ON THE OBSERVED HISTORICAL PRACTICE OF ANXIETY

Howdy Neighbors!


William S. Burroughs / fr  Cities of the Red Night  / Holt, Rinehart and Winston , 1981, New York

WE SEE TIBET WITH THE BINOCULARS OF THE PEOPLE

The scouting party stopped a few hundred yards from the village on the bank of a stream.  Yen Lee studied the village through his field glasses while his men sat down and lit cigarettes.  The village was built into the side of a mountain.  The stream ran through the town, and water had been diverted into pools on a series of cultivated terraces that led up to the monastery.  There was no sign of life in the steep winding street or by the pools.  The valley was littered with large boulders which would serve as cover if necessary, but he did not expect resistance on a military level.  He lowered his glasses, signaling for the men to follow.
       They crossed a stone bridge two at a time, covered by the men behind them.  If any defenders were going to open fire, now would be the time and place to do it.  Beyond the bridge the street twisted up the mountainside.  On both sides there were stone huts, many of them fallen into ruin and obviously deserted.  As they moved up the stone street, keeping to the sides and taking cover behind the ruined huts, Yen Lee became increasingly aware of a hideous unknown odor.  He motioned the patrol to halt and stood there sniffing.
       Unlike his counterparts in western countries, he had been carefully selected for a high level of intuitive adjustment, and trained accordingly to imagine and explore seemingly fantastic potentials in any situation, while at the same time giving equal consideration to prosaic and practical aspects.  He had developed an attitude at once probing and impersonal, remote an alert.  He did not know when the training had begun, since in Academy 23 it was carried out in a context of reality.  He did not see his teachers, whose instructions were conveyed through a series of real situations.
       He had been born in Hong Kong and had lived there until the age of twelve, so that English was a second language.  Then his family had moved to Shanghai.  In his early teens he had read the American Beat writers.  The volumes had been brought in through Hong Kong and sold under the counter in a bookshop that seemed to enjoy freedom from official interference, although the proprietor was also engaged in currency deals.
       At the age of sixteen he was sent to a military academy, where he received intensive training in the use of weapons.  After six months he was summoned to the Colonel's office and told that he would be leaving the military school and returning to Shanghai.  Since he had applied himself to the training and made an excellent showing, he asked the Colonel if this was because his work had not been satisfactory.  The Colonel was not looking at him but around him, as if drawing a figure in the air.  He indicated obliquely that while a desire to please one's superiors was laudable, other considerations were in certain cases even more highly emphasized.
       The smell hit him like an invisible wall.  He stopped and leaned against a house.  It was like rotten metal or metal excrement, he decided.  The patrol was still in the ruined outskirts of the village.  One man was vomiting violently, his face beaded with sweat.  He straightened up and started towards the stream.  Yen Lee stopped him: "Don't drink the water or splash it on your face.  The stream runs through the town."
       Yen Lee sat down and looked once again at the town through his field glasses.  There were still no villagers in sight.  He put his glasses down and and conducted an out-of-body exploration of the village--what westerners call "astral travel."  He was moving up the street now, his gun at the ready.  The gun would shoot blasts of energy, and he could feel it tingle in his hands.  He kicked the door open. 
       One glance told him that interrogation was useless.  He would get no information on a verbal level [...cut...W-ed-B...]
       Yen Lee advanced towards the monastery.  Then he stopped.  The gun went heavy and solid in his hands as energy left it.  His training had not quite prepared him for the feeling of death that fell in a steady silent rain from the monastery above him.  The monastery must contain a deadly force, probably some form of radioactivity, perhaps psychic fission.  He surmised further that the illness afflicting the villagers was a radioactive virus strain.  He knew that top-secret research in the West was moving in this direction: as early as World War II, England had developed a radioactive virus known as the Doomsday Bug.
       Returning to his body Yen Lee weighed his observations and surmises.  What had he glimpsed and hastily looked away from? [...cut…W-ed-B...]
       He did not push himself, knowing that a biologic protective reaction was shielding him from knowledge he was unable to assimilate and handle.  The monastery probably contained a laboratory and the village had been used as a testing ground.  How did the technicians protect themselves from the radiation?  Could the laboratory be operated by remote control?  Or had the technicians been immunized by gradient exposure?  Did the laboratory contain a sophisticated DOR installation?
       He picked up a walkie-talkie.  "Pre-Talk calling Dead Line…."                                                   cvg   

11/20/98  This passage is from a novel written by Jean-Paul Sartre,  La Nausée, first published in 1938.    <W-ed-B> 

Monday, 29 January, 1932:

Something has happened to me, I can't doubt it anymore. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that's all. Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it's blossoming.
    I don't think the historian's trade is much given to psychological analysis. In our work we have to do only with sentiments in the whole to which we give generic titles such as Ambition and Interest. And yet if I had even a shadow of self-knowledge, I could put it to good use now.
    For instance, there is something new about my hands, a certain way of picking up my pipe or fork. Or else it's the fork which now has a certain way of having itself picked up, I don't know. A little while ago, just as I was coming into my room, I stopped short because I felt in my hand a cold object which held my attention through a sort of personality. I opened my hand, looked: I was simply holding the door-knob. This morning in the library, when the Self-Taught Man came to say good morning to me, it took me ten seconds to recognize him. I saw an unknown face, barely a face. Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.
    There are a great number of suspicious noises in the streets, too.
    So a change has taken place during these last few weeks. But where? It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? If not, then it is this room, this city and this nature; I must choose.
                                               *       *       *       *        *       *       *       *       *       *
    I think I'm the one who has changed: that's the simplest solution. Also the most unpleasant. But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. This is what has given my life such a jerky, incoherent aspect.  For instance, when I left France, there were a lot of people who said I left for a whim. And when I suddenly came back after six years of travelling, they still could call it a whim. I see myself with Mercier again in the office of that French functionary who resigned after the Petrou business last year. Mercieu was going to Bengal on an archeological mission. I always wanted to go to Bengal and he pressed me to go with him. Now I wonder why. I don't think he was too sure of Portal and was counting on me to keep an eye on him. I saw no reason to refuse. And even if I had suspected that little deal with Portal, it would have been one more reason to accept with enthusiasm. Well, I was paralysed, I couldn't  say a word. I was staring at a little Khmer statuette on a green carpet, next to a telephone. I seemed to be full of lymph or warm milk. With angelic patience veiling a slight irritation, Mercier told me:
    "Now look, I have to be fixed up. I know you'll end up by saying yes, so you might as well accept right away."
    He had a reddish-black beard, heavily scented. I got a waft of perfume at each movement of his head. And then, suddenly, I woke from a six-year slumber. 
    The statue seemed to me unpleasant and stupid and I felt terribly, deeply bored.  I couldn't understand why I was in Indo-China.  What was I doing there?
Why was I talking to these people?  Why was I dressed so oddly?  My passion was dead.  For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty.  But that wasn't the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea.  I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn't look at it.  All that was confused with the perfume of Mercier's beard.
   I pulled myself together, convulsed with anger, and answered dryly:
    "Thank you, but I believe I've travelled enough, I must go back to France now."   Two days later I took the boat for Marseilles.
                                                                                                                                     cvg

fr. Philosophic Classics by Walter Kaufmann, (2nd Ed., 1968 pb Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Vol. 1: Thales/Ockham) 

     Zeno [(c. 350 - 264 B.C.) of Citium on Cyprus; The founder of the Stoic School]
                                                                          (from Diogenes Laertius -- Ethics)

    An animal's first impulse, say the Stoics, is to self-preservation, because nature from the outset endears it to itself, as Chrysippus affirms in the first book On Ends: his words are, "The dearest thing to every animal is its own constitution and its consciouness thereof";  for it was not likely that nature should estrange the living thing from itself or that she should leave the creature she has made without either estrangement from or affection for its own constitution.  We are forced then to conclude that nature in constituting the animal made it near and dear to itself; for so it comes to repel all that is injurious and give free access to all that is serviceable or akin to it.
    As for the assertion made by some people that pleasure is the object to which the first impulse of animals is directed, it is shown by the Stoics to be false.  For pleasure, if it is really felt, they declare to be a by-product, which never comes until nature by itself has sought and found the means suitable to the animal's existence or constitution; it is an aftermath comparable to the condition of animals thriving and plants in full bloom.  And Nature, they say, made no difference originally between plants and animals, for she regulates the life of plants too, in their case without impulse and sensation, just as also certain processes go on of a vegetative kind in us.  But when in the case of animals impulse has been superadded, whereby they are enabled to go in quest of their proper aliment, for them, say the Stoics, Nature's rule is to follow the direction of impulse.  But when reason by way of a more perfect leadership has been bestowed on the beings we call rational, for them life according to reason rightly becomes the natural life.  For reason supervenes to shape impulse scientifically.
    This is why Zeno was the first (in his treatise On The Nature of Man) to designate as the end "life in agreement with nature" (or living agreeably to nature), which is the same as a virtuous life, virtue being the goal towards which nature guides us.  So too Cleanthes in his treatise On Pleasure, as also Posidonius, and Hecato in his work On Ends.  Again, living virtuously is equivalent to living in accordance with experience of the actual course of nature, as Chrysippus says in the first book of his De finibus; for our individual natures are parts of the nature of the whole universe. <^>

Gentle Reader: "Compare and Contrast" this passage from William T. Vollmann's (a care: not  William S.  Burroughs, thank you.) The Rainbow Stories, Penguin,  1989.   fr. The Blue Yonder / Forensic Anthropology

Browsing through garbage cans is a must for the serious investigator.  In his mind, The Other constructed three categories of garbage, in order of increasing interest:    (I) First there were the non-unique items, which could be subdivided into two types: the ubiquitous, of which cigarette butts furnish so thought-provoking an example, and the local-specific, such as bag lunches in a schoolyard dumpster.  The general characteristic of this category would best be described as anonymity. (II) Secondly came items which were odd and individual, but most likely of random origin with respect to the murder at hand.  An example might be a book of matches from an out-of-state restaurant: -- the matchbook would be possessed of obvious if minor distinction, like some tourist who had been to Africa, but there was no reason to believe that it would furnish any information about the crime.  The essential quality of this category was miscellany.  (III) Finally there were items which were both unique (and therefore traceable), and also hypothetically specific to the crime.  If, for instance, he were to find a hacksaw blade with a reddish-brown stain, he might well have the instrument used in the decapitation.  Items in this category would possess potential essentiality.  They might help him find Ruby's head. -- You must see by now, brother officers, that The Other was a fellow of earnest motivation!   

                                                                               anthologia    @   Wallace Darwen Brindle   1998    cvg                           

                                     


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