if anyone would like the Worlding Project on PDF…

I have it!  Please email me and I’ll forward it to you.  Apparently, the google book is incomplete, and doesn’t include Rob’s afterword.

Three Very Important Announcements

1) For those of you who are writing your last response this week, you can write your response on anything you like: a book, topic, question, etc., that hasn’t been discussed so far? a set of ideas you would like to flesh out for the sake of your final paper preparation?  whatever you’d like, so long as it’s pertinent to beat literature (so… don’t write about what you did this weekend, unless what you did this weekend was beatific in some respect, I guess).  As I have had a few people seek clarification over this issue, I’m going to extend the deadline to Thursday, 11:59 PM.

2) If you’d like an overview of your grade so far, please email me a request.  I will respond to the email by Friday at noon (so that those with extensions can be accounted for).

3) VERY IMPORTANT: your final papers will need to be emailed to me!  I am going to be in Chicago.  So if there are problems you foresee (be it mediational, what have you), please let me know ASAP and I will make arrangements for you.  The deadline will not change (Thursday , March 17th, by 10:30 PM)… just less trees will die in the process.

Burroughs and the Fear of Stasis

The Beats are a group known for their wanderlust, with Kerouac tramping about the continental United States while Ginsberg journeyed to India and Snyder fled to China and Japan. Burroughs and Ginsberg’s The Yage Letters is an illustration not only of the fears and desires that fuel this wanderlust, but of the parallel desire for travel within the mental realm.

While Burroughs structures his narrative as a kind of goal-oriented quest, he nonetheless seems to suggest that his travels are undertaken not just in search of a destination, but for the movement of the journey itself. In the guise of his alter-ego Lee, Burroughs describes the feeling of being stuck in a town in Ecuador, a “nightmare fear of stasis. Horror of finally being stuck in this place” (Burroughs, 36). In a clever technique that is almost cruel, Burroughs replicates this stasis for the reader, perhaps in an attempt to provoke a similar “fear of stasis,” by essentially repeating himself pages later: “This place gives me the stasis horrors. The feel of location, of being just where I am and nowhere else is unendurable. Suppose I should have to live here?” (Burroughs, 46). This repetition uncannily replicates this stuck “feel of location”, as despite the fact that Burroughs has traveled in the time between the two letters, the repetition calls into question the possibility of any change in time and space.

Through his descriptions of the yagé experience, Burroughs suggests that the psychedelic trip is indeed a trip – a mental journey which, although entirely internal, gives the feeling of travel through time and space. As Burroughs puts it, “Yage is space time travel” (Burroughs, 50), an experience that can only be described in terms of vast movement, “migrations, [and] incredible journeys” (Burroughs, 50). In being transported to new mental realms, Burroughs is able to transcend the physical limitations of reality, and in doing so he is able to escape the bounds of “being just where I am and nowhere else.” In these descriptions of the inner travel that is made possible through the psychedelic experience, it becomes clear that part of what drives Burroughs towards drugs is also what drives him to travel: a concurrent fear of stasis and love of movement, a lust for travel both physical and mental. While he may not reach any sort of beatitude, he is at least given access to a momentary transcendence of space and time through which it is possible, however briefly, to avoid the paralyzing stasis of being.

– Palmer