Thursday, June 25, 2009

From the Book of Voices: an interview with Hunter S. Thompson

[Currently the wife of the late Hunter S. Thompson, Anita T in Latin. She has given me some of her husband's books. Story of Balaam comes from the Midrash. I think]

And in order to be fair the Lord G-d sent one prophet also unto the gentiles. And Balaam was his name. And the prophet Balaam was a wicked man and his prophecies always came to him at night and only after he did unspeakable things with his white donkey.
- I do wonder sometimes... Am I perceived as sme kind of crazy drug addict?
- Chances are you are not perceived as much of anything at all.
- You are a Quiet Type.
- But still. Suppose they do.
- Perceive.
- Notice.
- Suppose Hunter had noticed. If... If I was 34 ten years ago, not in ten years.
- If. But let's suppose.
- What do you want to show me. What do I have to notice/see?
- That reading is not a wholesome alternative to smack.
- Heroin you mean. Don't foul your pages with strong-seeming words.
- But I am sick of decent, tended meanings.
- The strong words won't be any more attractive than strong breath? Fool enough to court an empty vestige of a brutal manhood such as that?
- There is no way out of the labyrinth of reading. There is no way out of the multiverse of words.
- All depends on how you view it, I suppose.
- Your trip to Vegas turned to loathing of itself. You switch to harder drugs in REACTION. To more thorough madness in the external, materially sober world.
- The stone-cold sober world of matter run by an allegedly sober god.
- Is that the moral? Men drink and fill themselves with rancid toxins because the world itself is drunk unto white fever and hallucination and only with a mind unhinged a man can... understand. Begin to understand. The trip?
- And the much-used white ass of Balaam is the same undying snow-white talking donkey which the Messiah the last son of the House of David will ride into Jerusalem one day.
- Suppose the moral is easier than that. Suppose the moral is that there is no Search. No uppercase ideas. We rode into town packing more drogs per square inch of our flesh than the richest and the most desperate (NOT the same individuals, believe you me) junkies anywhere in out and within shooting range of sight. Suppose my moral is that those who seek the Right with a capital letter have already lost their way and those who seek the Dream also with a capital letter for their pains have only until the end of their drug high to keep dreaming. High's over and bam! back in the world of pushers and graspers - not in the intellectual sense of grasping stuff either, oh no. That old sick world of grasping for the needle in another body's arm and oh so what if you do cripple that worthless body and give your own worthless one some horrible blood-poisoning disease. Baby, you'll do it.
- No matter what the drug. Including women.
- Including a ertain way of thinking about women which brings a nice deep hit of a certain speedball brew of pheromones, adrenaline and boyish optimisim into your smart-boy clean-as-kleenex brain.
- Kleenex is not very clean. Ecologically speaking.
- Neither is your brain. Sociologically.
- Well I know my truth when I feel it. And besides. If you were already full of chemicals when entering Las Vegas.
- It is a try at narrating an acid trip.
- The other drugs, who's counting?
- Who can soberly count drugs anyway?
- Considering everybody either hates them or wants them.
- Often both. Retaining either.
- The strangest thing. I could kick a huge cocaine habit but I can't kick the habit of always being late. What do you make of that?

June 20.