An Exhibition Inspired by William S. Burroughs’ Immortality, by Ryan Golden Kirkpatrick

I have chosen to base my exhibition on William S. Burroughs’ Immortality. This piece by
Burroughs read as a deep investigation into capitalism and the extreme lengths that we humans
will go to preserve and maintain our relationship with the human body, and our place in the
world. And very importantly, this is a capitalistic pursuit as we have been so conditioned to
think of ourselves in the Marxist way as ‘labor.’ When Burroughs said: “the key word is
extraction,” I’m zeroing right in on capitalism. I’m thinking about David Harvey and his idea of
Accumulation by Dispossession. The idea that I’m focusing on here that extraction isn’t just
natural resources, minerals or even land, but the human body and the human spirit and the labor
that is extracted and derived from it. In a quite literal sense, we extract body parts from the dead
for transplants and research. The industrial prison complex leverages corrupt political agendas
and laws to extracts black and brown bodies from our society. Corporations in times of great
crisis extracts the sweat and blood of soldiers under the ideological colonialism of America to
gain control all over the world. What this idea has done, in my opinion is shape the way that we
view ourselves and of course, our bodies. I have asked myself: “is my finger Ryan?” “Is my
face Ryan?” “Is my body Ryan?” “Who is Ryan?” “Why am I Ryan and who is looking to gain
financially from my personhood?”

So, for this exhibition I have focused of works of art: performance, photography, painting and
music that investigates the idea of the body, self-possessing its kinetic energy, replicating its
beauty, demonstrating its vulnerability, and pulling, cutting and taking it apart in pieces. Pursuits
in direct conflict with the notion of capitalism that says we must be producing at all times, or our
value decreasing.

Works in this exhibition:

Frank Diaz by Robert Mapplethorpe: The kinetic energy of a buff male arm recoiling with a
knife. I think of cutting, I think of movement, I think of taking back one’s agency from the
hegemonic power structure and to move as one wishes. I think of the strength of the arm. This
isn’t a violent photograph, its sacred.

Spatial Concept, Expectations by Lucio Fontana: Here we have the cut. Fontana famous for
cutting his canvas to cut into the art world. Cut into ideas around art as a commodity. This idea,
this act, is as an act in solidarity with an anti-establishment, an anti-capitalistic show of rebellion.
These canvases are a mutation of what came before. Burroughs: “Immortality is prolongedfuture, and the future of any artifact lies in the direction of increased flexibility capacity for
change and ultimately mutation.”

Cut Piece by Yoko Ono. I think Yoko is asking: who does art belong to? Granting agency to
audience members to cut from her clothing, they become owners of the art too. The body is
involved too. We take things away sometimes to create more than what is lost.

Edith by Sarah Lucas. This Sarah Lucas sculpture deals with the reality of our existence through
talking about what is human: waste, vomit, piss, etc., Lucas creates a sculpture that mimics
someone throwing up in a toilet. Burroughs: “the body's reaction to an invading organism.” We
see legs, we see a waist…we see only body parts, and we build in what is not there to create the
whole person.

Back of the Neck / Untitled Anatomy by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat was in an accident as a
young child and given a copy of Grey’s Anatomy during his recovering. So much of his work
looks into body parts, separating them, conjoining them, describing them. As a queer black man
in NYC during one of many racist and homophobic periods in the city’s history, Basquiat’s black
body, and the black bodies others, became a focal point in his paintings to translate his
experience and the fetishization around his being. Basquiat was a target, as where all black and
gay men. Burroughs: “Personal immortality in a physical body is impossible, since a physical
body exists in time and time is that which ends.” Perhaps Basquiat saw his immortality located
in his paintings and for the body to become immortal, they must be IN the paintings.

Study for Self-Portrait 1964 by Francis Bacon. Bacon’s works violently contorts, mutilates,
removes, blends, and maims body parts giving the allusion of almost being in a psychotic
episode of grand proportions. This painting specifically joined Bacons’ portraiture of Lucien
Freud’s body with his own face. It fits so perfectly with Burroughs line: “You are other people
and other people are you.”

Untitled 1973 by Ana Mendeita. This photograph depicts Ana themselves in a ridge between
two rock fully allowing flowery type growth to come up between (the crevasses in) and around
her arms and legs. I think of extraction, how her body is placed right where one could imagine a
rock being extracted looking for ore or gold or silver. It is a beautiful metaphor for the
extraction of the human body. Burroughs: “The key word is extraction.”

Talking by Philip Guston. Guston’s late work relies heavily on the painter’s relationship to his
own aging body. Cigarettes are a common theme and along with the watch are a grave
indication of all the time that has passed, and how little of the future is left. I think of when
Burroughs talks of the “cancerous lung.”

Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs by Sarah Lucas. This photograph is a self-portrait of Lucas with
two fried eggs placed on top of her chest. Eggs being a metaphor for sex, fertility, birth and of
course death. I think of Burroughs’ line: “He can switch eggs in an alley...”

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Included not just because Burroughs is
ON the cover of this legendary Lp, but because of how it deals with concepts around aging and
the capitalistic notions of self-perceived usefulness in “When I’m Sixy-Four.”

Mister Heartbreak by Laurie Anderson. Burroughs in on this record reading the lyrics on the
closing track Sharkey’s Night.

Vitalogy by Pearl Jam. On this record is an incredibly beautiful song called “Immortality.”
Singer Eddie Vedder is a huge Burroughs fan, so I included it as a nod to them both.

Arendt On Power

A. Power Construed As Experience of Possibility (power from L. potens, potential)     

B. Political Rationality à

            yields emphasis on open futurity ineradicably inhering in present/presence à    

            history as interminable social struggle

C. Characterized by Dissensus, Dependent on Consent

__

A. Power Construed As Amplification of Capacities

B. Instrumental Rationality à

            Yields emphasis on The Future as destination/"Manifest" Destiny à

            History as causal material forces, often superhuman ones (prone to technological determinism         and "natural progressivisms" in which differences tend to be cast as exploitable atavisms)

C. Characterized by Consensus, Dependent on Dissent (prediction and control warranted by scientific             beliefs that attract a consensus after being put to the test)

Supplemental Reading for Our Marx Lecture

In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:

[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.

 ***

To the citizen Maurice Lachâtre

Dear Citizen,

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.

That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.

That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Believe me, dear citizen, Your devoted, Karl Marx

London, March 18, 1872

Our Syllabus

CS-500A-01: An Introduction to Critical Theory

Spring, 2020, San Francisco Art Institute

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Blog: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-syllabus.html
Wednesdays, 4.15-7pm, Fort Mason Lounge, 1/22/20-5/10/20 RONA REVISION: Migrating temporarily into cyberspace.
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 20%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 15-20pp., 50%.
THESE REQUIREMENTS HAVE BEEN REVISED FOR THE RONA: The Reading Notebook is now a weekly writing assignment to be handed in each week, 3 quotes/3 questions minimum, due by end of the day of each class "meeting." From here on out this requirement will stand in for the attendance requirement and contribute to the participation requirement as well (40% of the final grade) and the final 15-20pp. paper remains 60% of the final grade. The in-class presentation has become an extra credit assignment available to anybody who still wants to do it in an online form, the options for doing which are deliriously open-ended. Details of these changes soon forthcoming.

Course Description:

"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." -- Karl Marx

"Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a 'fact' into a 'contradiction.'" -- Sandra Lee Bartky

"Artists inhabit the magical universe." -- William Burroughs

This course is a chronological and thematic survey of key texts in critical and cultural theory. A skirmish in the long rivalry of philosophy and rhetoric yielded a turn in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into the post-philosophical discourse of critical theory. In the aftermath of world war, critical theory took a biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault -- a turn still reverberating in work on socially legible bodies by writers like Haraway, Spivak, Butler, and Puar. And with the rise of the global precariat and climate catastrophe, critical theory is now turning again in STS (science and technology studies) and EJC (environmental justice critique) to articulate the problems and promises of an emerging planetarity. Theories of the fetish define the turn of the three threshold figures of critical theory -- Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (commodity, sexuality, and ressentimentality) -- and fetishisms ramify thereafter in critical accounts from Benjamin (aura), Adorno (culture industry), Barthes (myth), Debord (spectacle), Klein (logo), and Harvey ("tech") to Mulvey and Mercer (the sexed and raced gaze). We think of facts as found not made, but facts are made to be found and, once found, made to be foundational. Let us pursue the propositions that fetishes are figures we take to yield false facts, while facts are figures we have fetishized to yield paradoxical truths.

                Provisional Schedule of Meetings

                Week One | January 22 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction

                Week Two | January 23 -- Ancients and Moderns, Margins and Centers

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns 
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View  
W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings  

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

                Week Three | February 5 | Nietzsche and the Fetishism of ressentiment

Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny
--supplemental Selections from The Gay Science

   

                Week Four | February 12 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities {Ellen}
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital 

--supplemental Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach and Marx on Idealism and Materialism

                Week Five | February 19 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism {Sarah}
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism
Excerpts from Freud's Case Study of Dr. Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity; 2,  Storytelling;  
3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality); 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis. 

                Week Six | February 26 | Commodity, Aura, and Culture Industry {Anya and Miles}

Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility  
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry 

--supplemental Benjamin, A Short History of Photography and Adorno, The Culture Industry Reconsidered

                Week Seven | March 4 | Nature As The Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language {James}
Roland Barthes, Mythologies 

--supplemental Daniel Harris, The Futuristic

                Week Eight | March 11 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding{Flora and Kyle}

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Naomi Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No Logo  

--supplemental Naomi Klein, Patriarchy Gets Funky

                Week Nine | Spring Break

 

                Week Ten | March 25 | REVISED "Study Week"

                Week Eleven | April 1 | REVISED "I Knew It Had To Be Something Like This"
At-Home Screenings of, Carpenter (dir.) They Live

                 Week Twelve | April 8 |  REVISED Out With The Old, In With The New {Ryan}
William Burroughs, Immortality 
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence

--supplemental William Burroughs, On Coincidence 
Hannah Arendt, The Miracle of Forgiveness and Must Eichmann Hang? (handouts)

                Week Thirteen | April 15 | REVISED Racial Fetishism and the Gaze {Madeline}
Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema  
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe 
--supplemental Fanon, "Concerning Violence"
               Week Fourteen | April 22 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy

Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish, the Body of the Condemned (pp. 3-31) Docile Bodies (pg. 135 +), Panoptism (pg. 195 +)
Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (read Chapters, 1, 2, 6 of the pamphlet at least if you can)

--supplemental Foucault, from History of Sexuality: We Other Victorians, Right of Death and Power Over Life

               Week Fifteen | April 29 | Intersections and Performance

Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference  
The Combahee River Collective Statement 
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs 
Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender
--supplemental Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto

                Week Sixteen | May 6 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Bruno Latour, To Modernise Or Ecologise?
Gayatri Spivak, Theses on Planetarity

--supplemental David Harvey Fetishism of Technology


Course Objectives:
 
I. Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: The inaugural Platonic repudiation of rhetoric and poetry, Vita Activa/Vita Contemplativa, Marx's last Thesis on Feuerbach, Kantian Critique, the Frankfurt School, Exegetical and Hermeneutic Traditions, Literary and Cultural Theory from the Restoration period through New Criticism, from Philosophy to Post-Philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; the postwar biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault; and the emerging post-colonial, post-international, post-global planetarity of theory in an epoch of digital networked media formations, anthropogenic climate catastrophe, and intersectional associations.
 
II. Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: Agency, Alienation, Aura, Cisheteronormativity, Critique, Culture Industry, Discourse, Equity-in-Diversity, Facticity, Fetish, Figurality, Humanism/Post-Humanism, Ideology, Intersectionality, Judgment, Normativity, Performance, Planetarity, Post-Colonialism, Queerness, Race, Recognition, Resistance, Scientificity, Sociality, Spectacle, Textuality, White Supremacy.
 
III. Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Marxism/Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Justice.
 
IV. Connecting theoria and poiesis: thinking and acting, theory and practice, creative expressivity as aesthetic judgment and critical theory as poetic refiguration, etc.

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 kdneys 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...

Mentase 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 thing 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."

Recent dream research has turned up a wealth of data, but no one has assembled the pieces into a workable field theory.

By far the most significant discovery to emerge frm precise dream research with vounteer subjects is the fact that dreams are a biological necessity for all warm-blooded animals. Deprived of REM sleep, they show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. Continued deprivation would result in death.

All dreams in male subjects, except nightmares, are accompanied by erection. No one has proffered an explanation. It is interesting to note that a male chipanzee who did finger and dab paintings, and was quite good too, went into a sexual frenzy during his creative acts.

Cold-blooded animals do not dream. All warm-blooded creatures including birds do dream.

John Dunne discovered that dreams contain references to future time as experienced by the dreamer. He published his findings in An Experiment with Time in 1924. Dream references, he points out, relate not to the event itself but to the time when the subject learns of the event. The dream refers to the future of the dreamer. He says that anybody who will write his dreams down over a period of time will turn up precognitive references. Dreams involve time travel. Does it follow then that time travel is a necessity?

I quote from an article summarizing the discoveries of Professor Michel Jouvet. Jouvet, using rapid eye movement techniques, has been able to detect dreaming in animals in the womb and even developing birds in the egg. He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream a lot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth.

He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had enough in practice in dreams. This indicates that the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically ddesigned for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as training for space conditions. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die.

Art serves the same function as dreams. Plato's Republic is a blueprint for a death camp. An alien invader, or a domestic elite, bent on conquest and extermination, could rapidly immobilize the earth by cutting dream lines, just the way we took care of the Indians. I quote from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt:

"The nation's hoop is broken and scattered like a ring of smoke. There is no center any more. The sacred tree is dead and all its birds are gone."