~ IMMORTALITY ~ by William S. Burroughs

"To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality." - James
Dean, quoted in James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton

The colonel beams at the crowd . . . pomaded, manicured, he wears the
satified expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent
peach orchard. "Folks, we're here to sell the only thing worth selling
or worth buying and that's immortality. Now here is the simplest
solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn-out parts and keep
the old heap on the road indefinitely.

"As transplant techniques are perfected and refined, the age-old dream
of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide
out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren't
enough parts to go around. You need the job lot once a year to save 20
percent, folks. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as
clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kidneys and
genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land;
the air-conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiate out to field
hospitals and open-air operating booths.

The poor are rising in mobs. They are attacking government warehouses
where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs
and guards to protect himself from roving bands of parts hunters, like
the dreaded Wild Doctors, who operate on each other after the battle,
cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab
men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes
of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here's a man
who sold his daughter's last kidney to buy himself a new groin- appears
on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and
give her this last Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blond known
apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John; now isn't that cute?

A flourishing black market in parts grows up in the gutted cities
devastated by parts riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Brueghel and
Bosch are reenacted; misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling
with maggots supported on crutches and cans, in wheel-chairs and carts.
Brutal-as-butchers practitioners operate without anesthetic in open-air
booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws.

The poor wait in parts lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a
cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth
nameless things in bottles that they think are usable parts. Shameless
swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.

And here is Mr. Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still
subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into
paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred
feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to
another requires months of sifting and checking computerized plans and
alternate routes to avoid the possibility of an accident. His idiotic
cowardice knows no bounds. There he sits, looking like a Chimu vase with
a thick layer of smooth purple scar tissue. Encased as he is in this
armor, his movements are slow and hydraulic. It takes him ten minutes to
sit down. This layer gets thicker and thicker right down to the bone-the
doctors have to operate with power tools. So we leave Mr. Rich Parts and
the picturesque parts people their monument, a mountain of scar tissue.

As L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology, said: "The rightest right a
man could be would be to live infinitely wrong." I wrote "wrong" for
"long" and the slip is significant- for the menas by which immortality
is realized in science fiction, which will soon be science fact, are
indeed infinitely wrong, the wrongest wrong a man can be, vampiric or
worse.

Improved transplant techniques open the question whether the ego itself
could be transplanted from one body to another, and the further question
as to exactly where this entity resides. Here is Mr. Hart, a
trillionaire dedicated to his personal immortality. Where is this thing
called Mr. Hart? Precisely where, in the human nervous system, does this
ugly death-sucking, death- dealing, death-fearing thing reside? Science
gives only a tentative answer: the "ego" seems to be located in the
midbrain at the top of the head. "Well," he thinks, "couldn't we just
scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it
belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEEE?" So he starts looking for a brain
surgeon, a "scrambled egg" man, and he wants the best. When it comes to
a short-order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley.

Mr. Hart embodies the competitive, acquisitive, success-minded spirit
that formulated American capitalism. The logical extension of this ugly
spirit is criminal. Success is its own justification. He who succees
deserves to succeed; he is RIGHT. The operation is a success. The
doctors have discreetly withdrawn. When a man wakes up in a beautiful
new bod, he can flip out. It wouldn't pay to be a witness. Mr. Hart
stands up and stretches luxuriously in his new body. He runs his hands
over the lean young muscle where his potbelly used to be. All that
remains of the donor is a blob of gray matter in a dish. Mr. Hart puts
his hands on his hips and leans over the blob.

"And how wrong can you be? DEAD."

He spits on it and he spits ugly.

The final convulsions of a universe based on quantitative factors, like
money, junk, and time, would seem to be at hand. The time approaches
when no amount of money will buy anything and time itself will run out.

This is a parable of vampirism gone berserk. But all vampiric blueprints
for immortality are wrong not only from the ethical standpoint. They are
ultimately unworkable. In Space Vampires Colin Wilson speaks of benign
vampires. Take a little, leave a little. But they always take more than
they leave by the basic nature of the vampire process of inconspicuous
but inexorable consumption. The vampire converts quality-live blood,
vitality, youth, talent-into quantity-food and time for himself. He
perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human
dreams to his shit. And that's the wrongest wrong a man can be.

Personal immortality in a physical body is impossible, since a physical
body exists in time and time is that which ends. When someone says he
wants to live forever, he forgets that forever is a time word. All
three-dimensional immortality projects, to say the least, are
ill-advised, since they always immerse the aspirant deeper in time.

The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the
illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE
forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging
ego.

What we think of as our ego is defensive reaction, just as the symptoms
of an illness-fever, swelling, sweating-are the body's reaction to an
invading organism. Our beloved ego, arising from the rotten weeds of
lust and fear and anger, has no more continuity that a fever sweat.
There is no ego; only a shifting process as unreal as the Cities of the
Odor Eaters that dissolve in rain. A moment's introspection demonstrates
that we are not the same as we were a year ago or a week ago. "What ever
possessed me to do that?"

A step toward rational immortality is to break down the concept of a
separate personal, and therefore inexorably mortal, ego. This opens many
doors. Your spirit could reside in a number of bodies, not as some
hideous parasite draining the host, but as a helpful little visitor.
"Roger the Lodger . . don't take up much room . . show you a trick or
two . . never overstay my welcome.

"Take fifty photos of the same person over an hour. Some of them will
look so unlike the subject as to be unrecognizable. And some of them
will look like some other person. "Why, he looks just like Khrushchev
with one gold tooth peeking out.

"The illusion of a separate, inviolable identity limits your perceptions
and confines you in time. You live in other people and other people live
in you- "visiting," we call it-and of course it's ever so much easier
with one's Clonies.

When I first heard about cloning I thought, what a fruitful concept:
why, one could be in a hundred different places at once and experience
everything the other clones did. I am amazed at the outcry against this
good thing not only from men of the cloth but also from scientists, the
very scientists whose patient research has brought cloning within our
grasp. The very thought of a clone disturbs these gentlemen. Like cattle
on the verge of stampede, they paw the ground mooin apprehensively.
"Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human nonselfness
is terrifying.

"Terrifying to whom? Speak for yourself, you timorous old beastie
cowering in your eternal lavatory. Too many scientists seem to be
ignorant of the most rudimentary spiritual concepts. They tend to be
suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push
around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a
wheelbarrow, terrified, no doubt, that some skulking ingrate-of-a-clone
student will sneak into their very brains and steal their genius work.
The unfairness of it brings tears to his eyes as he peers anxiously
through his bifocals.

Cloning isn't ego gone berserk. On the contrary, cloning is the end of
the ego. For the first time, the spirit of man will be able to separate
itself from the human machine, to see it and use it as a machine. He is
no longer identified with one special Me machine. The human organism has
become an artifact he can use like a plane, a boat, or a space capsule.

The poet John Giorno wondered if maybe a clone of a clone of a clone
would just phase out into white noise like copies of copies of tape. As
Count Korzybski used to say: "I don't know, let's see."

But ultimately, I postulate, true immortality can be found only in
space. Space exploration is the only goal worth striving for. Over the
hills and far away. You will know your enemies by those who attempt to
block your path. Vampiric monopolists would keep you in time like their
cattle. "It's a good thing cows don't fly," they say with an evil
chuckle. The evil, intelligent Slave Gods.

The gullible, confused, and stupid pose an equal threat owing to the
obstructive potential of their vast numbers. I have an interesting slip
in my scrapbook. News clipping from the Boulder Camera. Picture of an
old woman with a death's-head, false teeth smile. She is speaking for
the Women's Christian Temperance Union. "WE OPPOSE CHILD ABUSE,
INTEMPERANCE, AND IMMORTALITY."

The way to immortality is in space, and Christianity is buried under
slag heaps of dead dogma, sniveling prayers; and empty prayers must
oppose immortality in space as the counterfeit always fears and hates
the real thing. Resurgent Islam . . . born-again Christians . . . creeds
outworn . . . excess baggage . . . 'raus 'mit!

Immortality is prolonged future, and the future of any artifact lies in
the direction of increased flexibility capacity for change and
ultimately mutation. Immortality may be seen as a by-product of
function: "to shine in use." Mutation involves changes that are
literally unimaginable from the perspective of the future mutant.
Coldblooded, nondreaming creatures living in the comparatively
weightless medium of water could not conceive of breathing air,
dreaming, and experiencing the force of gravity as a basic fact of life.
There will be new fears like the fear of falling, new pleasures, and new
necessities. There are distinct advantages to living in a supportive
medium like water. Mutation is not a matter of logical choices.

The human mutants must take a step into the unknown, a step that no
human has taken before.

"We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea."