Tonight I saw a king. A few of his attendants were mulling about when I entered: a man in white T-shirt, black pants and an Alice-in-Wonderland black and white hat; another man in a sharply designed black suit, black and white shirt, shaved head (except for a fringe of punk-style ebony hair) and sunglasses; a third wearing diapers; a few guys in basic black cut-off T-shirts. The auditorium becomes silent when a man whose gray-white dreds are flowing out from under his African hat-headdress in a robe of pale blue and red squares walks out on stage. Mr George Clinton lifts his right hand in benediction: Reality breaks out into funk. Funk-e-delic. Now women appear: a major thigh babe in black tux and not much underneath, head hidden under a Mad Hatter top and wearing Vivienne Westwood rip-off shoes. Thighs for which to die, oh Ms Tina Turner. Another woman, spectral, in a golden and orange sari, her voice challenges Aretha Franklin’s. Then there’s a gigantic baseball jacket and equally skunky pants over which lies a baseball cap, and out of this strolling assemblage soars the sexiest little-girl voice I think I’ve ever heard. Rapping about an angel. I want to die. More men appear: a tiny guy who teaches us how to sing scat; a horn player in black and white bicycling shorts and nothing else.... Mr George Clinton directs everyone and everything, the gospel and jazz riffs, soul, horn solos à la Motown, rap, poetry, all mixed up, funked up, and when he gets tired, if he ever gets tired, he turns to us and directs us, and we follow him, until soon half the audience is on that stage, dancing as only humans can when space is equivalent to human flesh....
It all goes on for hours....
Lawrence is a small mid-western university town in Kansas. At the 1996 US elections, voters in Kansas returned all the Right-wingers to their governmental seats, then added a few; Lawrence, a Left-wing – or, at least, a liberal – oasis in a desert of conservatism and worse, according to some of its residents, might well be taken over by its increasing numbers of Aryan Nation immigrants.
There’s another king in Lawrence. I just had the pleasure of visiting with him. He’s a thin man who now walks with a stoop, sprightly and surely. According to some, including myself, Mr William Burroughs is the most important living fiction writer in the USA. Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Legs McNeill and I were in town to celebrate with speeches about William’s opus at the opening of a show of Mr Burroughs’ art work that started at the LA County Museum and moved on from there. In just over a week, Phil Glass, Laurie Anderson, John Giorno and Patti Smith will also pay public homage to William in his home-town. It all ends in Lawrence.
I can barely speak to William when I see him: A mixture of awe, respect and fear holds my tongue captive and I suspect that it’s that very mixture that’s making it difficult for me to talk about William here. He’s a good man. Politeness, with him, is not just a matter of surface. When I visited him a few days after the Lawrence Museum’s opening of his show, he was speaking about human integrity, for him deeply tied to politeness. He was sitting in a wheelchair whose back was covered with a green towel and gazing at an over-fat black cat he had just taken to the vet for skin trouble. In true Burroughs-speak, he said that he had to ask himself if for $100,000 he would kill one of his own cats. “Of course not. Not even conceivable.” “Every man,” commented William, “has to ask himself this. What would make him do what he couldn’t possibly do? What would make me kill a cat?” He thought about what might matter enough to him to act in such a manner. “A chance to escape death?”
Death is well-known to be a place on which there’s a lot of Burroughsian pondering. The old man said that he was discussing morality, because if a man is to have any moral standards, he must ask himself if there is anything that would make him turn away from these standards. “I would never kill a cat,” William thought out loud, then turned to considering moral dictates that come from the outside, from the government. As he spoke about the US government’s determined attempts to control the drug trade, he became more and more agitated.... When William hugged me good-bye, to my surprise, I felt not my usual awe as my fear had almost gone away. Rather, I felt something that I want to call ‘sadness’ but is more likely to be tenderness for this human who is happy and seems at peace with himself.
Though Mr Burroughs is not young, he’s showing no evidence that he is in danger of dying. The old man might live forever. Might have discovered space – to use Burroughs-speak. At his Lawrence Museum art opening, after all our presentations, he seemed joyous. Having signed books, he walked through the room and shook hands and talked to whomever was there. Ginsberg was slightly more reserved. He seemed occupied with health (he told me that due to heart trouble he had to cut down his touring) and with meditation practice. For me it was pure pleasure: He talked precisely about William’s use of cut-up. The whys and wherefores, dates and events. As if seeing can be remembering, I saw how intelligent Ginsberg is; while he was speaking, I could watch his mind move from point to point. Could this precision of mental movement, which I call ‘intelligence,’ be related to meditation, to the clearing of the mind of obfuscation?
The Lawrence Museum art opening is happening as I am writing about it now, so I shall say this in the present tense: It is a wonder for me to see these two men together, William and Allen, who make literature more than the fashioning of clever stories, other than the manipulation of language according to other peoples’ rules. These two men have not simply put writing and ‘life’ together, say, Fluxus-style; these men, I’d like to say ‘literally,’ write the imagination into actuality, write reality because they write themselves, because they write by listening, because reality writes them as they write reality. The practice of cosmogony is that of writing. And so all of our worlds, certainly mine, has changed.
Postscript 2010:
By a truly cruel twist of fate, given the musings on mortality above, the author of this piece, the beautiful Kathy Acker, along with her subjects here, Mr Burroughs and Mr Ginsberg, all died the same year this piece was written, 1997.
From the onlive archive of one of the greatest magazines ever - 21C
No comments:
Post a Comment