William Burroughs - The 3rd Mind.pdf - William S Burroughs - WMatrixie

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A Seaver Book/The Viking Press

First published in 1978 by The Viking Press

625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

Published simultaneously in Canada by

Penguin Books Canada Limited

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Burroughs, William S 1914-

The third mind.

"A Seaver book."

I. Gysin, Brion, joint author. II. Title.

PS3552.U75T48

813'.5'4

77-26896

ISBN 0-670-70099-1

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Linotype Times Roman

Portions of this book appeared during the years 1960-73, in slightly different

form, in the following publications:

The Award Avant-Garde Reader: "Proclaim Present Time Over"; Brion Gysin

Let the Mice In: "Let the Mice In"; A Casebook on the Beat: "The Cut-up

Method of Brion Gysin"; Evergreen Review: "Cut-ups Self-Explained," "Cut-

ups: A Project for Disastrous Success," "Fold-ins"; The Exterminator: "The

Exterminator"; Insect Trust Gazette: "Formats: The Grid"; May fair: "Films";

Minutes to Go: "First Cut-ups," "Intersection Readings"; Nova Express:

"Technical Deposition of the Virus Power"; Paris Review: "Interview with

William S. Burroughs."

BURROUGHS: I don't know about where fiction ordinarily di-

rects 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 scrap-

book 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 some-

thing 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. I do a lot of

exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as

what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about

at the time, what I was reading and what I wrote; all of this to

see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in

time.

• Extracted from the 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker in Paris Review;

reprinted in Writers at Work, 3rd Series (New York, 1967).

INTERVIEWER: In Nova Express you indicate that silence is a

desirable state.

BURROUGHS: The most desirable state. In one sense a special

use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks

and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me

to think in association blocks rather than words. I've recently spent

a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and

the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that!

Words—at least the way we use them—can stand in the way of

what I call nonbody experience. It's time we thought about leav-

ing the body behind.

INTERVIEWER: Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin

was needed to turn the human body into an environment that

includes the universe. But from what you've told me, you're not

at all interested in turning the body into an environment.

BURROUGHS: NO, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit

to me as a writer (aside from putting me into contact with the

whole carny world) came to me after I went off it. What I want

to do is to learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside,

to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surround-

ings. Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and

now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction: outward.

INTERVIEWER: Have you been able to think for any length of

time in images, with the inner voice silent?

BURROUGHS : I'm becoming more proficient at it, partly through

my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between

words and images. Try this: Carefully memorize the meaning of

a passage, then read it; you'll find you can actually read it with-

out the words' making any sound whatever in the mind's ear.

Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into

dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you're

well on the way.

INTERVIEWER: Why is the wordless state so desirable?

BURROUGHS: I think it's the evolutionary trend. I think that

words are an around-the-world, ox-cart way of doing things,

awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually,

probably sooner than we think. This is something that will hap-

pen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make them-

selves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never

been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid

of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means

for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This

is one objection to the cut-ups. There's been a lot of that, a sort

of superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you

can't cut up these words. Why can't I? I find it much easier to

get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—

doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent

person—than from those who are.

INTERVIEWER: HOW did you become interested in the cut-up

technique?

BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and

painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I

know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, "Minutes to

Go," was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pam-

phlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the

publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the pos-

sibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of

course, when you think of it, "The Waste Land" was the first

great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the

same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in "The Camera Eye"

sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same

goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw

it being done.

INTERVIEWER: What do cut-ups offer the reader that conven-

tional narrative doesn't?

BURROUGHS: Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of

poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which

may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rim-

baud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images.

Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.

INTERVIEWER: YOU deplore the accumulation of images and at

the same time you seem to be looking for new ones.

BURROUGHS: Yes, it's part of the paradox of anyone who is

working with word and image, and after all, that is what a writer

is still doing. Painter too. Cut-ups establish new connections be-

tween images, and one's range of vision consequently expands.

INTERVIEWER: Instead of going to the trouble of working with

scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldn't you obtain the

same effect by simply free-associating at the typewriter?

BURROUGHS: One's mind can't cover it that way. Now, for ex-

ample, if I wanted to make a cut-up of this [picking up a copy of

the Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read cross-

column; I could say: "Today's men's nerves surround us. Each

technological extension gone outside is electrical involves an act

of collective environment. The human nervous environment sys-

tem itself can be reprogrammed with all its private and social

values because it is content. He programs logically as readily as

any radio net is swallowed by the new environment. The sensory

order." You find it often makes quite as much sense as the origi-

nal. You learn to leave out words and to make connections. [Ges-

turing] Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put

this up here. Your mind simply could not manage it. It's like

trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn't do

it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also

operating against you.

INTERVIEWER: YOU believe that an audience can be eventually

trained to respond to cut-ups?

BURROUGHS: Of course, because cut-ups make explicit a psy-

chosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Some-

body is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in

the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time.

But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is

aware of the person sitting next to him. That's a cut-up. I was

sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and

coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in in New

York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window

and there was a great big Yale truck. That's cut-up—a juxta-

position of what's happening outside and what you're thinking of.

I make this a practice when I walk down the street. I'll say,

When I got to here I saw that sign, I was thinking this, and when

I return to the house I'll type these up. Some of this material I

use and some I don't. I have literally thousands of pages of notes

here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense it's traveling in

time.

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my

principal message to writers: For Godsake, keep your eyes open.

Notice what's going on around you. I mean, I walk down the

street with friends. I ask, "Did you see him, that person who just

walked by?" No, they didn't notice him. I had a very pleasant

time on the train coming out here. I haven't traveled on trains in

years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so

I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was

taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was

thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxta-

positions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in

New York. He said, "Every time we go out of the house and

come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, there's a rat in

the house." I look out the window, there's Able Pest Control.

INTERVIEWER: The one flaw in the cut-up argument seems to

lie in the linguistic base on which we operate, the straight de-

clarative sentence. It's going to take a great deal to change that.

BURROUGHS: Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of

Western thought, the whole either-or proposition. You remember

Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either-or think-

ing just is not accurate thinking. That's not the way things occur,

and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles

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