Home · Book Reports · 2017 · Yage Letters

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designates my notes. / designates important.

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Thoughts

Promotion of pedophilia and glamorizing the drug culture. I am ashamed to have ever looked up to these deviants. Burroughs shows little respect for the shamans that he would later promote as an ancient practice.

The most interesting part was the name drops of Hassan Sabbah (Hassan-i Sabbah) and H.G. Wells, the leader of the infamous Hashshashins (assassins). His mountain lair of Alamut is where he supposedly used hash, alcohol, and women to convince people he had some kind of mystical power and would get them to do his bidding.

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• From Burroughs to Ginsberg unless otherwise noted.

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January 15, 1953

• Another routine: A man who manufactures memories to order. Any kind you want and he guarantees you’ll believe they happened just that way - (As a matter of fact I have just about sold myself Billy Bradshinkel).

January 25, 1953

• I asked him [Doctor Schindler] about the telepathy angle. ‘That’s all imagination of course,’ he said.

May 12, 1953

• South America does not force people to be deviants. You can be queer or a drug addict and still maintain position. Especially if you are educated and well mannered. There is deep respect here for education. In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Even a man like Oppenheimer is a deviant tolerated for his usefulness. Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in U.S.

May 24, 1953

• [After being rolled] Trouble is I share with the late Father Flanagan - he of Boy’s Town - the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.

June 18, 1953

• Did you ever read H. G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind? About a man stuck in a country where all the other inhabitants had been blind so many generations they had lost the concept of sight. He flips. ‘But don’t you understand I can see?’

June 10, 1960

• From Ginsberg to Burroughs

• I’m still in Pucallpa - ran into a little plump fellow, Ramon P- who’d been friend to Robert Frank (photographer of our movie) in ‘46 or so here.

• I have to depend on my own Serpent-self’s memory of Merry Visions of Blake

June 21, 1960

• for Hassan Sabbah. Listen now? Take the enclosed copy of this letter. Cut along the lines. Rearrange putting section one by section three and section two by section four. Now read aloud and you will hear My Voice. Whose voice? Listen. Cut and rearrange in any combination. Read aloud. I can not choose but hear. Don’t think about it. Don’t theorize. Try it. Do the same with your poems. With any poems any prose. Try it. You want ‘Help’. Here it is. Pick it up on it. And always remember. ‘Nothing is True. Everything is permitted.’ Last Words of Hassan Sabbah The Old Man Of The Mountain.

Best 
William Burroughs 
For Hassan Sabbah 
Fore! Hassan Sabbah