"What I am getting at is we do not like each other we simply find ourselves on the same ship sharing the same cabin and often the same bed welded together by a million shared meals and belches by the movement of intestines and the sound of breathing...by the beating of our hearts. In fact his voice has been spliced 24 times per second with the shound of my breathing and the beating of my heart so that my body is convinced that my breathing and heart will stop if his voice stops." (__The Ticket That Exploded__ pg 3)

"I am reading a science fiction book called The Ticket That Exploded. THe story is close enough to what is going on here..." (pg 6)

"...but the show goes on...love...romance...stories that rip your heart out and eat it..." (pg 6)

"'The end is the beginning born knowing.'" (pg 10)

"Slow discrepancies smooth unknown bodies out the projector until one body of sex position to the sound track melted." (pg 74)

"'Bradley' entered the controlled prisoner body..." (pg 78)

"...you can edit a recorded conversation...speed it up...play a sentence backwards and learn to unsay what you just said...liberation from old association locks...different people will scan out different words of course...words literally made by the machine itself...no words animal noises...abritrary juxtopositions...cuts in are appropriate in many cases and your cut up tape makes surprising sense...everybody splice himself in with everybody else yes boys that's me there by the cement mixer...the more you run the tapes through and cut them up the less power they will have..." (pgs 206-217)

What are words? "A unit of language that a native speaker can identify." What is language? "A systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols." What is a symbol? "An arbitrary sign (written or printed) that has acquired a conventional significance." (Thanks google.) So words are arbitrary, based on individual perception and discretion. Words have acquired a conventional significance...aka...words have been given (one receives a present whether or not he/she deserves it... the kids on the naughty list often have mercifully dumb parents)a culture-by-culture-accepted meaning. But by whom? I don't remember signing any contract that tree means that tall brown and green thing outside my window. Why do I have to work out at the gym? Why not sex at the gym? Or canoodle at the gym? Burroughs brought to my attention that words are just fjkdslafjdas organized in ways that "people" decided made sense.

Stories work the same way because stories are made up of words. Burroughs cut up stories to show that this meaning equals that meaning equals that meaning equals no meaning equals every meaning. We make of something what we want to make of it -- our brain fills in the words that are missing and our ears hear things that could or could not be there...not that it really matters. Words are accepted units of "arbitrary juxtopositions." Therefore, (I hate this word; it sounds like I'm trying to prove something as fact when I'm really just rambling like an idiot...using words nonetheless.) stories, containing infinite amounts of words, are even more unreliable. There is no meaning to a story. There are a million meanings. So there is no "meaning." There are only interpretations. Nothing means anything...just as the word "nothing" literally does not mean "anything."

But Burroughs did not stop at words and stories. He cut up people too. "We're all living in our own worlds together." (I heard this from some crazy guy...not important.) I don't think he was saying that we are equally unimportant and therefore each individual being has no purpose or meaning or value...or maybe he was. But I do think he thought that all of our subconsciouses constantly and subconsciously (so I guess this is a case of double subconsciousness)collide and bump and bang and rub and fuse and melt and merge into each other so eventually we're all pretty much living one life. One story with a trillion meanings and no meaning at all. There are no bounderies, no distinction between him and her and you and me and this story and that story and Beauty and the Beast and Saw IV and The Notebook and "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosi" (yes this is a real word...some kind of lung disease) and "cunt." It all comes together in the end.

I guess this is why scientists and mathematicians have no respect for the study of language and literature...if it's all arbitrary and relative and subjective, than what's the point? And I have no answer because I'm pretty sure there is no point. This is probably all bullshit anyway (I say probably in case SOMEONE out there thinks it possesses a grain of intelligence), but hey, I think it's cool and interesting to think about. So there. That's my point.