The Ticket That Exploded

[Benny Bunter]

It's interesting Pound's conception of an image isn't restricted to something to be looked at. It's more like a frozen moment captured in any medium and which comes to life again when encountered.

Yeah, it's arguable these ideas come from painting and calligraphy first, which Pound and Burroughs were both taking cues from. Burroughs took the cut-up/collage techniques from Gysin into writing, recognising that they had already been used for decades in painting. Pound was into Chinese characters and calligraphy and used them in the Cantos.

And of course the Ticket ends with Gysin's calligraphy.

 

[version]

Yeah, it's arguable these ideas come from painting and calligraphy first,

Sculpture too, perhaps.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Towards the end of his life I think Burroughs more or less gave up writing and took up painting, cos he had nothing more to 'say'.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I suppose if you give primacy to the image, it's natural that you may eventually find written language constrictive compared to other art forms.

 

[version]

7:07

Curious where Burroughs would situate himself in what Flusser's laying out here as he would obviously be opposed to restrictions placed on the image via things like blasphemy but he also wrote against The Image and viewed it as another control system.

Flusser's argument that now images no longer represent the world they've become articulations of thought, projections, models, is fascinating too. Would Burroughs think of that as a positive development?

 

[version]

I suppose if you give primacy to the image, it's natural that you may eventually find written language constrictive compared to other art forms.

Unless you subscribe to Pound's conception of the image.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I think there's more of a barrier to overcome with reading rather than looking at a painting or sculpture, it's less immediate.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I'll have a look at that fusser thing tomorrow, need to go to bed now. Never even heard of him tbh

 

[version]

I think there's more of a barrier to overcome with reading rather than looking at a painting or sculpture, it's less immediate.

Writing feels more explanatory though, like you're being directly addressed and having something told to you. I don't get the same sense from painting or sculpture.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Pound wanted to get away from explaining stuff, that was pretty much the whole point of the imagist project - no superfluous language or flowery description allowed.

I'm a more literary person, like you I suppose, and that's what I respond to more strongly, but visual arts are addressing you and telling you something too - how you interpret the images afterwards is a different thing.

 

[version]

Pound wanted to get away from explaining stuff, that was pretty much the whole point of the imagist project - no superfluous language or flowery description allowed.

I'm a more literary person, like you I suppose, and that's what I respond to more strongly, but visual arts are addressing you and telling you something too - how you interpret the images afterwards is a different thing.

I'm not claiming they aren't. I'm saying there's something about writing that can feel more personal, reading someone's words. That might be down to the way we tend to engage with these things, mind you. We often read books alone in silence whereas if we want to see a famous sculpture or painting then we have to go to a public place and look at them surrounded by others. The equivalent of going to a reading.

 

[Benny Bunter]

.

I'm not claiming they aren't. I'm saying there's something about writing that can feel more personal, reading someone's words. That might be down to the way we tend to engage with these things, mind you. We often read books alone in silence whereas if we want to see a famous sculpture or painting then we have to go to a public place and look at them surrounded by others. The equivalent of going to a reading.

Writing/language is more connected to the human voice (either in your head when silent reading, or reading aloud, or listening to someone speak) than the visual arts so maybe that's why it feels more personal or intimate.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Anyone else tried reading it while a bit high? Unsurprisingly it goes together pretty well.

Also, I wonder if the skin-hugging material of the Sex Skin suits in some way inspired Pynchon's Imipolex G? Maybe someone's suggested this already, I'm just jumping into the thread here.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I've been puzzling over what makes The Image so powerful since starting this. Flusser, in that interview I posted the other week, says the philosophy of images has a long history and most of it negative because there's a prejudice against the image in philosophy's Greek and Jewish tradition, the image is viewed as a copy, a simulation of thought, to be either forbidden to make or to be accepted with great distrust.

The call the old doctor twice section is dealing with a lot of this stuff around distrust of image and word. Great chapter.

He says "image is trapped in word - do you need words?" Words/images seem to be a way for parasites to enter and take control, so he wants to separate them, to communicate in other ways - through sounds, colours or tactile sensations.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It all makes me wonder what Burroughs thought about what human relationships were like before the invention of photography/film and recorded sound, which all seem to inevitably lead to both pornography and - the other side of the coin - the lie of romantic love as transmitted through popular music etc.

But then again, you could trace it back much further into other visual art forms and writing, so have humans always been corrupted and controlled, sexually, through images and words? Is it somehow innate in us?

 

[Benny Bunter]

INTERVIEWER

In Nova Express, you indicate that silence is a desirable state.

BURROUGHS

The most desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. I’ve recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that! Words, at least the way we use them, can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. It’s time we thought about leaving the body behind.

 

[Benny Bunter]

INTERVIEWER

Sex seems equated with death frequently in your work.

BURROUGHS

That is an extension of the idea of sex as a biologic weapon. I feel that sex, like practically every other human manifestation, has been degraded for control purposes, or really for antihuman purposes. This whole Puritanism. How are we ever going to find out anything about sex scientifically, when a priori the subject cannot even be investigated? It can’t even be thought about or written about. That was one of the interesting things about Reich. He was one of the few people who ever tried to investigate sex—sexual phenomena, from a scientific point of view. There’s this prurience and this fear of sex. We know nothing about sex. What is it? Why is it pleasurable? What is pleasure? Relief from tension? Well, possibly.

 

[version]

It all makes me wonder what Burroughs thought about what human relationships were like before the invention of photography/film and recorded sound, which all seem to inevitably lead to both pornography and - the other side of the coin - the lie of romantic love as transmitted through popular music etc.

But then again, you could trace it back much further into other visual art forms and writing, so have humans always been corrupted and controlled, sexually, through images and words? Is it somehow innate in us?

He changed his tune a bit over the years:

“I think love is a virus. I think love is a con put down by the female sex. I don’t think that it’s a solution to anything.”
— The Job (1968)

"Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is."
— William S. Burroughs, July 30, 1997

Love and Death – RealityStudio

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting An installment in ...

realitystudio.org

 

[Benny Bunter]

He changed his tune a bit over the years:

“I think love is a virus. I think love is a con put down by the female sex. I don’t think that it’s a solution to anything.”
— The Job (1968)

"Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is."
— William S. Burroughs, July 30, 1997

Love and Death – RealityStudio

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting An installment in ...

realitystudio.org

Dunno, that second quote is him being ironic surely?

 

[version]

Dunno, that second quote is him being ironic surely?

They're the last words he ever typed, so people tend to take them seriously.