Soap bubbles
I don’t really remember what happened
I just know that Hutchinson
one of my school-friends
invited a group of us to come round
and play in the bush near his home
after much excitement and build-up
we all turned up
with our plastic guns
and headed for the trees
I recall crouching in a ditch
waiting for something
then
[blank]
crying bitterly
all the way home
the day was a failure
my fault of course
(default position)
perhaps a play fight
turned into a real one?
it is the future generation
that presses into being
by means of these soap bubbles
said Schopenhauer
sometimes I think
he might be right
and I should just cut myself
some slack
So apparently William Burroughs used to bore everyone rigid by going on and on about these things called
engrams - defined as "a mental recording of a traumatic past event that occurred while an individual was partially or fully unconscious" - and how it was possible to "clean" them by recording them on tape and playing them over and over again until, eventually, they elicited no emotional response whatever.
He got this idea from
Scientology, where auditors are trained to ask structured questions "intended to help a participant identify and address past experiences and emotional difficulties." They use a device called an
E-meter to pick up "changes in the subject's mental state, including helping [to] identify which topics contain emotional or spiritual distress, and when a procedure is completed."
Outside Scientology, the device is regarded as a type of skin galvanometer that measures variations in skin resistance. It is not considered a scientific instrument, and its use and interpretation are not supported by evidence in psychology or medicine.
In the end, even Burroughs got tired of this procedure, and began to see flaws in its theoretical basis - not to mention developing reservations about the bizarre Scientology mythos of ancient aliens and billion-year-old struggles between all-knowing, quasi-immortal thetans and corrupt physical beings.
However, that didn't prevent him from continuing to try and identify just when the (so-called) "ugly spirit" had entered him, and proceeded to "squat on his life" (a bit like Larkin's
toad work). Burroughs came to believe that it all stemmed from an early incident of child abuse:
It was Billy's Welsh nanny, Mary Evans ... who remained uppermost in his memory because of a traumatic incident that occurred when Burroughs was four years old. Little Billy was very close to his nanny, so much so that when she had her Thursday off he would throw hysterical tantrums, screaming, "All I want is Nursy!" ... Burroughs later assumed that his need for her must indicate that she fellated him to calm him and send him to sleep, but he also told one of his analysts that Nursy was "severe" and said that when she caught him masturbating she threatened to cut off his penis ...
Nursy was allegedly responsible "for a major trauma that occurred when Burroughs was four years old, something so extreme and shocking that despite ten years of psychoanalysis he was never able to properly retrieve it":
One Thursday in the late summer or autumn of 1918 ... Mary Evans took him along with her on her day out. Mary Evans had a girlfriend whose boyfriend was a veterinarian who worked from his home on the outskirts of St. Louis. They went there for a picnic. ... The general concensus among his analysts was that Mary had encouraged Billy to fellate the vet, and that, scared, Bill had bitten the man's penis, causing him to smack Billy on the head. Bill also theorized that he had witnessed Mary and her girlfriend having sex ...
In any case, "Whatever happened, it disturbed Billy greatly."
Reading the immensely detailed chronicle of Burroughs' life compiled by the indefatigable Barry Miles, I wondered from time to time if this demonisation of the nanny mightn't itself be a screen memory for some even earlier trauma to do with his parents, who supported him with saint-like patience throughout his turbulent life, but whom he seems to have (simultaneously) avoided physically, and refused to criticise on any level whatsoever.
But perhaps that's just the old Freudian in me rearing his shaggy locks again.
The jury's out on
engrams at present, but they may well be perfectly real. Defined as "a unit of cognitive information imprinted in a physical substance," they are:
theorized to be the means by which memories are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain or other biological tissue, in response to external stimuli.
The term was first coined by German evolutionary biologist
Richard Semon in his book
Die Mneme (1904). As a result:
Demonstrating the existence of, and the exact mechanism and location of, neurologically defined engrams has been a focus of persistent research for many decades.
It's possible that particular types of memory may be localised in particular parts of the brain. There have certainly been some suggestive results from time to time. For instance:
In 2016, an MIT study found that memory loss in early stages of Alzheimer's disease could be reversed by strengthening specific memory engram cell connections in the brains of Alzheimer mouse models.
Engrams certainly can't be detected by "E-meters", however, and there seems no reason to believe that an individual can be cleaned of them by having them played back to them again and again, as Burroughs and the Scientologists claimed.
Robert Lowell's searing mid-career poem 'To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage' begins with a rather elliptical quote from German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer:
It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.
Schopenhauer seems to be implying that our traumas may be driven as much by the
future - what's to come for us - as by the
past: what's already been. As it turns out, the title of Lowell's poem is also a quote: from the
Wife of Bath in Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales:
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage;
For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,
Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve ...
Lowell's poem, too, is written in the voice of the wife, not the husband, which is clearly not an aspect of "experience" which he could claim as his own. The husband in question does sound a bit like a self-portrait, though:
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
If so, it's a pretty searing indictment.
Whether or not there are actual physical "engrams" involved, I'm sure that we all have our fair share of traumatic experiences involving "emotional or spiritual distress" (as the Scientologists put it). The question is if they can be cleared in any way by repetition, as Burroughs - at least initially - believed.
The poem "Soap bubbles", above, is an attempt to record one of my own childhood traumas: albeit one as masked and inaccessible to me as Burrough's own alleged experience of infantile abuse.
Mine may be a minnow beside his sperm whale, but it used to bug me nevertheless - until I wrote it down. I began to notice, over the years, that when I'd forced myself to write about any particularly puzzling or embarrassing experience, that it had the effect of externalising it. After that, it was simply a syntactic artefact which could be worked on and revised like any other piece of work.
Strangely enough, this process also robbed it of its potency somehow.
Kingsley Amis, in an early novel, has his protagonist Jim Dixon refer to "those three or four memories which could make him actually twist about in his chair or bed with remorse, fear or embarrassment":
... the present top-of-the-list item [was] the time he'd been pushed out in front of the curtain afer a school concert to make the audience sing the National Anthem. He could hear his own voice now, saying in those flat tones, heavy with insincerity: 'And now ... I want you all ... to join with me, if you will ... in singing ...' And then he'd led off in a key which must have been exactly half an octave above or below the proper one. Switching every few notes, like everybody else, from one octave to the other, half a beat in front of or behind everybody else, he'd gone through the whole thing. Cheers, applause and laughter had followed him when he ducked his burning face back through the curtains.
I recognised that churning, twisting sensation when I first read
Lucky Jim. I can't count how many such memories bedevil
my life. So gradually, bit by bit, I've tried to disarm them - by writing them down. Admittedly, new ones arise as I deal with the old ones, so I doubt that the process will ever be finished. Sometimes it results in work I feel can be shared with others; sometimes not. It doesn't seem to make much difference to the effectiveness of the technique.
I don't know if this approach would work for anyone else, but I
do think there's something in William Burroughs' ideas. They might sound a bit eccentric on the surface, but there's generally a bedrock of good sense beneath them. Anyway, I don't what else one can do about these self-imposed torments: writhing about or punching the wall doesn't really seem to help longterm. A modified version of his engram theory very well might.
Burroughs himself appears to have tried this "externalisation" idea quite early on, in a passage from an early draft of
Naked Lunch, written in Tangier around 1957-58:
We are prepared to divulge all and to state that on a Thursday in the month of September 1917, we did, in the garage of the latter, at his solicitations and connivance, endeavor to suck the cock of one George Brune Brubeck, the Bear's Ass, which act disgust me like I try to bite it off and he slap me and curse and blaspheme. [...] The blame for this atrociously incomplete act rest solidly on the basement of Brubeck, my own innocence of any but the most pure reflex move of self-defence and - respect to eliminate this strange serpent thrust so into my face [...] so I [...] had recourse to nature's little white soldiers - our brave defenders by land - and bite his ugly old cock.
William S. Burroughs: Interzone. Ed. James Grauerholz (1989)
When he included this passage in the late compilation of outtakes,
Interzone, Burroughs' longterm friend and editor James Grauerholz did some background research which failed to reveal any veterinarians named George Brune Brubeck in St. Louis at the time, although "there is an Edward H.
Brune":
'Brune' ...B-R-U-N-E ... 'the Bear's Ass' ... bruin ... this name, although unearthed from a work of fiction, seems well established in Burrough's mind. With all due respect to the late Dr. Brune's descendants, we cannot convict him on this slender evidence, but it certainly points in an interesting direction.
I can't help feeling that the engram theory may take us in a more helpful direction here than such direct attempts to identify the true nature of the crime, interesting though Grauerholz's speculations undoubtedly are.
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8: 32). Possibly so. But the mere act of writing it down, then editing it for rhetorical effectiveness, might have the same result of making it no longer simply a part of you. As the wiseacres are keen to tell us, you don't actually
remember things, you just remember yourself remembering them, and then remember yourself remembering yourself remembering them - and so
ad infinitum.
If you want to get rid of them, they have to be first snared in the ether, then fixed and mounted on some kind of memory board: real or metaphorical.
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