TH5. Littoral Osteo-Chilopoda Cross The Wounded Galaxies

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), corresponding with Ballard, commended as ‘most interesting’ the British author’s ‘concept of a lost sacral brain’.1 Burroughs, who was also fascinated with the loops between ‘inner space’ and ‘outer space’, himself saw the vertebral column as a writhing inner bone-centipede. Nerves, along with all other control systems, were his sworn enemy. He imagined a surgical procedure to abbreviate a patient’s body to nothing but an unappendiculated ‘spinal column’, thereby creating a chilopodic monstrosity.2 Yet the major control system was not the nerves per se, but what they enabled: language.

‘Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue’, Barker recounts. For Burroughs, language is a ‘parasitic organism’ that possesses the speaker’s nervous system. ‘The word’, Burroughs characteristically wrote, ‘has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host’; and we have ‘no way of ascertaining’ the invasion in such cases of ‘latent virus infections’.

The same may be true of the word. The word itself may be a virus that has achieved a permanent status with the host.3

Words propagate through us, we do not make them, they are self-selective and thus have interests of their own, not necessarily coincident with ours. ‘Viruses make themselves real. It’s a way viruses have’.4 Thus, inspired by the research of the largely forgotten scientist Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz, Burroughs pieced together a detailed ‘linguistic virology’ and ‘viral linguistics’.5 He liked to remark that language isn’t something you decide to do, it is something that happens to you; it doesn’t belong to you, and it never will.

From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. […] You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. In the beginning was the word.

Anthropogenesis is thus symbiogenesis, or linguoparasitic horizontal transfer.6 ‘The realization that something as familiar to you as the movement of your intestines [is] also alien and hostile does make one feel a bit insecure at first’, Burroughs mused.7 He wondered, indeed, whether language was a virus from outer space. Moreover, ‘The Word’—this intimate alien—is precisely responsible for dragging us upright. Following von Steinplatz, he imagined it ‘effecting a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed’: these biophysical mutations, it was reported, mainly effected spinal makeup and thus also the ‘inner throat structure’.8

In a section of The Soft Machine entitled ‘Cross the Wounded Galaxies’, Burroughs dramatized this agonizing process, imagining that, at the dawn of hominization, this ‘muttering sickness leaped into our throats’—‘spitting blood bubbling throats torn with the talk sickness’—and spurred the ape-men into ‘warm mud-water’, where they ‘waded’ and thus ‘stood’ upright, becoming ‘naked’ and hairless’. ‘When we came out of the mud we had names’.9 In so far as this was also the birth of self-consciousness, ‘objective reality’ is thus ‘produced by the virus in the host’.10

With these images of self-consciousness and standing birthed in shallow swamps, one is inevitably reminded of the lingering Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which proposes an oceanic etiology for our orthograde spine. As first suggested by Westenhöfer’s ‘Aquatile Hypothese’ during the 1920s, Elaine Morgan’s 1972 Descent of Woman famously argued that female anthropoids first entered the water to protect their infants from sabretooths. (The fact that it was mothers who were first forced into the shallows in this way perhaps goes some way towards explaining the perennial mythic collocation of the feminine and the oceanic.) Wading facilitated acoustic communication (as the aquatic medium impeded olfactory and gestural signalling) as well as glabrous nakedness (for purposes of thermoregulation).11 Homo sapiens is indeed that ‘great and true Amphibium’. Most importantly, the exodus into water explains our otherwise anomalous bipedalism. For Morgan, the perversity of the orthograde spine could only be explained by our being forced—‘as it were under duress’—into wading in the shallows in such a manner.12 Alongside the threat of sabretooth predation, Morgan also speculated upon certain catastrophic geophysical causes that would have caused such ‘duress’: crustal deformations causing huge floods in Ethopia around the time of the ‘ape/man’ split.13

Whatever the cause of our evolutionary ‘duress’, it came at a high price. Morgan, in Scars of Evolution, meticulously recounts the ‘cost of walking erect’: from daily endocrine crises to swollen adenoids, to varicose veins, to inguinal hernia, to prolapsed uterus, to haemorrhoids and piles, to lower back pain and inevitable vertebral degeneration. As Barker (an early supporter of Morgan) later confessed: ‘I was increasingly aware that all my real problems were modalities of back-pain’.14

Morgan, moreover, went on to decrypt our being forced upright as the archaic source of human sexual difference’s unique violence. As the sacrum adapted for standing, the vagina migrated inward; our species could no longer copulate from behind; in consequence, humans adopted ventro-ventral ‘missionary’ intercourse; sex, now involving far more ‘intimacy’, became painful and traumatic for females; and thus only males that ignored protestations were reproductively selected for. Misogyny birthed from the spine.

Burroughs, interestingly, also related the adoption of uprightness and speech to ancestral sexual violence. Once more following the research of von Steinplatz, Burroughs remarked that the viral infection and its alterations to the spine ‘may well have had a high rate of mortality’ originally:

But some female apes must have survived to give birth to the wunder kindern. The illness perhaps assumed a more malignant form in the male because of his more developed and rigid muscular structure causing death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. Since the virus in both male and female precipitates sexual frenzy through irritation of sex centers in the brain the males impregnated the females in their death spasms and the altered throat structure was genetically conveyed. Having effected alterations in the host’s structure that resulted in a new species specially designed to accommodate the virus the virus can now replicate without disturbing the metabolism and without being recognized as a virus. A symbiotic relationship has now been established and the virus is now built into the host which sees the virus as a useful part of itself.15

And so, both Morgan and Burroughs (writing within a decade of one another) focus attention on the agonies involved in standing upright. In doing so, they notably invert a dominant Western tradition—extending from Aristotle to Gregory of Nyssa, to Charles Darwin—that links the orthograde ‘liberation’ of hand and mouth to the advent of human rationality.16 Western thinkers have often seen standing upright as a blessing. Gregory of Nyssa, as quoted by Leroi-Gourhan, is exemplary:

So it was thanks to the manner in which our bodies are organized that our mind, like a musician, struck a note of language within us and we became capable of speech. This privilege would surely never have been ours if our lips had been required to perform the onerous and difficult task of procuring nourishment for our bodies. But our hands took over that task, releasing our mouths for the service of speech.

Burroughs would largely agree with Gregory’s fourth-century musings on this telic identification of ‘speaking’ with ‘standing’. Yet, of course, he saw glottogony not as a blessing but as a pandemic.17 In this vein, Burroughs wrote of newfangled linguo-viruses being made to order in the lab. (Riffing on L. Ron Hubbard, he asked whether one could produce a string of words and images that could induce death—a ‘death-tape’. He even implied, like Ballard, that certain semio-strings or meme-packets could alter chronoception, with ‘[t]ime dragging or racing’ being caused by alterations in the way ‘the brain edits, makes sense of, and selects storage key features’.)18 He always feared the weaponized word, knowing that all words are weapons.

Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control?19

Burroughs, indeed, worried that, owing to the ease of transfer enabled by twentieth-century massified media (those very conditions which Ballard so adroitly diagnosed), the millennia-old ‘symbiotic relationship’ between virus and host ‘is now breaking down’.20 The time bomb is ticking.