The word/image collaboration between Malcolm Mc Neill and William S. Burroughs yielded a number of uncanny synchronicities. The collaboration as a process unfolded not only in the 1970s, but – particularly in Mc Neill’s case – it has its strange correspondence with the life and work of artist-explorer Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) who uncovered and depicted much of the lost architecture of the Mayans on his expeditions with writer John Lloyd Stephens. It was not immediately apparent that the Ah Puch/Pook project retraced that relationship broadly, and in the case of Mc Neill and Catherwood, in specific, inexplicable detail. As Mc Neill summarizes it in Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me:
The artist was English, like me, and like me, he’d gone to art school in London. Like me, he’d met an American writer who happened to be living in London at the time. The writer had contact him on the basis of his work, and they too had agreed to work on a book together…
…about the Maya.
They’d met in Leicester Square, a few hundred yards down the street from where I’d met Bill. The artist had then moved to America to complete the work – just as I had – slightly ahead of his partner.
In Manhattan, his first home, like mine, was on Houston Street. He also had a studio in Tribeca.
From there we both moved to Prince Street.
We each had children born in New York, each of us was separated from our wives there. His son, also born in December, was 6 years old at the time, as was mine.
We both quit illustration there.
As artists we shared a particular image style. In New York we’d become known for it – he through the panoramic images he exhibited in his gallery while living on Prince Street, myself through the panoramic images I created for television, while also living on Prince Street.
My images led to a career as a director. They were the reason I was now in California.
He also moved to California and while there, like me, became an American citizen – he while living in Solano County, me while living in Solano Canyon.
Facts.
Ultimately he produced a folio edition of his collaboration, describing the history of the project and acknowledging the friendship that had occurred as a result.
His account had already been published…
A hundred and fifty-nine years ago.
Now that I was aware of this, my own account could begin.1
Burroughs readers will be conscious of the role ghosts of chance play in his fiction, and in his analysis of culture, politics, and being, not least in the figure ’23’ which features so prominently in the history of the Mc Neill – Burroughs collaboration and beyond.
The mysterious correspondences that are interweaving facts between Mc Neill, Burroughs, Catherwood, Stephens, the Maya, and numerous historical situations that Mc Neill investigated and which are undeniable as resonances at the very least are crucial to an understanding of the work.
Entry points include the Jungian, the Freudian, the McLuhan-esque, and the paranormal, to suggest a some possible orientations. The essential point is that the work preserved in the Archive needs to be understood ‘across the wounded galaxies’ as it were, in uncanny returning and predictive relationships with history.
- Mc Neill, M. (2012). Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me. Fantagraphics (pp. 7-8) ↩︎