Free The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs Page A

Kim’s heart with a soft slimy clutch. The eyes were shafts of dead water leading down into black depths.’
    There are panoramas of sunsets and sunrises and of course eventually the anthologies will be illustrated with reproductions of paintings and photographs. You’re just nobody if you’re not on the list. Wearily our reader sweeps a pile of best-sellers to the floor as a Michelin inspector is said to have dismissed an unsuccessful souffle. Oh yes, we will have our inspectors.
    The Inspector is a shabby gray inconspicuous man. He glances around the vernissage and yawns. He identifies himself. The artist and the gallery owner stand there waiting. He shakes his head with a terrible smile. The List will grow into an institute with a research staff, a library, a museum and film archives. Bulletins will be issued and funds allotted to deserving projects.
    Footnote
    * The Place of Dead Roads.

Ten Years and a Billion Dollars
    My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.
    I asked some of my Buddhist friends, including Allen Ginsberg, this simple question: who are you actually talking to when you are ‘talking to yourself?’ Without presuming a complete understanding of the nature of the Word, I suggested that such an understanding would make it possible to shut off the internal dialogue, to rub out the Word. Allen replied that the Buddhists have developed techniques over the centuries to do just that; it may be so. Not having experimented with their techniques, I can’t say. But I wanted some answers, and it seems to me that in the three thousand years the Buddhists have had to toss this around, they have not come up with any. I offered this challenge then and I repeat it now: give me ten years and a billion dollars for research, and I’ll get some answers to the question of Word.
    But I do not have a billion dollars, and I may or may not have ten years, so in the meantime I have developed certain techniques of my own. First of all, I recognized writing as a magical operation, and since such operations are designed to produce specific results, this leads us to an inquiry as to the purposes of writing. Remember that the written word is an image; that the first writing was pictorial, and so painting and writing were at one time a single operation. Historically, they do not separate until we have a highly stylized pictorial writing, as in Egyptian, which of course developed much later. The original invention from which writing developed was quite simply to create on a cave wall images and scenes: hunting, and often so-called pornographic drawings. The purpose was originally ceremonial or magical, and when the work is separated from its magical function, it loses vitality. That is, when some tribe starts making dolls for the tourists, it’s gone. And that is what bestsellers are doing — whole valleys of dolls and shark teeth for the tourists. It may make money but it isn’t magical. I know Dali says the measure of genius is gold, and I agree that artists should be at least as well-paid as plumbers.
    Journalism is closer to the magical origins of writing than most fiction. That is, at least a few operators in this area — people like the late Hearst and Henry Luce — certainly quite clearly and consciously saw journalism as a magical operation designed to bring about certain effects. And the technology is the technology of magic; in the case of newspapers and magazines, mostly black magic. They stick pins in