Ghost of Chance commences with the story of Captain Mission, a pirate who established a utopian settlement in Madagascar. Mission is obsessed with lemurs and proscribes their killing. An event occurs that devastates Mission, who calls down a curse on all involved.

Burroughs develops this story into a tirade against mankind's devastation of the environment, the stifling effect that religion has had on our sensibilities and the disease-like nature of our civilisation. This novella is one very angry book, written in prose that is both beautiful and vehement. ( )

I was somewhat reluctant to read yet-another Burroughs bk given that I've already read so many & that there're so many other writers out there to read.. BUT, it was worth it! Burroughs' incisive, acerbic imagination held my attn once more. The bk's plentifully interspersed w/ black & white repros of paintings wch I reckon must be by Burroughs - since they're not credited otherwise. These are mostly busy energy patterns, semi-abstract-expressionist, probably more than a little influenced by Burroughs' pal Brion Gysin - they lurk w/ spirits needing the right frame-of-mind (or drug-induced expanded consciousness) to see dancing about.

One of the freshest parts for me (insofar as I don't recall any of Burroughs' other bks putting forth this idea) is where Christ is lambasted as someone who tried to corner the miracle market, tried to monopolize a capability held latently by all. Footnotes placed at the bottom of the pages (as opposed to the back of the bk) add further scholarly spice to the whole vision - grounding the fiction in 'factual' reference - that, in turn, often takes off in extrapolative fantasy. Take this, eg:

"11. Consider the history of disease: it is as old as life. Soon as something gets alive, there is something there waiting to disease it. Put yourself in the virus's shoes, and wouldn't you do the same? [..]

"And the fearsome SEPs. Some organ of the body sets up shop and grows on its own: huge brains in fifty-five gallon oil drums, a monster kidney that can be used for dialysis,

"It's an ill fart that farts nobody any good.

"The most dreaded SEP is the Pricks. Not a tumor, mind you, just a big prick and it keeps getting bigger."

Once again, I'm stimulated to return to Burroughs & to read everything I can by him. ( )

Last summer at a street fair in Portland, Oregon one of the booths displayed a banner: “Stop Breeding.” I picked up one of their postcards, which read: “Not having kids may be the best thing you can do for the environment.”

Reading Ghost of Chance, author William S. Burroughs is undoubtedly of similar mind. He alerts readers that on the island of Madagascar the human population is growing out of control (as of today, nearly thirty years after the author’s warning, the human population is twenty-five million strong). Meanwhile deforestation on the island continues apace - mining, logging, wood for fuel, along with the major culprit, slash-and-burn for agricultural, has reduced a once spacious jungle overflowing with life down to next to nothing.

Ghost of Chance, a novella of less than sixty pages published in 1991 as part of the High Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail series, is a tale of adventure set in the Madagascar jungle. If you look hard you might detect the bare outline of plot. But don’t look too hard, for the author’s artistry isn't so much in linear narrative as in well-tuned observations on the plight of modern homo no so sapiens expressed in tough, hardline Burroughs-ese.

This being the case, here are six direct quotes, six Benzedrine Bill tabs, along with my comments in the hope that you get hooked enough to read this short work from the master of Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine:

“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.” ---------- The word lemur derives from the word lemures (ghosts or spirits) from Roman mythology. Thus the strong connection between lemurs and the book's title. Captain Mission, the tale’s protagonist, possesses a strong affinity with the lemurs of Madagascar. For millions of years prior to the arrival of humans on the island, some lemurs grew to the size of gorillas. Lemurs have always enjoyed a great diversity. Even today, after the destruction by humans of vast tracts of jungle, there remains over one hundred species of lemurs.

“Mission set out walking rapidly. Half an hour later, he took a small amount of the crystals with a sip of water from his goatskin water-bag. In a few minutes he experienced a shift of vision, as if his eyes were moving on separate pivots, and for the first time he saw Lizard-Who-Changed-Color.” ---------- As readers we have come to expect any work of Burroughs to be chock-full of drugs of some variety. Here Captain Mission takes a specialty of Madagascar producing in him visions akin to a shaman on a vision question. Indeed, many the time reading Ghost of Chance I linked the insights of Burroughs with the world of Shamanism.

“Time is a human affliction; not a human invention but a prison. . . . And what does time mean to foraging lemurs? No predators here, not much to fear. They have opposing thumbs but do not fashion tools; they have no need for tools. They are untouched by the evil that flows in and fills Homo Sap as he picks up a weapon – now he has the advantage. A terrible gloating feeling comes from knowing you’ve got it!" ---------- The author detects Homo Sap’s rage and resentment at having being cast out of the present by the sickness of time. Not a happy combination – a species on the planet with seething, bitter anger combined with all those powerful weapons. Watch out animals and plants, here comes Homo Saps, an instrument of mass destruction and extermination!

Beauty is always doomed. Homo Sap with his weapons, his time, his insatiable greed, and ignorance so hideous it can never see its own face. Man is born in time. He lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with him and imposes time.” ---------- In a footnote William Burroughs asks if Homo Sap thinks other animals were there just for him to eat. I hear echoes of poet Gary Snyder observing when the Protestants came to America they judged the natural world as the stage for man working out his relationship to God. (Women and children being inferior versions of man). The animals and trees and lakes and rivers were but stage props. So, to answer your question, William S. Burroughs – yes, many peoples and cultures hold that animals exist for one sole purpose – food for the table!

"To distract their charges from the problems of overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, pandemic pollution of water, land, and sky, they inaugurated a war against drugs. This provides a pretext to set up an international police apparatus designed to suppress dissidence on an international level." ---------- I can just imagine what this statement sounds like when read in William S. Burroughs' gritty, gravelly voice. Can come off as a bit preachy but it does ring of truth. In another footnote, it is stated that a high ranking U.S. official said anyone who suggests a tolerant attitude toward drug use should be considered a traitor. Of course he wasn't thinking of those large corporations distributing millions of pills to get people hooked so their profits skyrocket. OxyContin flooding small towns in the US is but one example.

“Whoever needed a majority? Ten percent plus the police and military is all it ever took. Besides, we’ve got the media, hook, line, and blinkers.” ---------- Wise words, Bill! Nowadays in 2018 the powers that be can even chortle, cackle and yodel as they make this pronouncement. After all, they have a long standing track record of success going for them. ( )

I ran out of Burroughs to read awhile back, and hesitated to buy this one – one of his late works – simply because I could only find it in hardback and $24.95 seemed steep for a novel just 54 pages long. But eventually I found it in paperback at a discount, and while it’s not his best work ever, Burroughs is like Vonnegut in that even his lesser-quality work is worth the effort to read. Here he writes an environmentalist fable, and it’s worth it just for the list of weird diseases that rise from extinction to kill us off. Wonderful. ( )

"Like Blood Diamond, it combines individual heroics with the problems of the modern world, in this case how the rape of the global environment, capitalism and colonialism run amok, and the need of nation-states/corporations to establish and maintain control are leading us down a path of our own destruction."

Read it all at http://troysworktable.blogspot.com/2007/04/cities-of-red-night-1.html ( )