"Kim had never doubted the existence of God or the possibility of an afterlife. He considered that immortality was the only goal worth striving for. He knew it was not something you automatically get for believing in some arbitrary dogma like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in life."
- The Western Lands, William S. Burroughs, 1987
A great liberator has passed from our midst. William S. Burroughs, born 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, died Saturday afternoon in Lawrence, Kansas.
Frequently called one of the greatest writers of the 20th century - as often as not by people who never actually read his substantial body of work - Burroughs ripped literature out by its Victorian roots, examining the very elements of language. He experimented with it and he changed it. And in the process he became a somewhat reluctant harbinger of a revolution in culture itself. Burroughs was a writer, but he was much more, and much less, than that.
Burroughs would become an icon of apocalyptic hipster cynicism. Simultaneously, he would be a kind of black-humored advice counselor to avant garde psychedelicists and magicians seeking a "breakthrough in the gray room." And he would eventually become an honored "man of letters" within the literary establishment itself.
Burroughs' writing resonated deeply within the best minds of several generations, because it reflected both the frantic horror and liberatory potential of our unmoored scientific and technological epoch. But it was his presence and his voice that would enter the public imagination. He was the great gray gentleman junkie Godfather, and you didn't need to be particularly literate to pick up the vibe. Burroughs looked and sounded like death itself.
Recalling a childhood incident, Burroughs would write frequently about "the St. Louis matron who said I was a walking corpse." But his spectral presence had a charming, dapper, dignified quality. And to hear Burroughs read his own writing was to understand that he wasn't just a talented experimentalist, he was the funniest goddamned stand-up comedian of his time.
Burroughs first came to prominence when his second novel, Naked Lunch, became the subject of an obscenity trial in the early '60s. He emerged, along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as one of the major icons of the beat literary movement. But it was in the 1980s and '90s that Burroughs became an omnipresent pop culture apparition.
Appearing with recording artists ranging from Laurie Anderson to Ministry, in films such as Drugstore Cowboy, and referenced by every punk and post-punk artist from the United States to Slovenia, Burroughs was able to semi-retire in relative comfort in Lawrence, Kansas, where he moved to escape the hardcore druggie party scene that had developed around his infamous "bunker" in New York's Bowery.
Eventually the man who once wrote "Words, colors, light, sound, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! ... Steal anything in sight...." would even appear in a Nike advertisement. For William S. Burroughs - junkie faggot, interdimensional voodoo tactician, and antediluvian comedian - the American dream lived perversely. A boy from Missouri with the courage to write about talking assholes, junkie scammers, and autoerotic asphyxiated young boys spurting semen while being sodomized by venal government operatives could make a name for himself.
Now he's passed over to the other side, what he referred to as "The Western Lands." He believed in an afterlife - in a magical universe. I hope that, for William, the other side is as imaginative, entertaining, and dignified as he was.
