Zairja, Missiles, Bees: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in David Blair’s Wax

During the first Gulf War, David Blair produced the first independently made electronic film to achieve international distribution: Wax, or The Discovery of Television among the Bees (1991). Blair’s use of ARPANET to screen Wax recalls Ramón Llull’s ingenuity in repurposing an artifact against the beliefs of its creators. A pioneer of nonlinear video editing—a technology now common in software on today’s laptops and smartphones—Blair chose video as his medium because it enabled him to construct a “punning machine” and to work across disciplines such as drawing and performance art. Examining Blair’s practice clarifies William S. Burroughs’ own working methods, his fascination with weaponry, and his use of technologies such as the tape recorder and the e-meter to “queer” time. In Blair’s narrative apparatus, text often arises from the interpretation of images, a strategy that recalls Burroughs’ fold-in method. Blair’s punning, with the Gnostic resonances noted by Kathy Acker, only begins to illuminate Burroughs’ more intricate pursuit of “coordinate points,” yet both artists share an undercurrent of semiotic warfare. To contextualize this affinity, the medieval zairja will be considered as a precedent for Blair’s and Burroughs’ nonlinear approaches to time and semiosis. When Ibn Khaldun questioned its efficacy, the zairja responded it had been invented by the prophet Idris, identified with the biblical patriarch Enoch. Burroughs’ conception of nuclear weapons as “soul-killers” resonates throughout Wax, a film queering patriarchal western missile-land, where Burroughs’ presence is felt through a cameo appearance.