Burroughing in on Borrowed Time

William Burroughs is the dystopian most adept at confronting Einstein’s spooky actions at a distance, the origination point for much of what ails us.

The earth-bound’s been well-addressed. Huxley sussed the drugs. Orwell and Bradbury were good at the jackboots. But is the door still there to be kicked in, or did social media dissolve it in a vat of cyber-stew? Book-burning is so de rigueur especially when Amazon hides the more combustible texts from Kindle. (Now there’s an epiphanous product name.)

Burroughs was a magician which is to say that, among other key attributes, he traveled the world with one foot in, one foot out, creating feedback loops in time.

As for time itself, it exists ‘somewhere else’ in fully-dimensioned form from whence it is traversed opportunistically by entities, benign and malign, who ensnare us in the illusion of the former’s unswerving arrow, setting us up for a catalog of backward-looking sins: fatalism, dread, ennui, regret.

Not knowing whether the next second spells life or death creates a wellspring of fear and implacable angst. From there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to programmatic terror. Certain principalities and entities construct from this fear a vast macabre playground. Their human devotees plot ruinous wars, reserving us for bleeding, leading roles.

Inspector Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”  

— from Silver Blaze, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Realpolitik alone lacks sufficient explanatory power. Geopolitics (a synonym for hubris according to Webster Tarpley) confronts a map and insists it sees a rule-based chess board. More fear?

Paul’s Principalities are the dogs that fill the night with pregnant silence.

Of the myriad dogs nipping at Putin’s heels, which are the alphas, which the betas? Putin is equivocating. Putin is ready to pounce. Putin is balancing the Eurasianists against the Atlanticists. Putin is controlled opposition in a settled game. Putin wrestles Siberian tigers and gargles with the finest vodka. What to believe? A thousand armchair analysts want to know.

Why not all of them?

Discussing his recent documentary HyperNormalisation (2016), Adam Curtis characterizes for The Guardian the relationship between Putin and his ‘Rasputin’, Vladislav Surkov:

Surkov, whose previous career was as a director in avant-garde theatre, emerges, like Kissinger, as an arch manipulator of reality. “Surkov will invent dissident groups and fund them,” Curtis says. “He will fuel conspiracy theories, but that’s not new. His particular genius has been to let people know that is what he is doing. So whatever you see in the news: you just don’t know if it is ‘true’ or not. I noticed a headline in the Financial Times recently which said ‘no one understands Russia’s policy in Syria’. I thought: Mr. Surkov. The goal of this manipulation, Curtis suggests, is to spread a state of bewilderment and powerlessness across the globe. A sense that nothing quite makes sense.

For the record, Putin parted ways with Surkov in 2013.

Amidst all the Youtube Illuminati bric-a-brac, there’s a real gem that juxtaposes, to very eerie effect, the 911 WTC collapse with the 1985 movie Back to the Future. The conclusion, sort of, is that we’ll always be consigned to costumed-ape status within ‘their’ movie until we seize the narrative prerogative and banish the obelisk. (Yes, they work 2001: A Space Odyssey in at the end too.) Touch the screen. Be the movie. Burroughs: “Smash the control images, smash the control machine.”

The distortions in our walkabout lives are happening on multiple fronts. Perhaps Trump’s bombastic candor serves as an everyman salve. It seems everyone in power today has a trick up his sleeve. Maybe they always did and the analog world just hid it better.

The powerful script the narratives that suit them best. On behalf of their keepers, politicians play the hypernormalisation game, so cannily prefigured by Vince McMahon’s WWE via the spandex-kabuki spectacle called kayfabe. Trump volunteered for an early kayfabe beta test (see him beating the tar out of McMahon here.) Later, our telegenically minted hero showed his gratitude by appointing Vince’s wife, Linda McMahon to SBA Administrator. Who said televised pratfalls can’t reap real-life rewards?

What is really happening in the world (and there is something really happening) almost certainly bears little resemblance to what we plebes think is happening. Information is power. Misdirection magnifies the power of information. The truth is being held in strict abeyance while its guardians, the uber-rich visit island enclaves every few months to receive veritas® infusions that clear the mind and rid the body of psyop toxins. Truth has been weaponized by the Few. Its spear tips, always pointing away with diversionary malice, are wielded by the likes of CNN and Reuters.

Dissent requires a contextual fulcrum it can no longer adequately situate. Mass media is a syringe that extracts cogent narrative from the plebian epidermis. Confusion is our guide, chaos our milieu. We will never again acquaint on Earth with unmolested coherence. Only raw and naked spirit can save us now.

To borrow a Cybernetic Culture Research Unit term, plausible representation has been tactically repealed, the better to keep us off-balance. Yet every evil gesture comports an inverse shadow of divine intent. Deception drives us to question our reasoning faculties and geopolitical derivations. Given the unprecedented influx of entities at this, the twilight of human history, we are being called to the great final harvesting of souls where reason hardly matters.

In making themselves real, entities (must) also manufacture realities for themselves: realities whose potency often depends upon the stupefaction, subjugation and enslavement of populations, and whose existence is in conflict with other ‘reality programs’. Burroughs’s fiction deliberately renounces the status of plausible representation in order to operate directly upon this plane of magical war.
– Cybernetic culture research unit

See how Uncle Bill is arriving again?

Hobbled to half-measure by secularist protocols, Jordan Peterson nonetheless has said as much about ideas and ideologies. At the height of our obsession with ideas, says Peterson, we do not possess them. They possess us. Peterson tends to hide out in Jungian archetypes, too intellectually self-conscious perhaps to endorse the literalness of the entities that oppress and emancipate us.

Whereas Burroughs cut to the chase.

Because there are ghosts in the machinery of ideas, superstition desperately needs reviving. Baudelaire’s Lucifer destroyed it in The Generous Gambler running cover for Abraxas and Shiva, the patron-demons of science and nihilism, respectively. Secularism is—to sound rather old-fashioned—demonic.

Malign spirits delight in trafficking unresolvable paradox, the oxygen of cognitive dissonance. Media’s most determined adversaries could share after-hours snuggles for all we know. If Veteran Today‘s Gordon Duff can be believed (and often it’s a stretch, even by kayfabe standards), murals are stranger than fiction.

Burroughs gestured towards the emanation point with a silent gun. Message received. Belatedly. The Towers were being kept in jealous reserve like storied gunpowder for a more propitious time. Uncle Bill had to know this, but just didn’t want to say. I call him Uncle because he had a protective sensibility about him.

Tear away the kayfabe fabric and you risk the wrath of millions of ‘dispelled’ wrestling fans. Is uncovering the rich man’s truth really worth the herd’s dull wrath?

As long as Trump’s winning, he’ll take it. But that shouldn’t be enough for us. The meek shall inherit the fullness of time where all truths converge in the light. That time is coming back.

Norman Ball can be reached at gspressnow@gmail.com. Visit his blog Full-Spectum Domino to keep abreast. An excerpt of his latest book Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments is available at the Museum of American Poetics (MAP). He also has an eBook out on the impending currency reset Eye Am Eye Press, 2015. He can be reached at: gspressnow@gmail.com. Read other articles by Norman.