The Adding Machine (24 page)

‘We acted in the interests of national security.’ they say smugly. It’s the old war game, from here to eternity. Where would the military and the CIA be without it? It would seem that only a miracle could shock the planet into a realization that the game will kill us all unless we stop playing it.

I use scientific material in my fiction to get ideas for science, just to show the range and possibility of things that are actually going on. My use of building up identikit pictures is to get an idea of a character, maybe one I first encountered in a dream. I will find someone in reality that looks like that character and take a picture. I may find a picture in a magazine that resembles them. Or I may find a similar character in someone else’s writing. In that way you slowly build up an identikit picture of your character.

I may have many sources for one character. All characters are composites. I think that’s a mistake that writers often make when they start: they try to have just one real character. In other words, they are working from real characters and transcribing more or less directly. I mean literal transcription. Of course a writer’s idea of a person is always a fiction in itself. Like Kerouac’s picture of Neal Cassady. Well, I saw a very different Neal than the one he saw. You have
On the Road,
where Neal is always talking. Well, he had a great capacity for silence. I’ve driven with him for eight hours and he never said a thing.

In connection with schizophrenic writing, I’ve done a great deal of exploration in the direction of schizophrenic art, much of which is not very distinguished. But most of that was done by people who had some inclination towards painting, who might have been painters. So what I was interested in was writers who had the concept of schizophrenia. I knew one who was a poet; he was a great admirer of T. S. Eliot and his work was very much like Eliot’s. You could say it’s imitative of Eliot, but perhaps it’s the opposite. That little trick that Eliot has, that stylistic trick, is noticeable in schizophrenic poetry, but unfortunately I don’t have any of this poetry available. I just remember a few phrases like ‘Doctorhood is being made with me,’ or titles like
At Swim Two Birds
the same stylistic tricks of language that are found in Eliot and in the earlier poems of MacLeish.

You ask about the effects of grass on the creative mind. Hallucinogenic drugs tend to reduce the necessity to dream. People will dream less if they are using grass or LSD or any of those drugs, because they are doing their dreaming in a waking state. By hallucinogenic I don’t mean it produces actual hallucinations. It certainly extends awareness and I think makes your imagery more vivid, while at the same time you recognize it as imagery — you don’t see it as an hallucination. As to the literature of the hallucinogenics, I don’t think that such a literature exists. People are not going to become writers just because they are high. Undoubtedly a drug that increases awareness will give people ideas and imagery and so forth. But I don’t think there is anything that we could call hashish writing, LSD writing, or mescaline writing. There is a lot of writing done by people after they have taken LSD; I remember whole collections of it. Most of it is terrible, vague, and in essence not good writing. But these people were not experienced writers.

I have made several references to
Science and Sanity
by Count Korzybski. This book should be required reading for all college students and for anyone who is concerned with precision of thought and expression. Journalists and scientists especially. The Count points out that generalities without a clear referent are misleading and meaningless. ‘Everyone knows that. .. Informed opinion indicates .. . Most people will agree . . .’ What people will agree to what where and when? I have had reporters ask me whether I thought the American people were moving toward the right What people? Farmers? Book-of-the-Month-Club ladies on the east coast? College students? Ghetto residents?

In His Image
by David Rorvik contains a number of quotations from
scientists
who oppose cloning, and seem to be incapable of composing a semantically respectable statement.

‘Selfness is an essential fact of life.’

To whom is it essential? Has no one told the learned gentleman that eastern spiritual disciplines with millions of followers are designed to eliminate the ‘self?

‘The thought of human non-selfness is terrifying.’ Whom does it terrify, Professor?

I do not argue with his viewpoint. If he chooses to treasure that querulous, frightened, defensive, petty, boring entity he calls his ‘self that is his affair. I am taking him to task on semantic grounds. He is talking nonsense.

‘I consider selfness an essential fact of my life. The thought of human non-selfness terrifies me.’

Now it is a meaningful statement.

‘Difference of appearance reinforces our sense of self and hence lends support to the feeling of individual worth we seek in ourselves and from others.’

Our
sense of self?
We
seek? He has the stunning impertinence to speak for all mankind.

The Count points out that Aristotelian
either
or logic, setting up such polarities as intellect
or
emotion, reason
or
instinct, does not correspond to what we know about the physical universe and the human nervous system. He uses the phrase ‘neuromuscular intention behavior’ to describe the reactions of an organism as a whole in relation to its environment. Every action is
both
instinctive
and
intellectual, involving the entire body and nervous system. A man is hungry. The magic and almost meaningless word instinct has been invoked. But in his primitive instinctive search for food he may cross streets, take cabs, pay fares, read menus, all activities of the rational intellect it seems obvious, but here is Michel Jouvet, a French scientist, formulating a theory that dreams are ‘instinctive’.

Consider what would happen if instinctive and rational behavior were actually operating on
either or
basis.

The scene is the Rock Hotel in Gibraltar. The Professor lopes in like an animal sniffing for food. The waiter doesn’t like his looks and decides to give him the treatment. Now the Professor sits down and orders in a voice without inflection or any emotional tone like a speaking computer. He orders two portions of very rare roast beef telling the waiter that his ‘other half will be along in a minute, and a bottle of red wine. He finishes a cross-word puzzle. At the sight of his food he emits a gutty whine of anticipation and his stomach rumbles like a vast kraken. He snatches the meat and licks the plate in such an offensive manner that nearby diners turn away and retch. He composes himself and looks at the bottle. It is white wine. He signals to the waiter.

‘I ordered red wine. White wine taken with meat can cause serious gastric disturbances.’

‘Look Mister I wrote the order down.’

The Professor’s eyes light up inside and he bares his bloody canines. He slides out of his seat in a sinuous purposeful manner and seizes the waiter by the lapels.

‘Bring me red wine you hairy-assed rock ape or I drink it from your throat.’

The waiter twists free and runs for his life. The Professor sits down and writes an important formula on a napkin.

Let’s keep it together, Professor.

A victim is acted upon rather than acting. He is injured, ill, incarcerated, starving, or dead — that is, affected by other people or by circumstances or both. Some people are in the category of born victim; they may be bom into hopeless poverty or with congential deformities. Others have the status of victim thrust upon them by seemingly random circumstances — accidents, earthquakes, fires, floods, epidemics. Some achieve the condition of victim; they are accident or misfortune prone.

The hard-core victim is one who achieves his condition. The Egyptian hieroglyph of a man splitting his own head is applicable here. Take Hemingway for example; a toilet fell on his head in Paris, he shot his own foot trying to kill a gaffed fish, he was injured in a series of plane and car crashes. Indeed, the list of such achievers is a long one, with artists, writers and performers prominently featured: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Lowry, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Janis Joplin, James Dean, Isadora Duncan, and Jack and Bobby Kennedy. The chronic victim is in some cases seemingly endowed with negative telekinetic powers. (One man has been hit by lightning 11 times!) They are bad luck for themselves and anyone in their vicinity. Just walk down the street with one of these Jonahs and something bad will happen.

So, you may ask, isn’t a victim datebook unlucky right there? On the contrary, I think such a book can enable us to profit by the errors and misfortunes of our predecessors, and avoid some deadly snare. We are able to see what they could not, and take evasive action in time.

This is the principle of
minimax:
assume that the worst may happen and act accordingly; remember that lightning always strikes twice in the same place. This is a basic law known to all successful gamblers. Winning and losing come in streaks; in fact all incidents seem to arrange themselves in sequences as if one accident magnetically attracts similar occurences. Keep your eyes open and you will see this law in operation. If you just miss one train you are that much more likely to just miss another; see one man walking down the street talking to himself and you will probably see another; encounter one rude clerk or waiter and you will encounter another who will use exactly the same words. Look through a newspaper: two people on the same day drowned in bathtubs; similar fires and accidents ... (didn’t I already read that story?) or a run of fatalities all the same age. Thursday, May 18, 1979: killed in a plane crash ... single engine plane piloted by Kevin Brown, 22 .. . Man found burned to death was Clyde N. Olsen, 22 ... Casper man, 22, dies in traffic accident. . . Man, 22, found guilty in beating death. . .

Suppose this is a day a victim died — not just any victim but one with whom you especially identify. Be careful. This is a dangerous day for you. Remember, those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it. The more you know about that victim and his or her death the better. What was the cause of death? What day of the week? What else happened on that day? Last words? I know from a book,
The Death of Jesse James,
that he died on Monday, April 3, 1882 and the temperature was 46 degrees. He was shot while he had taken his guns off to clean a picture.

‘That picture’s awful dusty,’ were his last words.

Well, if you identify with Jesse James, don’t let your mother-in-law talk you up a ladder to dust off a picture on April 3. Watch your driving on the day James Dean was wiped out — and leave your scarf at home on Isadora Duncan’s last day.

When Malcolm X arrived at the auditorium on the day he was shot his step lacked its usual vigor, as if he were dead already. Brothers, that’s a day to stay home. Bobby Kennedy had a mysterious fainting fit on stage two days before he was killed. A week before Dallas some woman got within two feet of JFK and took his picture.

‘She might have assassinated the President,’ an official stated flatly.

This victim datebook will call your attention to things like that. If I were a politician in danger of assassination and someone got within two feet of me I’d fire every bodyguard in my entourage and borrow some guns from de Gaulle. Nobody ever got within two feet of Le General. And I’d stay the hell out of Dallas on November 22.

Hemingway should have known better than to be flying in a light plane in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. The brain damage he suffered in that crash prompted his suicide a few years later. He put a 12-gauge shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.

‘
White white white as far as the eye can see ahead a blinding flash of white the snows of Kilimanjaro!’

The victim datebook may save you a lot of trouble that way; it may even save your life. Consider the possibility of failure or misfortune and you have already been to the course of both. Suppose you are going to a crucial meeting.
First
consider everything that can go wrong.
Then
consider how the meeting would be successful. Confronting the possibility of failure keys in success. (Performers will tell you that the worse the stage fright the better the performance.)

The victim datebook can also serve as a rich source of conversational gambits.

‘Happy birthday, Mr Brown... rather amusing coincidence ... 2 years ago to the day a man named Brown dropped dead in this restaurant right where you’re sitting now ... In the midst of life what?’

Everyone is a victim in the end. Perhaps the publishers of the Datebook should sell future space like cemetery plots. Reserve your date now.

I built my first orgone accumulator on a farm near Pharr, Texas in the spring of 1949. I was living in the Rio Grande valley with my friend Kells Elvins, reading Wilhelm Reich, and we decided to build an accumulator out in Kells’ orange grove. In a few days we had put up a wooden box about eight feet high and lined it with galvanized iron. Inside was an old icebox which you could get inside and pull on top so that another box of sheet steel descended over you. In this way the effect was presumably heightened by an accumulator inside an accumulator. Kell’s wetbacks watched dubiously from a distance, muttering something in Spanish about ‘Brajerias’ — witchcraft.

Kerouac described my orgone box in
On the Road —
a pretty good trick, as he never set foot on the South Texas farm. He had me taking a shot of morphine and going out to ‘moon over his navel’. The fact is that I was not using junk at that time, and even if I had been I certainly would not have done so in an orgone accumulator. Kerouac even went so far as to write that ‘Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood he used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse.’ Like so much of Jack’s writing, this makes a good story but is actually pure fiction. When he visited me I was living in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, in a little house laid out like a railroad flat and raised up on the marshy lot by concrete blocks. In Algiers I had practically no front yard at all, and was far too busy with a habit to build an accumulator.