The Western Lands are fashioned from mud, from
fellaheen
death, from the energy released at the moment of death.
I realize now that the Mugwumps of
Naked Lunch
were Death Collectors like the Feku, the Shit Collectors. The sign for "to come into being" is the dung beetle, Khepera. From death they built the Western Lands, and from pain, fear and sickness and excrement they built the Duad as a moat around the Western Lands, lest this exclusive country club be overrun by the peasantry.
These thoughts took shape in hasheesh smoke and mint tea amid the flowers and shrubs of our garden. To maintain my cover as a traveling merchant, I made discreet purchases of rose essence and musk and the rare Pakistani berries that bring visions of exquisite, overripe corruption, of scented corpses and rotten flowers.
The Feku, the Death Collectors, are specialized beyond any human semblance. Their faces have a smooth copper sheen like a beetle's wing. The mouth is a purple beak, the huge black eyes bright and shiny with insect innocence of human feeling. A long pink proboscis can protrude from the mouth to a distance of two feet, sucking in the energy released in the moment of death. Violent death is the most nutritive, and these creatures gather like vultures at battles and riots and executions.
The first picture before the Gods . . . 1930s bankrobbers, roadmaps spread out on the kitchen table at the hideout farmhouse.
"Sure to have blocks up here . . . and here . . . we could just hole up here."
"Uh-uh . . . they don't rumble us getting out, they will close in house to house."
"Makes sense . . . let's try it here. . . . let's go."
As always he felt the cold hollow fear, his throat dry as he croaks, "Yeah, let's go. Up and at 'em." He wonders if they are as scared as he is. Sure they are, but you don't talk about it. Terrible form.
What was he leading this life for? Where any second could be his last. . . that
was
why. If you face death all the time, for what time you have you are immortal. It was always like this, the sick hollow fear, when he feels as if he is fainting . . . then the rush of courage, the clean, sweet feeling of being born. He read that somewhere, about an Old West shootist and how he felt after a shootout. But the fear can go on and on until you can't stand it, it's going to break you, and that's when the fear breaks—you hope.
What was Hassan i Sabbah like? Who was he?
For the last forty years of his life, HIS occupied the mountain fortress of Alamout in what is now northern Iran. From Alamout the Old Man dispatched his assassins when he decided they were ready and their missions necessary. It is said that he could reach as far as Paris. As for the training that the apprentice assassins received, there is no precise information. What little historical data survives tends to be misleading, such as the notorious account given by Marco Polo of a heaven of
houris
promised to the martyr, where he would be wafted when his work was done. There were no women in Alamout.
It is related that HIS had his own son beheaded for smuggling a bottle of wine into his quarters. No doubt this was not the real reason. Obviously the boy was plotting against the Old Man's life. It happens in the best Eastern families.
Beyond that, there is little. Did he ever tell a joke, or smile, or drink? Some say that in his later years he became an alcoholic, and that the smuggled bottle of wine was intended for him, and poisoned. Rumors . . . but very little of the man emerges and what we do see is not sympathetic. One can't help thinking of these evil old mullahs with their closed, harsh faces. I mean that his personal life, his habits, his eccentricities are completely occluded. This may well have been deliberate on his part.
Oh, yes, I knew him personally, but I never knew him at all. He was a man with many faces and many characters. Literally, he changed unrecognizably from one day to the next. At times his face was possessed by a dazzling radiance of pure spirit. At other times the harsh gray lineaments of fear and despair gave notice of defeat on some battleground of the spirit. Battles are fought to be won, and this is what happens when you lose. One thing I know: he was a front-line officer who never asked his men to do what he would not do himself. He was ready to fight alongside them, inch by bloody inch.
For example, he moved in a number of Islamic circles. There were many deviant sects, like the sentimental Sufis, too sweet to be dangerous. And the.whole labyrinthine world of Arab learning and thought, at a time when they led the civilized world, introducing such essential factors as distillation for drunkenness, and the zero for business. What would Burroughs and IBM do without it? Of all these sects, the Ismailians were singled out for special persecution, since they commit the blackest heresy in Islamic books, assuming the prerogatives of the Creator—and in a very literal sense, for his aim was the creation of new beings.
You can see the vein on the mullah's forehead stand out and pulse like an agitated worm at the thought. Leadership is passed along by direct contact with the Imam, in the course of which the subject becomes the Imam. This cannot be faked. Anyone who can see with the eye of the spirit can see it.
The human condition is hopeless once you have submitted to it by being born . . .
almost
.
There is one chance in a million, and that is still good biologic odds. Start from where you are looking down the
almost
barrel. Nine tenths of your activity is purposeless fidgeting around, lighting another cigarette . . . nine tenths deadwood weighing you down . . . house odds.
Films are supposed to concentrate the few moments of meaningful action, but they still carry sixty percent of dead weight. Take a film like
The Godfather
. . .
cut cut cut. Who wants to see him buy a peach, put on an overcoat, drink a glass of wine? So we have maybe ten minutes that really
move
and that is a very good film. So you can run through your life script in a week, often a lot less. Some walk-on extra blows his wad in a few seconds.
Fix yourself on the whole planet moving at that speed. Every encounter is portentous as a comet. The air crackles with danger, fear, grief and ecstasy. Faster faster round and round.
The Russian delegate tore the Atlantic Proposal into pieces, and to the amazement of the United Nations, wiped his ass with it.
"For this it is not even good," he grunted.
Red alert expected at any second . . . into the Centers . . . issued equipment ... stand down . . . President on the hotline . . . Checking their guns and shit in and out faster faster get to the end of the checkout line and join the in-line over here . . . round and round faster shift partners round and round faster faster . . . NATO planes up and down . . . tech sergeant finger reaches for the button . . . President on the hotline . . . round and round hotter and hotter... finger pulls back, moves forward . . . round and round closer and closer . . . RED AL/ . . . President on the hotline . . . three Russian heads have fallen meanwhile . . . heads are rolling round and round . . . they are shooting it out in the Kremlin like old gunfighters. . . .
The Old Man, Hassan i Sabbah, stands in an ozone reek of purpose, resplendent in his Imam persona. . . .
"This future may not happen, if you all strike at the right time in the right places. So we have a human lifetime with a few moments of meaning and purpose scattered here and there . . . need not be superb pieces of deadly tradecraft, can just be the night sky over St. Louis, or anywhere. Can be a white cat on a red mud wall looking out over Marakesh . . . that male cat is Ra himself. It is fleeting: if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it; if you see something horrible, don't shrink from it, counsels the Tantric sage. However obtained, the glimpses are rare, so how do we live through the dreary years of dead-wood, lumbering our aging flesh from here to there? By knowing that you are
my agent,
not the doorman, gardener, shopkeeper, carpenter, pharmacist, doctor you seem to be."
How many you kill today, Doc?" calls a fellow agent in Hicksville. And you feel good all over when you say something stupid and corny, you roll in the joys of deception and duplicity, the joy of being something quite different from the face you show the world, and quite dangerous.
So acting out a banal role becomes an exquisite pleasure . . . listening to a redneck's bigoted opinions. I've got
him
on my list. He
never
will be missed.
"You sure is right about them kikes. Ever read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?"
And the Saturday night poker game . . . you always win if you want to, cool in secret contempt, and on some level they feel the contempt and it frightens them and they want to placate you by losing. . . . The whole human comedy, spread out for your amusement.
Basically, however, you are waiting for the moment of action. So when do you really move? When your Ka takes over and directs your movements and you merge with your Ka.
The Ka, the double, takes the same chances you take in the Land of the Dead. If you die, he dies. If you are tortured, so is he. So your interests are absolutely synonymous. And that is the only basis for absolute trust. He will be there when you need him and he will know when that is.
The male Ka acts as an agent designed to further male interests in the widest sense, with particular attention to immortality. Recall dream in which women on bicycles, clad in gray shorts and jumpers, flash by a bandstand and raise clenched fists as they intone
Mortality!
Remember that as a man your Ka must be a male, so any female Ka is sure to be a lethal impostor, happily embraced by an appalling percentage of idiotic and besotted males just aching to be turned into swine. Remember that the Egyptian glyph for poltroon is woman as man, that is, a female Ka taking over a male body.
Now, Kas is all a little different, but people who look alike, Ka alike. They may be viewed interchangeably. The basic Ka spirit, the male Ka, is in fact the Imam. The quickest manner of contact is sexual. Sex is the basis of fear, how we got caught in the first place and reduced to the almost hopeless human condition. The Ka can be freed by the act of sex when there is no fear present.
The magic rites begin: "Let the Shining Ones not have power over me."
What niggardly dealings! Are the Shining Ones your guard dogs? Do your job and get back to heaven?
So the Adept, having intimidated the Shining Ones with an amulet or two and his ivory Rod of Power, now bribes them with some Woolworth incense, jacks off or fucks his chick and they have to obey him and fill that contract.
Let the Shining Ones
enter me.
I want to shine too. That's why I evoke the Shining Ones.
Sure, I know I'm breaking every range law and flight regulation you got. So what? Time to Stop—Change—Start. The point of contact with demons, elementals and succubi, incubi, radiant boys, Shining Ones, is to mate with them and produce desirable offspring, by which I mean offspring with long-range survival potential.
In present-day Egypt, or in the areas of the Mayan and Aztec ruins, one encounters truncated history, where the present-day reality has lost all connection with the historical past, to create a solid time-block. So the last place to look for clues to ancient Egypt is in Egypt itself.
Specifically, I want to reach Egypt about a thousand years ago, when Hassan i Sabbah was there. The concept of salvation through assassination is taking shape. The first real clue is the Egyptian concept of Seven Souls. HIS sees that the Ka, the Double, is the guide to the Garden. However, the Ka must kill the False Ka in carnate form. And the False Ka, the Feku,
must
present itself when the true Ka takes full possession of the human organism. This is the function of the human organism, to serve as a receptacle for the true Ka. So the enemies of HIS are various carnate manifestations of false, parasitic Kas.
The Feku have the advantage of being infinitely prolific and virtually interchangeable, like a virus. The Feku invades the Ka and immediately starts creating falsified copies. These bear some relation to the original, as cancerous liver cells are made from liver cells. Looks like the real thing but cannot survive contact with the real thing. A cancerous cell and a healthy cell cannot occupy the same space.
Religions are weapons, and some of them act quite rapidly. Witness the explosive expansion of Islam to the gates of Vienna, up into southern Spain, east to Persia and India, west to the Pillars of Hercules and deep into black Africa. In truncated time areas like Egypt, a diving-bell approach is indicated. Time has backed up here and solidified.
"Batten the hatches, Mr. Hyslop, we are going down."
Back through layers of newspapers, cheering crowds, down through Nasser to Farouk, a fat, sad clown, down through the stuffy dining rooms in the Shepherd Hotel that was burned by rioters, flames of the burning hotel snuffed to candlelight on British Colonials, sure of themselves as actors in roles of quiet privilege and self-possession . . . down through the prayer calls, the suffocating stagnation of the Arab world, back to an explosion of energy sweeping up to the gates of Vienna, up into southern Spain, over to the Atlantic, then KLUNK. And Allah hits a thousand-year writer's block.
"Sun cold on a thin boy with freckles," Burroughs repeats for a thousand years.
Allahu Akbar . . . Allahu Akbar . . .
So Allah overwrote a thousand years, and now he can't write anything better than Khomeini. I tell you, those old mullahs got a
terrible
look in their eyes. It's a cross-eyed look, up and to the left with a completely disagreeable expression. A dead wooden texture to these faces. This is nasty writing, Allah, and speaking for the Shakespeare Squadron, we don't like it.
The most severe visitation of writer's block has fallen as my narrative comes to Hassan i Sabbah in Egypt, where he presumably learned the secret of secrets that enabled him to attract followers, establish himself at Alamout and control his assassins from a distance.
I realize that my whole approach to HIS has been faulty. I have put him on a remote pedestal; then, with a carry-over of Christian reflexes, have invoked HIS aid, like some Catholic feeling his saint medal. And when I was defeated I felt betrayed. I did not stop to think that he was also defeated, that he is taking his chances with
me
.
Instead of asking about the juicy secrets, I asked another question: Did HIS have as bad a time in Egypt as I had in the Empress Hotel? Immediately I knew that the answer was Yes!