The RM then is an artifact designed to limit and stultify on a
mass scale. In order to have this effect it must be widely
implanted. This can readily be done with modern electronic equipment and
techniques described in this treatis. The RM consists of commands which seem
harmless and in fact unavoidable ... To be a body ... but which have the
most horrific consequences.
Here are some sample RM screen effects ...
As the theatre darkens a bright light appears on the left side of the
screen. The screen lights up.
To be nobody ... On screen shadow of ladder and soldier incinerated by
the Hiroshima blast
To be everybody ... Street crowds, riots, panics
To be me ... A beautiful girl and a handsome young man point to selves
To be you ... They point to audience
Hideous hags and old men, lepers, drooling idiots point to themselves and
to the audience as they intone ...
To be me
To be you
Command no 5 ... To be myself
Command no 6 ... To be others
On screen a narcotics officer is addressing an audience of school boys,
spread out in front of him are syringes, kief pipes, samples of heroin,
hashiesh, LSD.
Officer: "Five trips on a drug can be a pleasant and exciting
experience..."
On screen young trippers ..."I'm really myself for the first time"
Etc. Happy trips ...To be myself ...no 5 ...
Officer: "THE SIXTH WILL PROBABLY BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF"
Shot shows a man blowing his head off with a shotgun in his mouth...
Officer: "Like a 15 year old boy I knew until recently, you
could well end up dying in your own spew ..."
To be others no 6 ...
To be an animal ... A lone Wolf Scout ...
To be animals: He joins other wolf scouts playing, laughing, shouting
To be an animal ... Bestial and ugly human behaviour
...brawls, disgusting, eating and sex scenes
To be animals ... Cows, sheep and pigs driven to the slaughter house
To be a body
To be bodies
A beautiful body ... a copulating couple ... Cut back and forth
and run on seven second loop for several minutes ... scramble at
different speeds ... Audience must be made to realise that to be a body is
to be bodies
...A body only exists to be other bodies.
To be a body ...Death scenes and recordings ... a scramble of last words
To be bodies ... Vista of cemeteries ...
To do it now ... Couple embracing hotter and hotter
To do it now ... A condemned cell ... Condemned man is same actor
as lover ... He is led away by the guards screaming and struggling. Cut back
and forth between sex scene and man led to execution. Couple in sex scene
have an orgasm as the condemned man is hanged, electrocuted, gassed,
garroted, shot in the head with a pistol
To do it later ... The couple pull away ...One wants to go out and eat and
go to a show or something... They put on their hats
To do it later ... Warder arrives at condemned cell to tell the
prisoner he has a stay of execution
To do it now ... Grim faces in the Pentegon. Strategic is on the way
... Well THIS IS IT ... This sequence cut in with sex scenes and a condemned
man led to execution, culminates in execution, orgasm, nuclear explosion
...The condemned lover is a horribly burned survivor
To do it later ... 1920 walk out sequence to "The Sunny Side of the Street"
... A disappointed general turns from the phone to say the president has
opened top level hot wire talks with Russia and China ... Condemned man gets
another stay of execution
To be an animal ... One lemming busily eating lichen ...
To be animals ... Hordes of lemmings swarming all over each other in
mounting hysteria ...A pile of drowned lemmings in front of somebody's
nice little cottage on a Finnish lake where he is methodically going
through sex positions with his girl friend. They wake up in a stink
of dead lemmings
To be an animal ... Little boy put on a pot
To be animals ...The man has just been hanged. The doctor steps
forward with a stethoscope
To stay down ... Body is carried out with the rope around neck ... Naked
corpses on the autopsy table ... corpse buried in quick lime.
To stay up ...Erect phallus
To stay down ... White man burns off a Negro's genitals with blow
torch ... Theatre darkens into the blow torch on the left side of the
screen
To stay present
To stay absent
To stay present ... A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures ... Cut to
face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch
To stay absent ... Sex phantasies of the boy ... The black slumps dead with
genitals burned off and intestines popping out
To stay present ... Boy watches strip tease, intent, fascinated ...A man
stands on trap about to be hanged
To stay present ...Sex phantasies of the boy ..."I ponounce this man
dead."
To stay present ... Boy wistles at girl in street ... A man's body twists
in the electric chair, his leg hairs crackling a blue fire
To stay absent ... Boy sees himself in bed with girl ... Man slumps dead in
chair smoke curling from under the hood saliva dripping from his mouth...
The theatre lights up. In the sky a plane over Hiroshima
...Little Boy slides out
To stay present ... The plane, the pilot, thew American flag ...
To stay absent ... theatre darkens into atomic blast on screen
Here we see ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday jobs
and diversions ... subways, streets, buses, trains, airports, stations,
waiting rooms, homes, flats, restaurants. offices, factories ...working ,
eating, playing, defecating, making love.
A chorus of voices cuts in RM phrases
To stay up
To stay down
Elevators, airports, stairs, ladders
To stay in
To stay out
Street signs, door signs, people at head of lines admitted to
restaurants and theatres
To be myself
To be others
Customs agents check passports, man identifies himself at bank to cash
cheque
To stay present
To stay absent
People watching films, reading, looking at TV ...
A composite of this sound and image track is now run on seven
second loop without change for several minutes.
Now cut in the horror pictures
To stay up
To stay down
Elevators, airports, stairs, ladders, hangings, castrations
To stay in
To stay out
Door signs, operation scenes ... doctor tosses bloody tonsils, adenoids,
appendix into receptacle
To stay present
To stay absent
People watching film ... ether mask, ether vertigo ... triangles, spheres,
rectangles, pyramids, prisms, coils go away and come in regular
sequence ...a coil coming in, two coils coming in, three coils coming in
... a coil going away, two coils going away, four going away
A coil straight ahead going away, two coils on the left and right
going away. three coils left right and centre going away, four coils
right left centre going away
A coil coming, two coils coming in, three coils coming in, four coils
coming in ... spirals of light ... round and round faster, baby eaten by
rats, hangings, electrocutions, castrations....
The RM can be cut in with the most ordinary scenes covering the planet in a
smog of fear ...
The RM is a built-in electronic police force armed with hideous threats.
You don't want to be a cute little wolf cub? All right, cattle to the
slaughter house meat on a hook.
Here is a nostalgic reconstruction of the old fashioned Mayan methods. The
wrong kind of workers with wrong thoughts are tortured to death in
rooms under the pyramid ... A young worker has been given a powerful
hallucigen and a sexual stimulant ... Naked he is stripped down and skinned
alive ... The Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time
...The Ouab bird stands there, screams, washing through his wild blue eyes.
Others are crabs from the waist up clicking their claws in ecstasy,
they dance around and mimic the flaved man. The scribes are busy with
sketches ...Now he is strapped into a segmented copper centipede and placed
gently on a bed of hot coals ... Soon the priests will dig the soft meat from
the shell with their golden claws ... Here is another youth staked out on an
ant hill honey smeared on his eyes and genitals ...Others with heavy weights
on their backs are slowly dragged through the wooden troughs in which shards
obsidian have been driven ...So the priests are the masters of pain and
fear and death ...To do right... to obey the priests ... To do wrong? the
priest's very presence and a few banal words....
The priests postulated and set up a hermetic universe of which they were
the axiomatic controllers. In so doing they became Gods who controlled
the known universe of the workers. They became Fear and Pain, Death
and Time. By making opposition seemingly impossible they failed to make any
provision for opposition. There is evidence that this control system broke
down in some areas before the arrival of the White God. Stellae have been
found defaced and overturned, mute evidence of a worker's revolution. How
did this happen? The history of revolutionary movements shows that they are
usually led by defectors from the ruling class. The Spanish rule in South
America was overthrown by Spanish revolutionaries. The French were driven out
of Algeria by Algerians educated in France. Perhaps one of the priest Gods
defected and organised a worker's revolution ...
The priest Gods in the temple. They move very slowly, faces ravaged with
age and disease. Parasitic worms infest their flesh. They are making
calculations for the sacred books.
"400,000,000 years ago on this day a grievous thing happened..."
Limestone skulls rain in through the porticos. The Young Maize God leads
the workers as they storm the temple and drag the priests out. They build a
huge brush fire, throw the priests in and then throw the sacred
books in after them. Time buckles and bends. The old Gods, surfacing
from the immemorial depths of time, burst in the sky ... Mr Hart stands
there looking at the broken sellae ... "How did this happen?"
His control system must be absolute and world wide. Because such a control
system is even more vulnerable to attack from without than revolt within...
Here is Bishop Luanda burning burning sacred books. To give you an idea as to
what is happening, imagine our civilisation invaded by louts from outer
space...
"Get some bulldozers in here. Clear out all this crap..." The formulae of
all natural sciences, books, paintings, the lot, swept into a vast pile and
burned. and that's it. No one ever heard of it.
Three codices survived the vandalism of Bishop Landa and these
are burned around the edges.
No way to know if we have here the sonnets, the Mona Lisa or the
remenants of a Sears Roebuck catalogue after the old out-house burned
down in a brush fire. A whole civilisation went up in smoke...
When the Spaniards arrived, they found the Mayan aristocrats lolling in
hammocks. Well, time to show them what is what. Five captured workers bound
and stripped, are castrated on a tree stump. the bleeding sobbing,
screaming bodies bodies thrown into a pile...
"And now get this through your gook nuts. We want to see a pile of gold big
and we want to see it pronto. The White God has spoken."
Consider now the human voice as a weapon. To what extent can the unaided
human voice duplicate effects that can be done with a tape
recorder? Learning to speak with the mouth shut, thus displacing your speech,
is fairly easy. You can also learn to speak backwards, which is fairly
difficult. I have seen people who can repeat what you are saying after you
and finish at the same time. This is a most disconcerting trick, particularly
when praciticed on a mass scale at a political rally. Is it possible to
actually scramble speech? A far-reaching biologic weapon can be forged from a
new language. In fact such a language already exists. It exists as Chinese,
a total language closer to multileval structure of experience, with a script
derived from hieroglyphs, more closely related to the objects and areas
described. The equanimity of the Chinese is undoubtedly derived from their
language being structured for greater sanity. I notice the Chinese, wherever
they are retain the written and spoken language, while other immigrant
peoples will lose their language in two generations. The aim of this
project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherit in
all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The
follow-falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language.
This IS OF IDENTITY. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you
may be you are not an "animal", you are not a "body", because these are
verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the assignment of permanent
condition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the IS of identity.
This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient
Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS in
the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb TO BE can easily be omitted from any
languages and the followers of Count Korgybski have done this, eliminating
the verb TO BE in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the
English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain in
force so long as the unchanged language is spoken.
THE DEFINITE ARTICLE THE. THE contains the implication of one and only:
THE God, THE universe, THE way, THE right, The wrong, If there is another,
then THAT universe, THAT way is no longer THE universe, The way. The definite
article THE will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take it's
place.
THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF EITHER/OR. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or
false, the whole concept of OR will be deleted from the language and replaced
by juxtaposition, by AND This is done to some extent in any pictorial
language where two concepts stand literally side by side. These
falsifications inherent in the English and other western alphabetical
languages give the reactive mind commands their overwhelming force
in these languages. Consider the IS of identity. When I say to be me,
to be you, to be myself, to be others- whatever I may be called upon to be or
to say that I am- I am not the verbal label "myself." The word BE in the
English language contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of
damage, the categorial imperative of permanent condition. To be a
body, to be an animal. If you see the relation of a pilot to his
ship, you see crippling force of the reactive mind command to be a body.
Telling the pilot to be the plane, then who will pilot the plane?
The IS of identity, assigning a rigid and permanent status, was greatly
reinforced by the customs and passport control the came in after World
War I. Whatever you may be, you are not the verbal labels in your passport.
any more than you are the word "self." So you must be prepared to prove at
all times that you are what you are not. Much of the falsification inherent
in the categorical definite THE. THE now, THE past, THE time, THE space,
THE energy, THE matter, THE unIverse. Definite article THE contains the
implications of no other. THE universe locks you in THE, and denies the
possibility of any other. If other universes are possible, then the universe
is no longer THE it becomes A. The definite article THE is deleted and
replaced by A. many of the RM commands are in point of fact contradictory
commands and a contradictory command gains its force from the Aristotelian
concept of either/or. To do everything, to do nothing, to have
everything, to have nothing, to do it all, to do not any, to stay up, to
stay down, to stay in, to stay out, to stay present, to stay absent. These
are in point of fact either/or propositions. To do nothing OR everything, to
have it all, OR not any, to stay present OR to stay absent. Either/or is
more difficult to fomulate in a written language where both alternatives
are pictorially represented and can be deleted entirely from the spoken
language. The whole reactive mind can be in fact reduced to three little
words - to be "THE". That is to be what you are not, verbal formulations.
I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting
as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that
the falsifications of syllabic western languages are in point of fact actual
virus mechanisms. The IS of identity the purpose of a virus is to SURVIVE. To
survive at any expense to the host invaded. To be an animal, to be a body. To
be an animal body that the virus can invade. To be animals, to be bodies. To
be more animal bodies, so that the virus can move from one body to another.
To stay present as an animal body, to stay absent as antibody or resistance
to the body invasion.
The categorial THE is also a virus mechanism, locking you in THE virus
universe. EITHER/OR is another virus formula. It is alway you OR the
virus. EITHER/OR. This is in point of fact the conflict formula which is
seen to be archetypical virus mechanism. The proposed language will delete
these virus mechanisms and make them impossible of formulation in the
language. This language will be a tonal language like Chinese, it will
also have a hieroglyphic script as pictorial as possible without being to
cumbersome or difficult to write. This language will give one option of
silence. When not talking, the user of this language can take in the silent
images of the written, pictorial and symbol languages.
I have described here a number of weapons and tactics in the war game.
Weapons that change consciousness could call the war game in question. All
games are hostile. Basically there is only one game from here to eternity.
Mr Hubbard says that Scientology is a game where everybody wins. There are no
games where everybody wins. That's what games are all about, winning and
losing ... The Versailles Treaty ... Hitler dances the Occupation Jig ...
War criminals hang at Nuremberg ...It is a rule of this game that there can
be no final victory since this mean the end of the war game. Yet every
player must believe in final victory and strive for it with all his power.
Faced by the nightmare of final defeat he has no alternative. So all
technologies with escalating efficiency produce more and more total weapons
until we have the atom bomb which could end the game by destroying all
players. Now mock up a miracle. The so stupid players decide to save the
game. They sit down around a big table and draw up a plan for the immediate
deactivation and eventual destruction of all atomic weapons. Why stop there?
Conventional bombs are unnecessarily destructive if nobody has them hein?
Let's turn back the war clock back to 1917:
Keep the home fires burning
Through the hearts are yearning
There's a long, long trail awinding ... .
Back to the American Civil War...
"He has loosed the fatal lightning of this terrible swift sword."
His fatal lightning didn't cost as much in those days. Save a lot on the
defence budget this way on back to flintlocks, matchlocks, swords, armour,
lances, bows and arrows, spears, stone axes and clubs. Why stop there? Why
not grow teeth and claws, poison fangs, stingers, spines, quills, beaks
and suckers and stink glands and fight in out in the muck hein?
That is what this revolution is about. End of game. New games?
There are no new games from here to eternity.
END OF THE WAR GAME.
Williams Burroughs
