A PREMONITION OF W. S. BURROUGHS

Perhaps, it was a premonition of your death, Bill. On June 20, 1997, I had a dream in which you appeared. You were strangely more robust and hairier than normal, a sort of barrel-chested Bill Burroughs. But it was definitely you. I watched you from the shadows of a corner of a hotel room. You got dressed, put on a hat and the polished clodhoppers of a Midwestern farmer--only they were fan-shaped at the toes, as if you had the feet of a platypus, otter or beaver. (You always seemed ichthyic, Bill.) You left the hotel and I followed from a distance until you entered a park and stopped, your back towards me, like a René Magritte man facing the horizon of an Yves Tanguy painting. Then you telepathically said to me, 'I am an emission, we are all emissions in cars'. What did you mean Bill? A radio emission? Fossil fuel fumes? An inadvertent nightly emission of sperm? An emission nebula occluded by heavy metal? When I entered the park, all that was left of you was a clump of rich Midwestern soil molded as if in a die shaped like a flower pot or funerary vase. Then all of a sudden a hole the size of a golf ball formed and began to belch noxious fumes. (A strange dream to have experienced the sense of smell.) I began to throw clumps of earth into the orifice, which immediately gulped them down. Then the clump of earth lost its form, a kind of deliquescence. (Perhaps, it was the imaginal form of the subsidence of an erection I was having.) Had some sinister autochthonic spirit swallowed you, or dare I say the Muse in her darkest, destructive aspect? You once said, Bill, that ever since the death of your wife, some maleficent specter had haunted you.

Yeats writes in his autobiography that a moralist suppresses his anti-self. Bill, O great anti-moralist of American society post-WW II, you did not suppress your anti-self but, nevertheless, were a satiric moralist who pointed out the hypocrisy of American society.