The Northwest Passage

He was speaking again of its smallest version, where the desire to take over the world was first the desire to be in the world, a desire driven by the conviction that one cannot truly be in the world until the alienation of each from all has been vanquished, until necessity has been banished, until the world has been changed. Trocchi was talking again about the derive - there, he said, for as long as it lasted, you were in the world as if you were changing it, and there were intimations of utopia everywhere you looked. "The difficulties of the derive are those of freedom," Debord wrote in 1956 in "Theory of the Derive." "It all rests on the belief that the future will precipitate an irreversible change in the behaviour and the decor of present-day society. One day, we will construct cities for drifting ... but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist." Even if he had been used, that was what Trocchi remembered most sweetly, so he talked about getting drunk, chasing oblivion into the black hole, the way out, the Northwest Passage.

From an interview with Alexander Trocchi in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1989).