On, "Pay Color"

"Pay Red-- pay back the red you stole for your flags and your Coca-cola signs-- Pay that red back to penis and blood and sun--
"Pay Blue-- Pay back the blue you stole and bottled and doled out in eyedroppers of junk-- Pay back the blue you stole for your police uniforms-- Pay that blue back to sea and sky and eyes of the earth--
"Pay Green-- Pay back the green you stole for your money-- And you, Dead Hand Stretching the Vegetable People, pay back the green you stole for your Green Deal to sell out peoples of the earth and board the first life boat in drag-- Pay that green back to flowers and jungle river and sky--
Boards Syndicates Governments of the earth pay back your stolen colors-- Pay Color back to Hassan i Sabbah--"

- Selected from "Pay Color," By William Burroughs



What one might imagine when reading "Pay Color" is a kind of modern day hipster artist who has just moved into a new city and, with an accumulation of cultural experience from his previous journeys, strives to set grid-locked citizens free with artistic renderings and representations. The piece refers to him as, "The Subliminal Kid," and so we can imagine that this is someone whose actions are discreet but also deliver a certain impact upon those whom they directly effect. The subliminal quality to this hipster is what makes him not a hipster at all; he is something more, not an artist who simply bums around and tries to get his work seen and heard. He is a culture creator, an ability which involves being able to engage a system of messaging, coded with metaphor and symbology. His work communicates an agenda, a passion, an organic inclination for altering the way people operate in the city setting. The primordial motive for the Subliminal Kid's alteration of the social atmosphere cannot be denied. He wants the insensitive money-hungry (those who chronically neglect their primordial origins) to "pay color" back to the earth, give the steering wheel back to nature and allow consciousness to be the property of those who create it, rather than those who simply profit off of it (or disperse "Coca-cola signs").




Interesting about the Subliminal Kid is the great influence on the public that Burroughs allows him to have. Burroughs' language is demanding, eluding to the force that the character has at his disposal; he "moves in and takes over bars cafes and jukeboxes of the world's cities," has "agents" working for him, and presents the reader with a feeling of being invaded ("he set waves and eddies and tornadoes of sound down all your streets"). However, this is not "invasion" in any negative sense. The way Burroughs uses the word "your" might make a reader wonder if it is addressing the individual reader, or if it addresses the collective: the people of "all the worlds cities." With this latter context in effect, the Subliminal Kid can be considered a liminal character, intent on presenting the people of the world with a disorientation in space and time, which is nothing less than to say that this character is a kind of maverick, presenting the public with messaging that is intended to lead them out of the "here and now" and into some kind of nostalgic past:


... his agents with movie camera and telescope lens poured images of the city back into his projector and camera array and nobody knew whether he was in a Western movie in Hongkong or The Aztec Empire in Ancient Rome or Suburban America whether he was a bandit a commuter or a chariot driver whether he was firing a "real" gun or watching a gangster movie and the city moved in swirls and eddies and tornadoes of image explosive bio-advance out of space to neon-- (Burroughs 148-149).


Burroughs connects the objective of returning to a nostalgic past with the ecstasy of human sexuality. As the Subliminal Kid warps the experience of pedestrian life, he puts individuals back into contact with their cities; only then can they remember the rationale for leading an urban lifestyle and perpetuating the life of the city. It is a return to the trauma of chaos, so that the realization of disorder might resolve in a rearticulation of meaning: when it is articulated, populations figure it out and it feels GOOD, because individual punity and the satisfaction of making love are finally understood again. The Subliminal Kid takes a leap into the liminal dimension in order to provide space for this re-articulation. He is similar to the western outlaw, in that he travels as an individual who is detached from society, but who also maneuvers and navigates that society for affirming or refuting the methods by which that society has chosen to live, or influencing what that society remembers as its true history.

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- Burroughs, Willaim. Nova Express. Grove Press, 1992.