Junketing

“ The chickens will become ready for market when poultry will fetch the highest price; so that by the end of the year I shall have money enough to buy a new gown. In this dress I will go to the Christmas junketings, when all the young fellows will propose to me, but I will toss my head, and refuse them every one. ”

“ I once read an interesting article in the daily paper. It was written apropos of some Shakespearean celebrations or other, and its purport was that modern England was ever so much happier than mediæval or Elizabethian England. It is possible that an acute logician might find something to say on this thesis; but my interest lay in the following passages, which I quote:
"'Merrie England,' with its maypoles and its Whitsun Ales, and its Shrove-tide jousts and junketings is dead for us, from the religious point of view. ”

“ Dungarren, you are my prisoner in the king's name. To favour the escape of a criminal is no slight offence against the laws of the land.
DUNGARREN.
You distract me with your formal authorities: the laws of the land and the laws of God are at variance, for she is innocent.
SHERIFF.
She has abused and bewitched thee to think so; and a great proof it is of her guilt.
DUNGARREN.
It is you and your coadjutors who are abused, dreadfully and wickedly abused, to hurry on, with such unrighteous obduracy, the destruction of one whom a savage would have spared. Tremble to think of it. ”

“ I told him about the other addicts—how they feel this kinship that's not like any other relationship anywhere—how you have that exalted feeling of mingled hope and despair when another junkie is coming with a fix for you—and how by just drifting around in a strange city you find yourself drawn to the right district to score the stuff. ”

“ Like characters in the developing Theatre of the Absurd, the junkies in this play and in the books of the era live a life of no exit; they exist in tight, self-contained worlds of their own creation, existential men carving a separate reality out of nothingness with the hypodermic needle. Or to put it in Burroughs' own words, from Junkie, "Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. ”

“ Crime and madness have a certain resemblance. To see the prisoners of the Conciergerie in the yard, or the madmen in the garden of an asylum, is much the same thing. Prisoners and lunatics walk to and fro, avoiding each other, looking up with more or less strange or vicious glances, according to the mood of the moment, but never cheerful, never grave; they know each other, or they dread each other. ”

“ Drunkenness may very justly be termed the prolific parent of every vice and crime that can corrupt the soul, or disgrace the dignity of man; for in fits of inebriety what horrid deeds and hellish debaucheries have not been committed?—robbery, murder, incest, treason, and others still more shocking, by persons who in cooler moments, in a sober state, would have shuddered at the bare mention of such wicked and abandoned turpitude! ”

“ The prisoner was followed by a retinue that might have bowed the head of an old and hardened offender with shame—rude, idle, half-grown boys, with their morbid interest in every thing tending to excitement and crime, seedy loungers drawn away from saloon doors where they are as surely to be found as certain coarse weeds in foul, neglected corners—a ragged, unkempt, repulsive jumble of humanity, that filled the street with gibes, slang, and profanity. ”

“ Some of these bold vagabonds have blotched, cracked, veiny skins; their foreheads are covered with wrinkles, their hair scanty and dirty, like a wig thrown on a dust-heap. All are gay in their degradation, and degraded in their joys; all are marked with the stamp of debauchery, casting their silence as a reproach; their very attitude revealing fearful thoughts. Placed between crime and beggary they have no compunctions, and circle prudently around the scaffold without mounting it, innocent in the midst of crime, and vicious in their innocence. ”

“ When once the yoke of habit is imposed, the shoulder soon accustoms itself to the bondage, and the aches and bruises of initiation are forgotten. There are spasms of disgust, moments of wise suspicion; but they are transient, and men soon come to regard a city as the prison from whence there is no escape. ”

“ When we come to inquire into the cause of imprisonment, we are constantly impressed with one fact, which cannot be denied, that the curse of drunkenness has proved directly or indirectly the ruin of between eighty and ninety per cent. of all those in prison. Many a blow has been struck, many a deed committed, many a robbery perpetrated by those so under the influence of this evil spirit that when they have come to their senses in the prison cell they have asked, "Where am I, what have I done?" ”

“ The whole community was electrified by a catastrophe so unheard-of. Children quit their play, women their work, lovers their whispers, and laborers their daily toil, to talk over the astounding arrest. The wealth, the respectability, the youth, the beauty, the sex, the well-known arrogance and pride of the race from which the accused had sprung, all tended to heighten and deepen the breathless interest. And the time and place—the occasion of occasions on which the arrest had taken place—that, more than all, sent a thrill of horror through every heart. ”

“ How one shudders to think, that such arrests may often take place, founded upon nothing but the suspicion caused by the appearance of misery, or by some inaccurate description. Can we forget the case of that young girl, who, wrongfully accused of participating in a shameful traffic, found means to escape from the persons who were leading her to prison, and, rushing up the stairs of a house, threw herself from a window, in her despair, and was crushed to death upon the paving-stones? ”

“ Beneath those arcades walk the daughters of crime, by ones and twos—dressed in the flaunting garb that tells so forcibly the tale of broken hearts, and blighted promise, and crushed affections,—to lose an hour amidst the haunts of pleasure and of vice, and to court the crime by which alone they live. ”

“ Then his mind reverted to the strange sensations which he had experienced beneath those human eyes after being trapped into the padded chamber, and a shiver of repulsion ran over him. Was he a captive in the hands of, and at the mercy of, a gang of conjurers and mesmerists? The thought was horrible to him. He had courage enough to defend himself in a hand-to-hand encounter, but he felt powerless to contend against such diabolical influences as he had already been subjected to. ”

“ Once, after a week of mutual recriminations, driven beyond my strength by her simulated scenes of jealousy, I went to her, determined to provoke a final rupture. I can still remember the rage in my heart as I came into her salon that night of the final rupture that calls out the primitive criminal which abides in all of us. For criminal instinct is essentially the instinct of the survival of the fittest, and in that moment when, rightly or wrongly, we reach the frenzy where we must tear from us the arms that hold us back,—we destroy as criminals destroy. ”

“ To think that poor girl should be thrust into a dungeon—like a common murderer—when she is as innocent as a lamb! the very thought makes the blood run cold in my veins. My conscience tells me that I am responsible, to some extent, for this terrible calamity, though not intentionally. ”

“ There are in this dungeon a large body of men so steeped in misery, so used to torture for their daily food, that they will not be so nice as Messrs. Hawes and Evans. 'Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.' Follow me, sir; and as we go pray cast your eyes over the prison rules, and see whether you can find 'a punishment-jacket.' No, sir, you will not find even a Spanish collar, or a pillory, or a cross, far less a punishment-jacket which combines those several horrors. ”

“ The faces of all—men, women, and children—wore an ominous and gloomy expression; and the attitudes in which they stood betokened terror and alarm. Murmurs I could hear—now and then ejaculations—and sobs that bespoke sympathy with some one who suffered. I saw scowling brows, as if knit by thoughts of vengeance. But these last were few—the more general expression was one of terror and submission.
It was not difficult to tell that the cry I had heard proceeded from the neighbourhood of the pump, and a glance unfolded the cause. Some poor slave was undergoing punishment! ”

“ Of young girls with the fear of worse than death, stoned by low men. Again, we see untellable things—a wretched woman thrown, by the drunken men who have preyed upon her, forth into the gutter. There, when day has come, the children of the neighbourhood crowd about her like scavengers about their dead prey, shouting and laughing at the sight of this wreck of womanhood, kicking her bruised and filthy body as it lies in the mud of the gutter! ”

“ Meanwhile do there hide in any part of this wicked world two hearts which throb with unusual terrors this night? Or does there pass across the mirror of a guilty memory any unusual shapes of horror prognostic of detection and coming punishment? It would comfort my uneasy heart to know; for the spirit of vengeance has seized upon me, and my house will never seem washed of its stain, or my conscience be quite at rest as to the past, till that vile man and woman pay, in some way, the penalty of their crime. ”

“ I do not suppose for one moment all such spirits would be compelled to haunt certain localities, but only the spirits of murderers, of carnal-minded suicides, of misers and other people who, when alive, were attracted to one spot by some special vice or peculiar hobby; the spirits of criminal lunatics, and vicious imbeciles, and of particularly gross and sensual people, whose phantasms are, according to some authorities (a view I do not altogether take) , as bestial and savage in appearance as the people, when alive, were lustful and cruel in disposition, need not necessarily haunt one spot. ”

“ Some have suddenly become grey with terror when they heard the bell toll as the signal for their execution. Imagine and it is not near so terrible as the first case the state of mind of the child who, having committed a great fault, sees its father standing by its bedside in the morning with the rod in his hand, and calling out to him in an angry voice: get up! ”

“ The sensualist riots in the haunts of dissipation. The criminal sees the dungeon or the gallows. The awakened sinner beholds the flames of hell, or looks upon the sceptre of pardon; and the Christian anticipates heavenly joy. ”

“ Like savages, too, they are passionately fond of alcohol, orgies, and sensual pleasures, which alone rouse them to activity.
Orgies. Those who have observed children absorbed all day long by a game that pleases them, can understand the meaning of these words, spoken by a woman: "Criminals are grown-up children." The love of habitual debauch is so intense that, as soon as thieves have made some great haul or escaped from prison, they return to their haunts to carouse and make merry, in spite of the evident danger of falling once more into the hands of the police. ”

“ A quarrel that after a short time, with a little reflection, would be forgotten by sober minds, is renewed and revived with fresh exasperation in the mind at a moment of intoxication, and a thirst created for the most disproportionate and dreadful revenge. At such a moment, too, the jealous mind, without any real ground of jealousy, converts remote suspicion into certain conviction, and so on through the whole range of the human passions. ”

“ The criminality of many an act must be thrown back on a previous act, out of which it has arisen. A drunkard in a midnight debauch quarrels with his father, and plunges a knife into his heart. When he comes to himself he is absolutely unconscious of what he has done. ”

“ Shut away from the dear ones, the loved ones on earth,
I suffer the tortures that no man can tell
Till he's taken away from fireside and hearth
And sees the sad visions of a dungeon cell—
Then he feels that vile man can create a real hell. ”

“ A few minutes later, and the miserable crowd of depraved human beings had been absorbed again into cellar and garret, hovel and rookery, to take up the thread of their evil and sensual lives, and to plot wickedness, and to prey upon and deprave each other—to dwell as to their inner and real lives among infernals, to be in hell as to their spirits, while their bodies yet remained upon the earth. ”

“ In prison, whatever may be the depravity, it is kept under some restraint by reason and by fear of consequences; but here there are patients with passions depraved to the utmost, upon whom neither reason, nor shame, nor fear impose any restraint. ”

“ The craving for excitement, for intoxication, for uproar, finds its chief satisfaction in the love of orgy, which is now almost confined, at all events in its extreme forms, to the criminal and his intimate ally, the prostitute. The orgy is the criminal’s most sacred festival ”

“ What crime hast thou committed to make thee take the scourge in thy hands, and, besides thy strict and constant fasting, so unmercifully chastise thyself, weak and sickly as thou art, that thou walkest about like a living corpse or a skeleton? ”

“ By the skirmish behind, the woman without a nose, the scattered cards upon the floor, &c. we are shown that drunkenness and riot, disease, prostitution, and ruin are the dreadful attendants of sloth, and the general fore-runners of crimes of the deepest die; and by the halter suspended from the ceiling, over the head of the sleeper, we are to learn two things—the indifference of mankind, even in a state of danger, and the insecurity of guilt in every situation. ”

“ Not with the amiable jollity of the youthful tippler, nor with the heavy, fatuous oblivion of the sot, but with the drunkenness that marks the vicious rebellion of the nerve-cell against the prolonged excitation of an intoxicant—the dreadful revenge wherein the outraged brain summons the distorted imagination to fill the victim's landscape with uncouth and demoniacal visitants. ”