THE HIDDEN DISEASE THAT MIGHT BE SECRETLY KILLING YOU

On William S. Burroughs' "Cities of the Red Night"

Sick days used to feel like possible gateways to new worlds. I know now that disease really does deliver its sufferer to a liminal zone, but back then I thought this feeling meant I’d return to school on the other side and everything would have changed, or, more accurately, that I would not have to return to school on the other side because everything would have changed.

This feeling only intensified after I saw them during a childhood fever.

Laying on the couch, I watched as the walls, toys, television, everything most familiar to me, slipped out of its skin and revealed its interior. They teemed beneath the veil of everything, these tireless, crawling beings—an ocean of movement interweaving everything. Call them machine elves or coral insects if you will, but, to my childeyes, these things were ladybugs. Secretly, to myself, I named this vision The Ladybug Feeling because it was accompanied by an uncomfortable bodily sensation of prickling and depersonalization. It scared and fascinated me, and over the years I tried on occasion to will it back into existence, but only ever achieved the vaguest stirring. It was strongest when I was sick, especially if I had to be held home from school with a fever. That’s when the ladybugs were most likely to reveal themselves to me, as if, in our privacy, the world whispered its great secret.

I could sense the ladybugs were tired of holding their usual shapes, that they wanted to remake the world, but, just at the cusp of transformation, something forced them back into place. Perhaps this was the confining gaze of God, or simply the familiar grooves worn by Kenneth Batcheldor’s UCP. Either way, my own weak gaze was not enough to pop them over onto a new track. If sick days were truly the gateways to different worlds, as they once seemed, then, if everyone had a sick day at once, perhaps all together we could actually get the world to change shape.

Well, the world did have its universal sick day, about six years back now, with COVID-19. Quarantine kept the majority of people confined to their homes for months. It really did bring the status quo to its knees. More than a million people died in this country alone. I mean, things were so bad that the government of the United States of America cut checks to its citizens. Here, in the US of A, people were paid not to go to work. If ever the ladybugs were going to break free of their restraints and shape themselves into something new, this was the time.

That did not happen. Instead, the entire thing was memory holed, at least as much as possible, leaving only an ambient ocean of trauma that has never been dealt with. America knows only one direction: onward.

But what if it wasn’t that simple? Maybe things did snap back into place, but not quite so rigidly as before. The old skin has lost its tightness. It has slackened. Sloughed off a bit. The body, perhaps, has even died, but the ladybugs are still trapped within, not yet free to shape themselves. This thing first must fill with gas and burst. It is far too complicated a system for instant reconfiguration. That’s what I never understood as a child. The world is configured of numberless processes, of which the virus is only one station along the way.

Pharmakonic Texts

Outside of being the author of Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs is probably most well known for his association with the Beats, his lifelong heroin addiction, and finally for his killer bar: “language is a virus.”

It’s one of those oft-quoted lines that intuitively feels true (or at least it feels cool enough to say that the speaker wants it to be true), but what was he on about?

Animals communicate in a myriad of ways. Apes can even be taught to sign to a certain extent. Whales and birds sing. Insects vomit information-containing chemicals into each other’s mouths. Even plants and fungi can pass along data, but, it seems, only humanity has developed what we can rightfully call language, and we did so in the most distant mists of our prehistory. This has afforded us incalculable advantages, so if language is a virus it is one that has become fully symbiotic with its host, as much a part of us as our gut biome:

“Would you offer violence to a well intentioned virus on its slow road to symbiosis?”

It is unknown exactly how long spoken language existed before the written word made its relatively recent arrival, but to Burroughs it doesn’t exactly matter for the written word remade the spoken word in its own image, so to speak. It was in this remaking that language became a control machine, and it is only through another remaking that we can free ourselves of its shackles.

In an insightful essay on Michael S. Judge’s fiction, RM Haines calls the work of William S. Burroughs a “pharmakonic text”, borrowing the word from Jaques Derrida who, in turn, copped it from Plato, for whom the original Greek word (φάρμακον) could mean either remedy or poison; it was also closely related to pharmakós (φαρμακός) meaning human sacrifice or exile of a human scapegoat, further expanding and obscuring its meaning. This kind of ambiguity is central to Burroughs’ negative poetics.

To call writing a pharmakon, as Derrida does, is to name both its powers to heal and to poison, to control and to liberate. Such ambiguity is central to Derrida’s reading, as well as Burroughs’ understanding. Language’s power to control is obvious. The written word is a mechanism for binding. It not only binds symbol to thing, but it binds time by freezing information on the page. It can also bind the reader’s mind through the use of those black magic techniques we all learned in elementary school: pathos, logos, and ethos. There is no shortage of humans who have weaponized the virus and are putting it towards their own ends of control using these methods. Mass media has allowed apparatuses of control to perfect their use, and for decades they have been wielding language with deadly efficiency, but corporate advertisements and political messaging are only the most overt forms of this language virus.

Fox News cooing in your granddaddy’s ear

It works in far more subtle ways as well. And not all of them are so nefarious.

“A virus is a copy,” Burroughs writes. It has no will, but to replicate itself. The harm it causes its host is only ever to that end. Morality should not be applied to the virus itself. In fact, its genetics can be implemented in the cure, as with vaccines. Haines writes of Burroughs’ body of work as an attempt to use this other side of language, its ability for liberation—

“For Burroughs, Control is the name of the pervasive condition in which human beings are reduced to being either agents or victims of a self-replicating virus whose ultimate aim is total subjection of the other—of Otherness. So much of Burroughs’ life and work was a protracted defense against this entity (alternately known to him within his fiction and his life as the Nova Mob, the Venusians, the Ugly Spirit, et al.) and its efforts to thoroughly liquidate otherness in the name of a monological, tyrannically consuming Identity.”

The Virus

In 2026, the Virus has appeared in my reading with startling regularity. Like any well adapted virus, it did not give itself away immediately. I did not realize I had been exposed until long after I’d had adequate time to pass it along. In hind sight, I noticed its presence dating back to the very first book I read this year: David Leo Rice’s The Squimbop Condition.

For sufferers of Squimbop Fever, symptoms might include: 1) taking a captive, slitting his throat with a butter knife, and decanting his fluids into a bath tub, 2) being convinced “by forces outside our understanding, that they were once half of the iconic duo [the Brothers Squimbop], and that, if only enough radical violence could be enacted, a profound enough sacrifice, then that duo could be resurrected”, and 3) a monomaniacal drive to “puncture the veil and reconnect with the real world on the other side” (102-103).

This last one might be enough to classify Squimbop Fever as a gnostic pathology, and in that it is not alone. Octavia E. Butler’s Duryea-Gode disease (or DGD), as found in her short story The Evening and the Morning and the Night, is a condition which causes its sufferers a “persistent delusion that they are trapped, imprisoned within their own flesh, and that that flesh is somehow not truly part of them” (70). This anti-materialism is an ancient Gnostic belief and one that has never sat easily with me, but it seems to have taken hold with the population at large. There is something similar going on in the looksmaxxing trends of today, this pathological desire to hold flesh as rigidly unblemished as you can, of trying to bind time with cosmetic procedures. The neurotic fear of aging, playing out both micro- and macro-cosmically, a vampirism of the elderly upon the young.

“I just need you to see me as I-I-I- I- as I am. I need this. I need this from you. I-I-I...I need this from you, please."

Shortly after my bout of DGD, I became a vector for the disease within David Kane’s Drippy Trippy Doom. Kane appears well-versed in his Burroughs and even names three stories in his collection PHARMAKON I, PHARMAKON II, and PHARMAKON III. This series of stories is written as diary entries by the incorrigible Dr. Bendigan who is brought in to investigate a cult in the Californian desert. He brushes aside their stated beliefs and diagnoses them with cultivating Control for its own sake, of wanting to own the eyes of the last man staring up at the sky. Bendigan, who himself seems to be familiar with Burroughsian Virus Theory, closes out his initial entry like so:

“Food analogy: one must be careful only when selecting what food to swallow. In the realm of knowledge, data passes into our digestive system whether we choose it or not. One has a responsibility to ruminate with agency, as if one’s mind were a stomach, the neurons acting as enzymes of agency. May you, dear reader, gestate some truth from this raw material, and may their nutrients open new vistas for your empathetic imagination to plumb” (69).

With constant internet access turning us into baleen whales, swimming through the internet, jaws agape, constantly filter feeding the polluted waters abounding, how can we be careful of what data we ingest, what language invades us when we are so constantly immersed in it? What structures are these viruses forming within us that we mistake for organically occurring ideas? I believe it was Conner Habib who said that one of the most important spiritual practices of the modern age is to periodically acid wash all of our accumulated beliefs so that only what is True remains. What is a fever but the body’s acid wash? How exactly one goes about doing so in the soul and psyche, however, is another matter.

Finally, we arrive at the ur-disease, the one that finally made the motif stand out for me: Virus B-23 as found in Burroughs’ late career masterpiece, Cities of the Red Night.

Cities of the Red Night

The book, the first in a loose trilogy, starts out straight forward enough, at least for Burroughs. We get a brief history of Captain Mission (more often seen spelt Misson) and his short-lived pirate utopia in Madagascar. The ears of David Graeber readers might perk up here as they recall his Pirate Enlightenment. Although the story of Misson is thought to be apocryphal, Graeber concurs that Madagascar was—

“the place for radical social experiments. Pirates did experiment with new forms of governance and property arrangements; what’s more, so did members of the surrounding Malagasy communities into which they married, many of whom had lived in their settlements, sailed in their ships, formed blood brotherhood pacts, and spent many hours in political conversation with them.”

Burroughs takes Mission’s story and expands it into the seed for a worldwide anarchist revolution. The Articles, as instituted by Captain Mission, would abolish slavery, hold all property in common, abolish the death penalty, and institute complete religious freedom. The pirate foresaw this attracting the oppressed from all over the world to their cause. While it doesn’t exactly work out that way for him, his movement is picked up later on in colonial America and this narrative makes up one of the book’s three main strains.

The second follows the private investigator Clem Snide as he pursues a missing person case. His original ticket brings him to Athens where he discovers his subject is dead and missing his head. Snide then takes another case that brings him to Mexico City where an archaeologist has gone missing. It’s in pursuing this case that the book starts to get properly screwy.

Cue the third strand, the titular cities: Tamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis. This series of cities is said to have been located in the Gobi Desert some hundred thousand years ago, back when the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river. These cities, Mario Vrbančić writes, present “not just the unconscious, imprisoned in psychoanalytic language and symbolism…but the enlivening of dead possibility.”

The pirate rebellion could have happened, Burroughs insists. All the pieces were there: “The chance was there. The chance was missed.” These cities, then, exist in some kind of liminal, non-actualized space. As such, they are shifting, unstable, beautiful and horrifying at once, burning with colors one aches to see, existing simultaneously as ancient Mongolian city-states and futuristic space ports.

As the straight forward narrative of Book One crashes into the bulwark of these cities at the start of Book Two, accordioning in on itself, Burroughs’ old negative poetics erupt from the previously flat surface. The novel becomes one of image and reverie, largely centering on fever, sex, sex magic, and hanging. The binding control of narrative is broken even as there is a mad rush by various characters to reclaim it.

The Triumph of Death, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1610)

Fittingly, the Red Fever’s role in all of this is ambiguous as well. Like any virus, it mutates. Stories about it swirl with inconsistency, much like they’ve grown around Covid. It’s a lab leak; it’s a means for population control; it’s radioactive; it was sent into the past; it causes sex frenzies; it came from the jungle; it came from the Gobi Desert; it came from outer space; it’s lethal; it's liberating; it allows for the transmigration of souls; it’s all a story written in counterfeited imitations of ancient texts; it’s a high school play.

All of these layers and contradictions interrupt any primary narrative from taking control. Like Clem Snide using the I Ching and playback recording techniques in his investigation, they allow an element of randomness, of disorder into their midst. No clean message is allowed to grow. Instead, Burroughs constantly undercuts himself, revealing the falsity of the language, and allowing images to stand on their own, freed from all binds, becoming depthless as dreams.

a beautifully pharmakonic word

Magical Working

An invocation, nestled at the start of the book, between the pirate history and chapter one, invokes Ix Tab, Goddess of ropes and snares, patronness of those who hang themselves. This Mayan psychopomp is eating good throughout the novel as the secret to transmigration is discovered to be contained in the ejaculate of the hanged, and a secret cult learns how to replicate themselves through the ages, sending their own soul into new vessels, endowed with the power to chase out the vessel’s native soul, but might all this endless cum be serving some other purpose?

It occurred to me that the book might be collecting this semen for its own meta magical working. Burroughs was famously interested in the work of Wilhelm Reich whose orgone accumulator actually receives a few mentions throughout Cities. It also happens to crop up in Kane’s Drippy Trippy Doom¹:

“‘Electricity messes with the orgone accumulator.’

‘The what?’

‘Where I accumulate my orgones.’

‘Of course’” (39).

For Reich, orgone was the universal life force and was closely associated with sexuality, which he considered to be the primary energetic force of life. If sex magic is powered by orgasm, then Cities of the Red Night carries a huge charge as the male orgasm to page count ratio is off the charts. Could Burroughs be using chaos magic in an attempt to break language as a machine of control and reshape it into a means for liberation in the mind of his readers? Might the ambiguous nature of the Red Fever and the Cities reveal the illusory nature of all our creations? Showing them to be imaginary structures of varying permanence and usefulness, held together by systems of control?

If language binds symbol to the thing itself, Burroughs’ techniques tirelessly gnaw at the sinews. Breaking them completely would deliver us to a realm of total chaos, but he might have achieved some amount of loosening, gained a little bit of wiggle room, which is good because the thing itself tends to be rather loose, constantly in flux, divided into categories primarily for certain uses necessary to a shared existence. While one cannot live in such a state, it is good to remember such every once in a while. Traditionally, such reminders have been one of Trickster’s roles. He breaks and reaffirms at once. It is also what ritual does, delivering adherents to a liminal space where they can see the undergirding of society, and then, afterwards, reaffirming society’s authenticity and their role within it.

This brings us back to the ladybugs and their infinite plasticity. Earlier, we asked how to free them once they become ossified? David Leo Rice asks the same question, and takes some cues in answering it from Burroughs. His work, too, accumulates orgone in the form of masses of dead Squimbop. Death becomes as commonplace in his work as fucking is in Burroughs’.

Can all this violence be towards some end?

“‘This stalemate must end! The nuclear era has guaranteed that no decisive victory is possible. We cower, instead, in terror of the earth-shattering technologies our forefathers fashioned out of the quantum disturbance of the last World War, and satisfy ourselves with an endless succession of proxy wars that never result in the clarifying epochal shift we so profoundly crave and, indeed, deserve. No, instead, these minatory witnesses…have locked us into an endlessly self-perpetuating present. A zombie present, decades beyond its expiration date, children reliving the lives of their parents to ever diminishing returns, and yet the era has refused to expire because our fear of the future…has sealed us inside a loop where time can only grow stranger and stranger and stranger as we play at War without allowing it to swell into the kind of seismic historical shift that man-to-man combat, in its very essence, exists in order to activate. The putting of things to rest, like a battle in a ring of fire in the days of old. The very reason we wage War, the dim yet sacred hope of peace on the other side, is an utter sham so long as these monstrosities lord over the battlefield, mocking it in silence’” (155).

This feeling of frozenness is such a powerful presence that I sensed it even as a child. Burroughs has been writing about it since the 1950s. The desire for some great release is swollen to throbbing proportion, but systems of control hold us in place as rigidly as nuclear bombs promising mutual annihilation. However, as we hinted earlier, there might be some leakage. Not the release we crave, but a slow dribbling, a shift in atmosphere; a swelling.

Rice returns to this feeling in his long essay titled The Feast of Fools: On Carnival, Imagination, and Heresy in the Age of the Trickster. He envisions this swelling as an overlay of town and carnival. Whereas, you once had the carnival visit town and offer a physical and temporal zone for the townspeople to visit for a few nights of blowing off steam before returning to town with renewed vigor, much like rituals and rites of passage in more traditional societies, you now have a carnival that has set up its tents within the town, a blurring of chaos and order. There is no place to go to safely blow off steam, nor any home to return to afterwards. It is all happening at once. I encourage all to go read this essay as it offers some of the best advice for navigating such a world, but if I had to boil it down for you in as few words as possible, I would say: to survive in carnival-world, study The Magician.

Finally, I earlier called all the diseases we have here discussed gnostic pathologies, and in writing this piece I found myself arriving at a new understanding of Gnosticism. While I have never been very comfortable with the anti-materialism of the tradition, I came to see the pleroma not as some transcendental place, but as the base, material level of reality, what we have been referring to here as the infinitely plastic realm of the ladybugs. The shapes that it takes are a delusion in a certain sense as they all flow from one source, but in another, equally valid sense, nothing could be more real. As it turns out, it is pharmakonic ambiguity all the way down. Any perceived falsity is not necessarily evil, but rather a precondition for a shared universe. Even the much maligned demiurge need not be a villain. They are simply the nexus who holds together our created lifeworlds. It is only when that demiurge insists on hegemonic godhood, on becoming an unstoppable machine of control, that we end up with a situation like we have today, one we seem to be frozen inside of, but even here there are lines of flight for those magicians pirate-hearted enough to seize them.

[Exit Music]

1. Which includes another possible nod to Burroughs as it also kicks off with its own Invocation.