Always With The Negative Waves, Moriarty!

September 23rd, 2009

10:18 pm - Quotes from William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg's "The Yage Letters Redux"
"A Materialistic consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from Dissolution by restriction & persecution of Experience of the Transcendental. One day perhaps the Earth will be dominated by the illusion of Separate consciousness, the Bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the Divine, & restricting traffic. But Sleep & Death cannot evade the Great Dream of Being, and the victory of the Bureaucrats of Illusion is only an Illusion of their separate world of consciousness." - Allen Ginsberg, quoted in the introduction by Oliver Harris

Quotes from the text:
"I was getting off junk and he kept nagging me why was I kidding myself once a junkie always a junkie. If I quit junk I would become a sloppy lush or go crazy taking cocaine."

"He told me exactly what I would need for the trip, where to go and who to contact. I asked him about the telepathy angle. 'That's all imagination of course,' he said."

"I never feel flattered by this promiscuous liking for Americans. It is insulting to individual dignity, and no good ever comes from these America lovers."

"Like the U.S. Pegler fans say, 'The trouble is Unions.' They would still say it spitting blood from radiation sickness. Or in process of turning into crustaceans."

"It's your duty to turn in the guerrillas and work and know your place and listen to the priest. What an old con! Like trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge."

"I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent backwoods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four)."

"After five days in Puerto Assis I was well on the way to establish myself as a citizen in the capacity of village wastrel."

"The Brujo of Mocoa told me if a woman witnesses the preparation the Yage spoils on the spot and will poison anyone who drinks it or at least drive him insane. The old women-are-dirty-and-under-certain-circumstances-poisonous routine. I figured this was a chance to test the woman pollution myth once and for all with seven female creatures breathing down my neck, poking sticks in the mixture, fingering the Yage and giggling."

Puerto Leguizamo is named for a soldier who distinguished himself in the Peruvian War of 1940. I asked one of the Colombians about it and he nodded, 'Yes, Leguizamo was a soldier who did something in the war.'
'What did he do?'
'Well, he did something.'

"So here I am back in Bogota. No money waiting for me (check apparently stolen), I am forced to the shoddy expedient of stealing my drinking alcohol from the university laboratory placed at disposal of the visiting scientist."

"Arrested on the beach suspect to have floated up from Peru on the Humboldt Current with a young boy and a tooth brush (I travel light, only the essentials)..."

"In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Even a man like Oppenheimer is a deviant tolerated for his usefulness. Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in U.S."

This is a nation of kleptomaniacs. In all my experience as a homosexual I have never been the victim of such idiotic pilferings of articles no conceivable use to anyone else. Glasses and traveler's checks yet.
Trouble is I share with the late Father Flanagan--he of Boy's Town--the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.

"Yage is space time travel. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian--new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized passes through your body (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants sprout out of your cock and vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of the body), across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market."

"...get nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe..."

"This is the most powerful drug I have ever experienced. That is it produces the most complete derangement of the senses. You see everything from an hallucinated viewpoint. Yage' is not like anything else. This is not the electric euphoria of coke which activates channels of pure pleasure in the brain, the sexless, timeless, negative pleasure of opium."

"I have observed in using both yage' and Peyote a strange, vegetable consciousness, an identification with the plant. In Peyote intoxication everything looks like a Peyote plant. It is easy to understand how the Indians came to believe there is a spirit in these plants."