452
comes cheap. We live now
in
the
dirty stockings of Adolph. Remem–
ber Apollo 7? Didn't (Frank) Bor–
man coo the gideon bible? So let's
stop praying. According
to
Bur–
roughs:
To travel in space you must
leave the old verbal garbage
behind. God talk, country talk,
mother
talk,
love
talk,
party
talk. You must learn
to
exist
with no religion no country
no allies. You must learn to
live alone in silence. Anyone
who prays in space is not
there.
It turns out that travel is knowl–
edge and you can't breathe unless
you know. That is the odor of pre–
cedence
Ii
la carte.
You must know
that life
is
with little exception de–
tennined by a system of control
which has taken over the lives of
ordinary men and women.
As
Bur–
roughs has noted previously the
system has sucked all the taste out
of food the pleasure out of sex.
If
you can't live unless you are right
you see what he means.
'!be four disciplines which pre–
vail
in T
he Job
to keep ideas
in
motion are: anthropology,
linguis–
tics, orgonomics and dianetics.
The most interesting theories
about the control system and the
fonn it takes at present are inferred
convincingly from a model of
si–
multaneous calendars used by the
Mayan priests to control the Mayan
populace by remembering the past
and foretelling the future. And it
is all done with simple arithmetic.
Reference to this model has been
made in other parts of Burroughs's
JAN HERMAN
work. (See, for example, the chap–
ter called "Who
Am
I to Be Crit–
ical?" in
The Soft Machine.)
Bur–
roughs now clarifies this model in
astonishing detail.
The most interesting circumstan–
tial evidence in support of his
theories is drawn .from the
daily press. They
write
events
the way they want them to hap–
pen that is they are largely re–
sponsible for the dreary events they
describe. Burroughs rewrites news,
making you see what really happens
between the lines of today
&
to–
morrow. Hidden information sur–
faces to make oblique impropa–
ganda talk: "Man time bombs
rigged on 7 Hertz." Have heard
those tactics to be employed? It
was in all the papers. The Anny
has. I even read the following de–
flected information: that Gavreau's
subsonic equipment (which shakes
your internal organs
to
a lump of
jelly) "could be used to core out
worms from rotten apples."
Axe
you farmers going
to
swallow them
rigged apples??
The most interesting theme de–
clares that the control system uses
the mechanism of syllabic language
with more success than virtually any
other mechanism of control, includ–
ing the great blackmail against the
public of nuclear threat. According
to what Burroughs says in
The
Job,
if you eliminate the subvocal speech
patterns which accompany talk in
syllabic language, you decondition
your every thought your every
move, and you begin to eliminate
the Authority which controls you.
The Job
should convince you
that
this
planet is a bureau of over-
