Burroughs's Bunker

I was in the States this summer at my mother's outside DC and we went into town a few times to the National Gallery to see the George Bellows exhibit. But two years before that I was also down on the Mall and it blew my mind to see giant photos of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac displayed on the outside of the National Gallery. They had a small exhibit there in 2010 of Ginsberg's photo's. You can see a review here

To see a photo of Burroughs in the heart of DC is freaky. He has been consumed by the culture and canonized, but his work remains highly subversive. Burroughs used the language of technology against itself. He recognized that culture is at war, a war between techno-fascism and true anarchic freedom. Burroughs represents a potent threat to the current power structure, but he knew very well that as long as the great majority of people follow the national "dialogue", as long as they believe the state propaganda, then the radical opinions of a few intellectuals are rendered harmless and ineffective.

picture credit
But as an expat I find that I am thinking of Burroughs in terms of his lifestyle, his peripatetic wanderings. Burroughs was a state of one, an odd mix of old school St. Louis and radical fairy, dapper gentleman and junky pervert. The guy was brilliant, but creepy. Returning to the great Moloch from England in 1974, Burroughs was a celebrity by that time and he sequestered himself inside the Bunker, a windowless apartment on the Lower East Side. Or did he have the windows covered over? I'm not sure. But the name itself, the Bunker, is indicative of Burroughs's sense of isolation, of statelessness. This is what happens when you leave your home behind, you become rootless, drifting. Burroughs's junky monologues also float out into the ether. He's a fantastic writer, but the subject matter is vile. In this way he broke taboos and became famous, by imagining the unimaginable. This is the task of the artist. If the Moderns, of which Burrough is arguably, along with Samuel Beckett, one of the last, were grappling with the psychic despair of World War II and the atom bomb, what is the great issue of our time, if we are in fact post-modern? I suppose it could be the nihilism that Burroughs himself foresaw, the slippage of meaning as the flood of text that is the internet surges against rational thought and silts over any attempt at dialogue. Ideas cannot move against the muck of constant media. Like Burroughs we must become nomads, for if community has broken down, all we can hope to have left is a bunker in the wastelands of civilization.