NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE VII | PART II
THE QUEER NIGHT OF YAGÉ
DMT: THE EMPTY
“I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would’ve destroyed myself. And a wise old queen—Bobo, we called her—taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see.”
—William S. Burroughs, Queer.
Now Here: Panchase, Nepal, July 2025.
You have escaped death by millimetres —unlike Ozzy.
Black-heart-emoji.
Your Rescuer has produced a handful of dried mushrooms from his Dhaka Topi, the traditional Nepali hat, after saving your life.
Praying emoji.
You have gobbled them down as if you were complying with some unknown social protocol that claims that you must eat dried mushrooms off your guardian angel’s hand after the said angel has saved your life.
You would have done anything he would have asked you to do. You are his shadow and you are happy to remain his sleuth until the end of your days.
Pensive-emoji?
OH SENSEI
His name is Rajan and he looks remotely familiar: there is a sly face buried under a blanket of deep wrinkles. They look like a 3D topographic map of the Amazon after some kind of Apocalypse, likely desertification.
Rajan is 96 years old and he is chain-smoking his only remaining lung. Overall, he is the fastest martial cat you have ever seen in action, and the only one who has saved your loveless life.
Emotional-emoji.
Next thing he points at the sky and says:
“Today is Holy Monday. Can you see?”
You feel like the first line of the first song of the best record of the 1990s.
“I was blind, now I can see.”
TWO QUESTIONS ONE MIRACLE
You are the only witness of the miracle, not even the driver has seen it. Rajan has dodged the minivan with a high-suspended jump, and he has diverted its trajectory by just pushing its roof at an angle with the tip of his bamboo stick… ALL THE WHILE REMAINING FLOATING until the vehicle has diverted enough to fatally wound the buffalo instead of you.
Next thing, Rajan has landed on his feet like a cat just in time to prevent you from rolling down the Himalayan Vortex like the stone that the Buddha threw at its core to spread Buddhism in Winter Land —two millennia and a half ago.
Upon consummating the miracle, he lights up cigarette number 9.
“I didn’t smoke the other lung: mustard gas did.”
GURKHA STRONG
As it turns out, he is a “recently” retired Gurkha soldier, the fearsome Nepali battalion that fought and crushed gunpowder with kukris, the deadliest knife on Earth when brandished by one of them.
Rajan is particularly proud of his involvement in the Vietnam War. You wonder if he brought his knife and well, what side was he…
“Are you a journalist?”
Embarrassed emoji.
“How would you know?”
“Only a journalist can ask two stupid questions in one line.”
WOULD YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE?
Quiet emoji.
He keeps on rambling —your guardian angel does.
“Why do journalists only ask questions whose answer they know? Is the most infuriating part of it all: this conservative and adulating preservation of the known. It drives me maaaaaaaaaad!!!!!”
“Because we are only shadows? We don’t know better.”
“You know I was fighting for Uncle Ho! Don’t give me bullshit; neither the sorry eye. If you are to be my shadow you must come with me to Shiva’s house and celebrate Shrawan.”
TRMNT
As he is saying it, his wrinkles start crumbling and transforming like mercurial Terminators. It is like contemplating love stumbling upon the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the helpless nuclear paradox that explains how impossible it is to know the exact position and momentum of two particles simultaneously: the more we know about one particle, the least we know about the other.
UNGODLY
This is some ungodly train of thought, far out enough to make you realise that your guardian angel has drugged you and turn you into his little bitch.
The problem is that, from now on, you train of thought will keep derailing.
MEMORY LOSSES, TIME RETRIEVES
Nowhere in Nepal, July, 2025.
Before the miracle and the crumbling face, you were writing about the cardiac arrest of melancholy portrayed in Queer, your favourite Luca Guadagnino’s movie to date, such a deadly adaptation of William Burroughs namesake second novel, a book that he wrote in 1953 during the aftermath of the most devastating event of his life: the killing of Joan Vollmer, his wife and mother of his only kid, the ill-fated William Burroughs Junior.
You watched the movie on the same night Ozzy Osbourne departed and you thought it was poetic to live the death of the Prince of Darkness while watching an unlikely James Bond (Daniel Craig) playing the King of Junk (Burroughs). Craig delivers such a painful, moving performance of a corroded man trying to heal his demons, and getting lost in an untimely maelstrom.
His lust for belonging is like the Swan Lake performed by crows in Lovecraft’s tombstone.
Black-heart emoji?
Ozzy would have been familiar with that hell during his early, turbulent years, when he was a marginalised raven consumed by rage and fear.
KILL AND PASTE
You wanted to write about the stunning migration of Bill’s words into Luca’s unforgiving cinematography using Bill’s trailblazing “cut-ups.”
The cut-ups were Burroughs’ take on the Exquisite Corpse, the collaborative game invented by four Surrealist titans (Prevert, Duchamp, Breton and Tanguy), in 1925. In the game, a number of players contribute to a creative sequence with a drawing or a sentence without knowing what the others have drawn or written. In the end you stitch them up together —and enjoy the fireworks.
A LAD INSANE
The Surrealists strongly believed that there is more truth in our subconscious than there is in our rational minds therefore automatic writing and painting became one of the cornerstones of their creative process.
Bill was a true loner and he despised collective games, so he invented his own. He would spend days and weeks on end smashing the keys, his burning typewriter ejecting dozens of pages like drunken butterflies.
Once his machine was dry, he would pick up the sheets from the floor, cut them and randomly glue lines and paragraphs on a new blank page.
The idea behind the cut-ups is that the writer is just a typist remotely transcribing words dictated by greater forces: planets, gods or nature —anything but humans.
THE CAREFUL AVOIDANT
Now Here: Lawrence, Kansas. 1990s.
“When I started to write this introduction to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer’s block like a straitjacket: “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape (…) “The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951.”
—William S. Burroughs. Preface to Queer, 1985.
THE END OF UNCERTAINITY IS A WHITE CAT
After three decades of addiction, misplacement, displacement, endless travelling, hundreds of pharmacies and thousands of failed Heisenberg lovers in a million back alleys, Bill came across someone who could grasp and deliver telepathic powers like only Joan could; someone who loved him for what he was: a very thin, elegant and sinister old man with huge veins and tiny pupils, who could talk endlessly about any given subject without seldom losing the upper hand.
Her name was Magalas. She was also a murderer, and an altogether different kind of mammal. After becoming Bill’s widower, Magalas* would be known as Butch Burroughs.
“The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can’t shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can’t hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.”
—William Burroughs, The Cat Inside.
*There is room for assessing a Narcissist case, but the truth is that Burroughs had read everything about the Egyptian’s sacred felines, and believed that both him and White Cats were born with a divine mission.
SADDEST KILLING
Mexico, Ecuador, and Many Nowhere, 1951
In the aftermath of Joan’s homicide, Bill was convinced that alien forces, namely the morbid hand of death, had possessed him. His habit became a constellation of syringes and needles that gnawed and pecked away his joints and cells, while he kept running and picking up rent-boys, snakes, demons, and every bottle or drug he was able to get his hands on along his way.
From Mexico he would travel to Ecuador in search of ayahuasca, desperate to find a substance that would allow him to communicate telepathically with Joan and destroy all the wicked centurions of his tarnished brain.
He wanted to ask for forgiveness, but no one would listen until Magalas showed up.
DOCTOR COTTER, I PRESUME.
In the final act of the movie, Lee Burroughs (Daniel Craig) travels with his frigid rent-boy, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) to the Ecuadorian Amazon to meet Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville) the funkiest shaman ever seen —in life or fiction.
Lee and his frigid rent-boy walk through the jungle for hours until finding the hut where the doctor and her mysterious husband (played by Lisandro Alonso, legend of modern Argentinian cinema) live.
The couple gets instantly suspicious of the two outsiders, and Lee tries to conceal his hysterical wanting of Yagé, aka Ayahuasca talking like an Irish man about what he wants to get; that is: incapable of mentioning WHAT HE WANTS.
Instead, he tries to hypnotise his unsolicited hosts using grammar roundabouts and jumbled lexicon, all the while reassuring them with his destitute eyes: “I’m not a CIA agent, I just want the flower to communicate telepathically with my lost love.”
Guadagnino sets up a memorable game of mirrors in the thick of lush black and green garden where the shaman and husband engage in the same uncertain- Heisenberg choreography as the writer and frigid-rent boy.
The four are lost and not found, they flail their arms untimely, skid the kisses, miss the tongues and float alone in the amniotic fluid of the Amazon.
The ballet of disengaged bodies and grimaces would have made Heisenberg proud and emotional.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score meanders like a transparent snake the same heights reached by Love Will Tear Us Apart. Their soundtrack matches the arresting words and intensity of its cinematography, to score the dream of an Exquisite Corpse.
DOUBLE UP
Watching your Master Slave dissolving features is almost as thrilling as watching Burroughs making shotgun art.
He used to hang cans of paint outside his garden and place white canvases underneath it. And then he would engage in his famous shooting sprees using every firearm of his arsenal.
The explosive paints would splash the white fabric like Nepali children playing with mud under the downpour, a thousand colours raining sideways from the Amazon heavens, snakes, rainbows and rivers flowing in the name of bursting and blowing every notion we ever learned.
TWIN SHADOW
Rajan timely says that today is the start of Shrawan, a month devoted to honour the monsoon and Shiva, Lord Creator and Destructor, and God of the Elements. We must pray for an auspicious rice harvest and we must visit a temple.
You look at him and his face crumbles again, a torrent of lava receding from his chin to his forehead, while you remain silent like an obedient and dumbfounded shadow.
He is a faceless old man standing against the lushest jungle you have ever seen. The butterflies are acrobatically copulating like romantic kamikazes and you both funnel the rain like puzzled, misplaced particles until reaching the house of God.
EPILOGUE
“How can a man that sees and feels be other than sad.”
—Final entry on Burroughs journal before he died, and first song of the movie, “Vaster Than Empires.”
Panchase, Nepal, July 2025
From the 1960s to the start of this scary century, adolescents looked up to intoxicated artists as the coolest creatures in the Western world.
By the time you were a teen reader, a few self-destroying writers had carved their fast-burning stars in the Hall of Fame of Rock, although only Burroughs became the epitome of a literary weapon of massive self-destruction.
Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg had become The Wildest Pen Trinity, the highly praised descendants of the ungodly lineage of laudanum suckers and amphetamine and absinthe devotees, from De Quincey to Baudelaire, Byron and Shelley, a constellation of getting high achievers forever romanticised, their junky miseries turned into heroics by every self-proclaimed anti-establishment poet, wordsmith or journalist, who somehow got subversion and addiction mixed up with freedom and revolution.
If you were a teenager during the 1990s chances are that most of your idols were ragging drunks, a never-ending praised Parnassus brimming with full on Dionysian and Apollonian addicts: from Scorsese to Nirvana.
Rajan is Bill and Bill is Daniel Craig and Lisandro Alonso is the husband of the shaman of a long weekend that started on a Friday night of 1994, when you went out with Queer’s paperback in your back pocket and you found Detroit techno instead of literature, a bulldozing metaphor of all the things that you will be forever be losing, of all the particles that would never be reached.
SHIVA
The red saris are in bloom, they spread like silk wings beyond the walls and parasols; they swipe the ashes, light the candles and gently caress the petal-infested steps of the spiral staircase leading to an underground, wetted cavity, where flash lights, altars, prayers and cow sculptures render the quiet wishes of the vibrant parishioners.
If there is a country where Heisenberg principle might crash, this must be the one. Never Ending Peace and Love, just as Burroughs would have wished.
They are all kneeling, praying for water and fertility, abundance and wisdom, and even though you can’t see them, you know they are in the thick of NOWHERE. Now here.
This is cut-up.
So is the rest.
