Tantric Lemurs

Notes on Tantric Lemurs

I have preliminary designs for four series of paintings based on my interpretations of the works and life of the great postmodern author, William S. Burroughs. The four series are: the "Interzone", the "Western Lands", the "Cities of the Red Night", and the"Wild Boys" series. This painting, "Tantric Lemurs", was the first of the Interzone series.

"The meaning of Interzone, its space time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world." William Burroughs told Allen Ginsberg in a letter in 1955. Burroughs' characters open doors and step into different cities, countries or continents. Or they jump into and out of different time periods (years or centuries). Protagonists may subdivide into several differing characters in the same story with diffferent names, opposing ideas, concepts, personalities and or positions in life (e.g., criminal and cop, young and old, saint and sinner) giving the reader a different perspective on the actions and motivations within the "story".

Burroughs "makes no attempt to create artificial situations or to construct an elaborate plot. The text is simply a record of the writer's consciousness at the precise point of writing, with breaks, mood changes, unpleasant fantasies, mad humor, all described as they flash into consciousness. This is explained in the book itself [Naked Lunch]:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do not pretend to impose "story" "plot" "continuity" . . . Insofaras I suceed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have a limited function . . . I am not an entertainer.

In this, Burroughs joins the ranks of "garrulous" American authors such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, whose literary output adds up to a map of the authors' consciousness, recorded over a period of years or even decades."

Barry Miles,    William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible   1993

In this first Interzone painting, Burroughs is united with some of his favorite people, the Lemur People.

"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."

William S. Burroughs,    Ghost of Chance