by William S Burroughs
"I am not an addict. I am the addict. The addict I invented to keep this show on the junk road. I am all the addicts and all the junk in the world. I am junk and I am hooked forever. Now I am using junk as a basic illustration. Extend it. I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality. Give me an old wall and a garbage can and I can by God sit there forever. Because I am the wall and I am the garbage can. But I need someone to sit there and look at the wall and the garbage can. That is, I need a human host. I can't look at anything. I am blind. I can't sit anywhere. I have nothing to sit on. And let me take this opportunity of replying to my creeping opponents. It is not true that I hate the human species. I just don't like human beings. I don't like animals. WHat I feel is not hate. In your verbal garbage the closest word is distaste. Still I must live in and on human bodies. An intolerable situation you will agree. To make that situation clearer suppose you were stranded on a planet populated by insects. You are blind. You are a drug addict. But you find a way to make the insects bring you junk. Even after thousands of years living there you still feel that basic structural distaste for your insect servants. You feel it every time they touch you. Well that is exactly the way I feel about my human servants. Consequently since my arrival some five hundred thousands years ago I have had one though in mind. What you call the history of mankind is the history of my escape plan. I don't want 'love'. I don't want forgiveness. All I want is out of here."
Question: "Mr. Martin, how did all this start? How did you get here in the first place? If you found conditions so distasteful why didn't you leave at once?"
"Good questions I mean good questions, young man. Obviously I am not omnipotent. My arrival here was a wreck. The ship came apart like a rotten undervest. The accident in which I lost my sight. I was the only survivor. The other members of the crew...well...you understand...uh sooner or later...So I decided to act sooner. And I have acted sooner ever since. The entire human film was prerecorded. I will explain briefly how this is done. Take a simple virus illness like hepatitis. THis illness has an incubation period of two weeks. So if I know when the virus is in (and I do because I put it there) I know how you will look two weeks from now: yellow. To put it another way: I take a picture or rather a seies of pictures of you with hepatitis. Now I put my virus negatives into your liver to develop. Not far to reach: remember I live in your body. The whole hepatitis film is prerecorded two weeks before the opening scene when you notice your eyes are a little yellower than usual. Now this is a simple operation. Not all of my negatives develop by any means. All right now back to basic junk. Some character takes a bang of heoin for the first time. It takes maybe sixty consecutive shots before I can welcome another addict. (Room for one more inside, sir.) Having taken one shot it becomes mathematically probable that taken, he will take another given the opportunity and I can always arrange that. Having taken two shots it becomes more probable that he will take a third. One negative developed makes others almost unavoidable. The same procedure can be applied to any human activity. If a man makes a certain amount of money by certain means he will go on making more money by the same means and so forth. Human activites are drearily predictable. It should now be obvious that what you call 'reality' is a function of those precisely predictable because prerecorded human activities. Now what could louse up a prerecorded biologic film? Obviously random factors. That is someone cutting my word and image lines at random. In short the cut up method of Brion Gysin which derives from Hassan I Sabbah and the planet Saturn. Well I've had a spot of toruble before but nothing serious. There was Rimbaud. And a lot of peopleyou never heard of for good reasons. People who got too close one way or another. There was Tristan Tzara and the Surrealist Lark. I soon threw a block into that. Broke them all down to window dressers. So why didn't I stop Mr. Gysin in his tracks? I have ways of dealing with wise guys or I wouldn't be here. Early answer to use on anyone considering to interfere. Tricks I learned after the rash. Well perhaps I didn't take it seriously at first. And maybe I wanted to hear what he had to say about getting out. Always keep as many alternative moves open as possible. Next thing the blockade on planet earth is broken. Explorers moving in whole armies. And the usual do-good missions talk abouit educating the natives for self-government. And some hick sheriff from the nova heat charging me with 'outrageous colonial mismanagement and attempted nova.' Well they can't hang a nova rap on me. What I planned was simply to move out the biologic film to planet Venus and start over. Take along a few good natives to stock the new pitch and for the rest total disposal. That's not nova that's manslaughter. Second degree. And I planned it painless. I dislike sceaming. Disturbs my medications."
Question: "Mr. Martin, in the face of the evidence, no one can deny that nova was planned. The reports reek of nova."
"It will be obvious that I myself as an addict can only be a determined factor in someone else's equation. It's the old army game. Now you see me now you don't."
Question: "Mr. Martin, you say 'give me a wall and a garbage can and I can sit there forever.' Almost in th next sentence you say 'All I want is out of here.' Aren't you contradicting yourself?"
"You are confused about the word 'self.' I could by God sit there forever if I had a self to sit in that would sit still for it. I don't. As soon as I move in on any self all that self wants is to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Now there you sit in your so-called 'self.' Suppose you could walk out of that self. Some people can incidentally. I don't encourage this but it happens and threatens to become pandemic. So you walk out of your body and stand across the room. Now what form would the being that walks out of your body have? Obviously it would have precisely your form. So all you have done is take the same form from one place to another. You ahve taken great trouble and pain (believe me there is no pain like flesh withdrawal consciously experienced) and you have gotten precisely back where you started. To really leave human form you would have to leave human form that is leave the whole concept of word and image. You cannot leave the human image in the human image. You cannot leave human form in human form. And you cannot think or conceive in non-image terms by mathematical definition of a being in my biologic film which is a series of images. Does that answer your question? I thought not."
Question: "Mr. Martin, tell us something about yourself. Do you have any vices other than junk? Any hobbies? Any diversions?"
"Your vices other than junk I manipulate but do not share. Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my uh mineral origins. Hobbies? Chess. Diversions? I enjoy a good show and a good performer. Just an old showman. Well when you have to kill your audience every few years to keep them in your seats it's about time to pack it in."
Question: "Mr. Martin, I gather that your plan to move the show to planet Venus has, uh, miscarried. Is that correct?"
"Yeah it looks that way. The entire film is clogged."
Question: In that case, Mr. Martin, where will you go when you go if you go?"
"That's quite a problem. You see I'm on the undesirable list with every immigration department in the galaxy. 'Who him? Don't let him out here."
Question: "Mr. Martin, don't you have any friends?"
"There are no friends. I found that out after the crash. I found that out before the others. That's why I'm still here. There are no friends. There are allies. There are accomplices. No one wants friends unless he is shit scared or unless he is planning a caper he can't pull off by himself."
Question: "Mr. Martin, what about the others who were involved in this crash? Aren't they still alive somewhere in some form?"
"You don't have to look far. They are sitting right here."
Question: "Who were these others?"
"There was an army colonel, a technicial, and a woman."
Question: "Won't you have to come to some sort of terms with your, uh, former accomplices?"
"To my disgruntled former associates I have this to say. You were all set to cross me up for the countdown. You think I can't read your stupid virus mind lady? And you, you technical bastard with your mind full of formulae I can't read. And you Colonel Bradly waiting to shoot me in the back. The lot of you. Blind and paralyzed I still beat you to the draw."
Question: "Mr. Martin, what sort of place did you people come from?"
"What sort of place did we come from. Well if you want the asnwe to that question, just look around, buster. Just look around."
"Ladies and Gentlemen, you have just heard an interview with Mr. Martin, sole survivor of the first attempt to send up a space capsule from planet earth. Mr. Martin has been The Man Of A Thousand Lies. Well, he didn't have time for a thousand but I think he did pretty well in the time allotted. An dI feel reasonably sure that if the other crew members could be here with us tonight they would also do a pretty good job of lying.But please rememebr that nothing is true in space. That there is no time in space- that what goes up under such auspices must come down- that the beginning is also the end.
"Ladies and gentlemen, these our actors bid you a long last good night."
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I would perhaps enjoy it for awhile, but I'd rather return to the infinite knowledge that is "the collective". I don't think theres a God with his own personality or anything like that, but that WE are the God, the God is the universe...
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