William S. Burroughs Interviewed by Allen Ginsberg

The interview, care of Sensitive Skin.

From the piece...

AG: Later, in conversation with the shaman, you were agreeing that, in order to get a spirit, you have to see it.

WSB: Oh yes. If you see it, you gain control of it. It’s just a matter of, well, if you see it outside, it’s no longer inside.

AG: In other words, unless error were allowed enough play so that it manifested itself visibly—

WSB: You would never see it. In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can’t ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that’s what he wants. It’s only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal. Otherwise, they’d argue and argue going around and around and around for a hundred thousand years. But the arguing has nothing whatever to do with what they’re really doing.

AG: So now how would you have confronted the Satan in the Ayatollah and his followers, about this price on Salman Rushdie’s head and the killing of his Japanese translator?

WSB: That is not a question. You think in political terms or justifications, never get anywhere.

AG: Well, the method of confrontation is now that many of the publishers got together to put out The Satanic Verses in paperback. That’s not an argument, that’s a deed.

WSB: Yes, it might be something. But never, never a verbal argument, it will never never go anywhere except in circles. Because you’re not talking about the issue at all, you’re talking about words.