The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs Page A

perhaps there are no complete strangers ...
    The word is a virus.

It Belongs to the Cucumbers
    It seems that tape recordings made with no apparent input have turned up unexplained voices on the tape. ‘Voice phenomena are done with a tape recorder and microphones set up in the usual way and using factory-fresh tapes. No sounds are heard or emitted during the recording, but on replay faint voices of unknown origin appear to have been recorded.’ (The Handbook of Psychic Discoveries, Ostrander & Schroeder 1975.) Visible speech diagrams and voiceprints have confirmed that these actually are recorded voices. The most complete source book is Breakthrough, by Konstantin Raudive (Taplinger Publishing Co., 1971).
    These voices seem an appropriate topic to take up at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Before discussing the experiments carried out by Raudive, I will describe experiments performed with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville twelve years before Breakthrough was published and in fact before it was written. These experiments started not on tape recorders but on paper. In 1959 Brion Gysin said ‘Writing is fifty years behind painting’ and applied the montage technique to words on a page. These cut-up experiments appeared in Minutes To Go, in 1959.
    Subsequently we cut up the Bible, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, our own writing, anything in sight. We made thousands of cut-ups. When you cut and rearrange words on a page, new words emerge. And words change meaning. The word ‘drafted’, as into the Army, moved into a context of blueprints or contracts, gives an altered meaning. New words and altered meanings are implicit in the process of cutting up, and could have been anticipated. Other results were not expected. When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time, some of the cut and rearranged texts seem to refer to future events. I cut up an article written by John Paul Getty and got: ‘It is a bad thing to sue your own father.’ And a year later one of his sons did sue him. In 1964 I made a cut-up and got what seemed at the time a totally inexplicable phrase: ‘And here is a horrid air conditioner.’ in 1974 I moved into a loft with a broken air conditioner which was removed to put in a new unit. And there was three hundred pounds of broken air conditioner on my floor — a horrid disposal problem, heavy and solid, emerged from a cut-up ten years ago.
    The next step was cut-ups on the tape recorder. Brion was the first to take this obvious step. The first tape recorder cut-ups were a simple extension of cut-ups on paper. You record, say, ten minutes on the recorder. Then you spin the reel backwards or forwards without recording. Stop at random and cut in a phrase. How random is random? We know so much that we don’t consciously know we know, that perhaps the cut-in was not random. Of course this procedure on the tape recorder produces new words by altered juxtaposition just as new words are produced by cut-ups on paper.
    We went on to exploit the potentials of the tape-recorder: cut up, slow down, speed up, run backwards, inch the tape, play several tracks at once, cut back and forth between two recorders. As soon as you start experimenting with slowdowns, speedups, overlays, etc., you will get new words that were not on the original recordings. There are then many ways of producing words and voices on tape that did not get there by the usual recording procedure, words and voices that are quite definitely and clearly recognizable by a consensus of listeners. I have gotten words and voices from barking dogs. No doubt one could do much better with dolphins. And words will emerge from recordings of dripping faucets. In fact, almost any sound that is not too uniform may produce words. ‘Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise . . . The very tree branches brushing against her window seemed to mutter murder murder murder.’ Well, the branches may have muttered just that, and you could hear it back with a