The Wishing Machine

Last fall I listened to a recording on Archive.org, one of William Burroughs giving a presentation at the Naropa Institute in 1986. His topic is "The Technology & Ethics of Wishing." A fascinating talk given to a roomful of people who took some warming up, intellectually, on Burroughs' part. He didn't get them asking questions until he'd shifted the subject, slightly, at the end, to the business of writing. That they understood. That some of them seemed to be wanting to do themselves. What no one else in the room wanted to talk about was the "wishing machine" Burroughs described borrowing from a friend and testing. In simplest terms, the machine seemed to provide an apparatus for effecting "wishful thinking" magic along the lines of Austin Osman Spare's methods. The machine's operator wrote what they wanted on a slip of paper and out it between two plates on the wishing machine--a technological equivalent of "dropping the desire down the memory hole."

Twentieth-century humans (and twenty-first century ones to a greater extent) are largely if not completely ignorant about machinery and the mechanics of how things work. Because of this it's feasible that a "wishing machine" really could exist. After all, when we use a microwave or a computer, the vast majority of us (myself deeply included) have no idea what we're doing. We might as well be operating the Ark of the Covenant. And those devices tend to give us what we want at an equivalent or higher rate than does the "wishing machine," which clocked in a 70% - 90% success rate for the desired effects, including the healing of warts and acne in children and some other maladies in older people, and the killing of some insects. Those are things we can't do with our personal computers, so a bit lower success rate might be okay, yes?

That the wish is formulated on paper and placed between the plates seems to be all Burroughs has to say about the "apparatus," the "technology of wishing." On the ethics he goes into a bit more detail, retelling the story of "The Monkey's Paw" and all the side-effects, you might say, of careless wishing. The wishes all come true, but there are unforeseen aspects to how the wishes come true that cause great suffering. Burroughs, who you'll remember accidentally killed his wife while performing a William Tell-style stunt, says he would never do "something so stupid as to wish for money," as he expects any gain would come at some greater expense. And as for wishing someone dead, Burroughs says he would never do this, either. It's unclear whether this is because he knows what death is, having killed his wife, or if he simply believes in the sanctity of life, or if he has been scared straight by an anecdote he tells of a man who wished his neighbor dead, but before the wish could come true the neighbor heard about it, came over with a chainsaw and killed the wisher (the magician, you could say), then himself "dropped dead of excitement." "If a wish can kill a junebug it can kill a man," he warns. So a wishing machine truly is a murder machine.

If a wishing machine is to exist, then out of fairness everyone must own one. It sells itself, really, and makes for a hell of a gun-control parable. Burroughs' only regret, it seems, is that someone can't, or hasn't yet, patented a wishing machine, as they could grow rich off its sale. A bit tongue in cheek; gallows humor. But of course he may be making it all up, this business of a wishing machine, because each of us already does possess one. It is the combination of our imagination and the innate free will given to each human being at birth. In describing it this way, though, Burroughs performs his own bit of magic, imbuing our minds with light and curiosity. We want to know where we can find a wishing machine of our own, and in our desire for one we both externalize, and therefore alienate from ourselves, something innately ours. We also gain a way to talk about our own capacity, again possessed by every person, to make a wish and to see it come to pass in reality, in whatever grim way it will.

Burroughs also outlined some good exercises for magicians and writers, exercises in consciousness such as going for a walk around a city block, thinking what thoughts as we will, and then trying to remember what we were thinking when something remarkable (in the mundane sense of the word) happens: when we see a flashy advertisement, for example, or when someone asks us for the time. This is a good exercise for the modern magus to try, and Burroughs is a stellar example of a someone who was a magician as well as a writer.