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Zairja, Missiles, Bees: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in David Blair’s Wax

Antonio J. Bonome

Abstract

During the first Gulf War, David Blair produced the first independently made electronic film to achieve international distribution: Wax, or The Discovery of Television among the Bees (1991). Blair’s use of ARPANET to screen Wax recalls Ramón Llull’s ingenuity in repurposing an artifact against the beliefs of its creators. A pioneer of nonlinear video editing—a technology now common in software on today’s laptops and smartphones—Blair chose video as his medium because it enabled him to construct a “punning machine” and to work across disciplines such as drawing and performance art. Examining Blair’s practice clarifies William S. Burroughs’ own working methods, his fascination with weaponry, and his use of technologies such as the tape recorder and the e-meter to “queer” time. In Blair’s narrative apparatus, text often arises from the interpretation of images, a strategy that recalls Burroughs’ fold-in method. Blair’s punning, with the Gnostic resonances noted by Kathy Acker, only begins to illuminate Burroughs’ more intricate pursuit of “coordinate points,” yet both artists share an undercurrent of semiotic warfare. To contextualize this affinity, the medieval zairja will be considered as a precedent for Blair’s and Burroughs’ nonlinear approaches to time and semiosis. When Ibn Khaldun questioned its efficacy, the zairja responded it had been invented by the prophet Idris, identified with the biblical patriarch Enoch. Burroughs’ conception of nuclear weapons as “soul-killers” resonates throughout Wax, a film queering patriarchal western missile-land, where Burroughs’ presence is felt through a cameo appearance.

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... WHAT SCARED YOU INTO TIME? INTO BODY? INTO SHIT? I WILL TELL YOU. THE WORD. THE THEE-WORD. IN THEE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD. SCARED YOU ALL INTO SHIT FOREVER. COME OUT FOREVER. COME OUT OF THE TIME WORD THE FOREVER. COME OUT OF THE BODY WORD THEE FOREVER. COME OUT OF THE SHIT WORD THE FOREVER. ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE. FOREVER … AMIGOS MUCHACHOS A TRAVES DE TODOS SUS CIELOS VEA LA ESCRITURA SILENCIOSA DE BRION GYSIN HASSAN SABBAH. LA ESCRITURA DE SILENCIO LA ESCRITURA DE ESPACIO. ESO ES TODO HASSAN SABBAH…
William S. Burroughs (in Burroughs and Ginsberg 65-66)

1ASU Burroughs Archive. MS SC BU Box 13, Item 8, File 1 (Detail).

1. Introduction

2Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees was the surreal title of the very first full-length video ever to be shared online. Directed by David Blair in 1991 and aired through a platform developed by the American Federal Defense Department, Wax (henceforward) did not exactly support the Gulf War. However, the film's hypnotic and seemingly disjointed mash-up of times and spaces likely prevented some viewers from recognizing the antiwar message on the first viewing.

3To justify a comparison between Burroughs and Blair as process-based creators, it is worth remembering that Burroughs experimented with non-linearity during the 1960s by using electromechanical devices such as an e-meter or a tape recorder in coordination with traditional graphic devices such as grids or collages contained in scrapbooks or dream notebooks. Said experimentation was kept in the author’s archives and serially repurposed in his writing during the 60s, 70s and especially the 80s, when marketing demanded to sell the author’s hypothetical return to narrative. My theory since 2009—reinforced by conversations with Professor John Unger at Truman State University, and Professor Oliver Harris from Keele University—has been that from 1960 on Burroughs created his own semiotic system, a writing machine that can be intuited by looking at Burroughs’ archives and paying specific attention to his audiovisual production. I crudely represented Burroughs’ system at several conferences as shown in the 2009 diagrams below:

4These images partially justify why my choice for Burroughs scholars has been unusual. In the scholarly literature on Burroughs, Ansen, Hayles, Kahn, Zurbrugg or Acker have gone farther and have been clearest in their effort to make sense of this author. While Burroughs’ system was intricate and not always consistent, it was heuristically indebted to a serial, process-based, and conceptual attitude that was more widespread in music and the visual arts than in writing. Thus, the comparative angle emanated as a crucial tool to show how Burroughs’ machinery operated, for instance in the genesis of The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, a serial work where performance art, sound recording, three-column experimentation, and scrapbooking were crucial. The Adding Machine mentions 1962 as the year he collaborated with sculptor David Budd, and 1964 as the year he begins scrapbooking (13). Burroughs’ collaboration with Budd and the avant-garde composer Earl Browne materialized in the joint exhibition in March 1964: “Peinture, Poésie, Musique: David Budd, rencontre avec William Burroughs et Earl Browne” (Skerl 243), which shows he was close to other multimedia artists interested in combinatorics and serialism. Besides telling Burroughs about the last words of Dutch Schultz, David Budd generously partook in Burroughs’ experiments with Scientology, as it may be corroborated in the document image below, datable c. 1968:

5ASU Burroughs Archive. MS SC BU Box 13, Item 1

6To stress the role of Scientology and auditing during that period, it may be useful to look at the 1968 Scientology Clearing Course materials1 and collate them with Burroughs’ recordings from those decades; more specifically, in the unofficially released record The Electronic Revolution (1998), the Clearing Course materials are quoted verbatim (and subsequently cut up). Some of those contents recur in Burroughs’ Revised Boy Scout Manual (61), and are also presented and discussed more extensively in Burroughs’ and Gysin’s book of essays The Electronic Revolution (1970):

Now we try using some of Mr. Hubbard’s reactive mind phrases which are supposed in themselves to produce illness. To be me, to be you, to stay here, to stay there, to be a body, to be bodies, to stay present, to stay past. Now we scramble this in together and show it to the subject. Could seeing and hearing this sound and image track, scrambled down to very small units, bring about an attack of cold virus?

7The fragment above confirms Burroughs’ interest in sound, image, technology, embodiment, and weaponry, which will be relevant in the discussion. He contemplates some of the ideas gleaned from Scientology (i.e., reactive mind phrases) and hypothesizes the possibility of customizing their alleged power into producing specific diseases through scrambling. Scrambling in Burroughs as a queer author might be two-fold: “Queerness scrambles and interrupts the structured analogues of historical progress because it is not confinable to such rigidity; by its nature queerness is fluid, and queer time is no exception to this phenomenon” (Atkinson 82). To illustrate that point, readers might picture Burroughs writing his queer Wild Boy fantasies, and how in the “Penny Arcade Peep Show” chapter he scrambles a thinly disguised version of Scientology’s exercises in visualization (as in Part IV of Scientology’s Clearing Course) with graphic homosexual scenes (Wild Boys 44-9). While those passages may be hard to understand for those who are not familiar with Scientology, Burroughs’ search for coordinate points and his experimentation with time through parataxis led to an alleged return to narrative that paradoxically deployed several narrative multiverses, like for instance, in Cities of the Red Night (1981).

8Technology played a significant role in Burroughs’ system; for instance, his search for coordinate points and recurrent patterns depended on the day planners and agendas he repurposed as scrapbooks and dream notebooks. Additionally, his vision of time was informed by Maya calendrics. Built on rotation, repetition, prediction, and divination, Maya calendars suggested that past events determine the present. Burroughs was also able to apply the idea that calendars were instruments of control to his study of mass media, especially newspapers, but also radio and television. In fact, as early as 1969, he drew a bold analogy between the possible uses of calendars by the Mayan ecclesiastical caste and the use of typesetting by the editors of the daily press (Odier 35).

9Equally significant in his exploration of time were Korzybski’s General Semantics and Ron L. Hubbard’s Dianetics. In the latter, memory is structured as a “time track” comprising tridimensional multisensory images or impressions from the past that, in turn, influence an individual’s current actions and choices. Hence, the importance of memory and all possible paramnesias in Burroughs demanded precise multimedia records and an archive. Burroughs attacked (chrono)normativity by cutting up and reorganizing the time track, which demanded the use of technologies such as a tape recorder, a photographic camera, an e-meter, or psychedelics. The image below contains a reference to Burroughs’ bad DMT trip registered during an e-meter auditing session. He described the episode in Evergreen Review: “The Ovens closed round me glowing metal lattice in purple and blue and pink screaming burning flash flesh under meat cleaver of Sammy The Butcher and pitiless insect eyes of white-hot crab creatures of The Ovens” (Burroughs “Comments” 31).

10ASU Burroughs Archive. MS SC BU Box 13, Item 6, File 1

11The way Burroughs utilized and coordinated these technologies is reminiscent of the annual planner calendar books he repurposed as scrapbooks and dream journals. The archives suggest that Burroughs sometimes repurposed his e-meter as a Ouija board; tape recording and site-specific playback in his hands sometimes embodied the modern defixio. More importantly, these tools produced substantial copy and often yielded prospective outcomes of great interest to any science fiction writer. Ultimately, the way Burroughs weaponized these technologies against their creators or advocates resonates in the way David Blair broadcasted Wax through ARPANET, and rotation in Burroughs and Blair will bring a fascinating historical precedent in the realm of technology.

12Blair’s creativity in the 1980s was rooted in a multimedia strategy that echoed Burroughs; the former’s readiness to try new things with cutting-edge technology encouraged him to make use of a non-linear video editing tool that had just become available. Talking about the benefits of using that technology in terms of composition and concept, Blair declared:

Fortunately, I discovered a non-linear editing system in New York that had been made available for artist use … I went to see it and realized this was exactly what I was trying to do. You could have 2000 pairs of digitised frames available, each pair representing the first and last frames of a shot. These were all lined up, and by pushing buttons, you could rearrange their order, like rearranging a collage on paper. Then you could order the machine to play the shots represented by these virtual stills, in the order they were arranged .… And I could really try out every possible combination before I chose the sequence that I really wanted. (Zurbrugg and Burt 216)

13The director’s commentary on technology partially obscures a creative approach to filmmaking that heavily drew strategies from the rest of the arts; in reality, the film’s creative process progressed naturally from drawing to multimedia performance to video, and eventually to net-art. Such an organic approach to semiosis could very easily be compared to that of Burroughs, but further connections emerged while exploring Blair. Interviewed in 1992 by Nicholas Zurbrugg for the outstanding Art, Performance, Media: 31 interviews (2004), David Blair revealed Keith Haring’s subway drawings as an inspiration for his own illustrations in Monkey Monk, a multimedia performance artwork that sparked his work on Wax. Similarly, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz contained an unusual approach to writing, with two performance artworks carried by Burroughs in New York on February 14, 1965, and April 23rd of the same year, as an integral part of his expanded literature project.

14David Blair also declared a fascination with the albums by the radio theatre troupe The Firesign Theatre, which suggests an early awareness of sound and disembodiment. He also expressed an interest in the new wave of British science fiction and confirmed his obsession with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Despite having such a wide range of interests, Blair did not elaborate as to why he envisioned certain sci-fi film sequences as algorithms:

I would get a little stoned with a friend and sit and talk about a very bad science fiction movie and turn it inside out from moment to moment. It was as if the momentary appearance of part of the story was what we’d nowadays call an algorithm—or the TV screen itself was the algorithm—that could unfold many different stories, dependent upon what story-picture was passing at that moment. (Zurbrugg 60)

15Blair’s tentative intuition about algorithms began with simple combinatorics experiments with video: “One of the best moments was an afternoon when we saw two movies with the same script—It Conquered the World and Zontar, the Thing from Venus. We got this incredibly ineffable sense of the same thing being repeated twice with different actors—something ‘really Pynchonian’” (Zurbrugg 60). Though the film's obsession with conflict, weapons, and the paranormal or uncanny is clearly influenced by Gravity’s Rainbow, Blair’s Zontar experiment does have resonance with Burroughs’ fold-in technique (i.e., using one sound track for two different image tracks as a generative strategy). That strategy will resurface in Wax's plot and storytelling through audiovisual punning. Lebanese video artist and theorist Jalal Toufic writes about Burroughs’ theories and the “reality film” as follows:

Many states of altered consciousness unlock the a priori conjunction between a sound and an image … When in such states, one has to eschew falling either into the absolute solitude that consists in the deadly complete separation of the sound track and the image track (William Burroughs); or into the paranoid excessive correlations between sounds and images: for example, one body for two voices in possession (Friedkin’s The Exorcist). (Toufic 140)

16With Burroughs’ invisible cinema in mind, Toufic suggests the instance of one body, two voices from The Exorcist to illustrate how dividing (and/or altering) the soundtrack and image track in film causes a deep impression on the viewer. “The Whisperer”, in the service of the press oligarch in Ah Puch is Here (1979), appears already in the second edition (if we consider the text of The Atlantic Monthly as the first) of The Last Words of Dutch Schultz published by Cape Goliard (50-54), and in the final script published by Arcade (81-85), demonstrating his gifts of evil ventriloquism. The fact that Legs Diamond speaks while keeping his lips shut in scene 90 is another example of this harmful skill that highlights the subjectifying capabilities of the Reality Studio (Arcade 33). Surprisingly, Blair's abovementioned (presumably) synchronized projection of two different B-movies with the same script (roughly, two bodies, one voice) virtually exhibits a reverse but equally inspiring methodology. Questioned by Zurbrugg about Burroughs, Blair claimed that during the early 80s he knew very little about cut-ups, which is noteworthy since there are certain features in Wax’s genesis that will be familiar to Burroughs’ scholars and likewise deserve attention from anyone interested in cinema, narrative, and technology. What follows examines the many connections between Blair and Burroughs, but first a clear distinction between sound- and image track is in order to guide later comparisons.

2. Rashōmon: Cheers Here are the Undead

17Readers who have not seen Wax may rightly suspect that a film produced by methods as those already suggested may have a challenging plot. To paint as clear a picture as possible, four complementary descriptions of the film’s story line are provided hereunder, along with numerous references for additional research. A literal description of Wax might begin, firstly, with the film’s sound track, where a voiceover initiates the narrative as follows: “In early 1914, a spiritualist cinematographer from the Supernormal Picture Society of London joined the Royal Expedition to the Antarctic. His name was James Maker, he was also known as ‘Hive’ Maker. James Hivemaker hoped to photograph evidence of life after death” (Wax 0:01:49-0:02:13).

18The film’s image track, which begins with several segments of found footage, introduces the character James Hivemaker (Wax 0:02:01-0:02:04) by displaying two images of William S. Burroughs that have been manipulated by splicing in their vertical axis an inverted replica of one side of his face (Figures 1 and 2).

19Figure 1

20Figure 2

  • 2 Eliot cited Shackleton’s account of an Arctic expedition as an inspiration for his text.

21The Royal Expedition to the Antarctic, which is mentioned in the sound track, along with Burroughs’ altered images on the image track, undoubtedly bring to mind a simplified version of his photographical compositions alongside Ian Sommerville, on one hand, while on the other they remind of Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s book The Third Mind (1978), where Burroughs introduces their collaborative project by building his discourse upon T.S. Eliot’s reference to that bizarre expedition in chapter “Who is the third that walks beside you?”2 One further mention to The Third Mind is pertinent here, since as programmer and composer David Pocknee recalls, in that book Gysin’s poem “KICK THAT HABIT MAN” is “placed in reverse lexicographic order by Ian Sommerville, using a brand new [Sic.] Honeywell 200 Model 120 computer (released in 1965, the same year the book was finished)”). Pocknee’s website provides an analysis of Brion Gysin’s permutated poems to show or “give a better understanding of how computer algorithms were used in this period, in order to get a better understanding of the cutting-edge and pioneering technology that Gysin and his collaborator, Ian Sommerville were using to create this work” (Pocknee). Algorithms were a common interest in the artists discussed in this essay, a theme relevant to Wax, which follows Jacob Maker, a weapons guidance programmer who unexpectedly falls under the spell of his bees.

  • 3 Interestingly, Burroughs relocated to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981.

22Eyal Amiran reads Blair’s film against a historical shift from kamikazes to drones, with suicide bombing re-embodying death (in Bose 163), an approach that gains relevance as the plot unfolds. Every time Jacob visits his beehives (imported by his grandfather James Hivemaker from Basra, Iraq) he experiences a blackout, and the day after suffering this mnemonic disturbance, he recalls that his bees were talking just before his blackout occurred. Not only are his Mesopotamian bees damaging his memory; they also appear to be implanting strange recollections in his mind. Furthermore, Jacob gets increasingly attracted to his bees and begins to realize he does not understand his work in the military-industrial complex. The film shows how Jacob’s alien bees enable him to travel in space and time to places like The Garden of Eden, in Abilene, Kansas, and here word/image punning as a narrative device is clearly used (Burroughs might use the term “intersection points” to describe it). The Garden of Eden is the site for Jacob’s grandfather house and Jacob’s birthplace in the film; it is a clear biblical reference, a fine example of folk art in the Sunflower State, and a way to queer time through visual punning.3

23As far as his job is concerned, Jacob begins to realize its critical nature to the point that he is convinced that he is a weapon himself. Jacob’s (perhaps not so) bizarre idea comes with a suspicion of being in the bees’ crosshairs now he is a weapon, so he starts wearing his beekeeping protective gear night and day. Jacob works as a computer programmer in beekeeper’s drag, an incongruous attire that also obscures identity and gender into non-differentiation. The bees are agents for the dead souls, so Jacob was correct in his paranoid thinking. They will finally attack Jacob and insert a glass TV set in his head. Jacob sees himself travelling across space and time on his Bee TV as he physically cruises New Mexico in his beekeeping suit and visits real key sites of atomic experimentation, such as the Trinity site, in White Sands. His mind-bending journey reaches a climax when he visits a cave and discovers the bees’ dead alphabet. Jacob is promised a new body by the insects after his forthcoming sacrificial demise. It is time for Jacob to leave his body behind and turn into a letter in the dead alphabet. To achieve reincarnation, Jacob must accomplish his mission and kill. The bees use Maker as a guided missile to attack an Iraqi commando in the desert. At the end of the film, Jacob is back in Alamogordo, New Mexico, but has indeed reincarnated into two female twins who work in genetic engineering. It seems his close encounter of the third kind at the cave has given him access to an uncanny multiverse.

24The above literal description of the plot may seem, perhaps, a little arid (or a little too much) to some readers, but its charm increases exponentially when, thirdly, the film director and an associate scholar describe it in an academic essay:

Wax, or The Discovery of Television among the Bees … is a film told from the wandering point of view of a semi-intelligent agent, perhaps a literal artificial intelligence lost in a missile, before, during, and after a somewhat Cain-like act of revenge. This narrator-agent is also one Jacob Maker, an apparently real person who has been forced to interact perhaps too long with an automated story generation system (represented by the bees of the film’s title). (Trappl and Petta 84)

25David Blair and Tom Mayer carry out the above reading of Wax in 1997; it could be interpreted as a mental health warning against the use or abuse of artificial intelligence, or perhaps just describe a hallucination by an AI, which results equally enthralling. David Link comments about the Manchester Mark 1, the first computer recognized worldwide:

The engineers developed the volatile storage that made this machine possible out of the so-called ‘Moving Target Indication’ in the radar technology of the Second World War. The permanent increase in the range of the equipment finally led to hallucinations of the apparatuses themselves, which were discussed under the title of ‘radar angels’—dots on the CRT screen, which no longer corresponded to enemy aircrafts and which directly preceded the storage spots of the Mark I’s memory—the Williams tube. In 1952, the British mathematician Christopher Strachey wrote a programme for the Mark I, which of all things composed love-letters (Link 12).

26The commentary above highlights a tension involving weaponization and de-weaponization of technology in relation to time, space, semiosis, and embodiment. The “Cain-like act of revenge” alluded to by Blair and Mayer evokes, on the one hand, the cruelty of Cain against his brother Abel and by extension of war in general (and the Gulf War in particular), while on the other it associates war to the People of the Book, and obliquely recalls the Cainite Gnostic sect.

27As the film progresses, Blair’s critical stance towards the Gulf War becomes more apparent; furthering Blair’s anti-war posture, Jalal Toufic provides an intriguing fourth version of the film’s plot:

Every Name in History Is I
In memoriam William S. Burroughs
To fight the anonymity with which the war enemy is killed even by precision bombing, the soldier has to receive, from their state of being already dead, the calls of the unknown persons who will soon be murdered by him. Such a call is possible in the nonlinear time of undeath. The Jacob Maker of David Blair’s Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1992) has to receive the call of the two Iraqi tank soldiers at whom he is shortly going to fire a missile during the Gulf War and to whom he is invisible (whether because he is flying a stealth fighter or because the radars of their unit have been blinded). (Toufic Forthcoming 16-17)

28Toufic’s description manages to sketch the film’s use of non-normative time, adding an intriguing correlation between non-linearity and a state of “undeadness” that calls for further study, also regarding Burroughs’ literary multiverses. More importantly, Jacob’s realization that “he is a weapon” needs to be put into historical context once again, but this time in relation to queerness, and (post-)Beat writers. In their 1995 book Posthuman Bodies, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston begin the introduction to the section “Queer” by quoting David Wojnarowicz's memoir Close to the Knives (1991), where the AIDS-infected body is compared to a weapon (In Halberstam and Livingstone 14–15). In Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012), Cynthia Carr notes that Wojnarowicz met and was influenced by both Keith Haring (172) and the original Beat, writer Herbert Huncke (82–93), who introduced Burroughs to opiates and the carny world in the 1940s. David Wojnarowicz’s visions are poignant when it comes to describing the dangers homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians (among many other individuals) had to face during his lifetime; there, he certainly communes with Huncke's rugged candidness. While Wax does not feature in Posthuman Bodies, Wojnarowicz’s memoir not only shares with the film a portrayal of a violent America scared of diversity; it includes a chapter where the narrator cruises the U.S. Southwest while pondering:

Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it. If they own it, they will celebrate it, like in the air force base museum of the atomic bomb, where whole families of camera-toting tourists gather after the required i.d. security checks. In the gray-carpeted rooms, they walk the mazes of portable screens and platforms and enlarged photographs of death and incineration as seen from a discreet distance. The distance is far enough so you can’t see the bodies, only the architecture. (Wojnarowicz 35)

29Jacob Maker’s hallucinatory walk on the radioactive sands of New Mexico starkly echoes Wojnarowicz’s narrator cruising the same desert, but chock-full with rage, lust, and rebellion. Wojnarowicz’s storyteller does mention a visit to an atomic bomb museum, perhaps that one formerly located in Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico (less than two hundred and fifty miles from White Sands). If his story had been incorporated into Waxweb’s multiverse, it would have given Blair’s narrative a distinctive edge. While contemplating such parallelisms might result too speculative, it is worth reminding how weaponry, war, and patriarchal violence are interiorized by male narrators both in that fragment of Close to the Knives and in Wax, albeit in different fashion, which might explain why Wax was not well-received by video art curators. In Blair’s words:

I was quite surprised that it was really disproportionally unpopular in video art circles … All the things I did, I guess, were all the things people don’t trust … it looks terrible from the outside. Things like a man in a white suit, a man talking all the time, dealing with bees as if they were some sort of reified femininity, and speaking from the very heart of patriarchal culture—Missile-Land—as if this was a myth to live by, as if I was promulgating all the things that people thought were evil. (Zurbrugg 65)

30Blair’s surprise shows, on one hand, his initial candor regarding the contemporary art market, and particularly the video art milieu, while on the other his subsequent assessment of the film’s formal features is partially accurate. It is true his film’s political stance towards the Gulf War is not exactly blunt, and women are not given much of a voice (or screen time) in it. However, his innovative and sophisticated use of new media, what his work did to normative time, and the subtle discourse Wax contained explains why Blair’s work was well-liked by fans of cyberpunk culture and endorsed by queer avant-garde writers like Kathy Acker.

3. The Process: A Gnostic Negative Space

31David Blair’s articulation of a loose script for Wax depended on the images and sequences he used to organize his image track (and vice versa), with non-linear video editing used as a punning machine. While sound and image developed organically through recombination, Blair’s script also incorporated random readings he carried out at a New York library during the 80s. One of the books he had access to was Blazing the Trail: Reminiscences of A.Z. Abushady, Poet, Beemaster, Humanist, published in Alexandria, Egypt in 1939. The book contained some strange textual fragments and a few enigmatic illustrations that fired Blair’s imagination and helped him build his plot; found footage and computer graphics also fueled his punning machine. Blair’s appropriation and recombination strategies remind, for instance, of Burroughs’ use of the fold-in method in the sound and action tracks of The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1975).

32By using a non-linear video edition tool, Blair obtained something that he claimed Kathy Acker perceived as “a huge articulated punning structure” (Zurbrugg 63). He took Acker’s alleged interpretation further and defined that structure as a “gnostic negative space … the actual punning machine, some kind of algorithm spinning out the puns” (63). Blair’s intuitive approach regarding Gnosticism recalls, if applied to Burroughs, some analyses of his work by literary critics such as Gregory Stephenson, who in “The Gnostic Vision of William S. Burroughs,” finds certain connections between the The Soft Machine and Gnostic thought; not only because the book is concerned with how the self relates to the body, but also because “the attitude that characterizes all the Gnostic systems is that the world, the body, and matter are unreal and evil. They are illusions that are the products of malevolent powers called Archons …. The Archons seek to obstruct this liberation and to maintain their dominion” (Stephenson 60).

33Blair’s punning machine, with “some kind of algorithm spinning out the puns” suggests a concept the reader may keep in mind when discussing the zairja and its conceptual relevance in Blair and Burroughs’ working processes. Donald Kunze described the mysterious Medieval computer as “a set of linked techniques … the Zairja used celestial calculations and aleatory procedures to extend potential and sometimes fantastical relations, specifying as many causes as possible for any idea or effect” (Kunze 788). Studying David Blair’s work (and Burroughs’) under this definition of the zairja provides Stephenson’s analysis of Burroughs’ serial writing with an intuition of a “gnostic negative space” operating at full throttle. It points at the tyrannical rule of the Archons, while also comparatively describing Blair’s and Burroughs’ narrative engines.

34Blair’s punning machine allowed for the unsayable and the otherwise inaccessible to manifest through combinatory. Thanks to technology, his film’s final materialization into the hypermedia net-art piece Waxweb allowed readers to navigate that narrative multiverse and even intervene in the story; in short, while Burroughs and Blair reflected upon media and process in similar terms, a hypermedia narrative allowed Blair to further Burroughs’ engine one step beyond into ergodicity.

35Stephenson’s remarks on Burroughs’ methods support the analogies proposed so far: “In the multiverse of the cut-up all time is simultaneous … Events occur in what scientists call Absolute Elsewhere. The ego identity is likewise discovered to be an arbitrary and nonexistent limit” (64). Furthermore, by looking at Stephenson’s analysis of The Soft Machine it is easy to find some other concomitances with Wax: “The episodic structure, together with the use of cut-ups, effects a spatial and temporal dislocation, a breakdown of sequential, linear perception, inducing a sort of dream state in the reader” (67). What is missing in Stephenson’s impressionistic analysis (and that is indirectly provided by Wax) is a reference, or even a brief discussion of Burroughs’ articulated multimedia punning structure, the negative gnostic space where his machinery hummed, or in short, his literary algorithm.

36Michael O’Driscoll notes that the term algorithm “derives from the name of the ninth-century Arab mathematician who transposed the use of Hindu numerals into his own cultural milieu. Al-Khwarizmi thereby set the precedent for developing sets of rules or instructions that result in the solution to a problem—the mathematical or logical procedures that now bear his name” (118).

37An analysis of algorithms, permutations, and combinatorics in Blair and Burroughs (with Gysin/Sommerville) calls for a historical examination of technology and its relation to heterodoxy, which leads to the Golden Ages of Muslim and Jewish cultures in Al-Andalus, and their cultural legacy worldwide.

38In Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (2021), Mark A. Waddell notes that the Umayyad Caliphate was instrumental in preserving “the philosophical and medical works of classical antiquity … [as] Islamic scholars fluent in Greek began to translate them into Arabic” (19); about the situation in the West he states: “For many people living in western Europe, the learning of the ancients might as well have disappeared forever” (19). Scholars went to Baghdad and during the 9th century the city became the world’s capital of learning, translation, and innovation. All that knowledge was redirected to the West through the Islamic Caliphate: “In the eighth century, the Umayyad Caliphate expanded into the Iberian peninsula [sic]—what is now Spain and Portugal—and thereby came into direct contact with western Europe” (20). While mysticism, in the form of Sufism, was tolerated during the Caliphate, there was also an undercurrent where mathematics and astronomy coexisted with astrology and alchemy. The Sabians were apparently instrumental in the latter, even if their role is still under debate. The mysterious pre-Islamic Sabian religion has proved to be difficult to identify and localize. Şinasi Gündüz mentions how Harranian pagans were known as “the Sabians from Harran,” but adds that Muslim scholar Abd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi “divides them into two groups: the Sabians from Harran and the Sabians from Wasit” (Gündüz 40). Apparently the Sabians who lived in Wasit (Iraq) were followers of the religion of Shith (Seth), and that is one of the reasons why they have been identified with the Mandeans, who according to Şinasi Gündüz “are generally accepted as the last surviving representatives of the Gnostics” (1). During the 10th century, scholars from Harran became very appreciated in Baghdad. Dr. Annine van der Meer agrees with Gündüz, for instance, on the Harranian origin of the book Gayat al-Hakim, or Picatrix: “In this work a lengthy extract of the Nabataean Agriculture was transmitted. This source records the cult of the seven planets and is possibly connected with the Harranians. They were called Nabataeans before they were called Sabians” (van der Meer 1). She also maintains that the Gayat al-Hakim was “written by the Andalusian alchemist and astrologer al-Magriti (1000 A.D.)” (van der Meer 12). Maribel Fierro, in contrast, states in that respect: “the manuscripts usually have as the time of the composition of the Rutba the dates of 339-342/950-953, and for the Ghaya the dates of 343/954-348/959. Maslama al-Majriti's life clearly does not fit into those dates” (Fierro 93).

  • 4 Brion Gysin briefly mentions Ibn Khaldun in his book Living with Islam, written between 1952 and 19 (...)

39According to biographers such as Barry Miles, Burroughs and Gysin experimented widely with the esoteric while in Paris; thus, it is reasonable to think such experimentation came along with both writers researching the history of their common interest and studying any new publication that might surface during that period. For instance, in reference to the Rutbat al-Hakim (950-953) and the Sabians, Corbin notes that “[t]he pseudo-Majriti contains much valuable information about their astral religion. They traced their spiritual line of descent back to Hermes and Agathodaimon” (Islamic Philosophy 17). Corbin also mentions the Picatrix, adding that it “contains, apart from valuable information about the astral liturgies of the Sabians, an entire teaching on ‘Perfect Nature’ attributed to Socrates” (Islamic Philosophy 128). While Corbin declares a fascination with the invocation of the “Perfect Nature,” he does not mention, barring error, the specific words used to perform the invocation. Since Gysin knew those words and passed them on to Burroughs—who prominently uses them in Cities of the Red Night (1981)—two sources are most plausible: the Ghayat al-Hakim through the 1933 Warburg edition in Arabic, or Ibn Khaldun’s Al-Muqqadimah (1377), available in Franz Rosenthal’s 1958 English translation, the latter seeming more likely. Khaldun’s book reveals the dream words required for the invocation of the “Perfect Nature” at his “Sixth Prefatory Discussion,” the section where he also discusses the zairja.4 Even if Gysin later accessed the Ghayat al-Hakim (950-953), it is notable that he never mentions the grimoire, or its alleged author. It is also worth noting that the book’s invocations and talismanic magic required a good knowledge of astrology and astronomy, which suggests that Gysin’s knowledge about these issues was either incomplete or, more likely, hidden.

40Other examples pertaining to permutations could be used to further the argument above; particularly the works of Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (Zaragoza, 1240), spearhead of the prophetic/ecstatic Kabbalah, whose combinations and permutations depended on rotation (as in some of Burroughs and Gysin’s combinatory methods). In the article “Abulafianism Among the Counterculture Kabbalists,” Christine A. Meilicke comments how Abraham Abulafia “fundamentally affected the poets David Meltzer, Jack Hirshman and Jerome Rothenberg” (Meilicke 71). Abulafia’s influence on West Coast Beats is undeniable. influencing also works by associated visual artists like Wallace Berman. In fact, Jerome Rothenberg’s book of poetry Abulafia’s Circles (1979) displays a cover after an untitled piece by Wallace Berman. About the founding member of Fluxus Jason Mac Low, Meilicke mentions: “Mac Low first read Scholem in the early 1950s and was especially impressed by the exposition of the teachings of Isaac Luria and Abraham Abulafia” (Meilicke 86). Mac Low shared an interest in Jewish mysticism with poets David Meltzer, Jack Hirschman and Jerome Rothenberg; the latter were New Yorkers who eventually merged into the West Coast Beat poetry scene. In New York remained poet Lionel Ziprin, “The Mystic of the Lower East Side,” the Kabbalist grandson of Orthodox rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia. Ethnomusicologist and magus Harry Smith recorded a 15-LP set of Margolies Abulafia singing, since the Rabbi Abulafia was, according to Allen Ginsberg Estate homepage, a living repository of Jewish liturgical music dating back centuries, and that included Kabbalistic songs (Hale 1). The same source mentions that “the name Abulafia has a long and rich history stretching to 13th-century Spain and Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, one of the earliest Kabbalists” (1). If most avantgarde key players working with combinatorics in the U.S. were aware of Abraham Abulafia’s mystic permutations, it seems unlikely that Gysin and Burroughs were oblivious to that information.

41Perhaps because of his fascination with the legend of the Ismaili Order of the Assassins from Alamut, and probably also as a way to distance Burroughs and himself from the rest of experimental creators, Gysin mentions Hassan Sabbah (born in the 12th century) in relation to the origins of the cut-up method:

[H]e found when he came to deliver his speech … that his manuscripts had been cut in such a way that he didn’t at first realize that they had been sliced right down the middle and repasted … All his material had been cut up by some unknown enemy and his speech … was greeted with howls of laughter and utter disgrace and he was thrown out of the administration … So he was a victim of a cut-up. (68)

42Despite Gysin’s (and Burroughs’) flair for creating slogans and obscuring their sources—as with the Picatrix—and in support of Blair’s earlier intuition, it is worth noting that a Muslim historian described Gnostic algorithmic machines for textual production operating not in Iran but in the Maghreb during the 12th century. Ibn Khaldun’s Muqddima (1377) mentions a version of the zairja called the “‘Zā’irajah of the world’ … attributed to the Maghribi Sufi Muḥamad b. Mas‘ūd Abū l-‘Abbas as-Sabtī, who lived in Marraketch at the end of the twelfth century” (238-9). Henry Corbin’s book on Ibn Arabi (Murcia, 1165) mentions Majorcan mystic Ramón Llull (Palma, 1235); Llull was a contemporary of Arabi and relevant in this discussion because he invented a “thinking machine” that would help converting Muslims. His paper machine, included in his treaty Ars Magna, was based on the zairja, a mechanical divinatory device used by Arab astrologers to generate new ideas by mechanical means. Llull’s zairja used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, which were instrumental in representing 28 categories of philosophical thought. By combining numerical values associated with letters and categories, new paths of thought and understanding were created. Notably, Llull adapted an artifact used for divination to influence the culture in which it was embedded, demonstrating his awareness of the possibilities of technology to shape human consciousness. In this sense, he effectively sought to “weaponize” the zairja to indoctrinate and convert Muslims.

4. Conclusion

43The zairja, missiles and patriarchy converge in Wax, a multimodal work comprising a film and a work of net-art that relates to the Wax film (and by extension to Burroughs’ writing machine) as a structural metaphor for that gnostic negative space referred by Blair, who used a non-linear video editing system as a punning machine (broadly, a zairja). The editing system’s interface displayed an image track and a soundtrack, but the way Blair operated that system, how he took advantage of those two separate elements (as two paper circles in a zairja) allowed him to produce a narrative that essentially disrupted linear time through combinatory. If readers imagine the soundtrack and the image track in a non-linear video editing program not as two parallel lines but as two concentric rotating circles like those in the zairja below, which is kept at the Monastery of El Escorial, near Madrid, the image proposed by Blair of an algorithmic spinning machine acquires a new nuance.

44Ramón Llull. Ars inveniendi particularia in universalibus. (ms.&-IV-6, fol. 11). Royal Library of the Monastery of El Escorial

45Furthermore, the zairja is related to the patriarchy in the biblical sense. David Link’s Archaeology of Algorithmic Artifacts (2016) mentions Ibn Khaldun’s introduction to the machine by Al-Marjani in 1370. When Ibn Khaldun expressed skepticism, the pair asked the instrument how old it was, and the machine told them it was invented by the prophet Idris (Link 137). Idris has often been identified with the Biblical patriarch Enoch, father of Methuselah, but Shiites in particular identify him as Hermes (Kacimi 741). Shiite Baṭinī thought infiltrated al-Andalus during the Cordoban Caliphate (929-1031) through many scholars who were trained in the East. Thus, Andalusi Sufi and Batiniyya scholars became acquainted with Hermetic, Gnostic, and Neoplatonic philosophy. Moreover, thanks to the Cordoban Caliphate the Golden Ages of Muslim and Jewish culture occurred and without it the Renaissance would not have been possible. The Sunna was defended by the Maliki alfaqis, who also stood up to any current that lacked a strong basis in the Qur'an. They had the support of the Umayyad state, which tried to stop Shiite propaganda in al-Andalus as a response to the threat posed by the Fatimids. Again, the zairja might be viewed here as a weapon, in this case a Shiite propaganda tool, but it was also an incredible non-linear writing and thinking machine.

46The films It Conquered the World (1956), and Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966) share with Wax the mad scientist theme, a rocket science plot, and bizarre encounters with a swarm intelligence in a cave. If watched simultaneously, these films certainly evoke the idea of a multiverse. While It Conquered the World and Zontar uphold postwar ideals, Wax is less explicit about the principles it espouses and might in fact be considered an antiwar movie. It is amusing to discover how those twin extra-terrestrial b-grade movies show an alien called Zontar using biomechanical drones for nefarious purposes, but amusement turns into shock if readers recall that the world’s first artificial intelligence-guided combat drone swarm attack occurred in 2021. Both sci-fi films display hilarious biomechanical drones, or “injectopods,” a name that springs from their ability to insert implants on their victims to obtain automatic obedience (not unlike Burroughs’ Reality Studio inserts). After accomplishing their mission, injectopods “die,” just like bees after stinging somebody. Implants leave the victims quite powerless to Zontar’s control, and one of their symptoms is that they totally lack emotions afterwards.

47Fast-forward to 2018, West Point Academy. Dr. James Giordano from Georgetown University gives a speech to the cadets under the very Burroughsian title “The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future” where he proposes several neuroscience instruments for asymmetrical warfare such as “Transcranial magnetic and electrical stimulation … brain implants” (Giordano 0:36:28), “Neurobugs” (0:32:39), or “aerosolized nanoswarms of biopenetrable material” (0:38:19). Giordano also speaks about the Havanna syndrome, an alleged set of medical symptoms with unknown causes experienced by U.S. government officials and military personnel stationed in Cuba and China during the last decade, and points at microwaves as a possible cause, which recalls Burroughs’ obsession with Infrasound, D.O.R., etc. With “injectopods” appearing less fanciful, Blair’s use of ARPANET to screen Wax recalls Llull’s ingenuity in repurposing an artifact’s against the beliefs of its creators.

48Burroughs and Blair intended to disarticulate (chrono)normativity by repurposing specific technologies used for control and war. A historical analysis of scientific progress and its ties to heterodoxy has helped assess how David Blair and William S. Burroughs employed state-of-the-art technologies to produce works that may be regarded as dissident. An archaeological perspective traced the origins of algorithms to a time and place likely known to Burroughs and his collaborators, pointing to a historical period when the People of the Book allegedly coexisted peacefully and knowledge flourished for centuries. While Brion Gysin was not an Arabist stricto sensu, he widely read history and was well-informed of the esoteric undercurrents still surviving in the Islamic and Sephardic Maghreb he and Burroughs knew. This essay has presented new information on these undercurrents and their significance for Burroughs and Gysin’s multimedia projects and creative outlook. The greater explicitness of the West Coast Beats and Fluxus avantgarde regarding such influences reinforces the hypotheses advanced here. Both Blair and Burroughs inhabited the sci-fi realm, and it is not surprising that their works have a prospective dimension; Burroughs’ hypertextual machinery came to fruition with the irruption of net-art, and Blair’s fear of Archontic algorithms has already been surpassed by qatilgorithms, or algorithms that kill, either metaphorically through anger optimization and rage retention, or physically, by coordinating drone attacks.

49Examining David Blair’s Wax and Waxweb provides valuable insights into non-linearity and queer temporalities in Burroughs’ multiverses, while also illuminating the role of heterodoxy in 20th century culture. Though overlooked in the contemporary video art milieu, Blair’s intuitive approach to filmmaking distinctively embodied the spirit of the undercurrents that shaped the avantgarde. This essay has explored technology’s dual capacity to enhance consciousness and creativity or to control and destroy the body. It has also foregrounded the body as the locus of war, as a weapon, or an inscribed “soft machine.”

50While the brain remains a contested battlefield, the disappearance of geographical combat zones is unlikely in the near future. The enduring question in the study of conflict remains: Cui bono?

---. The Wild Boys: A Book of the DeadGrove Press, 1992. 

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Notes

1 https://www.xenu.net/archive/books/isd/isd-5j.htm

2 Eliot cited Shackleton’s account of an Arctic expedition as an inspiration for his text.

3 Interestingly, Burroughs relocated to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981.

4 Brion Gysin briefly mentions Ibn Khaldun in his book Living with Islam, written between 1952 and 1962 (34).

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References

Electronic reference

Antonio J. Bonome, Zairja, Missiles, Bees: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in David Blair’s WaxEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-4 | 2025, Online since 07 December 2025, connection on 10 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25543; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15oy5

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About the author

Antonio J. Bonome

Antonio J. Bonome is a Lecturer at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a writer, editor, translator, and visual artist. His scholarly work has appeared in the journals HumanitiesCLCWeb, and Ekphrasis, and in William Burroughs’s The Revised Boy Scout Manual, ed. Geoffrey D. Smith and John Bennett (Ohio UP 2018).

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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