American literature, referring in the context of
this essay mainly to literature conceived in the northern part of the
American continent, is still coded information, impressions and
perspectives, in a medium or mediums that are originally European
because most of what is written in the Americas is done mostly in
languages that were imported from the Old World. Escapist perhaps, in
tradition because of the preoccupation, or fetish even, to that which
is new in
opposition to the confines of that which is old,
the world left behind in pursuit of free territories. And these
territories were not vacant, so traditional practices of massacre had
to be utilized in order to achieve this new ”purity” of freedom.
Perhaps this is some kind of abstraction, a process of reduction, but
alas, from
something old and consequently tainted. So, if even this concept of a
New World
has come to being in relation to something old, we could easily argue
that its fiction, its biographies, have originated as colonial
and as such regional,
even provincial instead of worldly, High
literature. Here, we are of course referring to artistic values, not
necessarily Eurocentric values of an established center, from the
perspective of which all removed and remote forms of culture appear
as peripheral — twice removed
even. No, in terms of colonial or regional creative writing, we may
be emphasizing on
how the former are slavishly
imitative of some dominant (but remote and irrelevant) cultural
tradition because they hope to gain approval from it, and validation
for themselves as being 'civilized' and 'cultured'; and the latter
(regional literatures) exhibit the opposite vice, of making a great
noise about their own special unique experiences, which no-one who
isn't them can understand or appreciate. Colonial literature tends to
be derivative and inauthentic; regional literature tends to be
obscure and introspective, and obsessed with local detail (and quite
often also derivative and inauthentic, because it is being written
for some purpose other than the purely artistic). Both of these types
are provincial, because they are ultimately focused on what the
outside world thinks of them.1
As
we can see, this could be applied to “products” of any particular
and derivative form of culture there is to be found. And when we are
looking at some specific culture, cultivation or a genre, we are most
certainly also looking at a derivative phenomenon since no phenomenon
comes to being in a vacuum and out of nothing — we may be wise to
leave the origins of existence outside the range of whatever implied
in this essay. A lengthy description could be easily produced to
justify this Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit- argument in terms of whatever
cultural product we are looking at, but here we may be content with
this following citation that justly reminds us that human culture and
its language- and logo-centric manifestations cannot be disjointed
from the world of physical phenomena: ”Human beings belong to
reality as a one (internally extremely complex) system among others.
A human observer cannot know other systems directly but is able to
interact with them, within the constrictions of the entirety. Every
action causes a change in both the observed object and the
observer.”2
Thus, when we are looking at some specific
cultural genre, like original American Beat literature or
Scandinavian Black Metal, we are also looking at cultures that
interact with their environment, which is in the anthropic sense
acknowledged as Condition.
And, as a counter-reaction to that specific context, these, then
should be understood as satellites of sort, lesser through contest
specific evolution? Should it not be rather formulated, at least from
the perspective of the inherent observer of this text, as: a
development of a phenomenon pertaining to one of the most complex
peaks of known hierarchies, like Alexander Argyros, for one,
suggests?3
There is no reason not to. No compelling reason — compelling to an
intellect that cannot but be drawn to accept the most explanatory
depiction of history, metaphysical or strictly quantitative, as the
most likely. This acceptance should be a process of educated
approximation, like history, the history of evolution that is
evolution itself. Like acting through immediate realization of
possibility was inherent in both the environment, and the afore
mentioned inherent observer of this text.
What
we are also suggesting, is that when Black Metal ceases to be
exclusively anti-christian, it may engender new states of novelty
derived from its own internal constructions, originating in the
conditions provided by the system itself. The conditions, that
sparked the reaction, no longer define these new structures, each
with their own dynamic evolution, they enjoy the absolute freedom to
realize any and all possibilities that open constantly as the
structure reforms (in fact, the `re-´ is unnecessary in this said
`formation´). Nevertheless, there is no reason to omit the part of
“memory” pertaining to the onset conditions, for that is all
history, the story of a culture; it is relevant, as is the epoch of
whatever motion preceding it – and what we are looking at, when we
observe the given phenomena – is documentation, or traces
of motion. Motion, that is particular but obeys general lawfulness
that stems from a constitution written billions of years ago. This
lawfulness is, of course, constrictive, as it is written in the stuff
that is more fundamental than stone, and no inscription carved in
stone can reduce what this constitution allows, although, as Argyros
points out4,
there are also phenomena like retroactive causality, as according to
quantum theory, that suggests a far more complex conglomeration of
feedback relays that are, indeed, cast
in stone. Therefore, it should be born in mind that the laws that
define and determine evolution, are negotiable and are, in fact,
re-determined more or less constantly. They could be said to be
re-invented constantly.
As
a mode of transgression, trespassing on tabooed ground, the said
cultures are reactions against arbitrary limitations — limitations
that should perhaps be understood as attempts on anthropocentric
arche-writing5
— that are constantly disputed by the phenomena witnessed as
constant, the world,
the laws that are “physical” in that they are detectable. And the
authority that is called to outlaw these transgressions, withholds
intervention. Withholds as of yet, and this, therefore, makes
intervention improbable. Thus, since we have no reason to outlaw the
very existence of neither the particular phenomenon, nor the
conditions that sparked it, we can perceive this development as
“natural”. The commentary provided in this essay is, then,
introspection of nature from within nature, and, in addition to this,
it should be admitted that from the perspective stance occupied in
this essay, the freedoms enjoyed by both Black Metal and Beat
literature, appear much more tenable than the limitations imposed by
an equally natural but consequently deified self-constraint.
The stages `in counter-action´ and `realization of possibility´
are stages of ontogenies specified and characterized as pertaining to
particular conditions, and there is sense in forming hierarchical
models when describing such trajectory. As Richard Goymer phrases it:
I suggested that a literary tradition
'comes of age' when it gets beyond these stages, when it is no longer
trying to be something else than it is, or something that no-one else
is; when it can take its own experiences and universalize them, so as
to make them intelligible to other cultures which have had other
experiences, histories and myths. I suggested that American
Literature came of age with writers like Hawthorne and Twain, who
took particular cultural experiences (puritan fundamentalist
communities in Hawthorne, the frontier in Twain) and made of them
universally significant landscapes in which ethical problems and
dilemmas recognizable to all humans are examined and dramatized.6
Making
use of Stanley N. Salthes explanation of his figuration concerning
“ontogenic trajectories” I would like to add that ”The arrow
from the genome to the organism (protein synthesis [arrow pointing
from left to right through the stages of protein synthesis, the
medium through which the `occute ovule´ as it matures to an aged,
`senescent´ individual keeps on using genetic information to
`modulate natural processes by producing conditions within which
these processes will be able to guide morphogenesis into building and
sustaining an organism from moment to moment´]) shows the direction
of flow of information. It should be viewed as occurring all along
the trajectory, not just at one point as shown for clarity.”7
In other words, the organism or system gathers the feedback it uses
to adapt its processes according to the constantly changing
conditions. It also adapts to changes within its own organization.
So, if one prefers to perceive forms of expression such as literature
or music as modes of inscription, ways to document experience and
impression, these forms of culture, then, appear in this respect
similar, for the documentary value of performing such a function, to
protein synthesis, which, as above according to Salthe, processes
sensory feedback on a chemical level encoding this information into
bundles that are then stored into archives of nucleic acids. Thus
subcultural forms of music and literature may well be seen as means
of transcending particular conditions through this ability inherent
in organisms of this complexity level; the ability to gather feedback
and make use of it. Thus, the `coming of age´ Goymer refers to, is a
constant process rather than an instant, and when this process
appears in textual form, what we witness is the emergence of an
additional medium of being; a further dimension realized by an
evolving organism. This is what literature is: an additional medium
to being.
Consequently,
if like William S. Burroughs, the notorious beat writer, affirms:
”Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just
that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality,
so (the) writer can escape the limits of reality. The unworthies in
power feel danger, like cows uneasily pawing the ground with a great
`Moo´.”8,
there is resonance between what is postulated in this essay, what a
beat writer introspectively affirms, and perhaps even the phenomena
of the world as such, and if so, we can agree, that this essay is, at
least somewhat, descriptive. Furthermore, as to provide a description
or simulation
is what is ultimately intended in this essay, we can be satisfied
with the fact that an internal consensus is achieved: the logic of
this essay is thus far both inherent and, it is to be hoped, made
visible.
Further
aspects of interest can be found in focusing on the particular
products of the dynamic process here labeled `evolution´. These
products are, as manifestations of momentary realization, laden with
both implications of further possibility, traces of its former being,
and conditions to which this being has been subjected to. They
document the history of an organism, its introspection and
self-organization, carry moments of
realization from one temporal present
to the next, and, as we can see in this following lyric by a
Norwegian Black Metal band by the name of Satyricon, this process is
preoccupied with producing present and retrospective awareness, which
in turn implicate future possibilities:
a Moment of Clarity
Without beginning, without end (our lifeblood)
the road for the spiritual outlaw is never ending
and so is the hunt for all those answers
the devil may hold your truth, what a fucking relief it
would be (to know)
bluecold and the grim truth stands before you, all you
ever wanted ?
Descend and fly away to another day, another night
sleep forever or serve to justify
The brand that you wear speak of what you are made of
It leaves you like an open book for everyone to read
Is this it, is this what you wanted?
The eye of the rest on your back
To be a part of the masterplan is the only way
to spiritual hell
drink to that and never forget where you came from
cause there's no such thing as one way ticket to hell
what a fucking relief that is
Descend and fly away to another day, another night
sleep forever or serve to justify9
The
authoring organism, or Sigurd Wongraven as the author of the lyric,
is indeed formulating itself in this product, which, of course, is
presented here in a limited form, since it is separated from the
music that the text is woven into, but we must make use of what can
be reproduced in the context of this essay. Sleep,
in this lyric, is taken to depict the
settings imposed as fundamental defaults, defaults which limit
reality, making some aspects of reality realizable only as dreams,
hence the metaphor. But the metaphor also carries traces of the
illusion or utopia, which is taken to be at the end of the “law
abiding” as opposed to “outlawed” lifeblood of a contextually
present Scandinavian form of Christianity, the “prize” for
accepting the said limitations. Also the “forever” is a part of
this offering, for there is the promise of eternal life or sleep,
as in half-life (meaning ”unsatisfactory way of living”10)
that goes with affirming ones position as ”a part of the
masterplan”, and the option, which is given in the previous
sentence: “Descend and fly away to another day, another night”,
is to reject the justification and eternal salvation by stepping down
from that position, a position aligned to receive that “prize”.
The
focus is on a status, that is equally rebellious, as that of William
S. Burroughs above, and, needless to say, the descent
is a step down only as perceived from the position relinquished here.
Thus, when the descent is followed by flying
away, which of course suggests a new
sense of position as opposing to falling or being lost from the herd,
we are already aware of a new freedom. The freedom of emergent
organisms, but this is an unauthorized freedom, which loses the
certainty of predetermination associated with a justifying authority,
or rather handed down as pre-approved answers. Here the truth appears
also as a mode or a medium, which either is or is not deified.
“Bluecold and the grim” version of reality may not be ”all you
ever wanted”, as is asked in the lyric, but it is expressed, that
whether one chooses to project this truth to the outside humanity by
wearing a
mark (or rather a sign like the Cross
of Peter or the Pentagram, which are two of the most favored insignia
used among Blackmetallers, as one encountering them can witness), one
is making the decision to exist in open opposition and suffer the
consequences, instead of maybe choosing a more furtive or subversive
mode of resistance and being.
Although
Black Metal, in the form of its Scandinavian manifestations, was and
is often associated with nationalism or nationalistic movements of
some sort, its universality as an emergent medium, within which the
awareness of the freedom and un-authorization of emergence define the
horizons of its subjects; its creators. Its regionality or
provinciality soon became an untenable position to those of its
procreators that choose to accept the implications of their own
emergence in the fullest. Black Metal appears thus in the form of an
iconoclastic reformation that shook the petrified metaphysical
structures of a particular Status Quo, so that innovation and
proliferation of new formulations became possible again; a death and
subsequent re-invention of life. As if a bough of the evolutionary
tree had succumbed, in its senescence, to be eaten by some new
species of maggots that then had their own ontogeny. The larvae then
went through a metamorphosis
during which the species reinvents itself, its own identity. This
sort of ontogeny may be witnessed among many of the leading figures
of Scandinavian Black Metal, like, for example, the musicians of
another Norwegian band, Ulver11.
To
come back to the American Beats, the universality of freedom is, as a
given fact or, should it rather be said, as a monumental attractor in
the topography of the consciousnesses that comprise the movement,
present in the cartography, as well as, I would argue, in the
terrain, or environment of the movement; an encountered quality
pertaining to both the self and the environment that the textual
charts or hypotheses
then simulate with the signs and codes of the movement's own chosen
mediums or languages: poetry and literature. The same rift and
revolution, the same collapse into chaos, can be found at the advent
of the Beat movement again, in the reproductions of experience and
experiment that are left to document its phases like a paper trail
that seems to disappear and re-emerge abruptly even from the sights
of its nucleus quartet when the works were still in the make: Gregory
Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Corso
explains that his first batch of poems was left at the bus terminal
of Miami, Florida. But he was not worried because he felt he was
the poetry, so, as long as he had the poet, he had the poetry12.
Indeed, he was a part of evolution, a manifestation of that
evolution, and aware of the freedom pertaining to the emergence of
what he was. For Corso the poet “is always, has always been”,
free, to him there is no American poetry because the poet is first
and foremost a universal being; he is “of man, not of particular
place of man—that is why it is impossible for a true poet to be
nationalistic”13.
The poet is, however, subject to a particular
state and setting as a human being; “[t]he poet does not suffer his
poetry, he suffers his humanness”14.
The poet, or artist, cannot escape the physical world, nor can he
escape the politics that control the distribution of goods in the
sociotemporal15,
human realm, that the poet represents as a human being. This is not
to say that there is no such thing as escapist art, but rather that
the artists are also physical beings and as such part of the physical
world and subject to its laws. The novelty, or innovation, of both
these movements, lies in the awareness of the world, and the self
along with it, as a changing, mutating entirety. As Corso writes: “To
not know that the world is changing is to be certain of a world that
is familiar and old, a world that is no longer” and he acknowledges
that there is nothing new in the fact that everything is changing
since “[i]t has always been so, but it has not always been like it
is today; we are fully aware of the changing process, in and around
us—we are close to it, and for the first time in human history we
are wholly uncertain of what will come of it all—“16.
(It has to be noted that even though these movements may have
discovered this constant change and consequent freedom of their own,
they have also re-invented an ancient notion that merely wasn’t
fashionable enough to gain momentum as article, ultimately, of faith
as contrasted to rational observation or science. There is no reason
to deny or affirm that Democritus invented atomism yet he did, we
just don't know whether there were others before him who had similar
hypotheses or not, and, actually it is quite irrelevant. If the
phenomena of the world are depicted as accurately as possible, there
is an evident resemblance between representations and the terrain
itself, or a terrain
that is witnessed by also others than me.)
Adaptation, then, becomes a matter of prediction,
in fact, this is what the Beats are obsessed with; writing the
future, or liberating
the future from the constraints of a platonic straight-jacket, the
metaphysics of absolute being. Uncertainty is the price accepted and
paid (perhaps Kerouac’s nostalgia to Catholicism made him a
prisoner of debt having not paid his dues in full17)
for the freedom of the world. Thus, since there is no divine plan,
human survival is in human hands, and whatever threats the future
might hold become human concerns. Unfortunately, or out of the
pressure created by the development of nuclear weaponry, this human,
and artistic, liberation turns to realization of threats stemming
from former metaphysical formation and thus, as almost like an
attempt on correcting, re-programming summary groups of
individuations that all are a part of the human system. A system
that, indeed, suffers from its humanity, and not from its
universality, as Corso above suggests. The possible threats must
then, even if they are realized only as possibilities, be met with
preventive measures. An organism is not innately acceptive of
annihilation, at least not the individuations that do not. Burroughs
writes about this process as “wising up” especially in books of
his Nova-trilogy18.
He is critically concerned with activating the objective reader to
become a subjective reader and re-receive the ability to act on value
judgment. This judgment is based on, what can be said to be, an early
version of simulative evolution theory.
As an educated anthropologist he was drawn far from the western
dreams of Unilinear Evolution and branched off perhaps ultimately as
a cybernetic organism encoded by textual reprogramming into the hive
like being of the Soft Machine, that is the human organism.
All
originality, as a claim for ownership of one’s own creation, is
impossible after admitting to have gone through such introspection as
a reader of such textual system-viruses. The most powerful
explanatory models spread, like cholera among the malnourished, among
those set on finding such models, possibly also creating them. What
Burroughs wrote helps in that sort of survivalist activism, after
all, science is ultimately and innately interested in, or at least
born out of such action. This, if admitted, is of course, another
version of burroughsian ideas, virulent as vermins, manifesting as
coded textual semen aching to impregnate, to infect. That elderly
queer
never did become slack, in that he never did cease to be “an
indispensable indication that it is possible to be vicious without
becoming slack.” and as Alan Ansen continues:
How many addicts one knows incapable
of more than a sob or monosyllable, how many queens who seem to have
no place in life except the perfume counter at Woolworths or the
economy price whorehouse. To use drugs without losing consciousness
and articulateness, to love boys without turning into a mindless drab
is a form of heroism.”19
There is some apparent purposefulness both in
Burroughs and some of the more musically complex Black metal acts
like Satyricon, or the now retired Emperor, that forced their
expression into coherence; a strict and meticulous attitude towards
the works created. It goes without saying that Black Metallers are
also vicious.
To get back on track we should note that the
heroism of, at least, some Rock n’ Roll musicians (Rock n' Roll of
course act as upper category that includes Black Metallers) bear some
resemblance to what Burroughs writes in a manifesto called THE
FUTURE OF THE NOVEL:
The conferring writers have been
accused by the press of not paying sufficient attention to the
question of human survival— In Nova
Express [the
reference is to an exploding planet] and The
Ticket That Exploded [the
reference is to the freedom of emergence], I am primarily concerned
with survival— with nova conspiracies, nova criminals, and nova
police— A new mythology is possible in the space age where we will
again have heroes and villains with respect to intentions toward this
planet—20
When
we look at Satyricon’s earlier material such as the song Mother
North from the album Nemesis
Divina (1996), we can witness the
presence of ecological concerns in phrases such as ”how can they
sleep when their beds are burning” and “pigeon hearted beings of
flesh and blood keeps closing their eyes for the dangers that threat
ourselves and our nature”21,
but let such matters of who-and-where tinkering be as they may, what
I am trying to emphasize is, that once the implications of
unauthorized existence are accepted, no matter what are your
aesthetic concerns, the physical world has to be taken seriously when
documenting and predicting experience.
Transgressive
culture is counter-culture by definition; there has to be a standard,
a system of values that is violated by procreation of
counter-cultural activity. The transgression is an act of rebellion,
more precisely, an act of creation. A form of creative innovation
that pushes the limits and thus re-inventing freedom; an affirmative
refusal in that by taking their stand the said forms of being and
their modes of expression be admitted as culture, which they already,
by biological right, are. But this is beginning to be a metaphysical
debate, and the cultures mentioned do not need to be admitted the
existence they already possess in that they are. It would be of no
consequence whatsoever, to say that transgressive culture is not real
or high or
even true because
it comes to being only in reference to something priorly established.
Human forms of culture tend to impose heterogeny of sort often on
utterly arbitrary grounds. This most definitely has to do with the
fact that culture is also, by definition, a group activity liable to
social pressures, which, at times, cause ruptures and fermentation
that can, then, result in the invention of new frontiers, and at
times social pressures may also cause the collapse of entire
civilizations. Thus, as chaotic as it may seem, all counter cultural
activism is, residually or ultimately, a form of primal survivalist
activity that abrade the sensibilities of cultivated humanity as they
create through an opposition to the confines of the old, the create
their freedom through destruction of the confines of old and what
they feel and perceive to be senescent cultures. But since there is
the odd chance that something unprecedented comes to being, something
that may have actualized as a hole, a gap in the structures that
hoist up cultures, an empty space fertilized by crumbs, offal and
idle waste of the very machinations that make cultures, there is also
the chance that something that may survive the conditions that
created it and fly away to new modes of being and new concepts of
beauty.
- Argyros, Alexander J. 1991: A Blessed Rage for Order. Ann Arbor, USA: The University of Michigan Press
- Burroughs, William S. 1990: Interzone. London: Penguin Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1998: Junky. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1986: Queer. London: Pan Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1993: Naked Lunch. London : Harper Collins
- Burroughs, William S. 1986: The Soft Machine. London: Paladin Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1987: The Ticket That Exploded. London: Paladin Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1990: Dead City Radio. United Kingdom: Island Records
- Burroughs, William S. 1992: Nova Express. New York: Grove Press
- Burroughs, William S. 1983: Hurjat Pojat: Kuolleiden Kirja; suom. Kari Lempinen. Helsinki: Odessa
- Burroughs, William S. 1993: exterminator!. London: Penguin Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1980: Port of Saints. London: John Calder
- Burroughs, William S. 1984: Burroughs File. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
- Burroughs, William S. 1985: The Adding Machine: Collected essays. London: Calder
- Burroughs, William S. 1982: Cities of Red Night. London: Picador/Pan Books
- Burroughs, William S. 1984: Place of Dead Roads. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
- Burroughs, William S. 1988: The Western lands. New York: Penguin Books
- Burroughs, William S. 2005: Kissa Sisälläni; suom. Elina Koskelin. Turku: Sammakko
- Burroughs, William S. 1995: Ghost of Chance. London: Serpent’s Tail; High Risk Books
- Burroughs, William S. 2000: Last words: the final journals of William Burroughs. London: Flamingo
- Burroughs, William S. & Daniel Odier 1989: The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. 1969. New York, Penguin Books
- Castaneda, Carlos. 1970: The teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
- Foster, Edward Halsey 1992: Understanding the Beats. Columbia, South Carolina: South Carolina University Press
- Gell-Mann, Murray. 1995: Quark and the Jaquar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. New York: Henry Holt and Company
- Moynihan, Michael & S
- Murphy, Timothy S. 1997: Wising Up the Marks: the Amodern William S. Burroughs. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press
- Nemerov, Howard. 1966: Contemporary American Poetry. Washington, USA: Voice of America
- Soderlind, Didrik & Moynihan, Michael. 1998: Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Undergound. USA: Feral House
- Satyricon, 1996: Nemesis Divina. Nesodtangen, Norway: Moonfog
- Satyricon, 1999: Intermezzo II. Nesodtangen, Norway: Moonfog
- Ulver, 1999: Metamorphosis. Oslo, Norway: Jester
- Hume, Kathryn 1999:William S. Burroughs’s Phantasmic Geography, Contemporary Literature Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 111-135: University of Wisconsin Press: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208821
- Laughead, George 2007: Beats In Kansas: Shooting Joan Burroughs. Hosted at WWW-virtual Library: http://www.vlib.us/beats/shootingjoan.html
- Grauerholtz, James W. 2002: The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened? University of Kansas: http://old.lawrence.com/burroughs/deathofjoan-full.pdf
1
This perspective is that which Richard Goymer demonstrated in his
introductive lecture American Literature in the fall of 2010 in the
University of Oulu. The direct citation is from a private e-mail
correspondence between the author and Richard Goymer
2
Tarja Kallio-Tamminen: Kohti uutta todellisuuskäsitystä
—kvanttimekaniikka ja termodynaaminen energiavirta. Tieteessä
tapahtuu 1/2011 s. 9 Tieteen Seuran Valtuuskunta.Translated by
author.
3
Argyros, Alexander J. 1991: 111–128
4
Argyros, Alexander J. 1991: 123–127
5
Arche-writing, concept taken to be coined by Derrida, refers here to
the idea of an underlying metaphysical meaning-structure, that
writing is built upon a structure, formed through arbitrary labeling
or reification of meaning, in the sense that the signs of any given
text are cut off of their actual referents, by a continuum of
references that defer the ultimate presence of the referent out of
reach. Make it some form of forever evading otherness.
Thus all metaphysical structures are equally baseless and equally
arbitrary sets of value labels. See
http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH3b
6
Also from private correspondence
7
Salthe, 1993: 7–8 from Theory of
Evolution — In Need of a New Synthesis
edited by Sintonen & Sirén
8
Burroughs, 2000: 16
9
Satyricon/Sigurd Wongraven, 1999
10
halflife. (n.d.). Online Etymology
Dictionary. Retrieved January 22,
2012, from Dictionary.com website:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/halflife
11
For reference it might be suggested to look at e.g. Lords
of Chaos by Soderlind and Moynihan
(1998) or documentaries such as Det
Svarte Alvor (the Black Truth)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3392989328188807029
. Also the album booklet material such as on Ulver’s Metamorphosis
EP (1999).
13
Corso, 1966:225
14
as above
15
Argyros explains this term as stemming from Fraser’s concept
modelling the evolution of time; sociotemporality is the temporality
of the human socius, which means time as understood and experienced
by human beings in comparison to, say, minerals or quarks. Argyros,
1991: 129–152
16
Corso, 1966: 226
17
Burroughs often remarks those of Kerouac’s features that bring up
akin to Catholic teachings, i.e. the essay Remembering
Kerouac in the collection The
Adding Machine.
18
Soft Machine (1957–1960),
The Ticket That Exploded (1957–61,
Nova Express (1961–1963)—the
creation timeline taken from Word Virus (1998)
19
Burroughs File, 1984: 19
20
originally published in The Third Mind,
which Burroughs wrote with Brion Gysin, this reference is to
collection Word Virus: Burroughs: 1998: 272–273
21
Satyricon: 1996
