the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back

And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, ... ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, "It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you choose.” - Baudelaire

Oh, I'm exhausted. Haven't been sleeping well. The time shift didn't help much (good to know I'm not alone as "springing ahead" apparently increases both traffic accidents [by 7%] and the overall accident death rate [by 6.5%]). Enjoying, too, correspondences, interludes, and connections (and lots of ice cream). Have this buzz running through my brain and my thoughts have become cut-ups without need of any chemical assistance. A definite sign of sleep deprivation. That and difficulty focusing the eyes, moodiness, hallucinations, fragmented thinking, slurred speech, and diminished mental ability (though, no, I am not so far as to have gotten to some of these, as yet). And so, what better time than to return to creativity and altered consciousness? Paging Dr. Benway ...

In 1951, having been released from a Mexico jail after accidentally shooting and killing his wife in a "game" of William Tell, William S. Burroughs, who it goes without saying, was no stranger to altered states, journeyed to the Amazon in search of "the final fix"--a rumored telepathic, hallucinogenic drug called yage (pronounced ya-hay). Burroughs became fascinated with the drug (also known as ayahuasca) after learning of how it was used by natives to find things--lost bodies and souls, specifically. He recorded his journey and all of its lush incidents, in letters to his good friend, Allen Ginsberg, in what was later published as The Yage Letters. These notes and Burroughs' experiences during his travels also became the base for Naked Lunch (once criminal, now one of Time's "All-Time 100 Novels") as well as his "cut-up" writing form. The Yage Letters also includes Ginsberg's experiences during his own exploration of the drug, and his corresponding visions and terrors while on it.

As with Kerouac's structured quest for altered consciousness, so too was Burroughs', though his was also a quest through drugs to achieve this. He found himself a curandero and worked with him closely in order to experience not only the high, but also the ritualistic trance-state that the drug produces. It is not a casual experience, as both Burroughs and Ginsberg found out. After his first attempt, Burroughs wrote "checked into the hospital junk sick and spent four days there. They would only give me three shots of morphine and I couldn't sleep from pain and heat and deprivation." Without going into all of the gruesome detail of the body's reaction (you can read it here) the effect of the drug is to first purge you, bodily--from both ends--and then release you mentally. However, unlike Kerouac, for Burroughs (and for Ginsberg as well) the discovery was painful indeed, he did not find the enlightenment that he sought from the experience, not immediately anyway--the aforementioned novel and, more important, his "cut-up" form came afterward.

While his cut-up technique was literal, he would cut passages (by himself and other writers) and rearrange them randomly, from a prose perspective, he was seeking "the lost"--the hidden meaning of words. For Burroughs, the cut-up was "a montage of fragments ... consciousness is a cut up. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors." The cut-up disturbed continuity, but he worked within the randomness, assigning it limits with a result he felt went only so far as the fact that it was unintentional. It was about the subliminal flow of information, and perception hidden from our conscious. It was meant to directly contradict popular-culture manipulations--to be guided away from the visible and the "virus" that words have become in our culture. By juxtaposing sentences--logical sequences not represented in our brains--he renders the words meaningless and their control over our brains harmless. The cut-up is a method for direct action against mind control. And while he did not accomplish this under direct influence of yage (he certainly wrote under the influence of many others, whether in Tangiers with Paul Bowles, or in New York, under any number of substances), what his experience of it did was open this mind view.

City Lights Books has just this month published a new, more complete edition called, Yage Letters Redux. The text includes some previously unpublished (and previously unpublishable) correspondence, as well as a detailed history of both the drug, and Burroughs' obsession with it.