“The way OUT is the way IN”

“The way OUT is the way IN” is a paradoxical expression that collapses the distinction between escape and entry. It appears in a closing meditation where bodily transformation, revelation, and the book’s unruly movement across images and sounds converge; the phrase gives that movement its starkest formulation.

Wording and Meaning

The expression turns on the reversal of two directional terms: OUT does not lead away from experience but becomes the route IN. Its symmetry makes the claim sound almost like a rule, while its paradox unsettles any simple distinction between departure and arrival. The accompanying imperative to transmute the body presents this reversal not merely as an idea but as an embodied passage.

Context in the Closing Passage

The phrase follows a declaration that revelation is received through an old crystal set without FM, and a provocative account of perceiving God through the body in the “Hash bulb of orgasm.” The passage then makes the way OUT the way IN. In this sequence, entry and exit are placed alongside bodily orifices and altered perception, so the maxim carries both a physical charge and a claim about access to revelation.

Relation to the Book’s Form

Immediately before this passage, the text describes the Word as divided into units that are complete yet may be taken in any order, tied backward and forward, “in and out fore and aft.” It characterizes the book as spilling in all directions through a kaleidoscope of vistas, tunes, street noises, pain, commerce, and other abrupt images. Against that account of discontinuous reading, the expression supplies a compact formal analogue: movement through the work need not follow a single route, because the apparent way out can also be an entrance.

The Word as an Active Force

The surrounding passage does not treat the Word as a safely contained message. It says that the Word will leap upon the reader with iron claws, cut off fingers and toes, hang the reader, and coil around the thighs to inject rancid ectoplasm. The maxim therefore sits within a vision of reading as exposure and bodily alteration, not detached interpretation. Its importance lies in making passage itself unstable: to enter the text is also to undergo its force, while the promise of an exit offers no clean separation from what has been entered.