DEMONOLOGY
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stasis," most revealingly in the conclusion of his last letter in the
series-from Lima. "Everybody has gone and I am alone in a no–
where place. Every night the people will be uglier and stupider, the
fixtures more hideous, the waiters ruder, the music more grating on
and on like a speedup movie into a nightmare vortex of mechanical
disintegration and meaningless change. . . . Suddenly I wanted to
leave Lima right away.... Where am I going in such a hurry?
Appointment in Talara, Tingo Maria, Pucallpa, Panama, Guate–
mala, Mexico City? I don't know. Suddenly I have to leave right
now."
The dread of inertia and arrest, the compulsion always to move
on to unknown places, goes deeper than the surface drama of police–
dodging and drug-hunting, and it is significant that when he wrote
that last letter he had in fact found his yage, which proved no more
final than the other fixes. Burroughs' "stasis horror" is really a vivid
name for a larger preoccupation that runs deep
in
the American
soul and its literature, its preference for life which is fluid, unshaped.
Burroughs in this sense is a very American writer. What gives the
special twist to his writing is where his movement-hunger took him.
Huck Finn lights out for a mythic frontier; Augie March pauses for
some rather forced laughter in the cold fields of France with no sense
of final arrival. But Burroughs came to a very definite halt-"at the
end of the junk line." "I lived in one room in the Native Quarter
of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my
clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the
fibrous grey flesh of terminal addiction. . . . I did absolutely noth–
ing." The "stasis horrors" have, ironically, brought
him
to the horror
of total stasis; the "nightmare fear" of being "stuck in one place"
has been realized; and all that urgent movement has led to the
dreaded state of absolute immobility. Unawares, he had been
pursuing the inertia he sought to flee. And it was there, I think, that
Burroughs made an important discovery-that under
all
the ostensible
purposes of his traveling (search for yage, etc.), his movements had
really been directed towards death. In a later interview he said:
"I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a
tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had
filled up with empty Eukodol cartons: I suddenly realized I was not
doing
anything.
I was dying. I was just apt to be finished." And it
