Queer, Burroughs, and the Hidden Language of Plants
In Queer, William S. Burroughs imagined a world where telepathy was not a fantasy but a fact. Words were no longer needed. Minds could touch. Truth could be transmitted without distortion. It was radical, unsettling, and strangely familiar because somewhere deep down, we know that kind of connection exists.
Last night, under the new moon, I gave myself over to a different kind of connection. I used the darkness as a chance to release what no longer serves me. I set fire to old photographs, to letters written by lovers I no longer carry in my heart. One in particular who I once traveled with, who I shared a connection with so psychedelic and unexplainable that it felt like stepping into another frequency.
When the flames were done and the room was still, I lit one of my cigarettes and put on a film without even thinking about what it was. Queer. I didn’t know what it was about beforehand, yet it unfolded exactly on the wavelength I had been sitting in. A story of connection beyond what most know anymore. A reminder of a depth that cannot be reached through convenience or distraction, only through surrender. Only through traveling with the intelligence of nature’s plants.
Burroughs’ fascination with telepathy was not random. It ran parallel to his later obsession with yagé, the Amazonian brew now known as ayahuasca. He believed this vine carried a frequency of its own, one that could tune human beings to what has always been here.
Sacred plants carry these frequencies everywhere. They remind us that consciousness is not confined to the mind, that true communication cannot be reduced to words. Indigenous cultures have always known this. They sing to the spirits of tobacco, cacao, ayahuasca, peyote. They listen to messages in visions, in dreams, in silence.
Have you ever felt that? A knowing beyond language, a presence in the stillness, an understanding that you are part of a greater living network?
Burroughs’ Queer reads differently with this lens. Telepathy is not about human to human communication alone. It is about breaking out of isolation. It is about remembering that we are connected to each other, to the earth, to the unseen forces that hold life together.
Today, as we drift in a world full of noise and yet empty of meaning, these plant teachers feel more essential than ever. They offer what modern life cannot: true connection. Not over WiFi. Over life itself.
The plants are still speaking. The question is whether we will learn to listen.