Is Time Speeding Up To The Present?
A conversation with Genesis P-Orridge

The scenario: The harshly beautiful face of Genesis
P-Orridge, a burning- eyed mystic, fingers bedecked with
talismanic rings, glows in bursts of intensity. He reels out
astonishing statements as four competing TV screens flicker
their attempts at information through a San Francisco flat.
It's a flat of artists - young, squalid rebels, musicians
and artists for yet another questionable youth movement.
There's not much in it - bare wooden floors; most of the
funky Tibetan tapestries hang out of comfort's range. These
are souvenirs of a hurried consultation with ancient wise
men; a meeting on snowy Everest; a desparate flight to
safety. The persecution started when a British judge made it
illegal for people to get tattoos...

Wait

Stop! Stop the official broadcast! I think a bit of reality
got in there.

In actuality: The government has begun to come after people
aiming squarely at their bodies; this year, five gay men
were jailed in Great Britain for their tattoos, piercings
and private sexual behavior. Tattoos, piercings and
scarifications [ritual scarring of the body] are now
classified as "grievous bodily harm" and carry a sentence in
Britain of up to seven years imprisonment. Since Genesis and
wife Alaura had appeared with body tatttoos, piercings and
other body modification in the visually raucous Modern
Primitives/ReSearch, the British authorities had in hand
evidence to make a "heterosexual example." They proceeded to
cook up any story they could - stooping to ritual
baby-murdering - to take them into custody.

+ Although consensus reality is generally manufactured in
the West by the bureaucratic, media and educational machines
to look as comforting as a baby's blanket, it has gotten
tighter and tighter around the individual. Since the
Sixties, an anti-intellectual pressure has replaced
mysticism - although this is changing as cults and mystical
alternatives, from paganism to raves to Wicca to Nature
movements to vampires, are seemingly having a comeback. Now
that people are looking beyond the body, the government is
moving fast to claim a stake in ecstatic states, to
legislate disorder - legislate sexual activity.

+ So, insights from Genesis P-Orridge, founder of the Temple
of Psychic Youth, scholar of mysticism, co-inventor of
Psychic TV and Industrial music in the influential band
Throbbing Gristle, are helpful in this regard - of how to
regard reality, how to sidestep Control. Besides his
research with ecstatic states, pain thresholds and
mysticism, he has headed up many dissident lists: protesting
to close the dolphinariums, end apartheid, and work with
ACT-UP.

+ Virtual Reality, the new idea of body-to-computer
programming interface, is another area where the government
could enter the body if allowed. So I was surprised to find
Genesis in the midst of writing a TV treatment for director
Oliver Stone, who's shooting a miniseries on Virtual
Reality. Genesis was asked to contribute a psychological
treament for a spin-off book on the lead character Kreuzer,
the "egomaniacal Virtual Reality broadcaster."

+ Perhaps Genesis' vision, based on intuition and truth,
will transform the TV medium into something resembling a
message. At any rate, his words are intriguing
illuminations, and our conversation haunted me for days.

GENKREUZER:

will Power Go?
WORLD PRESET
GUARDIANS 
Be subtle
to the point of
formlessness
Be mysterious
to the point of
soundlessness
Be extreme
to the point of
powerlessness.

Justine: Tell me about the script - what you are writing at
the moment.

Genesis P. Orridge: I will, it's what I'm actually working
on at the minute. So Oliver Stone has done his first TV
series - it's a miniseries - they sent me a script. It's
called "Wild Palms." It's six hours - the main character is
this senator Kreuzer. And he seems to be an amalgam of Ron
Hubbard and Perot! At least that's how I understand it. He's
got his own cult religion named "Synthiotics." As in
synthesis. And then he's got a shadowy sinister Masonic thug
organization called the Fathers. Who beat up, kidknap and
arrest anyone who doesn't agree with their vision for the
United States. He also has somehow ended up owning the
biggest network TV channel. Now he's just at the point where
he's developed "Minicom," which is virtual reality
television. You wear the goggles and it's broadcast like a
television in your room. It takes place as holographic
virtual television.

There's also a psychedelic drug named Fugu, which is also
the name of the blowfish in Japan. Some essence of Fugu also
enhances this experience, so you actually go into the
virtual world and in that world you can have contact with
broadcasts and fantasies and cherished dreams and all sorts
of other dimensions. So though it appears to be
entertainment, it can go into this whole mystical
evolutionary realm as well.

And for some reason there's this whole group of store-bought
Democratic United States statesmen who think it's a terrible
idea that we should be allowed to experience this because it
appears to be addictive, and that of course is just morally
outrageous. So they call themselves the Friends. And the
Friends are determined to destroy the Fathers because
they're inherently no Good. They're obviously cruel and
ruthless, but their visionary aspect isn't necessarily
suspect.

Justine: Do they start to really bump each other off?

Gen: Oh yes, in very cruel and vicious ways. There's a woman
who pulls the eyes out of a painter...but I don't want to
get into the details, the murders are less interesting to
me.

It has this one level which is a bit like a science fiction
"Dynasty": Minicom control of the globe vs. "Freedom for Its
Own Sake."

But anyway, Kreuzer's real obsession is that there's a
microchip called the Go chip. And he's convinced that if
this Go chip is implanted in his brain he will be able to
separate from his own physical body and become an immortal
hologram that can come and go back through all realities at
will.

Justine: Okay.

Gen: So his quest is really to retrieve it from these
semi-neutral, slightly on-the-side-of-the-Friends, Japanese
techno-shamen.

Now I was given the task, they're going to do a spin-off
book of the series. And they've assigned different
characters to different people in the culture, so I was
offered Kreuzer at the very beginning of his life, '68 to
'73 when he was heavily into the psychedelics and was
formulating all of his philosophies and visions and theories
that would lead to him in the year 2015, being in the
position of an all-powerful billionaire, trying to become
immortal. And what would make him align himself with the
highest developments of TV technology, and make that into a
mystical cult.

Justine: That is a good task.

Gen: Yeah, it is.

Justine: And it's about control, which has always been one
of your interests.

Gen: Right, exactly, the whole mass media of control and
also politics of control.

Justine: What are the needs of control?

Gen: It appears that control has become a manifestation or
almost an entity into itself. One that is out of control of
those who think they are administering it. My overall
suspicions and speculations are very much that time and
control and consciousness are actually almost - that they
behave like matter, or like quantum physics definitions of
energy. And therefore we have to deal with them almost like
we'd deal with a new species. That it's a separate species -

A huge, interwoven consciousness that Time is a separate
manifestation that can be physically manifested. That you
are whatever your lifespan is, a physical manifestation of
time. That time is infinite, and the bit of time that
becomes you is actually a limited part of time. But when you
physically die, you go back to infinite time.

INFINITE TIME

So instead of it being that, "well, we're here, that's the
important bit," and that's the bit that we value, and
everything else is this mystery, this void that we're very
unsure about, it's actually the other way around. Us being
physically here is actually the mystery. And time actually
contains all those qualities. And so does light and so does
control. They all can have all the qualities and all the
words we use to describe what we call God. All the
definitions that have ever been made of deities are actually
definitions of physics - explanations of these other
energies.

So I think the big breakthrough, and what I'm trying to
include in this stuff I've been writing for Oliver Stone, is
basically to state that if we forget the word God, we're
talking about light being the same as matter. Therefore if
it's the same as matter, we can break it down, and do the
equivalent of finding the atoms and the neutrons and the
protons and so on. Then we really start to make progress
toward the ideas that this Kreuzer represents, that is we
start to be able to take control again, in a neutral way,
just to learn to be in interaction with these forces which
we've always been subservient to. We can finally sidestep
being involved in temporal control. I actually think
Kreuzer's on the right track.

Justine: Because of breaking temporal control into light?

Gen: Well, the latest books I've been reading on light and
time - in particular, Time The Ultimate Energy (by Murray
Hope/Element Books) - it's weird that this Kreuzer thing
gives me a vehicle for a lot of things I've been thinking
deeply about anyway.

But I was doing a rigorous neuro-shamanic ritual, after
being suspended in a darkened room in mid-air by ropes,
blindfold, with no outside sensory stimulus except muscular
and skin surface stresses...

Justine: This is in reality?

Gen: Yes, this is real. I was wrapped in goatskins in a
coffin in a darkened room suspended in mid-air. And - doing
that experience - was when I came to this conclusion that
time actually was literally a consciousness, just like yours
or mine. An entity. It's actually a consciousness, an entity
into itself, from which we are born and to which we return.

And it was so wacky that I kind of wrote notes on it and
made some cassette tapes about it with a friend. Then just
before I left Great Britain last year, Time The Ultimate
Energy came out. Which was using old anthropological
explanations of time and descriptions of different cultures
going back thousands of years on the nature of time. And it
came to the conclusion, using all the latest quantum
physics, that time actually behaves like an energy or a
consciousness. So I was really thrilled: "I'm not insane,"
you know.

It's beginning to seem that what's happening to us all is
that things are being confirmed that were the most wild
speculations not that long ago. And that mysticism is just a
failure of language to completely define the actual facts.

But if we know that light, and energy and control are all
media, consciousness media that we can travel in and out of,
and interact with, we then get access to infinite
alternative realities. We can have eventually the choice of
where to exist and in what form to exist. And we will
actually be liberated outside the physical body if we
choose.

Justine: I just wrote a sentence the other morning, "the
Spirit is a Function of the Time that is Now." Does that
kind of make sense?

Gen: Yeah. There is no future, past or present, there's
time. When you get into this area, this has been the problem
it will always be, it's not linguistic. You get into things
that sound spiritual or mystical and they are - but it's as
if every story everyone tells is actually true.

And that's why I've been interested in the idea of editing
and transmedia events, with visuals and overloads on all the
senses, because you get into a space of not thinking, not
using any words... you go into a symbolic, hieroglyphic
space. I think that is the doorway into these other states.
They are nonlinear, they are all-encompassing and infiltrate
every dimension and direction simultaneously. That's another
reason the frontiers of computer technology and digital
technology and psychedelia are all starting to integrate
again. That is a highly significant development.

Justine: Is cybernetics, as it deals with closed systems and
statistical certainties, contrary to an expanding awareness?

Gen: There are two ways of looking at it all - one is that
things are disordered, and that science and computers and
technology are imposing order on it, or that things are
becoming more ordered as we understand them better. But if
that was the case, then when you broke glass you would see
it leap back up and put itself together. That is the debate
- there are those who seek to maintain and assume that order
is preferable and possible, and that things are moving
toward greater order...

...And there are those others of us who say, no, this is not
a description of my existence whatsoever. I never know
what's going to happen or who's going to ring up on the
phone - things are moving and expanding and moving outward
and imploding - there is chaos.

If we work in media that generate disorder and allow for
chaotic elements and disintegration, we are describing
consensus reality better, and we are also integrated with
what's happening - therefore we can then be centered in a
different way.

Justine: Centered - not in total irationality though.

Gen: Well, if there was an option between total
irrationality and certainty, then I would always vote for
irrationality. Certainty seems a very dull option. And the
militaristic programming of the computer evolution, so you
have this ever-growing reliance upon this quasi-military,
industrial need. The United States is now the most
successful military operation ever in the history of the
planet. And its entire economy is reliant more upon the
continuation of arms defense, strategic developments than
ever before in any culture. To defend and police - nothing!
An illusion!

That's one of the ways that it can go... The job of the
artist and the writers and the thinkers and anyone who
rejects this consensus reality is to short-circuit, and to
disintegrate, cut-up and reaarange and assemble and take
apart everything handed to us as a given fact.

And that's what troubled me about the development of virtual
reality. Why would I want to be submissive to this other
person's fantasy without a lot of information first?

CUT-UP MACHINE

Gen: Finding cheap, quick ways to re-mind people that they
can alter and affect and re-direct any program, those are
the really, really vital tools we need. Software to destroy
and re-empower ourselves to make those choices. From just
using two or three VCR decks to sample off the television,
to software that permutates information beyond the rational
mind. Someone at Apple's just finished something they call
"Cut-Up Machine." A software that permutates any verbal
material in any language an infinite number of ways,
regardless of meaning. We're hoping to have it available as
a floppy disk next year at 50 cents a copy, to sell or give
away at events.

Anything you type in it will sort, any way you choose, you
can give it parameters. Every second word or every fifteenth
word or everything backwards or whatever. Then you can see
what else you really said, if something else is secreted in
there. It doesn't necessarily achieve something you couldn't
do yourself mechanically, but it re-minds you of the
processes there, and what can be done - to look at things
with a fresh eye and see if you've got lazy or if you've
started to assimilate the things you would normally have an
armor against or a filter about.

Justine: How would one do their own process of destabilizing
Control?

Gen: Well, any technique, like writing your sentences,
editing your own tapes off the TV and sending it to a
friend... Learn about editing. Learn the invisible language
- how things are lit. Where the cuts are made. How they're
manipulated; how you respond, how you change your response
according to what sound is there. I think people have become
really accelerated and sophisticated about basics and now
they're much more ready to look at the subliminal workings.

I think partly the positive side effect of the way people
got cleverer and cleverer at editing broadcast television
is, that we got quicker to assimilate almost any effect they
come up with. So we read the language of TV, the nonverbal
language, much quicker than we read the written language.
We've become really good at it, as a global animal. Some
people find that scary, I find it liberating.

Justine: If this is the end of history why are we taping
everything? Is this history or dissolution?

Gen: Well, it's the end of his-story, the patriarchal story.
I think what people are doing is empowering themselves to
maintain a relationship with what is happening. I mean,
we're all storytellers, and the role of the storyteller has
been buried for a long time in the old sense... But it was a
very cleansing role, it was the person who made sense of the
environment to the tribe, the chosen tribe or its community.

That role of making sense everything that's happening, in
this incredible kaleidoscope - for a long time that was
subverted into entertainment, decoration and education. But
people are, through different sources, re- activating the
storyteller. And one aspect of it is that people are
refuting the broadcast version. They're videoing their own
stories, their private stories, private myths. It's an
essential part of the survival tools that we should be
looking at.

TIME TRAVEL/IMAGINARY TIME

Gen: In late January, we started off in Tokyo in the 21st
century. Flew to Bangkok, which is like, I don't know... a
bit like an inner city in the United States maybe ten years
ago. Then we went to Kathmandu, which was 5th century - all
in 24 hours. And it's when you do things like that, you
realize that time travel is happening every time we move one
foot in front of the other. You can empower yourself by your
movement, or which book you pick up - If you pick up an old
book, you've traveled in time. If you pick up Mondo 2000,
you're projecting into another time zone. Time is malleable.
So the mind is already constantly traveling through time and
space, quite happily. It's just the physical body that gets
confused.

Justine: What do you think of people who want to get out of
their bodies by wiring into a computer?

Gen: To just wire into a computer... It doesn't appeal to
me, personally. I can understand the attraction, but it's to
remain static. It's a fear thing, to just make a cartoon of
yourself in there. To really let go is to let go of
everything completely. And my ambition has always been to
disintegrate into something beyond matter and beyond
anything we've conceived. You can't just want to be
"all-powerful" or "godlike." The only thing to want to be is
beyond anything any humans could imagine; not to be powerful
or godlike, but just disintegrate into the ultimate energy
pile which of course could turn out to be limited as well...
and could disintegrate into another...

Justine: That makes sense.

Gen: Anything less really seems pointless! (laughs.) I can't
understand why people limit themselves to what they know. My
excitement is to be absolutely drenched in, pulverized by
the unknown, until no possible conception of this me could
exist or be relevant in any way... Have we gone off the
beaten track a bit here?

Justine: I'd like to talk about your writing.

Gen: When I write, I'm a bit like a method actor. They've
asked me to be Kreuzer's brain in 1968. "Predict his brain
50 or 60 years later." So I've been staying up late reading
mysticism, quantum physics, and theories of television and
cyborganics, and so on until I can be Kreuzer. His visionary
side I can relate to - of wanting to absolutely let go of
all of this imagined reality. That I can follow.

Justine: Do you have a description of his mind's projection?

Gen: Not exactly... (looking at manuscript) the acceleration
of disorder... it's hard to say really.

Justine: I've noticed in your other writings you like to use
"thee" instead of "the" - "coum" instead of "come" -
replacing meaning, or letting meaning branch into ambiguity
at that point. Do you still do that?

Gen: Oh yes, I started using "thee" and "E" and stuff way
back in 1965, as part of a long process of training myself
with language, in my own diaries and essays. And then for a
whole year I didn't use the words "the" or "and" - just as
an exercise.

Justine: I like "it" a lot, personally. When I write, it's
good to end something with "it."

Gen: I like "it." You're very synchronous with this... Find
the it bits...

...Funny you should mention that... "As it is, so be it.
What does IT matter?" Then It Is Matter, you see. Yeah, I
got into the it bits. There was a whole section I wrote
about It. Most of it dropped out. Oh look, here! "As God is
actually a linguistic and televisual re-production of the
universe, then the Creator is he who defines, describes, and
makes a picture of It." In our own images, you see? No
wonder you came tonight.

It=Imaginary Time.

I decided that "it" was imaginary time. I'm not sure what it
means yet, but that's what (I wrote).

If you stop consciously conceiving it, it takes over. You
see paragraphs arriving in front of you, and you say, "this
makes sense to some other part of me. There are theories and
amplifications going on here that are coming out. Despite
all the millions of words I've heard people spew out, I
haven't seen this order of words before - and it's
resonating with me."

You're feeling like you've discovered something that could
be helpful. These tools that help you kind of sense what's
happening to you next, intellectually and emotionally, just
start to come at you like a visitor. A bit like when you're
tripping and you get this revelation about something. And
sometimes you get the sense while it's happening that it is
more than it will appear the next day. But you are in this
other reality. It is more astute in a way. Say you speak
fluid Swahili and you write a poem in Swahili, and the next
day you get a bang on the head and you get amnesia and it
wouldn't make any sense to you. It doesn't mean it wasn't a
good poem in Swahili. It just means today you can't read it.

I think people try to make judgements all the time based on
the idea that all realities are the same, and that one is
more or less valuable than the other. What you did then was
valuable, and remains so. That's the problem people have if
they think things always have to be constantly important, or
constantly truthful. Or constant. That's ridiculous. They
remain what they were when they occurred in that particular
moment.

Justine: But it's hard. In a relationship, all the levels,
when someone keeps changing, both are changing, you both
have to realize that... go through all that...

Gen: It's a marvelous adventure. It's probably the toughest,
the most revolutionary experience if you can stick with it,
and take a lot of risks. Absorb a lot of punishment. I think
people underestimate the metaphor of the relationship in
terms of the Omniverse.

Justine: The Omniverse?

Gen: I like the word Omniverse because Universe implies
there's only one and I find that ridiculous (laughs). One of
my favorite words is a geological term, "quaquaversal." That
means "pointing in every direction simultaneously." A sphere
infinitely expanding. They use it to describe crystals. The
opposite of that in language would be, Not pointing in any
direction at any time. That's called, "centroclinal."
Centroclinal is just defined as the "opposite of
quaquaversal." So there's a centroclinal view of reality,
which is that things are as they are, but then they're
indefinable and you can't even attempt to describe them,
because they don't exist.

... All these things are just tools, to keep the brain
slightly alert.

REFUGE

I've gotten more abstracted since we left Great Britain.
Because I feel like I don't have to be anything anymore.
It's given me a change to re-invent how I deal with things.
And the way I've seemed to have responded to it is just to
be more and more open about anything that's going through my
head. Which is something I've always aspired to, but it's
amazing how much censorships that we put on ourselves. I
think it's the community here, too, to be fair. People in
California and the Bay Area in particular are so very
open-hearted and open-minded. We couldn't have survived
everything without being here. The big adult government
persecution of government - your children used against you
as a weapon. What kind of sick, depraved people would try to
shut up a minor artist by hurting his children? Well, this
is the great problem. That's why our lawyers in Amnesty
International and everyone are saying don't come back,
because no one has revealed themselves as the person behind
it all.

It's obviously someone quite powerful, to be able to
orchestrate Scotland yard, national television, and senior
national newspapers, three things on three out of four
days...

Justine: What were the accusations of rituals?

Gen: Actually murdering babies on a regular basis. And
murdering teenage boys imported from South America. My
answer to that was, if I could afford all those air tickets
to South America I'd be over there myself seeing the
beautiful ruins. I'd be traveling the world having a good
time, I wouldn't be like serial killing. But they admitted
within a week that that was all fabricated and the witnesses
were paid to say it. If Scotland Yard did a 12- month
investigation as they say, why didn't they bother to check
the bank accounts to see that we were overdrawn? Why didn't
they check the flights out of Brazil, the tickets for these
people? Did they not check to see that the "basement" of the
house did not exist where all this "took place"?

After a few weeks serious journalists said it was all
fabricated. And they said, "So it is - what a surprise!" No
apologies, nothing returned. No receipt or list of what they
took - two tons.


Justine: Were you watching them take it out of the house?

Gen: Oh no, we were with Tibetan refugees in Tibet, having a
great time, actually. We came straight to California. We
went to see the Tibetan Rineoch who is now considered the
most holy reincarnated Tibetan after the Dalai Lama. And his
monastery was just on the side of Everest, so it's a very
holy spot. He gave us these blessings to protect us... We
asked, through an interpreter, "We're having troubles at
home. Where should we go?" And he said, "California!" So
then we thought we'd play safe. We went to the head of the
Shiva-Sadu as well. To the Agoria Baba, that's the Path of
No Distinction, where everybody is the same, in Nepal. And
we said to him, "We have problems in Britain, where should
we go?" And he went, "California!" So we thought, we have
the two holiest people saying we should go to California,
let's use up the card and get there.

Justine: That's a strange spot to be in when you hear the
news.

Gen: It is. To be there, with these spiritual refugees with
their own metaphysical investigations... and they're very
much mind, very intellectual. The Shiva-Sadu are very
physical, lift rocks with their penis, we met the milk Baba
who's only drunk milk for 20 years and he's got dreadlocks
15 feet long. Never claiming to be Buddhist or Hindu, all of
them welcomed us in as if we understood their way. All the
things we've done over the years, the experiments we've
made... with threshold and instinct, shedding Western ways.
It was like going home. If there is such a thing as home.
People walk round with things stuck in them, crawl hundreds
of miles on their knees, starve in caves until they die -
there is nothing considered as extreme; to set one free from
the physical world, then that is valid in itself.

It seems over here in the West, everything is policed for
the sake of policing everything. And if it's to do with
sexuality, then it's heavily policed.

Justine: What are the new 'tattoo discrimination' laws?

Gen: Well, this is all thought to be linked. They've
extended the laws on injury, and in Great Britain it now is
illegal to let anybody else injure your skin. Or injure your
own skin. And they define an injury as any breaking of the
skin surface, or any mark made on or in the skin, or any
cut, or hole. Because technically, medically speaking, these
are defined as 'injuries.' So this means that any piercing,
tattoo or scarification is an injury, because it is breaking
the skin and marking it. And they made a point of saying
that hickeys were also illegal injuries.

Justine: How did they make this law?

Gen: Well, last year they had the equivalent of what is here
a Supreme Court decision, with no jury. They brought in
twelve gay men including Mr. Sebastian, who used to do all
our tattoos and piercings and who's been our friend for
years (he spoke on our first PTV album as the voice of the
Temple, he has this great, deep voice), and they gave one
man four years for piercing his own foreskin. They said it
was the same as grievous bodily harm, which carries the
maximum sentence of seven years.

So if you pierced your nose, or pierced your nipple, or if a
friend did, or if you scratched someone's back during a
passionate lovemaking session...

Justine: Or bit them...

Gen: ...or bit them, then in Britain you have committed
grievous bodily harm, which is the same as all but murdering
someone in law, and you could get seven years in jail. And
they aren't joking, they're serious. They jailed half of
these men... One of them for whipping his boyfriend's
bottom.

Justine: Sounds like a gay tax or something!

Gen: Well, that was what happened - because the civil rights
people said this is all gay men, and this is gay-bashing. So
the theory is that they then wanted to prove it wasn't
gay-bashing, it was everyone-bashing - as if that made it
better! They wanted a heterosexual example (with Alaura and
I) be made to justify all of it - to consolidate an entire
precedent of law. They are not only saying a woman doesn't
have a right to choose what she does with her body, they are
also saying, that no-one, anybody of whatever persuasion,
does not even own their own skin. It is not yours, it
belongs to the government.

But they took it further! On appeal they said, not only was
this decision correct - but it is now illegal to own leather
thongs, or any whips, or any masks or blindfolds, or any
gags, or any item that you might be tempted to use in an S&M
or sexual way.

Justine: Are there any loopholes?

Gen: The judge said in appeal that a piercing in itself
would not necessarily be illegal. It would possibly be legal
if it was purely decorative. But if at any time during the
piercing or after it was done in your life, you voluntarily
or involuntarily got erotic, sensual or sexual pleasure from
it, that would immediately make it illegal. Which means, by
implication, no one in Great Britain may have sex or touch
each other who have piercings anywhere on them. It's illegal
to have an erection with a pierced cock. Or have an orgasm
with a pierced labia. Or kiss a pierced nipple. This is the
law of the land! It's been passed by one high court judge,
who then promptly retired.

Justine: Great Britain has no Bill of Rights -

Gen: They do have an appeals system - you have to put down
50,000 pounds cash to start it. If enough pressure is put on
the government to rescind, they can say, "anyway the judge
is gone now, maybe he was senile... sorry about that." But
it doesnt' get defeated, and if enough people don't realize
the real implications for freedoms - they've gotten away
with it. Of course this is all frightening and hard to
believe; but to me what's really frightening is the real
erosions of any pretense of maintaining civil liberties.

Justine: It sounds like the Baroque Era... cheap
entertainments, big government architecture... the Spanish
Inquisition...

Gen: Yes, it's a revival of the Baroque era. That's a good
one. Britain and the U.S. have both been going through this
neo-Baroque era, trying to integrate church and state.

And bit by bit, pulling each other into this really
fundamentalist and Baroque vision of the state. And
fundamentalism is always bad news, because it implies
absolute intolerance. We're all capable of giving ourselves
suffering and confusing ourselves, we don't need anyone else
imposing it on ourselves, thank you very much! We're all
quite capable of screwing ourselves up, we don't need any
outside help! And as we start to empower ourselves, or check
ourselves out, learn our own personal dynamics, the last
thing we need is someone interfering or threatening us, just
when we've started to make sense of something for ourselves.

POCKET ORGONE ACCUMULATOR

... I had an Orgone accumulator for awhile. I was skeptical
at first, but I thought it's cheap to build one, I might as
well.

I could really feel the effect - it gives you tingles. I
also built a pocket one as an experiment. You know you can
get stick glue here? In Britain they make bigger ones, extra
large ones, about five by one inch. And if you take all
insides out, and then you get aluminum foil, and either dog
fur or cat fur or human hair, and put alternate layers of
that inorganic and organic material in layers inside it, and
then put the top back on and just hold it near your hand,
you can feel it get cold.

I used to lend it to people for their headaches, and they
said it helped. But the most interesting time was when we
were doing a concert at an underground psychedelic club in
London, and a friend slipped on some water and split his
head open really badly. It looked like it needed several
stitches; but for some reason he didn't want to go and get
it seen to in the casualty ward. So I gave him my "pocket
Orgone accumulator." And said, "I have no idea if this will
make any difference, but it can't do any harm, right?"

He was a bit out of it so he did it - held it to his head.
And he said by the next evening it had healed! It had
knitted, it didn't hurt, the scab was kind of healthy, and
afterwards there was almost no scar. He ascribed that
directly to the Orgone accumulator. I had given it to him
partly just to calm him down - but at the very least it
triggered an amazing metabolic effect in him, that he healed
himself. How it happens doesn't really matter. Who cares if
we hynotize ourselves, that doesn't make it less fabulous.
Again, the West seems to think there's got to be some
mechanistic intervention, otherwise it has no real
importance, and that's rubbish.

Burroughs had one for years that he used to sit inside. He
was convinced that it helped him with longevity.

Justine: Have you spoken to Burroughs lately?

Gen: I haven't spoken to him personally since we got here, I
did speak to James Grauerholtz. I'm planning to do a book
called Exile and Exhilaration about the apparent negativity
but the actual benefits of being displaced, disowned and
disconnected. In many ways it's one of the best things that
can happen to you, and also of course in a sense, we are all
refugees in a way. Most of us don't even get along with our
own "nuclear family."

Once you don't belong anywhere, you also don't belong to
anyone. You are reliant upon and only answerable to
yourself. Of course a lot of people have this situation, but
they don't realize the full meaning of it.

So Burroughs offered a piece on exile, and Timothy Leary,
who was exiled for awhile, he's going to do one; and Kathy
Acker; and I'd like to get his Holiness the Dalai Lama to
give an essay; and Allen Ginsberg wrote this amazing essay
on exile that's only been published in a very small
mimeographed pamphlet before. Assemble all these different
people and positive feelings about exile. I thought that
would be a nice thing to do. Being alienated from
expectation is a really great and powerful thing.

Something very exciting happened. Because we weren't able to
go back (to Great Britain). So it was as if - something that
was out of our control and out of control's control, was
unveiling itself. And all those experiments for twenty odd
years with releasing the mind, following all these other
apparently nonlinear traditions and disciplines, and
experimenting with thresholds, it all started to make sense.
It all led to us surviving.

That we had enough fine-tuning to take with us exactly what
we would need, (the numbers and addresses of people in
California) to go to exactly the right place to be a refugee
- a refugee community - without forseeing that all this
would happen. That was almost the most overwhelming fact. We
were in this wave of events that swept us here, regardless
of any possible planning. All the theories that all of us in
the community have been investigating all became confirmed
and given real value - saved our lives, in the real sense.
It's not just being physically alive; life is almost more
about the time you have to spend and where you spend it.