symbolic system where something represents something else. You can’t draw a map, it doesn’t mean anything to an animal; you can’t get an animal to read a map, but illiterate, so-called illiterate people can.
Well, let’s consider the human artifact and what is wrong with it. Consider a creature that can live on the seacoast, watching ships come in, day after day, year after year, and still believe the Earth is flat because the Church says so. They knew the Earth was round. They
So why has the human artifact stayed back with the flintlock? Well, I’m advancing a theory that we were not biologically designed to remain in our present stage any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. The human is in a state of neotony - that’s a biologic word we’ve already heard from Dr. Lotsch used to describe an organism fixated at what would normally be a larval or transitional phase. Now ordinarily a salamander starts his life cycle in the water with gills; later the gills atrophy and drop off and the animal develops lungs and comes up to land: then they go back and spend the rest of their lives in the water and they have to come up to breathe. Just why they do that I don’t know.
However, there are certain salamanders who never lose their gills and they never leave the water. Now they’d be considered in a state of neotony. The Xolotl salamander, found in Mexico, is an example. And scientists, moved by the plight of this beautiful creature gave him an injection of hormones, whereupon he shed his gills and left the water after ages of neotony. Whether this was any advantage to him is another question. (Laughter). It does seem advantageous if you’re gonna spend much of your time in the water to have gills, but evolution is a one-way street. Once you lose your gills you can never get them back. I think it’s a little too much to hope we could be jolted out of neotony by a single injection. But by whatever means the change takes place, if it does take place, the change will be irreversible. The Xolotl, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse By William S. Burroughs Page 3 of 4
of course, once he sheds his gills can never reclaim them. This law of evolution... I don’t know any reason for it but it seems to be a law - the whales must have been on land at one time: they lost their gills and they never got them back.
Now when we consider these evolutionary steps, one has a feeling that the creature is tricked in a way into making them.
Now here is a fish that has survived droughts because he has developed feet or rudimentary lungs. As far as the fish is concerned, the feet are simply a means of getting from one water source to another or of going down into the mud and waiting out the drought. But once he leaves his gills behind he has made an involuntary step - I won’t say forward exactly -
but a step. Looking for water he has found air. And perhaps a forward step for the human race will be made in the same way.
The astronaut is not looking for Space, he’s looking for more Time to do exactly the same things. He’s equating Space with Time and the Space program is simply an attempt to transport all our insoluble problems, our impasses, and take them somewhere else where exactly the same thing is bound to occur. However like the walking fish, looking for more Time he may find space instead, and then find that there is no way back. Now such an evolutionary step would involve changes literally inconceivable from our present point of view.
Many of these ideas I have incorporated into a novel on which I’m now working. I’ve had several titles for this novel, and the title that I have more or less decided on in the course of this conference is Place of Dead Roads - Planet Earth. I’ll read a few pages here...
“As a prisoner serving a life sentence can think only of escape, so Kim (this is my hero) took it for granted that the only purpose of his life was Space travel. He thought of this as not so much a change of a locality but as a change of dimension, the basic change of a being with all its surroundings like the switch from water to land. But you see, there had to be the air-breathing potential first. That’s where you start. And what is it that you must alter in order to make these changes.
“The first step towards Space exploration was to examine the human artifact with biologic alterations in mind that would render our human artifact more suitable for Space conditions and Space travel. Now we are like water creatures looking up from here at the earth and the air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium. Fish didn’t have the capacity to do that: we do. The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond Time is Space. And that is where we are going... Kim read all the science fiction books and stories he could find and he was stunned to find the assumption, the basic assumption, that there is no real change involved in Space travel, same dreary people playing out the same tired old roles. Take that dead act into Space. Now here they are light years from Planet Earth watching cricket and baseball on a vision screen.... can you imagine taking their stupid pastimes light years into Space. It’s like the fish said, ‘Well, I’m gonna just shove this aquarium up onto the land and there I’ve got everything I need...’ (laughter)... you need entirely too much.
“Well, to begin with there is the question, of weight, the human organism weighs about 170 pounds and that is a decided disadvantage. But also this breathing- eating-excreting-dreaming human organism must have its entire environment, its awkward life process encapsulated and transported with it... into Space. And one wonders - Kim goes into his academic act, letting his bifocals slip down onto his nose like a professor launching into a well-worn joke - one wonders, gentlemen, if this crew doesn’t perhaps have a pet elephant essential to its welfare that it’s gonna take along...”
Now, regarding this question of weight, we have a model at hand of a much lighter body, in fact a body which is virtually weightless and I’m referring to the astral dream body, which some scientists don’t believe in. But this model gives us a clue to the changes we must undergo. When I say must, I am speaking not in moral, but in biologic terms. And the dream also gives us insight into Space conditions. One of the more interesting facts of dream research, has established that dreaming is a biologic necessity. You see, they can tell now when an animal or a person is dreaming by the brainwaves, the REM waves, and research has established that if dream sleep is cut off every time they see sleep brainwaves they wake the animal up - no matter how much dreamless sleep he is allowed, irritability, restlessness, hallucinations and eventually coma, convulsions and death would result. He’d show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much sleep he was allowed... I don’t know what Freud would have made of that... Kim saw dreams as a vital link to his biologic and spiritual destiny in Space, and deprived of this airline he would die. The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off their dreams in the way that whites took care of the Indians, they cut off their dreams, their magic, and they tended to die out.
So I’m starting here with a basic assumption which of course many of you will, cannot accept: that our destiny - again I’m talking about our biologic destiny - is in Space, and that our failure to achieve this is the basic flaw in the human artifact.
That’s why it’s back here, down here with the flintlock instead of being somewhere up here.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse By William S. Burroughs Page 4 of 4
