Written by awneitsch on September 4, 2023

William S. Burroughs – Apocalypse

Mutterings And Murmurs . Social Studies . Songs For The Apocalypse

Apocalypse Now!

“I love the smell of melted aluminum alloys and crispy baby bodies in the morning” – Maui Governor, Josh Green

“I love the feel of human ashes under my bare feet and in my nostrils” – Lahaina Mayor Richard Bissen

“I fucked em over and covered the mass murder in Las Vegas…watch me now” – Lahaina Police Chief and Coroner, John Pelletier

Who Was William S. Burroughs?

(1914-1997)

– From BIOGRAPHY Famous Writers and Authors – Updated May 5, 2021

William S. Burroughs became one of the founding figures of the Beat Movement. An addict for years, he crafted books like Junky and Naked Lunch, which were harrowing, often grotesque looks at drug culture. He is cited as a major influence on countercultural figures in the world of music as well and worked on several recording projects.

School and Travels

Born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs was born to Laura Lee and Mortimer Burroughs. Burroughs was named after his famous grandfather, an inventor who was a pioneer in adding-machine technology.

Burroughs attended prep schools and later studied English literature at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1936. He traveled to Europe and met and married Ilse Klapper for the purpose of allowing her entry into the United States. The two ended the union upon their entry into the states.

Meeting Fellow Beats Ginsberg and Kerouac

Trying different career paths to no avail, Burroughs eventually traveled to New York and met writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the mid-1940s. The three would be heralded as starting the Beat Movement, an artistic outpouring of nontraditional, free expression.

During the mid-1940s, Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on a novel about the murder of a friend—And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks—that was published decades later posthumously. Burroughs developed a relationship with Joan Vollmer during this time as well and they would live together as husband and wife starting in 1945. Burroughs was also open about his attraction to men, and he and Ginsberg had been lovers.

Burroughs had started to use opiates and descended into heroin addiction. He was also a gun enthusiast and, while living with his family in Mexico City in 1951, played a drunken game of target practice with Vollmer and accidentally shot her to death. He did not receive major prison time, yet would struggle with demons for years to come as a result of the killing.

Writing ‘Junky’ and ‘Naked Lunch’

Burroughs published his first novel, Junky, in 1953 under the name William Lee. The work featured an unflinching, semi-autobiographical look at drug, or “junk,” culture. He continued to travel and eventually ended up in Tangiers, strung out and running out of financial resources. He realized he would perish if he didn’t change his path and so traveled to London to receive apomorphine treatments, which he credits as curing his addiction.

With the help of Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs wrote the novel Naked Lunch in Tangiers, which continued to follow the exploits of William Lee in a disturbing drug culture journey. The book featured nonlinear narrative forms with elements of sadomasochism, metamorphoses and satire. Published in 1959, the book wouldn’t be released in the United States until the 1960s due to a highly publicized governmental ban over its content, which pushed Burroughs into the spotlight. He became a figure both acclaimed and spurned.

Around the time of Lunch‘s release, inspired by artist Brion Gysin, Burroughs began to experiment with the cut-up technique, where random lines of text were cut from a page and rearranged to form new sentences, with the intention of freeing reader’s minds from conventional, linear modes of thought. Using this technique with elements of satire and sci-fi, the 1960s saw Burroughs releasing novels like The Soft Machine (1961) and Nova Express (1964), which indicted consumerism and social repression, and the nonfiction work The Yage Letters (1963).

Musical Influence

Burroughs played with audio cut-ups as well via tape recordings. He released his first album in 1965, Call Me Burroughs, which featured his readings of text from Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. Burroughs not only made waves in the literary world but became a huge influence for many musical artists of the day. The acts Soft Machine and Steely Dan took their names from the writer’s work and Burroughs went on to collaborate with artists of the avant-garde like Laurie Anderson, Sonic Youth and Genesis P-Orridge.

Burroughs continued his literary pursuits as well in the early 1970s, publishing The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) and Exterminator! (1973) and penning a screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schulz. By the end of the decade, he worked on a book with Gysin that delved into their cut-up philosophy—The Third Mind (1978).

Burroughs would face family tragedy yet again as his son Billy Burroughs Jr., also a writer, succumbed to substance addiction and died from alcohol-related trauma in 1981.

Death

Burroughs died in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997.

APOCALYPSE! – William S. Burroughs

Mariners sailing close to the shores of Tuscany heard a
Voice cry out from the hills, the trees, and the sky: “
The Great God Pan is dead!” Pan, God of Panic:
The sudden awareness that everything is alive and significant.
The date was December 25, 1 A.
But Pan lives on in the realm of the
Imagination, in writing, and painting, and music.

Look at Van Gogh′s sunflowers,
Writhing with portentous life;
Listen to the Pipes of Pan in Joujouka.
Now Pan is neutralized,
Framed in museums, entombed in books, relegated to folklore.
But art is spilling out of its frames into subway graffiti.
Will it stop there?
Consider an apocalyptic statement: “
Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted,
” Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain.
Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained
And destructive behavior;
That would be a minor episode, which would run its course.
Everything is permitted because nothing is true.
It is all make-believe, illusion, dream, art.
When art leaves the frame and the written word leaves the page–not
Merely the physical frame and page,
But the frames and pages of assigned categories–a basic
Disruption of reality itself occurs: the literal realization of art.
Success will write Apocalypse across the sky.
The artist aims for a miracle.

The painter wills his pictures to move off the canvas with a separate
Life, movement outside of the picture,
And one rent in the fabric is all it
Takes for pandemonium to sluice through.
Last act, the End, this is where we all came in.
The final Apocalypse is when every man sees what he
Sees, feels what he feels, and hears what he hears.
The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right
Here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be.
Electric vitality of careening subways
Faster faster faster stations flash by in a blur.
Pan God of Panic, whips screaming crowds,
As millions of faces look up at the torn sky.
OFF THE TRACK!
OFF THE TRACK!
The planet is pulling loose from its moorings, careening into space,
Spilling cities and mountains and seas into the Void,
Spinning faster and faster as days
And nights flash by like subway stations.
Iron penis chimneys ejaculate blue sparks in a reek of ozone.
Tunnels crunch down teeth of concrete
And steel, flattening cars like beer cans.
Graffiti eats through glass and steel like acid,
Races across the sky in tornados of flaming colors.

Cherry-pickers with satin brushes big as a door inch through
Wall Street, leaving a vast souvenir postcard of the Grand Canyon.
Water trucks slosh out paint.
Outlaw painters armed with paint
Pistols paint everything and everyone in reach.
Survival Artists, paint cans strapped to their backs,
Grenades at their belts, paint anything and anybody within range.
Skywriters dogfight, collide and explode in paint.
Telephone poles dance electric jigs in swirling, crackling wires.
Neon explosions and tornados flash through ruined cities.
Volcanoes spew molten colors as the earths
Crust buckles and splinters into jigsaw pieces.
Household appliances revolt!
Washing machines snatch clothes from the guests.
Bellowing Hoovers suck off makeup and wigs and false teeth.
Electric toothbrushes leap into screaming
Mouths, as clothes dryers turn gardens into dust bowls.
Garden tools whiz through lawn parties impaling the guests,
Who are hacked to fertilizer by industrious Japanese hatchets.

Loathsome, misshapen, bulbous plants spring from their bones,
Covering golf courses, swimming pools,
Country clubs, and tasteful dwellings.

At my back – faster and faster – I always hear hurry up!
Energy ground down into.
Please its time closing.
Sidewalks and streets by billions of feet and tires
Erupt from manholes and tunnels break out with volcanic force.
Let it come down!
Careening subways faster and faster stations blur by.
Pan whips screaming crowds with flaming pipes.
Millions of faces look up at the torn sky.
OFF THE TRACK!
OFF THE TRACK!
The planet is pulling loose from its moorings,
Careening off into space spilling cities and
Mountains and seas into the Void faster and faster.
Skyscrapers scrape rents of blue and white paint from the sky.
The rivers swirl with color.
Nitrous ochres and reds eat through the bridges,
Falling into the rivers splashing colors
Across warehouses and piers and roads and buildings.

AMOK art floods inorganic molds, stirring passion of metal and glass,
Steel girders writhing in mineral lusts burst from their concrete
Covers, walls of glass melt and burn
With madness in a billion crazed eyes.
Bridges buck cars and trucks into the rivers.
The sidewalks run ahead faster and faster,
Energy ground down into sidewalks and streets by billions of feet and
Tires erupts from manholes and
Tunnels, breaks out with volcanic force.
LET IT COME DOWN!

Caught in New York beneath the animals of
The village, the Piper pulled down the sky!

Let us give thanks.

A Thanksgiving Prayer
William S. Burroughs Lyrics

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts —

Thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —

Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

Thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —

Thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

Thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers —

Thanks for laboratory AIDS —

Thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

Thanks for a nation of finks —

Yes,

Thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms…
You always were a headache and you always were a bore