Burroughs: Could you explain this Ziggy Stardust image of yours? From what I can see it has to do with the world being on the eve of destruction within five years.

Bowie: The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ‘cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. ‘All the young dudes’ is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.

Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.

Bowie: Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.

Burroughs: Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.

Bowie: Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!

Whole thing.

The book was conceived as a single painting in which text and images were combined in whatever form seemed appropriate to the narrative. It was conceived as 120 continuous pages that would “fold out.” Such a book was, at the time, unprecedented, and no publisher was willing to take a chance and publish a “graphic novel.” Burroughs and McNeill finally abandoned the project after collaborating on it for 7 years….

Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely.

John Stanley Hart is the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control” – a billionaire newspaper tycoon obsessed with discovering the means for achieving immortality. Based on the formulae contained in rediscovered Mayan books he attempts to create a Media Control Machine using the images of Fear and Death. By increasing Control, however, he devalues time and invokes an implacable enemy: Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God. Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality.

To quote Harvey Pekar: “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.”

Here’s a piece from www.burroughsmcneillart.com, click to enlarge:

SF: Did Burroughs have any opinion about the 2012 issue? Positive or negative societal transformation (with or without the supernatural whispers surrounding the date)? Any hope for mankind really figuring out the various mechanisms of control he’d been writing about all his life?

JG: I don’t know. People are searching his work for clues to that now. I don’t at all recall him emphasizing “2012″ in conversation, and he and I did often compare our studies in Mesoamerican pre-history and archaeology, enlarging each other’s knowledge, I believe.

William did go through a period of working from Mayan calendrical theories and his own fantasy/memory sources to create his own calendar. Barry Miles, more than any other Burroughs biographer to date, offers the best and fullest explanation of Burroughs’ personal calendar system, in Miles’ book, William S. Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible.

As for Burroughs’ level of “hope,” I must tell you that, the older he got, the less “hope” he had — for anything good ever to emerge from “the Human Experiment.” This is not uncommon in the elderly, you know. It definitely makes sense as a survival instinct: tell yourself it’s a good thing you won’t have to be around, to witness or suffer the universal Hell that is soon to descend upon all human life everywhere, etc.

You’ll notice I am resisting giving much credence to any “Apocalypse Soon” scenarios, that of “2012″ included — but you shouldn’t think for a second that I don’t recognize that these are truly “apocalyptic” times — if only for the way that mechanized humanity (an oxymoron if there ever was one!) has apparently damaged Planet Earth beyond the planet’s — or Mankind’s — ability to maintain climatic stability and predictability.

I submit to you that “The Future of the Novel” is a prophetic work, especially as he says: “A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroes and villains, with respect to intentions towards this planet.”

(via Technoccult)

It says:

Dear Lucien & Cessa — Writing to you by candlelight from the mysterious Casbah — have a magnificent room overlooking the beach & the bay & the sea & can see Gibraltar — patio to sun on, room maid, $20 a month — feel great but Burroughs has gone insane e as, — he keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy part & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like — Naturally I feel lonesome with this old familiar lunatic but lonesomer than ever with him as he’ll also mumble, or splurt, most of his conversation, in some kind of endless new British lord imitation, it all keeps pouring out of him in an absolutely brilliant horde of words & in fact his new book is best thing of its kind in the world (Genet, Celine, Miller, etc.) & we might call it WORD HOARD…he, Burroughs, (not “Lee” any more) unleashes his word hoard, or horde, on the world which has been awaiting the Only Prophet, Burroughs — His message is all scatalogical homosexual super-violent madness, — his manuscript is all that has been saved from the original vast number of written pages of WORD HOARD which he’d left in all the boy’s privies of the world — and so on, — I sit with him in elegant French restaurant & he spits out his bones like My. Hyde and keeps yelling obscene words to be heard by the continental clienteles — (like he done in Rome, yelling FART at a big palazzio party) — I’ll be glad when Allen gets here. — Meanwhile I explores the Casbah, high on opium or hasheesh or any drink or drug I want, & dig the Arabs. — The Slovenija was a delightful ship, I ate every day at one long white tablecloth with that one Yugoslavian woman spy. — We hit a horrendous tempest 2 days out, nothing like I ever seen, — that big steel ship was lost in mountains of hissing water, awful. — I cuddled up with TWO TICKETS TO TANGIER and got my laughs, I read every word, Cess, really a riot. — Also read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling which you should read, it’s down on your corner. — Right now I’m high on 3 Sympatinas, Spanish bennies of a sort, mild. — Happy pills galore. — The gal situation here is worse than the boy situation, nothing but male whores all over, & their supplementary queens. — Met an actual contraband sailing ship adventurer with a mustache. Etc. More anon. Miss you & hope you’re well. Jack.

Anyway, that’s when I knew Philip, and now we’ve reconnected. From his piece,

I’ve made frequent work-related trips to the southeast section of the state, particularly to a town called Coffeyville, and seen such reckless toxic industrial waste it staggers the imagination. Whole cities and sections of cities have had to be evacuated (Treece, Kansas, Picher, Oklahoma, Galena and Coffeyville, Kansas). There is a refinery in Coffeyville that is owned by Goldamn Sachs, does $3 billion in sales every year, that dumps its waste straight into the Verdigris River and can be smelled throughout the town and, depending on the winds, from twenty miles away. A business called Safety Kleen (you can’t make this up), owned by Viacom, dumped enormous quantities of dioxin and PCB into the regional ecosystem. No one has yet figured out how to clean up Safety Kleen’s lethal mess. The populous of Coffeyville demonstrates a bizarre array of skin afflictions. The tap water tastes like something you would use to clean a rug.

It’s not entirely hopeless:

What can be hoped for?

Much of it can be resolved by simply stopping the destruction. The landscape has an unstoppable capacity for regeneration. If you don’t mow your lawn, in a few short months you’ll find yourself surrounded by jungle.

Once erosion stabilizes and wetlands renew themselves, they have a near miraculous capacity to filter and break down most toxins. Wildlife populations race into new niches, adapt quickly and thrive when relieved of the stresses of human encroachment.

Philip Heying’s responsible for this very great picture of William Burroughs and Timothy Leary. Other great photos on his site.