Burroughs and Me: Notes on Writing Identifications Part I
I’ve written about temporal heuristics. My current project is spatial. Is there an identity heuristic that functions by a similar logic? If so, can this headline help me to understand what it might do?
William Burroughs and I have something in common. That commonality, though it may extend from this clipping to something grand or large in scope, can initially be located in a minor detail in a newspaper clipping from 1951. The William Tell incident, in which Burroughs shot his wife in a game of put the apple on her head, is one of the author’s most notorious moments. In some conversations, this moment eclipses Burroughs’ literary and theoretical output (whose main focus is either on control or the cut-up). But the shooting is not what we share. I am not going to ask my wife to put an apple on her head. I am not going to shoot her.
The commonality is age. One might classify such commonalities as trivial, idiosyncratic, solipsism. Or we might consider any pattern as itself a principle of organization (particularly for the pattern’s relationship to new media). I.e., as compositional. “Perhaps organization is allegory,” John Law writes about patterns and allegory in After Method. “It is gathering. Perhaps it is the creation, recognition, and tolerance of different patterns altogether.” Patterns offer different kinds of control mechanisms for composing, for invention.
And what prompts the heuristic? What prompts the recognition of pattern? What prompts any call to write for that matter? Immediacy? Well, it’s not my birthday. Accident? I came across this graphic weeks ago. Desire? Possibly…..
St. Louis? Burroughs, a St. Louis native, marks another pattern which moves me (along with a non yet identified one regarding the adding machine): for I will soon spend much time in its airport (and maybe in the city itself too). The allegory here - what such moves tell me that a specific or explicit representation could not - is not clear. It doesn’t add up yet. This is, after all, only a blog post (the blog post’s relationship to heuristics has not yet been fully explored beyond “writing prompt,” whatever that might mean). Still, in the logic of the cut-up (remove images, words, phrases from representational contexts in order to shape other kinds of contexts not anticipated), I feel further motivated. A series of posts generated out of a pattern? A momentary writing project?
Perhaps. To be continued….
Cyber St. Louis, it seems, is already out of the gate.
Comment by Jilted in the Motor City — April 11, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
“In some conversations, this moment eclipses Burroughs’ literary and theoretical output (whose main focus is either on control or the cut-up). But the shooting is not what we share. I am not going to ask my wife to put an apple on her head. I am not going to shoot her.”
This reminded me of a portion of Victor Bockris’ “With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker”.
Bockris-Wylie: But after you shot her did you think, “I’m being controlled by something else and that’s why this happened?”
Burroughs: No, I thought nothing. It was too horrific. It’s very complicated to tell you. It was obviously a situation precipitated by some part of myself over which I had, or perhaps have, no control.
end.
I wonder how many other life changes precipitate “lack of control” and the freedom and/or bondage they foster as a consequence. Daddy? Husband? Teacher?
Me thinks Burroughs, sans the William Tell episode and perhaps other paranoid events, might have enjoyed a children’s story or the rare comic book. Too bad the world will never know.
Comment by Chuck Robinson — April 12, 2007 @ 8:26 pm
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