Excerpts from The Western Lands written by: William S Burroughs.
- - - -
A Kansas vet known as Joe Lazarus was the instrument of altered destiny. He had been kicked in the head by a mule and pronounced dead at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, but was returned to life. Like Saint Paul, knocked off his ass on the road to Damascus, after his miraculous recovery, Joe Laz knew what he had to do.
He set out to produce a fertile mule. He exposed horse and donkey sperm to orgone radiation in a magnetized pyramid, and inseminated the mare-didn’t hack it. So Laz went further: he rigged a magnetized stall and bombarded the copulating animals with DOR-Deadly Orgone Radiation. He sewed himself into a goat skin and whipped his beasts to wild Pan music-any woman hit by the Goat God’s whip will conceive-and finally he created a fertile mule.
Skeptics pronounced Joe Laz’s mule the most colossal hoax since the Piltdown Man.
“I had it up my sleeve,” Joe deadpanned.
- - - -
As the doctor surmised, Joe’s blind left eye was not blind. Joe had devised an artificial eye, wired into the optic center, that presented his mind with pictures, often quite at variance with the reports of the right eye. This was especially noticeable when he looked at human and animal subjects, and he came to realize wo what extent that which we see is conditioned by what we expect to see-that is, by a habitual scanning pattern, whereas the artificial eye had no scanning pattern. The lens was fixed and Joe had to direct it by movements of his head. On the other hand, the lens could be adjusted to a wide angle, which greatly extended the range of his peripheral vision. He found that he could read motives and expressions with great precision by comparing the data of the good eye, which was picking up what someone wants to project, and the data of the synthetic eye. Sometimes the difference in expression was so grotesque that he was surprised it was not immediately apparent to anyone.
- - - -
On building McDonald’s and Hilton hotels in the the last great Rainforest.
He can see it already. The jungle Hilton’s…”When Orchids Bloom in the Moonlight” on the Muzak…the bar, with orchids and a tank against one wall full of piranha fish. The management throws in live goldfish and pieces of raw meat.
The motels and souvenir shops and hamburger joints, drunken Indians, polluted rivers, the gritty bite of diesel fumes. In front of the Manaos Opera House, tourists pose with a boa constrictor.
Terrible scandal: a big pop star, in a jealous rage fueled by cocaine, grabbed his girlfriend’s Yorkshire terrier and threw it into the piranha tank. As the piranhas attacked the floundering dog, the hysterical starlet threw a heavy bronze ashtray which shattered the tank, spilling snapping fish and bloody water across the patrons as the disemboweled, screaming dog dragged its intestines across the floor. Quite a scene it was, and of course there were plenty of camera to capture this edifying spectacle for posterity and export. It’s the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed.
- - - -
The only way forward is through a hybrid being.
The Zoo Team plunges into an orgy of outlandish operations on the animal subjects…hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers, appendixes are exchanged in the operating room where often six operations are underway, the surgeons passing organs and instruments back and forth, slipping on the bloody floor. Brains are slopped from one pan to another like scrambled eggs.
“Move over! I got a pregnant wart hog here.”
Each day, stretchers loaded with patched-together animal cadavers are carted off for autopsy, and some to Recovery. It is surprising that the animal subjects were able to exhibit any behavior for study after such surgery, but some of them were able to walk, bark, howl and snarl.
There were no meows, since Joe would have no cats in the Zoo, nor any raccoons, skunks, minks, foxes, lemurs or any creature with a high cuteness rating. He did not want even want to contemplate or describe dubious surgery on these creatures, mute evidence that at one time a Creator with skilled, delicate and loving fingers drew breath on planet Earth, before the bad animal, Man, put an end to creation and so brought the evolutionary process to a halt.
For Man in indeed the final product. Not because homo sap is the apogee of perfection, before which God himself gasps in awe-”I can do nothing more!”-but because Man is an unsuccessful experiment, caught in a biologic dead end and inexorably headed for extinction.
“All right, boys, let’s cut our way to freedom.”
The hybrid concept underlies all relations between man and other animals, since only a being partaking of both man and animal can mediate between two species.
- - - -
So in his pride of prowling healers, the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady. So he frames the adulterous surgeon for prostate cancer and everybody knows there is only one cure. The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down to Pathology. Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him hot and he surprises his wife with a real pimp fuck. He’s got another surprise for her: as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat. As the Germans say, unappetitlich.
