Home		Denise Low Bardo, or Death Journey, of William Seward Burroughs
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		The last public event to commemorate William S. Burroughs’ death in October, 1997, was a bonfire ritual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thobol). The conflagration incinerated the old beatnik’s photographs and personal belongings. According to the Book of the Dead, it would also release his soul to enter Nirvana. His personal secretary James Grauerholz set the order of ceremony, which included post-funeral farewells, Tibetan chanting, and Burroughs’ own recorded voice. The scenery, though, was a long way from Tibet. Wayne Propst hosted the affair in his barnyard outside of Lawrence, Kansas. The improvised memorial was a wake, a potluck, a sending-off of a celebrity, a Buddhist ritual, a concert, and a party. Burroughs entered his final decline in 1991, at age 77, when he had a heart attack and bypass surgery. He retired from public life, which meant he no longer walked to the grocery store for cat food. In private he continued to receive guests for dinner, such as Patti Smith, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Andres Serrano, and, finally, Steve Buscemi in 1997. He filmed a rock video for U2. He appeared in a Nike commercial and a Gentleman’s Quarterly fashion spread. He performed a cameo role in a Japanese science fiction film with a section of Albert Einstein’s brain. Like any good Midwesterner, he paid his bills. Still, after 1991, Burroughs made few trips outside of his hometown of Lawrence, and his writing slowed to journal entries. A Burroughs Communications writer transcribed his dreams every morning and typed up his personal journal. No more novels were in his Underwood typewriter. A few weeks after his death, the New Yorker published excerpts from the journal. On August 1, his last conscious day, he wrote, “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller—what there is. LOVE.” When he died August 2, at 83, he had lived a full life. Yet according to Tibetan tradition, the death interlude between reincarnations, or bardo, had just begun. * After the funeral, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an effigy of the dead person is built from wood and familiar clothes, a type of scarecrow. In the position of the face is placed a printed paper with a drawing of the deceased’s face. The effigy is like a coptic Egyptian mummy, with a wide-eyed portrait. According to the Tibetan book translator W. Y. Evans-Wentz, “The dead-piece for the [Tibetan] effigy has its Egyptian parallel in the images made for the Ka or spirit.” This was familiar territory for the author of The Western Lands. In Tibet the effigy is fed at each meal, and priests pray every week for the soul to move on to paradise and not into another human incarnation. After forty-nine days, the exact period of the bardo, the paper image is burned. The color and form of the fire communicate the destination of the released soul. For Burroughs, photographs took the place of a dummy corpse. The fire ritual to end William S. Burroughs’ bardo took place north of Lawrence. Fire consumed his attachments to this lifetime and freed him to move into another incarnation, or perhaps even into the pure light land beyond human experience. A hundred people or so wished him bon voyage. These were the local people who had come under his spell. * While he lived in Lawrence, beginning in 1981, Burroughs made good friends with a circle of writers, artists, and shooters. They were devoted to him until his death. The crusty outlaw who wrote about every combination of every bodily excretion was, unexpectedly, endearing. His essays about his cats, collected in The Cat Inside (1992) created what one reviewer called “a Warm Fuzzy.” Friends drove him to Kansas City for a weekly methadone shot. Sunday afternoons were shooting and drinking times, either in his basement shooting gallery or in the countryside. A rotation of people cooked dinner for his soirees, for each night of the week. Cocktails and joints began at five. Then more conversation and dinner at seven. He nibbled at the main courses and ate dessert with relish. A bowie knife was his cutlery of choice. Bed came early these last years. Friends made sure he was comfortable, and they took his cats to the vet. This was assisted living at its best. This was a private life, far from media coverage, and a little-known part of his life. Most of the obituaries mentioned only the controversy surrounding the publication of Naked Lunch in 1962. They described his drug use, his time in Tangier, and sexual activities of the 1950s and 1960s. But when he moved to Kansas, Burroughs dropped into terra incognito, west of the New York map. He lived in Lawrence for sixteen years—longer than any other place except his native St. Louis. Burroughs participated in civic life. He wrote letters to the editor of the Lawrence Journal World. On April 20, 1997, he objected to George Will’s treatment of Allen Ginsberg’s death: “Mr. Will pointedly ignores the calm and dignity with which Allen met his death. I wonder if, when his time comes, will George perform as well.” After his death, many local people missed “the old man,” as friends called him. James Grauerholz considered making his house a museum. His journals and artworks were collected and labeled. Stories circulated among friends during dinners at his empty house and on the web site: He had a peaceful last conversation with Allen Ginsberg, who died in April. He and Propst had made a bardo bonfire for Allen. The same wire pyre, then, was used for Burroughs himself. His favorite cat Fletch had died about a week before Burroughs. This broke the old man’s heart. Maybe this was the last loss he could endure. After the funeral, the entourage to the St. Louis interment had stopped at a roadside rest area. A wandering Deadhead had asked someone in the men’s room what the group was doing. Amazed when he found out it was Burroughs in the hearse, he changed course and joined the caravan for the duration. A brother’s family still lived in St. Louis. They entertained the funeral party in a mansion, with elegant service. Burroughs’ aristocratic manners played out in their oddly familiar mannerisms. When cleaning out his room, friends found a brown recluse spider in his closet. He had always claimed there was a spider there, but no one had believed him—just an old man’s paranoia. The spider ran from the dark recesses of a corner, bit the intruder, and disappeared. Again. At coffee shops and taverns, the last days of William Burroughs were replayed, in an extended wake. Who came to the funeral. Who did not. Who said what at the funeral reception. The final illness. The hospital. The last words. The dinner groups continued to meet weekly. And then the stories faded in intensity. This took more than forty-nine days. * The bardo-ceremony took place in front of an open barn, the kind in Andrew Wyeth paintings, though the red paint was faded. It was barely Tibetan and mostly Midwestern. Wooden trestles within the barn held potluck dishes—tabouli, baked beans, fresh tomato slices, potato salad, pasta, brownies, peach cobbler. A bottle of Polish potato vodka sat in the center of the tables. Vodka had been Burroughs’ favorite evening cocktail—vodka with warm Coke. People picked up the exotic bottle and read the label, and most remembered that the deceased author mostly drank cheap McCormick’s. It was hours before anybody was drunk enough to open the Polish vodka. The centerpiece of the barnyard was a twelve-foot mound of firewood, photographs, wadded newspaper kindling, book jackets, fireworks, shot-up targets, record and CD liner notes. Chicken wire, with a doorway, contained the mass. Within the wire cage, photographs dangled from strings, including images of Allen Ginsberg and the old man himself. Some guests added mementos. People formed a loose circle around the mass, eyeing the jumbled remains. Everyone is wary of death, especially that of this old wizard who researched the final state so compulsively. The mound was much more than the simple paper effigy of the Tibetans. It resembled an installation in an art museum. It was a three-dimensional scrapbook of Burroughs’ life. Some American Indian groups burn the belongings of a dead person, and this was a start at removing his presence on this dimension. Though this was not all of Burroughs’ personal effects, it was an impressive assemblage. Nobody used heroin or yage. Most people drank beer, and a few older gentlemen shared a joint. Kids ran underfoot. An old high school classmate of James Grauerholz, John Andrews, showed up in his Renaissance Fair costume—tights, a cape, and a Henry VIII velvet hat. Later he would sing show tunes and hymns, in a trained operatic voice. Twilight fell. Grauerholz said a few words over the microphone, about the bardo tradition and letting go of the past. He read letters from friends. He thanked people for good thoughts, and then started a recording of music and Burroughs’ voice. The creaky Burroughs intonation seemed displaced on the farm, and then, as dark fell, it found its place within the cricket chorus. The host and farm owner, Wayne Propst, wheeled out an ignition machine he had invented. It fired flames into the heap of Burroughs’ past. The fire sputtered in several hot spots, and then incandescence triumphed over the dark country skies. Drab mourning ended with explosions. Prominent in the bonfire light was a life-sized paper target, with a man outlined in black, and torn bullet holes. Presumably, this was Burroughs’ last target. As the red fire-beast gained strength, the target caught fire and burned evenly from right to left—toward the heart. The last portrait of Burroughs by photographer Jon Blumb, with a revolver in his hand, disappeared into ash, along with the title page of an early pulp novel. These were duplicates. The fire did not consume all the author’s printed matter in libraries, book stores, and archives—mummified thoughts made possible by presses would not be reversed by this fire—but one less copy would exist, and maybe the soul of the deceased would have one less reason to return to his old haunts. Within the furnace were hand-painted faces of the three cats—Fletch, Ruski, and Horatio. In Egypt the animals would have been killed and embalmed with their master. Here their images glowed and disassembled into river-bottom darkness. I thought of the old man joined with his cats, his son, and his wife. The Roman candles ignited in green, silver, red, and tracer trails. Bottle rockets zipped into the surrounding, dark field. At the height, firecrackers went off in random, percussive phrases. The fire took on a life of its own, waxed, continued, fell off a bit, and settled into a cozy, long burn. The opera singer gave his concert. * Despite his hatred of “Johnsons” and personal eccentricities, Burroughs was a kind man. Patricia Elliott has written on the internet that he liked “persons rather than people.” He was a Buddhist—lived simply, stayed true to his writing path, and showed compassion to sentient beings. He lived the teachings rather than proselytized them. And he bore the indignities of old age without whining. His speech, though slower after eighty, still occurred in the form of full inductive or deductive paragraphs. The bardo bonfire should have been the end. Burroughs should be nothing more than scuffed ash in the fire ring at Propst’s farm, and the soul should be reassembled into a new existence. At the end of his remarks, Grauerholz asked, “Why are we here? I mean, in the larger sense . . . . William had a very definite answer to that question: We are here to go.” Yet he remains, caught in the slow conflagration of this alphabet. And caught by the quirky law of love, “what there is.” He entered a Midwestern state of grace when he moved to Lawrence, settled in, and made many friends. Most recently, as the millennium begins, memorial readings were being held in Lawrence every two months. Despite all the farewells, William Seward Burroughs has not yet taken leave of this earthly existence.
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