Fiction

Cities of Yagé anhu_1084 122..129

MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Department of Anthropology
1200 Amsterdam Ave, Mail Code 5523
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027

Why would people see cities when they drink yagé? Not only travelers from the
city, but Indians of the forest who never visited a city?
I asked myself this question once again on re-reading The Yagé Letters by
William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. First published in a dark, slim, volume
in English in 1963 with a shaman on the cover, his face etched in vibrating white
lines, it was reissued in 2006, double the length with splendid notes and a
carefully researched introduction by Oliver Harris who previously edited Bur-
roughs’ letters written between 1945 and 1959.

The Composite City

With good reason in his Introduction to The Yagé Letters Redux, Harris draws
our attention to what Burroughs, in two letters to Allen Ginsberg, refers to as
“the composite city,” first mention of which is in a letter dated February 28,
1953, Hotel Niza, Pasto, concerning what he considers a failed yagé experience
in the Putumayo region of Colombia, not far from the foothill town of Mocoa.
“That night,” wrote Burroughs,
I had a vivid dream in color of the green jungle and a red sunset. Also a composite
city familiar to me but I could not quite place it. Part New York, part Mexico City and
part Lima which I had not seen at this time. I was standing on a corner by a wide street
with cars going by and a vast open park down the street in the distance. I cannot say
whether these dreams had any connection with Yagé. Incidentally you are supposed
to see a city when you take Yagé.

And he referred to the shaman as an “old drunken fraud” who was when he
met him “crooning over a man evidently down with malaria.” Burroughs can
be such a jerk, a real know-all. Of course he would know it was malaria. Of course
he would know the shaman was a drunk. And of course he would be ever-ready
to put the shamans down as seedy con artists. In a way this is a relief when
compared with today’s wide-eyed adulation of Indian medicine men by visitors
from the cities of Colombia, the United States, and Europe, and it might also be
noted that local people, very much including Indians (especially shamans), are

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 36, Issue 1, pp 122–129, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.
© 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2011.01084.x.
Taussig Fiction 123

by and large even quicker than Burroughs to be skeptical of shamans. When it

comes to magic, faith and skepticism go hand in hand and in Burroughs’ case,
he supplies the skepticism, and yagé will provide the faith, for when it works
(and remember, yagé is extremely variable), yagé can really toss you around.
After his first, disappointing encounter, Burroughs became wildly impressed
with the powers he found in yagé, powers that sustained his writing the rest of
his surprisingly long life.
There is certainly no mention of fraud the second time he saw a city, as
recounted in a letter to Allen Ginsberg dated July 10, 1953. Now the man is all
shook up. He has taken yagé some six times these past four months and, with
amazing chutzpah, brought some to Lima from Pucallpa and, so he claims,
drunk it on his own—something I still can’t quite believe as yagé is seeped
in stories as to its dangers (as Allen Ginsberg notes) and should always
be administered in ritual in which incantation and song to the spirits are
essential.
Perhaps drinking yagé on his own would more easily allow Burroughs to be
his own shaman, so to speak, fitting in with his blindness to yagé ritual in favor
of a narrow pharmacological approach to this hallucinogen, an approach
endorsed by the Harvard professor of ethnobotany, a sort of overgrown boy
scout, Richard Evans Schultes, who was instrumental in getting Burroughs to
the Putumayo yagé world. A key figure in the U.S. government’s search for
suitable Amazonian rubber in World War II, Schultes, interest in natural hallu-
cinogens does not seem free of U.S. government interest either, a point lost on
Burroughs who was otherwise profoundly suspicious of the state and its incli-
nation toward mind control through drugs.
In the letter from Lima to Ginsberg there is a remarkable shift in voice and
tone compared with the other letters for now it seems like it’s a letter from yagé
itself. The Self has disappeared into protoplasmic metamorphosing motion.
First to go is the physical sense of stability. The room vibrates and does so
because of a wild Orientalism. The blood and substance of many races passes
through you—Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot
Near East, Indian, as well as “new faces as yet unconceived and unborn,
combinations not yet realized pass through your body.”
It is this journey within and beyond the body that is the Composite City (now
in upper case) “where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent
market.”

All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod with high mountain Mongols
blinking in smoky doorways, houses of bamboo and teakwood, houses of adobe,
stone, and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and houses on
river boats, wood houses 100 feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of old boxes
and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotting rags talking to themselves and
cooking down. Canned Heat, great rusty iron racks rising 200 feet in the air from
swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multileveled platforms and
hammocks swinging over the void.

The Composite City. “A place where the unknown past and the emergent
future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities waiting for a live one.”
124 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 36, Number 1

An Indian City
A similar leap into the city was told to me in Spanish by my Ingano Indian
friend, Florencio, who lived on the Río Caquetá in the Putumayo lowlands of
Colombia. It was the early 1980s. We were talking in a shaman’s house close to
Mocoa, a small town at the bottom of steep mountains connected to the high-
land city of Pasto, the largest city in southwest Colombia, by a tortuous zig-
zagging road that, after a steep ascent, runs through the Sibundoy Valley, home
to several thousand Ingano and Kamsa Indians. In this mountain valley, Capu-
chin friars from Igualada, outside of Barcelona, Spain, set up their base around
1901, taking control of an enormous stretch of Amazonia, which up till that time
had had little experience of the Church.
Florencio was about sixty-five years old at the time we spoke. Someone told
me a few years later he died from too much cocaine or, more likely, bazuco, a foul
derivative of cocaine. As a young man in 1932 he had ferried gasoline in
dug-out canoes from Úmbria to Puerto Asís for the Colombian army in the war
with Peru, the first time that soldiers of a nation-state had ever entered the
Putumayo except for the Spaniards in the sixteenth century searching for
the fabled El Dorado and, maybe, Incan soldiers in the centuries preceding the
Spanish conquest. He had served the Capuchin monks as a sacristan in Puerto
Limón, and all his adult life he was an avid drinker of yagé dispensed by
shamans.
Around 1960 he had accompanied a shaman from Puerto Limón curing
a woman sick with headaches. They drank yagé. With the third cup,
Florencio began to have visions. He saw angels coming from the clouds
to place crystals on his forehead, to capture the experience of illness so
that he could learn to cure, on his chest so he would have good spirit with
people and do no evil, in his hands and in his mouth “so that one can speak
with anyone, so that one speaks well . . . And this is what the yagé makes
you see.”
The angels disappeared and another vision or pinta, as he called it, took its
place. Birds crowded into the room, filling and overflowing it, yet that, too, went
away and was followed by what he called “another class of painting.”
And this forms a street, like a city, no? It gets clearer and in this city each room has its
own vision, while from still others comes music. First to come out is a person from the
Sibundoy valley, thus. Others come with the plumage of shamans who take
yagé . . . all like this they form up the street. They keep on forming themselves, some
dancing with their music, others with other music. Over here they bear different
feathers, dressed with mirrors—people, yagé people—with necklaces of tigers’ teeth
and curing fans and clothed in gold. That is beautiful. And they keep on coming and
coming, singing the while.
Then emerges a battalion of the army. How wonderful! How it enchants me to see
that! I’m not sure how the rich dress, no? But the soldiers of the battalion are much
superior in their dress to anybody! They wear pants and boots to the knee of pure
gold, all in gold, everything. They are armed, and they form up. And I try to raise
myself . . . so that I too can sing with them, and dance with them, me too. Then the
shaman . . . with the pinta [image], he already knows that I am trying to get up to go
there, to sing and to dance with them just as we are seeing. And then he who gives
the yagé [i.e. the shaman], he already knows, and he is quiet, knowing, no? Thus those
who know how to heal are given account. Seeing this, they are able to cure, no? And
they pass this painting to the sick person. And that person gets better! And I said to
Taussig Fiction 125

the shaman who was curing me, I said to him, “Seeing this, you know how to heal?”
“Yes,” he told me, “thus seeing, one can cure, no?”

Florencio entered a house. There were three men in black. Behind them were
books bearing crosses spewing gold. A waterfall of gold. Asked why he came,
he said he came so he could know, conocer, become acquainted. “But you
already know,” they say. And they blessed him and gave him power to do good
works back home.
It is in that city with each room having its own pinta and its own music that
the dancing, feathered, and mirrored shaman-like beings that he calls “yagé
people,” turn into dancing soldiers. It is at that point that he tries to get up and
dance along with them. He enters into the vision, or at least tries to. “Then, the
shaman . . . with the painting, he already knows that I am trying to get up to go
there, to sing and to dance with them just as we are seeing . . . Seeing this they
are able to cure, no?”
I feel that in telling me this, he is passing on the image to me, and that in my
retelling it, I am passing it on to you.

New York City

“It is the most powerful drug I have experienced,” Burroughs wrote Allen
Ginsberg. “That is it produces the most complete derangement of the senses.”
Yagé provided the seed for Naked Lunch, explained Allen Ginsberg in 1975, in
what must be one of the most spirited and generous invocations of Modernism
as montage, Burroughs-style, ever made.
It was just after Burroughs had returned from South America and was
staying with Ginsberg on East 7th St, NYC. Looking out the back window onto
courtyards and back windows of apartments, crisscrossed by fire escapes and
clothes lines, Burroughs suddenly saw those amazing “composite cities” he had
seen when taking yagé, cities which leap at you from all angles and heights
throughout his life’s work as exemplified in the title of one of his last works,
Cities of the Red Night. What is wonderful is that Ginsberg opens the shutter on
that moment when it all came together; NYC, yagé, and the wild imagination of
William Seward Burroughs, performance artist. “He acted it out completely,”
said Ginsberg,” which he always did with his routines.”
As Ginsberg recalls, there on East 7th St, Burroughs “suddenly had a vision of
the racks, the great city of iron racks rising hundreds of feet into the air with
hammocks swinging and people climbing from one level onto the other. Over-
populated city of racks, where people are stored, just making a living, like they
are now in the megalopolis of streets covered with garbage, blocks of ruined
buildings, bums living in motorcycle gangs, muggers and policemen and
junkies and the CIA stealing out of hallways and blackmailing each other.”
Looking out the window, Burroughs (a notorious misogynist) suddenly
became one of his characters, a nasty old woman reaching out from the upper
balconies for her laundry, which becomes a flayed corpse. Burroughs lunged.
“Sometimes he fell on the floor,” went on Ginsberg, “he was so possessed with
the total slapstick humor of his imagination, the images that were coming to
him almost as a movie picture, automatically.”
126 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 36, Number 1

Into the Image

To pass into an image has to be one of the most fascinating possibilities in a

human life. For Nietzsche, this is what the Dionysian moment is all about, and
for Walter Benjamin it is what occurs with watching movies as well as with the
child gazing into the colored illustrations in children’s books.
Florencio tells us that the image he is entering into, transmitted by the
shaman, cures sorcery. Could this also be Burroughs’ intuition, transmitting
images to us that can cure the modern equivalent of sorcery such as the
unconscious control exercised through our habits of mind and the machina-
tions of busybodies and the state? Burroughs emphasizes the operation of
chance associations triggered by cut ups to pull this off, yet what also stands
out in his writing is its saturation in color, beginning with the decidedly
curious color-properties he attributes to yagé —as when, in Naked Lunch, he
writes in a series of ellipses, “Notes from yagé state: Images fall slow and
silent like snow . . . Serenity . . . All defenses fall . . . everything is free to enter
or go out . . . Fear is simply impossible . . . A beautiful blue substance flows
into me.”1
Among other things, he notes a blue face, a blue wall, and plants growing out
of genitals. No wonder he felt the room shaking. In the pharmacological appen-
dix to the book, Burroughs assures us that: “Blue flashes in front of the eyes is
peculiar to yagé intoxication.”2
I sometimes wonder whether in his South American travels Burroughs might
not have visited the Desana Indians far from the Putumayo, way down the
Amazon along the Vaupes River, either in fact or in time-travel, thanks to the
magic carpet provided by yagé. From prolonged conversations in his university
office in Bogota with the Desana Indian, Antonio Guzman, the Colombian
anthropologist, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, found he had a lot to say about blue
too.3 For according to Guzman, blue is the color of the Milky Way, intermediate
between solar yellow and terrestrial red, which is to say between male and
female, semen and life. Desana blue is essentially ambivalent, says Reichel. By
which I take him to mean that it is ambivalence. It is beneficial in so far as it is
associated with the sun, but destructive in its associations with vomit, putre-
faction, and wounds. Milky Way blue is what you enter into taking hallucino-
gens; it connects, it ruptures, it transforms. Small wonder Burroughs found a
beautiful blue substance flowing into him.
But if there is a color to the sacred I would go back to the red and the green
in the dream Burroughs had when he first took yagé and saw what he called “a
composite city.” I would chose not blue but green, green for envy that animates
sorcery, and that is every inch the color of yagé too, although to tell the truth,
yagé, like the sacred, has no one color, being that black from which colors pour
as from tar. Yagé is a creeper—what else would you expect?—creeping its way
through the dank dark depths of the forest where it hides, thanks to its twisting
itself this way and that with its dark mottled coloring. In preparing yagé for the
shaman, invariably a man, the Indians add to its mashed up self what they
regard as the female element, the dark green faintly lined heart-shaped leaves of
chagropanga. Without them, no pinta (as the Indians say), pinta here meaning
paint, what we call “hallucinations”—a word easier to use than to know quite
Taussig Fiction 127

what it means. But there it is, clear as day: pinta is what is crucial and she is
paint, meaning color.
As for the red, that’s what you may well see as a precursor to your dying if
a menstruating or pregnant woman has been close to the site where yagé is
being prepared in a semi-secret grove or where it is being drunk. I know of no
taboo in relation to yagé anywhere near as strong as this, such that I am led to
think that shamanism and being woman are two poles of the one continuum of
energy and in effect amount to one and the same thing except that one pole gets
valorized as positive and the other negative. Yet the valorization is deceptive
because shamanism is as full of negative force and danger including death as is
alleged for menstruation and pregnancy, which themselves can be positively
valorized as the mystery of the creation of life, such that I think it makes sense
to regard shamanism (as I have come to personally experience it) as the male
equivalent, so to speak, of these female powers which themselves, therefore, can
also be seen as “shamanic.” (As an instance: I once lived in a house with Kofan
Indians along the Guamuez River in the 1970s. The shaman’s mother-in-law,
herself the widow of a shaman, was said to have some shamanic powers like
preparing the beer that would attract the animals to be killed. She was post
menopausal.)
Does any of this appear in The Yagé Letters? Well, early on Burroughs feels
himself turning into a Negress and then a Negro fucking a Negress, and Allen
Ginsberg sees himself facing death in the eye of a holy vagina, strong images
indeed. But the image that brings it all together, I suggest, is the East 7th street
Composite City which is the ur-scene for Naked Lunch and indeed for the entire
Burroughs’ oeuvre. What Burroughs does, said Ginsberg, is first see the city of
racks and then the nasty old woman reaching for her laundry which transforms
into a corpse which she flails at. Like Florencio he then enters the image, and
becomes the nasty old lady flailing at the swinging corpse by the fire escapes
high up in the sky.
Shamanism, I submit, is the other side of the coin to menstruation and
pregnancy. Male and female lie at the heart of the system that Burroughs, brave
and passionate and just plain hilarious about male homosexuality, was so close
to but couldn’t see. Not a glimpse. Until he looked out the window of East 7th
street when the Composite City, that seething mass of inchoate transgression,
sprang into view as he fell to the floor.

Dream City of Colportage

The body (Burroughs) and death (Ginsberg) are striking in The Yagé Letters.
Hit by nausea at the beginning of his first effective yagé trip, Burroughs
rushed to the door but could barely walk. He had no coordination, his feet were
like blocks of wood. He vomited violently and then felt numb as if covered with
layers of cotton. “Larval beings passed before my eyes in a blue haze, each one
giving an obscene, mocking, squawk . . . I must have vomited six times. I was on
all fours convulsed with spasms of nausea. I could hear retching and groaning
as if I was someone else.”
Allen Ginsberg strikes a different note, closer to Walter Benjamin’s idea in his
1929 essay on Surrealism of “profane illumination,” where he actually celebrates
128 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 36, Number 1

the biting of mosquitoes and the horror of uncontrollable vomiting that yagé
induces. At first irritated, he later accepts being bitten as it enables him to feel his
body extending into the universe. Along with the barking of dogs and the
croaking of frogs, their whine becomes part of the song of the Great Being,
announcing that he, too, will have to become a mosquito, as the universe vomits
itself out.
Burroughs on the other hand retreats into pseudo-pharmacology when
feeling threatened, swallowing down barbiturates with great aplomb and
letting loose with what he came to call the cut-up method, which is what he
prescribed for Allen’s death fears of losing his soul and what is, in effect the
Composite City: “A place where the unknown past and the emergent future
meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities waiting for a live one.”
Compare with Walter Benjamin. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past
can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be
recognized and is never seen again.” In these “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” Benjamin held out hope for a redemption of the injustices of the past
by means of entering into their fleeting image. This is writing from what
Benjamin called “the state of emergency,” and which I, from my yagé experi-
ences, call “the space of death,” meaning the Spanish conquest with its violence
and attributions of sorcery as between Spaniards, Africans, and New World
Indians.
Certainly Benjamin and Burroughs write from a “state of emergency,” yet as
far as I know, Burroughs never read a word of Benjamin. It makes you laugh
and roll your eyes to think of them having a conversation, perhaps on one of
Burroughs’ “color walks” starting off from the Beat Hotel in Paris. We could of
course just as well call this a “city walk” as a “color walk,” thereby evoking the
motif central to Benjamin’s way of thinking in his mature years, what he called
“colportage,” meaning a synthesis of filmic montage, walking the city and
getting lost in it as a flaneur, combined with a wonderfully altered perception
as occurs upon taking hashish, mescaline, and opium. Colportage is the operat-
ing principle of the Composite City.
Benjamin’s last work, the 1,200 page manuscript now published as The Paris
Arcades in English, is just such colportage; a series of unfinished fragments,
largely quotations, concerning nineteenth-century Paris as the dreamscape of
capitalism from which, upon awakening, capitalism would be self-transformed.
Benjamin writes,
The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing
the present as a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers
in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!4

I cannot but wonder if this mix of film, drugs, and walking the city this
colportage is not the same as what Burroughs experienced as a waking world to
which the past refers as truth, when he looked out the window on East 7th street.
In that instant he connected the city of New York with the selva of Colombia and
Peru, same way as Florencio himself became connected to the city of dancing
shaman-soldiers. Both Burroughs and Florencio scramble to act this out and
become one with what they are seeing. They plunge into the image which, as
the shaman said, is what cures sorcery, and this image they now experience as
Taussig Fiction 129

an ecstatic vision gathering in the city—for what is the city? It seems a fairy tale
space, like an enchanted forest, in which anything can happen, yet world
history has granted the city enough ideological weight and texture to give you
visions for a lifetime and beyond—city as in citizen, civitas, the city of cities,
meaning Rome, which established our law and with it civilization which Spain
(invaded by Rome) used as name and category to separate the citizen from the
New World Indian, the racional from the irracional, considered more animal than
man. And long before the Spaniards, the Incan king had his cities in the high-
lands from where his soldiers would descend into the lowland forests, home of
incest, brilliant feathers, and shamans with powerful drugs.
This seems reason enough why when you take yagé you are likely to see a
city as much as a jaguar, for the city is built into the conquest of the New World
as a ramifying image. To undergo what Burroughs calls space-time travel to the
Composite City is to space-time travel the imaginative work of conquest in the
same manner as Benjamin juxtaposes the dream with its awakening as a key and
as yet little explored modality in modern history. And let us not overlook the
fact that the Indians of the forests where Burroughs took yagé, were themselves
supposed to have cities, presided over by El Dorado, the Golden One—last seen
dancing with feathers and mirrors in the city on the hill.

Notes
1. William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, New York: Grove, 1990, p. 130. The ellipses
are Burroughs.
2. Burroughs 1990, p. 283.
3. Gerard Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of
the Tukano Indians, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971[1968], pp.
45–52.
4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002, p. 389.