific radicals [John von Neumann,

Anatole Rapoport and Alfred Korzybski], plus some Buddhists.

That includes von Neumann's three-valued logic [true, false, maybe], Rappoport's four-

valued logic [true, false, indeterminate, meaningless], Korzybski's multi-valued logic [degrees of

probability] and also Mahayana Buddhist paradoxical logic [it "is" A; it "is" not A; it "is" both A

and not A; it "is" neither A nor not A]. But, as an extraordinarily stupid fellow, I can't use such

systems until I reduce them to terms a simple mind like mine can handle, so I just preach that

we'd all think and act more sanely if we had to use "maybe" a lot more often. Can you imagine a

world with Jerry Falwell hollering "Maybe Jesus 'was' the son of God and maybe he hates Gay

people as much as I do" -- or every tower in Islam resounding with "There 'is' no God except


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maybe Allah and maybe Mohammed is his prophet"?

How does Quantum Psychology offer a counter-viewpoint to that kind of anxious grasping

at what you've called "fictional certainties"?

Quantum Psyche offers a variety of linguistic reforms that condition the mind against

premature closure. Some of these techniques come from General Semantics, some from Nuero-

Linguistic Programming, and some from Buddhism. These techniques used consistently over a

period of fifty years have made me, I dare say, a lot less stupid and a lot less frightened than my

condition in the 1950s. Those not as dumb as me can learn even faster.

What do you think explains the current resurgence of "faith-based" worldviews?

The robber barons imported "cheap labor" from Europe in the late 19th Century. In other

words, they flooded us with an ocean of ignorant and superstitious people, who could not

understand research-based organizations but formed an ideal market for faith-based con artists.

Do you see any deeper explanation behind it, other than faith-based worldviews being the

dominant mode of thinking for those currently in power?

The acceleration factor in information systems [documented by Korzybski and Shannon]

means that social changes happen faster and faster every generation. People not trained in Maybe

Logic feel more and more confused, which leads to anxiety, which means they'll swallow any


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line of hogwash if it promises some certitude in a world they can't understand.

Does it seem to you that other countries have more fully embraced ideas present in

Quantum Psychology than has America?

I would not claim that, but the civilized world in general has shown much less hostility to

research-based groups and has no Bush-style revival of faith-based groups.

How does the Guns and Dope Party fit in to American politics?

Our platform has 3 major planks:

Free access to guns for those who want them; no guns forced on those who don't

want them [Quakers,Amish, pacifists etc.]

Free access to drugs for those who want them; no drugs forced on those who don't

want them [Christian Scientists, homeopaths, Natural hygienists etc.]

Equal rights for ostriches.

For further details see http://www.gunsanddope.com/

What do you see for the future, in the short term? In the long term?

In the short term, more power by faith-based organizations. In the long term, the eventual

triumph of research-based organizations. Inquisitions, whether by popes or presidents, only slow

progress in limited areas. They never stop it. Stem-cell research, for instance, still moves along

rapidly, overseas in the civilized world.


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In Reality is What You Can Get Away With, you wrote, "The right wing will have nightmares

in the late '90s that will make the 62 Satanism panics of 1982-1993 seem sedate by

comparison." How much of the current political environment would you attribute to the

inevitable right-wing response to that nightmare, and how much to "Future Shock" in

general?

"Future shock" started with the first stone axe, but due to the acceleration factor, it

discombobulates more people every decade. When the civilized world, where research-based

organizations will soon start curing everything with stem cells, our faith-based organizations will

want the U.S. to declare war on damn near everybody.


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On Vortex Particles

David Saint John

"In short, we can reach the final unified theory -- which we symbolically place at the top of Motion Mountain --

only if we are not burdened with ideological or emotional baggage. The goal we have set requires extreme thinking,

i.e., thinking up to the limits. After all, unification is the precise description of all motion. Therefore, unification is a

riddle. The search is a pastime. Any riddle is best approached with the lightness that is intrinsic to playing. Life is

short: we should play whenever we can." -Christoph Schiller, Motion Mountain, Volume 6

The following text is an attempt to reconsider the Victorian-era vortex model of the atom in a

modern context, with an emphasis on the phenomenology of particles as experienced

experimentally. This involves a departure from certain currently accepted traditional constructs

of physics, but remains a synthesis of several ideas which have been floating around in some

form or another for many years. It should be considered a remix of what has already been

developed previously by various scientists and natural philosophers, with a view toward our

current state of scientific endeavours at the level of subatomic phenomena.

The initial stimulus for this work lies in the relative mystery of isotopic stability as a

function of protons and neurons, along with the haunting staircase structure of this stability -

often described over-simply as being due to ‘magic numbers’. Figure 1 illustrates this stability

http://books.google.com/books?id=UzkaSdlxTjMC&lpg=PA22&dq=The%20goal%20we%20have%20set%20requires%20extreme%20thinking%252C%20i.e.%252C%20thinking%20up%20to%20the%20limits.%20After%20all%252C%20%20unification%20is%20the%20precise%20description%20of%20all%20motion&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q=The%20goal%20we%20have%20set%20requires%20extreme%20thinking,%20i.e.,%20thinking%20up%20to%20the%20limits.%20After%20all,%20%20unification%20is%20the%20precise%20description%20of%20all%20motion&f=false


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staircase, wherein the shallow steps of the lighter nuclei eventually give way to a more regular

staircase (from Oxygen16 to Argon36), with a more complex set of stairs and stable isotope

‘islands’ up until one reaches the ‘island of stability’. The standard model is silent in regard to

this behavior of isotopic stability - having applicability to primarily sub-nuclear phenomena, it

gives little insight into the distinctions between protons and neutrons. But before treating this

isotope issue, we will first explore the idea of knots as particles, and see if we can work our way

back to isotopes.

One form of an isotope stability table showing the ‘staircase of stability’, from Wikipedia. Notice the step like patterns which stable isotopes trace out - perhaps suggesting an underlying mechanism for nuclear stability. A more


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useful chart for the isotopic explorer can be found here: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/pdf/chart.pdf

Before our attempt at re-contextualizing this vortex knot model (VKM), it is worth

tracing back its recent incarnations in brief. A thorough historical account has been made by

others, in particular by Helge Kraigh, and so the descriptions here should by no means be

considered authoritative. Most scholarly discussions of vortex atom models trace the idea to

William Thompson (Lord Kelvin), who developed his VKM after being inspired by the work of

Hermann von Helmholtz, who first developed the mathematics of vortex motion in an

incompressible fluid. Thompson found the model of “Lucretius’ atoms” - their individual atomic

properties being extant for their own sake without recourse to any mechanism - as ontologically

repulsive, while the idea of knotted vortex atoms satisfied his urge for some descriptive

mechanism which seemed powerfully evident to Kelvin when observing the interactions of

vortex rings moving through the air.

This idea of Kelvin’s, that atoms were composed of some sort of ethereal knots, had

many proponents in a time when the very existence of atoms was questioned by those with a

panache for the continuous and/or a distaste for the discrete. One of Kelvin’s contemporaries,

Peter Guthrie Tait, went on to classify knots of up to 9 crossings, developing what would come to

be known as the Prime Knots. Prime knots are analogous to prime numbers, in that they

represent irreducible topological structures while prime numbers are irreducible in terms of their

lack of divisors. As such, prime knots cannot be represented as a knot sum of other knots but are

fundamental to modern knot theory as prime numbers are in number theory.

http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/pdf/chart.pdf

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0498.2002.440102.x/abstract


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What really seems to have killed Kelvin’s vortex knot model of the atom was the

profound success of the periodic table, along with the total inability to massage any sort of 8-fold

periodicity from the prime knots. With the success of the periodic table, predicting elements

previously undiscovered and unexpected, the vortex knot model languished. Kelvin himself is

said to have discarded it late in his life, but one of his primary assumptions can now, through the

lens of a nuclear era, be considered to have new legs: Kelvin believed atoms to be fundamental -

as small a particle as one needed to consider. We now know this to be false; atomic systems

contain protons and neutrons in the nucleus, electrons occupying energetic states around these

nuclei and their neighbors with photons participating in the transitions between energy states (to

say nothing of the massive zoo of unstable particles discovered as the “Big Machines” of particle

accelerator technologies developed and evolved). If one suspects some value in Kelvin’s

intuitions and reapply them in light of this different understanding, one might find that the vortex

knot model might be applied to something more fundamental in physical space than the atom,

which now appears as a collective of sub-atomic particles, rather than a fundamental construct.

It is worth noting that this desire to connect knots to physical phenomena has not

abated with the passing of Kelvin’s work. Knots have been found useful in the context of light

(as in the work of Mark Dennis, at the University of Bristol), DNA and chemistry writ large

(http://www.math.vt.edu/people/linnell/4994/knot.pdf), magnetohydrodynamic plasmas, and __.

The series of books entitled “Knots and Everything”, currently at 45 volumes, regularly contains

works which relate knots to extant scientific phenomena, including volume one; “Knots and


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Physics”.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giant_smoke_ring.jpg

Here we should take a moment to rehearse Kelvin’s experience of observing smoke rings

travel and bounce off of each other in Tait’s lecture room, as this was part of the imaginative

channel through which this idea became embodied in his case*. In Kelvin’s mind, this

magnificent display is made of a collection of smoke particles and gaseous atomic species

exhibiting similar vortical forms as those that the atoms themselves might be dancing in - as

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giant_smoke_ring.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_ring


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above in the air, so below in the atoms. Kelvin begins his paper “On Vortex Atoms” in the

proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (available here):

“After noticing Helmholtz’s admirable discovery of the law of vortex motion in a perfect liquid—that is, in a fluid

perfectly destitute of viscosity (or fluid friction)—the author said that this discovery inevitably suggests the idea that

Helmholtz’s rings are the only true atoms. For the only pretext seeming to justify the monstrous assumption of

infinitely strong and infinitely rigid pieces of matter, the existence of which is asserted as a probable hypothesis by

some of the greatest modern chemists in their rashly-worded introductory statements, is that urged by Lucretius and

adopted by Newton—that it seems necessary to account for the unalterable distinguishing qualities of different kinds

of matter. But Helmholtz has provided an absolutely unalterable quality in the motion of any portion of a perfect

liquid in which the peculiar motion which he calls “Wirbelbewegung” has been once created. Thus any portion of a

perfect liquid which has “Wirbelbewegung” has one recommendation of Lucretius’s atoms—infinitely perennial

specific quality. To generate or to destroy “Wirbelbewegung” in a perfect fluid can only be an act of creative power.

Lucretius’s atom does not explain any of the properties of matter without attributing them to the atom itself.”

The air was an imperfect fluid (having viscosity and fluid friction) while the ether was the

prefect fluid lying underneath, alongside (or as) the electromagnetic fields themselves. These

thoughts require subtle modification in light of our current knowledge. Atoms are no longer the

simplest stable observable particles, that position being taken by photons, electrons, protons,

neutrons, and neutrinos in addition to many inferred particles (quarks, gluons, etc.) In addition

to new distinctions about particle character, there must be some alterations to the ‘ether’ in which

Kelvin placed his knots.

When considering what a vacuum really represents, this historically often involves a

http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_vortex_atoms.html


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specialized chamber along with various types of apparatus which are employed to remove

atmospheric atoms and molecules from the interior of the vacuum chamber. While there are

inevitably some species remaining in an evacuated chamber, what is obtained through these

pumping processes is a rough approximation of empty space. The ability of photons to travel

through vacuum led some to believe (especially when thinking of light as a wave) that some sort

of elastic medium was required for these light waves to propagate. The name commonly

ascribed to this medium is ‘ether’ and while this term as fallen out of favor (see Michelson and

Morley), the original descriptive paradigm of the ether has been maintained in a sense through

the concept of the electromagnetic field, which is considered to pass through all space while

bearing some responsibility for photon propagation in vacuum. It is within this context of

electromagnetic ether in which we place ourselves, for the time being.

The idea of knots in the electromagnetic ether was appealing enough to drive many to

find a way to merge these ideas with scientific consensus, especially in the work of Tait, who

classified prime knots for the sake of the periodic table. If one were to proceed like Tait, and

attempt to find a link between this vortex knot model and real physical science, one must

determine then at which level of particle identity the VKM should be applied. For reasons that

should become evident later, it seems prudent to stick to observable particles rather than inferred

ones.

An issue arises when one considers the details of current knot theory with an eye

toward physical application. Most study of knot topology can be done, or at any rate has been


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done, often by using simple string or yarn. This allows one to create simple and useful models

while keeping research overhead low. While most of these rope-knots share some characteristics

with our electromagnetic vortex knots, research into knots in the context of plasma physics

seems to suggest that certain types of helicity are not conserved under a classic knot theory

operation known as the first Reidemeister move. When modified slightly, the modified

Reidemeister I captures an intricacy previously missing from topological knot theory, suggesting

a minor revision to what might constitute an electromagnetic prime knot. There is some

literature to support this line of reasoning (see Yongnian, H. & Weidong, S. Topological

structures of vortex and helicity analysis. Acta Mechanica Sinica 14, 208-214(1998)., and

Bouzarth, E.L. & Pfister, H. Helicity conservation under Reidemeister moves. Am. J. Phys. 74,

141-144(2006). ) Currently, a standard table of prime knots begins with the following:

These symbols illustrate the Unknot, Trefoil knot, and Figure 8 knot, with 0, 3 and 4

crossings respectively - no 1 or 2 crossing knots exist in this scheme. With a modified take on

Reidemeister I, an additional construct appears, with characteristics that suggest it be described

as a sort of ‘mobius knot’, with only one crossing.

We will return to this mobius knot and the other prime knot constructs after

considering the advances in knowledge which precipitated abandonment of vortex knot theories

in the 1900s. The state of scientific understanding at that time was complicated by re-

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ReidemeisterMoves.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/y221385255480874/






http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v74/i2/p141_s1?isAuthorized=no







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representation of certain particles in different contexts. Gamma rays, X-rays and other photons

were classified differently, probably due to the differences in their sources and interactions with

matter. By the late 1940s, the cast of characters on the atomic stage had shifted from nuclear

radiation (alpha, beta, gamma), X-rays, atomic elements and wave-like light into photons,

electrons, protons, neutrons and neutrinos, along with an assortment of other unstable particles.

At that point, the ‘actors’ were limited by the energies obtainable by the particle accelerators in

use, and these simplified characters remain fundamental to nuclei composition to this day.**

A model having protons and neutrons as billiard balls in an nucleic bag, surrounded by

the electron orbitals, is an understanding of the atom that has been dynamic enough to afford

ongoing advances in technological development over the last 70 years - be it nuclear, molecular,

biological or otherwise. A similar “Ball in the bag” paradigm was ultimately applied to the inner

structure of the protons and neutrons as well as the classification of the less stable zoo particles.

The standard model may be crudely approximated by this ‘balls in a bag’ description, where

quarks are the ‘balls’ of various flavour, held in a metaphorical bag by the gluons (Perhaps even

a gluonic bag?). It is useful to consider the experimental phenomenology that helped legitimize

this model. In collision experiments wherein protons were smashed together, an inner structure

began to become apparent. Prior to the use of ‘quark’, the word ‘parton’ was proposed to

describe these inner structures seemingly within protons and other particle species. The

excruciating paradox was that if enough energy was applied to extract a parton/quark, new

particles were generated in the process, without observation of any internal structure in isolation.

Thus the often repeated assertion that no quark has been observed in isolation, but that they


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nonetheless constitute an internal mechanism which distinguishes protons, neutrons, and other

(non-leptonic) zoo particles.

If one considers all particle collision experiments, there is an element of projection to

them, whereby a three dimensional construct is reduced to a two dimensional one. While prior

collision experiments often focus on small numbers of participants, this phenomena is observed

with an ensemble of particle collisions in transmission electron microscopy (TEM), whereby

accelerated electrons interact with a thin sample to produce an image. When tomographic

techniques are not applied, analysis of TEM images requires some care due to this very problem

of projection - the 3D sample is often only captured through a 2D image. A similar problem

likely applies when colliding protons and nuclei, while the collisions are often concieved of as

between seemingly point like particles, their inner structure must have some 3D character to it

which is sampled in a particular way through the relative orientation of the participants of the

collision interaction.

The study of knots has also dealt with the ‘projection issue’, as 3D loops and knots of

string are often drawn or laid out such that special attention is given to the places where two

strands cross. Instead of simply making an ‘X’, which makes the intended structure ambiguious,

a natural convention has been established, perhaps by cavemen or doodling students, wherein a

certain kind of ternary logic manifests:


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These symbols, marked + and -, are often described as ‘crossings’ and illustrate some

of the most simple features of any knot. Any illustration of a knot maintains its information about

the knot through the use of these crossings. Prime knots, like the few shown above, are often

ordered or classified in terms of the fewest crossings required to create a projection of some knot

which maintains its basic topological information. In some very real sense, crossings and quarks

are very analogous in behavior. As quarks cannot be removed without ‘breaking’ the particle and

spawning new ones using available energy, a crossing cannot be removed from a prime knot

without cutting the thread and destroying the knot construct. All prime knots are in some sense,

Gordian.

As quarks are to ‘non-leptonic’ particles, so are crossings to knots in a sense (as we

return to the goal of attempting to relate the two as Kelvin might). If one assumes that the mass

of a particle is somehow related to its ‘tangled-ness’, or the number of crossings, we still seek to

account for particle charge. To this end, knots have properties other than their crossing number,


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particularly their writhe. Some knots, like the unknot and figure 8 knot, have no writhe. Other

knots, like the trefoil knot, have some writhe which has an associated sign. If one is willing to

associate charge with writhe, then we obtain a mechanism for positive, negative and neutral

charges associated with knot constructs, along with a viable route toward a description of

antimatter. Here is a loose outline of how one might attempt this series of analogies:

Photons ~ Unknots/loops. Chargeless / Writhe-less. No mass / no self crossings.

Polarization already seems to exhibit behavior which could be mapped from electromagnetic

ripples persisting on a ring-like topology.

Electrons ~ Mobius knots. Charged / writhe dependant on sign. Gives some insight

into the possibility of electron spin. This sort of idea was proposed before, see "Is the Electron a

photon with toroidal topology?" by J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark (1997) Annals of the

http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf

http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf


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Louis de Broglie Foundation 22 (2) 133.

Protons ~ Trefoil knots. With three crossings (3 quarks), greater mass than electrons,

and charge / writhe, the quark/crossing interrelationship seems most clear in this example, when

considering the similarity of the phenomenology of each.

Neutrons ~ Figure 8 knots. Without charge/writhe, but with more mass/crossings than

a proton/trefoil, these constructs are their own mirror image, suggesting that it does not have an

anti-particle (with apologies to Bruce Cork). As neutrons are unstable outside of the nucleus,

one would expect that more complex knots would also be of limited stability in comparison to

electrons and protons.

Neutrinos* ~ linked photons might be an explanation for neutrino phenomena, being

chargeless and of very low, but not quite zero, mass. There is much variety in linked loop

configurations, which may be ascribed to different types of neutrinos - should they be

distinguished conclusively from one another.

Consider the mechanism of beta decay, in which a neutron decays into a proton,

electron and (anti-?)neutrino. Or: n → p + e + ν Visualized through vortex knots, the process

might be conceived as:


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All of this is oversimplified - it gives little consideration to the underlying

electromagnetic vibrations which would constitute the strings or filaments of the vortex knots

described above. Additionally this is not a topologically sound proof, as any knot theorist might

attest. With a similar disregard for rigor, consider the annihilation of an electron and positron

pair:

In this case, the mirror particles ‘match’ each other and have some predilection for ‘unknotting’ each

other, producing photons/unknots in the process.

If, despite the absence of theoretical calculations, the reader maintains some interest or

willing suspension of disbelief, the remainder of this work will detail some of the inconsistencies

and heresy associated with fusing this reasoning to the current state of the Standard Model. It

must be considered tentative speculation at best. If one begins to consider this electromagnetic

vortex knot model as having potential merit, it immediately wreaks taxonomic havoc on the

familial designations applied by the standard model, in addition to the obviously radical

reinterpretation of quarks. While quarks are a convenient accounting system (made even more

flexible through the use of anti-quarks) they are re-envisioned through a knot model as a

misinterpretation of the admittedly murky and complex experimental data about internal particle

structure that was expanded as needed to accommodate the increasingly energetic zoo particles

created throughout the evolution and enhancement of accelerators/ colliders /high energy physics

technology. This model served its purpose in giving a framework to the experimentalists doing

the observations.


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The lepton-hadron family structure is seen to be somewhat unnecessary (as would

become the distinction between mesons and baryons). All known particle phenomena could

conceivably be unified under a single conceptual form. The characterization of particles as being

‘bosons’ or ‘fermions’ can be interpreted as a misunderstanding about what it means to exhibit

certain types of statistical behavior in different contexts. Bosons exhibit ‘bosicity’, a certain type

of statistical behavior, in that they are best described by Bose-Einstein statistics. This retains the

utility of the distinction without allocating unnecessary reverence toward their statistical

behavior, and could provide a re-interpretation of superconductivty in the BCS model. If you’re

not enslaved to the idea of fermions and bosons, you may interpret what invokes ‘fermicity’ or

‘bosicity’ in a particle as a context-dependant process, rather than an inherent property of the

particle.

Another heretical development from this thought-experiment deals with reformation of

what makes up the strong and weak forces. For example, if your fundamental particles (the term

fundamental being somewhat disputed) are not conceived as balls but as electromagnetic knots, it

may be possible that their interaction and decay can be mediated without recourse to additional

forces. With regard to the nuclear force, these knot constructs give some alternative possibilities

(One will be proposed here, though others can be imagined).

If one assumes that the proton and neutron are identified with the previously described

knots, a certain kind of geometry develops for the nuclear structure which would otherwise have

no apparent source: Imagine that these two knots (trefoil, figure 8) can be approximated by a


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geometric shape derived from the symmetry of their respective knot (triangle, tetrahedron),

whose surfaces are decorated to exhibit the respective charge of the particle. For protons, each

face (top and bottom) would be of +1/2 charge, with the entire particle charge ‘integrating’ to +1.

For neutrons, the four faces of the tetrahedra would be mixed, with 2 faces appearing as +1/2

and two faces appearing as -1/2, with the entire particle charge ‘integrating’ to a net charge of 0.

If one uses tetrahedral dice (D4) to construct these nuclear models, accounting for the positive

and negative faces according to the proscribed numbers of protons and neutrons which yield

stable isotopes, this seems to yield a viable system for describing nuclear structures.

Within this model of nuclear attachment, localized charge approximations give a

mechanism for nuclear bonding, with the standard rule of charge: opposites attract, like charges

repel. Two protons cannot coexist in a nucleus as a lone pair, as there are no negative faces for

their positive faces to attach to. Deuterium would be considered stable, as its single proton could

attach to either of the two negative faces of its neutron. Similarly with Helium 3 - though no

more protons can be added from that point, without the addition of more neutrons. To this point,

no more rules are required, but the instability of Tritium (Hydrogen 3) requires some thought but

can be rationalized in this way: if a neutron is unstable in free space, and even in certain nuclear

settings, there must be something about its natural configuration which leads to instability. In

terms of this toy model, the rule might be described as the exhibition of two negative faces by a

single neutron - something which is guaranteed with a lone neutron, or in neutron-rich isotopes.

Within this model, it is easy to imagine two configurations of tritium in which this neutron

condition is either satisfied or not satisfied, with relative stability or instability as a function of


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the given configuration. Sandwiching the proton between the two tetrahedral neutrons would

(n~p~n) would be stable as each neutron exhibits only one negative face, while a configuration

in which the proton ‘decorates’ one of the two neutrons would have stability dependent on which

neutron was being decorated. In this scheme, an asymmetry is introduced by connecting two

neutrons to each other directly - one must donate a + face, one must donate a - face. The result is

that one neutron keeps both of it’s negative faces, while the other only has one. As the proton in

the tritium nucleus must ‘attach’ to one of the exposed negative faces, the neutron stability

condition will either be met (p~n+~n-, where the sign of the neutron denotes the sign of the face

contributed in their ‘bond’), or one neutron will be in a condition where two negative faces are

exposed, similar to that of a neutron in free space (p~n-~n+). This neutron instability (beta

decay) rule helps set the upper limit on the number of neutrons which can be added to a nucleus

before decay becomes possible, and then increasingly probable. One might imagine that

neutrons on the surface of a nucleus have some flexibility in terms of their position, provided

that there is a nearby face of appropriate sign for them to switch to, and that this neutron

migration on the surface has something to do with statistical probability of decay.

To continue onward with this, Helium 4 would exhibit only one negative face in any

configuration, and would be considered to be particularly stable, though perhaps prone to being

ejected from heavier isotopes (alpha decay). When considering this system, both Deuterium and

Helium 4 are useful constructs, as they each are the simplest configurations which exhibit only

one negative face. This becomes useful when considering that the process of connection of

neutrons and the addition of protons has a tendency to ‘eat up’ the negative faces exhibited by the


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nucleus. To move from one isotopic structure to another, having these ‘base units’ (along with

protons and neutrons) is of great use, in that they can be attached to light isotopes to make

heavier isotopes without breaking any previously defined rules provided that a simple connection

is made in which only one face of the base unit (p,n,D,He4) is in contact with the lighter isotope

to construct the heavier isotope.

This model has been applied with some rigor up to isotopes of Argon and seems to

hold with some notable exceptions. Helium 3, with no negative faces remaining exposed, seems

to be an exception rather than a rule, with other isotopes seeming to prefer to keep at least one

negative face exposed on their surfaces. It is expected that certain local arrangements may allow

more than one negative face to be shown, provided that no single neutron exhibits both of them

at the same time (this was touched on with Tritium, and also seems to apply to Lithium 7). If one

models Beryllium 8, it becomes clear why this might prefer fissure into two Helium 4 nuclei

while Lithium 7 and Beryllium 9 do not. Using home-made dice models, gedanken experiments

have yielded fruitful descriptions of the simpler isotopes, and these efforts imply that a full

attempt at applying this model to the entire isotope map might best be done with the assistance of

computers. Assistance from interested parties is welcomed, as the idea is easier to form than to

test rigorously.

Leaving this hypothetical nuclear model (derived from a hypothetical vortex knot

model) aside, it is worth remembering that some similar ideas have been floating around online

which propose to merge these string/knot/vortex concepts in various ways. Several theories have


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been proposed which seem to weave the knot metaphor into a conceptualization of fundamental

particles through some mechanism or another. Christoph Schiller has developed his strand

model, which describes particles as crossings or tangles of cosmic strands. This shares some

similarity with the ideas above in that they describe perceived particles as string-like interactions,

much as quarks are re-interpreted above as a projection-like, string-crossing phenomenon (see

Motion Mountain). Clifford Ellgen is possessed by a very similar sort of thoughts, as is

everyone else listed on M. Erk Durgan’s page (http://www.unitytheory.info/

similar_theories.html) Mr. Durgan himself having a related thread of thought. (sorry)

These models tend to build on the standard model as practiced currently, without much

development regarding reinterpretations of what quarks are in light of a new knot model. But a

certain amount of scepticism and critique has been evoked over the years, often simply by

examining the drastically evolving states of the standard model over the course of its

development. Three quarks became four, then five, then six. The number of quarks seems to

trend with our accelerator and detectector capability, in as much as they describe anything about

the universe (or so one might argue). There is a physics poem, rare among journal submissions,

which is tacked onto the end of the paper by H. J. Simon, D. E. Mitchell, and J. G. Watson,

“Surface plasmons in silver films---a novel undergraduate experiment,” (Am. J. Phys. 43,

630-636 (1975) [doi:10.1119/1.9764)]. This poem reads:

J or psi(A physicist’s four-footed sonnet)

Where is the thing beneath the thing?


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When can we say we have found it all?Is there an end or just a stringThat dangles down like an endless fall?

Molecules, yes, and atoms, to,Electrons we know, and nuclei;Neutrons, protons, the particle zoo,And now enter now the J or psi.

Can we not try to knot the same string,To start from a bottom and see what grows?Plant us a seed and see what we getWhen unity doubles and does its thingAnd triples, quadrubles, quintuples. Who knowsWhat patterns will show? What world is there yet?

- Roger E. Clapp

The J/Psi particle was the impetus for acceptance of the addition of a fourth quark to

the standard model to account for another particle, and apparently also the impetus for Roger E.

Clapp’s poem*** above. Consider the degree of technical and scientific capability before quarks

were king: the development of molecular analysis and synthesis (organic and inorganic), isotope

separation, and beam handling (electrons, ions or otherwise) did not require quark models nor,

for that matter, do any of our current electronic or photonic technologies. In some sense, the

utility of the standard model and the quark metaphor has been limited to projecting descriptions

onto the smallest known constructs with no real impact in terms of atomic applications and no

clear macroscopic comparison. Perhaps this is the true dread secret of the high energy physicist.

But all hope is not lost, beam-line workers! This re-envisioning of Kelvin’s Vortex

knot model, if taken seriously, could provide a powerfully simple re-interpretation of the

Standard Model of fundamental particles. As no mathematics has been employed to give rigor,


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there is plenty of room for additional thought here, with a possibility that the desired equations

may already be known through prior mathematical labors. In an ideal future, this might simplify

fundamental physics to a level accessible to savvy school children, as nuclear structures and

elementary spectroscopy have been to be for some time. The nuclear structure model proposed

here requires more development, but might provide a similar level of educational accessibility.

Any serious effort to develop such a model would surely motivate dozens of graduate theses -

even if it was eventually considered no more useful than string theory and cast aside as fruitless.

With this in mind, the elaboration of mathematical models for the vortex knot idea and

subsequent invocations of heresy toward the standard model are left as an exercise for the reader.

The nature of infinity is this : That every thing has its Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro' Eternity

Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding, like a sun,

Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth, Or like a human form, a friend with whom he liv'd benevolent. As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing Its vortex: and the north & south, with all their starry host: Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding

His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square. Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the moony shade. Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and the earth

A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity.

Excerpted from ‘Milton’ by William Blake


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Footnotes:

*Vortex rings are exploited currently in certain toys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Vortex_ring_toys), and used occasionally by dolphins in a similarly playful fashion (http://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_ring).

**We must also eventually consider the nature of kaons, J/Psi particles, and other

particle characters with less prominent roles than the more readily observed photons, electrons,

protons, neutrons, and neutrinos.

*** Clapp seems particularly sceptical of the quark idea, as one can read in his

“Nonlocal Structures: Bilocal Photon” paper, though his own explanation for particle behavior is

fairly dissimilar to that of the knot/string/strand/tangle models described/referenced here.

http://www.springerlink.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/content/p8424158526qu0w5/


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Celestial Events

By Andrew Winegrad

Nobody plays the news anymore, but we all heard one way or another. InSystem Media reported

that the explosion would be "vaguely" visible, its proximity to the Sun hampering the vision of

those within sighting distance. Most likely just a slight change in spacial brightness to the naked

eye, occurring for only a few hours beginning at 9:45am Agreed Solar Time. I borrowed a pair of

UltraV specs from Nick next door anyway. He said he'd be using them himself if he hadn't

burned his retinas examining solar flares for longer than recommended. It's too bad for him.

I've never been to Earth. Neither has anybody I know. I've seen pictures of course, from

back when it was still inhabitable, but it's hard to relate those to the gray dot that passes by the

window every couple of days. They say some people still live down there, in small national

clusters outside of government sphere of influence, or interest. Most are pretty hostile. Several

missionaries were killed in the last attempt to make contact before they were all recalled. They

called the situation "hopeless." The Earthlings are "savages," hell-bent on their archaic

livelihoods of agriculture and husbandry. I get a little queasy myself thinking about it, food

straight from the ground, from live animals. Difficult to imagine.


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It does seem a little cruel, going about it like this. I mean they are still people, aren't they?

They live there, not like you or me, but they do live, somehow. But maybe that's just some kind

of genetic nostalgia. Just because our species originated there doesn't make it our home. And the

shipping routes between Venus and the outer colonies have to be maintained with efficiency, or

else the entire economy will falter, both systemically and intersystemically. Unemployment on

Triton is almost 8%, and it's even worse on the deeper moons. It took authorities over 72 hours to

quell the Martian Pole riots, and there's no guarantee there won't be more upheaval if we don't

regain a surplus of Venusian sulfur and bolster their refinery markets.

I'd feel better if there were a way to adjust the orbit or renavigate the lanes around it, but

what do I know about physics? They say there's no way to reach the necessary efficiency with a

planet disrupting the cycles every few weeks, and the sheer number of warheads necessary to

alter its orbit would evaporate whatever water remains on the surface anyway, with no guarantee

of success. Still, I don't know...

They say debris is probably going to interrupt some communications between satellite

communities for the next couple of months, but the actual interference should be minimal.

Asteroid patrols are going to be doubled, even tripled in some of the closer sectors, and that's

good for jobs, too, at least temporarily. And the government has ordered all magnetic shields at

full for the next month. At least we don't have to worry about the old moon. I've heard that pieces

of it still turn up in the outlying colonies, but I doubt anyone ever bothers to prove that it's the

real thing. What for? Collectors, maybe. I wonder what a piece of Earth will be worth once the


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initial wave is over.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be there when it happens. To stand on the surface

of an exploding planet, feeling the ground give way and then push up and out with all of the heat

and light. It couldn't last more than half of a second, but damn. That would be something. But I

can't say I'm sorry to be several million miles away.

It's almost a little funny. No, funny's not the word. Ironic, I guess. All of the known life in this

system, and every other colonized system for that matter. It all started there. On that gray dot.

And then blink. It's nothing. Even with Nick's specs it wasn't much more than a pin prick, like a

tiny spot of blood welling up, wiped away and then clotted, gone. Nothing spectacular.


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Cracking the Oyster

Translated by Richard Prins

Deep sea divers, from waves and surfwho plummet through the undertow

stroking bellydown, swelling your joints,I’ll sell you my silence. What will my netting get?

I know you swimming sages, you can’t resist my riddle,unstringing every hint, one by one like beads.Every iron-beater must get himself a hammer.

I’ve tangled it up in my hand. Maybe you experts

can open it up, or enlighten me:The sky has a cloud (may its rain explore the world)windflown down the coast and dripping wet pebbles

that plunge so deep, rippling apart the surface

to penetrate the ocean and its yawning foldslike threading the eye of a needle, a single silky stringthrough the lip of the oyster shell, shutting in the pearl.

So dear, this gem, unrivalled yet engulfed.

The oyster shell will hang from a tree on the bottom of the oceanwhich receives no light in its long submergence

with branches invisible to the world, no matter how they multiply.But this is no miracle tree. It can take root in any earth.

Once the pearl is finally perfectedits encasement cracks apart. It crawls from its nest

poured through a chute of waves until mooring on some beachdragging behind seaweeds, a glistered tail of glory.

Luminescent sunlight! Everywhere glows!Anyone who passes, they must be transfixed


37

and whoever gets it, let them seal it in a chest.For many men, this is their silver, their gold.

So back to you geniuses. I am releasinga cluster of kites into the sky.

Have a shot now at their tangles.I’ll weigh them on a scale. The reward is quite dear.

I’m returning to my station and dropping my anchors,one off the stern and one off the prow.

Your captain has been Nabahani, who’s known the seaand fears no wave, nor any of its baleful associates.

Shaza

Ahmed Sheikh Nabahani

Wazami wa uziwani, wa mawimbi na miuyaMuzamao zizimbwini, mahodari wa koweya

Kwa kuwama na kwa t’ani, kubenuwa zenu ziyaNauza changu kimiya, kichatiya chashikani

Nayuwa siwatanizi, hamugagwi yaweleyaYafumbuweni wayuzi, mutongowe moyamoya

Kula aliye mfuzi, na nyundo huitumiyaKibafute natatiya, tatuwani watatuzi

Welevu kitatuweni, munambiye nieleweKuna kiwingu yangani, mvua itandaziwe

P’epo husukuma pwani, nyunyu ni kama zijiweKwa kasi zitandushiwe, na kushukiya maini

Hupenya ndani kwa ndani, ya uk’eto wa bahariKama uzi sindanoni, upote pota hariri

Yakashukiya shazani, na kufuma lulu duriHapitwi na johari, nda k’uu mno thamani

Shaza lengetwe mtini, zizimbwini mwa nyongozaHaupo kitalaleni, haupati muwangaza


38

T’andu hazionekani, yapokuwa zatepuzaSi miti ya miujiza, yenezee duniyani

Lulu ikikamilika, yuu la mti shazaniDondole huk’ek’etuka, ikatoka kiotoniWimbini huisumbika, ikegesha ufuoni

Yafumapo mkwambani, kitoche humemetuka

Mianaza na miandi, eneo hung’eng’ezukaHuvuta kila mwenendi, kijopo hukusanyika

Aipatao ni kandi, kashani akiiwekaWengi wametajirika, kwa ng’andu na tu chandi

T’at’azi zingatatiya, mafundi zitatuweniRajai naregezeya, kishada changu bwagani

Nitawapa mwingi mwiya, fundo hili funguwaniNiwapimiye kwa mani, tuzo t’unu na hidaya

Narejea kituoni, nanga zangu nazitiyaMoya t’ezi na omoni, sambo ipate tuliyaNahudha ni Nabahani, bahari alozoweya

Hachi shuu na miuya, wala wimbi uziwani


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Quotidiana Is My Homestead


40

A Fiction of Philosophy by Alex Broudy

I.

“Yesterday I made Aliyah, today will bring me home.”

-Aldo

It wasn’t until fortune struck chance that glee could have ever renewed my soul within me.

Nesting within what I thought I was without, my Land of Milk and Honey nourished Her gentry

on the spirit of needlessness. And from this brewed a magnificence I could not have seen.

As brilliance of the self radiates unto others dissolutely, one’s selfhood is tarnished as

jealousy sets in on the behalf of the admirer - its affect concealed beneath an exterior image.

And so, I was uniquely envious of those religious ones I also hated.


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II.

“The present is big with the future.”

- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Yesterday I embarked on a backwards journey. In search of my spiritual innards I moved

in palintropes, rolling back fixed philosophies one by one .1 See gloss (below) now!

Moved to feel I tried to explain what was beyond meaning, “This backwards journey

seems to walk the same walk that elliptical thinking does.” Afterthought snapped, “Are you off

your rocker, or has the poet got your tongue?” I paused, “No, lather up that idea some more …

‘If ellipses were to walk, how might their innards travel?’” This was the pulp of a new frontier.

Gloss

1. Imagine something hypothetical: If mind and body were physically separated such that each

was contained in its own glass jar, how would shattering one jar affect the other? Now: shake your head so

your brain rattles. Really startle yourself.

Done? Good, so what was it you were thinking immediately after your brain settled? Try

to elucidate this thought by re-reading and repeating the paragraph’s instructions.

Whatever you conclude is arbitrary. The significant thing is that you went back

to the beginning and began again. This is a semblance of palintropic thinking, an

especially deconstructive method for stepping back, remarking and remixing into the

future. You may now resume your journey.


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III.

“And, no matter how fleeting the imagery, I remain steadfast that last night I glimpsed beyond, I

saw the unseeable.”

-Noam

I spent lifetimes in meditation untangling that knotted mix, my selfdom. Seldom did I

not feel. Experience found me, urging a new vocabulary to surface along with a new context for

life’s cynical wonder. Hate is a word I have since dispelled from my vocabulary.


43

IV. “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

-Jorge Luìs Borges

Later I pondered something remarkable about elliptical thoughts walking, “This remix is

an anecdote for my religious mix-up.” Unsure of my own construction, I decided to dive its

strange depths.

My primary attempts to reach into hindsight appeared defunct. Enshrouded by thick

murk, I could only envisage hindsight’s exterior shell. My worn recollective memory made it

appear as if everything was wrapped in some self-obfuscating blanket.2

Little by little I began to taste the inner-fruit of reflection. It was succulent, savory. And

while I could never fully see inside my wobbly walking thoughts, I could imagine. Wonder

displaced confusion, passion grew from nothing – I was reflecting my way towards the answer.

Gloss

2. What was your first recollective memory - a memory so indelible that you can manifestly feel,

taste, smell, hear, see right now? Try to transport your self to this scene, grip it and hold on.

When I did this I saw my 1st-person self (from the 3rd-person perspective) acting goofy.

When I (1st person) imagined myself acting this way, I laughed. Now I can recollect laughing

about being goofy from either perspective. The process is wonderfully elliptical, quickening at

times while in slow motion for others. Can you imagine peeling back each layer of your

recollective memory in order to retrieve a transitory thought?


44

V.

“Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands,

lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his

own soul, explained.”

-Saul Bellow

I, man, was trying to explain the soul away. What’s worse, I did it as a justified raison

d'être. How could I wade in daftness at such costs?

For an unknown period there had been a bystander gazing on this, a personal conflict.

All at once her presence belittled and aggrandized my sense of self. More than anything it

perplexed: how could she have read my mind?

“Non è impensabile,” she responded, “lei pensa a voce alta. Questo è normale per tutti

gli italiani; inanzitutto, di noi chi non siamo pazzi!”3

Gloss

3. “It is not unfathomable, sir; you think aloud. This is normal for all Italians; at least, for those

of us who aren’t crazy!”


45

VI.

“Fate: A lusus so brutish it stirred and confused us. Creed: A line so straight it timed my fate.”

-Aldo

With swift words she caught my heart and yanked out my tongue. I was muted by

exactitude. On the precipice of achieving clarity, my mind’s own Sisyphus buckled. I would

have to start the ascent again.4

I felt compelled to crack Sisyphus’s spell. Since far finer acuity would be needed, I

administered a hearty dose of rigorous self-honesty.

Splicing certainty with curiosity spun me ‘round, down, up and through many older

abstractions. Each was necessary to pontificate, but few conclusions were on point. I asked, “In

death, do we lose that 1st person consciousness we possess in life? If so, is there an omniscient

view we can attain in life, perhaps through study and intense introspection? Would this view

ultimately lead to happiness? Is any happiness sustainable? What is infinite perspective?”

“Forse. Sì. Forse. Solo un po’ - non può averlo pur sempre. Non lo so, una fantasia?”

said the onlooker.5

She answered each question with a certain surgical exactness. The little Italian girl, this


46

peeper of my spoken thoughts, observed my quandary with clairvoyance beyond my own.

Gloss

4. Let’s play ‘connect the dots’. Suppose you are gazing from your beach chair far off into the

Mediterranean Sea. Where sea meets sky lays the horizon, a place you can only jump to in theory. Jump to

it and look straight up. Now raise yourself to a point just slightly above the final telic height of your last

glance; shift your gaze downward. Congratulations, you’ve theoretically peered beyond the horizon.

This game in perception represents more than just navel gazing; it also illustrates the type

of mental exercise needed to press past the precipice when thinking palintropically. We can see

beyond conceptual horizons when we apply this model to our own thought processes.

5. Reader, again I will translate to save time: “Maybe. Yes. Maybe. Only a bit -

you cannot have it forever. I don’t know, a fantasy?”


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VII.

“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won

behind your forehead.”

-James Joyce

Between her small hands stretched a small book. Taught as it was – and pointing

downward – I could hardly catch sight of the title. Even still, I could make out its English

lettering. Curious, I engaged.

“You know, switching between languages like that is quite the talent; how did you come

about polyglottery with such youth?”

“English! His tongues are vast!” she said with great snark. “I took you for confused and

babbling, not American! What brings you to Jerusalem?”

Bedazzled, flabbergasted, I tilted my gaze upward. As if there were someone up there

going to feed me the answer. Alas, glint caught my pupils; swelling like sponges to water they

twisted and turned and… Alas, foiled. “Damn you, Sisyphus!!”.

I inflected, “Turning points that reveal something new are transient overall, but…” What

blasphemous jazz, what fecund garbage I tell you! What dastard made me think such sinful

thought? What will will lead me rightly.


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VIII.

“Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.”

-Simon and Garfunkel

As the questions bubbled up through and out of my skull - soaring skyward - something

popped. Aha!

“Che sucesso? Aldo, tutto bene? Forse…ALDO! Can you hear me?,” she asked out of

concern but her questions were so piercing I could cry.

“Yes, yes. Can you lower your voice? My head split just then. Like another cleft tool is

your voice to my ears right now.” I was internally garbled, mixing and mincing.

“This is the story of calm, Aldo; see if you can remember. It wasn’t long ago that you

first told me this tale; in fact, it was only several months back. Do you remember where we

were?”

“No, is it relevant? Because I just don’t see how it could be at this moment, my head is

splitting and…”

“Nonsense. Listen good.”


49

And then there was calm. This little girl, my precious daughter, was singing the rich

notes of seraphim. Hearing her voice assuaged me, and my fits of second guessing, over-

thinking, and under-appreciating dissipated. Quotidiana became my homestead, a benevolent

place of perennial synchronicity, a grateful place where today I continue to dwell.


50

ReplyZalie Troumpec

Reply-To: "The proprietary use of a book_"

(Power) Book/ -

The poem is our encounter with the procedure used to seize messages.

Jos = = = A 9 = A 2 =


51

The Enzensberger-Baudrillard Mass Media Debate Reexamined: Temporal Models and the Dialectic

Jack Kredell

Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “Constituents of a Theory of the Media”, originally published in

1970 in the New Left Review, is an ambitious and urgent attempt to patch existing Marxist media

theory with a Leninist social strategy of the new media. Enzensberger describes the emergent

category of mass media as a “consciousness industry”, one that “…infiltrates into all other

sectors of production, takes over more and more directional and control functions, and

determines the standard of the prevailing technology” (Enzensberger 261). Collectively the

various technological and cultural manifestations of new media constitute a new and

interconnected “universal system”.

The voice of the essay is that of the traditional vanguard intellectual urging socialist strategy to

recognize the emergence of electronic new media as the prevailing locus of contradiction within

the system of post-industrial monopoly capitalism. Prophetically, Enzensberger exhorts the

“open secret” of the emancipatory capacity of new media, “which has been waiting, suppressed

or crippled, for its moment to come…” to be recognized for its inherent power to mobilize. In

contrast to the bygone forms of social mobilization such as the protest march, which, for the

radical left at the time, carried the stigma of the Stalinist parade-as-clockwork, the new

organizational paradigm will make men “as free as dancers, as aware as football players,

surprising as guerrillas” (Enzensberger 261).


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The notion that the mobilizing potential of electronic media will usher us into a more

favorable spatial, kinetic and temporal orientation to political life is preordained by a progressive

view of history. Gracing the present moment with a greater freedom of movement than ever

before, mass media becomes the socio-cultural kindling that spark’s the present moment’s

ontological disposition to revolution. What is really being said, however, is that new media

offers a new and improved version of mobilization, one that it is not constrained by the planned,

linear determinations of marching and parading. Thus, the ‘newness’ of new media is the degree

to which it enables us to transcend the image of the past as the failure to mobilize. Regardless of

the structural influence of Ezensberger’s progressive critical paradigm, there is something

innately magical, almost subversive even, about electronic media’s ability to make us “as free as

dancers” even prior to its strategic, emancipatory use.

With the resolute air of a positivist, Enzensberger asserts that the revolutionary potential of

electronic media is concretized in an egalitarian structure which permits a new relationship

between the means and the forces of production: “For the first time in history, the media are

making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical

means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves” (Enzensberger 262). Here an

unlikely comparison can be drawn between Enzenberger and McLuhan based on the idea of

technological immanence. In Enzensberger, what might be called the ‘massness’ of the mass

media, the totalizing degree of its enclosure of receivers and transmitters, superficially resembles

Marshall McLuhan’s notion technological immanence, the audio-tactile ether in which the


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famous “global village” subsists. In actuality the two couldn’t be more antithetical:

Enznensberger’s mass media is a hyper-egalitarian structure viewed within the framework of

socialist discourse, one that enables greater individual participation and freedom of movement;

by contrast, McLuhan champions a spatio-temporal immanence that permits interconnectivity

and interdependence as opposed to independence (or individuals for that matter).

McLuhan, as befitting his unlucky fate in American academia, will play only cameo roles in

the work of the theorists discussed. In Enzensberger, he appears, briefly, as a kind of intellectual

extremist of the apolitical avant-garde whose work immodestly exhibits a lack conceptual

stringency and historical responsibility. This somewhat unusual, given that Enzensberger’s essay

is pardonable of avant-garde delinquency owing to its premature futurity; it is literally trying to

express itself in terms which have not yet been invented. Though Dadaism “teemed with

barbarisms”, it possessed an historical and prognostic value that for Enzensberger was non-

intrinsic to work itself, since it was“...attempting to achieve those effects which the public today

seeks in film with the means of painting” (Enzensberger 275). For McLuhan’s vangaurdism,

however, there is only hostility.

The conflict between Enzensberger’s responsible socialist left and representatives of the

‘apolitical’ such as McLuhan is really a territorial dispute over the theoretical colonization of the

new productive forces. “Innocents” writes Enzensbrger, “have put themselves in the forefront of

the new productive forces on the basis of mere institutions with which communism-to its

detriment-has not wished to concern itself” (Enzensberger 271). Which is one way of saying


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that “innocents” of the apolitical avant-garde have often made greater strides than Marxists in the

radicalization of new media owing to their willingness to embrace the new productive forces of

the time. The popularity of the “charlatan” McLuhan is directly related to communism’s belated

evaluation of electronic media. What is significant about the configuration of the McLuhan

galaxy, regardless of its own temporal model of the present, is that it is perceived as a threat to

the linear and progressive interpretive model of the dialectical materialism espoused by

Ezensbeger. Thus while we are asked to laugh at the “provocative idiocy” of regressing to

prehistoric tribal existence, the reason for McLuhan’s appearance at all is that such a regression,

if true, would undermine the theoretical foundations of the Enlightenment.

In Enzensberger’s scant and patronizing treatment of McLuhan’s thought, isolated in the

famous “the medium is the message”, the figure of McLuhan becomes as a kind of metonymic

effigy for the “mystique of the media which dissolves all problems in smoke” (Enzensberger

270). What this depoliticizing mystique reinforces is the mistaken notion, according to

Enzensberger, that “media are neutral instruments by which any “messages” ones pleases can be

transmitted without regard for their structure or the structure of the medium.” McLuhan’s irony

here goes unnoticed: the saying “the medium is the message” does in fact have a tautological

structure, as Enzensbrger notes, but the point is the very opposite of neutrality: there is no

message outside its medium. The expression refers specifically to the pre-foreclosure of

neutrality through technological mediation. It is from the positions of this theoretical crux, first

articulated by McLuhan, that Baudrillard will critique Enzensberger’s strategy of re-

appropriating the media as a mobilizing tool for being practically and theoretically unlikely.


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In 1972 Baudrillard published a response to Enzenberger’s dialectical approach in “For a

Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.” In the exchange between Enzensberger and

Baudrillard, which is fundamentally a debate about the future Marxist theory, the work of

McLuhan assumes an important yet ambiguous role.

However, I want to stress that the true object of Baudrillard’s critique of Enzensberger’s

socialist strategy and the structure of mass media is the status of the dialectic itself. If

Baudrillard’s requiem for the dialectic holds true in the era of mass media and globalization, then

his association with McLuhan constitutes an important theoretical allegiance as well as challenge

that demands further development by the Left. Building on McLuhan’s criticism of Marxist

materialism for circumscribing itself to the analysis of material production alone, and

incorporating the frameworks of communication theory and cybernetics, Baudrillard locates the

terminal deficiency of the dialectic in its artificial and internally mediated union of content. The

impasse of the dialectic, and, analogously, of the mass media, is that the structure is coded in

such a way as to prevent real exchange or reciprocity. Enzensberger’s practical solution of

transforming the media from a medium of manipulation to one of communication is misguided

“since media ideology functions at the level of form, at the level of the separation it establishes,

which is a social division” (Baudrillard 280).

This direct application of McLuhan is noteworthy in that it forms the theoretical basis for

Baudrillard’s own solution to radicalizing the media. According to Baudrillard, “The mass


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media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication-this is what

characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space

of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral

responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange)” (Baudrillard 280). What

Baudrilliard denotes as “reciprocal space”, understood in a global and abstract sense, is

ultimately where McLuhan and Baudrillard will depart. However, for our purposes,

Baudrillard’s theory of mass mediation as being anti-mediatory opens a contested and fraught

perspective from which we can view the dialectic and its extensions of critical discourse afresh.

Baudrillard’s theory of the media comes out of the work of Marcel Mauss, especially the

latter’s theory of symbolic exchange: “To understand the term response properly, we must take it

in an emphatic sense, by referring to an equivalent in “primitive” societies: power belongs to the

one who can give and cannot be repaid” (Baudrillard 281). For Baudrillard the media is a

monopolized system of exchange in which the response is articulated in such as a way as to

prevent “antagonistic reciprocity”. Thus our only hope of radicalizing the mass media consists in

“restoring this possibility of response” at the level of form. “No other theory or strategy is

possible”, writes Baudrillard. But if that doesn’t sound like a cataclysmic endeavor, Baudrillard

extends his analysis to the socio-cultural sphere as well, noting that the “the consumption of

products and messages is the abstract social relation that they establish, the ban raised against all

forms of response and reciprocity” (281). Baudrillard’s analysis of the media is directed at

empiricism: “So the functionalized object, like all messages functionalized by the media, like

the operation of a referendum, controls rupture, the emergence of meaning, and


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censorship” (281). Thus what the empirical transparency and immediacy of the mass media

openly conceals is a semiotic worm, which, colonizing and hollowing out every last trace of

meaning, leaves us in a lushly textured desert of appearances. A desert Baudrillard set out to

explore in his later works.

A strange line of analogy can be drawn from the function of the law in Kafka’s The Trial to

Baudrillard’s schema of mass media in that the real labor of the law, like the mass media, is not

in the exchange of content, but in the mediation of exchange itself. In Kafka, the omnipotent

discourse of the law interpellates the individual as an individual and then negates individuality

per se. The law, famously, “receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”

Likewise, “…transgression and subversion never get on “on the air” without being subtly

negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated on their

meaning” (Baudrillard 282).

In Baudrillard’s estimation, McLuhan gets close to the real structure of the mass media when

he asserts the primacy of technological structure, the underlying a priori code that administers

the form of the exchange: “Furthermore, it has changed status with the extension of the mass

media: from a parallel category (descended from almanacs and popular chronicles), it has

evolved into a total system of mythological interpretation, a closed system of models of

signification from which no event escapes” (Baudrillard 283).

For Baudrillard, our only hope of violating the system of structured communication is through


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a return to the symbolic exchange relation, that is, an unknown relation in which response is not

predetermined by the ideological and hierarchical categories of transmitter and receiver, or, for

that matter, the Marxist categories of consumer and producer. The relation consists of an

unknown (x) in that the symbolic gesture has no concrete existence outside its unprincipled,

multivalent, and spontaneous appearance. Thus it becomes inherently useless in the era of

electronic mass media to strategize, let alone orientate oneself, politically. In its radical oath of

transgression aimed at “univocality”, “message”, “code”, “model”…etc, the project of restoring

symbolic exchange is the inverse, as well as reverse, of any rationalist tradition of political

thought.

As an instance of such a response Baudrillard cites the graffiti of May 68’, “…which is

transgressive because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of non-

response enunciated by all the media” (Baudrillard 287). But here we are faced with a kind of

paradox of critical discourse; on the one hand, the discourse of the critic preserves itself by first

enumerating and then fashioning theoretical models and histories based on instances of

‘response’ or rupture; and on the other, critical discourse renounces its own imagined etiological

bond with the transgressive component of its speech-a vanity-and lapses into silence. Weary but

unperturbed by this kind of structural auto-da-fe, Baudrillard writes, “But what does this

“subversive” reading actually amount to? Is it still a reading, that is, a deciphering, a disengaging

of a univocal meaning…Or is it yet another controlling scheme of interpretation, rising from the

ashes of the previous one?” (287) By this logic nothing could be said without unintentionally

reinstating some form of the dominant code. Ideally, the ‘code’ of the last code, if it were


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perfect, would destroy the message and restore the ambivalence of meaning once and for all. But

it cannot; we are forced into a position, the coordinates different each time, of repeated

transgression: “What is strategic in this sense is only what radically checkmates the dominant

form” (287). Yet each response is insufficient; it is always check and never mate. By virtue of

our absolute adherence to transgression, perhaps an effect of the paranoia of manipulation (or

worse, becoming manipulators, by instituting a new ideological code), we end up preserving the

original integrity of the ruling form.

This grand schism articulated in Baudrillard’s critical discourse is what the leftist theory of the

time identified as the post-modern condition. Confronted by a monolithic self-regulating socio-

economic code, modernity, and its cultural logic of capitalism, Leftist theory responds by

colonizing the theoretical-historical vantage point of ‘after’ modernity and theorizing itself from

the outside, as if from the mere condition of being post-modern. More than a semiotic model of

McLuhan’s dictum of the medium as the message, the paradigm of mass media doubles as an

historical model of modernity.

What Baudrillard’s versions of Enzensberger and McLuhan show us, in a way that neither

capable of, is that the dialectical attempt to invert the structure of mass media by repositioning it

the hands of the receiver is impossibly flawed because it mistakes the ideological category of the

receiver for an ontological one. Thus no strategic action or intervention can maintain it’s own

semantic cohesion and force without, in Baudrillard’s lyrical schadenfreude, becoming “…subtly

negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their


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meaning” (282). More than just the defeat of the Left’s most amenable and prolific of

methodologies, the dialectic, we are witness to the expiration of all rationalist methodologies

issuing from the Enlightenment.

However, keeping Baudrillard in mind, this collapse is not the result of succession; replacing

the old ideology with new ideological models or master narratives as such, but of their reduction

by a ubiquitous system of mediation into nullifying social feedback. Ultimately Baudrillard’s

critique unconsciously reproduces a model of temporality as impasse: the production of linearity

or progress is undercut by action of eternal recurrence of ‘symbolic exchange’. Thus “Requiem

of the Mass Media” operates through the assumption that historical progress ceases after

modernity. The end result of Baudrillard’s critique of the sign and its omnipresent mediation is a

kind a theoretical Babel in which linearity or progress and static symbiotically coexist; internally,

at the level of form, the mass media is a closed ideological system; externally, at the level of

content, which is also the discrete or individual level, the media presents itself an open,

reversible, and transparent agent of social progress. “Good grief!” said Charlie Brown.

Works Cited:

Baudrillard, Jean. For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 164-184. Trans. Charles Levin. Saint Louis, MO.: Telos Press, 1981. Reprinted in The New Media Reader, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press, 2003.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. New Left Review (64)13-36. Nov/Dec 1970. Reprinted in Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, The Consciousness Industry, trans. Stuart Hood. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Reprinted in The New Media Reader, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press, 2003.


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On GreenSheila Squillante

Then green is a breach, a rupture in the scrub; is pyramids or triangles waving in a fronded surfeit. Green

breathes. Against sky, green wings, preening; against clear panes, perfect

squares, a green-gold sheen;

a meeting. Of blue and green andwhat we wrongly call brown,

but is really, just look at it, weathered

grey-green. The tallest reaches above green, reaches out and all around. Green,

then, exceeds. Shivers like coins on a dancer’s

skirt, green silvers between. (Green’sa she. Dream, then, pleat color and light,

divide green each from each...)

Green weeps here, displeased, on the needle-strewn ground, a thousand green

needs flowering about. A full field of green,

what some might call teeming,what to some might seem a sea.


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Plato’s Dialogical Structure and Socrates as the Physician of

the Soul

Jafar Al-Mondhiry

I. INTRODUCTION

Health, broadly considered, provides one with the vigor to pursue life. Our precarious hold on

health is one of the central human struggles, and in many important ways the pursuit and

maintenance of health is an indispensable condition for human flourishing. One view of Plato’s

dialogues takes philosophy to be the care of the soul; that philosophy has as its goal the

sustenance and guidance of the soul to a state of virtue and moral health. Through this lens,

philosophical activity can be identified as the turning of souls toward the Good in a way that is

gradual, cooperative, and particular to the individual engaged. Through dialogical interaction

with a philosopher and philosophy in general, the soul can be examined, critiqued, and advanced

by a transformative relationship to the Good. Similarly, medicine and healthcare professionals

treat patients and steward the sick through a unique process of recovery that rehabilitates and

reorients the body back towards a state of health.

It is the task of this paper to explore the similarities between the methods, attitudes, and

goals at work in medicine and this kind philosophical care of the soul as it is variously

demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues. Specific attention to the ways medicine and the task of

the physician are referenced within the wider action of the dialogues will serve to explain what


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significance, if any, this comparison has for Plato’s portrayal of the philosophical life, the way it

is taught and shared, and to what end. This paper takes as a guiding principle the sentiments

expressed widely across the dialogues, but perhaps most succinctly by Socrates in Alcibiades 2,

that “the state or soul that is to live aright must hold fast to this knowledge [of the Good], exactly

as a sick man does to a doctor.”

Exploring the implications of this model first demands an interrogation of the form of the

dialogues themselves, with an attempt at understanding why Plato chose to illustrate philosophy

in this way. It is my contention that an analogous understanding of the health of the body and the

health of the soul – philosophy characterized by a concern for the latter – lends itself to a

sensitive understanding of the structure and movement of the dialogues and, more importantly,

the characters within them. In particular, an overarching concern with philosophical health and

healing may better frame the way Socrates engages his interlocutors in a process of probing

criticism and exhortation. To this extent, I will try to show that what Plato depicts are scenes of

moral diagnosis and treatment in dialogues such as the Gorgias and the Protagoras, amongst

others. The care of the soul in these encounters requires a personal relationship between the

philosopher and the interlocutor that models itself after the physician-patient relationship, as the

insights of the former work to redirect and rectify the maladies of the latter. Success in this

engagement is variably determined by the dimensions of just such a relationship. Finally, the

unique and complex features of moral and physical health, in their related but distinct

understandings, will allow the limits and value of this analogy to take shape.

At base, what this paper means to address is the bare fact that Plato did not simply

espouse his beliefs as a direct and consistent set of propositions, either in his own voice or by


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way of Socrates. Instead, the bulk of what we are given are dramatic dialogues: scenes of

conversation and engagement, movement and change between characters, topics, values and

beliefs. What we need to interrogate, then, is the manifest and latent content of these encounters,

and what kinds of patterns and themes emerge. Taken this way, we would already be justified in

questioning the persistent references to medicine that occur and recur in almost every dialogue.

A major Plato scholar of the early 20th Century, Werner Jaeger, was one of the first to describe

the significance of such references in a way that frames and introduces this discussion:

Plato speaks of doctors and medicine in such high terms that, even if the early medical literature of Greece were entirely lost, we should need no further evidence to infer that, during the last fifth and the fourth centuries before Christ, the social and intellectual prestige of the Greek medical profession was very high indeed. Plato thinks of the doctor as the representative of a highly specialized and refined department of knowledge; and also the embodiment of a professional code which is rigorous enough to be a perfect model of the proper relation between knowledge and its purpose in practical conduct… It is no exaggeration to say that Socrates’ doctrine of ethical knowledge, on which so many of the arguments in Plato’s dialogues turn, would be unthinkable without that model of medical science, to which he so often refers. Of all the branches of human knowledge then existing (including mathematics and natural science) medicine is the most closely akin to the ethical science of Socrates.

It remains an open question whether Plato actually develops just such a coherent and

rigorous doctrine of “ethical science” through the dialogues. Indeed, any reading which distills

and systematizes what the dialogues show cannot unequivocally be said to represent Plato’s view

or the intentions of the dialogues as a whole. Such attempts necessarily move past the very

content dialogues, and fail to address the work on its terms or the author’s. What little writing

we do have from Plato directly through the Letters does not prima facie eliminate the esoteric

quality of these works or explain any ethical system or philosophical doctrines that underlie the

writing. Certain attention to key passages written in the Seventh Letter, however, I believe

shows that the dialogues were animated by a particular conception of the philosophy that may


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illuminate both their structure and guiding concern.

II. DIALOGICAL STRUCTURE, THE SEVENTH LETTER AND CARE OF THE SOUL

The ‘Proto-Essay’ View

To reiterate the question posed above, it seems we are forced to ask (as a preliminary to

any conscientious reading of Plato) why he chose to write in dialogues rather than simply

announce his views in some other form. While debate, discussion and puzzlement remains and

will remain in the scholarship, it is worth noting some prominent conceptions that bear upon this

topic. In a close reading of some of the late dialogues where the significance of the dialogical

form is less apparent, Kenneth Sayre summarizes what he calls the popularized ‘proto-essay’

view of Plato’s writings. This understanding of the dialogues (which he opposes to his own),

takes Plato’s guiding intention in writing to be the construction of rigorously tested philosophical

arguments, supported by explanations of effective methods for procuring philosophical

conclusions. From this perspective, the dialogical form was not itself significant for the

transmission of the philosophical ideas articulated. Instead, the dialogues operated as a literary

device for the convenience of its Greek audience accustomed to such dramatic forms. Or

perhaps they were simply an imaginative failing on Plato’s part to reformulate transcriptions of

the dialogues with his late teacher, the later dialogues like the Timaeus and Critias showing a

progression to a more overtly essay-type form. The final conclusion following these

assumptions of the ‘proto-essay’ view is then that the philosophical ideas prominent within the

dialogues represent Plato’s own beliefs, from which we can construct his philosophical system.


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Aside from the unavoidable problems of speculation in understanding the text this way,

there are several concrete elements in the dialogues which point to problems with the ‘proto-

essay’ view. First, if Plato meant to espouse a set of stable philosophical assertions, we are left to

wonder why so many of the dialogues end in apparent aporia, or at least without a clean

conclusion. In the Protagoras, for example, we are given an elaborate exchange between

Socrates and the famous sophist of the dialogue’s namesake that ends with each speaker coming

to contradict their earlier positions, Socrates himself calling the affair a “hopeless mess” (361c)

and calling for more discussion before any true understanding can be reached. Likewise,

examples from both the early dialogues (e.g., in the Laches where a definition of courage is

pursued) and the late dialogues (e.g., the Theaetetus and the definition of knowledge) show

Socrates questioning his interlocutors through a series of definitions that are proposed and

corrected many times over without a satisfactory conclusion.

Second, and on a related note, Socrates seems to say different things in different

dialogues about the same philosophical issues. To use the Protagoras again, much of Socrates’

late exchange with Protagoras involves a working definition of the Good that Socrates explicitly

equates with the pleasurable.In the Gorgias (a dialogue written chronologically close to the

Protagoras), however, Socrates takes a strong issue with this same definition when it comes out

in his arguments with Polus and Callicles. The nuances and motivations between these

definitions set aside, more explicit examples abound between other dialogues. In the Republic,

for instance, Socrates claims that the soul is tripartite, while in the Phaedo he claims it has no

parts, but that the soul is simple and whole. The difficulties in constructing a clear view of

Plato’s opinions on these cannot easily be dismissed, and at the very least confounds the position

that he used the dialogues as a vehicle for simply asserting his philosophical ideas as the ‘proto-


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essay’ view states.The Seventh Letter

If the dialogues do not give themselves over to a clear and coherent philosophical system

as some might suggest, some clarification of Plato’s intentions might be found in the only works

that bear his voice directly. In particular, the Seventh Letter provides a commentary that reaches

over the whole of Plato’s writings in a way that radically influences our reading of them: “One

statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim

to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myself—no matter how they pretend to have

acquired it… Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I

certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no

way of putting it in words like other studies.”

While some writers contest whether Plato genuinely authored this work, Kenneth Sayre

(amongst others) defends the legitimacy of this writing on the grounds that even a forgery shows

great familiarity with and fidelity to Plato’s style and works that show, in his words, “whatever

motives might have underlain forgery would have ruled out disclosure in the form of gross

misrepresentation.” At the very least, one cannot escape the fact that a very similar sentiment is

expressed in the Phaedrus in Socrates’ recounting of the Egyptian myth of King Theuth: “He

would be a very simple person… who should suppose that he had left his 'Art' in writings or who

should accept such an inheritance in the hope that the written word would give anything

intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing could be any more than a reminder to one

who already knows the subject.”


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This seems to be a rather jarring statement to receive from such a prodigious author. The

rejection expressed in the Seventh Letter would perhaps not be so radical if it were simply a call

against writing, but instead it calls into question any linguistic formulation of philosophy, Plato

stating that “no intelligent person will ever risk putting what he really understands into

language.” Names, descriptions, mathematical formulations, scientific knowledge (episteme),

and all discursive practices are thus all deemed insufficient for the genuine grasp of philosophy,

which further undercuts the notion that Plato had something simple or direct to articulate through

the dialogues. Rather, only a deeper sense of understanding approximates the sense of true being

that is not caught up in linguistic concepts or sense experience. Plato provides a provocative

explanation of the experience further in the letter: “Acquaintance with it [philosophy] must come

rather after frequent conversations with a master about the subject itself and living with it, when,

suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes

self-sustaining.”

Several important ideas contained in this passage guide the rest of this project. The first

is that philosophy is not an abstract set of principles or propositions to be discovered and

subordinated to, but a feeling “generated in the soul” of the individual akin to a mental state or

vision—a profound inner change within the soul of the young philosopher. Sayre expresses this

change in a way that suggests a reorientation of the way philosophy is shared: “Given the view

that philosophic understanding is a kind of intellectual discernment that cannot be adequately

expressed in language, the goal of philosophic instruction would be to bring about this state of

mind in the student.” This relates to the second point: that this state of the mind and soul doesn’t

come about on its own, but that only through “frequent conversations with a master” is it able to

generate the spark that brings it to illumination. Thus, philosophy is not to be constructed


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immutably and silently, but brought into the world through the awakening of souls who

participate in a community of dialogue. The relationship between the philosophical master and

student defines how the soul can be brought up to this place of philosophical vigor.

Finally, because philosophy is not a coherent and universal system that one can simply

dispassionately enter into, this state of the soul needs to be cultivated through a rigorous

immersion in philosophical subjects, a “living with it” that demands a constant process of

reconstruction and correction in order to be “self-sustaining.” Plato likens the austerity of such a

process to a change in the whole order of one’s life: “As for those, however, who are not

genuine converts to philosophy…as soon as they see how many subjects there are to study, how

much hard work they involve, and how indispensable it is for the project to adopt a well-ordered

scheme of living [diata], they decide that the plan is difficult if not impossible for them, and so

they really do not prove capable of practicing philosophy.” The philosophical life is one which

demands an intellectual regimen in order to be sustained, and the dialogues themselves might be

read as just such an exercise of the mind for both the interlocutors and the reader.The Health of the Soul

An integration of these insights seems to point to a particular conception of the dialogues

as a whole; namely, that they show a concern for the health of the soul. I liken the experience

described in the Seventh Letter to be something akin to the theory of recollection proposed in the

Meno, in that it represents the potential within every soul to recover a higher state of functioning

defined by its natural propensities. This sentiment is articulated well in this dialogue when

Socrates claims that “virtue, like health, has the same ideal for men, women, children and the

elderly, and the best state of the soul is analogous to the best state of the body”; i.e., there is a


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general norm for the state of the soul which we can appeal to in the pursuit of the virtuous life.

Moreover, the health of the soul is something which, like the health of body, is advanced or

restored by the knowledge and expertise of a healer, who is able through a sustained relationship

to affect and reorient the soul of student/patient towards the Good. The dramatic figure of

Socrates, as he is cast across many of the dialogues in his interactions with different

interlocutors, would thus be what he refers to in the opening strokes of the Protagoras as “a

physician of the soul,” understanding what kinds of words and logos can affect the soul’s health.

Finally, I take note of the “well-ordered living scheme” recommended in the previous

passage as a nod to the idea that cultivating one’s philosophical health is a matter of creating

healthy life habits—the Greek term diata more often referring to a physical as opposed to an

intellectual regimen, usually in a medical context. Philosophy, in its emancipation from strict

propositions and writing, would be concerned with the ideas and words which stir and invigorate

the soul’s health. An excellent description of this appears in the Phaedrus, where Socrates and

Phaedrus call for the “intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself,

and knows with whom to speak and with whom to be silent… the living word of knowledge

which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image.” To be

engaged with philosophy as Socrates engages his interlocutors is thus an organic, dynamic affair

of the soul that responds differently in different situations and is not limited by the propositions

and ideas it produces in this engagement. Similarly, the dramatic Socrates (and we might also

rightfully include the Plato which stands behind him) does not rest content with the conclusions

produced by his conversations, but always exhorts his listeners to continue the pursuit beyond

the fragile instability of the theses continually produced and discarded.


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If the previous arguments have sufficed to give a nuanced view of the dialogues, such

that their overall concern (as dictated primarily by the Seventh Letter) seems to rest on this

conception of philosophy as a care and cultivation of the health of the soul, it remains to be seen

what implications the metaphor to medicine has in this context. While it is readily obvious that a

vocabulary of health and healing brings up medical imagery, a deeper exploration of what this

parallel understanding offers will better illustrate some key concepts and bring attention to the

prominence of this analogy in the dialogues.

III. THE MEDICAL ANALOGY OF THE DIALOGUES

The Philosopher-Interlocutor/Physician-Patient Relationship

A substantive correlation between Socrates’ activities in the dialogues and the task of the

physician suggests that Socrates himself is subject to or embodies some form of “medical

ethics,” in the most basic sense that he takes as his guiding principle the care of his interlocutor

as the physician takes care of the ill. Acting on this principle entails a fundamental sense of trust

that Plato himself seems to recognize both for the physician and for himself:

One who advises a sick man, living in a way to injure his health, must first effect a reform in his way of living, must he not? And if the patient consents to such a reform, then he may admonish him on other points? If, however, the patient refuses, in my opinion it would be the act of a real man and a good physician to keep clear of advising such a man… This being my firm conviction, whenever anyone asks my advice about any of the most important concerns of his life, such as the acquisition of wealth, or the proper regime for body or soul, then, in case I think that his daily life is fairly well regulated, or that when I give him advice on the matter about which he consults me, he will consent to follow it, under these circumstances I do counsel him with all my heart and do not stop at a mere formal compliance.


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It is the first priority of a physician to know how to engage to the sick individual so as to

understand in what capacity help can be afforded. Just as the ill cannot be moved to take

prescriptions unless they feel to be in trust with the doctor, so also the interlocutor cannot be

successfully engaged unless there is an opening of souls between the interlocutor and the

philosopher. A line from Socrates in the Charmides captures this understanding in both contexts:

“And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul—that is

the first and essential thing. And the cure of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use

of certain charms, and these charms are fair words.” Thus, the philosopher’s task (and the

physician’s, for that matter) demands the use of words and, I venture further, the open process of

dialogue in order to engage the soul of the interlocutor.

Here, again, Plato makes ample use of the physician as the appropriate model for just

such an engagement. Significantly, certain passages in the Laws create a vision of the medical

practice which goes far beyond what Jaeger described as Plato’s reverence for the physician as

“the representative of a highly specialized and refined department of knowledge”. For Plato,

medicine entails a certain kind of relationship that indicates both the physician and the patient in

a process of healing that promises to be transformative for both parties. Plato demonstrates this

in his distinction between slave doctor and the free practitioner in Book IV of Laws:

A physician of this [slave] kind never gives a servant any account of his complaint, nor asks him for any; he gives him some empirical injunction with an air of finished knowledge, in the brusque fashion of a dictator… The free practitioner, who, for the most part, attends free men, treats their diseases by going into things thoroughly from the beginning… and takes the patient and his family into his confidence. Thus he learns something from the sufferers, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his powers. He does not give his prescriptions until he has won the patient’s support, and when he has done so, he steadily aims at producing complete restoration to healthy by persuading the sufferer into compliance.


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The contrast highlighted here also bears upon the previous distinction made between a

philosophy which produces a profound inner change in the soul of the interlocutor and a

philosophy that establishes immutable principles that one must comport to, in the same sense as

the slave doctor who makes prescriptions in the “brusque fashion of a dictator”. To inspire true

virtue and a sense of the philosophical life, the philosopher must establish a rapport with his

listener such that his words enter into the soul and inspire changes to the interlocutor’s life. It is

only by establishing that “living word” spoken of in the Phaedrus that the philosopher can

promote the sense of the philosophical which is “self-sustaining” and compelling for the

individual. Socrates must convince his listeners to adopt the “well-ordered scheme of living”

that genuine philosophical rigor demands, in the same capacity the physician exhorts his patient

into a similar diata or physical regimen.

Moreover, Socrates encourages his interlocutors “to the best of his powers.” If we take

this to mean the best of the interlocutor’s or patient’s powers, then we get a picture of the very

individualized treatment process that Socrates mobilizes differently in different settings with

different listeners. We are not consigned to think that Socrates contradicts himself across the

dialogues or that one view of the soul or the virtues is the dominant position for him or Plato.

Rather, we can see each occasion for philosophical healing as a moment that allows him to “learn

something from the sufferer” and adapt his methods. Even while he didn’t write much on the

topic himself, Charles Griswold recognized this theme as well, describing the many dialogues as

“medicinal” to the extent that “they vary the treatment with the patient,” and, more

provocatively, that “[t]he medicine is conservatively applied by Plato; philosophy [being] not

beneficial for each and every person.”


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While Griswold mentions these words only in passing, I think they develop an important

point of caution for the medical model of philosophical care. The proper exercise of medicine

means that it is employed in the care of the sick, and the entire nature of physician-patient /

philosopher-interlocutor relationship depends on the dimensions of the illness itself. As Socrates

points out in the Lysias: “a body which is in health has no need whatever of the medical art or of

any assistance, for it is sufficient in itself. And therefore no one in health is friendly with a

physician on account of his health… But the sick man is, I imagine, on account of his sickness.”

More importantly, Socrates goes on to point out that “it is for the sake of health that the medical

art has received the friendship.” Likewise, I take it as a motivating value in the dialogues that

Socrates receives the company of his interlocutors and attends to the health of their soul for the

sake of the Good. Thus, the entire concept of a “philosophical friendship” – based on the care of

another’s soul – relies on this orientation towards the Good in the way medicine is oriented

towards health. Socrates continues: “All such value as this is set not on those things which are

procured for the sake of another thing, but on that for the sake of which all such things are

procured.”

This theme is developed in greater detail in the Gorgias, where Socrates’ discussion of

the differences between real and apparent goods takes shape. He does this by way of comparison

between medicine and pastry-baking on the one hand, and justice and rhetoric on the other, the

former which “always take care—some of the body, the others of the soul—in accord with what

is best,” while the latter only “guesses at the pleasant without the best.” Simply giving an

account of the thing which the physician or the philosopher works toward with the encountered

individual (health and the Good, respectively) is insufficient. Their task must be actively


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transformed by this correspondence or accord between practices and values. On a level which

speaks closer to the nature of the relationship between the physician and the patient, Book I of

the Republic also sheds some light on the selflessness inherent to the healing event, that “no

physician, insofar as he is a physician, considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the

good of the patient,.” In his task, the healer’s concern is not the study or advancement of medical

knowledge or philosophy as such (although this may come in fact as a consequence), but always

“to the subject which he has undertaken to direct; to that he looks, and in everything which he

says and does.” Socrates uses this example in the Republic to construct a view of the ideal

relationship between the rulers and the polis, and despite the troubling paternalistic and eugenic

overtones that come out later, I think these passages prefigure in an important way the values and

attitudes employed in contemporary biomedical ethics.

The exact dimensions of this philosophical or medical “friendship,” however, are not

defined in reference to some abstract ethical principles but with close attention to the illness or

malady at hand. Another analogy to medicine from Socrates in the Laches illustrates this idea:

“When a person considers about applying a medicine to the eyes, would you say that he is

consulting about the medicine or about the eyes? … And in a word, when he considers anything

for the sake of another thing, he thinks of the end and not of the means?” We should be cautious

here not to simply delimit philosophy to a pursuit of instrumental value in caring for the soul.

The point taken is that the methods of philosophy in and of themselves do not constitute some

independent, wholly abstract value, but more so with regard to how they inspire the

philosophical life. The modern diagnostic imaging techniques of our times (X-Ray, MRI, CT

scans) all certainly take on their own value in the way they have revolutionized and advanced

knowledge in many disciplines, but their force would not have been nearly as dramatic if it were


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not for the health of the lives they have improved and the initial call for aid which motivated

their discovery.

By this, I only mean to put emphasis on the fact that it is the personal relationship

between the physician of the soul and the interlocutor with reference to some characterological

or moral malady that determines the tools used in any particular engagement. Although we

might be able to construct a kind of generalized “medicine for the soul” that Socrates develops

with his different methods for engaging his listeners, it is for their particular care that these

methods take shape at all. And this understanding of how to care for the individual comes about

through an understanding of the Good or health that can dictate the specifics of the case.

Socrates develops this idea in the Phaedrus when he states that the simple techniques of

medicine (knowing how to induce warmth, make a patient vomit, use a particular drug) do not

suffice to make one a physician. It is the ability to understand who to apply such a treatment to,

why one should do it (through an account of what the treatment affects in the body), and, as

Ludwig Edelstein suggests, “when the right moment (kairos) has come to act.” This concept of

knowing when the right kairos to intervene or desist with his interlocutors is an especially

important element of the dramatic form as it is displayed in the dialogues, and some suggest it

plays a particularly significant role in the movements of the Protagoras, a play bookended by

references to the hora or fitting time. The general point is that the physician’s task, as well as the

philosopher’s in the dialogue, is to have an understanding of the other’s soul such that the

appropriate and timely intervention may be made. Access to the soul of the interlocutor, which

defines in no small part the quality of the relationship able to be built, depends on the open

process of dialogue previously mentioned, as well as the techniques that Plato has Socrates

employ to generate such a healing dialogue. An exploration of the way this engagement models


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itself on the techniques employed in the physician-patient interaction will further illustrate the

force of this medical analogy.

The Questioning of the Patient/Interlocutor’s Soul

As any physician would readily admit, the patient interview is one of the most

fundamental and indispensable tools for diagnosis, and the ancient Hippocratic writings

contemporary to Plato reflected this. For them, the way the sick received the questions and

prescriptions from the physician was another crucial dimension in sealing a trust between the two

that would result in the patient’s confidence and compliance: “But it is particularly necessary, in

my opinion, for one who discusses this [medicine] to discuss things familiar to ordinary folk…

But if you miss being understood by laymen, and fail to put your hearer in this condition, you

will miss reality.” For the physician of laymen, or for the philosopher with any interlocutor

under her care, adapting the right form of speech allows for words to inspire the “condition”

necessary for self-healing and personal growth. This implies that the patient/interlocutor receive

her words in such a way that they can genuinely respond and be indicated as a full participant in

the process.

For the care of the soul, this task takes added importance. Because the soul does not have

the many brute, physical, macroscopic parts that the body has for simple examination, in order to

care for the soul of his interlocutor, Socrates must get them to open and bear it for scrutiny and

treatment. Mark Moes provides a helpful explanation of Socrates’ ability to identify the

sicknesses within his interlocutor’s soul through his engagement with them:

An important theoretical presupposition of the practice of philosophy as Plato


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understands it seems to be that it is possible to diagnose ways in which a person’s soul has departed from the norm of health by attending to that person’s beliefs and desires… In many of the dialogues, Socrates tests his interlocutors’ responses to questions, suggestions, speeches, myths, and the like, in a way similar to the way physicians test their patients’ responses to various pokes, prods, and other diagnostic tests.

An important conclusion to note from this understanding of Socrates’ “diagnostic” efforts is that

they can only be effective when his interlocutors share their true beliefs and attitudes, and thus

their true soul. Socrates’ commitment to getting at the true soul of his interlocutor is

demonstrated perhaps most dramatically in the Protagoras when he insists that the sophist drop

his elusive character and confront their conversation forthrightly and respond in a way that

would make him accountable for his words: “I’ve got no interest in investigating in this ‘if you

like’ and ‘if that’s what you want’ kind of way; it’s the real you and me I want to test.” The way

Socrates indicates both Protagoras and himself reveals his own vulnerability and accountability

as much as the sophist’s, and reiterates the previous passage from the Laws that points out the

potential for transformation by both physician and interlocutor.

Many parts of this dialogue, in fact, are motivated by this concern for understanding the

“real” Protagoras. The very first lines exchanged between Socrates and the famous sophist make

it clear: “it is you we have come to see.” Later, as their discussion progresses and Socrates makes

several pleas for brevity, the breakdown of the dialogue shows a breakdown in Protagoras’ ability

to answer in his own voice rather than in speeches. Protagoras understood the conversation as a

performance of words, and not as an opportunity for he and Socrates to meet and examine each

other’s souls: “I saw that he was dissatisfied with his own performance in the answers he had

given, and would not of his own free will continue in the role of answerer, and it seemed to me

that it was not my business to remain any longer in the discussions.” Without Protagoras’


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willingness to submit his soul for open critique and understanding, Socrates has nothing to offer

him as a healer concerned for the health of his soul. Again, as the previous passages from the

Seventh Letter and the Laws have noted, it is the physician’s practical wisdom to know if she can

offer any genuine help to her patients, i.e., whether they will open their soul to the process of

healing.

This concern for the true soul of the interlocutor is likewise an animating element in the

Gorgias. Within the first few pages of the dialogue, Socrates mentions not only an interest what

Gorgias’ art is and what he teaches, but he tells Chaerephon to ask the obvious question: who is

he? This concern comes out again later in the dialogue in the heat of his discussion with Polus

about the difference between doing and suffering injustice. Socrates holds Polus to the their

discussion in the hope that it will test his true beliefs and thus his true character, in a way that

again reminds us of the medical backdrop that motivates Socrates’ care for the soul of his

interlocutor: “Submit nobly to the argument as you would to a doctor, and say either yes or no to

my question.”

It is also worth noting that prior to this passage there are many instances where Socrates

attempts to redirect his engagement with these different rhetoricians back towards a true

dialogue. At 448d-e, Socrates rebukes Polus for using rhetoric rather than answering the

question asked of him; at 451d-e, he claims Gorgias is being unclear and giving “debatable”

answers; and at 466a-b, he cuts Polus off from beginning a speech and asks him to stick to a

single question. Perhaps most significantly, the dialogue begins with Callicles’ expectation that

Socrates and Chaerephon had come to listen to Gorgias’ speech, but Socrates is quick to shift this

assumption in a way that seems to frame the whole dialogue: “What you say is good, Callicles.


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But then, would he [Gorgias] be willing to talk [dialegesthai] with us?”

The emphasis on true and excellent political dialogue becomes one of the defining

themes of this work, and Socrates’ interactions with the different interlocutors in this work

attempt to model the excellences of dialogue as a true meeting between open souls. His efforts

are thwarted (to a greater or lesser extent) in each encounter, and his ability to affect the souls of

each of the three interlocutors in their turn seems to be determined to a great extent by the quality

of the dialogue they share. Gorgias, the great rhetorician himself, ends up the most amicable of

the three, but the final encounter between Callicles and Socrates bears a caustic bitterness that

leaves the two at odds through the very end of the dialogue. The significant aspect of their

encounter is Socrates’ failure to build the open philosophical friendship that allows for the

possibility of change in either party. Despite Socrates’ claims to friendship early on in their

discussion, his inability to get Callicles to commit to a single, coherent view leads to a near-

breakdown in the dialogue in a way very similar to that in the Protagoras:

Oh! Oh! Callicles, how all-cunning you are… at one time claiming that things are this way, and at another time that the same things are otherwise, deceiving me! And yet I did not think at the beginning that I was to be deceived by you voluntarily, since you were my friend. But now I have been played false, and it looks like it’s necessary for me… to make do with what is present and to accept from you this that is given.

Without a clear view of what beliefs are truly at stake for Callicles, Socrates is helpless to create

an effective diagnosis or treatment for the deformities in his soul. Socrates’ enterprise rested on

the assumption of friendship and forthrightness between them, and when this was manifestly

destroyed by the harsh rebukes and irascible temperament Callicles demonstrated, the dialogue

stopped being a potentially healing, transformative relationship. As if to salvage the matter,


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Socrates turns his arguments towards the rest of his listeners who have variously shown promise

for improvement, while admitting his failure to Callicles directly: “Truly, Callicles, you

compelled me to engage in popular speaking, by not being willing to answer.” Although Callicles

is not given a chance to respond to the last speech Socrates offers, his final answer makes it clear

that he is unwilling to see beyond a politics of gratification. In this final question to Callicles,

however, Socrates implicitly proves his commitment to working for the sake of the Good.

Explicitly aligning his view with the medical metaphor argued in this paper, he aspires to be the

type of politician who would not simply gratify the polis, but “[fight] with the Athenians so that

they will be as good as possible, as a doctor would do.”

IV. CONCLUSION

In this paper, I have tried to stress the importance of Plato’s dialogical form, as well as

certain key passages in the Seventh Letter which point to a different conception of philosophy

than that provided by the ‘proto-essay’ view. Plato seems to conceive of philosophy in such a

way that it even defies the very form in which we carry his tradition, that is, in writing.

Philosophy is to be taken as a profound personal change affected by rigorous immersion in the

philosophical life and the guidance of a master. To the extent that it demands a “well-ordered

scheme of living,” it seems to point to a certain health of the soul and the many regimens and

restorative measures necessary for its maintenance. Given the esoteric quality and considerable

differences between the views espoused across the many dialogues, it was my contention that

Plato’s intentions in the dialogues be recast as a concern and care for the health of the soul.

Through this lens, the dramatic Socrates’ engagement with his interlocutors could be

modeled after the physician-patient relationship. Such a relationship demands a basic sense of


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trust and fidelity, an openness and vulnerability to be changed by the pressures of dialogue and

healing, and an orientation towards the Good which recognizes the individual in their concrete

situation and problems. I have used the Protagoras and the Gorgias to demonstrate the

difficulties and obstacles endemic to creating the model healing relationship advocated by the

medical metaphor. The breakdowns in these dialogues occur precisely because Socrates’

interlocutors close themselves off from the open process of dialogue that would allow him to

examine their soul and affect a treatment. In spite of this, Socrates’ commitment to the healing

task – to take in his interlocutors as a physician of the soul and struggle with them for their

welfare – still provides a novel and illuminating reading of the dialogues, and could serve as an

invigorating reorientation for other philosophical traditions.

Bibliography“On Ancient Medicine.” Hippocrates, Volume 1. Translated by W. Jones. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1956.

Brumbaugh, Robert. “Digressions and Dialogue: The Seventh Letter and Plato’s Literary Form” Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 84-92. Print.

Edelstein, Ludwig. Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein. Ed. O. Temkin Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Pg. 109

Griswold, Charles. Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Pg 221

Jeager, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.Vol. III. Translated by G. Highet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1967. Pg. 3

King, Lester S. “Plato’s Concepts of Medicine.”(Journal of the History of Medicine. January (1954): 38-48

Long, Christopher. Lecture on Plato’s Protagoras. The Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2009, PHIL553: Ancient Philosophy Seminar


83

Moes, Mark. Plato’s Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2000

Plato. “Alcibiades 2.” Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 8. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1955.

-------. “Charmides.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition.

-------. “Laches.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition

-------. “Laws.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by A.E. Taylor. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition

-------. “Letter VII.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by L.A. Post. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition.

------. “Lysias.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by J. Wright. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition

-------. “Meno.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition

-------. “Phaedo.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition.

-------. “Phaedrus.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by R. Hackforth. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition.

-------. “Protagoras.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition


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-------. “Republic.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Paul Shorey. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition.

-------. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998

-------. Protagoras and Meno. Translated by Adam Beresfprd. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 331c; my emphasis

Sayre, Kenneth M. “A Maieutic View of Five Late Dialogues.” Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Ed. James Klagge and Nicholas Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pg. 221-243

Sayre, Kenneth M. "Plato's Writings in Light of the Seventh Letter." Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 93-109. Print.

Plato. “Alcibiades 2.” Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 8. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1955. 146e; my emphasis Jeager, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.Vol. III. Translated by G. Highet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1967. Pg. 3 Sayre, Kenneth M. “A Maieutic View of Five Late Dialogues.” Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Ed. James Klagge and Nicholas Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pg. 221-243 Cf. Plato. “Protagoras.” Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 361c Cf. Ibid., 358b Cf. Plato. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 475a; 492a ff Cf. Plato. “Republic.” Translated by Paul Shorey. 435d-444a Cf. Plato. “Phaedo.” Translated by Hugh Tredennick. 78b-84b Plato. “Letter VII.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by L.A. Post. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. 341c-d; My emphasis Note: all citations from the dialogues not listing a volume or book should be assumed to come from this source. Cf. Brumbaugh, Robert. “Digressions and Dialogue: The Seventh Letter and Plato’s Literary Form” Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 84-92. Print. Sayre, Kenneth M. "Plato's Writings in Light of the Seventh Letter." Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 93-109. Print. Plato. “Phaedrus.” Translated by R. Hackforth. 275c-d; my emphasis Plato. “Letter VII.” Translated by L.A. Post. 343a Ibid.,341d Translated by L.A. Post with minor alterations to the italicized words by Mark Moes. [Moes translation found in Plato’s Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul (New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2000. Pg. 45-46), to which I am indebted for much of the inspiration for this paper. Sayre, Kenneth M. "Plato's Writings in Light of the Seventh Letter." Pg. 103 Plato. “Letter VII.” Translated by L.A. Post. 340d-e; my emphasis Plato. “Meno.” Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 72d-e Plato. “Protagoras.” Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 313e Plato. “Phaedrus.” Translated by R. Hackforth. 276a-b; my emphasis Plato. “Letter VII.” Translated by L.A. Post. 330d-331d Plato. “Charmides.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett. 157a See Gorgias, 450a: “medicine too, as it seems, is about speeches” Plato. “Laws.” Translated by A.E. Taylor. 720b-d; my emphasis


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Griswold, Charles. Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Pg 221 Plato. “Lysias.” Translated by J. Wright. 217a Ibid., 219a; my emphasis Ibid., 219a Plato. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. 464c; my emphasis Ibid. 465a Plato. “Republic.” Translated by Paul Shorey. 342d Ibid. 342e-343a See Lester S. King’s article “Plato’s Concepts of Medicine.”( Journal of the History of Medicine. January (1954): 38-48) for an overview and discussion of the radical paternalism and eugenics arguments developed in the Republic Interestingly, shortly before these passages about the physician’s overriding concern for the patient, he differentiates the physician from the “money-maker” (341c), claiming the former cannot have fee-earning as a necessary component of his art. Such selflessness that was ostensibly obvious in Plato’s time could provide a sharp corrective to our own. Plato. “Laches.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett. 185c-d Plato. “Phaedrus.” Translated by R. Hackforth. 268a-c

Edelstein, Ludwig. Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein. Ed. O. Temkin Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Pg. 109 I give full credit to Christopher Long for developing and sharing these ideas in a class-based discussion of this work (Long, Christopher. Lecture on Plato’s Protagoras. The Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2009, PHIL553: Ancient Philosophy Seminar) “On Ancient Medicine.” Hippocrates, Volume 1. Translated by W. Jones. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1956. Pg. 2; my emphasis Moes, Mark. Plato’s Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2000 Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Translated by Adam Beresfprd. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 331c; my emphasis Plato, “Protagoras.” Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 316b Ibid., 335a-b; my emphasis Plato. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. 447b-d Ibid., 475d-e Ibid., 447b-c Ibid., 487c-e Ibid., 499b-c Ibid., 519d Ibid., 521a; my emphasis

PAGEXXX


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An ensemble of Inter-Galactic Techno-Tribal Saltimbanques

Nauman Humayun


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Whereas ‘Ever After’, an exhibition currently up at Jack Shainman gallery, finds Nick

Cave’s more minimal, mystical side of the creative endeavor, the artist engages in a more

effulgent and imaginary realm in his concurrent show at Mary Boone gallery, entitled ‘For Now’,

(in collaboration with Jack Shainman gallery), where he reveals himself as a veteran voodoo-

mixologist, pulling together a rich variety of media, including mannequins, found objects, fabric,

animal toys, buttons, beads, and brewing a splendid psychedelic cocktail of swarming colorful

‘alien beings’ that are visually inebriating to the eye.Whereas Ever After, concurrently up at Jack

Shainman gallery, finds Nick Cave’s more minimal, mystical side of the creative endeavor, the

artist, for now, indulges in a more effulgent imaginary realm in For Now, at Mary Boone gallery,

where he reveals himself as a veteran voodoo-mixologist, pulling together a rich variety of

media, found objects, upholstery, fabric, sweaters, animal toys, buttons and beads, and brewing a

splendid psychedelic cocktail of colorful alien beings that are visually inebriating to the eye.

Who or what are these creatures? I say ‘creatures’ because at first glance they appear very

organic, jello and funky, like something out of Parliamant-Funkadelic; they are inter-dimensional

flavored beings, I tell myself, as I amusingly try to comprehend other ontological scenarios for

these oversized, popsicle-shaped alien acrobatics, or very likely, some configuration of their

soulful fruity hard-ons. Then, I remind myself, they are meant to be ‘Soundsuits’, as intended by

the artist; suits that express and encompass the realm of sound in one form or another, and link

its elemental properties to the body, the being, the presence, the spectacle, and ultimately, to the

invigorating theatricality of a ‘Techno-Tribal’ carnival. The Soundsuits may also function as


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‘noise-proof’ encasings: talismanic defense encapsulations camouflaging the creature’s (the

alien) body, race, gender, class, and embellishing a shield around the body, ensuring a protective

barrier to conceal inner fragility and repel cultural typecasts and labels.

Cave proclaims his congregation of wacky personalities as a “psychedelic, functified

freak show that is an accumulation of the decades from the perspective of voodoo woo-loo.”

Voodoo magic and Shamanic ritual conjuration — a concocted exposition of tribal-visual

incantation: these are themes central to the show, and in a strong way draw us back to our ancient

past, nearer to some sort of an imaginary re-actualization of the primitive, an archaic revival,

where ritual and magic played an important part in Cromagnon ceremonial festivities. The work

of the artist welcomes a return to the ancient notion and practice of magic, ritual and spirit, and

especially of the need for re-linking and re-integrating some aspect of it in contemporary

technotronic life.

Cave’s performers are not demure by any means, but radiate the rococo, the ornate, and

are unabashedly resplendent and unrestrained; one hardly misses the ancient megalithic

connection here as well, with regard to the elongated shape and arrangement of the figures (think

of the Stonehenge, the Callanish Stones, the statues on Easter Island). However, the artist re-

aestheticizes his own version of the ancient tribalesque relic through a full palette of color, sound

and radiance — a spectralized, organismic libidinal splendor; a turbo-charged visual cacophony

of psychedelic-relic glossolalia: These chromatic tribalesque ‘relics’ are engaged on stage in a

ritualistic, linguistic-symphony of sense and non-sense, voodoo chants and other supernatural


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utterances through an elaborate visual display of color, form and pattern.

While scanning the stage where these suits are assembled, I am funnily reminded of

Terence McKenna’s description of the ‘Self-Transforming Machine Elves’ — rumored by the

legendary psychedelic explorer as alien inter-dimensional beings that appear in the psychonaut’s

inner perceptual field during hyperreal DMT flashes of otherworldly proportions. These elves, or

let us call them a band of nomadic peregrinate acrobats, are fond of random encampments,

planting their tents pretty much anywhere in the stretch of a vast surreal dreamscape, and from

time to time as a gesture of compassion, love and joviality, putting on a carnivalesque display of

florid bright colors, song and dance. This is the artist’s affirmation, realization and celebration of

a modern Dionysian utopia.


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Photographs by Nauman Humayun

For Now is up at Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24 Street, and will continue through 22 October 2011. For further information, contact www.maryboonegallery.com

http://www.maryboonegallery.com/


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The Soft-Boiled Egg

Katrina Voss

All at once, there was the splattering sound of the gravel. I'd been waiting for it. I stayed in the

gazebo but I stopped reading. The print got smaller, too small to read. Too distant. I no longer

felt the pages or smelled the grass or heard the rocking of my chair. I closed my eyes and

listened. I wanted it to begin at that moment so I would always remember it. So I would

remember when it started and what started it: The opening and closing of a car door and someone

treading across the gravel. My mother opening the front door to greet him. Her voice. The man's

voice.

I went inside through the back door and passed the kitchen where Valentina was

preparing the silver coffee set. She turned and half smiled at me, her hands on the apron of her

uniform and her chin up. The light from the kitchen lit up her white blond hair. Only her breast

moved as though her breath might be quick. I moved close enough for her to take my hand.

"They're going in the library. Go on. Get a look at him."

I crossed the hall and stood by the library door. My mother and the man sat opposite each

other. She wore a white cotton dress. She smiled and pressed her palms together. Her hair was

pulled back and her face moved as she spoke, her cheeks pinkish and stretching into smiles. I

liked her terribly at that moment.

My father sat at my mother's left. He smoked his pipe and nodded to my mother's words.


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About the man's drive and the heat. About the pollen in the air. About when lunch would be

served.

The man wore a yellow suit and a held a Panama hat on one knee. I was not struck, as I

had imagined, with the first sight of him. The thought, knowing, this one. Rather I thought of

cartoon cats in yellow suits and started to laugh. They heard and they all turned to look at me.

"Eve," my mother said. "This is Mr. Lee." Mr. Lee stood and put out his left hand. I put

my right hand into it and he accepted it, fingers first. His palm, warm and damp with fresh sweat,

curled around it. With the other hand, he pushed away some of the black curls around his face. A

plain, handsome face.

"How do you do?" he said. Then to my mother, "She's even prettier than in the picture

you sent."

He extended his arm to his left, offering me a place to sit on the sofa next to him. I sat

and pulled my skirt over my knees. He was a big, muscular man and, as he sat, the sofa caved in,

causing me to slide against him. "Oh, excuse me," I said.

Valentina came in with the coffee and lemon biscuits. She served us and never looked at

me. She only looked at him, but carefully as she might look at any guest. She put out the cream

and sugar and left.

Mr. Lee bit into a biscuit. "Umm," he said to my mother.

She smiled and took one herself. "Valentina made them. She's been with us since Eve was

three years old. A jewel. A second mother to my dear Eve. Why, sometimes I get jealous." She

laughed and adjusted a pin in her hair. My father blew smoke in the air and stared into his coffee.

My mother stirred her coffee and said to my father, "Dear, why don't you have a biscuit?


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You haven't eaten anything all morning."

My father either grunted or cleared his throat.

"May I have another, ma'am?" asked Mr. Lee.

"Oh, please. As many as you like. This is no time for watching calories. We want you to

have your strength for this big day." She hunched her shoulders and winked at him. He took

another lemon biscuit.

The cushion was slowly sinking. My hip touched his thigh, as hard as frozen meat. I

could hear the biscuit in his mouth. I looked at his head, the way the temples pulsed. Beads of

sweat crept out of his hairline and hovered around his forehead. His head had a shelf-like

projection so the sweat stayed like glass marbles. My mother had stopped talking. He and my

father were assessing each other as men do.

"Well, you seem like a charming young man," said my mother. He and my father looked

at her.

"And handsome too," she added. "Mr. Lee, I must say, you have a most attractive head of

hair. Look at his hair, Eve." I looked at it. "Eve's hair color is so ho hum. I mean, what color is

this?" She leaned forward and took a clump of my hair in her palm. Mr. Lee leaned in to look, to

be polite. "And it has always been so terribly limp," she continued and dropped the hair.

"Valentina and I used to try and try to put some curl in it. God forbid, can you imagine if she had

a child with someone who had hair like hers? I must admit, Mr. Lee, I liked you initially for

your hair." She giggled.

"Really, darling," said my father. "There are more important factors than limp hair. He's a

smart, healthy young man. That's why we've...."


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"Let's not quarrel. This is our daughter's big day." She shrugged and said to Mr. Lee, "At

least we agreed. It's hard enough for us to arrive at the same decision. Why harp about which

factors we each found most important?"

My sundress was damp on my back. Mr. Lee took up most of the sofa and I felt myself

sinking into it and into him. I stood and opened the French doors to let the air in. I stood there

breathing, letting the fabric peel itself off my skin.

I heard Mr. Lee shift behind me. "That's better," he sighed.

I looked back at him. He had taken off his coat. He was eating another lemon biscuit. I

kept my back to them. The smell of lemon was thickening.

The air moved my dress around my calves. My mother was talking again, but I did not

hear it. Only the voice as if it were too far away to be words. Ahead, the gazebo. The chair where

I had left my book, the pages switching about as the occasional gust shot through. There were no

other houses for miles. Only scattered trees, lakes, and, distantly, the highway. From the porch on

the other end of the house, the water was barely visible. But from the garden, the land seemed

endless in all directions.

"I'm sorry you had to come on a Sunday," my mother was saying. "But today is the day.

Oh, it's going to be lovely! My little girl! She's all grown up."

I looked back at my mother. The barrette pulling her hair back, flattening it over the curve

of her skull. I looked out the door again towards the highway.

"Valentina will serve lunch soon," my mother said.

"Very well," my father said and made the throat noise again.

I felt Mr. Lee come up behind me, the expanse of him like an invisible weight. "What's


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for lunch, anyway?" I heard him ask.

"Soft-boiled eggs," said my mother.

Soft-boiled eggs again. My mother believed eggs were the perfect food. The source of

life. Protein. DNA. Where the beginning of life resides. All my life, we had eaten three eggs a

week. I had always feared the white, sticky slime, the slippery yolk, the smell of eggs, the idea of

eggs: not plant, not quite animal. Somehow, a soft-boiled egg was not as scary as an uncooked

egg. Soft-boiled eggs are only half cooked. The eggness is still there. The yolk stays wet and

fluid. But the white hardens and sticks to the shell. The mysterious amusement of eating an egg

from an eggcup: the egg stays in place. Breaking the top and seeing into it like a cavern of warm

white and yellow. The depth. The strong primal smell.

I turned around. Mr. Lee was wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Valentina came in the

library to clear the coffee.

"Valentina, is lunch almost ready?" my mother asked. She took Valentina aside and

whispered, "And the dining room? Don't forget the fresh flowers. And Eve's nails. After all, this

is a day to celebrate." Valentina nodded and started to leave. "When are the guests arriving?" my

mother said to her back.

"Not until 2:00," said Valentina.

My mother looked at my father, "Well, of course," she said. "It is Sunday." Valentina and

I smiled at each other. Her eyes glazed and her lips tightened. She swiftly left with the tray.

At noon Valentina served us lunch. My father at the head of the table. My mother to his

left. Mr. Lee at the other end of the table in front of the window. The sweat had disappeared and

his hair was smoother. The light filtered through the half opened curtains and fell across the stark


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linen tablecloth in changing, circular designs. The fresh flowers. A small basket of white bread. A

salad of sun dried tomatoes, endive lettuce, and olives. Soft-boiled eggs served in white china

eggcups, each rim shaped like a curling flower, its petals beginning to open and separate.

I had always admired the way my mother cut the shell in one sharp smooth line around

the upper quarter of the egg. Somehow it never seemed to burn her fingers. She turned the knife

around it and lifted off the top in one swift incision. I looked down at my imperfect egg. My

shattered egg. The yellow and pulpy white that sticks to the cut off lid.

After lunch I bathed and dressed upstairs. Valentina did my hair, my nails, and helped me

with my dress. "Don't be nervous," she said. "The worst thing you can do is tense up. Just relax

and soon it will be over with." I saw her behind me in the mirror, her sweet face and her mouth

tightening with the advent of tears. I turned and put my arms around her. "Oh, Valentina! Why do

things have to change?"

The guests arrived at 2:00. Valentina had made champagne cocktails. When I came

downstairs my parents were entertaining the guests in the parlor. My mother wore her yellow

dress with the petal embroidery. My father had a flower in his lapel. In one hand his glass of

champagne was beginning to tilt. His lips were wet and he was smiling more. He always came

alive with guests to whom he could show something off. They were passing around the file,

smiling over it and slowly sipping champagne. It was an outstanding genetic profile, so

complimentary to mine. "This genetic material," my father had told me, "provides a perfect

infusion into our genetic line. You'll thank me for this someday." My stomach ached, the soft-

boiled egg in it like a weight. I remembered doctors. The touching and looking. They had said it

must be today.


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My mother was at my father's ear saying, "Now don't be cocky, dear." I looked at him

with his glass in the air. $5,000. A small price to pay for the future. And then Mr. Lee would get

into his car, and with the second crack of the gravel, be gone from our lives forever.

They insisted we not drink champagne. I knew when it was time. Mr. Lee and I climbed

the steps to my bedroom. The window was closed but the open curtain let the sunlight fall

through it and cover the sheets with glistening white points of light. The sound of the guests,

their clapping, their voices, faded. I heard it like a low murmur, like a memory of sound. My

hands were useless. Cold.

He closed the door. His hands were on my waist, my back. The dress fell like a piece of

dead skin. His hands moved to my waist. My stomach. The free skin damp and bristling. His skin

like a hide. He pressed me onto the bed and his shadow moved over me, covering the window

and the afternoon sunlight. My legs collapsed. A cold pain spiraled from my stomach to my

throat. My fingers curled like petals against the sheet. The different parts of him were like

instruments, each with its purpose. He never kissed me but I could feel his breath on my neck

and cheek.


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Party

Peter Matyskiela

We get to the party around 10:30 and it’s on the corner of this really shady street that I

can’t remember the name of – I just know that it’s about 6 blocks and I’m feeling kind of pissed

that Mike made us walk out this far for such a shitty house. There’s a kid sitting on the front

stoop in a grey hooded sweatshirt with this self assured look on his face and he says “ Five

dollars bro,” real calm like, and I hand him the money. I look around the party and I can’t see

anyone I know and Mike is already out dancing with some girl and I’m just standing here with

plastic cup in hand and I start to feel anxious. I find the nearest keg and wait for what seems like

10 minutes till I can fill my cup and then I go back to look for Mike.

There are all these people around, laughing and talking, and when I walk by them they all

sort of glance up at me and shift out of the way like I’m interrupting them. I hear my name called

and I look around and I see Glenn over by the window with beads around his neck and

sunglasses pushed halfway down his nose. Glenn is a kid I knew from high school, but since we

didn’t really know anyone when we got to college, we ended up hanging out a lot more, but I’m

not really sure if I would call us friends. I make my way through the crowd and he’s with this girl

who keeps looking back and forth from me to him, smiling. “This is Melissa,” he tells me.


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“Hi, Melissa,” I say.

“Melissa has coke,” says Glenn. He smiles.

“Wanna do a couple lines?” she asks with an innocent schoolgirl look.

“Sure,” I say.

We make our way to an upstairs bedroom and close the door and Melissa cuts three lines

out on a mirror and we each do one. I gag a little from the drip and Glenn stretches and says,

“Hey man did you hear about George?”

“George who?”

“You know, George. He had real dark hair; I think he was in our physics class? Shit, what

was his last name?” I look at him and shrug. “Well anyway he died man. Isn’t that fucked up?

Cancer or something. Makes you think.”

I wonder who George is and then Melissa offers us more lines. Glenn says no he has to

go meet some people and leaves, so Melissa says, “More for us,” and splits his coke into two

lines.

After that we’re both pretty high and Melissa starts asking me all these questions about

what I like to do and what my plans are for the future. I give vague answers, but it doesn’t really

matter. It seems like every time I try to answer she interrupts with a new question. She sits closer


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to me and starts to massage my shoulders, but her eyes look bloodshot and I feel weird so I say,

“Thanks for the coke,” and “It was nice meeting you,” and I head back downstairs to the main

floor. I look around for Mike and I don’t see him so I decide to check for him in the basement.

The door to the basement is in the kitchen, and in the kitchen they’re selling shots for a

dollar. As I’m weaving my way through people to the basement door, some random guy grabs

me and says, “We should totally do some shots.” I’m still very high from the coke and not sure

what to say, so we each give out two dollars and do two shots of vodka . “Alright bro,” he says

and he slaps me hard on the back. I smile and head into the basement.

It’s dark and the music is blaring and the only light is from a strobe above the DJ and

some black lights hanging from the ceiling. Down in the basement I see a few more people that I

know, all of them from high school, but I don’t feel any less relaxed and start looking around for

Mike before I get noticed. I don’t see him, but this girl Amy sees me. She was thin in high school

and I notice she is looking even thinner now, almost sickly. She walks up smiling with a camera

in her hand and puts her arm around me and takes a picture of us. “How you been love?”

“Alright, you?”

“I’m great, just great. Hey, oh my God, did you hear about George? He OD’d.” I just look

at her and she lights up a joint and offers it to me. We smoke that for awhile and she talks about

how bad she feels for George’s family. As we’re smoking, I can hear this really loud shriek and I


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look up and see a girl sitting on the floor by the stairs and she’s crying her eyes out. No one

seems to know why or, at least, if they do, they don’t act like it. She keeps looking up at

everyone, but people just look away and try to distance themselves from her. She sees me staring

and she gives me this look like I’m the one responsible for her crying, as if I should do

something about it. I wonder if I know her from somewhere, but I’m pretty sure I don’t. I take a

long hard hit as I’m looking at her and, as I blow the smoke out, she buries her head in her hands

again. Amy takes one more hit and then flicks the roach to the floor. Then she walks away to talk

to someone else she knows and I look around – I still don’t see Mike.

I run into more people I know and I ask them if they’ve seen Mike; they haven’t – maybe

he’s in the back by the keg. One girl asks if I’ll dance with her if she buys me a jell-o shot. She’s

a little bit shorter than me and has dirty blonde hair and a pretty cute face, so I say yes. A rap

song is playing, but it’s so loud and distorted I can’t tell what it is or who it’s by. The girl is

dancing pretty close to me and we’re both sweating in the middle of a crowd of people. The

lights keep flashing and I wonder if the joint was laced. The room feels like its tilting and the girl

asks me if I heard about George’s car crash. I tell her I don’t know who George is and I’m

sweating so much and I feel like yelling. The room is spinning and there are all these people

around me dancing and howling like animals. It’s so loud that I can feel the vibrations from the

music blasting through my skin and reverberating in my body. Everyone’s voices are mixed and I

can feel the blood pumping through my veins. I hear someone calling me. Looking around, I find

no one. I hear the voice call out again, “George!” it says. What? I stop dancing. Why did I think

they were calling me? My name isn’t George, is it? I feel sick and push the girl away; I tell her


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sorry, but I have to go. No… no, of course not. That isn’t my name. Whose name is it? I see

Glenn and tell him that if he sees Mike he should tell him I left early. He tells me I don’t look so

good and I leave the party.

As I’m walking back I see a homeless man sitting on the street next to a pile of rags and I

just know he is going to beg for money. My head still throbs with the beat of the party and I just

cannot deal with that right now. I cross the street to get away from him and a kid on a bike flies

by me. Laughing, he throws a rock at the homeless man. His head tilts forward slightly, but he

remains inert - as if he didn’t even know what had happened. I wonder if he is still alive and how

long he had been there. I shudder, zip up my jacket and hurry down the road.

When I get back the house Mike is sitting on the couch and watching TV. “Wow you’re

back early,” I say.

“Yeah I just wasn’t feeling it. That party was too crowded.”

“Yeah. Hey did you hear about George?”

“Who?”

“George.” A confused look is Mike’s only response, “He had dark hair?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Oh,” I say.

“You don’t look too good,” Mike says.

I shrug, head upstairs and lay on my bed - staring at the ceiling.


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Shadows Out Of Time and Space: The European Avant-Garde and the Future of the Blues

Shuja Haider

Part 1

1. In his 1975 text Blues and the Poetic Spirit, Paul Garon attempts an analysis of African-

American blues music using a Surrealist methodology, one that properly incorporates the

psychoanalytic theory integral to that movement, and does not assume bourgeois definitions of

notions like politics or, indeed, "poetry." For Garon, it is essential to reconceive poetry in a

manner informed by the practice of Surrealism, and developed most of all in the writing of Andre

Breton. Garon says in his introduction,

Hopefully the concept of poetry which, as an activity of mind, has

been totally ignored by the same critics—so preoccupied have they

been with outmoded theories of meter, rhyme, and the retrograde

doltish sniveling of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and their ilk—hopefully

everything having to do with poetry, in the most vital and active

sense as the revolt of the spirit, will be clarified in the discussions

that follow. (Garon 6)

Garon finds surrealism in the blues, conceiving of surrealism as a discursive method

rather than an historical period. His materialist approach is indebted to an idea Andre

Breton and Leon Trotsky expressed in their “Manifesto Toward a Revolutionary Art,”


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which insisted that “we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under

which creative activity takes place; nor should we fail to pay all respect to those

particular laws which govern intellectual creation” (What Is Surrealism? 243).

As Breton himself acknowledged elsewhere, the things most surrealists had in common

were a petty-bourgeois background and an inclination toward plastic arts and literature (WIS

153). Garon’s aim is to start out under different intellectual conditions and locate what we might

call a “surrealist impulse,” to invert a phrase coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1966 essay “R&B

and the Changing Same”—“the blues impulse” (Baraka 180). This is not a tidy equivalence, but

in considering either respective practice as impulse rather than category, the walls of dominant

ideological categories like nation, class, genre, and so on weaken and crumble.

Ironically, it is this imperative that Garon loses sight of, and it becomes the glaring

aporia in his study. While Garon is undeniably fluent with the plurality of Surrealist thought,

with its incorporation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other component parts, his conception of

the blues falls victim to the same reification and superficiality he decries in the introduction.

Framing the statement-of-purpose he begins with is a desperate lament for dearly departed blues.

Occasional glimmers of hope that the trend of blues revivalism will bring the insight and

revolutionary character of the form back to American culture confirm the point: the blues once

was, and is no more (Garon vii). Any rigor in the remainder of the text is compromised with

expressions of Garon’s distaste for any African-American music besides blues and jazz, at one

point condemning Junior Wells and Buddy Guy for sounding too much like James Brown, even

sniping at the supposed poetic deficit in the Godfather’s words (Garon 29).

The short-sighted pessimism of Garon’s treatment of black music is unfortunate in


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light of the complexity and precision of his analysis of the blues. However, Garon refuses to

complement his notion of a surrealist impulse with the blues impulse identified by Baraka,

resulting in infidelity to his own dialectical, historical commitment. To break open the

boundaries erected by Garon requires a willingness to look in the wrong places, taking to heart

Franklin Rosemont’s identification of an “accursed tradition” in popular culture, illuminated by

surrealism, that is “emblazoned by the colors of the future” (Garon 224-5). Music, mostly

ignored by the Surrealist movement, provides a necessary point of departure for futures of the

European avant-garde's “spirit of revolt.” Paul Garon’s work can help point the way, albeit in

between the lines.

2. Looking in the wrong places—the basis of a form like collage—is no doubt a crucial avant-

gardist habit. It also is what was happening when Andre Breton, “who boasted he never went to

concerts, nonetheless made it a point to attend jazz performances during his exile in New York,”

and when European avant-gardists collected and danced to jazz records (WIS 348).# It was also a

willingness to look in unexpected directions that led Andre Breton to write, in 1946, a careful

examination of music, taking positions contrary to the disdain for music that had been second

nature for many surrealists. In that essay, “Silence is Golden,” Breton acknowledges a “general

antagonism” that presents itself for writers between music and language (WIS 349). Admitting

that his ability to speak on the subject is marred by his lack of musical knowledge, he

nonetheless suggests that, “like all the antimonies presented by modern thought,” this

antagonism should not be “fruitlessly deplored but, on the contrary, should be interpreted as an

indication of the necessity for a recasting of certain principles of the two arts” (350). He

compares this possibility to one he had already seen in the plastic arts:


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The painter will fail in his human mission if he continues to widen

the gulf separating representation and perception instead of working

towards their reconciliation, their synthesis. In the same way, on the

auditive plane, I believe that music and poetry have everything to

lose by not recognizing a common origin and a common end in song,

by letting the mouth of Orpheus get farther every day from the lyre of

Thrace. (351)

Ironically, as the musical avant-garde of the time largely eschewed narrative both textual and

melodic, Breton called for a return to the tradition of song.

In the end, though, parallels between music and painting or music and literature cannot

hold too securely, as Garon inadvertently demonstrates in his reluctance to engage with music

proper, focusing solely on blues lyrics instead. “From the outset,” he writes in his introduction,

“we must emphasize our irritation at the lack of understanding we have of the specific emotional

meaning of music” (Garon 9). Music does, in a sense, seem to fall outside of Breton’s definition

of surrealism: “to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the

actual functioning of thought” (Breton Manifestoes 26). Can music correspond to a typology of

art limited to representation and perception? It is equally arguable that music causes certain

“functioning of thought” rather than expresses it—though it would be the greatest mistake to

argue it is merely one or the other. Breton and Garon’s focus on the fusion of words and music

dodges the issue of how music as such affects the mind. Though Garon quotes psychoanalyst

Heinz Kohut as claiming that in speech “tone” communicates more than words (which are

related to psychoanalytic “secondary processes”), he does not engage with how this presents


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itself in the musical form of the blues, focusing instead on a model of “identification”—a

relationship between listener and performer based on a linguistic model of representation (Garon

13;16).

There is certainly a representative aspect of music. Taken to its extreme it would leave

a Looney Tunes model of sound/image correspondence (Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”

means love, Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” means fear, descending augmented fifths are

equivalent to embarrassment, brass bands playing major chords embody triumph, etc.). This is

hardly a satisfactory understanding of the form. Perhaps music would be better thought of as a

singular variation of the “profane illumination” Walter Benjamin credits surrealism with

exposing, the experience of which brings new thoughts, emotions, and instincts to the surface of

the psyche—as productive rather than merely representative (Benjamin 209).

3. Garon’s avoidance of the aural is one reason he cannot surmount the limitations inherent to a

generic definition of the blues. He rebukes the “constant resorting to vague criteria like ‘funky’

and ‘soul,’” as evidence that we are “still incapable of describing, in secondary process terms

(words), the nature of our primary process response to the blues” (Garon 13). This is vital to his

dismissal of later R&B and soul music, the most explicit symptom of his linguistic bias. He goes

as far as to equate the very concept of “soul,” not to mention the genre, with “bourgeois values”

and in opposition to the “nastiness” of the blues (as described by a middle-class African-

American informant in an anthropological study) (Garon 27; 32). Garon’s strange conclusions

become mere presumption, because he refuses to ask a necessary question. What is soul?

No less authority than George Clinton, conceptualizer of the avant-gardist musical

organization Parliament-Funkadelic, explored this line of inquiry five years before the


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publication of Garon’s book, in a song that takes the form of a classic call-and-response blues

chant. In response to the call “what is soul,” Clinton’s various answers include:

“Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes.”

“Soul is the ring around your bathtub.”

“Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper.”

“Soul is rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps.”

“Soul is chitlins foo yung.”

“Soul is you.”

He goes on to make the claim that “all that is good is nasty” (“Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”).

Without even examining the surreality of Clinton’s poetry, it becomes clear that to at least one

African-American soul and funk musician indebted to the blues (celebrated on the same album,

Funkadelic’s eponymous debut, in “Good Old Music” and “Music for My Mother”), “soul”

signifies the very material of black proletarian life, often by its proud, incongruous presence

within bourgeois society. The concept later developed by Clinton of “funkentelechy,” the

expressive materialization of a resistant unconscious element immanent to those conditions, is

not far from “psychic autonomism,” without that notion’s problematic Cartesianism

(Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome).

One need not even go as far as the deliberately surrealistic disposition of George

Clinton to release the blues impulse; casually dismissed in Poetic Spirit, James Brown used the

blues form as the foundation of his most revolutionary single, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,”

and was steadfast in his refusal to whitewash the Black vernacular with which he spoke, sung,

and otherwise vocally produced noise.


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The example of “Brand New Bag,” as well as Funkadelic, brings to light another

particularly counterintuitive oversight in Garon’s analysis. It is a safe assumumption that most if

not all of the blues compositions that Garon discusses were, like the aforementioned pop records,

commercially released in the commodity form of the seven or twelve-inch vinyl record. This is

hardly a small matter; the approach taken by thinkers like Andre Breton and Walter Benjamin led

them to understand the emergence of the commodity forms of the novel, the photograph, and

film, due to both the nature of their experience and their reproducibility, as significant historical

shifts. Mass-produced records are sonic equivalents, and the relationship of recorded blues to the

oral tradition of blues is far too complex to be overlooked, subsumed in a naive faith in the

integrity of representation. Just as Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst and others made the

nature of the presence itself of text (or image) on a page an aspect of surrealist literature,

revolutionary musical forms in an age when mechanical reproduction was a given would explore

the particularities of the form of their artwork-commodity.

4. A charge consistently made against popular culture, by Adorno and others, is that its form

mirrors its industrial means of production; the repetitive structures and “formulaic” patterns are

nothing less than the presence within the artwork of the regimented rhythm of the assembly line.

This reductive analysis, made by those who do not listen closely, cannot locate any subversive

core within the blues, a genre in which nearly every song has the same poetic and harmonic

structure (three lines, three chords), both of which not only repeat, but are made up of a series of

repetitions. Paul Garon, however, approaches the issue with far more subtlety:

Considering the part played by repetition in our psychic life and

above all its manifestations in creative activity, it is likely that one


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determinant of the evolution of [the AAB] verse structure…is the

psychological tendency toward repetition, whether it relates to

mastery of unpleasant undischarged affects, repetition of what is

pleasurable in itself, or a more all-encompassing “repetition

compulsion” in the sense in which Freud posited it. (Garon 165)

That repetition is present not only within individual instances of the blues form but is also

intertextual is certainly due in part to the production of blues by a subaltern community of former

slaves. In a context with a dominant cultural norm of “progress,” repetition of certain elements—

including repetition itself—starkly declares cultural difference and autonomy.

This, however, is due to the blues’ basis in oral folk culture rather than its later pop

cultural connotation. It is worthwhile to reconsider cultural repetition and formula in a context

that does not permit refuge in the same guilt-free proletarian sanctuary. One passage in Louis

Aragon’s surrealist novel Paris Peasant finds the author in the audience of burlesque striptease

performance. He celebrates this performance—only partially ironically—as “the model of the

sort of erotic, spontaneously lyrical drama that might profitably be pondered upon by all our

aesthetes laboring painfully to produce something avant-garde.” Like any art, it “possesses its

conventions and its audacities, its disciplines and its contrasts,” within a pornographic, functional

formula (Aragon 108).

Though Aragon’s unreservedly masculine viewpoint complicates the matter, his focus

on a sexualized event leads to an unavoidable connotation of repetition: its relation to the body.

Garon quotes Austrian Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, in a discussion of the “rhythms” of

cubism, making the connection to music explicit.


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Jazz has its roots in the African tom-tom. A tom-tom that I once

thought I heard in a lecture-hall where a documentary film on X-rays

was being shown. What I confused with the beating of the ageless

drum was in actuality the proportionately amplified sound of a

greatly magnified human heart. And the beating of the heart-drum is

found again in the plastic cadence of the axe blows which liberated

the powerful cubes of Negro sculpture that inspired the beating of

cubist space. Against a contemporary intellectuality given over to its

pretension of being the accountant of the universe, it was the beating

of revolt of a new cosmic sense. (qtd. in Garon 214)

Paalen is certainly guilty of homogenizing and romanticizing a “primitive” African continent, but

there remains insight in his account. Indeed, if we take seriously psychoanalysis’s call to

consider what is “primitive” not in terms of racialized inferiority, but in reference to unalientated

libidinal expression, the notion becomes liberated from ideological orientalism and presents itself

as a quality present in radical art as such—Modern European, traditional West African,

contemporary American (Garon 12). Aragon even finds “the very spirit of the primitive theatre,”

in a “natural communion between audience and performers” at the striptease, in the role of the

audience to laugh, shout, dance, and so on (Aragon 109). It is, however, arguably Aragon’s

particular identity that makes this interpretation possible—perhaps the strippers were not quite as

thrilled. To identify a self-reflexive, deliberately revolutionary movement that achieves Aragon's

natural communion, it may become necessary to travel farther in time and space.

Part 2


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5. In a French television documentary on the music of Detroit, Michigan, composer and

performer Derrick May directs the camera to a place he considers metonymic of Detroit as a

whole: the former Michigan Theater. He describes its history:

Techno city, folks—at its best. Welcome home. Inside this building

was a theater. And they tore out the theater, and they made a carpark.

But they kept the actual theater. So you’re parking your car in a

theater. It’s fucking scary. Look at it, man. Can’t you feel it? Can’t

you see it? Look at these arches—they’ve been broken off, totally

destroyed. At one time, where we’re standing was air. People were

dancing, singing in this place at one time. This was amazing! This

was music, this was life. (Universal Techno)

May echoes Louis Aragon’s lament in Paris Peasant, which chronicles how the Parisian

Boulevard Haussmann, with its large department stores, came to replace the small shops and

stalls found before in the arcades. The effect of the Boulevard Haussmann is echoed even now in

the boulevards of the culture industry, with the vehicles of profit ceaselessly steamrolling over

passing forms, exploiting marginal movements in constant rotation.

Derrick May was one of the earliest creators of what is now called techno music. The

producers of techno (and the related forms of hip-hop, house, and electro), in defiance of the

circulation of mass culture and the false autonomy and authoritarian “originality” that circulates

in high art museums, based their craft in thrift stores, garage sales, and pawn shops. Cheap,

“obsolete,” synthesizers, that when tweaked and rewired adapted like living organisms,

producing otherworldly noises, dismantling traditional “composition” and proposing new


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methods to their human co-composers. Records no one had played for decades, their contents

transformed by samplers into subatomic particles of sound, resynthesized into nuclear bomb

beats. Sequencing machines designed for “real” musicians to practice with that no “real”

musician had tolerated, repeating loops that transformed themselves, fingers turning knobs,

knobs turning minds. These reanimated scraps formed the basis of a new musical style. The

“techno rebels,” as they called themselves, shared an insight that Walter Benjamin credited to the

surrealists, who, he wrote, were

the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the

‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings,

the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand

pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the

vogue has begun to ebb from them. (Benjamin 210)

Like these producer/composers exploring the anti-museums of urban commercial districts,

Aragon had spent much of his wanderings sifting through decades of material in unmarked

crates:

This handkerchief saleswoman, this little sugar bowl which I will

describe to you if you don’t behave yourself, are interior boundaries

of myself, ideal views I have of my laws, of my ways of thought, and

may I be strung up by the neck if this passage is anything else but a

method of freeing myself of certain inhibitions, a means of obtaining

access to a hitherto forbidden realm that lies beyond my human

energies. (Aragon 88)


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The profane illumination experienced in these Paris dérives proved to Aragon the possibility that

“future mysteries will arise from the ruins of today’s,” just as they would half a century later in

Detroit (Aragon 15).

It is collage that transforms the experience of the consumer under capitalism from

internal, affective reflection into expressive practice. As defined by Max Ernst, collage is “an

alchemical composition of two or more heterogenous elements, resulting from their unexpected

reconciliation” (qtd. in Lippard 12). Ernst could not have known it, but he had described the

performance model later used by producers and DJ’s of postmodern African-American music.

While for Ernst, these elements were reconciled through their relative flatness and their

coexistence on a canvas or page, a DJ’s canvas is the eternal beat, the repetitive pulse that never

wavers, remaining intangible and contingent. Like the canvas, it produces reconciliation, but it

never takes the form of an object. It can never acquire the aura of a Great Work that Ernst’s

collages or even Duchamp’s urinal enjoy today.

As Derrick May explains it, a DJ operates from “the philosophy of how to make

records speak to each other, how to make them sing to each other…how to make music out of

music” (Universal Techno). A record made by a producer in Berlin using a machine from Japan

that samples a rapper from New York might by played by a DJ from Detroit in a warehouse in

England, coexisting rhythmically with a record from Brazil recorded years ago in imitation of an

African-American funk musician from Georgia. This hypothetical juxtaposition is only one

possible instance of the subversion of the commodity fetish inherent in the medium of the

twelve-inch record into a means of pluralistic universalism, an alchemical transmutation of two

slabs of mere vinyl into an ethereal “third record” that shines across a dancefloor like solid gold.


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6. “Night Drive (Time Space Transmat)” is a 1985 recording by techno’s founder and namer, the

author of its earliest manifestos, Juan Atkins. Since techno music rejects the bourgeois

individualism of authorship through the constant adoption of synonyms, the label credits the

composition to "Model 500." The song, with an insistent synthesizer vamp based on the blues

scale, describes a drive down the I-94, a search for “shadows out of time and space.” It is not

unlike a trip described by Louis Aragon in the second half of Paris Peasant, a late-night dérive

with Andre Breton and Marcel Noll through a garden. Both Atkins and Aragon fixate on the

mystery of night, personifying it as a mysterious and dangerous woman. The night of the

Twenties is a “vast sheet-metal monster pierced by countless knives…Night bears tattoos,

shifting patterns of tattoos upon her breast. Her hair curlers are sparks, and where the smoke

trails have just died men are straddling falling stars” (Aragon 141). The night of the Eighties

wears a “black leather micro mini skirt,” high heels, and “mirrored sunglasses” in which the

observer’s image is terrifyingly distorted. She looks over the Detroit skyline “contemplating

contemptuously the inferior designs...and the outmoded, underpowered and otherwise obsolete

lifeforms.” Night is both a source for despair and an opening, a loosening of the social

restrictions imposed by the sun—a recurrent archetype in the blues as understood by Garon.

Likewise, blues themes of transcendental homelessness and the animalism of humans and

machines (Atkins’s car is likened to a snake) are resurgent in “Night Drive.”

Certainly there are marked differences between the lives of Parisian surrealists or

Mississippi blues musicians in the early 20th Century, and that of Atkins and May during a

decade of trickle-down economics and virtual reality. “Night Drive’s” refrain, “TIME. SPACE.


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TRANSMAT.” invokes the idea of teleportation as metaphor for his excursion down the

highway; a science-fiction fantasy. As in textual or filmic science fiction, the deferral to the

future cannot be misconstrued as escapism; it is an opening of a rhetorical space in which the

highest flights of imagination can become expressions of a radical call for social transformation.

Atkins's rhetoric tele-transmutes the marvelous and utopian elements of European avant-gardism

into another world, one which includes aliens, time travel, robots—all of which signify on the

presence of technology in everyday life and the uncanny strangeness of modern science,

incorporating them into a critique of social control and ideology, while ultimately arriving at a

proposal for resistance.

The idea of techno as a nexus of the blues tradition and 20th century avant-gardism is

metaphorical, but it is not merely figurative. Lacking the particular European bourgeois/literary-

artistic background of Breton and his fellow surrealists, Detroit techno musicians were immersed

in George Clinton rather than Lautreamont, based in the desolate postindustrial metropolis of

Detroit rather than the French “capital of modernity.” As Derrick May explains:

Industry is the principal focus of just about anybody who lives here.

At one point or another, just about everyone has a family member

who works for the industry. So the effect is indirectly there, but it’s

not a positive effect—it’s a very unaffectionate, cold effect. A

machine has no love, nor any feeling. And sometimes the people who

work for it end up having no feeling and no love, because they’re

working relentless hours, they’re putting in total commitment to

something that is giving nothing back. We tended to find the idea of


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making music subconsciously. […] All these sounds—

subconsciously—came from the idea of industry, of mechanics, of

machines, of electronics. (Universal Techno)

The minds of these artists demonstrate an outlet for the surrealist/blues impulse in drastically

different “intellectual conditions,” unconscious minds formed by different factors that

necessarily express themselves differently.

The revolutionary tendency in techno is not merely latent and unrecognized.

Something like the European avant-garde, techno went through an original aesthetic, idealist

phase, in which the music and its contexts for production were developed. The revolutionary

content was matched to practice later, when younger musicians like the Underground Resistance

collective and Carl Craig began spreading their music through avenues outside of and defiant

toward the music industry, adopting deliberately militant political and intellectual stances. In the

notes to his album More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, Carl Craig prints a short

manifesto.

Revolutionary art is not determined by its…format of technical

trickery, its interpretation of reality, or its verisimilitude, but rather by

how much it revolutionizes our thinking and imagination; overturning

our preconceptions, bias and prejudice and inspiring us to change

ourselves and the world. (Craig 1997)

It is not unrealistic to consider this cultural movement as a further step toward what Walter

Benjamin called for in his essay on Surrealism, “The Last Snapshot of the European

Intelligentsia”:


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Only when in technology, body and image space so interpenetrate

that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation,

and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary

discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the

Communist Manifesto. (Benjamin 218)

Breton also emphasized this revolutionary potential in culture, writing that “if through

Surrealism, we reject unhesitatingly the notion of the sole possibility of the things which ‘are,’

and if we ourselves declare that by a path which ‘is,’ a path which we can show and help people

to follow, one can arrive at what people claimed ‘was not’” (Manifestoes 128). Or in other

words:

They say there is no hope

They say no U.F.O.’s

Why is no head held high?

Maybe we’ll see them fly.

—Juan Atkins (Model 500, “No U.F.O.’s”)


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Works Cited

Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Boston: Exact Change, 1994.Atkins, Juan. 20 Years Metroplex. Tresor, 2005.Baraka, Amiri. Black Music. New York: Da Capo, 1998.Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969._____. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978.Craig, Carl. More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. Planet E, 1997.Deleuze, Dominique. Universal Techno. Arte. Strasbourg. Sept. 1996.Funkadelic. Funkadelic. Westbound, 1970.Garon, Paul. Blues and the Poetic Spirit. New York: City Lights, 1996.Lippard, Lucy. “Max Ernst: Passed and Pressing Tensions.” Art Jounral. 33, (Autumn 1973): 12-

17.Parliament. Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Casablanca, 1978.


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We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves Of Hiroshima

Devin William Daniels

Abstract

This thesis, “We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves of Hiroshima,” aims to achieve a

greater understanding of what the atomic bomb means and what it can teach contemporary

society, rather than to investigate the debates of policy and morality which tend to surround it.

Towards this end, I briefly examine contemporary reactions to the bomb and “classically post-

apocalyptic” works, revealing that of chief issue behind the dropping of nuclear bombs on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a restrictive and arbitrary idea of what “life” was that did not

properly include the Japanese people. Further, the disturbing and nostalgic means through which

the bomb is understood, the death view, is explicated and rejected.

In search of a superior means of understanding the post-nuclear world, I turn to William S.

Burroughs and his word virus theory, which I demonstrate to be explicitly linked to nuclear

weaponry and discourse in The Ticket That Exploded, which brands the bomb as a symptom of

the word virus, resulting in the provocative idea that the post-nuclear world existed before the

bomb and created it, rather than the opposite. Burroughs depicts this world as a reality studio in

which the films, representing prior thought formations, must be destroyed. Chief among these

prior thought formations is the idea of one god essentialism. Burroughs’s culminating work The

Western Lands is then investigated, in which the philosophy of silence is carried out in the form


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of a pilgrimage to the Ancient Egyptians’ place of immortality. Burroughs means to move us

beyond the death view so that we might recognize the arbitrary nature of our languages, our

innate ideas, and our fear of death. In doing so, an empowering and positive reading of the

nuclear bomb is proposed, albeit one which makes the event itself all the more horrifying: the

nuclear bomb serves as an event so immense and undeniable it might wake us up from our

slumber, force us to recognize the issues of the word virus and lead us towards the Western

Lands.

i

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Friendliest Place on Earth....................................................................................

1 The Birth of the Death View in the Classical Post-Apocalyptic

Wasteland......................................3 The Word Virus of William S.

Burroughs......................................................................................12 The Word That Exploded:

The Linguistic Structure of the Bomb..................................................19 The Reality Studio in

The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands.......................................30 We Are Beyond

Death: The Journey Towards the Western Lands.................................................44 A Long Way

Down: Parting Shots from the End of the World.......................................................53 CODA 1:

Nuclear Film and the Fear of Machine Life....................................................................56 CODA

2: The Fukushima I Accidents............................................................................................58

CODA 3: An Experiment in Installing “We Are Become Death”..................................................59

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................


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62

ii

Introduction: The Friendliest Place on Earth*

On July 15, 1945, the Manhattan Project, headed by nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer

and Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, culminated in the world’s first artificial nuclear

explosion: the so-called Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico (ironically, a city self-described

as the “Friendliest Place on Earth”). Oppenheimer’s oft-quoted reaction to the explosion has

become a cultural paradigm, though sources disagree on precisely what was said. Oppenheimer

himself recalled the reaction in a filmed interview in 1965:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most

people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu

is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-

armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all

thought that, one way or another. (Atomic)

Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing

between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred fifty thousand people, with untold others

suffering and dying due to the effects of radiation exposure. The rest of the world was left

wondering what it all meant.

Those bombings stand among the major events of human history as truly undeniable. Their


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horror, devastation, and pure power were so great as to not only elicit but, indeed, to demand a

response, and society surely responded. The bomb has spawned novels, films, political

movements, and even entire genres, yet, in spite of its ubiquitous presence in post-World War II

art and culture, there is good reason to think that our society is still struggling to know the

bomb’s meaning – or, even worse, that we think we know but have in fact “misread” it. Thus,

while it

* For recommended musical accompaniment to the reading of this thesis please see “CODA 3:

An Experiment in Installing ‘We Are Become Death.’”

1

might sound overly vague or simplistic, a question as fundamental as “What does the bomb

mean?” is actually incredibly important and often ignored due to this deceptive simplicity. By

examining the cultural shockwaves of Hiroshima, we can uncover new ways of answering this

question. By a cultural shockwave, I refer to the ways in which such a significant cultural

moment as the events of Hiroshima pervades our society and comes to define the perspectives of

our culture, in particular our art. A shockwave moves at a velocity greater than the local speed of

sound, and a cultural shockwave often works analogously. By this, I mean that tracing the

cultural shockwaves of a moment is often much more complicated than, say, looking up which

books are written about post-nuclear wastelands and atomic warfare. Often the most revealing of

works will rarely mention the nuclear bomb specifically at all (see: Pynchon), or at least, as in

the case is Burroughs, seem to be talking about a much broader theme, but they approach the


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world from a perspective that has been undeniably changed by it.

The American reactions to the bomb, particularly as expressed in mass media and traditional

post-apocalyptic genre fiction, have provided a dominant – and quite pessimistic – answer, based

on a particular reading of Oppenheimer’s famous quotation steeped in a fear for the annihilation

of consciousness and the birth of absolute nothingness, in the strongest and most literal sense of

those terms. In opposition, various post-war authors, usually operating from the postmodernist

tradition, have provided alternative readings of this phrase. Chief among them is William Seward

Burroughs – ironically an alumnus of the Los Alamos Ranch School, Oppenheimer’s inspiration

for placing the Manhattan Project headquarters in the New Mexican desert (Morgan 44; Rhodes

450). While operating in a much less obviously nuclear model (though his atomic references are

nonetheless frequent), Burroughs provides a theoretical basis for interpreting the bomb, its

implications, and the hypothetical post-nuclear apocalypse in new ways,

2

repositioning the atomic bomb not as a transforming event but, rather, as an alarm clock, an

undeniable moment that forces us to wake up and recognize the arbitrary and problematic

restrictions that linguistic man has placed on the definition and understanding of life, a flaw that

Burroughs, in The Western Lands, traces all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians.

The Birth of the Death View in the Classical Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

Any meaning that the bomb has for humanity, of course, is through its relationship to humanity

itself and life as we know it, so the question comes to be, “what does it mean to be alive in the


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post-nuclear world?” Such a question, in turn, is but a variation of the general inquiries into the

definition or meaning of life that have dominated both the humanities and the sciences in

different ways. The horrifying spectacle of the nuclear bomb blew a hole in our perceptions of

what life was, fundamentally changing the game and challenging our definitions. The end of the

world, the apocalypse, is not a post-nuclear idea by any means, but prior to Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, such devastation could only be imagined, not witnessed. Throughout history,

humankind has demonstrated an affinity for thinking it is living in the end of days, but such an

end required the power of gods to be realized, or, at the worst, cosmic coincidences that humans

had no control over (e.g. meteoric devastation or the death of the sun). Upon viewing for the first

time a level of destruction so total and so directly attributable to the actions of humanity, we are

naturally led to the same conclusion as Oppenheimer: we have become Death. William S.

Burroughs famously remixed Oppenheimer’s quote as such in The Place of Dead Roads, but

Burroughs is picking up on a general cultural reading of the phrase. “We have become Death” is

understood to mean “we are all going to die,” that life ends with us and nothing will remain

afterwards; furthermore, that death is attributable to a very specific instance of technology, the

atomic bomb.

3

Such a reaction, which I will term the death view, became the primary cultural reading of the

nuclear bombings, and is reflected in the classic post-nuclear wastelands depicted in the books

and film of the Cold War period.

There are several issues with such a reading of the bomb, and Burroughs offers an alternative


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view that builds a more enlightened understanding of the bomb, but before their rejection of the

death view makes sense, we must understand how it developed. The initial reaction to the bomb

was quite distinct from the death view, in fact, because the cultural context of World War II and

1940s America presented a definition of life, particularly as understood by the cultural media of

the time, that resisted the humanity of the Japanese people who had been subjected to the bomb’s

horrors. John Dower notes the intense dehumanization of Japanese people during World War II,

whom were portrayed as “a nameless mass of vermin,” writing that “[i]ncinerating Japanese in

caves with flamethrowers was referred to as ‘clearing out the rat’s nest.’ Soon after Pearl Harbor,

the prospect of exterminating the Japanese vermin in their nest at home was widely applauded.

The most popular float in a day-long victory parade in New York in mid-1942 was titled ‘Tokyo:

We Are Coming,’ and depicted bombs falling on a frantic pack of yellow rats” (231). Arthur N.

Feraru, writing in the Far Eastern Survey, notes that, in 1944, 13% of polled U.S. citizens

advocated the complete extermination (or “killing off,” as the poll itself phrased it) of all

Japanese men, women, and children (101). If the truth behind the atomic bomb is that it

demonstrates the intimate connection between humanity and the machines we create, as I find

displayed in Burroughs, one can imagine the difficulties in such a view being accepted when we

struggle to expand our definitions of life to even encompass all of our fellow humans.

It is in this context that one of the first post-nuclear films was produced but, interestingly

enough, it was never shown. Produced by Lieutenant Daniel McGovern of the U.S. Strategic

4

Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki utilizes


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confiscated Japanese-filmed footage of the devastation, which McGovern attempted to salvage

for public consumption, though his plans were frustrated and the film was suppressed and

forgotten. The documentary, capturing various horrid images, was never shown until a print was

discovered two decades later, the original negative having been lost. Abé Mark Nornes describes

the documentary’s status as perhaps the first post-apocalyptic horror film:

From a certain perspective, this is a mind-numbingly boring science film; from another, it is a

horror film that leaves one speechless and trembling. Most filmmakers trying to represent events

as extreme as the holocaust or the atomic bombings run up against the specter of the

unprepresentable [sic]. The strange thing about this film is that the filmmakers never make this

effort to begin with. They simply describe the two events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the dry

language of hard science. Nothing could be more unnerving.

The Effects of the Atomic Bombs thus represents possibly the first step away from the initial,

enthusiastic reactions to the bomb (though it clearly lacked much empathic connection to its

subject) and towards the notion that the bomb’s existence symbolized death and destruction,

rather than power and supremacy. It zoomed in the camera towards the mushroom cloud,

revealing the shocking images behind its veil. However, its suppression kept the post-apocalyptic

genre from developing in a direction focused on the Japanese victims themselves.

Without a film like The Effects of the Atomic Bombs to educate the public, and with other such

footage expressing the more inhuman aspects of the bombings hidden from view, American

society was left with only the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the footage of the post-

World War II nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. These photographs of the devastation (at least the ones


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that reached the public), taken by an aircraft named, of all things, Necessary Evil, were mostly

limited to shots of the mushroom clouds. Silent, they expressed their impressive power through

sheer visual might while the voices of the Japanese victims remained unheard. The Bikini Atoll

footage

5

provided a particularly perverse sort of star vehicle, with Rita Hayworth’s likeness placed across

the bombshell (the pun was certainly intended). These images of explosions and mushroom

clouds expressed triumph and power to a public who were able to ignore the untold horrors

experienced by the Japanese people, as the American media edited the graphic images of the

attack (Trinity; Boyer 239).

Eventually, the fervor of the initial reactions was quelled, and the bomb became subject to moral

debate. However, these moral debates seem to largely miss the point. Such debates amount to,

ultimately, a perverse comparison of the lives of Japanese civilians and Japanese and American

troops, in which figures calculated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff assuming “1.78 fatalities per

1,000 man-days” (resulting in 380,000 American dead) are balanced against the impact of the

atomic bombings on civilian lives (Frank 135-7). Such debates fail to address the question of

utmost importance: beyond whether or not the bomb should have been dropped, what has its

dropping done to humanity as a whole, and American civilization, the most responsible, in

particular? (Of course, the Japanese perspective is at least as important, and probably more so, as

the American, but a true and dedicated examination of that perspective is beyond the scope of

this project.) To determine the answer, we must return to the original and most effective means


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through which the bomb was transmitted, in spite of the shameful awe it inspired in 1940s

America: film. In a way, the first nuclear film may have been the bomb itself – a film that

destroys its audience – but did it destroy the survivors as well, its audience from afar? Was

Oppenheimer right that the surviving world has, indeed, become death?

The classic and quintessential post-apocalyptic genre films suggest he was. Typified by desert

landscapes, rampant death and desolation, and a few wandering survivors who persist but

ultimately give in to their inevitable fate, these films mark a disturbing trend in nuclear cinema

that

6

might have been quelled had a film like The Effects of the Atomic Bombs been more widely

viewed. Rather than reflecting regret and sympathy towards the events in Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, their consequentialist plots seem less disturbed by the initial (read: non-fictional)

attacks on Japan and more concerned with how they might result in attacks on or contamination

of the American landscape on which the films almost universally take place. Regardless, it seems

clear that the glory of the 1940s has substantially faded (or, at least, moved into the background)

by the time a film like The Day After, which depicts a full scale nuclear war between the United

States and Soviet Union, is released in 1983, and certainly by the time of Fallout 3, a 2008 video

game based in an alternate future in which America, and specifically Washington D.C., has been

completely devastated by nuclear exchange, leaving behind a Western-themed world inhabited

by wanderers, mutants, and mercenaries.


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The two works are extremely different in their general approaches; The Day After combines

ostensible realism, cheesy if classically post-apocalyptic special effects, and a plot depressing to

the point of exploitation, whereas Fallout 3 places itself squarely in the science-fiction genre,

combining a realistic (if decimated) D.C. setting with oversized weaponry, radioactive giants

known as “Super Mutants,” and an ever-present sense of irony and humor. Both works

nonetheless share theoretical similarities. They are both marked by their desert landscapes,

wandering characters, and fetishization of the nuclear bomb, but even more importantly, both

operate under nuclear ideologies informed by Oppenheimer’s reading of the Bhagavad Gita –

that is, the death view.

The desolate landscapes of the works, located in Kansas City, Missouri and Washington, D.C.

respectively, fill the viewer with an overriding sense of absence and emptiness: specifically an

absence of life. There is no plant-life, no rushing water, with the color green only evoking the

7

glow of radiation. The Day After depicts many scenes in which characters walk across this

landscape for many miles (often in search of medical aid), just as the nameless main character of

Fallout 3, who becomes known simply as “the Lone Wanderer,” does. Combined with the desert-

like settings, this recalls the great American Westerns and lends an almost comforting aspect to

the post-apocalyptic world, especially in Fallout, which features many explicit Western parallels

– mercenaries, ghost towns, shoot outs, and general lawlessness. Thus, the post-apocalyptic

world is not just an end, but a return to a nostalgic time.


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The works also show that the glorified qualities of a nuclear explosion have not entirely left us.

Fallout 3 does this in its entire basis, but one detail of particular note is an extremely powerful

weapon in the game known as the Fat Man (which was the codename of the bomb dropped on

Nagasaki), a missile launcher that fires small nuclear bombs, leaving behind miniature

mushroom clouds. The Day After, meanwhile, depicts its nuclear devastation in a three minute

scene filled with more mushroom clouds, explosions, desperate screams, and skeletons than

perhaps any other three minute segment in film history, lending an air of distastefulness and

snuff that is stretched across the film’s narrative, which mostly consists of people slowly but

surely succumbing to radiation sickness. Indeed, the survivors in the film are not particularly

successful at all; their survival largely being portrayed as being worse than death. Even in the

world of Fallout 3, where life persists relatively successfully (as it must due to the mechanics of

a sandbox-style video game with no strict end time), it seems the world is no longer designed for

life. Life persists in spite of it, but ultimately will succumb to the nothingness. The ideology of

the “survival is worse than death” plotlines present the troubling proposition that the victims of

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fictional bombings were the lucky ones, with center stage being

given to the depicted American survivors who must contend with the nuclear power they

unleashed upon the world, eventually

8

giving into death. (Such an ideology regretfully ignores the Japanese survivors who seemingly

have been so ignored since the repression of The Effects of the Atomic Bombs.) Dr. Oakes, the

main character of The Day After, wanders back to his Kansas City home at the end of the film to


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gaze upon his house’s remains one last time before his death. The Lone Wanderer of Fallout

sacrifices his own life so that the struggling lives of the Capital Wasteland might continue a little

bit longer. In so giving into death, however, the survivors are empowered and comforted in that

they are able to end their lives on their own terms, just as human life as a whole, in an act of

seeming and perverse honor, ends on its own terms.

These films thus demonstrate how the nuclear apocalypse is profoundly different from the floods

and Ragnaröks of cultures past. Steven Kull observes that the post-nuclear mindset is marked by

“the impression that there is an unidentified moving force impelling people toward a fate that no

one wishes,” something he connects to a long history of human desire for world destruction, but

whereas “the various images of deity and of the world itself that have been developed in different

cultures often depict such an impersonal force that moves toward the destruction of the world,”

nuclear destruction is directly attributed to man, who in becoming death, as Oppenheimer

prophesized, elevates to a status previously reserved for the gods (571). Thus, while horrifying

and somber, The Day After and Fallout 3 depict a certain longing for the apocalypse. Their

images evoke the ecstasy of the nuclear explosion, its awe-inspiring characteristics, and the

quintessentially American Western film, lending an air of romanticism to the wasteland. In fact,

the response of awe is in line with the public reaction to the first nuclear films: the (macro)

footage of the actual bombings themselves, to which awe was the overriding, often exclusive

response of the American public. It is only when confronted with the micro-image – the bomb’s

real effects on its casualties and survivors – that the true horror slips in, the idea that

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we have become the destroyer of worlds. The initial response to the bomb’s fantastic qualities are

thus quelled by a dread for its real world effects – although the fantastic never completely goes

away, as evidenced by our insistence on (some might call it an addiction to or fascination with)

capturing the explosion itself on film, over and over again. This phenomenon forms an uneasy

tension that is laced throughout these post-apocalyptic films: the tug of war between the bang

and the whimper. The bang ignites glory, the whimper ignites shame and horror, but both result

in the end.

Film proves to be the perfect medium through which we express our obsession with the end, due

to the bomb’s nature as a profoundly visual weapon. It is the fear, transmitted through sheer

visual might, that the bomb places in the rest of the world that makes it so effective, that allows it

to end World War II. It puts humanity in a new role as witnesses of the power of the apocalypse,

as an audience for the end – not merely imaginers of it. Post-apocalyptic film and visual media

continue the story started in New Mexico in 1945, depicting the post-nuclear world as one in

which life is snuffed out and death and desolation take its place, forcing humanity into the role of

witness and audience member to the spectacle. The worlds of The Day After and Fallout 3 seem

to be symptomatic of a culture unable to come to terms with the immensity of the nuclear

bombings. Mushroom clouds that once instilled national pride now instill horror and shame, the

apparent inevitability of a world without life seems harder and harder to deny, yet this post-

apocalyptic mindset might yet be faulty. By returning to the place where it all started – July 16,

1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico – we find reason for questioning the death view, for

developing a new perspective on the post-apocalyptic world in which life does not merely cease,


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but changes.

A closer examination of the Bhagavad Gita verses, which popped into Oppenheimer’s

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head upon viewing the spectacle of that first nuclear explosion, reveal another side to what it

means to live in a post-apocalyptic world, what life means in a post-apocalyptic world. As he

worked towards the development of a means of planetary annihilation, Oppenheimer went to the

Gita, “one of his favorite books,” and found in it a justification for his actions and

“encouragement that steadied him in his work,” for the Gita told Oppenheimer, as he interpreted

it, that he had a particular duty, that of a nuclear physicist, and it was his job to pursue the bomb

for that reason only, “not because he was intent on obtaining any particular result” (Hijiya 125).

Speaking to the workers of Los Alamos, some months after the bombings of Japan, Oppenheimer

stated, “If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing... If you are a scientist you believe...

that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world

and to deal with it according to its lights and values” (Hijiya 137). Yet, Oppenheimer’s citation

of the Gita is incomplete and even inaccurate, for he confuses Krishna with Vishnu. Indeed,

while Krishna becomes death, this can also be translated as time, and both of these are just

singular aspects of what is truly an all-encompassing entity. As the Gita continues, Arjuna praises

Krishna, saying:

You are the original Personality of Godhead, the oldest, the ultimate sanctuary of this manifested

cosmic world. You are the knower of everything, and You are all that is knowable. You are the


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supreme refuge, above the material modes. O limitless form!

. . . You are air, and You are the supreme controller! You are fire, You are water, and You are the

moon! You are Brahma, the first living creature (Gita)

Thus, a fuller sampling of the Gita presents us an image not just of an all-encompassing being

but of a profoundly vital and life-based being existing as the representational hub of a world of

profound interconnectedness. Such a reading of the Gita would suggest a post-apocalyptic world

which is far from doomed, wherein life can persist in “limitless form.” Of course, the future may

not be controlled by the Hindu scriptures, but just as Oppenheimer’s interpretation of the Gita

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informed his actions and reflected the post-apocalyptic mindset and culture he helped unleash, an

interconnected reading of the Gita demonstrates a new possibility for looking at the post-

apocalyptic world. This interconnectedness, though, requires that we abandon much of the

fundamental logic found in the variety of post-apocalyptic media we have examined. As noted,

films like The Day After are primarily concerned with the singular status of its survivors, their

loneliness, their disconnect from (and jealousy of) the dead. They fail to recognize the dynamic

nature of the connection between the survivors, the dead, the original victims of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, and the bomb itself. They seek to temper their survivors’ horrid lot with tragic

romanticism and nostalgia. In the end, they portray futures of death, but the future of life is not

death, it is evolution. The ultimate struggle of the post-nuclear world is not determining how we

are going to die, but determining what it means to live in a world in which such an undeniable


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event, which we are all connected to, has happened. Of course, such a mission might find the

answer to be even more terrifying than the desolate wastelands of the apocalypse and their

comforting finality.

The Word Virus of William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs, like other post-war, postmodern authors, proposes a reading of the nuclear

age that looks towards a human society without individuals as the real problem behind the bomb.

In other words, the bomb is not a virus which infects society with the disease of apocalyptic fear;

rather, it is a symptom of a disease already present in society prior to the bombs’ droppings.

Burroughs distinguishes himself, however, by taking it one step further: the bomb is not just a

symptom of the postmodernist, post-industrial, bureaucratic age which Pynchon’s Slothrop

attempts to understand at the sacrifice of his individuality – the bomb is a symptom of a virus

that

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has infected humanity for as far back as history stretches: language itself.

Burroughs’s conception of language as a disease – the so-called word virus – is one of his

most famous and pervasive theories. The word virus permeates all of Burroughs’s work, but in

his novel The Ticket That Exploded he goes into particular depth to explain both the word virus

itself and its connection to the atomic bomb, which, while lurking in the background of the entire

Burroughs’s corpus, is made explicit and undeniable here. For Burroughs, the bomb did not, in

fact, change anything, at least fundamentally, for he positions it as a natural consequence of


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language and the restrictive life definitions inherent to our understanding of language.

Burroughs’s plots are often inscrutable, and his villains, such as the Nova Mob who dominate

The Ticket That Exploded, exist in a strange space between being mere concepts and actual

characters. In spite of such confusions, that resist traditional literary analysis, Burroughs makes

his atomic position relatively clear. A close examination of The Ticket That Exploded’s moments

of philosophical lucidity and clarity makes the workings of the word virus and its connection to

the nuclear age undeniable, providing the basis for atomic readings of Burroughs’s later novels,

The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, which seek to further understand and combat

the nuclear issue by introducing the problematic concept of machine life, which helps to break

down the strict definitions and categories that fuel the word virus and thus free humanity from its

infection.

The chief characteristics applied to language in the word virus theory are its arbitrariness (i.e. its

unessential connection to humanity) and its debilitating effect. The arbitrary qualities of

linguistic systems have a long history, but perhaps the most iconic figures of that history are the

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the seminal philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who

addressed such issues in his early work. Saussure conceived of language as “a system of

interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous

13

presence of the others,” rendering the idea of “inherent” meaning naive, if not absurd (969). For

example, there is no particularly reason to refer to a tree as a “tree,” as evidenced by the fact that

different languages have different, unrelated words for a tree. We refer to it as such out of,


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essentially, habit and convenience. Nietzsche takes this a step further by saying that the idea of

thinking of all trees as possessing some sort of “tree-ness” that categorizes them together is

really just an illusion – a metaphor that we have forgotten is a metaphor. The things we call trees

have no true connection; we are engaging in the metaphorical operation of relating them based

on perceived similarities, but, having forgotten about this process, think of the objects as

inherently related. Nietzsche refers to this process as “making equivalent that which is non-

equivalent,” and through this process not only are the specific instances of language arbitrary, but

the idea of language itself is arbitrary; the concept of a linguistic system is likewise a metaphor

we have forgotten is a metaphor (877).

Burroughs’s word virus concept is highly influenced by these ideas of linguistic arbitrariness but

with a heightened sense of nefariousness (on the part of the words). Burroughs captures these

two qualities in The Ticket That Exploded during a passage of extensive exposition on the word

virus concept – calling it the “Other Half,” implying language’s role as a separate, parasitic, and

unessential:

The “Other Half” is the word. The “Other Half” is an organism. Word is an organism. . . yes

quite an angle it is the “Other Half” worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From

symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. . . It is now a parasitic organism

that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence.

Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will

encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. (49)

The idea that language originally operated symbiotically reflects the arbitrary but convenient


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logic

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of Saussure’s linguistic theory. For Burroughs, humans are not inherently linguistic beings, but

they developed their symbiotic relationship with language, described as a unique organism with a

mind of its own, due to the great benefit for society of linguistic communication. However,

language quickly stops being one of multiple communication tools, one of multiple means of

understanding the world, and takes over the human mind to the point where non-linguistic

communication, or even thought, seems impossible. Language’s transition from symbiosis to

parasitism captures the utter domination of language over our thought processes through the

virus metaphor. The common, often subconscious, misconception that there is a substantive, non-

arbitrary relationship between our words and our meanings (or, in Saussure’s terms, between the

signifier and the signified) is this virus’ main symptom, and, devilishly, its nature prevents us

from realizing we are infected. Having forgotten, as Nietzsche realized, that all of language is

composed of metaphors, and, indeed, that the very idea of language as a word-structuring system

is metaphorical, we open ourselves up to the manipulation of the word virus. Language “forces

[us] to talk” and makes it virtually impossible to “achieve even ten seconds of inner silence,”

without the internal linguistic voice shouting out from within us. We do not recognize this

phenomenon as a problem because we assume the linguistic inner voice is inherent and

necessary, that it is impossible to think without language, but Burroughs, convinced that

language is a parasite, recognizes that language cannot be without us, but that we can certainly

exist outside of language, even if we have forgotten how.


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Burroughs’s recognition of the word virus’s manipulative qualities help to explain his

preoccupation with all systems and methods of (mind) control. The intense study of addiction

found in Junky, the manipulative brain surgeries of Naked Lunch, and the secret government

crime agencies and invading alien crime organizations of the trilogies suggest a similar world of

15

complex, de-individualizing associations to the paranoid universe of Gravity’ s Rainbow, in

which humanity is in constant danger of being manipulated and destroyed by forces much more

substantive than the word virus. Unlike Pynchon, however, Burroughs has little interest in the

paranoid approach to such a reality: the obsession of understanding the multitudinous conspiracy

that connects everything. Given the fate of both Slothrop and the reader of Gravity’ s Rainbow to

be completely subsumed by the conspiracy they attempt to understand, one can understand

Burroughs’s reasons. He seeks no end to be discovered in such a task because, in fact, “control

can never be a means to any practical end . . . It can never be a means to anything but more

control” (Naked 137). Whereas Pynchon’s characters attempt to understand the systems of

control, Burroughs’s attempt to undermine them.

As much as his novels present a world overwhelmed by control systems, the most

understandable passages, which become even more emphasized to the reader through their

juxtaposition with chaos via the cut-up method, often consist of rather direct instructions for

undermining those systems, as well as organizations, such as the Nova Police of the Nova

Trilogy and the Johnson Family of the Red Night Trilogy, who embrace randomness and

uncertainty against organizations based around regimented control and precise definitions –


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essentially creating a battle between the arbitrary and the non-arbitrary (or, more accurately, the

recognizably arbitrary and that which thinks it is not arbitrary). Burroughs introduces both the

types of organization to the reader at the same time as The Ticket That Exploded’s central

character Inspector Lee, writing, “In this organization, Mr Lee, we do not encourage

togetherness, espirit de corps. We do not give our agents the impression of belonging. As you

know most existing organizations stress such primitive reactions as unquestioning obedience.

Their agents become addicted to orders” (Ticket 9). Burroughs notes of their methods that

“[t]here are worse things than

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death Mr Lee for example to live under the conditions your enemies will endeavor to impose,”

and this resistance to destruction, in favor of manipulation, reflects the control society’s origins

in and associations with language (9). Their aim of unquestioned obedience is mirrored in their

very structure and nature, which are based around a control as rigid as that which they would

impose on humanity; their agents’ addiction to orders, in this sense, reflects humanity’s addiction

to language, the most successful control system of all.

Ironically, Burroughs uses writing as his chosen means of bringing the word’s viral nature to

humanity’s attention. His entire literary philosophy consists of methods of forcing the reader to

recognize the fact that the novel he or she reads exists within an arbitrary universe which is at the

mercy of the words used to describe it. Burroughs does not imagine worlds which he then

struggles to put into “the right words.” Rather, he actively constructs worlds that, in spite of their

verging on the nonsensical, mean to bring the constructed nature of the actual world to the


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reader’s attention. Chief among these techniques is the cut-up method. By introducing random

elements into his writing that not even he has any say over, Burroughs counteracts the control of

the word virus, which even has influence of his own mind. This randomness, combined with his

general avoidance of traditional plot structure and character development, creates a

defamiliarizing effect on the reader, forcing them to closely examine the text, conscious of its

status as text, rather than simply absorb it passively (which would be playing into the word

virus’s hands).

The organizations within Burroughs’s novels which attempt to compete with the control systems

thus, mirroring his literary methodology, must, beyond having opposing aspirations, adhere to a

fundamentally different logic from the controlling organizations, as do the Nova Police, in their

eschewing of belonging, togetherness, espirit de corps, and even certainty: “There is no

certainty. Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department. This is in point of

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fact a non-organization the aim of which is to immunize our agents against fear despair and

death. We intend to break the birth-death cycle” (Ticket 10). Burroughs thus presents a

philosophy that is not just opposed to the obvious control segments of society (to which we

might point to a variety of culprits: governments, corporations, police forces, drug enforcement

agencies, educational institutions, etc.) but is, in fact, opposed to the basic concept of

organization itself, which is an outgrowth or symptom of the word virus, as well as the very

ideas of order and truth which must be assumed in a non-arbitrary linguistic philosophy which

forgets it is a metaphor. One might interpret Burroughs’s philosophy as clamoring for a dark,


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anarchic world, and an even darker and more anarchic literature, in which nothing means

anything, and thus classify his philosophy as negative or even destructive; however, it is actually

very positive and liberating in its aims to “break the birth-death cycle.” By reducing death and

life to linguistic categories without inherent meanings, Burroughs’s philosophy allows for a true

and complete defeat of the death view of post-nuclear life. In this sense Burroughs presents a

much more revolutionary, and one might say optimistic, reading of the post-nuclear,

systematized universe than Oppenheimer and his contemporaries. Rather than a world at the

brink of annihilation in which the only possible responses are resignation to one’s fate and hope

for or obsession with a life after death, this is a world in which the fate branded on humanity by

the atomic bomb can be defeated, a world in which “[a] camera and two tape recorders can cut

the lines laid down by a fully equipped film studio” (Ticket 111).

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The Word That Exploded: The Linguistic Structure of the Bomb

While Burroughs’s interests in the word virus and control society (which he, importantly,

depicted as a “reality studio”) are clear enough, one might reasonably request justification for the

subsequent idea that the nuclear bomb is a consequence of language. Such a claim is not as

controversial as it first seems, however, when broken down into parts. The idea that control

society develops as a result of the word virus is not only clearly present in Burroughs’s writing,

as shown above, but is in many ways the quintessential Burroughsian claim. The control society

flaunts the same parasitic, essentialist qualities as language and inherits from it an ambition for


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absolute, inescapable determination and limitation of humanity.

A sterilized reading of Burroughs might propose that his plots, laden with assassins’ guilds,

nefarious CIA analogues, and parasitic alien beings (such as the Nova Mob of The Ticket That

Exploded, whom will be analyzed in greater detail below) consist of mere metaphorical or

allegorical representations of his word virus philosophy, which stands as the ultimate “positive

claim” of the Burroughs corpus. Another, equally sterilized reading, might propose the opposite:

that the conception of language as a virus is the metaphor, that Burroughs is using viral imagery

and linguistic terms in order to create (rather than recognize or discover) a word virus which we

may use as a means for understanding the actual methods of control that exist (i.e. the control

society is now the positive claim). Both of these readings should be rejected, for both the control

society and the word virus are, in Burroughs’s philosophy, very substantial things. Positive

evidence for such a claim may seem weak, for while Burroughs consistently states his positions

in a very direct and literal manner (e.g. “Word is an organism”), the nature of metaphor makes it

so we can never adequately prove that Burroughs is actually being literal (Ticket 49). However, I

would suggest that sufficient evidence for a literal understanding of Burroughs (both in general

19

and in regards to the “realness” of the word virus and the control society themselves) can be

obtained through the combination of his unforgiving, “straight” writing style, his resistance to

traditional literary models and modes (which, we could presume, include resistance to traditional

literary methods of interpretation), and the lack of evidence for why we should read Burroughs

metaphorically, other than the fact that it makes his work more palatable. While it can be useful


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to utilize Burroughs’s theories metaphorically, to extrapolate them towards making larger

cultural claims, which is something I myself will engage in (e.g. the idea that Burroughs’s

machine life concept can serve as a metaphor for American culture’s resistance to admitting the

humanity of African, Japanese, etc. peoples), let it not be lost that Burroughs’s means for his

theories to be taken, at the same time, very literally (e.g. that the idea that machines could and

may be alive, in a way that causes us to reevaluate our understanding of the term, is a very real

issue).

Having thus established the corporeality of the control society in Burroughs (as well as of the

word virus), we can recognize that the nuclear bomb is obviously a product of that control

society. It is relatively uncontroversial, or at least less controversial than we might think, to

accept Burroughs’s claim that the word virus spawns the control society, but the idea that the

nuclear bomb results from the control society seems even less difficult. In fact, various other

writers have maintained such a position, most notably Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity’ s

Rainbow presents a vision of control society as all-encompassing, incommensurable, and

ultimately destructive to both individuals-in-themselves and the very concept of individual in

general. Pynchon’s main character, Slothrop, attempts to understand the conspiracy that underlies

the war and manipulation his world is subjected to, and he, more importantly, tries to

comprehend his place in it all. The control society, however, views Slothrop only as a tool, an

information-transporting device akin to a sentient, two-legged flashdrive. Slothrop’s sexual

conquests correlate to the locations of V-2

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bombings, but there is nothing about Slothrop himself that is of interest to the various acronym-

branded organizations that seek him out and attempt to manipulate his actions. Slothrop is only

useful to the control society in that his actions can be mapped – literally – as in the map he keeps

at his desk chronicling the women he has slept with. The control society wishes to take an

individual like Slothrop, in all his eccentricity and familial history, and reduce him to a map, to a

graph, to information, to completely reduce his individuality to nameless statistics. Burroughs’s

picture of the world as a reality studio, which I will examine in greater detail below, imagines

reality as equal to the process of transforming singularities into information (on the medium of

film).

Slothrop’s privileged position as Gravity’s Rainbow’s protagonist would normally offer him a

degree of protection from such a fate, for even if the control society defeats Slothrop in the literal

happenings of the plot, the novel will nonetheless irrevocably remain Slothrop’s story: his defeat

will always be understood, by the reader, as happening to him in some way that no death,

imprisonment, or any other fate could take away; Slothrop’s worst case scenario seems to be one

of martyrdom for the cause of the individual. However, Pynchon quickly and cruelly

demonstrates that Gravity’s Rainbow is not Slothrop’s story at all: it is the story of the control

society. Slothrop completely disappears from the final sections of the narrative without comment

or explanation. He has been completely subsumed by the conspiracy in his attempt to reduce it to

understandable terms. Pynchon thus forces us to recognize that our assumption that Slothrop was

the subject of Gravity’ s Rainbow was faulty. He was merely the object of the novel, but in his

ultimate fate, Slothrop no longer exists even as a cog in the conspiratory machine; all evidence of


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his existence merely evaporates into the confused narrative. The new object of Gravity’ s

Rainbow is then the reader his or herself, and when Pynchon ends his novel with the cry “Now

everybody–” he

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presents a vision of the future in which the control society subsumes all individuals as it has

subsumed Slothrop (776). The ultimate result of such a process is a world in which the very idea

of the individual no longer exists, in which a single person is nothing and can accomplish

nothing. Under such constrictions, the individual sees little hope in rebelling against the control

society, for the control society offers no recognition of his rebellion. Rebellion in such a de-

individualized world exists only in hushed tones and wordless disappearances. This is the world

that produces the nuclear bomb.

Indeed, Pynchon’s great contribution in Gravity’s Rainbow is demonstrating this production, for

his narrative takes place in an explicitly pre-nuclear universe. The great weapon of Gravity’s

Rainbow is the V-2 rocket, not the bomb, and the victim is England, not Japan, yet Gravity’ s

Rainbow is being written and read in a post-nuclear universe, in which it is impossible to read a

World War II-based novel revolving around weapons that scream across the sky without making

explicitly nuclear associations. Pynchon must recognize this, and is, indeed, writing about the

nuclear bomb (or, in other words, the post-nuclear world) without writing about the nuclear

bomb. Through his examination of the death of the individual in a pre-nuclear universe, he

demonstrates that the nuclear bomb’s dropping did not kill the individual; rather, the individual

had to die in order to create the kind of society in which a nuclear bomb would be produced. He


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also demonstrates that there is no inherent connection between the problems that create the bomb

(which we might call the nuclear worldview or discourse) and the specific technology that is the

bomb itself. Getting rid of a specific technology will not help us, because the nuclear worldview

will simply manifest itself through a different technology, as it does through the V-2 rocket in

Gravity’ s Rainbow (under different circumstances we could just as easily be living in a post-

Vergeltungswaffe world).

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Burroughs established that the control society results from the word virus, and Pynchon has

provided us with ample evidence to conclude that the nuclear bomb is a result of this control

society. Thus, a simple application of the transitive property leads us to the claim that at first

glance seemed so difficult and controversial: the word virus created the nuclear bomb, which is

merely a symptom of its disease. In spite of the acceptability of its parts (a = b and b = c),

however, we might still have trouble accepting such a seemingly incongruous result (a = c) – that

a weapon of divine destruction resulted from mere words. Indeed, perhaps it is worth questioning

whether mathematical logic should be applied to an author who is trying to blast a whole in our

common assumptions, to point out the falseness in the inherent truths of our language-enslaved

perspective. Burroughs, however, makes the connection between the word virus and the nuclear

virus (as I might recast the death view in Burroughsian terminology) explicit and undeniable in

The Ticket That Exploded through the nature and methodology of its villainous alien characters

and organizations.

Burroughs introduces a Venusian invasion, a common motif of his novels, under the codename


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“Operation Other Half,” recalling the previously dissected passage in which the word virus is

branded with the same alias; these invaders are noted as being “[a]rmed with nuclear

weapons” (Ticket 51). Language is thus described not only as a virus but also as an alien

invasion armed with atomic bombs; the plot of Burroughs’s novels, to the degree a plot is

discernible, is often motivated by a few individuals struggling against such invasions. Equally

strong evidence of the word-nuclear connection is provided by a District Supervisor figure,

whom this passage focuses on. Burroughs describes his struggling with how to deal with the

nuclear-armed 5th Colonists as he writes, “The D.S. was contemplating the risky expedient of a

‘miracle’ and the miracle he contemplated was silence” (Ticket 51). In this sentence, Burroughs

reinforces the

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connection between nuclear and lingual viruses while simultaneously prescribing a treatment.

The D.S., facing off against nuclear-armed adversaries, recognizes that the only effective

response is one of silence, one coming from outside language. Burroughs’s belief that nuclear

arms must be dealt with non-linguistically clearly suggests that nuclear arms are but a symptom

and aspect of the larger word virus problem. His recommended countermeasure, the blast of

silence, attempts to call to our attention the intrinsic connection between both the nuclear armed

and the nuclear devastated. Such a truth is difficult to transmit from within language due to the

fact that the discourse of the nuclear bomb, which one is thus forced to operate in, establishes as

a matter of course the inherent difference between these two, but Burroughs maintains that if we

are to take a “forward step” it “must be made in silence,” and we must thus “detach ourselves


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from word forms” (Interview). Burroughs rejects a political or diplomatic response, which would

be entrenched in those very word forms, when he tells us that his advice for politicians is for

them to “[t]ell the truth for once and for all and shut up forever” (Interview).

Like language, the logic of the bomb, and indeed of all weaponry, resolves around ideas of

separation, even at the most basic levels of functionality. Almost all forms of weaponry are based

on the physical principle that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. This

begins obviously with melee weapons such as swords and axes, swordplay being a task in

forcing one’s blade into the same location as the enemy’s vital organs. This same principle

applies to projectile weapons, which present a safer and more distanced means of achieving the

same result. Defense systems such as armor and bulletproof vests, meanwhile, with the goal of

preventing a blade or bullet from occupying the same space as the wearer, operate under the

logic as well. Thus, while the nuclear bomb, at first glance, might seem to be a completely

different sort of weapon from a pistol, a bow and arrow, or a lance, all merely use different

functional methods to achieve the same

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goal. Additionally, the functionality of Little Boy, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, is

actually much more gun-like than one might think. Known as a gun-type fission weapon, Little

Boy essentially contains a hollow “bullet” of uranium within it which, when fired towards the

solid piece of uranium in the bomb’s tip, results in a nuclear chain reaction (Glasstone).

The bomb thus seems inherently linguistic in its character, for both language and nuclear


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weaponry are systems of separation, the basic idea of language being one of dividing the world

in to different “things” which are then given particular names and definitions which erroneously

are seen as their natural boundaries. Returning to the nuclear standoff of The Ticket That

Exploded, we see Burroughs painting not just the bomb and the word in separation terms, but

also sex, when he writes, “all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement whereby two entities

attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points giving rise to the sordid latrine

brawls which have characterized a planet based on ‘the Word,’ that is, on separate flesh engaged

in endless sexual conflict” (52). Even an idea as seemingly uncontroversial as the “separate

flesh” of our planet’s inhabitants is attributed to the word virus. Sex, as an attempt to force two

beings into the same space in opposition to fundamental physical principles, serves as a sort of

perverse rebellion against the Venusian-imposed concept of flesh (and word) separation. In

response, the character Johnny Yen, one of the Nova Mob, who is described as “errand boy from

the death trauma” and leader of the Venusian Boy-Girls, takes control over the Other Half,

“imposing a sexual blockade on the planet,” illustrating the disturbing nature of the sex act to the

Venusians and establishing its rebellious character (Ticket 52-3). Of course, under the “same

place, same time” principle, a truly successful sex act (i.e. one in which “two entities [occupied]

the same three-dimensional coordinate points”) would be akin to suicide, but Burroughs asks for

us to leave such linear and essentialist life models behind when he writes, “Death is orgasm is

rebirth is death in orgasm is

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their unsanitary Venusian gimmick is the whole birth death cycle of action – You got it? – Now


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do you understand who Johnny Yen is?” (Ticket 53). True orgasm may be akin to death, but the

very concepts of death and orgasm are themselves mere effects of the “unsanitary Venusian

gimmick” that is language; the entire birth/death narrative is a constructed one; “death in

orgasm” is as much a rebirth as it is an end, as Burroughs shall fully realize in The Western

Lands, itself a journey through (the linguistic category of) death towards immortality.

Burroughs’s question of Johnny Yen’s identity, though, remains unanswered, but it seems clear to

the reader, by this point, that Johnny Yen, like all of the Nova Mob, is a personification of the

word virus, the “Other Half.” Burroughs answers his own question with a variety of titles which

reflect Yen’s nature as a linguistic, viral being:

The Boy-Girl Other Half strip tease God of sexual frustration – Errand boy from the death

trauma – His immortality depends on the mortality of others – The same is true of all addicts...

His life line is the human junky – The life line of control addicts is the control word – That is

these so-called Gods can only live without three-dimensional coordinate points by forcing three-

dimensional bodies on others – Their existence is pure vampirism (Ticket 53)

In this passage, Burroughs utilizes the word virus’s own weapon (language) against itself. As a

writer, he is able to manipulate the words that a being like Johnny Yen relies on to control

humanity and in doing so gains a measure of power and determination over Yen’s identity, akin

to Yen and the Nova Mob’s power and determination over the definitions of life, death, and

orgasm. Thus is the danger of language as a control system and what enables it to be co-opted by

writers like Burroughs towards revolutionary, anti-establishment ends. In using language to limit

the agency of a population, those in charge of the control society become subjected to its


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limitations as much as the population. The best possible reading for the control society is that

they are willingly operating under language’s rules, which makes them perhaps as susceptible to

control as the

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populace but at least conscious of their predicament, yet it seems more likely that the control

society has utilized language to separate and subsequently forgotten the separating act,

convincing itself that its own machinations are in fact natural. Burroughs, and Nietzsche before

him, give the sense that such issues of amnesia are an aspect of the nature of language itself, and

thus par for the course. Nietzsche sees the “first step towards the acquisition of... truth” as

occurring when “a way of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force

everywhere,” that is, when language enters the arena, drawing firm lines in the sand between

truth and falsehood, yet due to their constructed nature, Nietzsche is convinced that “[o]nly

through forgetfulness could human beings ever entertain the illusion that they possess

truth” (876). This forgetfulness underlies the entire process of language formation, for in order to

form a concept like the word “leaf,” which encapsulates many different objects-in-themselves

with many different particular characteristics, one must “[drop] these individuals differences

arbitrarily... so that the concept then gives rise to the notion that something other than leaves

exists in nature, something which would be ‘leaf’, a primal form, say, from which all leaves were

woven” (877). The control society thus must necessarily be forgetting the constructed nature of

their arbitrary distinctions as they construct them.

For a writer like Burroughs, who is so conscious of the control society, this is a very liberating


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and empowering fact. Burroughs will utilize his chosen weapon to much more effective and less

pessimistic ends than a writer like Pynchon does in conspiracy narratives such as Gravity’ s

Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 because, rather than using language to understand and map

out the control society, which is ultimately incommensurable and leads only to the assimilation

of the conspiracy theorist into the conspiracy, essentially rendering them castrated and

lobotomized as potential revolutionary agents, Burroughs will be using language to fight back.

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In branding Johnny Yen the “[e]rrand boy from the death trauma,” he defines Yen and the other

Nova Mob members as slaves of the very categories they claim to be utilizing as methods of

control. Yen thinks “death”-as-category is his weapon, but in reality Yen is nothing but a

byproduct of “death”-as-category, a Burroughsian phantasm, linguistic death conjured in

physical form so it can be destroyed. Having so conjured him, Burroughs is able reformulate Yen

in terms of the drug addict, a life Burroughs has lived and explored to great depth in his first

novel Junky, showing that those behind the control society are actually addicted to their control,

and thus as dependent on it as a junky is on heroin. The personified “gods” of language live

outside of the spatial constraints of man – constraints, as seen above, that often lead to his death

– but can only do so thanks to their parasitic and vampiric control over human bodies. Burroughs

thus shows that while language may control us, it is likewise dependent on us – we are in the true

position of power. By rejecting our mortality, that is, our enslavement to the “death” category

(and, by the same token, the death view of the post-nuclear world), we deny the immortality of

the control society; The Western Lands will see this journey fully realized.


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Into this scene thus enters the previously introduced Inspector J. Lee, now a full-fledged member

of the Nova Police and a clear representative of (or stand-in for) Burroughs himself, summoned

to properly deal with the now manifested Nova Mob. Lee outlines the criminals’ technique for

achieving nova, “the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet” (i.e. supernova, the

explosive destruction of the planet, which is a clear reference to the potential nuclear demise that

was so feared during the time of Burroughs’s writing), on the worlds they target (Ticket 55). The

nova technique, on its most basic level, aims to “create as many insoluble conflicts as possible

and always aggravate existing conflicts – This is done by dumping on the same planet life forms

with incompatible conditions of existence” (Ticket 55). The Nova Mob seek to enhance and

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aggravate the concept of difference (or separation) that is so fundamental to the control society,

as has been shown. Of course, the differing life forms of the planet, such as American and

Japanese people (who at the time, as shown above, were depicted and approached in strongly

non- or subhuman terms by the American population), are not inherently opposed, as we might

think, for “[t]here is nothing ‘wrong’ about any given life form since ‘wrong’ only has reference

to conflicts with other life forms” (Ticket 55). The idea that there can be “wrong” (or, by the

same token, “right”) versions of life is formed by language. Burroughs would have us realize the

arbitrariness of these distinctions and our essential connection to all forms of life, abandoning

our established life definitions, which will always inherently exclude other possible forms of life

as “unnatural” (Africans, Japanese, homosexuals, machines, etc.) and thus be “incompatible in

present time form,” yet the Nova Mob of The Ticket That Exploded acts in opposition, seeking


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that our differences “remain in present time form,” allowing for the global manipulation of the

control society which “feeds back nuclear war and nova” (Ticket 55). Here Burroughs again

explicitly ties his villainous controllers to nuclear weaponry while also depicting nuclear war as

an outgrowth of essentialist life definitions. Further, the fact that “nova criminals are not three-

dimensional organisms...but they need three-dimensional human agents to operate” and that “the

criminal controllers operate in very much the same manner as a virus” makes it undeniably clear

that the Nova Mob, bringers of nuclear war, are the word virus. Quite literally, language is the

ticket that exploded.

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The Reality Studio in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands

Burroughs thus provides the backdrop for a reading of the atomic bomb that permeates his later

novels The Place of Dead Roads and, especially, The Western Lands. In them, Burroughs will

expand on Pynchon’s theory of “individual death” by showing that the death of the individual as

an event occurred long before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; its origins are traced back

as far as Ancient Egypt and even further to the origins of the word virus itself. His solution, this

blasting of a whole in the linguistic sphere that (traps and) contains us, paradoxically restores the

individual by demonstrating his or her connection to all things. He will dare to propose a positive

reading of the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which these events, while

terrible, teach us just how connected everything is.

That which creates the separations within the whole is ultimately a matter of categorization, a


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habit based on a need for terms and narratives that is purely lingual. The word virus, in order to

function, must reduce something that is strictly irreducible into individual subjects and objects,

which results in categories like “life” which seem essential but are, of course – as Saussure and

Nietzsche would concur – arbitrary and never quite true or correct. For example, it seems an

essential thing that I, the writer, am a unique existence irrevocably distinct from you, the reader,

but ultimately my and your “I”s (the most potent aspect of the word virus) are resting on rather

shaky foundations: a physical body that, in a handful of years, consists of entirely new cells; a

memory that is easily distorted, forgotten, manipulated and reconstructed; a personal self-

consciousness or self-conception that feels entirely different and distinct from its ten years past

form. Any one thing connecting that which we call “me” with true philosophical force, beyond

social and linguistic convention, remains elusive. Burroughs thus might seem on a mission to kill

the individual himself, the same goal as Pynchon‘s version of the control society, if his

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philosophy so leads us towards recognizing the arbitrariness of individualization, yet the process

of rendering the individual arbitrary also lends great power to the individual, paradoxically.

Without any inherent meaning, the individual can rebirth itself under its own rules, resisting the

rhetoric of death that has previously been imposed upon it by the control society. Thus

Burroughs, in The Western Lands, depicts a pilgrimage beyond death and towards immorality,

providing an ultimate vision that verges on utopia, a post-nuclear world that is truly post-nuclear,

that is, a world which, while not abandoning language, has recognized its status as a tool and

learned to resist its fundamentalist tendencies, such as a strict, essentialist definition of life in


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which Japanese people do not “count‘ as alive, making their extinction, regardless of the

technological means, an acceptable endgame. If we are to journey beyond death, to the Western

Lands, we must abandon the idea that we know what life is at all and recognize that it may

contain much wilder beings than we might imagine, even a machine, even a dead man.

The groundwork for The Western Lands, however, is first laid in Burroughs’s 1983 novel The

Place of Dead Roads, in which Burroughs, appropriately, returns to the nostalgic locale of the

Old West, just as the traditional post-apocalyptic tales, The Day After (also in 1983) and Fallout

3 (in 2008), do. Burroughs’s use of this setting, however, does not reflect a romanticization or

fetishization of human extinction. Burroughs, rather, returns to the Old West for its liberating

qualities; before industrialization, postmodernization, and globalization, it was a place in which

one man, usually a subversive, antisocial, countercultural figure (i.e. the kind Burroughs has

traditionally sympathized with and lionized), could truly make a difference – at least we like to

remember it that way. In the novel’s preamble, Burroughs recalls this nostalgia by explaining the

book’s original title, The Johnson Family, writing, “‘The Johnson family’ was a turn-of-the-

century expression to designate good bums and thieves... a code of conduct” (Place).

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Burroughs thus longs for an idealized past when criminals possessed a now lost sense of honor (a

charge found frequently in other works of American art, from The Godfather to The Dark

Knight, to the point where we might question whether or not such a past ever actually existed,

but regardless of this point, such a past serves as a model for Burroughs’s very real response to


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the word and nuclear viruses).

Throughout Burroughs’s writings one detects a certain privileging of space over time, which is

viewed as a pure construction. The Old West, with its open settings and lack of rigid societal

structure, thus seems the perfect model for a space-based future to Burroughs, who continues his

preamble by stating that “[t]he only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program...

The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function” (Place). The

Place of Dead Roads will attempt to actualize such a world, one in which “all participants” are

truly welcome, and in doing so calls for an expansion to the rigid life definitions that seem at the

core of nuclear discourse (importantly one of the key players in this actualization, Joe the Dead,

which is not just a cute nickname, persists in spite of an actual death in a form closer to machine

than man, representing the concept of machine life, a challenge to those life definitions more

radical than any national or racial boundary). Burroughs seems potentially skeptical of a

harmonious joining of disparate forms of life in the sense we might think (read: the disparate

groups of society joining hands and singing around a campfire), however, given Inspector Lee’s

assertion in The Ticket That Exploded that our planet is populated by “life forms with

incompatible conditions of existence” (55). Burroughs’s precise position in Lee’s statement could

be debated with great nuance, but either way his proposed solution is clear: creating enough

space so that everyone has “an opportunity to function” and making the achievement of this into

a unifying principle. When paired with an abandonment (or at least a demotion) of the external,

constructed

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time, space might approach infinity, true and unadulterated.

The character who will helm the quest towards space and beyond death (death being

intrinsically related to time and ultimately its byproduct), Kim Carsons, stands as a unique, and

quintessentially Burroughsian, sort of post-apocalyptic hero. The traditional post-apocalyptic

hero, such as the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is as much a remnant of his time and

culture as the dilapidated skyscrapers and abandoned streets which surround him; he is a last

man standing, attempting to keep his particular and accepted definition of life (that is, human

life) preserved in a world that no longer makes sense to him, as McCarthy’s unnamed father

stands as the last bastion for such exalted human qualities as devotion to one’s children (the

means through which life and life definitions are continued and spread), in opposition to a world

of cannibals and slavers which has completely abandoned its principles. The post-apocalyptic

hero is not designed for the world he now inhabits, but he perseveres in spite of his environment.

Kim Carsons, meanwhile, is quite well suited for such an environment and for a role as a

rebellious, anti-viral figure, as opposed to a mere remnant struggling for only survival. As an Old

West-style shootist, Kim is particularly adapted towards the post-apocalyptic desert world he will

journey through to reach the Western Lands in the novel of the same name. He is likewise

particularly adapted towards undermining language, strict categories, and the hegemony of the

dominant American culture that Burroughs relates to the control society. Kim is a man of

slippery and bending identity; the moment we are introduced to him, in the newspaper article that

chronicles his death, it is not even as Kim Carsons, but as “William Seward Hall, sixty-five, a

real-estate speculator,” a man who “wrote western stories under the pen name of ‘Kim


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Carsons’” (Place 3). What first seems to be a simple matter of a pseudonym, of course, proves

much more complicated over the course of The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, in

which Kim is shown to exist in many bodies,

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under many names, in many different times, with no real attempt given by Burroughs to explain

these overlapping existences chronologically (e.g. Kim’s story begins in the Old West, continues

into a science fiction future following Kim’s “death,” and culminates thousands of years earlier

in Ancient Egypt, alongside 11th century figure Hassan i. Sabbah). Kim thus seems to exist

outside of strict identity and time itself, making him an ideal figure for subverting the word virus

and the control society. Kim’s possession of unessential identities and his ability to so bend them

can be ascribed to his status as a writer, William Seward Hall, who we are clearly meant to relate

to Burroughs himself (whose middle initial stands for Seward). Kim, Hall, and even Inspector

Lee of The Ticket That Exploded thus all seem to connect with and reflect each other as aspects

of the same identity, ultimately to Burroughs himself, who as a writer is able to use language,

that which ascribes identity to him, against itself, gifting himself with a plethora of identities.

This identity-bending quality is itself an aspect of Kim’s larger social deviance, most apparent in

his promiscuous and unapologetic homosexuality, but also in his status as a roaming criminal,

free of societal obligations and responsibilities, and an artist. Kim thus seems a horrible choice

for a post-apocalyptic hero; he does not represent fading human virtue particularly well (at least

as it would be understood by the central culture he subverts) and is, indeed, no survivor at all, in

the sense of avoiding a physical death: from the moment we are introduced to Kim we already


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know he is going to die. Kim’s death, however, will prove to be the ultimate liberation which

allows him to journey beyond death and towards the immortality of the Western Lands.

Of course, the dream for a spatial, non-temporal world to counteract the post-apocalyptic is much

more than a mere physical journey or “charge of locale,” and Kim and Burroughs thus recognize

the need for “basic biologic alterations, like the switch from water to land. There has to be the

air-breathing potential first. And what is the medium corresponding to air that we must learn

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to breath in? The answer came to Kim in a silver flash. . . . Silence” (Place 40). This is a similar

realization to the one made by the District Supervisor in The Ticket That Exploded; that is, if we

are to properly move beyond the control society, and the nuclear issues that it has created (a

connection Ticket made clear), we must achieve true silence, the seemingly impossible, and

move beyond language. Only then can our life definitions truly change, can we “evolve” into

beings not dependent on the word virus. Such an evolution would lead, Burroughs suggests, to

true immorality, something “Kim considers... the only goal worth striving for,” but finds absent

from Christianity and other religions, particularly the Ancient Egyptians, whose immorality

discourses are “arbitrary, precarious, and bureaucratic” (Place 42-43).

The Egyptians thought they had achieved immortality, at least that those rich enough to have

themselves mummified had, but “your continued immortality in the Western Lands was entirely

dependent on the continued existence of your mummy” (Place 43). The Egyptians fail to achieve

true immorality in Kim/Burroughs’s eyes, thus, because a true immorality would have abandoned


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such viral ideas as an inherent and necessary connection to the physical body. Burroughs,

writing, “your mummy isn’t even safe in a museum. Air-raid sirens, it’s the blitz!” notes how

easily the physical remnant is destroyed (Place 44). Particularly in world of nuclear weapons and

incendiary bombs, it seems we should be seeking to move beyond our physical ties, which might

be atomized at any moment. The Egyptians’ immortality is intrinsically tied to the physical world

and thus very weak, easily subverted by grave robbers and time, which will ultimately wins out

over even the most effective of preservation methods. Burroughs’s plan for a united space

program necessarily calls for the abandonment of all ties, particularly the Egyptians’ dependence

on the barren, mummified carcass. Burroughs is not merely critiquing the Egyptian system,

however, for we shall see that his ultimate culprit, on whom he squarely pins the blame for

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the nuclear problem, is one god essentialism in any and all forms, particularly Western

Christianity.

Burroughs introduces his own version of J. Robert Oppenheimer as a twisted, film screen villain,

a “director” persona representing the death view, the control society, and the one god

essentialism that Burroughs brands as the ultimate nuclear culprit. Oppenheimer’s introduction is

prefaced with mediation on mortality that strikes a particularly nuclear chord. Burroughs relates

Kim’s viewing of a photograph of his friend Tom’s, writing, “the Indians and the one white are

all related, by location: the end of the line. Like the last Tasmanians, the Patagonians, the hairy

Ainu, the passenger pigeon, they cast no shadow, because there will never be any more. This

picture is the end. The mold is broken” (Place 87). There is a post-nuclear mindset to these


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thoughts in general, for they contemplate the extinction of past species and people, and thus the

capacity for human extinction – always a possibility (usually through invocation [or solicitation]

of divine forces), but certainly of particular note in the post-nuclear world, in which instant and

total annihilation based on nothing but mere human folly is a constant threat. The moment seems

to be even more specifically nuclear, however, if we focus on the words, “they cast no shadow,

because there will never be any more.” This line recalls the famously eerie and terrifying

shadows of Hiroshima, spots where incinerated victims left shadow-esque marks on the steps and

sides of buildings as the sole, vague marks of their existence. These victims do not cast any

shadow for they have been obliterated to a point of becoming their shadows, mere simulacrum in

a twisted version of Plato’s cave. Any attempt to immortalize or commemorate the victims of

Hiroshima, the Patagonians, or the passenger pigeons is in vain, for Burroughs continues, “This

final desolate knowledge impelled them to place phalluses... on male graves. The markers are

scattered and broken. Only the picture remains” (Place 88). The shadows are all that remains;

any tangible

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object we might hold onto as proof of their existence is gone, exposing the irrelevance of the

ideological attachment to the body as a means of immortality.

Burroughs quickly confirms the suspicion that this passage is to be read in nuclear terms when he

writes, “Spelling out . . . August 6, 1945: Hiroshima. Oppenheimer on screen: ‘We have become

Death, Destroyer of Worlds,’” literally spelling out his own metaphors for us, plainly stating

what was previously only implied. Having brought on this sense of atomic doom, Oppenheimer


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appears as Burroughs’s arch nemesis, declaring that not just he, but we, have become death,

imposing the previously discussed death view upon us (Place 88). Appropriately, he does not

appear to us directly, but rather as a projected image on a screen. This mimics the power and

nature of the bomb itself, which, with the exception of tests like Trinity and Bikini Atoll, cannot

be witnessed by anyone who would actually survive it outside of the film medium. Rather, the

bomb is transmitted to us through the photographs of its devastation on Japan and the films of

the mushroom cloud (as perhaps definitively, if ironically, captured in the ending sequence of Dr.

Strangelove). When the atomic vision cuts out, Kim notes that “[h]e is looking forward to

moving film,” suggesting Burroughs has plans for its appropriation just as he did with language,

so we might look back to The Ticket That Exploded for Burroughs’s advice on how to handle the

film form (Place 88).

Further into The Ticket That Exploded than was previously examined, Burroughs presents his

conception of the word virus, the control society, and the post-nuclear death view mentality as a

“reality studio,” i.e. in particularly cinematic vocabulary. Reality-as-film is depicted as

ultimately worthless, a series of signifiers without any signified to lend them positive content;

“[t]he film stock issued now isn’t worth the celluloid its [sic] printed on. There is nothing to back

it up. The film bank is empty” (Ticket 151). However, just as the arbitrariness of Saussurean

37

linguistics makes language more difficult to change (i.e. if there is no reason to call a tree-in-

itself by the signifier “tree” than there is no argument for why we should call it something else;

the status quo is simply more convenient), the emptiness of the reality studio (which we might


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read as language itself anyway, though it also encompasses the control society and the

particularly visual nature of the bomb more directly than the word virus concept does by itself)

makes resistance that much more difficult, for in order to prevent the disclosure of that

emptiness, the reality studio will resort to any and all means to prevent the creation of alternative

realities (e.g. an expansion of or challenge to life definitions, as Burroughs will introduce): “The

full weight of the film is directed against anyone who calls the film in question with particular

attention to writers and artists. Work for the reality studio or else. Or else you will find out how it

feels to be outside the film. I mean literally without film left to get yourself from here to the

corner” (Ticket 151). It is clear we are supposed to be equating film with the control society and

the bomb (Burroughs, throughout The Ticket That Exploded, describes explosions as “burst[s] of

nitrous film smoke” and similar language), but also with language and the basic organizing

structures of our understanding of the universe (104). Thus, the threat of a life outside of the

reality studio, a life essentially without structure, is a terrifying one. We must recall, however,

that escaping the essentialist constraints of the reality studio is exactly what Burroughs is calling

for us to do. The threat of control society is more than null and void, it is welcomed.

Burroughs makes his plans for the reality studio even more clear when he depicts the studio’s

destruction at the hands of a character named Ali, who reemerges during the latter parts of The

Western Lands (possibly as one of Kim Carsons’s many personas). Burroughs describes the

scene as such:

Yes, you have a doorway – Ali blew the smoke and waved his hands – “Abracadabra” – distant

events in green neon – you the smoke...


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old mirror bent over a chair... luminous grey flakes falling... Impressions suddenly collapse to a

heap... Film set goes up in red nitrous smoke – Remember show price? Know who I am? Yes

talking to you board members . . I don’t talk often and I don’t talk long . . You smell Hiroshima?

(Ticket 155)

Burroughs laces the scene with magical imagery: smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, and the

magic word “Abracadabra.” Ali thus seems to destroy the reality studio through an act of magic,

beyond the capacity of Burroughs’s audience, but Ali’s magic words are ultimately just words,

ones that have been endowed with particular meaning by society; he creates a “doorway” out of

the reality studio and leaves its remnants aflame through the power of linguistic play – the same

variety of linguistic play that defines Burroughs’s writing style. Appropriately, the burning film

stock gives off the stench of Hiroshima, for within the studio’s reels lie the prior thought

formations that restrict human discourse and language, resulting in the nuclear catastrophe, just

as the Nova Mob had planned. Their success is denied, however, by the destruction of the films –

not the bombs themselves or the individuals behind them. The bomb’s power lies in the films of

the bomb, in its image; there is no difference between the signified and the signifier. Burroughs

thus makes it clear that the confusing, inscrutable nature of his novels are not merely cases of

playful subversion and literary tricksterism: it is a true call for downright destruction, countering

the destructive force of the bomb with an equally destructive force aimed at the prior thought

formations. The Western Lands will aid in this by identifying the thought formations that need to

be destroyed and providing an image of life outside of the reality studio.


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The thought formations that need to be destroyed are, of course, the restrictive life definitions of

the control society, and their ultimate source, one god essentialism, or the One God Universe, to

use Burroughs’s terminology. Appropriately, J. Robert Oppenheimer (or at least his projected

image) is presented as the ultimate culprit behind the One God Universe, reflecting its

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relation to the nuclear issue, alongside the Venusians that pervade the entire Burroughs corpus,

but Oppenheimer and the other villainous figures are ultimately a stand-in for or representative

of the issue rather than its originators. The Venusian invasion, which represented the control

society in The Ticket That Exploded, is revealed in The Western Lands to be even more nefarious:

“The Venusian invasion is a takeover of the souls” (Western 6). Oppenheimer provides their

ultimate weapon, the atom bomb, which Burroughs reveals secretly functions as “a Soul Killer,

to alleviate an escalating soul glut” (Western 7). Burroughs’s understanding of the soul is much

more complex than a traditional Western/Christian perspective, however, in which a soul would

be seen as a single, irreducible being. Burroughs utilizes an Egyptian model (gleaned from

Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings) in which the soul actually consists of seven souls which can

separate from each other and die independent deaths. The concept of death in general is thus

much more murky under such a system, for various of the seven souls can be dead while others

are still alive. The first three souls, which are eternal and merely transfer to new vessels upon

death, consist of Ren, the “Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death;”

Sekem, “Energy Power, Light,” described as a Technician; and Khu, the Guardian Angel

(Western 4). The remaining souls are Ba, the Heart; Ka, the Double and “only reliable guided


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through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands;” Khaibit, the Shadow or Memory; and

Sekhu, the Remains (Western 5).

Shortly after outlining the Egyptian souls, Oppenheimer is introduced for the first time in The

Western Lands, again through a screen, as in The Place of Dead Roads. It is clear from the

passage that follows that Oppenheimer is meant to be interpreted in terms of the Egyptian soul

system:

Ruins of Hiroshima on screen. Pull back to show the Technician at a switchboard. Behind him,

Robert Oppenheimer flanked by three middle-aged men in dark suits, with the cold dead look of

heavy power.

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The Technician twiddles his knobs. He gives the O.K. sign. “All clear.”

“Are you sure?”

The Technician shrugs. “The instruments say so.”

Oppy says: “Thank God it wasn’t a dud.”

“Oh, uh, hurry with those printouts, Joe.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked after them sourly, thinking: Thank Joe

it wasn’t a dud. God doesn’t know what buttons to push.” (Western 8)

Oppenheimer is the ultimate man in control of the nuclear operation – he is even compared to

God – but he “doesn’t know what buttons to push.” He is completely reliant on a Technician to


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realize his aims and vision. The capitalization of Technician makes it clear that this Joe figure it

meant to represent the Sekem aspect of the soul, the aspect which actually gets things done.

Oppenheimer then is clearly in the position of the Director or Ren, appropriate given his official

title at Los Alamos, scientific director, and the cinematic connotations he is always paired with.

Oppenheimer may be seen as the Ren aspect of the soul that is the entire novel’s universe. He is

the nefarious figure directing all the action from behind a screen without directly participating.

He lacks the capacity for creation and can only achieve his power through the manipulation of

already existing control systems. This seems a somewhat exaggeratedly Machiavellian position

for a man who, in spite of his fame and his folly, was but one of many cogs in the machine that

produced Little Boy and Fat Man and dropped them on Japan. However, this is not Oppenheimer

the man, it is Oppenheimer the idea, as human incarnate of the atomic, the man who became

larger than life, a destroy of worlds, an avatar for that entire horrible machine. In spite of his

power he is at the mercy of his Technician Joe, clearly Joe the Dead, a machine life character

who, along with Kim Carsons, will help to undermine the control society in The Western Lands.

Ultimately, however, Oppenheimer is a stand-in for something much bigger than the nuclear

bomb or the control society; he personifies the One God Universe (which Burroughs, and thus

myself, will abbreviate

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OGU) and moreover God Himself.

The ultimate culprit or villain behind The Western Lands and thus the entire nuclear age is

much more than some exaggerated Oppenheimer figure, it is God. Burroughs will define the


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prior thought formations, the films, that have to be destroyed to liberate humanity as those

espousing the OGU, which seems predominantly Christian but also encapsulates Islam and

presumably all monotheistic religions. The Venusian conspiracy, of which Oppenheimer is a

chief architect (given the Venusians’ plans basis in nuclear weapons or “Soul Killers”) is

described as “antimagical, authoritarian, dogmatic... The universe they are imposing is

controlled, predictable, dead,” combining the traditional control discourse with particularly

religious terminology like “antimagical” and “dogmatic” (Western 59). However, the One God is

quickly exposed in much more direct fashion, Burroughs claiming he, “backed by secular power,

is forced on the masses in the name of Islam, Christianity, the State, for all secular leaders want

to be the One. To be intelligent or observant under such a blanket of oppression is to be

‘subversive’” (Western 111). Burroughs thus clearly positions the One God at the head of his

control society while simultaneously positioning himself as the enlightened writer and observer

who can subvert that control. Burroughs continues by identifying the One God directly with

time, which is of course in direct opposition to Burroughs’s space-based ideals, writing, “The

One God is Time. And in Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like

an old joke” (Western 111). If we are to realize Burroughs’s vision, it is clear the One God, Time,

and Oppenheimer all have to go.

Oppenheimer’s allegiance to the OGU makes sense, given his famous misreading of the

Bhagavad-Gita, in which he confuses Krishna and Vishnu, reflective of a man from a culture

doused in one god essentialism (the death view is thus entirely based in this anti-Burroughsian

mindset, as is the use of nuclear bombs in the first place, as Oppenheimer’s misreading serves as


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his justification for his actions). Oppenheimer is far more than just an ally to the OGU, though:

he is a personification of God himself. In a strange way, Burroughs ties the nuclear bomb, the

first non-divine means of apocalypse, back to divinity, though not in any traditional sense. The

evidence for Oppenheimer-as-God is circumstantial but powerful, and it illuminates the nature of

Burroughs’s text in fascinating ways. Burroughs describes the God of Judaism, Christianity, and

Islam as “an obvious lie... a shameless swindler,” casting him in a similar light to the pathetic

and manipulative Oppenheimer simulacrum (Western 70). Burroughs continues, “does this

Christian God stand with his worshippers? He does not. Like a cowardly officer, he keeps

himself well out of the war zone, bathed in the sniveling prayers of his groveling, shit-eating

worshippers – his dogs” (Western 70). Burroughs paints his One God with the same exact

imagery with which he paints his Director Oppenheimer. Both hover outside of wars they

themselves created, unwilling to put themselves in harm’s way. As Oppenheimer’s immortality is

guaranteed, being a Ren soul, so is the One God’s, both perfectly content to utilize the lesser

moral souls for their experiments and battles. Both act as commanding officers, not directly

involving themselves in their work, and both are ultimately being blamed for the same things:

nuclear warfare, linguistic imprisonment, and flawed immortality. Like Oppenheimer, the One

God, in spite of all of his power, does not know what buttons to push, “Because He can do

everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition... He can’t go

anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta” (Western 113). In

fact, this reveals that when Burroughs wrote, “God doesn’t know what buttons to push,” he was


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not merely reflecting the Technician’s attitude towards his superior but, rather, hiding the

correlation in plain sight. The most direct correlation is found in their ultimate nature as film in

the Burroughsian reality studio, however. The fact that Oppenheimer only ever appears on screen

suggests he himself is nothing but a recording, a film, and if

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Oppenheimer is a stand-in for God, this would imply that Burroughs is claiming that God is just

another recording to be discarded. We do not need to rely on this supposition because Burroughs

provides us with a direct proclamation of this fact, and it is perhaps the most damning evidence

that we should be reading Oppenheimer and One God as a single entity: “The OGU is a pre-

recorded universe of which He is the recorder” (Western 113). The film is not simply God’s

message, but God is the medium for the film, for the recorded universe, itself. The barrier

between signifier and signified once again collapses. Thus, the prior thought formations

Burroughs calls for us to destroy, and shows Ali destroying in The Ticket That Exploded, are not

merely ideas of language, of essentialism, of monotheism and restrictive life definitions; the red

nitrous smoke smelling of Hiroshima is the stench of the One God Himself being burned. The

Ticket That Exploded is a how-to manual for the destruction of the One God Universe, and The

Western Lands is its fruition.

We Are Beyond Death: The Journey Towards the Western Lands

The now clear mission of The Western Lands is realized through a series of complex, and not

necessarily commensurable, plots. The mission begins with the united space program first


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conceived of by Kim Carsons in the pages of The Place of Dead Roads, which is foiled by the

intervention of Joe the Dead, who is revealed to be Kim’s murderer (in the shootout described at

the beginning and end of The Place of Dead Roads). I will use this intervention as an opportunity

to examine the ways in which Joe the Dead, as an example of machine life, helps to undermine

the restrictive life definitions that are core to OGU and nuclear discourse, as has been discussed

throughout this work. Finally, The Western Lands culminates in Kim’s pilgrimage towards the

novel’s titular locale, representing the destruction of prior thought formations, leading to

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ambiguous results, as Kim, transubstantiated into an old writer character who clearly represents

Burroughs himself, completes his mission to unclear ends. I will argue for an optimistic and

empowering reading of this ending, one that affirms the reader to take the same pilgrimage

beyond death, to a truly post-nuclear world, not the one which gave birth to the bomb that we

have erroneously dubbed with the name.

We are reintroduced to Kim’s planned space program fairly early in The Western Lands; it is

conceived as “a secret service without a country” called Margaras Unlimited or MU (an acronym

which Burroughs also uses for Magical Universe, his term for a universe of many gods in

opposition to the OGU) (Western 24). By blackmailing Interpol, MU is able to gain access to the

wealth of files and information possessed by the world’s intelligence organizations, a literal co-

opting of the control society, iconically represented throughout literary history as an alphabet

soup of shady organizations, towards Burroughsian, space-based ends. Kim and MU state, “Our

policy is SPACE. Anything that favors or enhances space programs, space exploration,


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simulation of space conditions, exploration of inner space, expanding awareness, we will

support” (Western 25). Such rhetoric continues directly from where Burroughs and Kim left off

in the previous novel, seeking to abandon time for space whilst saving and unifying humanity.

Unfortunately, the space program is derailed before it even gets off the ground, for on the very

next page of the novel, the first of its second chapter, Burroughs returns us to the scene of Kim’s

murder, revealing Joe the Dead, Kim’s once ally, as the killer. Kim’s death was not merely an

unfortunate incident, however, and Burroughs will demonstrate that his death was actually

profoundly necessary in order for the space program to succeed.

First, the novel shifts its focus to the character of Joe the Dead, who, while not engaging in the

same pilgrimage as Kim/Neferti/the old writer/Burroughs, subverts the dominant structures of

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the OGU in interesting ways due to his status as a half-machine/half-man hybrid, who uses his

particular abilities and knowledge to defy death in ways that frustrate the control society.

Burroughs describes Joe in terms that are decidedly robotic and inhuman, writing that “[h]e feels

[grief] in the plates in his skull, in his artificial arms, in his artificial eye, in every wire and

circuit of the tiny computer chips, down into his atoms and photons” (Western 40). Burroughs’s

description focuses on Joe’s artificiality almost to the point of absurdity: the nouns are all either

electronic components or described with the adjective “artificial” directly, and this artificiality is

stated to exist as such down to the atomic level, in such a way that any hope for “life” within

Joe’s machine seems impossible. However, everything about Burroughs’s intentionally

mechanistic description of Joe the Dead is undone in his characterization, his possession of a


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grief so deep it pervades every wire, chip, and proton of his existence. This juxtaposition of the

natural and the mechanistic is unsettling, but it makes it clear that, for Burroughs, Joe the Dead is

an example of machine life, in the long tradition of such speculations in science-fiction history.

Burroughs further characterizes Joe in terms of his Egyptian soul system. When Burroughs

writes that, “Joe is the Tinkerer, the Smith, the Masters of Keys and Locks, of Time and Fire, the

Master of Light and Sound, the Technician,” he obviously identifies Joe with the Sekem, the

second soul, directly underneath the Ren (Western 28). The Sekem is the soul that knows how to

push the buttons, and we might recall that Oppenheimer’s Technician is referred to as Joe. Joe is

formally subservient to Oppenheimer/Ren/One God, but in practice subverts him. Joe the Dead is

described as a member of “a select breed of outlaws known as the NOs, natural outlaws

dedicated to breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon us by physicists,

chemists, mathematicians, biologists and, above all, the monumental fraud of cause and effect, to

be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity” (Western 30). Joe’s entire existence

is

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based around undermining the directions of the Director God, on which the neat order of his One

God Universe depends, and his contradictory, category-rejecting nature as an example of

machine life makes this inevitable. Joe uses a variety of methods to counteract traditional

evolution, breeding, and death by dealing in advanced hybridization, transplant surgery, and even

cancer treatment, in which his antagonistic nature to Ren is made explicit, while Ren’s


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connection to the nuclear is further reinforced:

Cancer seems as immutably real and exempt from intervention as a nuclear blast. The explosive

replication of cells? Once it starts, it is like an atom bomb that has already detonated. Death is an

end product of purpose, of destiny. Something to be done in a certain time, and once it is done

there is no point in staying around. Like a bullfight. Destiny = Ren. (Western 60)

The connection between the atom bomb and cancer reflects larger connection being made

between death in general as a category and the One God Universe. Joe the Dead, as living dead

and living machine, undermines the category of death in a way that frustrates the One God’s

system. He is in many ways doing the work of the Burroughsian revolutionary, breaking down

and expanding categories that present themselves as essential.

Joe is not completely sympathetic to the cause of the Burroughsian human rebel, however, given

his advocacy of a complete evolution beyond the human race, believing “[t]he human problem

cannot be solved in human terms. Only a basic change in the board and the chessmen could offer

a chance of survival” (Western 27). This idea of being replaced, of being rendered obsolete, is

arguably the true terror behind a post-apocalyptic world, as evidenced by more recent post-

apocalyptic works of art moving away from the traditional “last humans standing” plots of works

like The Day After or Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and towards the machine-dominated, and by

no means less apocalyptic and nuclear, futures of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of

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Electric Sheep? and films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and even The Matrix. Joe the Dead


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presents a reading of “we are become death” that equates to the birth of the machine. In our

attempts to maintain primacy over the definition of life, we are actually part of a long tradition

that Burroughs traces back to the Egyptians. Joe the Dead challenges the idea that there can be

one type of life in the same way that Burroughs challenges the idea that there can be one type of

god. Joe’s character suggests an entire reading of post-nuclear, machine-based art, particularly

film, through the Burroughsian lens. Such a project is beyond the limits of this work, but the first

of the three codas which follow the work proper will suggest a potential schema for a reading of

Burroughsian machine life in atomic cinema.

Kim Carsons reenters the scene of The Western Lands as a dead man summoned by, of all

people, the District Supervisor whom was encountered in The Ticket That Exploded, the man

whom first prescribed the miracle of silence as the cure for the Venusian invasion which has

clearly taken on new life in the Red Night Trilogy. Provocatively, upon seeing the District

Supervisor, Kim is incredulous, recalling his shared identity with Burroughs himself, as

previously described, in asking, “So how come I’m not the Supervisor? After all, I wrote the

Supervisor,” but the D.S. himself clarifies that Kim, like all writers, does not actually write, but

merely reads and transcribes the already written, that which Kim “reads” is conveyed through his

“spokesman, the Supervisor. The Imam. The Old Man” (Western 74). This Old Man is the Old

Man in the Mountain, more commonly referred to as Hassan i. Sabbah (commonly abbreviated

as HIS by Burroughs), the Islamic assassin figure who will accompany Kim, who at this point

will be mostly seen under the Neferti identity, on his soon to be ordered pilgrimage. The D.S.’s

dialogue, however, suggest HIS is to be identified with both Kim and Burroughs themselves, and


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thus the “old writer” figure who appears at the novel’s bookends. Burroughs’s insistence on not

merely

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changing his and his character’s identities at will, but in splitting a single identity across several

simultaneously existences of ambiguous relation, suggests the true commitment to a non-

essential, non-lingual, silent world that must be made in order to make it to the Western Lands.

Any man who is arrogant enough to assume his entire personage is a single, irreducible being is

doomed for disappointment and failure.

Regardless, the D.S. informs Kim of his mission to find the Western Lands. Appropriately this is

an act of a character from The Ticket That Exploded, which I have argued is a “manual” for

Burroughsian methodology, instructing a character in The Western Lands to act the theory out in

practice. Kim’s mission for a unified space program is thus sidelined because first death has to be

over come via the discovery of the Western Lands and the immorality that lies within them. We

might thus consider back to Kim’s first plans for the space program in The Place of Dead Roads,

when he noted the need for certain biologic alterations before the program could be enacted

successfully. It thus seems clear that the pilgrimage is the biologic alteration in question, and

there is a reason the space program had to be so quickly interrupted by Kim’s death. Joe the

Dead, seemingly taking a villainous and traitorous action (and he is, of course, by no means a

fully redeemable character), actually helps to fulfill Kim’s and the D.S.’s plans, for they now

know that the answer much come from silence, from a land beyond death. Only when the


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pilgrimage to the Western Lands has been made can the space program be a viable option.

The novel thus chronicles Burroughs’s various self-extensions of Kim Carsons, Hassan i.

Sabbah, and Neferti journeying though the profoundly strange, mystical, and polytheistic world

of the Land of the Dead towards the Western Lands. The details of this journey, from the

presence of gigantic, radiated centipedes to nuclear bomb jet packs, are laden with various

potential metaphorical significances, but a full analysis of such details is not of chief interest to

us here and

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ultimately critically superfluous: the point is that the pilgrimage is made. Thus, a brief overview

will suffice for my purposes. The characters journey through Waghdas, City of Knowledge, a

particularly post-apocalyptic city, adorned with “stick people frozen on the wall, like the

shadows of human figures left on the walls of Hiroshima” (Western 129). Waghdas is a city of

not just knowledge, but nuclear knowledge, and all of its knowledge must be abandoned if the

pilgrimage is to be successful. The pilgrims thus proceed to the town of Last Chance, a town of

duelists, some who “ride in with atomic bullets” to “take out the target and immediate environs

like a saloon or half a hotel” (Western 142). Such tactics are dishonorable by the code of the Old

West which Kim Carsons stands as a remnant of. In opposition to this atomic weaponry, Kim

engages in his duel with the character Zed with handguns, which he only uses after Zed misses in

an attempt to shoot Kim in the back while he urinates. Kim then, tracking Zed down, approaches

him from the front, gives him an opportunity to defend himself and, after Zed misses again,

“disintegrates him with one shot that takes out a wall of the store” (Western 149). Surrounded by


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dishonorable tactics and weaponry, Kim Carsons perhaps returns a measure of honor to

weaponry (Burroughs, of course, being quite fond of handguns) in an age in which such honor

has been lost. Finally, they must pass through the Duad, a river of excrement, for “[t]o transcend

life you must transcend the conditions of life, the shit and farts and piss and sweat and snot of

life” (Western 155). Neferti, noted to have particular trouble with the Duad due to his past

experiences with “the deadly poison of Christianity,” finally succeeds in crossing by “dropping

his Ego, his Me,” completely eliminating any sense that he is any way truly distinct from those

around him, upon which he realizes that “[t]here is nothing here to protect himself from,” and

grime of life is none the less as arbitrary as its splendors (Western 158).

The pilgrimage is far from an isolated journey, as well. Burroughs describes leagues of

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“awakened pilgrims,” finding “[t]he great mushroom-shaped cloud always closer,” that is,

attempting to move beyond the pessimistic death view of their post-nuclear existences, “take a

step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land.

That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space” (Western 115). This is the path

Burroughs has been laying out for us throughout his corpus, but only now is the mass pilgrimage

actually beginning, a successful trip will give “access to the gift that supersedes all other gifts:

Immortality,” an immortality free of the lies and trickery of the One God Universe and the

physical entanglements of the Egyptians (Western 124). Will the pilgrims truly live forever? The

answer is a substantive yes but not a literal one. The immortality Burroughs offers is outside of

the realm of language and therefore cannot be understood in the normal sense of the term. Death


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will still occur in the terms of linguistic, categorical death, but the true pilgrimage is the

recognition that this death is nothing but a category. Life need not be obsessed with maintaining

its own status quo, with maintaining its consciousness in the terms it has come to understand

indicate “being alive.” Burroughs’s truths are hard to fathom because we attempt to fathom it

linguistically; his pilgrimage truly necessitates that “[o]nly those who can leave behind

everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape” (Western 116). Doing so provides the

ultimate repellent to the restricting and controlling forces of nuclear weaponry, control society,

and one god essentialism. Ultimately, it is the practice of Burroughs himself, more directly

captured in the “old writer” (who, as the last man standing, seems to be the whole which has

emerged from the Western Lands following the various characters’ successful entrance) of the

novel’s final pages than any of his other personas, moving beyond death and abandoning the

prior thought formations he has spent so long calling our attention to. It is a strangely utopian

message, breaking through our frameworks of thought to save us.

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Burroughs leaves us with the figure of the old writer, seeming to represent a reconstitution of

Burroughs himself, who, following the pilgrimage, “couldn’t write anymore because he had

reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words” (Western 258). Frederick M.

Dolan, in “The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S.

Burroughs’s The Western Lands,” chooses to read this moment as a meditation on the limits and

failures of writing, on Burroughs’s own failure to accurately sublimate the word virus, which

Dolan frames as an “Aristotelian construct,” writing:


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the problem with the ‘Aristotelian construct,’ fundamentally, is its inaccuracy. ’Reality’ just is

synchronous and unpredictable, whereas the declarative sentence moving ahead determinably

through time makes it appear as if one event follows another in an orderly manner. Burroughs

might attempt to write in ways that undermine the Aristotelian construct, but not without

declaring something, and finally, as we have seen, not without becoming inveigled in this

construct’s seductive images of lucidity, order, control, and a plenitude beyond mere writing as

fiction. (549)

I reject Dolan’s reading of this moment, for while Burroughs is required to engage in some level

of declaration, this is not in itself a ruination of his linguistic philosophy. Burroughs notes the

word virus, not a parasite, originated as a symbiotic relationship. It is a tool for structuring and

interpreting reality. Thus, while Burroughs will produce declarations that engage in Dolan’s

Aristotelian construct, his hyperconsciousness of language’s arbitrary nature saves him from

falling back into the same slumber from which he has attempted to awaken us through the use of

language. Burroughs’s lament that he has reached the end of words is in fact a joyous cry of

success: he has exhausted the word virus’s tricks and reduced it to a symbiont. He has

undermined post-nuclear terror, one god essentialism, and the word virus as much as he can for

us with his words. His job is done. As readers, it is now upon us to move on from language

ourselves, to follow Burroughs on his pilgrimage to the Western Lands. If there is a lament at the

end of The


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Western Lands, it is not for Burroughs himself, it is for the reader who might not follow him.

Burroughs asks us, “[h]ow long can one hang on in Gibraltar... clinging always to less and

less” (Western 258). Throughout his entire literary corpus, Burroughs has encouraged us to

abandon the prior thought formations that limit our perspective on the world, that allow us to be

controlled by language and society, that lead to determinations that a homosexual or a Japanese

citizen is not truly alive, yet still many cling to their Gibraltar, the last vestige of a once great

Empire of language, God, and bombs. When he, closing the novel, quotes T.S. Eliot, who

conceived of a post-apocalyptic wasteland long before J. Robert Oppenheimer made it a

terrifyingly possible reality, writing, “Hurry up, please. It’s time,” he does not mean time is

running out; rather, Time is running after us. He cautions us to follow him, to move onto the

Space of the Western Lands before Time catches us for good.

A Long Way Down: Parting Shots from the End of the World

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous words upon witnessing the first nuclear explosion helped

convince the world that it had or would profoundly change in a post-nuclear apocalypse in which

annihilation would be sudden, absolute, and the work of humanity. Traditional post-apocalyptic

works lamented humanity’s lot while simultaneously romanticizing its status as the last men

standing. Meanwhile, no one seemed to realize the true horrors that had led to the nuclear bomb

in the first place: exclusive and limiting definitions of life that viewed the Japanese people as a

vermin to be “killed off,” a society that would rather see the candle of life in the universe

completely snuffed out than be replaced by life that defied that definition. The post-nuclear


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world existed before the bomb; it created the bomb, not the other way around. William S.

Burroughs traces the bomb as a discourse to its very basic assumptions, its implicit logics of

control,

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manipulation, one god essentialism, and viral language. This is the true mark of a nuclear

apocalypse, not a headcount of warheads and power plants. Destroying the specific instances of

technology does not stop anything if the underlying logic continues. We need to approach the

bomb as a discourse, from the bottom up (and the bottom is a long way down), if we are to truly

understand it. Ultimately though, humanity tells us less about the bomb than the bomb tells us

about humanity.

If nothing else, let this work have taken the normally inaccessible work of William S. Burroughs

and shown the complex cultural analyses within. Burroughs shows us that the ultimate culprit

behind the bomb is the word virus and the One God Universe, but he also shows us that

Burroughs’s declaration that we have become death need not be a permanent fate. By moving

beyond death, through the Western Lands, we can achieve the immortality that only comes from

the recognition of the connection of all things. Even if the literal language of such a statement

strikes as too strong, even if everything is not actually and substantively connected, things are

significantly and closely connected, and approaching the world as if the connection is substantial

proves to be a useful theoretical framework. Perhaps, though, the nuclear bomb can be the

historical moment through which we come to recognize the profound literalness of this

connection, the shockwave through which we place ourselves in the moment of impact. Such an


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admission makes the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even more horrifying, but it might also

prevent such tragedies from happening again.

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CODA 1: Nuclear Film and the Fear of Machine Life

The limits of space and time did not allow for a true analysis of nuclear film, particularly as it

might be understood through the Burroughsian lens, which lends its propensity for connecting

the bomb to other discourses that are not explicitly nuclear, with an eye towards the concept of

machine life, a concept that has come to dominate post-apocalyptic film, particular since the

1990s. Such an analysis would do well to examine the 90s post-apocalyptic action films

Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Matrix. Terminator 2’s nuclear connection seems obvious

enough, given its subtitle and its explicitly nuclear imagery (e.g. the famous playground scene).

Interestingly, however, the object of central interest, and ultimate doom, to the universe of the

film is not a nuclear weapon, nor even a battle android, but the computer chip within the wrecked

Terminator’s arm. The characters desperately attempt to destroy this chip, which sends man on

the trajectory towards inventing the chip itself. Even the “good” Terminator himself is chiefly

interested in eliminating his own existence. In spite of this, the end of the film, by which point

the Terminator has established a strong, fatherly relationship with the boy, paradoxically suggests

that an emotional reconciliation between human and machine is possible, that machine life just

might be alive, while simultaneously doing everything to suggest the technological progress that


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will destroy mankind is entirely inevitable. The film remains optimistic in the personal moment

while famously bleak in its “big picture” narrative, as continued in Terminator 3: Rise of the

Machines, a film mostly notable for its ending sequence only, unfortunately.

The connections between nuclear devastation and a computer chip in Terminator 2 do well to set

up an analysis of The Matrix, which reverts to an almost entirely negative view of machine life

(and not a particularly positive one of human life either). Indeed, The Matrix depicts a world,

darkened by the use of weaponry of a probably nuclear nature, in which all life in the “real

world”

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is exceedingly bleak. The machines, e.g. Agent Smith, are not content within the Matrix either,

suggesting complete ignorance is the only method towards anything resembling happiness. It

also suggests a machine life that is, well, not very alive, but just as alive as its pathetic human

counterparts, who are not particularly alive themselves in their reliance on literally

preprogrammed religious sequences of uprising and sacrifice for anything resembling a purpose.

The most pivotal point to be taken from The Matrix, however, is its shocking, but profoundly

true, equation of the computer (and more specifically the Internet) with the nuclear bomb. The

two technologies developed alongside each other, with figures such as Vannevar Bush being

central to both, and in the future of The Matrix it takes computers, networks, and nuclear

missiles to build the lethal cocktail that induces the bleak dystopia shared by humans and

machines in mutual dissatisfaction. The specific technology means nothing; sometimes it takes a


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large number of them in a very particular combination, but in the end, the end is a discourse.

Finally, such a film analysis might look at Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (known only as

Innocence in Japan), an anime film proposing an unessentialist view of life, inclusive of human,

machine, and hybrid, that strikes as oddly enlightened (appropriate that it would come from

Japan) and even Burroughsian. An extensive analysis of the roles of machine life and the nuclear

bomb in post-apocalyptic art might look to a great many other works (Blade Runner and its

source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, come to mind

particularly), but this schema might be an interesting and non-traditional starting point for a

nuclear film analysis.

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CODA 2: The Fukushima I Accidents

As this thesis neared its completion, Japan was hit by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami,

triggering various equipment failures and radioactive releases at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power

Plant. The news media has subsequently been flooded with debates as to the safety of nuclear

power, sensationalist reports of radiation waves crossing the Pacific into the United States, and

frequent parallels between the events of Hiroshima and Fukushima. With my thesis of this

nature, I feel obligated to acknowledge the Fukushima incident, but only to caution those who

seek to draw such parallels to Hiroshima too readily. These are two entirely different historical

events happening within entirely different historical frameworks. We do not want the death view

to resurface and keep us from helping the many victims of the natural disasters due to our fears


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of nuclear incidents.

A conceptual sketch of a potential installation of “We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves

of Hiroshima”


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CODA 3: An Experiment in Installing “We Are Become Death”

If any reader should be inspired to display this thesis as an art installation, may they first be

welcome to do so. Secondly, may I offer my humble suggestions, which I include here mostly

out of a sense of obligation to return Burroughs to the chaos from which he emerged. My

explication of his theories above both emboldens and unsettles me. I feel that I have gone into

Burroughs’s home and straightened up all of his things without asking, and I have a duty to

return the mess the way I found it.

Firstly, having so engaged with the word virus through this piece, I feel it is necessary to let it

know who is boss. I recommend two to four large printers set up to be constantly printing the

thesis from the first to last page in sequence. The printers will be arranged so that pages, upon

their completion, fall into a furnace in the center of them. The thesis proper should be cut-up in

Burroughsian style and displayed as a massive tile puzzle, which visitors are strongly encouraged

to distort, ensuring surprising and new reading experiences for all. A wall of monitors

soundlessly play a variety of nuclear-related clips, each in random sequence: footage of

mushroom clouds, scenes from The Day After, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Terminator 2, and other nuclear films, and perhaps, occasionally, the

entire Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last.” Once per day at some time of significance

(which I leave to the exhibitors), however, the exhibit goes into shutdown. Air raid sirens wail,

introducing J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose head takes over the wall of monitors, now acting as a


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single screen. He delivers his famous “I am become death” performance as the furnace ignites.

During all times other than Oppenheimer’s guest appearances, the following songs shall play in

random sequence in the background of the exhibit:

--- “Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor --- “Mourning Doves” by

The Hourglass Orchestra

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--- “We Will All Go Together When We Go” by Tom Lehrer --- “The End of the World” by

Skeeter Davis

--- “In the Year 2525” by Zager & Evans

--- “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

--- “I Melt With You” by Modern English --- “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn

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multimedia associated with this project may be viewed at wearebecomedeath.tumblr.com

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Bibliography

Atomic Archive. “J. Robert Oppenheimer ‘Now I Am Become Death...’” Atomic Archive. AJ Software & Multimedia, 2011. Web. 27 March 2011.

Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros., 1982.Boyer, Paul. “Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory.” The American Experience in World War II: The


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Atomic Bomb in History and Memory. Ed. Walter L. Hixson. New York: Routledge, 2003. 237-259. Print. Burroughs, William S. Interview with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. The Journal for the Protection of All

Beings. San Francisco: City Lights, 1961. Print.Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959. PrintBurroughs, William S. The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Picador, 1983. Print.Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove, 1967. Print.Burroughs, William S. The Western Lands. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print.The Day After. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. ABC, 1983. Film.Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Rey, 1968. Print.Dolan, Frederick M. “The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S. Burroughs’s The

Western Lands.” Contemporary Lierature, Vol. 32, No. 4 (1991): 535-551. Print.Dower, John. “Race, Language, and War in Two Cultures: World War II in Asia.” The World War Two Reader. Ed.

Gordon Martel. New York: Routledge, 2004. 226-249. Print.Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Columbia, 1964.

Film.Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks, 2008. Video Game.Feraru, Arthur N. “Public Opinion Polls on Japan.” Far Eastern Survey, Vol. 19, No. 10 (1950): 101-103. Print. Frank, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. Toho, 2004. Film.“The Gita: Chapter 11.” The Bhagavad Gita: The Divine Song of God. Web. 27 March 2011.

< http://www.bhagavad-gita.us/categories/The-Gita:-Chapter-11/?Page=2>Glasstone, Samuel and Philip J. Dolan. “Chapter I: General Principles of Nuclear Explosions.” The Effects of Nuclear

Weapons. The Trinity Atomic Website. Web. 27 March 2011. 62

Hijiya, James A. “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 2 (2000): 123-167. Print.

Kull, Steven. “Nuclear Arms and the Desire for World Destruction.” Political Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1983): 563-591. Print.

The Matrix. Dirs. Andy and Larry Wachwoski. Warner Bros., 1999. Film.McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon,


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1988. Print. Nietzche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed.

Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 874-84. Print.Nornes, Abé Mark. “Production Materials from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” CJS

Publications. Centre for Japanese Studies Publications. Web. 27 March 2011.Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973. Print.Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Touchstone, 1986. Print.Saussure, Ferdinand de. “From Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed.

Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 960-977. Print.Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Ballantine, 1957. Print.Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Dir. James Cameron. TriStar, 1991. Film. Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Dir. Peter Kuran. VCE, 1995.

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The “Phenomenology” of Dissolution / Disillusionment

Shafni Awam

“Affectation is effective.”Rivers run amuck,

perpetually crumbling levees separating

‘reality’ and ‘illusion.’

“Hyper aware.”(Consciousness),its derivative ‘I’

observe(s)(its) myself transition into sleep.

The levees are crumbling,seams undone

thru interweaving.Perceptions seem more intense,

‘hypereal’ I suppose.

“Estranged.”Starring at the mirrorLooking into eyes,

seemingly foreign eyes,(I) Touch (my) body,I felt myself feeling,

I guess this is my body.For a moment it seemed like Iembodied the negative spacethat connected the reflection

with its source.‘Seamless’ I guess.

“When becoming unconscious”,


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the loci of Imaginationseem to be independent

of odinary conscious input,transforming into a

‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’‘Of sorts.’

A visceral shift from the ‘imaginary’

to the ‘ imaginal’ realm.

“When becoming unconscious,”becoming = whizzing thru swirlingtunnels of sensations, all of them,

fracturing, colliding,multiplying and dividing

seamlessly. A hybrid of (sexual reproduction) X (binary fission),birthing a synesthetic orgy of mutating sensations.

Events: (past) - (future), can’t delineate.It is not that ‘I am losing consciousness,’

forced to wormhole into a dream state rather,a theater of shattered sensations interweaving,

highly absurd and intensely meaningful.

Elephants succumbing to an icy corridor,the army,

a blur of skin, hide, fur,Metal, wood and body odor.

Pelted into clay stoned hushness by a swarm of sparrows,

fodder, half chewed, moaning, orchid icicles, splattering,

splintering into the dusty earth.Honeying…

light dissipating,

rock cold air, unsettling the gloom.

I feel cold, sweaty,

eyes squinty, palms clammy,mouth dry, heart racing,

for a moment,


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the world seemed alien,what, where, who am I or was I?

“Yes… All this seems strangely familiar…Back to my old self again,(‘whatever that means…’)”

“Thou” “art” “that.”‘That’ is what eludes ‘me’,

‘Art’ discloses ‘that’ perhaps,“Maybe not, who knows?

‘Not me.’”

"Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness." — Haruki Murakami


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Swarm Scholarship ProjectChallenge #1:

Fiasco Press is seeking your guesswork, research, and personal knowledge to help identify the title and attribution of an original William S. Burroughs painting featured on the following page.

*Please post all comments publicly so your peers can participate in this exercise of swarm scholarship. Thanks!

Photographed by Alex Broudy

Title, attribution, and signature found on the back of the original William S. Burroughs painting featured on the following page.


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Painting with Illegible Title by William S. BurroughsPhotographed by Alex Broudy


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