Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal

This essay first appeared in Beatdom #23, an issue of Beatdom devoted to the environment. The next issue of the journal goes on sale two weeks from today. That will be the Allen Ginsberg centennial special. You can see a list of contents and pre-order information here.

Ghost of Chance is one of William S. Burroughs’ most interesting but least studied books. It began as a short story called “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar” for sci-fi magazine Omni in 1987 and was then expanded into a novella, published in 1991. In 1995, it was re-issued by the short-lived High Risk Books label before being more widely published in 2002. However, it has never enjoyed the same sort of appeal as many of his other works. This is a shame, for it is an important work, like another of his late-life releases, The Cat Inside (1986), which has since been rereleased in several editions, including as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Ghost of Chance is ostensibly the story of one Captain Mission and his doomed attempt at establishing a utopian colony called Libertatia on the island of Madagascar in the 1600s.[1] The first pages are oddly coherent for Burroughs, following Mission briefly as he explores the area around his pirate settlement. He lives just outside of Libertatia in the Museum of Lost Species, an ancient stone building largely reclaimed by the jungle, an image that evokes the famous stone-swallowing trees of Angkor Thom. However, this narrative comes to an abrupt end after Bradley Martin blows it all up, killing Mission.[2] The rest of the book is comprised of fragmented, routine-like scenes that play out some of Burroughs’ old obsessions but ultimately focus on the ecological consequences of humanity’s interference with nature.

Subscribe now

Most importantly, this book is Burroughs’ clearest statement on ecology, a topic that one may not immediately associate with the author, but which had been an area of some concern throughout his writing career. However, in Ghost of Chance, humanity’s destruction of the environment is the primary concern and the author employed various forms of criticism in order to make clear to his readers how repulsed he was by this.

To begin with, we see our pirate protagonist walking near Libertatia in search of a rare species of lemur and learn that he has established this colony based upon a set of idealistic values that would allow humans to live peacefully within a natural ecosystem. The killing of lemurs, for example, is prohibited as an infraction against indigenous belief systems. It will also become apparent that, for Burroughs at least, lemurs are a symbol of the natural world—something pure and comparatively defenceless, easily destroyed by those sadistic enough to do so.

These first pages are heavily grounded in the physical landscape. Even the manmade features of the pirate colony are highlighted not for the human engineering that has gone into them but for their natural qualities. The red clay and hardwood, we learn, are excellent for building modestly sized buildings in a small-scale settlement. Centred around a scenic bay, this human settlement is portrayed as virtually part of the natural landscape. It is “timeless as houses in a fairyland,” Burroughs tells us, with all its parts “floating in a limpid, frameless painting.” (3)

Mission is at home in this natural setting. Despite it being a jungle, he is not troubled by the humidity or the mosquitoes. In Burroughs’ fantasy land, this is a perfectly comfortable place. The pirate is surrounded by a variety of lemurs, which are depicted as mysterious, gentle, and strangely adorable. (Readers familiar with The Cat Inside will be less surprised by the author’s affectionate attitude towards furry animals than those who know him only from his earlier work.) One small species of lemur eats from Mission’s hand, making “chirping squeaks of delight.” Even the snakes here are curiously devoid of menace, “glid[ing]” from one place to the next. (4) Nature, Burroughs tells us, is a beautiful and innocent thing.

When Mission discovers an “ancient stone structure” that he will later call the Museum of Lost Species, he finds in it the ghosts of extinct creatures. One of these, “like a small deer” but with no horns and a long snout, brings him to tears:

Slowly the animal raised one paw and touched his face, stirring memories of the ancient betrayal. Tears streaming down his face, he stroked the animal’s head. He knew he must get back to the settlement before dark. There is always something a man must do in time. For the deer ghost there was no time. (5)

Until this point, the narrative (admittedly just a few pages) was unusual by Burroughs’ standards. The prose had been conventional, as had the ideas expressed. Here, however, we begin to see his turn toward more typically Burroughsian territory. First of all, there is that casual but unexplained reference to “the ancient betrayal.” By this, Burroughs means a point at which humans separated from their animal brethren, ceasing to live as animals but rather to dominate the natural world, using animals as resources. Humans, Burroughs believes, began to do this because of their adoption of words and time. This is what is meant in the final two sentences of the above quote. Man lives in time; animals live outside it.

Mission rushes back to the settlement to find Bradley Martin standing over the body of a lemur, which Martin has shot dead after the creature apparently tried to steal a mango. Mission challenges him to a duel but Martin refuses. If Martin represents humanity, then it indicates we are not only sadistic but also cowardly, unwilling to face the consequences of our own malicious, irresponsible actions. “Then you must leave Libertatia, this very night,” Mission tells him. (6) In the morning, Martin and the lemur’s body are gone, and Mission believes that the backstabbing Martin has taken the creature to “the natives” in order to frame the pirates for its murder. (7)

Up to this point, Burroughs’ idiosyncratic views had mostly bubbled up just beneath the novella’s surface text but here he begins inserting footnotes, wherein the author directly addresses the reader, offering his views separately from the narrative. He explains Adolf Hitler’s theory of the Big Lie (without naming Hitler). Mission has been targeted by Martin, Burroughs says, commenting on his own story, because “[h]e threatened to demonstrate for all to see that three hundred souls can coexist in relative harmony with each other, with their neighbors, and with the ecosphere of flora and fauna.” (8)

Outside the footnotes, the story continues. From the tropical paradise of Madagascar, we are transported to—it seems—London and the “custodians of the future” who discuss Mission and Martin. This shadowy organisation, known here as the “Keeper of the Board Books,”[3] is worried that if Mission’s settlement is successful it will spread throughout the world and all humans will live at peace with one another and in harmony “with the ecosphere of flora and fauna.” (8) These people are depicted as being thoroughly at odds with Mission’s utopian vision. An unnamed woman has a face so evil that it “stops the breath like a deadly gas.” (ibid) Whereas the snake on a previous page had “glided,” this woman’s words “slither out of her mouth writhing with hatred.” (ibid) Burroughs has flipped the typical perspective of chaotic, dangerous nature to show that it is humans—or whatever human-like beings these are—who are the truly malevolent beings.

One cannot help but feel that the choice of London (we assume from the ringing of Big Ben) adds a colonial critique. The novella is set in the seventeenth century, when European colonists were spilling across the globe, bringing an end to indigenous ways of life and starting a great wave of extinctions with their sophisticated yet reckless use of technology. Mission, as a pirate—the enemy of the British Navy—represents an attempt at avoiding this fate and opening an avenue through the history of human cohabitation with animals. This is an interesting comparison. Burroughs is aligning his intergalactic Nova Mob with Colonial England and positioning a pirate as the rebel upstart standing hopelessly against it. However, he is doomed, Burroughs tells us, because “[i]n a prerecorded and therefore totally predictable universe, the blackest sin is to tamper with the prerecordings.” (ibid)

The concept of disrupting “the prerecordings” is of course a common one in Burroughs’ writings and in the next pages we encounter several of his other interests, such as yagé and hieroglyphs. Mission mentions yagé because he has found a local drug called indri, which he takes as he goes on a twilight jungle walk in search of chameleons. His veneration of indigenous lore and the natural world is sharply juxtaposed against the previous scenes of extra-terrestrial and possibly colonial machinations. Now Mission appears to float free of time and we learn that he has adopted that rather convenient stone structure in the jungle as his home. It is curiously devoid of unpleasant insects but attracts cute animals and “was completely enveloped by the roots of a huge bulbous tree, as if held in a giant hand.” (11) His Swiss Family Robinson-esque residence is now replete with the basics required for human habitation.

Between the drug and his journaling with hieroglyphs, Mission attempts to peer into the past and discover the origins of his jungle abode. He recognises that the animals around him are free and he is trapped: “The split between the wild, the timeless, the free, and the tame, the time-bound, the tethered.” (13) He sleeps beside and cuddles with his favourite lemur, called Ghost, and watches adorable little mouse lemurs as they eat insects and then jump back through time as easily as a person might walk through a doorway: “They gambol, leap, and whisk away into the remote past before the arrival of man on this island, before the appearance of man on earth, before the beginning of time.” (15) Again, it is a reminder that humanity—in Burroughs’ conception—is a virus on the face of this planet, a sadistic species bent on the destruction of its own environment. Although it had been rather obvious by this point, he states more clearly now that lemurs possess the very opposite nature:

The Lemur People are older than Homo Sap, much older. They date back one hundred sixty million years, to the time when Madagascar split off from the mainland of Africa. Their way of thinking and feeling is basically different from ours, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality. They find these concepts repugnant and difficult to understand. (15)

This splitting off of Madagascar from the African continent becomes a motif representing the division of humanity and the animal kingdom. The processes of evolution and tectonic shifting are depicted in gorgeous descriptions, colourful and vivid, grounded in nature. In this Edenic land, lemurs grow opposable thumbs but do not learn to master tools, unlike their cousins across on the mainland. “They are untouched by the evil that flows in and fills Homo Sap as he picks up a weapon—now he has the advantage.” (17) Despite his personal affinity for firearms, Burroughs equates humanity’s development of weapons with “his insatiable greed.” (ibid) Once again, this is all linked to the seemingly artificial concept of time, without which the fauna of Madagascar, he believes, had developed in a state of perfect symbiosis. No such luck for humans, of course: “Man was born in time. He lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with him and imposes time.” (ibid)

Thus, nature is doomed. Mission realises that his jungle home is a gateway to “the biological Garden of Lost Chances.” (ibid) The visions of strange, extinct creatures he had seen were species humans had already killed off after their arrival on the island. One—a simian creature—sings “a black song, a harsh melody of a blackness too pure to survive in time.” (18) It is a poignant image, a reminder of the fragility of nature in the face of cruel human ingenuity. Burroughs continues:

Mission moves through a black tunnel, which opens onto a series of dioramas: The last deer lemur falls to a hunter’s arrow. Passenger pigeons rain from the trees to salvos of gunfire and plump down on the plates of fat bankers and politicians with their gold watch chains and gold fillings. The humans belch out the last passenger pigeon. The last Tasmanian wolf limps through a blue twilight, one leg shattered by a hunter’s bullet. As do the almost, the might-have-beens who had one chance in a billion and lost. (ibid)

As though this image were not clear enough, Burroughs appends an angry footnote:

When we see the planet as an organism, it is obvious who the enemies of the planet are. Their name is legion. They dominate and populate the planet. […] Did Homo Sap think other animals were there just for him to eat? Apparently. Bulldozers are destroying the rain forests, the cowering lemurs and flying foxes, the singing Kloss’s gibbons, which produce the most beautiful and variegated music of any land animal, the gliding colugo lemurs, which are helpless on the ground. All going, to make way for more and more devalued human stock, with less and less wild spark, the priceless ingredient – energy into matter. A vast mud-slide of soulless sludge. (18-19)

This sad but brilliant statement ends the first part of the book. Burroughs has juxtaposed a hallucinatory passage that collapses time and space, extinctions past and present, against a vivid, coherent tirade. We have the narrator channelling Mission and then Burroughs’ direct commentary atop it, a perfect storm of indignant rage at the murderous capacity of the human species. Burroughs himself seems to stand apart from the human species by referring to them as “Homo Sap.”

Subscribe now

In short order, we learn that Mission has been tricked away from Libertatia for a little more than a week and that, after he returns, he finds his settlement “now a burnt-out ruin.” (21) Worse still, his precious companion Ghost has been mortally wounded by a bomb Martin has planted in the Museum of Lost Species.

He pries the stone aside and gathers the dying lemur in his arms, knowing that Ghost has been there waiting for him. The lemur puts a slow paw up to his face with a sad, weak cry. The paw drops. Mission knows that a chance that occurs only once in a hundred sixty million years has been lost forever. (ibid)

Burroughs is suggesting here that the relationship between Mission and Ghost was a means of resolving that ancient split between humanity and the natural world. In essence, it is the same image as that of Libertatia itself, which was in Burroughs’ mind a rare opportunity for humanity to live again as part of nature.

From here, the narrative becomes more fragmented and absurdist, devolving into a series of comical and often violent routines more like Burroughs’ better-known works. It is never obvious exactly what happened, but Mission is killed at this point.[4] In dying, he “calls down a curse on the Boards and the Martins of the earth” that will “loose on them the blood of Christ.” (22) This begins a series of odd scenes starting with Christ cutting himself. His blood is “yellow-green” and “gives off a reek of ammoniacal corruption, like rotten urine, the reek of man’s sojourn on earth.” (23) Where it falls on wood, “it eats in like acid, delineating a malignant simian face etched in hatred, evil, and despair.” (23)

Until this point, Burroughs’ stance had been mostly clear and his methods of conveying this perspective were uncharacteristically straightforward (aside from his notions of time, drugs, words, and so on). Here, however, he appears to be suggesting that Mission’s death (in the seventeenth century) caused the rise of Christianity and that in the blood of Christ we can see the betrayed ancestors of present-day humans. Several pages of anti-Christian sentiment follow. Burroughs attacks Christ as a show-off who lacks compassion for animals. His miracles are mere tricks, he says, and Burroughs seems particularly contemptuous of the notion that animals “have no soul.” (ibid)

We then come to a quotation: “The great god Pan is dead!” which Burroughs dates as “December 25, year Zero A.D.” (25) This of course is a famous quote over whose origins there is much uncertainty. The subject is too vast to cover here but, particularly with Burroughs’ given date, it refers to the death of Pan and the rise of Christ.[5] Associated with the natural world, Pan’s death on Jesus’ supposed birthday symbolises the birth of a new and more destructive phase in human history, with the old gods of nature replaced by corrupt, manmade versions. It also allows us to reframe a reference made at the beginning of the book: “Captain Mission did not fear Panic, the sudden, intolerable knowing that everything is alive. He was himself an emissary of Panic, of the knowledge that man fears above all else: the truth of his origin. It’s so close. Just wipe away the words and look.” (3) Panic then is an adjective rather than a noun. Mission represents the pre-Christ world, the non-Christian portion of humanity that supposedly stands side-by-side with its animal counterparts. He is part of that dying segment of his species that is willing to look at the planet’s flora and fauna and not see it as it is viewed in the Bible, among other religious texts:

Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26)

Burroughs makes clear his stance in a footnote:

So Christ set out to destroy the raw material of miracles… souls, spirit, djoun, prana, the force that animates any living creature… spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. And what is Panic? The realization that everything is alive.

The great god Pan is dead. (25)

At this point, with the protagonist dead and the novella only halfway through, the footnotes appear to spill into the main text as for the first time the narrator uses the first-person singular pronoun and goes off on a long anti-religious tangent that ends with an “all-purpose nuclear bedtime story” courtesy of Brion Gysin. (28) He appears to position Christ and his adherents as proponents of “the Big Lie” and says—in the footnotes—that “[t]he teachings of Christ read like biological suicide.” (26) This rambling routine brings him to the so-called Moral Majority, which Burroughs terms “the Moron Majority,” (30) and the United States’ catastrophic War on Drugs. Interestingly, Burroughs frames the War on Drugs as a means of distracting people from environmental concerns: “overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, pandemic pollution of water, land, and sky.” (29) There have been various explanations for this failed “war” but Burroughs’ is surely one of the more original.

In part three of the book, we move into the modern era with an agricultural scene. “A group of herdsmen” is busy burning a chunk of rainforest and feeding “their worthless zebus,” which are admired among the locals and used for “idiotic funerary practices.” (32) The herdsmen accidentally blow up a powder keg that Martin, several centuries before, had left behind. This finally annihilates the entrance to the Museum of Lost Species and the rest of the book is largely a depiction (in a series of routines) of the pestilence that subsequently spreads across the globe. This virus sweeps through modern-day humanity in a variety of forms. In scenes reminiscent of Burroughs’ early work, it causes immense violence. People commit murder with homemade flamethrowers and a “pastor sacrifices a human infant on the altar with a chain saw and quaffs a chalice of blood before his paralyzed flock can intervene.” (34)

These various plagues are important when we keep in mind the fact that their origins are in the repository of “Lost Species.” We could read them in one of two ways: Either that they are a defensive mechanism wherein nature has fought back against humanity, or that humanity has engaged in an act of terrible self-destruction. In either case, by destroying the environment, humans have not only sacrificed their animal cousins but have brought a terrible fate upon themselves—comical Burroughsian diseases called the Hairs, the Pricks, the Roots, and the Lits, as well as Red Spiders, which more obviously show nature defending itself with great ferocity. These new diseases, created through the destruction of jungles and the eradication of countless animal species, adapt to thrive on human flesh. It is a fate, Burroughs seems to suggest, that we deserve due to our limitless capacity for cruelty and greed:

There were of course species that became extinct before man, but Homo Sap added a twist. He has killed to eat, but he has also killed for pleasure, to be sure. Moreover, he has killed for the sheer ugliness of the thing. The Thing inside him. The Ugly Spirit who found a worthy vessel in Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal. (48)

Burroughs perhaps inevitably turns to Alfred Korzybski for an explanation of this predicament. This leads him to the thought that “[m]an sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.” (49) Humans removed themselves from nature through certain developments but nature established “an occupying garrison in his nondominant brain hemisphere.” (ibid) He brings this back to his notion of Madagascar separating from Africa, living at peace without human interference for a hundred and sixty million years. He equates the “rift” between the two bodies of land with the hemispheres of the human brain. “One side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery.” (ibid) Burroughs suggests that the rift cannot be healed but that perhaps “like opposing magnets” they can be permanently separated. (50) His solution seems to be cutting off the part of the brain that functions on language in order to live (as Mission had attempted with his hieroglyphs) outside of language like plants and animals.

Finally, Burroughs tells us of an array of fantastic animals, which he claims to be extinct but in fact appear to be biological possibilities yet unexplored due to humans’ various destructive efforts. These exist only in the Museum of Lost Species. “Admission is free to anyone who can enter,” he writes. “The coinage here is the ability to endure the pain and sadness of observing extinction and by doing so to reanimate the species by observing it.” (51)

The meaning is unclear and becomes less so in the following pages, where he describes an apocalyptic scene. The species that had caused the extinction of an unprecedented number of its fellow creatures sees its numbers dwindle. Even the Board has gone into hiding, their power all but lost. Burroughs is suggesting that if humanity succeeds in wiping itself from the face of the Earth, it will be no great loss. In fact, it might just be the rebirth our planet needs.

People of the world are at last returning to their source in spirit, back to the little lemur people of the trees and the leaves, the streams, the rocks, and the sky. Soon, all sign, all memory of the wars and the Plague of Mad will fade like dream traces. (54)

It is an unusual book, even by Burroughs’ lofty standards. Beginning as though it were a conventional tale of swashbuckling piracy, it turns into a series of comical routines, features the collapsing of time and space, and ends in an alternate future with the near extinction of humanity. All through it, though, Burroughs makes an array of creative efforts to convey his central message, which is that Homo sapiens have wrought untold destruction upon the natural world—something of which they once viewed themselves a part. This has been achieved through various narrative means, with Burroughs himself periodically coming to the fore, sometimes in the main narrative and sometimes in the footnotes. Various old tropes and motifs have been resurrected, with lemurs chief among them, representing the vulnerability of the natural world, in order to present this highly original work of ecocriticism.

The book ends with an Afterword that gives supposedly real information about Captain Mission (which is in fact largely inaccurate) and a final footnote that breaks into a direct appeal to the reader, with Burroughs asking us to donate to the Duke University Primate Center. I will end this essay by repeating Burroughs’ instructions. Since Ghost of Chance was written, by some estimates more than half of the planet’s wildlife has gone extinct and the situation worsens with each passing day. Fortunately, Duke still houses a centre for lemurs and they take donations in an array of forms, which can be read about here: https://lemur.duke.edu/donate/

Works Cited

Burroughs, William S., Ghost of Chance (High Risk Books: London, 1995)

Skerl, Jennie, William S. Burroughs (Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1985)

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this essay, you may want to look up a copy of Chad Weidner’s 2016 book, The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind.

I mentioned yagé in this essay. Last year, I wrote about the origins of Burroughs’ interest in that particular substance. It was the first time that anyone had found the exact article in which Burroughs learned about it. Read that here:

Footnotes

[1] Burroughs tells us in the book’s Afterword, “The first name of the libertarian, pirate Captain Mission, is lost to history. All that we know of Mission comes from the book, A General History of the Most Notorious Pirates, published in London in 1724 […].” In fact, his first name is believed to be James or Olivier. Burroughs has also gotten the book title and year of publication wrong. It is A General History of the Pyrates and was published in 1728. As for his being a libertarian, Burroughs is—as usual—being rather fanciful. In addition, Libertatia (or Libertalia) is generally believed to have been fictional.

[2] Usually spelled “Bradly,” this character will be familiar to Burroughs’ readers as leader of the Nova Mob and embodiment of the “Ugly Spirit.” He appears frequently in Burroughs’ fiction and embodies the very worst qualities of humanity.

[3] In the Burroughsian universe, Board Books are the pre-recorded tapes that control the world. Jennie Skerl writes that “[t]he Board and their Board Books are a three-dimensional, realistic version of the Nova Mob and the Word virus.” (William S. Burroughs, p.62)

[4] In the original short story, the pirate settlement is overrun by angry natives and Mission escapes, fleeing to the Americas per the allegedly true story of Captain Mission.

[5] Burroughs had invoked “Pan God of Panic” many times in his work, sometimes pitted in a duel against Martin and the Board.