‘One thing is sure — he don’t look good.’
‘A filthy mess .. .’
‘Sew her up, it’s inoperable.’
‘Clamps, nurse, he’s bleeding like a pig.’
‘Prepare the patient for a heart shot.’
‘A round of drinks he dies on the table.’
These irresponsible observations are recorded and stored in the patient’s memory bank, enough so to convey a permament patient status. In Esquire’s 1971 Christmas issue, there was an article called ‘Future Shock’; Doctor Cheek, who carried out hypnotic experiments on post-operative subjects and found they were recording every word and sound in the operating room, recommended that silence be observed during an operation. Because what the patient hears during an operation is filed with all his tapes of pain, fear, helplessness and hostility — all the horrible, frightening, disgusting things he has ever known awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, from his conception.
Everyone you have ever known, however briefly, is there on film and tape. Take a look at these talking films and you will begin to notice that certain words and characters tend to recur. The rude clerk in Hong Kong bore a strong resemblance to the rude clerk in New York, and both used the same words to indicate they did not have what you asked for: ‘I never heard of it.’
The more you look at it, the more it looks like a tired old film, nice voices nasty voices, good guys and bad guys, the old game of war from the Stone Age to eternity ...
‘Are we men or toothless crones? How long will we allow the filthy Zambesi to plunder our fishing territories?
‘As free men we cannot stand idly by.’ Time to get yourself hid good and the deeper the better. ‘And I say to Russia, beware the fury of a patient man.’ A good crossing. The earth disintegrated. Old war tapes. We all have millions of hours of it, even if we never fired a gun. War tapes, hate tapes, fear tapes, pain tapes, happy tapes, sad tapes, funny tapes, all stirring around in a cement mixer of voices.
Raudive dismisses the second alternative explanation for the origin of the voices — that they are extraterrestrial — because they are ‘too banal’. Well, no reason to think we have a monopoly on banality. His reasoning exemplifies the error of either/or thinking. Having categorically crossed out 1) and 2), he is stuck with Number 3: the voices come from the dead. I could suggest other possible explanations: the voices are a backplay of recordings stored in the memory banks of the experimenters.
Now the psychiatrists tell us that any voices anyone hears in his head originate there, and that they do not and cannot have an extraneous origin. The whole psychiatric dogma that voices are the imaginings of a sick mind has been called into question by voices which are of extraneous origin and are objectively and demonstrably there on tape. So the psychotic patients may be tuning in to a global and intergalactic network of voices, some using quite sophisticated electronic equipment. It belongs probably to the cucumbers. Fifteen years ago in Norway, experiments indicated that voices could be projected directly into the brain of the subject by an electromagnetic field around the head. The experiments were in a formative stage at that time. So maybe we are all walking around under a magnetic dome of prerecorded word and image, and Raudive and the other experimenters are simply plugging into the prerecording.
Could you, by your cutting up, overlaying, scrambling, cut and nullify the prerecordings of your own future? Could the whole prerecorded future of the human race be nullified or altered? I don’t know — let’s see. And don’t let any smooth old voices ease you out of it. .. ‘There are certain things my son that human beings are not permitted to know —’ like what we are doing — ‘Son you’d fall dead from one whiff of the pickle factory and other similar factories in other countries.’ Scramble him like an egg before he hatches. What is this? His hand is one of the unbearable mysteries, and the other players can’t see his cards, as he rakes in the chips and then says the chips are his cards, a billion on the board.
The Fall of Art
Some years ago in London, I asked Jasper Johns what painting was all about — what are painters really doing? He countered with another question: what is writing about? I did not have an answer then; I have an answer now: The purpose of writing is to make it happen.
What we call ‘art’ — painting, sculpture, writing, dance, music — is magical in origin. That is, it was originally employed for ceremonial purposes to produce very definite effects. In the world of magic nothing happens unless someone wants it to happen, wills it to happen, and there are certain magical formulae to channel and direct the will The artist is trying to make something happen in the mind of the viewer or reader. In the days of cows-in-the-grass painting, the answer to ‘What is the purpose of such painting?’ was very simple: to make what is depicted happen in the mind of the viewer; to make him smell the cows and the grass, hear the whistling rustic. The influence of art is no less potent for being indirect. We can leave riots, fires, and wrecks to the journalists. The influence of art has a long-range cultural effect. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso — the Beats wrote a world-wide cultural revolution. Remember that four-letter words could not appear on a printed page twenty-nine years ago. Now, with the breakdown of censorship and the freeing of the Word, the New York Times has to print four-letter words used by the President of the United States.
We can trace the tremendous indirect effect of the written word; what about the indirect effect of painting? I have explained how in 1959 Brion Gysin said that writing is fifty years behind painting and applied the montage technique to writing — a technique which had been used in painting for fifty years. As you know, painters had the whole representational position knocked out from under them by photography, and there was in fact a photography exhibition around the turn of the century entitled ‘Photography — The Death of Painting’. Premature, but painting did have to get a new look. So painters turned first to montage.
Now the montage is actually much closer to the facts of perception, than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put what you have just seen down on canvas. You have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows — a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words. Remember that the written word is an image. Brion Gysin’s cut-up method consists of cutting up pages of text and re-arranging them in montage combinations. Representational painting is dead, unless perhaps the new photo-realism takes hold. Nobody paints cows in the grass any more. Montage is an old device in painting. But if you apply the montage method to writing, you are accused by the critics of promulgating a cult of unintelligibility. Writing is still confined in the sequential representational straitjacket of the novel, a form as arbitrary as the sonnet and as far removed from the actual facts of human perception and consciousness as that fifteenth-century poetical form. Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.
Painting in the past hundred years has come from an exclusively representational position, where any number of artists could cover the same material to such a state of fragmentation that every artist must now have his own special point on which there is only room for one artist. Any number of artists can paint country landscapes, but there is only room for one Warhol soup can. It’s every artist his own movement now. Here is a question for all schools: If art has undergone such drastic alteration in the past hundred years, what do you think artists will be doing in fifty or a hundred years from now? Of course we can foresee expansion into the realm of exploding art... A self-destroying TV set, refrigerator, washing-machine, and electric stove going off, leaving a shambles of a gleaming modern apartment; the housewife’s dream goes up behind a barrier of shatterproof glass to shield the spectators.
Now here’s another angle for you young art hustlers: There is an explosive known as ammonium iodide made by pouring ammonia over iodide crystals or m
ixing it with tincture for brash work. This compound when it dries is so sensitive that a fly will explode it. I remember how I used to while away the long 1920’s afternoons with sugar sprinkled around little heaps of ammonium iodide waiting for the flies to explode in little puffs of purple vapor. So you paint your canvas with ammonium iodide and syrup and release a swarm of flies in the gallery... or the people walking around set it off with their vibrations ... or a team of choir boys touches it off with pop guns...
And metal sodium explodes violently on contact with water; so you paint in sodium (which has a beautiful sheen like the side of a silver fish in clear water), and stand well back, and shoot it with a water rifle, or induce a spitting cobra to spit on it and get blown apart. Can sacrificial art be far behind? Cut a chicken’s head off and paint with the gushing blood. Disembowel a sheep and paint with its intestines. Or you can do a combo with the sodium number.
Then there will be the famous Mad Bear Floyd, a billionaire painter who covered a twenty-foot montage of porno pictures with thousand-dollar bills soaked in ammonium iodide ... the montage was laid in the middle of the gallery, then a hamper of thousand-dollar bills rained down and set off the charge, burning a million dollars out of circulation while his agent sold the burnt canvas for $10 million on the spot.
Could this proliferation of competitive angles precipitate a revival of old-time potlatches? The potlatch was a competitive destruction of property carried out until one contestant was rained and frequently died of shame on the spot. It is interesting to consider American tycoons sitting on this game — blowing up their factories and mines and oil wells, burning their crops and sloshing oil on their beaches, irradiating their land, irrigating with salt water, letting the frozen food rot, burning Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, original Rembrandts, destroying Greek statues with air hammers ... the American team drops atom bombs on America while China and Russia match us bomb for bomb on their own ground.
The potlatch was invented by the Northwest Coast Indians in the area that is now British Columbia, and it occupied most of their time. Objects destroyed at these uncomfortable occasions included salmon oil, blankets, and coppers. Salmon oil poured on an open fire at the center of the room frequently singed honored guests in the front row, who were obliged by protocol to evince no signs of displeasure. The coppers were engraved shields of thin copper about three feet by two feet, and are now highly valued as curios.
A copper receives its value from the number of potlatches it has weathered: THIS IS THE GREAT COPPER BEFORE WHICH OTHER COPPERS PISS THEMSELVES LIKE BITCH DOGS.’ And cowardly coppers shrink back, losing value. You see, a potent copper like this represents so many value units, just as modern art objects may derive value from a series of competitive manipulations: this soup can represents fifty burnt kitchen chairs, twenty urinals, and a Wyeth pig. Competitive over-inflation of values could lead to La Chute de l’Art; a total collapse of the art market. Imagine the artist Bourse where all the painters stand by their pictures — frenzied phone calls from broker to collector ... ‘Your margin’s wiped out, B.J. You gotta cover with the gilt-edge stuff — you know what I mean: Monets, Renoirs, Rembrandts, Picassos .. ,’ And then: PICASSO SLUMPS SHARPLY AS HIS ENTIRE OUTPUT IS DUMPED ON THE MARKET BY FRANTIC DEALERS ... As an artist falls off the Board he is obligated by the Board of Health to surrender his pictures to the public incinerator. What art and what artists would survive the holocaust? And how’s this for an angle, B.J.? Now this ART grabs you by the balls, see? It hits you in the stomach and dampens your eyes. So the artist gets behind his picture like Punch and Judy and reaches right out through it and grabs a critic by his lapels or slugs him in the guts and sprays him with tear gas. Lots of ways you can slant this. Dead cows in the grass. Dogs leap out of a picture. Vernissage guests savagely clubbed’ by picture cops. It finally gets so that pictures of dangerous animals, electric chairs, riots, fires, and explosions have the gallery to themselves. Will cows in the grass make a comeback? A critic was gored yesterday. Another drowned in a Monet river and a Bacon exhibition has given rise to unfavorable mutations ...
What has happened here? Art has become literal and returned to its magical function of making it happen, after a long exile in the realms of imagination where its appetite for happenings has become inordinate. Now suddenly art makes its lethal eruption into the so-called real world. Writing and painting were in the beginning and the word was written image. Now painters paint a future before it is written, having outstripped the retarded twin, writing, and left it back there with the ABC’s. Will writing catch up?
A writer who writes a book about a virgin soil epidemic, impregnating his pages with the virus described .. . this book about Poland in a typhus epidemic has typhus lice concealed in the bindings, to be released as book-of-the-month-club ladies turn the pages. Mektoub. It is written. Others have radioactive pages dusted lightly with botulism. The reader is no longer safely reading about sharks while she belches out chocolate fumes; on the page is a powerful shark attractant. Others scorn such crude tricks and rely on the powers of magic — potent spells and curses, often firmed by human sacrifice, flutter from these pestilent pages.
‘Beauty kills. Beauty is the murderer,’ in the words of Gregory Corso, and painting is reunited with its stupid brother, writing, in books done entirely in pictographs. And by now all books are scented with the appropriate odors and readers are provided with scent bottles for renewal... Musky Ozone, Rain on Horseflesh, Empty Locker Rooms... Finally comes the Master of the Empty Page, which can only be by initiates ...
LA CHUTE DU MOT. .. what survives the literalization of art is the timeless ever-changing world of magic caught in the painter’s brash, or the writer’s words, bits of vivid and vanishing detail in space any number of painters can dance on the end of a brash, and the writer makes a soundless bow and disappears into the alphabet.
Hemingway
In writing the old-style novel, there was a more or less clear-cut technology and aim. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had plot, it had chapters that maintained suspense, one chapter ending with a suspense situation which led to another chapter on a different character, then back to the suspense situation, building to a climax. The aim was basically to entertain the readers and to sell books. Critics still criticize authors for not writing novels of this sort, even when the novelist is not attempting to do so. Now painting and writing are split into schools and movements. The technology and aim of one movement may be quite different from those of another — if you are doing mobiles, the silkscreen technology of Pop Art is of no use.
Now consider some writers who have said something about the technology of writing. Other writers may not say anything directly, but their concepts of aim and technology may be implicit in the work that is done. I have previously mentioned Graham Greene; he is frankly horrified at the thought of formulating a technology of writing. ‘Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed writing.’ This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk about anything so long as it isn’t important. Not much help from Mr Greene — go to Downside, become a bad Catholic and talk about the weather. He definitely does represent the Gatsby point of view.
There are some do’s and don’ts. The sound of the first sentence often determines if anyone will read the book or not. Here’s a really atrocious first sentence: ‘Herr that unpronounceable name, Hereditary Commander and Chief of the Fleet of Droco, Fisher of the Western Seas, leader in sacrifice, an oracle of the stars, spread his wings and brought them together again in an astonishing thunderclap’. First of all, he has an incomprehensible if not unpronounceable name, he has too many titles, and he already has wings. It’s all right if he has wings, but you’ve got to lead up to it.
Now to quote another first sentence, this time one that makes it: ‘Jon Ominar,’ (easy to pronounce) ‘Emperor of the East’, (only got one title) ‘reclined in his garden, watching a man being prepared for slow impalement.’
Hemingway
has quite a lot to say about writing. He started writing of course as a journalist, which he considered very valuable training. He says use short words and short sentences, although he doesn’t always do this by any means. He uses short words, but in very long sentences sometimes. He said to look at the person or object in front of you and transcribe what you see. He also developed a number of exercises, like describing a scene from a viewpoint, then removing the viewpoint and leaving the description. It’s as if I described everyone in my class from this viewpoint, then removed myself and just left the description. Take out the ‘I’. What his technology boils down to, however, is how to write Hemingway.
The same thing is true of Kerouac and Wolfe. Kerouac had the idea that the first draft was always the best. You should just let the mind flow and type away, and never change it. Well, that’s all right for him, but it’s not my way of writing. I told him that. I revise. It’s how to write Kerouac. And Wolfe is much the same.
Hemingway has been admired and praised by critics for things that he did not do. The Sun Also Rises has been acclaimed as the definitive statement of the Lost Generation. It wasn’t. There’s more of the 1920’s in one page of Fitzgerald than in the whole of Hemingway. That wasn’t what Hemingway was doing, and he can’t be criticized for that. He wasn’t evoking a period the way Fitzgerald was.
Hemingway has been described as a master of dialogue. He isn’t. No one talks like people talk in Hemingway’s novels except people in Hemingway’s novels. John O’Hara, not nearly as good a writer, is much more a master of dialogue than Hemingway. You know when you read John O’Hara that that’s something he actually heard someone say.
Perhaps it’s unfair to say that there’s nothing in Hemingway except Hemingway, but that’s really the way I feel about it. It’s not exactly a criticism, because that’s what Hemingway was doing. Hemingway had such a distinctive style that he was trapped in it forever. Nevertheless I think Hemingway came closer to writing himself in present time, closer to writing his life and death, than any other writer. Of course Mishima wrote about hara kiri and then later committed it. A French writer of detective stories wrote ‘Then he walked across the room, opened the window, and jumped out.’ After typing these lines, he walked across the room, opened the window, and jumped out. Well, that’s cheating. I mean, Hemingway wrote his death as a character, not as an actor. The difference being, anybody can write ‘And then he shot himself and then shoot himself, if he is prepared to do this. I’m talking about someone who writes ‘And then he was shot’ and is himself shot by someone else. That’s the trick.