“A Paranthesis Stagnantxas the Green Water”
I was watching a documentary about William S. Burroughs last night and despite my deep fascination with the man and his work, I found myself yawning. I wasn’t yawning because I found the subject himself boring, far from it. William S. Burroughs is the Marcel Duchamp of American literature. What was boring was the way the film was conceived and executed. The people they had speaking about him, the people lined up to give an account of the man were intelligent and sincere but also lacking in some way, lacking the same depth the man himself carried around with him everywhere he went. You can’t have shallow people (sorry Iggy, but compared to Burroughs you are a clean-cut boy scout) making exclamations about the blackest, most unfathomable depth. Whenever William S. Burroughs came on screen, everything fell silent and the heaviness of the man, the intense Plutonic acuity of him took over the movie. But the second he left the screen, or when images of him tottering around his kitchen feeding his cats were accompanied by some narration or voice-over, waves of mediocrity swam ashore, as it were, and washed away everything interesting. I think Burroughs himself would have hated this film and its pretentious and ineffective attempts at being cool.
“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage,” quoth the man at one point in the film. That’s the thing about documentary films. They are often completely paralyzed and can’t muster anything other than flashing small bits of the subject’s brilliance in little quotation marks on screen while they blunder around trying to fill ninety minutes with idiotic inanities. For example, this quote in itself could fill over two hours of psychological analysis. It is a reference to the Jungian shadow but do they even mention Jung in the film? No, they mention Freud, who, according to one of the distinctly un-sage-like people standing in for Burroughs, declares that Freud would have seen Burroughs as deeply troubled. With all due respect, ignore Freud! I said so out loud when this bit of sacrilegious mundanity flashed across my screen. Freud was afraid of his own shadow and did everything he could to blame its existence on his father and the big bad wolves of the sexual impulse. That’s another thing: they made the whole thing about Burroughs and his sexual life, making ludicrous claims about how he was afraid to have deep lasting romantic relationships. He didn’t want to be hurt, apparently. To claim that someone who spent his life dangling on the edge of a knife while tussling with Satan himself, someone who dragged Satan through the mud and humiliated him in front of God and all the denizens of hell and then stole his secret book of poetry that only the greatest ever get their hands on — to claim that such a man was “afraid” of anything is the deepest insult and, for that, each every person in this film deserves to be spanked in front of their mother.
“I don’t know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I’ve recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I’ll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I’ve written. I’ll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll suddenly see a scene from my book and I’ll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I’ve found that when preparing a page, I’ll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I’ve been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines.”
Burroughs is describing here the creative collaboration process with the collective unconscious (the source of all creativity) that Jung called active imagination. It’s essentially a shamanic technique that writers, artists, and mystics have used for millennia to commune with the transcendental dimensions of consciousness which gives life its tenor and meaning but that is still completely misunderstood (and often even misapplied) by those who want to approach it with the rigid (stick-in-the-butt) lens of critical theory. I think it’s because admitting that creativity comes from a dimension beyond the will of the ego (beyond rational discourse about the conceptual basis for art products) is too much of an admission of defeat and helplessness. Most artists (and curators for that matter) are plagued with neurotic egoism and want to claim their products for themselves, they want to own the creative expressions that pour through them, they want to take personal credit for it all. It is too much to accept that they are merely conduits and that the creativity belongs, in fact, to a transpersonal entity we usually call “god.” Instead, they wish to be fêted and revered, they want to stand there and dramatically read out loud the poetic words that were god-given and then swim in the glory of adulation and adoration that pours over them in the form of applause emanating from an equally misled audience. Again, I think Burroughs the man washed his hands of this creepy side of art and poetry, as did Marcel Duchamp incidentally. On the eve of a great big opening in New York City, for example, Marcel Duchamp would secretly fly to Paris so he wasn’t on hand for vacuous people and art-world hacks to fawn all over him. If the show was in Paris, he’d fly to New York. I think this is why Burroughs moved to Tangiers where the despicable American impulse to commodify everything in sight could be avoided like the plague.
“What we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear.”
Yes, we always have our mouths open, don’t we? But our ears are rarely pricked.
