BY BILL RICH

TALK-TALK - LAWRENCE - Autumn 1981

 Talk-Talk : Today's Bastille Day, how long have you been in town ?

 Mr. William Burroughs : I will have been here six weeks on Monday. I think I got here about the 12^th (of June). I wanted to get out of New York and get a new ambiance.

 TT: I looked through the 60-some pages you've written here. They are numbered 330 on. So you have all the others done ?

Mr. B. : Oh, yes. This is the end.

TT : It didn't seem to be a western…

Mr. B. : Well, it isn't a western anymore. At this point he has left the west and is going back… back to the big shootout, which will take place in Boulder. I could hardly be expected to write it completely conventional western.

 TT : Is Kim Carsons based at on Kit Carson ?

 Mr. B. : Not at all. Kit Carson was back at the beginning of the 19^th Century and this is way after that, the end of the 19^th, beginning of the 20^th Century. He has nothing in common with Kit Carsons.

 TT : How has your trip been ?

 Mr. B. : I did what I came for. I wanted to see how the end would work out. Now I 've found out.

 TT : Can you tell me about it ?

 Mr. B/Well, it's in there. James showed me a picture of an orange-looking monkey that happened to be a creature from outer space, the missing link to the human species. Now in the end, my hero retraces his steps back.

TT : How ? How does he go back in time ?

Mr. B. : Well, it's what the whole thing is about - time travel. It's quite a complicated procedure. He does it. Having gone forward in time, he starts backward in time. In doing so,

He's upsetting the whole order of the universe and he leaves a series of disasters behind him - earthquakes, riots, stock-market crashes, because he is leaving an empty space behind him - very much like a tornado because he's leaving a low-pressured area where he was.

 TT : How is he doing ? What mechanism ?

Mr. B.: He's going back in time on associational networks. Actually time travel is something all of us do. You just have to think about what you were doing an hour ago and you're there. !there's an interesting book out called EXPERIENCE WITH TIME, by John Dunne, who found that his dreams consisted not only of the past but the future as well, which is possibly

Potentially, you can move both into the past and future. So I did a lot of experiments with this and wrote down dreams and found that, indeed, he is correct and a portion of dreams refer to future time, often to quite unimportant incidents. If you're traveling on your own time track, it isn't… If you have a dream on an earthquake and it does happen, what you see is not the earthquake but the moment you become conscious of it by the newspaper because it's your time track. In other words, you haven't lived up there and seen the earthquake, you have moved forward in time to the moment you have heard about it. And travelling back in time is trickier than travelling forward. The Mayans did a great deal of backward travel. They computed, made computations on their calendar of the past, back to 400 millions years ago. Oddly enough, they didn't make any computations into the future, just the past. They did have a definite idea that times starts and times ends. They realized that time is a resource, like coal or gas, and there is a time when time runs out for a person, for a nation, for any operation. And time can run out before other resources run out. We are squandering time and time is running out. We must conceive of time as a resource. That is one of the concepts central to this book. Another is that people are living organisms as artifacts made for a purpose, not cosmic accidents, artifacts created for a purpose.

TT : What are some of the purposes ?

Mr. B. : Space. Leaving the planet. We are here to go. This first chapter shows you the concept of living beings as artifacts which is developed much more in the rest of the book. Artifacts created for a purpose, just like arrowheads.

TT : Have you decided o a title ?

Mr. B. : Oh, yes, Place of Dead Roads… The Planet earth, place of dead roads, dead purposes.

TT : You said there are 40 more pages to go ?

 Mr. B. : Yes. The end is already written. The end was written the same time the beginning was written, about a year ago. Then I had to find out how he got there. At the end he is back on the mesa and has had the shootout with Mike Chase. Well, you don't know about Mike Chase yet.

TT. : What about all the physical hours spent while going in the future and coming back?

Mr. B. : You see, we think of time as having a measurable meaning, but it doesn't at all.

TT : Has he aged ?

Mr. B. : He is a clone of a clone at this point. He's cloned himself a number of times. Of course, if people could travel they would likely never age. These terms don't have much meaning. Even the speed of light only has meaning with reference to human measure. You say light travels at the speed of 180,000 miles a second. Well, it does so with respect to human measurements. Nobody's been able to crack Einstein yet but the black holes may do it because in a black hole all physical laws are invalid.

TT : But still, did he age ? He had all these experiences.

Mr. B. :Of course physically not aging is one thing. Say he's a clone. Suppose I had a clone made of me.

TT : Do you ?

Mr. B. : Well, I don't have one, no. The clone would have all his experiences but be physically young. The physical youth is not as important as everyone thinks. Say if someone was actually 500 years old but occupying the body of an 18-year-old boy, no matter how much you might want to be.

Time is obviously limited time, with no meaning without a limit. The only reason time has meaning to you is because you have limited time. You are going to die, you're getting older. If you had unlimited time, it would have no meaning.

TT : The human body does wear out and age.

Mr. B. : Yes, but you can trade it in one new body, like a new car. You aren't your body, you are simply an occupant of it. However, if you remain locked into three-dimensional conceptions, you have not gained anything - you gain time perhaps to get beyond the physical body. People who say they want to live forever are talking nonsense because forever is a time word and time is something that ends - you missed the plane, you're getting older. They simply mean they want to live a long time. This is quite possible. You see brain transplants,, a much cruder idea, are within the reach of modern technology. They made the starting discovery that there are no rejection syndromes in brain transplants done in rats.

There is a location in the brain which might be said to correspond to the ego, your conception of yourself. So you take it out and slop it down in a young healthy body.

 Mr. B. : You were asking about time travel, backward and forward and how it is possible. It is all explained in the text. But briefly, you have someone called God, which might not mean anything except he is the director of a certain section of human film. He decides when this guy is going to do this and when he will do that, just like a film producer.

The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded or prephotographed universe is the prerecordings themselves. So my hero, Kim Carsons, begins tampering with the prerecordings. In other words, he cuts in on God's monopoly. And that is one of the things the book is about and how he is able to move about - backwards and forward in time under a certain very tringent terms.

 TT : Once Kim goes into the future and stops and then comes back, he doesn't go forward again?

Mr. B. : I don't exactly remember. I know he went onto the future and got into this very involved situation and then came back but then he finally disappeared and made another trip. A Russian scientist said we will travel in space and in time as well, which means that when you travel in space, you travel in time.

TT : What about a person travelling in time who comes back to before the point of departure ? Would he find himself ?

Mr. B. : you possibly put more emphasis on the self than it deserves. As the Buddhists say, there is no such thing as the self. It changes from second to second. No, he would not find himself as he was. He might find something else.

TT : Do you think that this has been done yet ?

Mr. B. : Who knows ? Perhaps.

TT : Where would you prefer to live ?

WB : I live in America by preference. For one thing, it's my country. If you live outside of America for many years as I have, you realize that it means something to be in your own country where if you have a beef with the landlord, you have the same rights as he does. This is very important. Besides America is the freest country in the world, no doubt about it. You have more freedom here to do what you want without the police interference than any other country. There 's no heat here on personal use of drugs, no worry about the police coming at 3 in the morning to drag you out and blow your brain out, the way it happens to 1,4000 people a year in Argentina. You're running your TALK-TALK magazine and they don't like it and one day they just come kick your door in and drag you out and shoot you. This happens all the time in the Latin American countries. We don't realize the horror going on. It's no myth, it's true. This doesn't happen here.

TT : Talking about oppression, don't you have a certain worry about people out there who don't like what you have done ?

Mr. B. : Well, Bill, you have the same worry. I've gotten in the position of Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or anybody else. As soon as you are a public personality, you are a potential assassination target. Of course, I think about it.

 TT : So what do you do to stay out of that situation . In New York everyone wants you to be at their event.

 Mr. B. : I can handle the New York scene very well - just cut it off. I don't go to parties or gallery openings. There is no doubt that every time I get up to give a reading that it is quite possible some nut will be there. So far as that goes, you just take your chances.

 TT : You wouldn't recommend to anyone to become timid and not do what they want ?

 Mr. B : I think this is always a mistake to back up. I got a lot of nasty reviews on "Cities". Although I got a lot of good ones, too I got a lot of people mad. It's completely anti-Christian and the next book will be even more anti-Christian and coming to America, anti-protestant. Well now for me to sort of hide ? No, no, instead I go on a Red Night tour. As Napoleon said, "Dastardly and more dastardly and ore dastardly is the sequence of success - you never retreat." But you do know that you are laying it on the line.

I'm pretty good at picking up the trouble, seeing where it could come from and avoiding it.

 TT : Let's talk about Denton Welch.

 Mr. B. : I am writing an introduction for a German translation of "In Youth is pleasure". I've been running through it and underlining certain passages. I'll just read some at random. He's

Such a marvelous writer, the way he can make anything into something. Writers who complain that they don't have anything to write about should read Denton Welch and see what he can do with practically nothing. Like this, he borrows a boy's bicycle.

What a mind !

Denton Welch is actually Kim Carsons in the new book. I sort of kidnapped him to be my hero. And so much of it is w

 TT : Denton Welch used different characters, didn't he ?

 Mr. B. : He's only got one character and it's always him. Well, there are other characters, what it all pivots around is an eternally 15-year-old boy. His writing was all done after his accident. He had this accident when he was riding his bicycle and some woman ran into him from behind. That happened when he was 20 and he was an invalid the rest of his life and died at the age of 31 from complications.

 BR : I like his journals.

 Mr. B. : I love his journals. I like everything he wrote. I've read every word I could get my hands on. He started out to be a painter. He was in art school when he had the accident. He had a terrific style with the choice of one word or another or a sentence that no one but Denton Welch could have written. I compare him to Jane Bowles because she had the same faculty for writing a sentence that no one else could conceivably have written. And there, again, her complete work is 500 pages or se. People ask me about influences. I should say that he is the strongest influence on my work - stylistically certainly.

 TT: When did you first read him ?

 Mr. B : Back in 1947 or 48 when he was still alive. Kerouac read him. I thought he was great. I didn't realize the extent to which he had influenced me or the extent to which the character Audrey Carsons was derived from Dental Welch until I reread him in 1976 in Boulder. Cabell, who I was sharing an apartment with, had found someone who was a Denton Welch fan and had all the books. So I reread them and read some I had not before, like the Diaries. I was even more impressed. Some writers reread well and others don't. He does. And another writer I was influenced by was Joseph Conrad.

 BR : What do you think about the usefulness of the music industry ?

 Mr. B : In a way, of course, it is thy oldest industry in the world. It is quite probable that singing came before talking. The things that are new are the huge amounts of money being made and the fact that mass performances are held. If you would remember in the 1920s, the jazz performers would play in a club for about 100 people. This Seha Stadium bit is almost unprecedented in the history of entertainment. Perhaps the gladiatorial combats or Hitler's games and rallies are the only comparisons that come to mind of the tremendous mass audiences.

 TT: I've been reading the new book "With William Burroughs" by Victor Bockris.

 Mr. B. : It's not my book, although I had to go through and correct it word for word. When people take dictation from conversations they misread words and just get a meaningless mess. So I did a lot of work in correcting it. For another thing, I wrote the end. I have mixed feelings about it. There are some good photographs in it. But I could have lived without it.

 TT : It does have a lot of information available nowhere else.

 Mr. B : Yes, this is true.

 TT : Do you keep upon current events ?

 Mr. B. : I read the papers everyday and most days I cut something out. I think it is very important for a writer to maintain his input from newspapers and magazines. Often times, I don't know where the next chapter will come from and I pick up the paper or turn on the television or someone will drop over and I'll get it. People who say they are going to go lock themselves away in a cabin and write the great American novel - it does take that sort of concentration, yes. But if you cut your input, you're making a great mistake.