there's a great proto-burroughsian posthuman moment in Hippos when Phillip (the plausibly deniable DL manic pixie twink, the object of desire for basically everyone in the story) gives this whole spiel:
"he had a third martini. he looked at me intensely and took a hold of my arm. 'Look,' he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. it's drying up. you have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, that everything is going to be alright.'"
this is post-Mexico Burroughs word for word written out in plain english in 1944. like someone reached back through time and put it there just to fuck with me. it just demonstrates the shocking extent to which Phillip (Lucien) is a ghost haunting these guys., like for their entire lives. he started it! and yet we never hear from him. he is not directly mentioned, rarely even photographed, but still he is the gory, difficult to look at, emotionally painful pith of this whole organism.
