Once started, the Beat movement had a momentum of its own and a world-wide impact. In fact, the intelligent conservatives in America saw this as a serious threat to their position long before the Beat writers saw it themselves. A much more serious threat, say, than the Communist Party. The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not political legislators, who implement change after the fact. Art exerts a profound influence on the style of life, the mode, range, and direction of perception. Art tells us what we know and don’t know that we know. Certainly On the Road performed that function in 1957 to an extraordinary extent. There’s no doubt we’re living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger picture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four letter word couldn’t appear on the printed page, and minority rights were ridiculous. (xxxi, Beat Reader)
From letters Burroughs sent to his friend and fellow pedophile, Allan Ginsberg, about his travels in South America seeking out, and finding, a drug called Yage, which I believe to be the same as Ayahuasca:
On the boat I talked to a man who knows the Ecuador jungle like his own prick. It seems jungle traders periodically raid the Auca (a tribe of hostile Indians) and carry off women they keep penned up for purposes of sex. Sounds interesting. Maybe I could capture an Auca boy.
I have precise instructions for Auca raiding. It’s quite simple. You cover both exits of Auca house and shoot everybody you don’t wanna fuck. . .
The boat gave out with a broken propeller at Las Playas halfway between Manta and Guayaquil. I rode ashore on a balsa raft. Arrested on the beach suspect to have floated up from Peru on the Humboldt current with a young boy and a tooth brush (I travel light, only the essentials) so we are hauled before an old dried up fuck, with a withered face of cancerous control. The kid with me don’t have paper one. . . .[he himself leaves it ambiguous if the kid was actually with him, but does not explain what the connection might be, if not.]
Three paragraphs later:
Ecuador is really on the skids. Let Peru take over and civilize the place so a man can score for the amenities. I never yet lay a boy in Ecuador and you can’t buy any form of junk.
From Naked Lunch, a semi-autobiographical novel written while under the influence of a number of drugs, and assembled by Allan Ginsberg, and with a title suggested by Jack Kerouac. This is him, as a drug dealer and user, contemplating getting caught:
And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: “he force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk” I could kiss the street good-bye.
And:
Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young long.
Biographically, Burroughs son died of severe alcoholism brought on, seemingly, by both his emotional coldness, and by the fact that one of his friends molested him when he was 14, in Tangiers.
Burroughs last public appearance was on the U2 video, “Last Night on Earth“. He is on the other side of the light, at the end, opposing all the men with guns. His face is the last picture in the video.
Ask yourself: what has been wrought, and who wrought it? And why, to what purpose, if any?