The Brain Doctor: William Burroughs (1914-1997)

Portrait of William S. Burroughs by Lance Austin Olsen.

“Language is a virus.”

W. B.

William S. Burroughs’ supernal and subterranean Beat influence on Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac alone would secure him a stable place in the modernist canon of American letters, as would Norman Mailer’s prescient early acclamation, “Burroughs might be the only American writer of sheer genius.” For me, Alexander Kafka penned what I’ve long felt was an ideal characterization of this experimental literary legend: “Burroughs was an ethereal intermediary between the here and the fiery beyond, pausing to give us the purgatorial skinny.” That skinny was transmitted in haunting and disturbing novels such as Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), among many others. However, it was through his influence on every other aspect of 20th-century culture in all media that his spectral presence as a testifier was most perhaps most long-lasting.

Victor Bockris, a close confidant and translator of the Burroughs ethos, after spending huge chunks of time in his writing studio (known affectionately as “the bunker” due to the absence of any windows except for those in his own head), once explained it this way: “William Burroughs’ career is counted out in multiple transformations. There is no one single Burroughs to be easily considered.” His ethos, however, remained constant, from radical Beat rebel to elder aesthetic statesman and poetic mentor, or maniacal muse. His working method is to explore the surreal potential to manufacture new and fresh meanings as the result of aleatory alignments of thought, image and text.

In other words, just let pure undiluted chance be your friendly guide through the underworld of truth-seeking and let your narrative follow the flow of random associations which might just have an even deeper actuality than those under your conscious control. Essentially an American embodiment of early French surrealism. An examination of how one of America’s most controversial literary figures altered the destinies of many other notable writers, artists and musicians reveals the staggering stylistic transformations that Uncle Bill wrought on the interdisciplinary cultural domain. Burroughs was the ultimate counterculture grandfather and, for some of the most incisive musical artists of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, it became a rite of passage to hang out with him. To drink with him, do some drugs with him, listen to music with him, and also often incorporate his droll and sarcastic baritone voice into spoken word pieces they crafted together.

St. Martins Press, 1996

At the same time, those acolytes, everyone from Tom Waits and Patti Smith to Jimmy Page and Kurt Cobain, were also utilizing his notorious cut-up method themselves, literally fusing random ideas and fragments into revolutionary lyrics to match their equally evolutionary musical styles. Perhaps Dylan would be the most gifted example of a poetic inheritor, especially in his own wildly romping on-the-road prose book Tarantula from 1966. Jed Birmingham summed up the historic literary Burroughs experiments merging the visual and verbal in “RealityStudio” (2008) and are well worth quoting at length here:

Exterminator serves as a transitional work from the early poetic experiments of Minutes To Go to the formal structure of the novel The Soft Machine. It is also the foundation for the more ambitious cut-up works like The Third Mind and The Dead Star. I feel that Burroughs’ literary and [multi-media artist Brion] Gysin’s asemic visual contributions really mesh well together. I am reminded of the tagline to Naked Lunch— “Exterminate all rational thought.” This thin book seeks to shatter the control of the Word. The book opens, “The Human Beings are strung lines of word associates that control ‘thoughts, feelings and apparent sensory impressions.’ Gysin’s permutation poems “Rub Out the Words” and “In the Beginning was the Word” fit in beautifully here as do his drawings that close the book.

Burroughs’ interest in the possibilities of glyphs and hieroglyphics (like [Ezra] Pound’s with ideograms or [Charles] Olson’s with the Mayans) as alternative forms of communication and representation becomes apparent here.

 Burroughs would return to this literary effect at the end of Olympia Press edition of The Ticket That Exploded, where that book ends in silence, as represented by Gysin’s poem, “Silence to say Goodbye,” which morphs fully into asemic writing, a non-literary form of calligraphy. From the instant of its rediscovery by Gysin in September 1959, the cut-up technique was in a state of constant flux and rapid development. The experiments quickly overflowed and morphed into the work collected in Exterminator. Like mercury, the fused material refused to remain under Burroughs’ authorial control. The source material kept on coming and spilled into a possible second volume. Despite his optimism, alas, Exterminator was destined to be a one-shot deal.

Many of us can still dream that sequel, however, since Burroughs believed it might actually exist in another immaterial dimension.

Penguin Books, 1973

One of my favourite ‘stories’ contained in Exterminator relates to what Burroughs called “the Discipline of DE (Do Easy),” which I occasionally refer to instead as NE (No Effort), since "easy" suggests the lazy way, whereas in actuality NE is about doing three times the amount of work as the normal mind can undertake: it’s all about doing more, not less. Just doing it all with vastly greater ease, not to mention less conscious thought. It is not a story per se, or a novel, or a fiction, or even a narrative; it is primarily an essay on strategic survival for everyday life, offered as a surreal kind of self-help guide. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, it is selfless-help.

As per Uncle Bill’s priceless admonition:

The Colonel Issues Beginners DE lessons. The Colonel decides, on this mild grey day, to being his time into present time. He looks at the objects on the breakfast table calculating the moves to clear it. He measures the distance of his chair to the table, how to push chair back and stand up without hitting the table with his legs. With smooth precise movements he scrapes his plate into the New York Times, folds the paper into a neat triangular packet and with no wasted movements sweeps up everything to be washed and put away. Before he made the first move he planned a whole series o moves ahead. He has discovered the simple and basic Discipline of DE. DO EASY. It is simply to do everything you do in the easiest and most relaxed manner you can achieve at the time you do it.

He becomes an assiduous student of DE. He practices for a year before he is ready to reveal the secrets and mysteries of DE. DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE. You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Consider the weight of objects exactly how much force is needed to get the object from here to there. Consider its shape and texture and function where exactly does it belong. Use just the amount of force necessary to get the object from here to there.

Once you find the easy way you don’t need to think about it. It will almost do itself. The beginner can think of DE as a game. You are running an obstacle course with the obstacles set up by your opponent, yourself. As soon as you attempt to put DE into practice you will find that you have an opponent very clever and resourceful with detailed knowledge of your weaknesses and above all in diverting your attention from the moment. You have a computer in your brain. DE will show you how to use it. But that, is another chapter.

Five years later, renowned American film director Gus van Sant (creator of My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Milk, and a shot-by-shot recreation of Hitchcock’s Psycho, among others) decided to share his own quixotic found footage rendition of “The Discipline of DE”. He had joined a distinguished coterie of admirers, perhaps the most famous being Norman Mailer (not an author known for extolling the genius of writers other than himself), in celebrating the otherworldly creativity of the author of the incendiary Naked Lunch. He also reminded us, in his quirky little self-help movie, of something important about this remarkable counter culture figure.

William Seward Burroughs, outlaw heir of a powerful family dynasty which marketed the adding machine and other business equipment, deeply explored the outer limits of the outer limits and was also a helpful demonic counselor for anyone and everyone who approached him in the correct manner: as the Pope of Dope, King of Grime, and most importantly as a Genet For Our Time. As Burroughs himself put it in Nova Express (1964), in his usual laconic and subtly understated style when characterizing his cut-and-splice method of prose/poetry construction, as well as his personal and literary lifestyle in general: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” But that is another chapter.

(Brain Doctor is an excerpt from Transposed Heads, an anthology of literary profiles and portraits by Donald Brackett and Lance Austin Olsen.)

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.