The aim [of The Third Mind, a collaborative effort of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin,] is to expand consciousness, to tap the coded messages beyond literary earshot, to retrace the secret of Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, to reach the silence beyond words in soundless, universal images and patterns "at the extreme limit of readability". Everything, from Dunne's Experiment with Time to Derrida's Las dissemination, is grist to this neo-romantic mill…. Like earlier romantics, Burroughs and Gysin also claim linguistics for their programme. For this is to be a collaborative deconstruction of the verbal prison-house, not by a sunburst of Blakean vision, but by a kind of science of Dadaism. Though "scientology" seems a more appropriate term….

Ah Pook Is Here follows close on the heels of The Third Mind, as a kind of companion volume which puts the doctrines into action. Yet it seems much the same mix...