The Adding Machine (10 page)

Commentary: ‘We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people.’ In 1970, about the time that these recordings were made, I wrote a story about a Chinese patrol which finds a Tibetan monastery taken over by the CIA to test a radioactive virus... ‘Yen Lee studied the village through his field glasses.. .’

‘You belong probably to the cucumbers.’ I don’t know how many of you are familiar with a term used to designate the CIA: ‘the pickle factory.’ ‘He works for the pickle factory’ means he is a CIA man. I think this designation was mentioned in TIME or NEWSWEEK. Well, pickles are made from cucumbers, so it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to postulate that ‘cucumbers’ refers to the CIA.

‘Telephone with restraint comrade.’ Watch what you say over the phone — the cucumbers are listening in.

‘Are you without jewelry?’ May refer to lasers, which are made with jewels.

‘Bind death — Obey death.’ Compare to Dutch Schultz’s last words, ‘I don’t want harmony. I want harmony.’

‘Are you in salt? We have been looking all over the place for human beings.’ Salt could refer to any basic commodity. In this case, since the voices are discarnate, the reference is probably to human bodies. Your blood as you know has the saline content of sea water, — ‘Ah good the sea.’ Now, to say ‘Are you in blood?’ would blow the vampiric cover.

‘Have you stolen horses with him?’ Is a German proverb meaning ‘Can you trust him?’

‘Draw the spirit to the
plata.’
Raudive considers this utterance inexplicable. Apparently he did not know that
plata
is a general Spanish slang term for money.

‘A good crossing. The earth disintegrated.’ Some years ago scientists drew up a plan for a space ship to be propelled by atomic blasts behind it. Well, that would be a motive for blowing up the earth: propulsion to healthier areas.

The publication
of Breakthrough
in England caused quite a stir. One of the editors, Peter Bander, later published a book entitled
Voices From the Tapes,
describing the reactions in England. There were articles in the press, radio and television programs, much discussion pro and con. Some people protested that if these are voices from the dead, they seem to be living not in celestial realms but in a cosmic hell. In consequence the voices may be misleading, interested, even downright ill-intentioned. Well, what did they expect? A chorus of angels with tips on the stock market? Others protested that contact with these voices is dangerous, citing the use of black magic and the invocation of lower astral entities by Nazi leaders. An article written by a psychic researcher, Gordon Turner, typifies the ‘dangerous for the uninitiated’ line. Turner’s article was written in answer to an article by someone named Cass, in which Cass said: ‘If a door has been opened between this world and the next, then the masses, armed with their cheap transistor sets and five-pound Hong Kong recorders, will participate despite Gordon Turner, the Pope, and the Government.’

Here is Turner: ‘I believe
Breakthrough
should not have been published. Does (Cass) think it is safe for anyone and everyone to open themselves to this kind of influence? Has he the slightest conception of how dangerous this might be?’ Dangerous to whom exactly? When people start talking about the danger posed by making psychic knowledge available to the masses, they are generally trying to monopolize this knowledge for themselves. In my opinion, the best safeguard against the abuse of such knowledge is widespread dissemination. The more people that know about it, the better.

Raudive considers three theories to account for the voices: 1) They are somehow imprinted on the tape by electromagnetic energy generated by the unconscious minds of the researchers or people connected with them. 2) The voices are of extraterrestrial origin. 3) The voices come from the dead. He then crosses out Number 1, the imprint theory, because it is ‘technically impossible.’ It seems to me that we are operating in an area where technical impossibilities, in terms of what we know about magnetic tape and the way in which sounds and voices are imprinted by the usual means, no longer apply.

Remember that your memory bank contains tapes of everything you have ever heard, including of course your own words. Press a certain button, and a news broadcast you heard ten years ago plays back. Under hypnosis, people have remembered in detail conversations and events that took place many years ago, and this has been confirmed by witnesses. Hypnotic subjects have been able to recall exactly what doctors and nurses said during an operation, and such recall, particularly if it has a menacing or derogatory content, can be extremely disturbing...

‘One thing is sure — he don’t look good.’

‘A filthy mess .. .’

‘Sew her up, it’s inoperable.’

‘Clamps, nurse, he’s bleeding like a pig.’

‘Prepare the patient for a heart shot.’

‘A round of drinks he dies on the table.’

These irresponsible observations are recorded and stored in the patient’s memory bank, enough so to convey a permament patient status. In Esquire’s 1971 Christmas issue, there was an article called ‘Future Shock’; Doctor Cheek, who carried out hypnotic experiments on post-operative subjects and found they were recording every word and sound in the operating room, recommended that silence be observed during an operation. Because what the patient hears during an operation is filed with all his tapes of pain, fear, helplessness and hostility — all the horrible, frightening, disgusting things he has ever known awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, from his conception.

Everyone you have ever known, however briefly, is there on film and tape. Take a look at these talking films and you will begin to notice that certain words and characters tend to recur. The rude clerk in Hong Kong bore a strong resemblance to the rude clerk in New York, and both used the same words to indicate they did not have what you asked for: ‘I never heard of it.’

The more you look at it, the more it looks like a tired old film, nice voices nasty voices, good guys and bad guys, the old game of war from the Stone Age to eternity ...

‘Are we men or toothless crones? How long will we allow the filthy Zambesi to plunder our fishing territories?

‘As free men we cannot stand idly by.’ Time to get yourself hid good and the deeper the better. ‘And I say to Russia, beware the fury of a patient man.’ A good crossing. The earth disintegrated. Old war tapes. We all have millions of hours of it, even if we never fired a gun. War tapes, hate tapes, fear tapes, pain tapes, happy tapes, sad tapes, funny tapes, all stirring around in a cement mixer of voices.

Raudive dismisses the second alternative explanation for the origin of the voices — that they are extraterrestrial — because they are ‘too banal’. Well, no reason to think we have a monopoly on banality. His reasoning exemplifies the error of either/or thinking. Having categorically crossed out 1) and 2), he is stuck with Number 3: the voices come from the dead. I could suggest other possible explanations: the voices are a backplay of recordings stored in the memory banks of the experimenters.

Now the psychiatrists tell us that any voices anyone hears in his head originate there, and that they do not and cannot have an extraneous origin. The whole psychiatric dogma that voices are the imaginings of a sick mind has been called into question by voices which are of extraneous origin and are objectively and demonstrably there on tape. So the psychotic patients may be tuning in to a global and intergalactic network of voices, some using quite sophisticated electronic equipment. It belongs probably to the cucumbers. Fifteen years ago in Norway, experiments indicated that voices could be projected directly into the brain of the subject by an electromagnetic field around the head. The experiments were in a formative stage at that time. So maybe we are all walking around under a magnetic dome of prerecorded word and image, and Raudive and the other experimenters are simply plugging into the prerecording.

Could you, by your cutting up, overlaying, scrambling, cut and nullify the prerecordings of your own future? Could the whole prerecorded future of the human race be nullified or altered? I don’t know — let’s see. And don’t let any smooth old voices ease you out of it. .. ‘There are certain things my son that human beings are not permitted to know —’
like what we are doing
— ‘Son you’d fall dead from one whiff of the pickle factory and other similar factories in other countries.’ Scramble him like an egg before he hatches.
What is this?
His hand is one of the unbearable mysteries, and the other players can’t see his cards, as he rakes in the chips and then says the chips are his cards, a billion on the board.

Some years ago in London, I asked Jasper Johns what painting was all about — what are painters really doing? He countered with another question: what is writing about? I did not have an answer then; I have an answer now: The purpose of writing is to make it happen.

What we call ‘art’ — painting, sculpture, writing, dance, music — is magical in origin. That is, it was originally employed for ceremonial purposes to produce very definite effects. In the world of magic nothing happens unless someone wants it to happen,
wills
it to happen, and there are certain magical formulae to channel and direct the will The artist is trying to make something happen in the mind of the viewer or reader. In the days of cows-in-the-grass painting, the answer to ‘What is the purpose of such painting?’ was very simple: to make what is depicted happen in the mind of the viewer; to make him smell the cows and the grass, hear the whistling rustic. The influence of art is no less potent for being indirect. We can leave riots, fires, and wrecks to the journalists. The influence of art has a long-range cultural effect. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso — the Beats wrote a world-wide cultural revolution. Remember that four-letter words could not appear on a printed page twenty-nine years ago. Now, with the breakdown of censorship and the freeing of the Word, the
New York Times
has to print four-letter words used by the President of the United States.

We can trace the tremendous indirect effect of the written word; what about the indirect effect of painting? I have explained how in 1959 Brion Gysin said that writing is fifty years behind painting and applied the montage technique to writing — a technique which had been used in painting for fifty years. As you know, painters had the whole representational position knocked out from under them by photography, and there was in fact a photography exhibition around the turn of the century entitled ‘Photography — The Death of Painting’. Premature, but painting did have to get a new look. So painters turned first to montage.

Now the montage is actually much closer to the facts of perception, than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put what you have just seen down on canvas. You have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows — a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words. Remember that the written word is an image. Brion Gysin’s cut-up method consists of cutting up pages of text and re-arranging them in montage combinations. Representational painting is dead, unless perhaps the new photo-realism takes hold. Nobody paints cows in the grass any more. Montage is an old device in painting. But if you apply the montage method to writing, you are accused by the critics of promulgating a cult of unintelligibility. Writing is still confined in the sequential representational straitjacket of the novel, a form as arbitrary as the sonnet and as far removed from the actual facts of human perception and consciousness as that fifteenth-century poetical form. Consciousness
is
a cut-up; life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.

Painting in the past hundred years has come from an exclusively representational position, where any number of artists could cover the same material to such a state of fragmentation that every artist must now have his own special point on which there is only room for one artist. Any number of artists can paint country landscapes, but there is only room for one Warhol soup can. It’s every artist his own movement now. Here is a question for all schools: If art has undergone such drastic alteration in the past hundred years, what do you think artists will be doing in fifty or a hundred years from now? Of course we can foresee expansion into the realm of exploding art... A self-destroying TV set, refrigerator, washing-machine, and electric stove going off, leaving a shambles of a gleaming modern apartment; the housewife’s dream goes up behind a barrier of shatterproof glass to shield the spectators.

Now here’s another angle for you young art hustlers: There is an explosive known as ammonium iodide made by pouring ammonia over iodide crystals or mixing it with tincture for brash work. This compound when it dries is so sensitive that a fly will explode it. I remember how I used to while away the long 1920’s afternoons with sugar sprinkled around little heaps of ammonium iodide waiting for the flies to explode in little puffs of purple vapor. So you paint your canvas with ammonium iodide and syrup and release a swarm of flies in the gallery... or the people walking around set it off with their vibrations ... or a team of choir boys touches it off with pop guns...

And metal sodium explodes violently on contact with water; so you paint in sodium (which has a beautiful sheen like the side of a silver fish in clear water), and stand well back, and shoot it with a water rifle, or induce a spitting cobra to spit on it and get blown apart. Can sacrificial art be far behind? Cut a chicken’s head off and paint with the gushing blood. Disembowel a sheep and paint with its intestines. Or you can do a combo with the sodium number.

Then there will be the famous Mad Bear Floyd, a billionaire painter who covered a twenty-foot montage of porno pictures with thousand-dollar bills soaked in ammonium iodide ... the montage was laid in the middle of the gallery, then a hamper of thousand-dollar bills rained down and set off the charge, burning a million dollars out of circulation while his agent sold the burnt canvas for $10 million on the spot.