V. In Letters

  Literature is filled with bold voices and exemplars who have waded in, wholly or at least knee-high, in the attempt to become a straddler of Realms... an interpreter, a translator. Those unable to accept drugs and madness as pure Otherness, even fondly... Unwilling to see them as windows onto incoherence, or as pretty sound-recordings of a lost language. Or, even shamanistically, as reflecting a Supertruth that is sublime beyond words, and trapped in some distant state of mind. We find examples like Kurt Beringer, in his monograph, Der Meskalin-Rausch, transcribing the prismatic effects of mescaline into high-poetic form. Or Walter Benjamin who wished, in his Versuchen with opium, mescaline, and hashish, to "render accessible by rational means that range of experience that announces itself in schizophrenia." Benjamin would take down every goofy thought and empiricism, along with friends like Ernest Bloch, and address them seriously, as containing an inner coherence that could be brought back into the social whole. Thanks to these transcriptions, we can look over Benjamin's shoulders and read his Protocols...

Bookstores are also loaded, you've probably noticed, with cautionary tales of opiate addiction. Pulp nonfiction from the Other side. Criminality and desperation rendered into polished slang. But most of these efforts— I'm thinking of books like Trainspotting or Basketball Diaries— still retain the Otherness of the experiences, and on purpose, as shock and postcard exoticism.

But then there are works like Naked Lunch and The Nova Trilogy, by Burroughs. These belong to another genre altogether and I'll tell you why. They take the experiences of junk and junk-sickness as metaphoric and boogey-man instances within our universal economy of Need and Control... Using deeply-private struggles to indict the sickness and neurosis in the greater arrangement of Mankind.

Burroughs makes an open declaration of this, in his introduction to Naked Lunch, the Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness:

"Junk yields a basic formula of 'evil' virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need..." Adding, somewhere down the pages, that... "I have almost completed a sequel to Naked Lunch. A mathematical extension of the Algebra of Need beyond the junk virus. Because there are many forms of addiction I think that they all obey basic laws. In the words of Heiderberg: 'This may not be the best of all possible universes but it may well prove to be one of the simplest.' If man can see."

The author sees the infernal mechanisms in our daily strivings. For Burroughs, there is no recovery. Hell surrounds us. Indeed, he creates an entire mythos; a richly-populated universe of ugly spirits, sadistic doctors, catamites, man-size insects, and countless other freaks and species, born from the conditioned perspectives of addiction and withdrawal. His universe is not just a Disneyland for the criminally-insane, but a grotesque of our own, that like a microscope, magnifies every virus and malignancy until it becomes visible to the common consciousness...

On the brighter side, though, we can also turn to those who represent working, drug-free forms of divergent thinking. People like Temple Grandin, grand expositor of autism, inventrix of the Squeeze Machine and the Stairway to Heaven, as well as the author of Animals in Translation and Thinking in Pictures. I quote the latter:

In Grandin, we find an epistemological polyglot. And remember: this is how we are thinking of epistemology, here. Not as a fixed problematic of how subject grasps object, or how knowledge is possible, but a shifting, historicized array of possible categories, wide meanings, symbol-sets, images, presumptions...Of epistemologies, plural, that can be rendered sensible, and sometimes learned and even mastered.

Dialects of Experience. I. Interpretation. II. Twilight Orderings. III. Subjecthood and Hypersemia. IV. In Secret. V. In Letters. VI. In the Forum. VII. The Axiom of Mood. VIII. Quick Visions IX. Lines of Force