William Burroughs, Paul Bowles and Allen Ginsberg outside Burroughs’ villa garden, Tangier Morocco, May 1961.
Allen writes to Jack Kerouac a year later “Bill now working on advanced electrical cut ups, said poetry and words were finished, didn’t even read Kaddish, he was doing a thousand interesting things … Bill had declared independence from all passions, affections, mayas, thoughts and language and was sitting around listening to the messages of static on transistor radios and staring at stroboscopes and taking photographs of photographs of his own and making super collages (all developing from you remember the brown collages of old photos of Vienna and Tangier he had on wall last time in Tangier? Well photos of photos of that trying to get the message and essence of all that reduced to a blur and he’d sit and stare at that and point out interesting blobs and ghosts and phantoms, plus new photos of collages of newspapers and Time, Khrushchev’s mouth in Kennedy’s forehead, - all the time trying by means of language cut ups and mind consciousness cut-ups to track down the original master agents of the cosmos who were using us humans as TV screens to project their schemes – he declaring the universe an Allah-like blank into which these forces had invaded. Actually all pure classical advaita (nondualist) Indic philosophy with really great means for breaking up conceptions. Except he so inhuman it scared me…”
(Photo snapped by either Peter Orlovsky or Gregory Corso, courtesy Stanford University Libraries. Allen Ginsberg Estate)
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