P.E. > Books: drugs‎ (24)

'A mi padre, que me mostró el camino que no hay que recorrer.'

'Sad understanding is what compassion means–I resign from the attempt to be happy. It's all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you'd only stare into space and in that space though you'd see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory furs [...] you'd still be staring into space for form is emptiness and emptiness is form'

'Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make living something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobile day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere.'


'One look at the officials in the American Consulate where we went for dreary paper routines was enough to make you realize what was wrong with American “diplomacy” throughout the Fellaheen world:—stiff officious squares with contempt even for their own Americans who happened not to wear neckties, as tho a necktie or whatever it stands for meant anything to the hungry Berbers who came into Tangiers every Saturday morning on meek asses, like Christ, carrying baskets of pitiful fruit or dates, and returned at dusk in silhouetted parades along the hill by the railroad track. The railroad track where barefooted prophets still walked and taught the Koran to children along the way. Why didnt the American consul ever walk into the urchin hall where Mohammed Mayé sat smoking? or squat in behind empty buildings with old Arabs who talked with their hands? or any thing? Instead it’s all private limousines, hotel restaurants, parties in the suburbs, an endless phoney rejection in the name of “democracy” of all that’s pith and moment of every land.'


'At night at my desk in the shack I see the reflection of myself in the black window, a rugged faced man in a dirty ragged shirt, need-a-shave, frowny, lipped, eyed, haired, nosed, eared, handed, necked, adamsappled, eyebrowed, a reflection just with all behind it the void of 7000000000000 light years of infinite darkness riddled by arbitrary limited-idea light, and yet there's a twinkle in my eye and I sing bawdy songs about the moon in the alleys of Dublin, about vodka hoy hoy, and then said Mexico sundown-over-rocks songs about amor, corazón, and tequila - My desk is littered with papers, beautiful to look at thru half closed eyes the delicate milky litter of papers piled, like some old dream of a picture of papers, like papers piled on a desk in a cartoon, like a realistic scene from an old Russian film, and the oil lamp shadowing some in half - And looking at my face closer in the tin mirror, I see the blue eyes and sun red face and red lips and weekly beard and think: 'Courage it takes to live and face all this iron impasse of die-you-dool? Nah, when all is said and done it doesn't matter.' '

'It was a little sad. Bull would be too tired to go out so Irwin and Simon would call up to me from the garden just like little kids calling at your childhood window, “Jack-Kee!” which would bring tears to my eyes almost and force me to go down and join them. “Why are you so withdrawn all of a sudden!” cried Simon. I couldnt explain it without telling them they bored me as well as everything else, a strange thing to have to say to people you’ve spent years with, all the lacrimae rerum of sweet association across the hopeless world dark, so dont say anything.'


'My money came and it was time to go but there’s poor Irwin at midnight calling up to me from the garden “Come on down Jack-Kee, there’s a big bunch of hipsters and chicks from Paris in Bull’s room.” And just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they are all hunching around in marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag after all and at the time (1957) not even started yet officially with the name of “Beat Generation.” To think that I had so much to do with it, too, in fact at that very moment the manuscript of Road was being linotyped for imminent publication and I was already sick of the whole subject. Nothing can be more dreary than “coolness” (not Irwin’s cool, or Bull’s or Simon’s, which is natural quietness) but postured, actually secretly rigid coolness that covers up the fact that the character is unable to convey anything of force or interest, a kind of sociological coolness soon to become a fad up into the mass of middleclass youth for awhile. There’s even a kind of insultingness, probably unintentional, like when I said to the Paris girl just fresh she said from visiting a Persian Shah for Tiger hunt “Did you actually shoot the tiger yourself?” she gave me a cold look as tho I’d just tried to kiss her at the window of a Drama School. Or tried to trip the Huntress. Or something. But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair like Lazarus listening to their awful “likes” and “like you know” and “wow crazy” and “a wig, man” “a real gas”—All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing! But Irwin paid no attention to all that and just wanted to know what they were thinking anyway.'


'And now, after the experience on top of the mountain where I was alone for two months without being questioned or looked at by any single human being I began a complete turnabout in my feelings about life—I now wanted a reproduction of that absolute peace in the world of society but secretly greedy too for some of the pleasures of society (such as shows, sex, comforts, fine foods & drink), no such things on a mountain—I knew now that my life was a search for peace as an artist, but not only as an artist—As a man of contemplations rather than too many actions, in the old Tao Chinese sense of “Do Nothing” (Wu Wei) which is a way of life in itself more beautiful than any, a kind of cloistral fervor in the midst of mad ranting action-seekers of this or any other “modern” world—'


'I'm 34, regular looking, but in my jeans and eerie outfits people are scared to look at me because I really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength and innate dog-sense to manage outside of an institution to feed myself and go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views about eccentricity every day. Walking thru towns in the middle of America I got stared at weirdly. I was bound to live my own way. The expression 'nonconformity' was something I'd vaguely heard about somewhere (Adler? Eric Fromm?). But I was determined to be glad! Dostoevsky said 'Give man his Utopia and he will deliberately destroy it with a grin' and I was determined with the same grin to disprove Dostoevsky!' '[...] since it’s impossible for everybody to be artists, to recommend my way of life as a philosophy suitable for everyone else—In this respect I’m an oddball, like Rembrandt—Rembrandt could paint the busy burghers as they posed after lunch, but at midnight while they slept to rest for another day’s work, Old Rembrandt was up in his study putting on light touches of darkness to his canvases—The burghers didnt expect Rembrandt to be anything else but an artist and therefore they didnt go knocking on his door at midnight and ask: “Why do you live like this, Rembrandt? Why are you alone tonight? What are you dreaming about?” So they didnt expect Rembrandt to turn around and say to them: “You must live like I do, in the philosophy of solitude, there’s no other way.”'


'And also dont think of me as a simple character—A lecher, a ship-jumper, a loafer, a conner of older women, even of queers, an idiot, nay a drunken baby Indian when drinking—Got socked everywhere and never socked back (except when young tough football player)—In fact, I dont even know what I was—Some kind of fevered being different as a snowflake. (Now talking like Simon, who comes up ahead.) In any case, a wondrous mess of contradictions (good enough, said Whitman) but more fit for Holy Russia of 19th Century than for this modern America of crew cuts and sullen faces in Pontiacs—'


'God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life—and to think that negative little paper shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that!… No remedy but in my mind I raise a fist to High Heaven promising that I shall bull whip the first bastard who makes fun of human hopelessness anyway—I know it’s ridiculous to pray to my father that hunk of dung in a grave yet I pray to him anyway, what else shall I do? sneer? shuffle paper on a desk and burp with rationality? Ah thank God for all the Rationalists the worms and vermin got. Thank God for all the hate mongering political pamphleteers with no left or right to yell about in the Grave of Space. I say that we shall all be reborn with The Only One, that we will not be ourselves any more but simply the Companion of The Only One, and that’s what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, dont deny her that, that’s her way of stating the fact. If there cant be love among men let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate so am I. Therefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate America between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the hematodes that hang parasitically from dreary southern trees, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath—Who are men, that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I’m talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking “What is there to laugh about in that?” “How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?” “Who makes fun of misery?” There’s my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads—Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness, forever?'


'A fine thing to say in this day and age! And especially with the wild life he was now leading that was going to end in tragedy in six months, as I’ll tell in a minute—A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street … When the highest ideals on earth are based on the month and the day of some cruel bloody revolution, nay when the highest ideals are simply new reasons for murdering and despoiling people—And Angels?'

'Raphael in the middle hearing nothing and seeing nothing but just looking straight ahead, like Buddha, and the driver of the Heavenly Vehicle (the full Oxcart Bullock White-as-Snow Number One Team) talking earnestly about numbers, waving with one hand, and the third person or angel listening with surprise.'


'“Random and Urso argue with me about my theory of absolute spontaneity. In the kitchen, Random takes out the Jack Daniel’s and says, “How can you get any refined or well-gestated thoughts into a spontaneous flow, as you call it? It can all end up in gibberish”. And that was no Harvard lie. But I said:
”If it’s gibberish, it’s gibberish. There’s a certain amount of control going on, like a man telling a story in a bar without interruptions or even one pause.”
– “Well, it’ll probably become a popular gimmick, but I prefer to look on my poetry as a craft.”
– “Craft is craft”
– “Yes, meaning?”
– “Meaning crafty. How can you confess your crafty soul in craft?'

'Here now I’m telling about the most important person in this whole story and the best. I’ve noticed how most of my fellow writers all seem to “hate” their mothers and make big Freudian or sociological philosophies around that, in fact using it as the straight theme of their fantasies, or at least saying as much—I often wonder if they’ve ever slept till four in the afternoon and woke up to see their mother darning their socks in a sad window light, or come back from revolutionary horrors of weekends to see her mending the rips in a bloody shirt with quiet eternal bowed head over needle—And not with martyred pose of resentment, either, but actually seriously bemused over mending, the mending of torture and folly and all loss, mending the very days of your life with almost glad purposeful gravity—And when it’s cold she puts on that shawl, and mends on, and on the stove potatoes are burbling forever.'