text:
(from "The Cat Inside" by William Burroughs, Copyright William S. Burroughs, 1986, 1992:)
June 3, 1982. Perhaps I should do one of those sprightly
"fixing up my country house" books...First Year in the Garden...a chapter on the White Cat who got his ass bit by a dog, and the gray cat...such a handsome animal. Smoky we call him, after Colonel Smoky, the narc in Maurice Helbrant's Narcotic Agent, bound with Junkie in the Ace edition...well, Smoky is getting to be a real nuisance, fawning all over me and putting his face up to mine, rubbing his head against my hand and following me around when I am trying to shoot. It's almost spooky. I am looking to find a good home for Smoky.
Reading over these notes, which were simply a journal of my year at the Stone House, I am absolutely appalled. So often, looking back over my past life, I exclaim: "My God, who is this?" Seen from here I appear as a most unsightly cartoon of someone who is awful enough to begin with...simpering, complacent, callous..."Got his ass bit by a dog." "Leaving one feeling vaguely guilty"..."like an Arab boy who knows he is being naughty"...snippy old English queen voice..."I am looking to find a good home for Smoky."
The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is "the cleaner" or "the animal that cleans itself," described by the Sanscrit word Margaras, which means "the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer." The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.
To me the white cat is a messenger who summons me to confront the horror of thermonuclear devastation as seen from the pet shop at Dillon's, chasing my cats through a wrecked house with a gun. The vision filled me with desolation and an iron resolve to prevent this big-power outrage. We need a miracle. Leave the details to Joe....
Joe places a cat box on the board room table. Gently he removes a white cat. The board members crawl under the table, screaming, "THE WHITE CAT! THE WHITE CAT!"
---William S. Burroughs,
from "The Cat Inside"
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(from "The Place of Dead Roads" by William Burroughs, Copyright William S. Burroughs, 1983:)
Tom looks up sharply from his crossword puzzle.
"What's noxious in the kitchen?" he demands.
"It's possum." Kim waltzes around humming "The Anniversary Waltz." ... "a surprise for our anniversary."
"That possum couldn't surprise anyone half a mile downwind," Tom says flatly. "Tell me frankly, Kim, what were the circumstances surrounding its death?"
Kim looks at him complacently as if he were announcing his pregnancy. He sings:
"Possum ain't far
Thar he are thar...."
He points to the far end of the hut, which serves as the kitchen.
"I have no reason to doubt it. What I want to know is how did it die? and when?
"At the last full moon ... the time is now ripe...."
"You could say so."
Kim leafs through a Venusian cookbook.... "It's called La Cuisine de Peste ... disease cooking.... You see, when an animal dies of a certain illness it imparts a certain flavor to the meat.... Fortunately for us, our possum succumbed to climatic buboes.... Swollen groin glands ... They swell, they burst, they suppurate..."
And indeed, disgusting farting noises are emanating from the kitchen....
Kim reads from his cookbook. "'There is no pleasure short of love-making to equal the crunchy, curdy ...'"--Kim sticks his middle finger in his mouth and pops it out with a loud "POP," spraying saliva across the table--"'of a suppurating bubo cooked in aftosa spit.... and there will be candied suckling armadillos cooked in their own leprosy .. pearl-white phosphorescent meat soft as butter, you cut it with a lead knife ... when the knife sinks through the meat is ready ... unspeakably toothsome....'" Kim bares his teeth, lays back his ears and purrs like a hungry cat.
"Look, honey face, whyn't you nip down to the PX for Spam and canned pineapple ...?"
"Oh why do you have to spoil everything!" Kim wails, rubbing his hands.... There is a muffled explosion from the kitchen and such a vile stink billows out that they are both thrown retching to the floor....
"Get it out of here, for the love of God!" Tom screams. They don masks and manage to get the stinking potful into the chute and dump it. They pull the chute back in and draw up stools in front of the window. Smuns wriggle up and grab the steaming carrion in the air.... Scavanger land crabs big as plates swarm from burrows in the slope, snapping up the bits that fall from the slavering, steaming jaws of the Smuns. (And all this deadly silence broken only by sounds of chewing and rending--not a snarl or even a whimper as one Smun disembowels another with a side kick of its deadly claws.)
---William Burroughs
from "The Place of Dead Roads"
The Commandante stripped Carl's body and smeared on green jelly nipples that pulled the flesh up and in. Carl's genitals wither to dry shit he sweeps clear with a little whisk broom to white flesh and black shiny pubic hairs. The Commandante parts the hairs and makes Incision with a little curved knife. Now he is modeling a face from the picture of his novia in the Capital.
"And now, how you say, 'the sound effects.'" He puts on a record of her voice, Carl's lips follow and the female substance breathed in the words.
"Oh love of my alma! Oh wind of morning!"
"Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for." Carl made words in the air without a throat, without a tongue. "I hope there is a farmacia in the area."
The Commandante looked at him with annoyance: "You could wait in the office please."
He came out putting on his tunic and strapping on a luger.
"A drugstore? Yes I creo...Across the lagoon...I will call the guide."
Carl walked through a carnival city along canals where giant pink salamanders and goldfish stirred slowly, penny arcades, tattoo booths, massage parlors, side shows, blue movies, processions, floats, performers, pitchmen to the sky.
Puerto Joselito is located Dead Water. Inactive oil wells and mine shafts, strata of abandoned machinery and gutted boats, garbage of stranded operations and expeditions that died at this point of dead land where sting rays bask in brown water and grey crabs walk the mud flats on brittle stilt legs. The town crops up from the mud flats to the silent temple of high jungle streams of clear water cut deep clefts in yellow clay and falling orchids endanger the traveler.
In a green savanna stand two vast penis figures in black stone, legs and arms vestigial, slow blue smoke rings pulsing from the stone heads. A limestone road winds through the pillars and into The City. A rack of rusty iron and concrete set in vacant lots and rubble, dotted with chemical gardens. A smell of junky hat and death about the town deadens and weight these sentences with "disgust you to see it." Carl walked through footpaths of a vast shanty town. A dry wind blows hot and cold down from Chimborazo a soiled post card in the prop blue sky. Crab men peer out of abandoned quarries and shag heaps some sort of vestigial eye growing cheek bone and a look about them as if they could take root and grow on anybody. muttering addicts of the orgasm drug, boneless in the sun, gurgling throat gristle, heart pulsing slowly in transparent flesh eaten alive by the crab men.
...
---William S. Burroughs,
from "The Soft Machine"
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Went to Brion Gysin's place in the Medina for lunch: Brion, Dave
Morton, Leif and Marv, and a handsome New Zealander who is passing
through the Zone. A ghastly, meaningless aggregate.
Morton said to me: "How long were you in medical school before they
found out you weren't a corpse?"
The standard double entendres and coy references to test the
stranger. Brion says: "I'm queer for shoes," and begins polishing his
shoes
during lunch.
Marv says: "I'm very sensitive to that word. I wish you wouldn't use
it,"
rolling his round gray eyes, speckled with flaws and opaque spots like
damaged marbles, at the young stranger.... Oh God!
But none of this is the real horror. Looking around the room, I
suddenly
saw that the other people were figures in a waking nightmare where no
contact with anyone else is possible.
Somehow it was worse than a gathering of out-and-out squares, say
the St. Louis country club set I was brought up with. There, a dreary
formalism reigns. It is just dull. But this was horrible, pointing to
some final
impasse of communication. There was nothing said that needed to be said.
The dry hum of negation and decay filled the room with its blighting
frequency, a sound like insect wings rubbing together.
Dream: I am in Interzone some years ago. I meet a silly fairy who
twists
every remark into obscene, queer double entendre. Under this vacuous
camping I see pure evil. We meet two lesbians, and they say, "Hello,
boys,"
a dead, ritual greeting from which I turn away in disgust. The fairy
follows
me, moves into a house with me. I feel nauseated, as if a loathsome
insect
had attached itself to my body.
---WSB
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