PARTISAN REVIEW
261
have been obscured by the authoritarian Controllers. That's why he's
been experimenting with the cutting up of sounds and playing them
back, in other words feeding back the control images to the Control
Central in the hope of setting up anti-image consciousness feedback
that will explode their Control machine.
Int:
That's in
The Ticket That Exploded.
Ginsberg:
And which he practiced at Chicago when he came into the
Convention Hall with his tape recorder with all sorts of riot sounds
from Tangiers like shutters slamming and started spraying all these
sounds out on the balcony of the convention, and within an hour the
place was in an uproar.
Int:
Is the terrifying chaos in Burroughs's fiction purposeful?
Ginsberg:
I think so. He would maintain that he is making propositions
and hypotheses which he examines by means of language and imagina–
tion. So chaos--transfiguration is a better word, really--is only the
preliminary guardian of the sacred extraterrestrial area of conscious–
ness. The end is not
dereglement de tous les sens
but clear vision, not
chaos but total silence and calm like a great blue tide flooding the
body. And
dereglement de tous les sens
is not even so much a means
as it is a by-product of the pursuit through to the other side of
phenomena, the disruption of the apparently normal order determined
by the CIA and the Control Forces. In fact he feels that they are
responsible for the chaotic apparitions, the fear, the Ovens, the images
of death. What he is saying over and over, also, is that death is the
greatest con, that it has been created by the Controllers to scare
everybody, and there's really nothing to fear.
Int:
Is he still involved with the scientologists?
Ginsberg:
Only in denouncing them, he wrote a long attack on them as a
fascist organization in
Rolling Stone.
I went to supper with him and
Girodias and heard another terror story about the scientologists-–
which is that Girodias published a book attacking scientology, and
they sued him to try and stop the book and they lost the suit, so they
organized a letter-writing campaign to the British Home Office com–
plaining that Girodias was a pornographer, and so the Police raided
Girodias and seized 125,000 volumes and drove him out of business in
England. So he couldn't defend himself because his assets had been
seized. And many things like that have happened, so Burroughs has
attacked the scientologists as an extension of the control apparatus
that offers people hints of exercises that are useful, but which hangs
them up in the middle of the exercise.
Int:
How does Burroughs see his own function as a writer relating to this
control system?
