The Yage Letters

Just finished reading The Yage Letters, it's the fourth book I've read so far by William S. Burroughs, and it was a major disappointment. Not good at all. It sounded intriguing, the search for a drug that is said to stimulate sensitivity to telepathic communication; that's something that is totally up my alley. In fact, if you know of any books that deal with that subject matter, please do send them my way, via email or the comments, I'll look into it immediately.

Anyway, Burroughs lived many years south of the border in Mexico, mostly to escape prison time in the U.S. for long-time opiate addiction and dealing, and during his time there traveled extensively through Central and South America. This book, presented as a series of letters to friend Allen Ginsberg, chronicles his search for the hallucinogenic vine Yage, also known as Ayahuasca.

His experience with it was nothing special, and mostly negative. Though I have to say his documentation of the experience, not only of using, but the whole process of finding it, and the cultural folklore, encounters with shamans and such, acquired along the way was very brief and incomplete. Read more like informal letters to a friend, rather than an anthropological survey, which of course is I guess all that it was intended to be. But based on his other writings and ideas, which I believe are best captured in his interviews, where his extensive knowledge and intellect really shines, he could have done a lot better than this.

It's just that there wasn't really enough there in my opinion to even publish it as a book. The whole thing was less than eighty pages, and most of it, despite the title and description, centered not around the search for Yage, but the search for casual sex with young men, who in some cases were still what you would call boys, teenagers, barely legal. Okay, I don't care about Burroughs' homosexuality, doesn't bother me, but men who are over forty-years-old cruising for one night stands with 15 year old boys is in my opinion disgusting.

Its value is primarily autobiographical, but as far as providing information about Ayahuasca, and being a travelogue of 1950s Latin America, its value is minimal.

I don't know why, but I always seem to gravitate to reading dirty old men, people who, like Burroughs, Bukowski, Miller, in real life I would find so repulsive and degenerate that I'd have nothing to do with. I guess it's my shadow, such interests, that manifest purely in literary form, a fascination with inferior men with brilliant minds, tarnished by perverse, decadent habits and thoughts.

I'm not done with Burroughs just yet, but this one has turned out to be the least interesting and most disappointing book of his so far. Though I have to say, his books Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters should all be read together, they were all written, though not published, around the same time, and deal with the same subject matter, that of addiction, gay cruising (despite the fact that he was married to a woman) and travels, and read like they could have been combined in one big autobiographical novel; with The Yage Letters being better as an appendix, rather than a stand-alone work; though I can understand why they did it that way. Junky was, after all, his first novel, and almost wasn't published. Its autobiographical value wouldn't be realized until many decades later.

I'm looking forward to reading more of his interviews, his novel Naked Lunch, and then moving on to other things for awhile. But I will be back.

Everybody is Watching

Watched a movie last night, its name is unimportant, but what caught my eye was that several people in the movie were using smartphones, taking pictures and video clips of strangers on a plane and uploading it to social media; which would later be misconstrued as proof for a crime, used against them, making them look bad, but who would later be found innocent.

It could admittedly go either way, amateur video footage has both helped and harmed, but the fact of the matter is that it's everywhere, and there's no escape.

Everywhere you look people are doing that, or have the capability of doing that, of being amateur journalists and spies; filming people without their knowledge or consent, and sharing it online. This, coupled with the fact that reality TV is becoming the most popular type of television content, is normalizing this intrusion of privacy, making people more comfortable with the idea that it is okay to be watched, to always be watched, and to have our private lives a matter of public record.

I had this insight that the prophecy of the Orwellian Police State, where everybody is under constant surveillance, is not necessarily something that must be imposed by governments or corporations, but is more likely realized by the hands of ordinary people equipped with smartphones and blogs, doing the dirty work for "them".

Timelessness

What is timelessness?

It comes down to perception. How fast or how slow time appears to move, or not move, depends entirely upon your perception of it. Awareness shapes reality. But what shapes awareness? Like dreams, it may seem like a few hours have passed, but in actuality, or rather on the objective level of ordinary reality, perhaps only a few seconds have passed.

It is possible for a few seconds to feel like a few years, and for a few years to feel like a few seconds. An entire lifetime looked back in retrospect from the perspective of old age, viewed as a memory, may feel like seconds, like many years compressed into a few seconds, highly dense, concentrated, instant knowing, super fast data compression, that is memory, and without memory there would be no awareness of time.

Timelessness is the perception of stopping time, or of time moving very slowly, or perhaps so fast, that it appears to stand still.

What remains is the now, containing future and past, overlapping the present, not as separations in time, but one vast experience of potential energy, of what happened, what could happen and changes along the way, modifications of actuality, modifications of memory, modifications of perspective.

What has happened has happened. Can't undo anything, ever, just as the blowing of the wind, or lightning striking, cannot be undone, but you can change the way you see it, the way you remember it, what you look at, what aspects you focus on, what you consider important or unimportant; that is entirely changeable, alterable, malleable.

The experience of timelessness removes the boundaries separating the importance between yesterday and tomorrow. They are like wind currents and waves in the sea, changes of direction and velocity, like boundaries on the map; countries and capitals; points of reference useful for navigating the world in abstraction.

Memories are a lot like dreams; phantoms, yes it really happened but, after the fact, looking back, it's like a shadow. The reality of it has evaporated, has become as seemingly intangible as the wind.

We have time to measure our lives, to give us a sense of order and coherence, and a feeling of permanence and control, but ultimately the actual essential experience exists in a state of timelessness, real life lived in the now, what we experience in any given moment without regard to past or future.

You read this now. Ten minutes later. Tomorrow. Next year. Whenever. It doesn't matter. If you are here, whenever you are here, reading this, you have just transcended the barriers of time. Congratulations: you are a time traveler! Different times, different positions in space, and yet we are both perceiving it as happening now.

Reading Burroughs

So, as mentioned two earlier posts down, I've been taking advantage of the public library's interlibrary loan service, and am presently devoted to reading William S. Burroughs.

I've only read one book of his, that would be Queer, which was okay, but certainly not great. That was not through interlibrary loan, but something I picked up locally. Believe it or not I have not yet read Naked Lunch, which is probably his most famous work, but I do have some familiarity with it, after having seen the movie by David Cronenberg. Not bad. Been awhile since I've seen it though. Not since the late 90s, actually.

Anyway, I'm currently reading The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, via interlibrary loan. It's not a great book, but it's definitely worth reading if you're interested in learning more about Burroughs.

My feelings about the man are mixed. I'm undecided. Not sure if he is a genius or a raving lunatic. Seriously. There are clearly some things I disagree with, some things that bother me about him. My main problem and primary area of disagreement, is with his apparent dislike, disregard, and blatant misogyny concerning not just the female sex, but with the feminine principle in general. As a female, I feel that basically anyone who states a belief that females are a curse, that the world would be better off without them, is going to get a huge red flag of skepticism and doubt hovering over all that they say, no matter how good and enlightened the rest of it is.

I almost think that I could have been born a man, but instead chose at the last minute to be a woman in order to prove firsthand through experience exactly why advocating the supremacy of the male principle is false. Only a man could believe that woman is a curse. Basically it suggests some major mommy issues, like ah, not getting enough attention or something, or else getting rejected by some other woman that he loved, but didn't return the love, and blaming every other woman that comes along for their lack of love and attention, lack of a strong mother/son bond.

Anyway, there's that, and there's also his rejection of the positive value of the family unit, that I would disagree with completely.

Other than that I would say he's brilliant, especially concerning his understanding of the mechanisms of control, the way governments function, the role of nations, police states and thought control, it's all very interesting. Don't agree with it completely, but it's definitely worth reading. Too bad there are so many brilliant men, that have little regard for women, beyond perhaps their sexual or procreative role, as mothers and lovers, and little else. Too bad. If they were females with the same mind, it would be totally different. It's the same mentality of the white racist. If they were born black, with the same mind, they would cease to be racist, in the sense that they would cease to view a person as inferior solely based on their physical appearance alone.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty to love. And I'm planning on reading everything he ever wrote. Pretty much everything except his opinion of females and the family unit is exceptionally interesting.