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- ...drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -- That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bentback mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it -- The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so hagged and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing t connect with tears or anything (7-8)
- a creek having so many voices it's amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other singers and voices from the log dam, dibble dabble all night long and all day long (19)
- when you say AM ALONE and the cabin is suddenly home only because you made one meal and washed your firstmeal dishes (20)
- as daylight retreats the flies retreat like polite Emily Dickinson flies and when it's dark they're all asleep in trees or someplace (21)
- And so everything eventually marvelous (21)
- but what is death anyway in all this water and rock? (22)
- but who cant sleep like a log in a solitary cabin in the woods, you wake up in the late morning so refreshed and realizing the universe namelessly: the universe is an Angel -- but easy enough to say when you've had your escape from the gooky city turn into a success -- and it's finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for "cities" at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings'll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds -- so I tell myself "Be Wise." (22)
- and in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) "no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self imposed agony... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time... Yay, for this, more aloneness" -- "Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism -- sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood" (24)
- so even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant mental movies brought up at will and projected for further study -- and Pleasure -- as I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us (25)
- and here I am with a 60-foot redwood tree under my arm walking slowly pulling it along, they are amazed and scared, "Are we dreaming? can anybody be that strong?" they even ask me and my big Zen answer is "You only think I'm strong" and I go on down the road carrying my tree -- this has me laughing in clover fields for hours (27)
- I see as much as doors'll allow, open or shut (27)
- because on the fourth day I began to get bored and noted it in my diary with amazement, "Already bored?" -- even tho the handsome words of Emerson would shake me out of that where he says (in one of those little redleather books, in his essay on "Self Reliance" a man "is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best") (applicable both to building simple silly little millraces and writing bit stupid stories like this) -- words from that trumpet of the morning in America, Emerson, he who announced Whitman and also said "Infancy conforms to nobody" -- the infancy of the simplicity of just being happy in the woods, conforming to nobody's idea about what to do, what should be done -- "Life is not an apology" -- (30)
- the way waves sound especially at night -- the sea not speaking in sentences so much as in short lines (32)
- ...writing down these fantastic inanities actually but yet I felt I had to do it because James Joyce wasnt about to do it now he was dead (32)
- the huge black rocks seem to move -- the bleak awful roaring isolateness, no ordinary man could do it I'm telling you (32-33)
- "Blessed is the man can make his own bread" (33)
- and other belongings so valuable compared to the worthlessness of expensive things I'd bought and never used -- like my black soft sleeping sweater also five years which I was now wearing in the damp Sur summer night and day, over a flannel shirt in the cold, and just the sweater for the night's sleep in the bag -- endless use and virtue of it! -- ... and losing myself in this like a kid playing, it's the little things that count (cliches are truisms and all truisms are true) -- on my deathbed I could be remembering that creek day and forgetting the day MGM bought my book, I could be remembering the old lost green dump T-shirt and forgetting the sapphired robes -- Mebbe the best way to get into Heaven (33-34)
- Summer afternoon--- / Impatiently chewing / The Jasmine leaf (34)
- and as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words (35)
- the world being just what it is, moving and passing through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to complain about (35)
- everything is the same, the fog says "We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera," and the leaves say "We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall" -- even the paper bags in my garbage pit say "We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season" -- the tree stumps say "We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth" -- Men say "We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same" -- while the sand says "We are sand, we already know," and the sea says "We are always come and go, fall and plosh" -- the empty blue sky of space says "All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me" (36)
- the blue sky adds "Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise" (36)
- can you imagine a man with marvelous insights like these can go mad within a month? (36)
- but I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of "Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do" (36)
- but there's moonlit fognight, the blossoms of the fire flames in the stove... (37)
- there's the raccoon in his fog, there the man to his fireside, and both are lonesome for God (37)
- there's in the mid of sleep the moon appearing (39)
- saw, or heard, the words "Roses of the Unborn" as I sat crosslegged in soft meadow sand, heard that awful stillness at the heart of life, but felt strangely low (40-41)
- it comes over me in the form of horror of an eternal condition of sick mortality in me -- in me and everyone -- I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices like thoughts about life or meditations under trees and the "ultimate" and all that shit, in fact the other pitiful devices of making supper or saying "What do I do now next? chop wood?" -- I see myself as just doomed, pitiful -- an awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else -- All all of it, pitiful as it is, not even really any kind of commonsense animate effort to ease the soul in this horrible sinister condition (of mortal hopelessness) so I'm left sitting there in the sand after having almost fainted and stare at the waves which suddenly are not waves at all, with I guess what must have been the goopiest downtrodden expression of God if He exists must've ever seen in His movie career (41)
aug 10 2013 ∞
jan 5 2024 +
jan 5 2024 +