Cluster the Second

… Paris, August, 1979 …

… a bookstore in Boulevard St. Michel deliveres a treasure trove, a silver & green gateway is opened, a threshold is crossed, & going back is hampered forever …

… fluttering eyes & fingers skimming & leafing through Oeuvres Croisée, «premiére publication» of The Third Mind, a «manual of elementary illusion techniques», whose unforgettable beginning is as follows…

«Not much time left on set…

«… officer sitting there in the attic room, late-afternoon shadows against his back. He is sitting at a desk on which we see a portable tape recorder, a portable typewriter, ledgers, photos and notes. A window shade drawn down serves as a screen for magic-lantern slides.

«The officer addresses an audience of any two cadets. It is enough. The voice is tired: on his face the last, almost invisible scars of war … dim jerky faraway:

«Why am I here? I am here because you are here … […] »

… she nears a big dusty dusk-wooden desk on which there are a book and a tarot deck resurfaced by a strange concomitance, monuments of a trip, or a place, or a love, or a thing gone bad—an enchantment faded in bitter disillusionment but never gone away, ever there …

… rustling pages in late afternoon gloom, a dusty gleam in the silence, little, bright, smooth, silent cards rustling under her fingers as neatly and ligthtly as over the green cloth …

… sixteen cards slowly …

… a sequence of sixteen cards out of a lost, forgotten pattern to answer a lost, forgotten question, or plight …

… impossible to reassemble the cluster into which the relations between the cards were shaped back then, irretrievably deranged into a linear sequence—impossible to restore the earliest reading order …

/ lost / there, everything sees things unseen, threshold gates open, astral braves come out, & then only other inner things / a low sky, some gray waking through the profane vision of twofold shades of high bushes / fate—& great, grey memories, turbulently rumoured / ordinary death formed an islet of ecstacy, contentment, human love and sea, springs / september, with a high wind …

«Cut-ups are for everyone»: Margin Notes to «A Cut-up Fragment Rearranged»—Cluster the Third

«Cut-ups are for everyone»: Margin Notes to «A Cut-up Fragment Rearranged»—Cluster the First

A Cut-Up Fragment Rearranged

Note. The above quotations are from William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Oeuvre croisée, Paris, Flammarion, 1976, p. 19; William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, London, John Calder, 1979, p. 25.

#Crevice Weeds