Burroughs last words
Malcolm Lawrence (malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:47:46 -0700
Speaking about people dying....and Dylan Thomas...I thought I'd pass
this on that a friend just passed on to me.
Malcolm
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Last words: At his exit, Burroughs didn't miss a beat
By Barbara T. Roessner
Hartford Courant
Famous last words of the 19th century tended to be something short of
inspiring.
"Is it the Fourth?" asked Thomas Jefferson in his final utterance on
July 3, 1826. (He died the next day.)
"Strike the tent," said Robert E. Lee when he kicked the bucket in 1870.
By the middle of this century, things had improved considerably. Dylan
Thomas, after a lethal bout of drinking in a Manhattan bar in 1953,
gasped this goodbye to the universe: "Seventeen whiskeys. A record, I
think."
And in 1977, Gary Gilmore told his firing squad: "Let's do it!"
Today, as dusk falls on the millennium, an entirely new standard for the
ultimate farewell appears to have been set. With his death this month at
the age of 83, William S. Burroughs, grandfather of Beat and author of
the infamously obscene, infamously nonlinear novel "Naked Lunch," has
done to the convention of Last Words what his life's work did to
contemporary American prose -- clawed it raw and left it oozing with
hilarity and pathos and rage.
The current issue of The New Yorker excerpts Burroughs' journal entries
(his only recent writings) from May through the eve of his death Aug. 2.
And if last words are a distillation of a person's short stint on Earth,
Burroughs' was, very simply, one blazing blow against banality,
especially that perpetrated upon the masses by politicians.
On May 25, he begins an entry: "All governments are built on lies. All
organizations are built on lies."
Less than a week later, he elaborates: "That vile salamander Gingrich,
squeaker of the House, is slobbering about a drug-free America by the
year 2001. What a dreary prospect! Of course this does not include
alcohol and tobacco, of which the consumption will soar. How can a
drug-free state be achieved? Simple. An operation can remove the drug
receptors from the brain. Those who refuse the operation will be
deprived of all rights."
And after a lifetime love affair with heroin, methadone and marijuana,
Burroughs had these departing musings on cannabis and its effect on his
art: "A few drags...and I can see multiple ways out and beyond. So why
all this heat on this harmless and rewarding substance?"
Burroughs isn't the first Beat to go out with a whole new concept in
deathbed profundity. When Burroughs' cohort Allen Ginsberg died in
April, Ginsberg's own last words to Burroughs were: "I thought I would
be terrified, but I am exhilarated!"
Timothy Leary, with whom both Ginsberg and Burroughs experimented
extensively with LSD, bid his goodbye in May 1996 with a disyllabic
synopsis of his beliefs, his religion, his personality, his politics and
his attitude toward the great unknown awaiting him: "Why not?"
As the baby boom lurches through the passages of middle age, and the
Xers somnambulate through their first bouts with adulthood, these old
rebels, in their dying words, say a great deal not only about
confronting the ultimate passage, but about the living that precedes it.
In 1994, not long before his own death, Ginsberg was asked during a
student lecture in Colorado why the Beats were suddenly inspiring a new
and expanded audience. Listen: "Because of the sincerity of the works of
art, the passion, the feeling of self-empowerment independent of
government, media and social conditioning, the breaking out of the
plastic mass into human flesh and blood, vulnerability and tenderness"
-- all of which, he correctly pointed out, stand in raving contrast to
"20 years of the Reagan-Bush-Nixonian ugly spirit."
Conformity is a sin in the Beat bible. Wrote Burroughs on May 31: "How
good will it be to have total conformity? What will be left of
singularity? And personality? And you and me?"
But the greatest sin, perhaps, is uninterest. A numbing of the spirit,
the psyche, the mind. The loss of the ability to feel.
The last of Burroughs' last words, penned in a quavering scrawl, is
this: "LOVE."