The 23 Enigma & The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

This is the third article in a series on contemporary and ancient Books of the Dead. The first piece is here and the second one is there.

spiriti questi? personae?

                       tangibility by no means atasal

                       but the crystal can be weighed in the hand

formal and passing within the sphere: Thetis,

Maya, Ἀφροδίτη,

                                      - Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI

Note: "atasal" = union with God; from Avicenna.

Thetis = mother of Achilles who made him immortal, except for his heel, by dipping him in the River Styx, the river that runs through the Underworld. 

Maya, also spelled Maia = the daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes via a liaison with Zeus. The Greek word = Aphrodite, the goddess of love

The 23 Enigma – encountering a network of synchronicities and coincidences related to the number 23 – seems quite familiar to many readers of Robert Anton Wilson. He laid out his experience with this phenomenon in Cosmic Trigger – the Final Secret of the Illuminati. Multiple listings to Twenty-three appear in the Index beginning with William Burroughs telling him about it and recurring frequently until nearly the end of the book. The importance of this engima to Wilson's Hermetic development cannot be overstated. He compared it to the flash of insight Dr. James Watson received walking down a spiral staircase leading him to consider DNA as spiral-shaped, an intuitive hunch that led to cracking the DNA code. This opened up the world of Science and applied Technology to all kinds of new beneficial healing advances for humanity. "23 was my spiral staircase, my intuitive signal." ( CT I p. 46, Hilaritas). The 23 Enigma served as an entry point for Wilson to crack, actually more like construct, the code of numerology and correspondence found in the science of Cabala. I contend that this also brought beneficial healing advances for some parts of humanity through his writing and teaching.  

Wilson presented the 23 Enigma so well that it entered the underground cultural lexicon. Some examples of this off the top of my head include an excellent, but short-lived (1987-1988) science fiction TV show called Max Headroom. The main character works as an investigative reporter for Network 23. Around the same time, a great film packed with esoteric information, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, came out. It opens with a Warner Bros. style cartoon, Somethin's Cookin'. In it, Roger gets tasked with babysitting Baby Herman after Mother says she's off to the beauty parlor. The baby innocently gets into all kinds of dangerous situations that Roger frantically tries to protect him from resulting in various daredevil slapstick antics. A refrigerator falls on Roger's head at the end of it, but he blows his part by seeing tweety birds instead of stars and gets fired. He pleads with the director, "please drop the refrigerator on my head again," the director replies, "we've dropped the refrigerator on your head 23 times already!" When you see this, especially after viewing it more than once and knowing the context of the rest of the film, it feels more like a deliberate inclusion rather than a random coincidence 

In 2007 this enigma entered the mainstream with the film The Number 23 starring Jim Carrey – I have not seen this. The description of it says the protagonist finds an obscure book about 23 that leads to a descent into darkness.  As recently as a few weeks ago on the TV show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver played a clip of a jury foreperson reading the guilty verdict on 34 charges brought against a political candidate. To great comedic effect, Oliver showed each charge of guilty being read one by one in sequence only stopping at the 23rd. 

According to Wilson odd coincidences and synchronicities tend to multiply as one gets more involved with the occult. I can verify this through my experience and would add that not only do synchronicities increase upon the spiritual path they can also help to guide. I've heard reports from several people that coincidences involving 23 become spookily more frequent after reading Wilson on the enigma. Part of the reason may certainly be attributed to selective attention. We see more 23s because we're looking for them or we gain increased maze brightness to that number simply from having read about the enigma; they jump out to us because we've tuned in to the phenomena. Anyone working along the lines of Scientific Illuminism is encouraged to be skeptical of assigning significance whenever seeing a 23. Yet, there seem occurrences of 23 (or any number important to us) not so easily explained.

Anyone who has come across and assimilated some kind of self-observation practice, whether from the disciplines of Buddhism, Yoga, Gurdjieffian 4th Way practices or something else can gradually become cognizant of the source of their attention. Meaning that a process of discernment can get applied to numerological encounters – did I make it up or is there some sort of occult communication going on? Perhaps a communication from one of the higher brain circuits? For the most part, these higher circuits seem occult (hidden) to our ordinary awareness. Can the more unknown parts of our DNA and nervous system arrange for synchronicities to communicate to our consciousness via unknown forces and interactions that can be modeled in quantum physics? What is the difference or relationship between a turned on C6 (using Leary's model) and the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (using the Thelemic model)? As RAW said, and I concur, 23 can act as an intuitive signal. A signal for an educational process that starts to alchemically construct and turn on C6 – it seems never ending, yet always growing in beauty like a well tended garden full of joy to produce, and in a vegetable garden if I may extend the metaphor, tasty and joyful to eat the produce.

The discernment process reflexively exercises Intuition. Numerological consideration can be a workout for Intuition. Intuition does get stronger when exercised. Numerology can also be complete self-delusion without a healthy sense of skepticism. Intuition enters the picture when attempting to discern whether you're deluding yourself or if something real is going on.  

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PROOF OF CONCEPT (maybe)

Regarding encountering synchronicities in this line of work, the day after I wrote the last few paragraphs a post came up in my Facebook feed from Dan Clore asking about: Musicians of interest to sombunall RAW fans?" I opened up the comments and one of the first ones I saw from Robert Rabinowitz included a quote from Cosmic Trigger about the 23 Enigma. The quote includes Wilson saying: "This, of course, illustrates Jano Watts' concept "The Net" – the lines of coincidence-synchronicity that connect everything-with everything. It is also an analogy with what phsyicists call QUIP – the Quantum Inseparability Principle" Rabinowitz goes on to write that he composed a classical sounding piece of music called QuIP. He plays the flute,with Jai Jeffryes on piano. You can hear the live performance of it here. Right below was a comment from Jessebob Baughman who gave a shout out to this blog and to my discography that I greatly appreciated.

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 One of my favorite anecdotes concerns someone who posted a skeptical diatribe on Twitter about the 23 Enigma then went out to eat and was directed to table 23. It both blew and changed his mind. I've often been asked, what does it mean to encounter weird 23 synchronicities? So I've developed a take on it: 23 signals you're in the Bardo now. Let's look at how I got there:

By Gematria 23 = Parted, removed, separated. This easily suggests death - physically when parted, removed and separated from the body, and psychologically when parted, removed and separated from  ego and personality.

23 = Joy

23 =  A thread. Maintain the thread of consciousness while traversing the labyrinth of the Bardo appears a prime instruction in Tibetan Buddhism.

23 = Life

23 corresponds with death, the Bardo and Life and, for added measure, Joy. It recalls the line: "This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing and the joy of dissolution all." (Liber Legis I:30)

In the "List of Primes" from 777, Aleister Crowley's Qabalistic dictionary, 

23 = The glyph of life – nascent life

This nascent life could easily symbolize newborn life in the higher domains of consciousness.

Key 23 in 777's "Table of Correspondences" represents the Hebrew letter Mem, the element Water, and The Hanged Man in the Tarot. In The Game of Life, Leary connects Mem and The Hanged Man (and thus 23) with Caste 13, the first stage of what he calls "Post-Terrestrial Evolution" which include Circuits 5 - 8 in his model.

This Tarot card is an unmistakeable, dramatic signal from DNA that your nervous system contains post-terrestrial circuits which free the body from the gravitational and terrestrial limits of the womb planet. The Birth of the Self. The Self! The Self! - Leary, The Game of Life.

Hexagram 23 in the I Ching = Po/Splitting Apart. This splitting apart can suggest entering the Bardo when the spirit leaves the body or entering a psychological Bardo, even a Chapel Perilous when the higher, post-terrestrial consciousness breaks free from identification with terrestrial consciousness. Sufis call that "waking up." 

The six lines of an I Ching hexagram carry a meaning when the line indicates that it changes. The first four changing lines in Hexagram 23 sound rather dire and appear to refer to complete identification with Circuits 1 - 4, what Sufis call "sleep." The fifth changing line could refer to the post-terrestrial side:

A shoal of fishes

Favor comes through the court ladies

Everything acts to further

A "shoal of fishes" could serve as a metaphor for the alignment of our wishes, aims and desires to formulate a Will to wake up. In Thelema, Nuit and Babalon are two of the court ladies. In the opening quote, Ezra Pound utilizes Greek mythology to present the court ladies Thetis, Maya and Aphrodite.

The top changing line in Hexagram 23 means:

There is a large fruit still uneaten.

The superior man receives a carriage.

The house of the inferior man is split apart. 

A carriage = a vehicle which could be a kind of "body" for navigating the territory of the post-terrestrial circuits. "Man", of course, represents the ancient generic term Leary rebranded as "WoMan."

And finally . . . in Crowley 101, the online course Robert Anton Wilson gave under the auspices of The Maybe Logic Academy in 2005, we studied Chapter 23 from The Book of Lies. In that chapter, Crowley takes off on the then contemporary expression, "23 Skidoo" which means "get out!" He proceeds to express the word OUT as a Magick formula with sophisticated Qabalah, but more simply I think he also literally means "Get out" judging from the repetition of it five times. Get out of your comfort zone, get out (at least temporarily) of your habitual belief systems, the ordinary way of seeing things. Get out of your sleep. Get out of your enlightenment. It reminds me of entering the Bardo because whatever you get out of seems like a small death. It also recalls the Burroughs/ Gysin formula, "Here to Go" and Crowley's fifth power of the Sphinx, "to go."

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A large number, but not all of 23 synchronicities appear connected to either death or birth. In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson tells the story of William Burroughs introducing him to the 23 Enigma. According to Burroughs, it first came to his attention when an acquaintance by the name of Captain Clark mentioned that he'd been operating a ferry from Tangier, Morocco to Spain for 23 years without an accident. Later that very same day the ferry sunk killing everyone on board including Clark. Burroughs apparently turned on the radio that night and heard of an Eastern Airlines, Flight 23 plane crash also piloted by a Captain Clark. The flight was going from New York to Miami. It doesn't say if anyone died so I searched online for a record of it and couldn't find anything that matched those details. There was a mysterious plane crash of a United Airlines flight 23 in 1933 near Chicago killing everyone onboard that was later suspected to have been caused by a bomb and thus the first instance of terrorism of that kind. Although it was flight 23, it was not Eastern Airlines, wasn't going to Miami and the pilot wasn't Captain Clark. There was a crash near San Francisco in 1964 of a plane flown by a Captain Clark that killed 44 people. Clark had been shot by another passenger. Right time and the same Capitain's name, but it was Pacific Air Lines flight 773 – nothing to do with 23 or Eastern Airlines. Who knows what Burroughs heard on the radio that night, if he misheard it or if the newscaster supplied misinformation.  Whatever happened, it caused Burroughs, and later Wilson to begin notating odd occurrences of 23. It's interesting to me that garbled communication brought recognition to the 23 Enigma. What agency was at work to bring this about? It's almost as bizarre, though not as far-reaching, as Albert Hoffman "accidentally" discovering the consciousness altering properties of LSD, another well-known, albeit much stronger Bardo enabler.

Wilson writes of taking a skeptical friend to see the film Charly about a mentally challenged character transformed into a genius by neuro-surgery in Operating Room 23 – a dramatic metaphorical death and rebirth. He lists a number of gangster deaths connected with 23. For instance, "Mad Dog" Coll shot on 23rd street at age 23. There's the story of Laura Huxley attempting to communicate with her husband Aldous after his death. A psychic told her Aldous wanted to communicate "classic evidence of survival" after death. The disembodied Aldous allegedly directed her to read line 23 on a particular page in a particular book on modern writers. The line praised Aldous Huxley "in this admirable communication." What strikes me as odd is how anyone living, even Aldous Huxley before he passed, would know exactly where the book was (fifth book on a certain self'), exactly which page and which line to read. Then, of course, we have the famous incident on July 23rd, 1973 when RAW received his first communication on the importance of Sirius following a prolonged excursion into the Bardo the night before courtesy of Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel ritual, John Lilly's Beliefs Unlimited and sex Magick.

In Cosmic Trigger RAW considers that the 23s might result from selective perception yet identifies this selective perception as the metaprogrammer, one of the higher neurological circuits. In other words, my words, the metaprogrammer selects perceptions to guide the mundane awareness to the expanded awareness of the post-terrestrial territory. Working with Aleister Crowley's terminology, as RAW did at the time, one could say the Holy Guardian Angel selects perceptions for the Initiate to enable its Knowledge and Conversation to function as a Guide.  He writes that most of his communication from the HGA came from synchronicities. 

Related to selective perception, RAW incorporates 23s into the Discordian Law of Fives "which holds that all incidents and events are directly connected to the number five, or to some multiple of five, or to some number related to five in one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter" (CT I p. 57). His reasoning holds that 23 can break down as 2 + 3 = 5 so whenever you see a 5 or a multiple of 5 you're also implicitly getting a 23. Of course, by the same logic, 5s and their multiples also implicitly contain the numbers 14, 32, and 41. Ingenuity seems the key word for interpreting the Law of Fives. It means "the ability to solve difficult problems in original, clever and inventive ways." It also seems related to "genius" and, for me, connects with a work by Plutarch, De genio Socratis. It refers to the daimon of Socrates, which, according to Plutarch, means that Socrates has a guardian spirit who leads him in the best way. This also perfectly describes the Guide aspect of the Holy Guardian Angel. Paradoxically, the Law of Fives can come across as a rationalization for making shit up to see whatever it is you want to see, or conversely, intuitively connect with the HGA to receive guidance. Crowley connects 5 with The Hierophant from the Tarot, the one who communicates the secrets of the temple. Incidentally, RAW writes that he put all the research and data he found concerning 23s in Illuminatus!

As I see it, strange sightings of 23s can serve as a reminder of being in the Bardo, the space of in betweenness, in between waking sleep and enlightened awareness. Coincidences can serve as a reminder to make the attempt to wake up. Waking up can seem as simple as being fully present in the moment, disengaged from daydreams and mental chatter. According to the Sufis, we naturally wake up several times a day. These instances are called "moments of freedom", but we usually don't recognize them due to the momentum of the sleeping state carrying over through them. They involuntarily slip by. It's not always necessary to take a psychedelic, perform prolonged rituals or meditations, fast, do yoga or otherwise engage in esoteric practices to enter the Bardo, though these don't hurt and can help if done with discipline. You don't have to physically or mentally contort yourself, find a guru or join a cult to construct a path toward higher consciousness. 

Traveling through the Bardo, attempting to metaprogram new realities, expanded perceptions, new ways of thinking and doing is not a picnic or a walk in the park despite Illuminatus! literally starting with a walk in New York's Central Park. The Bardo can be terrifying with shocking ambushes, intense radiations, piercing sounds among other gnarly sensations. Chapel Perilous, the Dark Night of the Soul, the ordeal of Crossing the Abyss all occur in this territory. Hence the usefulness of a guide whether it be one's daimon, Holy Guardian Angel or a Book of the Dead of one kind or another – the Hitchhiker's  Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams appears one fun and light-hearted example. 

Nowadays, we have Films of the Dead. Three of those that immediately come to mind include The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, Beeteljuice by Tim Burton, and All That Jazz by Bob Fosse. Note that Beeteljuice borrows part of the classic "It's showtime, folks" line from All That Jazz. This three minute and thirty-three second clip gives a taste of the Bardo . . . where all your dreams and nightmares can come true.

The 23 Enigma offers more than a symbol as a bardo indicator. Not every coincidence appears meaningful. 23 can serve as an identifier in a code. Toward the end of chapter 23 in Thomas Pynchon's last novel, Bleeding Edge, there appears what I suspect is an allusion to Robert Anton Wilson's inveterate agnosticism and principle of Maybe Logic interspersed with a few 93s (Thelema adds to 93 making it aka the 93 Current). The CS glyph that I've mentioned once or twice ("slowly cooking", "soon compelling", "cozy schmozy", etc.) runs throughout chapter 23. Pynchon is an acknowledged and brilliant Qabalist. More on the Qabalah in Bleeding Edge here.

Another instance of 23 as a code identifier appears in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Chapter 23 in that iconic novel opens with: "Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon." Recall that RAW considered 23 a key number; "out" recalls the "get out" formula from The Book of Lies chapter 23; "fish" indicates the Hebrew letter Nun which corresponds with the Tarot trump Death. Thus, 23 (the Bardo) = a key for Death; "nylon" adds to 210 an important Qabalistic number RAW explicates somewhere in the Historical Illuminatus trilogy, if memory serves: two becomes unified as one then becomes none – a progression that appears a form of death and rebirth. A loop in music describes a passage, usually a drum or percussion phrase, that repeats over and over until stopped. A "loop of nylon" thus symbolizes the repetitive, mystical practice of 210. Entrance into a Bardo space appears obvious in that chapter to those who recognize it. It concludes with a death and rebirth. I wrote more on the 23 Enigma and death in Neuromancer, parallels with Leary's S.M.I.²L.E. formula, and its influence on Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in a post here.  

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"ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS DEMONSTRATES 

THAT LIFE AFTER DEATH IS WITHIN THE REACH OF EVERYMAN . . .

However, soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions

for reaching the Land of the Dead. . .

    Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anybody ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space.

    The Pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death."

– William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, p. 115

    "The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil, and death, does not arise.

                 "What happened, Osiris? We got a famine here."

                 "Well, you can't win 'em all. Hustling myself."

                 "Can't you give us immortality?"

                 "I can get you an extension, maybe. Take you as far as the Duad. You'll have to make it from there on your own. Most of them don't. Figure about one in a million. And, biologically speaking, that's very good odds."   – ibid., 113

Bill Laswell and I both agree that The Western Lands is one of William Burroughs' best works. On one level it's a brilliant, direct and  highly informative  Book of the Dead. My first encounter came from helping record Burroughs reading from it for the Material album Seven Souls. (constructed and produced by Laswell). Apart from Burroughs and Laswell, this manifestation of Material also includes Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Faheim Dandan, Nicky Skopelitis, Simon Shaheen, L. Shankar, Jeff Bova, Sly Dunbar and Aiyb Dieng. In the title track, Burroughs outlines the fate of the different souls in the afterlife, according to Egyptian mythology.

                                  Material Seven Souls                      

The Western Lands is a collage-like collection of episodes ranging from fictional and science fictional vignettes to auto-biographical moments, dream fragments, old-cut-up experiments, references to his friends, other books and writers, occult experiments, black magic and more. It includes some of his favorite subjects like giant, killer centipedes taking over remote outposts of civilization and the adventures and modus operandi of the Persian mystic leader Hassan i Sabbah; the latter being another Burroughs influence on Robert Anton Wilson who put Sabbah in Illuminatus!.  

The connecting theme running throughout is confronting and conquering death. Unlike Bob Wilson, Burroughs doesn't place any stock in prolonging the life expectancy of the physical body ("it's full of holes, it's full of holes"). Rather, he seems to take the approach of training ourselves to become familiar with the Bardo and the ordeals found there; learning how to tolerate and deal with that territory through gradual exposure. The afterlife technology he presents, though largely Egyptian, can come from anywhere. 

"The Hindus teach that the Heaven World is more dangerous for the soul than the Hell World, since it is more deceptive and conduces to the fatal error of overconfidence and assumption of immunity. Like a fighter the soul must be constantly in training lest it grow soft on an ephemeral throne." ibid, p. 137

Much of the bardo training value in The Western Lands doesn't come from any advice or data presented. It comes from the bardo scenes,  the moods and feelings of that space evoked by Burroughs' visceral descriptions. He frequently gives a taste of this territory gently letting the reader metaphorically dip their toes into the strange, disorientating, sometimes terrifying Land of the Dead. A couple of brief examples:

"The cave system penetrates the mainland for miles. No one knows how far back the tunnels go. Some narrow into dead ends, others open into huge caverns with underground rivers and lakes. There is a deadly stasis of impregnable grandeur, forming a dense medium, difficult to breathe. One suffocates in fairy lands forlorn, magic casements, ruined palaces." ibid, p. 189

"He sees canals and paths and bridges, a network to the sky with an intricate series of locks and sluices, gardens and houseboats pulled by large turtles with eyes for ropes in their shells. The turtles have webbed feet and move with surprising speed and power, pulling barges of produce and passengers. 

    In the distance he can see a vast lake in milky light. There is no sun or satellite visible. It must be reflected light that gives such a soft, even distribution. Occasionally he meets people on the path. He can feel their bodies as a precise displacement." ibid. p. 244

The poignancy, profundity, and genuinely masterful quality of the writing comes from Burroughs directly confronting his own death in these pages. The Western Lands begins and ends with a semi-autobiographical character, "the old writer." This character had published a novel once that made quite a stir but was never able to finish another one. Now he was humming the refrain to "Dead Man Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton. On page 3 he gives the writer a name: "So William Seward Hall sets out to write his way out of death."

Not only his own death. His dear friend and closest collaborator, the painter Brion Gysin, died the year before this was published. Gysin, the formulator of a consciousness altering device and doorway into the Bardo called the Dreammachine, was the one who introduced him to the cut-up technique. Gysin does get mentioned by name a few times.  As does another friend/collaborator and ex-lover, Ian Sommerville who had an untimely death at the age of 36 in a car accident on Burroughs' birthday in 1976. Sommerville was an electronics technician who also collaborated with Gysin to create the Dreammachine in 1961. The year before, Sommerville found a way to program a random sequence generator that Gysin applied to his cut-up technique. Years later, Robert Anton Wilson tried similar experiments with computer software programmed to create random cut-ups that found their way into his book on synchronicity, Coincidance.

On p. 236 WSB writes a Bardo hotel episode: Le Grand Hôtel des Morts where he glimpses Sommerville several times on an escalator or in the corridors or waiting rooms and references his fatal car accident. He asks the front desk girl if Ian Somerville is there. He is and comes out. They "exchange a few dead sentences. It doesn't matter who says what." He then asks if Brion is there, but he isn't.

The strongest reference to Gysin's death occurs in the last episode in the book where the "old writer . . . had reached the end of words, the end of what could be done with words. And then . . ." A distant memory of the British in Gibraltar evokes a bardo scene that ends with a metaphor for clinging to a dying life. The book ends with:

       "In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling upon the Mountain.

           'Hurry up, please. It's time.'"

The Parade Bar was a restaurant in Tangier that Brion Gysin bought, set -up and operated primarily for the purpose of having a regular venue where the Moroccan music he loved could be performed live. These were the Master Musicians of Jajouka from a small village a couple of hours away.  The "Mountain" seems a reference to Hassan i Sabbah aka, the Old Man of the Mountain. Burroughs mythologizes Sabbah as the one who breaks the monopoly energy vampires have on the gates to Immortality.  The last line is what you hear in British pubs announcing the last call for alcohol before closing for the night. T.S. Eliot used the same line in The Wasteland. It's not clear to me if Burroughs intended to reference The Wasteland, but it would be appropriate if so as that poem appears another excursion into the Bardo.  A recurring theme in both this book and Burroughs' philosophy is the breaking out of TIME and expanding into SPACE. I don't know if these were officially his last words: when he had his fatal heart attack and was being taken out of his house on a stretcher he said to his companion, "back in no time."

The Western Lands portrays the Bardo of William S. Burroughs, the documentation of the unraveling of his subconscious mind and making it conscious. The deaths of both his parents turns up in an episode on p. 42. The presence of his son, Bill Burroughs Jr. who tragically died young after a difficult life is there too.

* * * * * * 

In chapter 4, Kim Carsons, a Western (as in the old west in the U.S. circa late 19th Century/ early 20th Century) character from WSB's previous novel, The Place of Dead Roads – the second novel in a trilogy that concludes with this novel – is given the assignment to find the Western Lands and find out how the Western Lands are created; he wants to find their blueprints. The Western Lands is what the ancient Egyptians equated with Immortality. Burroughs wants to know why the Egyptians needed to preserve the physical body after death with mummification. He considers it a mistake. Carsons is based on the English writer Denton Welch, but also stands in as another alter ego for WSB. The author frequently breaks the so-called fourth wall with direct references to his writing process. In this case, Kim receives a summons from the District Supervisor to get his assignment, but he wants to know why he isn't the District Supervisor since he wrote him. A snippet of the writer's philosophy on writing follows. 

Via a fragment of an ancient Mayan codex, Kim's assignment surrealistically morphs into a search for monster centipedes and the Centipede God. The chapter mixes genuine research and data on centipedes embellished greatly by the author's vivid imagination (we hope it's an embellishment!). Carson journeys into the wilds of the South American island of Esmeraldas in search of the centipede cult. The Guide gets introduced as the one taking the expedition down a river into the jungle though Kim has left the narrative and it's now Neferti leading the voyage.

  "The Guide consults his map, which opens like an accordian. The map is brightly colored, depicting unusual beings. Some of them are growing upside down into the ground, shoots sprouting from their legs."

At first only referring to him as The Guide, we soon find out the guide's name is Wilson. This could allude to either Robert Anton and/or Peter Lamborn Wilson. I suspect both – they're both quite obviously very experienced Bardo Guides. The latter gets thanked in the acknowledgements section at the beginning for providing research on Hassan i Sabbah.

* * * * * * 

Burroughs affirms synchronicity pretty early on (p. 30) calling it a pregnant concept that replaces the "monumental fraud of cause and effect."

Proof of Concept (maybe)

When Burroughs came to Platinum Island to record excerpts from The Western Lands, I knew very little about him and didn't know what to expect. I bought several of his books beforehand to read up on him, but thanks to a busy studio schedule only had time to read one of them, Junky. It was the first book he wrote and doesn't represent his genius.. I did know of his pioneering literary cut-up techniques and had recently read Robert Anton Wilson's new book, Coincidance, which also contained cut-up experiments generated from computer software. I brought my copy in to show Burroughs after we finished recording. He seemed very interested when leafing through the book so I told him he could keep it. This delighted him immensely. After he and his editor James Grauerholz left the studio they went upstairs to visit his friend the famous grafitti artist Keith Haring whose painting studio was a couple of floors above our recording studio. About 6 or so months later a new Burroughs release called Interzone, comprising Naked Lunch outtakes was accidentally delivered to our studio. It was addressed to Haring. Unfortunately (or not, you never know), Keith had confronted and succumbed to his own death from AIDS in the intervening period. I was there when our studio manager received the mail. "You're into Burroughs, aren't you?" He said to me, "here you have this book, Keith Haring won't be needing it." I'd given a book by Robert Anton Wilson to WSB and somehow, through fate, magic or random chance, a book from him was gifted to me.

That one day meeting and recording William Burroughs is one of the highlights of my career as a sound engineer and one of the highlights of my life. Before he arrived, I half expected a somewhat washed-up character from the 60's. When he left, I felt like I'd met one of the most wise individuals I would ever meet and still feel that's true to this day. I wrote up and posted the experience on this blog slightly more than 14 years ago. The follow-up post is here.

I'll leave you with more bardo words of advice from WSB and music from Bill Laswell's  Material. This one comes from the album Hallucination Engine.

Words of Advice for Young People – Material featuring William Burroughs.