No Maps for These Territories Page #4

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Its simply a matter of simply a matter of being there,

and being somewhat open, open to possibilities.

What you couldnt have told me at that stage of my life

what I couldnt have told me at that stage in my life that Ive subsequently come to

come to accept is that

all drugs

all any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data.

And you have to beyou have to be

really incredibly self-centered,

or pathetic, to be satisfied with simply

tweaking the incoming data.

Enough of the right drug, and anything is groovy.

Enough of the right drug, and its okay to be having open-heart surgery.

Well, you know, who wantswho wants that?

My experience has been that, beyond

a certain point, theres only pathology.

Youre not dealing with a personality anymore;

youre dealing with a kind of hardwired

hardwired pathology

Youreyoure dealing with a chemical entity, a neurochemical entity.

It doesnt really have much to do with the who is a person

manifesting in was.

Recreational drugs are essentially a wank,

and a wank is okay,

but you really should know that its just a wank.

And I think thats what we didnt

what we didnt know, to use the generational

weand what some of us still dont know.

I was kept from the opiates by having read Burroughs.

I knew from even before I had ever tried any mind-altering

substances that heroin was really addictive,

and that you thought it wasnt when you began

to take it but then you discovered that it was.

You know, the opiates aside, I tried whatever was going.

You know, I sort of prided myself on it.

In fact, I was sort of a very regular cannabis user for a number of years,

n spite of the fact that I was always had a terrible time with it.

And, you know, Ive long since come to realize that

that I suffer from cannabis dysphoria.

Like, the lowest possible dose of cannabinol makes

me incredibly uncomfortable and unhappy.

I think its just easier to die doing that stuff

than people are, you know, people are

comfortable admitting.

You know, at least people who like to do that stuff.

A certain number of people do their

accustomed dose of cocaine, or sometimes even

their very first dose of

cocaine, and simply drop dead!

You know, a certain percentage of people do.

Its kind of like, you know, the street drug thing isyou know,

when did you ever hear a drug dealer

when did you ever go to a drug dealer

and the drug dealer says,

You know, you should come back tomorrow, this is not very pure.

Its not too good tonightcome next week.

It doesnt happen.

Where are we?

This is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina,

the closest thing closest thing to a city

near where my parents were living in a beach house,

when I was born in 1948.

This was a farm that my parents had rented,

I believe, while my fathers construction company

put in a lot of these civilian sort of workaday plumbing

around the Oak Ridge Atomic Project.

My father was working there during

the production of the bombs, I believe.

Army Jeep of some kind

This is in Virginia Beach or nearby, which is where

I lived just prior to my father s death in 56.

Upon his death, within a matter of days,

my mother had packed, uh, packed everything up

and taken me back to Wytheville,

which is a town both my parents came from,

in SouthwestSouthwest Virginia.

She stayed there for the rest of her life.

My mothers death, when I was nineteen,

coincided, really, with the beginning of

the beginning of what we think of as the Sixties.

I was in a boarding school

in Tucson, Arizona,

and we would see the people coming and going from San Francisco.

You know, you couldnt miss them, really.

There had never been people in America who looked like that.

And they looked like they were having a pretty good time.

So, I knew already that something was going on

no one had given it a name yet.

What was going onwhat was going on inside me,

and what was going on in the world outside, were very, very confused for me.

I had no way ofI had no way of sorting,

sorting those things out.

You know, it just seemed like the

inside of my head was going off,

and the outside was going off as well.

II know I became very, very isolated for a long time.

I mean, I do, really do think I

maybe its just a middle-aged thing, but

Im inclined to think that I was crazy,

at some level, for a long time.

But its only become

its only become apparent to me relatively,

you know, relatively late in life

And its only become apparent

because I no longer feel that I am crazy.

What makes you anxious these days?

I think the thing that makes me most anxious

at this point in my life is

the thought that I might not

be able to become

as honest with myself as

I would like to, as I would like to become.

Because I think that more real is always

is always better.

Andbutits not necessarily given to us as individuals

to be, always be, more real.

Im not a didactic writer, I hope.

Theres nothing nothing I want less to be than

than someone couching a conscious message in prose fiction.

But I think one of the

one of the things that I see when I look back,

when I look back at my earlier work, is a

a struggle to recognize, and accept,

that the heart is the master,

and the head is the servant,

and that is always the case.

Except when it isnt the case,

were in deep, deep trouble.

And were often in deep, deep trouble.

So, thats the waythats the way it starts

to look to me, now, when I look back at it.

But I wouldnt have been able to articulate

that twenty years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm.

Did you read William Burroughs last piece?

[Love? what is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. Love.]

Yeah, I thought it was absolutely extraordinary

It was so wonderful that I almost didnt believe it.

It was so much what I wouldve

wanted his last words to be.

Burroughs death was something that I had anticipated

for many, many years as being

I didnt know what would happen to me.

Its, you knowin some way that I cant explain,

he was just terribly, terribly

terribly, terribly important to me.

But when he went,

it was okay.

I mean, I was okay.It was okay.

I just felt, Okay.Thats, likeits okay. Hes gone.

I didnt haveI didnt have a sense of loss,

and I didnt I dont think I

I didnt really have to grieve.

But it wasit was a real milestone for me.

I had a sense that he had had a couple of

really deep, really powerful resolutions

that came to him, came to him very late.

One piece of his I read, he spoke of

no, it might have been an interview he spoke of going

into a sweat lodge ceremony, possibly a series of them,

and being relieved, finally, of that which

he had always referred to as The Ugly Spirit.

And before he died, he spoke quite movingly,

and lovingly, of of his wife, whom hed killed

in a blackout in Mexico City.

Andand he seemed to have come to terms with that.

It just seemed that, at the end of his life

at the end of his life, he was

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