Falling into Place (Part II)

Image of Ah Puch, the Mayan god of death and king of the underworld, Metnal. He is represented as a corpse or skeleton wearing bells, sometimes possessing the head of an owl, itself an omen of death in Mayan culture (Lost Art of Ah Pook, 15). The spelling “Ah Pook” is a variation of “Ah Puch.” 

Adrian Hill on Malcolm Mc Neill and William S. Burroughs’s Ah Pook Is Here

The following is a three part exploration of Malcolm Mc Neill and William S. Burroughs’ word-image collaboration during the 1970s. This is part two. See part one here, and check back next Tuesday for part three.

Ah Pook is Here—Play By Play

What is the story of Ah Pook is Here? Even reading the text several times doesn’t necessarily provide a definitive answer.

What follows is a high-level description of scenes from the text in the order that they appear—along with some commentary—and cross-referenced with images from The Lost Art of Ah Pook in an attempt to contextualize the art within Burroughs’ narrative framework. If the scenes seem to be disjointed, well, that’s because they are—even in the original text.

Foreword

In the foreword to Ah Pook is Here, Burroughs elucidates the notion of death as an organism that reproduces itself through life. His premise: “The Mayan codices are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say, directions for time travel” (APIHOT,15). Unpacking this phrase involves an understanding of Burroughs’ conceptions of time and control.

As Mc Neill explains it, given the current state of humanity and the world at large, it’s hard to imagine that human civilization is sustainable. This may suggest that the actual reasons for reality to be unfolding as it is have something to do with a design beyond our usual assumptions.

God? Naaaahh… Burroughs calls it Control, and explains that it feeds on death. The propagation of life is the means towards an end—to cultivate lived experience. Through the process of living life, “limited” (as opposed to absolute) time is cultivated. Relatively speaking, death cannot exist without the existence of time. Conversely, as Burroughs puts it: “Time has no meaning without death. Death uses time.” And “time is that which ends” (APIHOT,15-16). By extension, in order for Control to feed on death, death must have a human host in the form of lived experience.

The Mayans predicated their worldview on their relationship to time, as it manifested itself in worldly events such as the rising of the sun, the phases of the moon, the seasons and their relationship to the cultivation of crops. Author Ronald Wright points out:

Inquiry into the mystery of time has been called the soul of Maya culture. Their very name is cognate with ...