Naked Lunch

“I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death…”

Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long.

But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can’t see it, you don’t know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street—every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.

And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down.

Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner.

“What the Mariner actually says is not important… He may be rambling, irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens in psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens.”

In fact, the Sollubi are subject to become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness.

“And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles… I never claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis… I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen—I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics…”

“Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind., until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet the needs of people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.)

The Sender is not a human individual… It is The Human Virus.

(All viruses are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence… They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, etc. So every species has a Master Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species.)

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell… Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…

Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book […] …

How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall… Doors that only open in Silence… Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse…

The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises […]