Observed While Falling

• “If anyone prays in space, they aren’t really there.” –p43
• “The purpose of writing is to make it happen.” [Burroughs] viewed writing in terms of effect and questioned the inherent purpose and nature of words with respect to their capacity for achieving it.... He viewed them as energy—organic, even—and subjected them to laboratory-like scrutiny, relentlessly prodding at them and dissecting them to try and elicit a response—to try and determine patterns of behavior. His modus operandi as a writer might be described as the process of using words to see what words can do. –p44
• Every culture has its aesthetic: its style of architecture, its clothes, its art, its music, even its military. It has its own aesthetic of violence. –p103
• GPS, CCTV surveillance 24 hours a day, more and more cops, more and more security, relentless word/image “programming” and “monitoring” through the media, results in an increasing behavioral conformity, political correctness, and identical cultural and religious mindset. “A uniformity of environment that precludes evolutionary mutation.” (WSB) But such a level of control in the long run produces a dull, homogeneous, non-resistant human product. –p117
• It’s only religious indoctrination that suggests that all [non-human] life on earth is somehow inferior. The human ideals of care, altruism, and sincerity are all clearly evidenced in the rest of nature. Boredom, duplicity, and the need to control, on the other hand, are not. –p121
• Both reincarnation and heaven enforce a sense of individual ownership of life by promoting a potentially painful system of personal accountability when that life is complete. It’s a process of continually obscuring the present with a fear for a hypothetical future. Given that there are no clear “rules” for ownership, it creates a state of psychological imbalance from which Control can operate. –p134

Malcolm McNeill, Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me