Nails drifts off, disappears among the stone markers. A scow trolling the Hudson River. If the subject of art is art, then the subject of writing is writing. Yet you can never say that Trocchi's writing is beside the point like, say, a student practicing syntax rather than story. His syntax is heroin, his story is Trocchi.
Fiction is pornography, journalism is truth.
Thus Trocchi becomes not only a symptom of disintegration but also of the transition from a society of readers to a society of writers. In Burroughs, sex is murder. In Trocchi, sex is poetry, is dream. The voyeurism engages the self. Indeed, as is commonly the case with addicts, the addiction starts with sex, then sex is replaced with drugs.