Big Sur, Unmistakably Autobiographical, Big Sur, Jack Kerouac's Ninth
Novel, Was Written As The "king Of The Beats" Was Ap-, Proaching Middle-age
And Re flects His Struggle To Come To Terms With His Own Myth. The
Magnificent And Moving Story. Of jack duluoz, a man blessed by great talent
and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction, big sur is at once ker
Unmistakably autobiographical, Big Sur, Jack Kerouac's ninth novel, was
written as the "King of the beats" was approaching middle-age and reflects
his struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The magnificent and moving
story. Of jack duluoz, a man blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge
towards self-destruction, big sur is at once kerouac's toughest and his most
humane work. JACK KEROUAC was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the
youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family. In high school he
was a star player on the local football team, and went on to win football
scholarships to Horace Mann (a New York prep school) and Columbia College.
He left Columbia and football in his sophomore year, joined the Merchant
Marines and began the restless wanderings that were to continue for the
greater part of his life. His first novel, The Town and the City, was
published in 1950. On the Road, although written in 1951 (in a few hectic
days on a scroll of newsprint), was not published until 1957 -- it made him
one of the most controversial and bestknown writers of his time. Publication
of his many other books, among them The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax and
Desolation Angels, followed.
Jack Kerouac died in 1969, in St Petersburg, Florida, at the age of
forty-seven.
My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my
remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.
Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use
the same personae names in each work. On the Road, The Subterraneans, The
Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, Desolation Angels,
Visions of Cody and the others including this book Big Sur are just chapters
in the whole work which I call The Duluoz Legend. In my old age I intend to
collect all my work and re-insert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the
long shelf full of books there, and die happy. The whole thing forms one
enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known
as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle
sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye. JACK KEROUAC
1
The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen" on the bells in the
skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another
drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my "secret return"
to San Francisco by getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums
and then marching forth into North Beach to see everybody altho Lorenz
Monsanto and I'd exchanged huge letters outlining how I would sneak in
quietly, call him on the phone using a code name like Adam Yulch or Lalagy
Pulvertaft (also writers) and then he would secretly drive me to his cabin
in the Big Sur woods where I would be alone and undisturbed for six weeks
just chopping wood, drawing water, writing, sleeping, hiking, etc., etc. --
But instead I've bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop at the height
of Saturday night business, everyone recognized me (even tho" I was wearing
my disguise-like fisherman's hat and fishermen coat and pants waterproof)
and "t'all ends up a roaring drunk in all the famous bars the bloody "King
of the Beatniks" is back in town buying drinks for everyone -- Two days of
that, including Sunday the day Lorenzo is supposed to pick me up at my
"secret" skid row hotel (the Mars on 4th and Howard) but when he calls for
me there's no answer, he has the clerk open the door and what does he see
but me out on the floor among bottles, Ben Fagan stretched out partly
beneath the bed, and Robert Browning the beatnik painter out on the bed,
snoring... So says to himself "I'll pick him up next weekend, I guess he
wants to drink for a week in the city (like he always does, I guess)" so off
he drives to his Big Sur cabin without me thinking he's doing the right
thing but my God when I wake up, and Ben and Browning are gone, they've
somehow dumped me on the bed, and I hear "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen"
being bellroped so sad in the fog winds out there that blow across the
rooftops of eerie old hangover Frisco, wow, I've hit the end of the trail
and cant even drag my body any more even to a refuge in the woods let alone
stay upright in the city a minute -- It's the first trip I've taken away
from home (my mother's house) since the publication of "Road" the book that
"made me famous" and in fact so much so I've been driven mad for three years
by endless telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters,
snoopers (a big voice saying in my basemerit window as I prepare to write a
story: ARE YOU BUSY? ) or the time the reporter ran upstairs to my bedroom
as I sat there in my pajamas trying to write down a dream -- Teenagers
jumping the six-foot fence I'd had built around my yard for privacy --
Parties with bottles yelling at my study window "Come on out and get drunk,
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! "... A woman coming to my door
and saying "I'm not going to ask you if you're Jack Duluoz because I know he
wears a beard, can you tell me where I can find him, I want a real beatnik
at my annual Shindig party" -- Drunken visitors puking in my study, stealing
books and even pencils... Uninvited acquaintances staying for days because
of the clean beds and good food my mother provided... Me drunk practically
all the time to put on a jovial cap to keep up with all this but finally
realizing I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude
again or die -- So Lorenzo Monsanto wrote and said "Come to my cabin, no
one'll know, " etc., so I had sneaked into San Francisco as I say, coming
3000 miles from my home in Long Island (Northport) in a pleasant roomette on
the California Zephyr train watching America roll by outside my private
picture window, really happy for the first time in three years, staying in
the roomette all three days and three nights with my instant coffee and
sandwiches -- Up the Hudson Valley and over across New York State to Chicago
and then the Plains, the mountains, the desert, the final mountains of
California, all so easy and dreamlike compared to my old harsh hitch hikings
before I made enough money to take transcontinental trains (all over America
high school and college kids thinking "Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on
the road all the time hitch hiking" while there I am almost 40 years old,
bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat) -- But in
any case a wonderful start towards my retreat so generously offered by sweet
old Monsanto and instead of going thru smooth and easy I wake up drunk,
sick, disgusted, frightened, in fact terrified by that sad song across the
roofs mingling with the lachrymose cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the
corner below "Satan is the cause of your alcoholism, Satan is the cause of
your immorality, Satan is everywhere workin to destroy you unless you repent
now" and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in rooms next
to mine, the creak of hall steps, the moans everywhere Including the moan
that had awakened me, my own moan in the lumpy bed, a moan caused by a big
roaring Whoo Whoo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost.
2
And I look around the dismal cell, there's my hopeful rucksack all
neatly packed with everything necessary to live in the woods, even unto the
minutest first aid kit and diet details and even a neat little sewing kit
cleverly reinforced by my good mother (like extra safety pins, buttons,
special sewing needles, little aluminum scissors)... The hopeful medal of St
Christopher even which she'd sewn on the flap... The survival kit all in
there down to the last little survival sweater and handkerchief and tennis
sneakers (for hiking) -- But the rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of
bottles all empty, empty poor boys of white port, butts, junk, horror...
"One fast move or I'm gone, " I realize, gone the way of the last three
years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and
metaphysical hopelessness you cant 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 bent back 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 haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for
a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and
therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it's like William
Seward Burroughs" "Stranger" suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror
-- Enough! "One fast move or I'm gone" so I jump up, do my headstand first
to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new
T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run
out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street and walk fast to
the nearest little grocery store to buy two days of food, stick it in the
rucksack, hike thru lost alleys of Russian sorrow where bums sit head on
knees in foggy doorways in the goopy eerie city night I've got to escape or
die, and into the bus station In a half hour into a bus seat, the bus says
"Monterey" and off we go down the clean neon hiway and I sleep all the way,
waking up amazed and well again smelling sea air the bus driver shaking me
"End of the line, Monterey. " -- And by God it is Monterey, I stand sleepy
in the 2 A. M. seeing vague little fishing masts across the street from the
bus driveway. Now all I've got to do to complete my escape is get 14 miles
down the coast to the Raton Canyon bridge and hike in.
3
"One fast move or I'm gone" so I blow $8 on a cab to drive me down that
coast, it's foggy night tho sometimes you can see stars in the sky to the
right where the sea is, tho you cant see the sea you can only hear about it
from the cabdriver -- "What kinda country is it around here? I've never seen
it. " 'Well, you cant see it tonight -- Raton Canyon you say, you better be
careful walkin around there in the dark. " 'Why? "
"Well, just use your lamp like you say... "
And sure enough when he lets me off at the Raton Canyon bridge and
counts the money I sense something wrong somehow, there's an awful roar of
surf but it isnt coming from the right place, like you'd expect it to come
from "over there" but it's coming from "under there" -- I can see the bridge
but I can see nothing below it -- The bridge continues the coast highway
from one bluff to another, it's a nice white bridge with white rails and
there's a white line runnin down the middle familiar and highway like but
something's wrong -- Besides the headlights of the cab just shoot out over a
few bushes into empty space in the direction where the canyon's supposed to
be, it feels like being up in the air somewhere tho I can see the dirt road
at our feet and the dirt overhang on the side
"What in the hell is this? " -- I've got the directions all memorized
from a little map Monsanto's mailed me but in my imagination dreaming about
this big retreat back home there'd been something larkish, bucolic, all
homely woods and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the
dark -- When the cab leaves I therefore turn on my railroad lantern for a
timid peek but its beam gets lost just like the car lights in a void and in
fact the battery is fairly weak and I can hardly see the bluff at my left --
As for the bridge I cant see it anymore except for graduating series of
luminous shoulder buttons going off further into the low sea roar... The sea
roar is bad enough except it keeps bashing and barking at me like a dog in
the fog down there, sometimes it booms the earth but my God where is the
earth and how can the sea be underground! -- "The only thing to do, " I
gulp, "is to put this lantern shinin right in front of your feet, kiddo, and
follow that lantern and make sure it's shinin on the road rut and hope and
pray it's shinin on the ground that's gonna be there when it's shinin, " in
other words I actually fear that even my lamp will carry me astray if I dare
to raise it for a minute from the ruts in the dirt road -- The only
satisfaction I can glean from this roaring high horror of darkness is that
the lamp wobbles huge dark shadows of its little rim stays on the
overhanging bluff at the left of the road, because to the right (where the
bushes are wiggling in the wind from the sea) there aint no shadows because
there aint no light can take hold -- So I start my trudge, pack aback, just
head down following my lamp spot, head down but eyes suspiciously peering a
little up, like a man in the presence of a dangerous idiot he doesn't want
to annoy The dirt road starts up a little, curves to the right, starts down
a little, then suddenly up again, and up By now the sea roar is further back
and at one point I even stop and look back to see nothing -- "I'm gonna put
out my light and see what I can see" I stay rooted to my feet where they're
rooted to that road Fat lotta good, when I put out the light I see nothing
but the dim sand at my feet. Trudging up and getting further away from the
sea roar I get to feel more confident but suddenly I come to a frightening
thing in the road, I stop and hold out my hand, edge forward, it's only a
cattle crossing (iron bars imbedded across the road) but at the same time a
big blast of wind comes from the left where the bluff should be and I spot
that way and see nothing. "What the hell's going on! " "Fol-low the road, "
says the other voice trying to be calm so I do but the next instant I hear a
rattling to my right, throw my light there, see nothing but bushes wiggling
dry and mean and just the proper high canyonwall kind of bushes fit for
rattlesnakes too -- (which it was, a rattlesnake doesnt like to be awakened
in the middle of the night by a trudging humpback monster with a lamp). But
now the road's going down again, the reassuring bluff reappears on my left,
and pretty soon according to my memory of Lorry's map there she is, the
creek, I can hear her lappling and gabbing down there at the bottom of the
dark where at least I'll be on level ground and done with booming airs
somewhere above -- But the closer I get to the creek as the road dips
steeply, suddenly, almost making me trot forward, the louder it roars, I
begin to think I'll fall right into it before I can notice it... It's
screaming like a raging flooded river right below me -- Besides it's even
darker down there than anywhere! There are glades down there, ferns of
horror and slippery logs, mosses, dangerous plashings, humid mists rise
coldly like the breath of death, big dangerous trees are beginning to bend
over my head and brush my pack -- There's a noise I know can only grow
louder as I sink down and for fear how loud it can grow I stop and listen,
it rises up crashing mysteriously at me from a raging battle among dark
things, wood or rock or something cracked, all smashed, all wet black sunken
earth danger -- I'm afraid to go down there -- I am affrayed in the old
Edmund Spenser sense of being frayed by a whip, and a wet one at that -- A
slimy green dragon racket in the bush -- An angry war that doesnt want me
pokin around -- It's been there a million years and it doesnt want me
clashing darkness with it -- It comes snarling from a thousand crevasses and
monster redwood roots all over the map of creation -- It is a dark clangoror
in the rain forest and doesnt want no skid row bum to carry to the sea which
is bad enough and waitin back there -- I can almost feel the sea pulling at
that racket in the trees but there's my spotlamp so all I gotta do is follow
the lovely sand road which dips and dips in rising carnage and suddenly a
flattening, a sight of bridge logs, there's the bridge rail, there's the
creek just four feet below, cross the bridge you woken bum and see what's on
the other shore. Take one quick peek at the water as you cross, just water
over rocks, a small creek at that.
And now before me is a dreamy meadowland with a good old corral gate
and a barbed wire fence the road running right on left but this where I get
off at last. Then I crawl thru the barbed wire and find myself trudging a
sweet little sand road winding right thru fragrant dry heathers as tho I'd
just popped thru from hell into familiar old Heaven on Earth, yair and Thank
God (tho a minute later my heart's in my mouth again because I see black
things in the white sand ahead but it's only piles of good old mule dung in
Heaven).
4
And in the morning (after sleeping by the creek in the white sand) I do
see what was so scary about my canyon road walk -- The road's up there on
the wall a thousand feet with a sheer drop sometimes, especially at the
cattle crossing, way up highest, where a break in the bluff shows fog
pouring through from another bend of the sea beyond, scary enough in itself
anyway as tho one hole wasnt enough to open into the sea... And worst of all
is the bridge! I go ambling seaward along the path by the creek and see this
awful thin white line of bridge a thousand unbridgeable sighs of height
above the little woods I'm walking in, you just cant believe it, and to make
things heart-thumpingly horrible you come to a little bend in what is now
just a trail and there's the booming surf coming at you whitecapped crashing
down on sand as tho it was higher than where you stand, like a sudden tidal
wave world enough to make you step back or run back to the hills -- And not
only that, the blue sea behind the crashing high waves is full of huge black
rocks rising like old ogresome castles dripping wet slime, a billion years
of woe right there, the moogrus big clunk of it right there with its
slaverous lips of foam at the base -- So that you emerge from pleasant
little wood paths with a stem of grass in your teeth and drop it to see
doom... And you look up at that unbelievably high bridge and feel death and
for a good reason: because underneath the bridge, in the sand right beside
the sea cliff, hump, your heart sinks to see it: the automobile that crashed
thru the bridge rail a decade ago and fell 1000 feet straight down and
landed upside-down, is still there now, an upside-down chassis of rust in a
strewn skitter of sea-eaten tires, old spokes, old car seats sprung with
straw, one sad fuel pump and no more people...
Big elbows of Rock rising everywhere, sea caves within them, seas
plollocking all around inside them crashing out foams, the boom and pound on
the sand, the sand dipping quick (no Malibu Beach here) -- Yet you turn and
see the pleasant woods winding upcreek like a picture in Vermont -- But you
look up into the sky, bend way back, my God you're standing directly under
the aerial bridge with its thin white line running from rock to rock and
witless cars racing across it like dreams! From rock to rock! All the way
down the raging coast! So that when later I heard people say "Oh Big Sur
must be beautiful! " I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being
beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock
Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny
day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.
5
It was even frightening at the other peaceful end of Raton Canyon, the
east end, where Alf the pet mule of local settlers slept at night such
sleepfull sleeps under a few weird trees and then got up in the morning to
graze in the grass then negotiated the whole distance slowly to the sea
shore where you saw him standing by the waves like an ancient sacred myth
character motionless in the sand -- Alf the Sacred Burro" I later called him
-- The thing that was frightening was the mountain that rose up at the east
end, a strange Burmese like mountain with levels and moody terraces and a
strange ricepaddy hat on top that I kept staring at with a sinking heart
even at first when I was healthy and feeling good (and I would be going mad
in this canyon in six weeks on the fullmoon night of 3 September) -- The
mountain reminded me of my recent recurrent nightmares in New York about the
"Mountain of Mien Mo" with the swarms of moony flying horses lyrically
sweeping capes over their shoulders as they circled the peak a "thousand
miles high" (in the dream it said) and on top of the mountain in one haunted
nightmare I'd seen the giant empty stone benches so silent in the topworld
moonlight as tho once inhabited by Gods or giants of some kind but long ago
vacated so that they were all dusty and cobwebby now and the evil lurked
somewhere inside the pyramid nearby where there was a monster with a big
thumping heart but also, even more sinister, just ordinary seedy but muddy
janitors cooking over small woodfires... Narrow dusty holes through which
I'd tried to crawl with a bunch of tomato plants tied around my neck --
Dreams -- Drinking nightmares -- A recurrent series of them all swirling
around that mountain, seen the very first time as a beautiful but somehow
horribly green verdant mist enshrouded jungle peak rising out of green
tropical country in 'Mexico" so called but beyond which were pyramids, dry
rivers, other countries full of infantry enemy and yet the biggest danger
being just hoodlums out throwing rocks on Sundays -- So that the sight of
that simple sad mountain, together with the bridge and that car that had
flipped over twice or so and landed flump in the sand with no more sign of
human elbows or shred neckties (like a terrifying poem about America you
could write), agh, HOO HOO of Owls living in old evil hollow trees in that
misty tangled further part of the canyon where I was always afraid to go
anyhow -- That unclimbably tangled steep cliff at the base of Mien Mo rising
to gawky dead trees among bushes so dense and up to heathers God knows how
deep with hidden caves no one not even I spose the Indians of the roth
century had ever explored -- And those big gooky rainforest ferns among
lightningstruck conifers right beside sudden black vine cliff faces rising
right at your side as you walk the peaceful path... And as I say that ocean
coming at you higher than you are like the harbors of old woodcuts always
higher than the towns (as Rimbaud pointed out shuddering) -- So many evil
combinations even unto the bat who would come at me later while I slept on
the outdoor cot on the porch of Lorenzo's cabin, come circle my head coming
real low sometimes filling me with the traditional fear it'll get tangled in
my hair, and such silent wings, how would you like to wake up in the middle
of the night and see silent wings beating over you and you ask yourself "Do
I really believe in Vampires? "... In fact, flying silently around my
lamplit cabin at 3 o'clock in the morning as I'm reading (of all things)
(shudder) Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde -- Small wonder maybe that I myself
turned from serene Jekyll to hysterical Hyde in the short space of six
weeks, losing absolute control of the peace mechanisms of my mind for the
first time in my life.
But Ah, at first there were fine days and nights, right after Monsanto
drove me to Monterey and back with two boxes of a full grub list and left me
there alone for three weeks of solitude, as we'd agreed -- So fearless and
happy I even spotted his powerful flashlight up at the bridge the first
night, right thru the fog the eerie finger reaching the pale bottom of that
high monstrosity, and even spotted it out over the farmless sea as I sat by
caves in the crashing dark in my fisherman's outfit writing down what the
sea was saying -- Worst of all spotting it up at those tangled mad
cliffsides 'where owls hooted ooraloo -- becoming acquainted and swallowing
fears and settling down to life in the little cabin with its warm glow of
woodstove and kerosene lamp and let the ghosts fly their asses off... The
Bhikku's home in his woods, he only wants peace, peace he will get -- Tho
why after three weeks of perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange
woods my soul so went down the drain when I came back with Dave Wain and
Romana and my girl Billie and her kid, I'll never know -- Worth the telling
only if I dig deep into everything.
Because it was so beautiful at first, even the circumstance of my
sleeping bag suddenly erupting feathers in the middle of the night as I
turned over to sleep on, so I curse and have to get up and sew it by
lamplight or in the morning it might be empty of feathers... And as I bend
poor mother head over my needle and thread in the cabin, by the fresh fire
and in the light of the kerosene lamp, here come those damned silent black
wings flapping and throwing shadows all over my little home, the bloody
bat's come in my house -- Trying to sew a poor patch on my old crumbly
sleepingbag (mostly ruined by my having to sweat out a fever inside of it in
a hotel room in Mexico City in 1957 right after the gigantic earthquake
there), the nylon all rotten almost from all that old sweat, but still soft,
tho so soft I had to cut out a piece of old shirt flap and patch over the
rip -- I remember looking up from my middle of the night chore and saying
bleakly "They, yes, have bats in Mien Mo valley'... But the fire crackles,
the patch gets sewn, the creek gurgles and thumps outside -- 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 the voices of the creek amusing me so much at first but in the
later horror of that madness night becoming the babble and rave of evil
angels in my head -- So not minding the bat or the rip finally, ending up
cant sleep because too awake now and it's 3 A. M. so the fire I stoke and I
settle down and read the entire Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde novel in the
wonderful little handsized leather book left there by smart Monsanto who
also must've read it with wide eyes on a night like that -- Ending the last
elegant sentences at dawn, time to get up and fetch water from gurgly creek
and start breakfast of pancakes and syrup And saying to myself "So why fret
when something goes wrong like your sleepingbag breaking in the night, use
self reliance'... "Screw the bats" I add. Marvelous opening moment in fact
of the first afternoon I'm left alone in the cabin and I make my first meal,
wash my first dishes, nap, and wake up to hear the rapturous ring of silence
or Heaven even within and throughout the gurgle of the creek -- When you say
AM ALONE and the cabin is suddenly home only because you made one meal and
washed your firstmeal dishes -- Then nightfall, the religious vestal
lighting of the beautiful kerosene lamp after careful washing of the mantle
in the creek and carefuldrying with toilet paper, which spoils it by
specking it so you again wash it in the creek this time just let the mantle
drip dry in the sun, the late afternoon sun that disappears so quickly
behind those giant high steep canyon walls... Nightfall, the kerosene lamp
casts a glow in the cabin, I go out and pick some ferns like the ferns of
the Lankavatara Scripture, those hairnet ferns, "Look sirs, a beautiful
hairnet! " -- Late afternoon fog pours in over the canyon walls, sweep,
cover the sun, it gets cold, even the flies on the porch are as so sad as
the fog on the peaks -- As daylight retreats the flies retreat like polite
Emily Dickinson flies and when it's dark they're all asleep in trees or
someplace -- At high noon they're in the cabin with you but edging further
towards the open doorsill as the afternoon lengthens, how. "strangely
gracious -- There's the hum of the bee drone two blocks away the racket of
it you'd think it was right over the roof, when the bee drone swirls nearer
and nearer (gulp again) you retreat into the cabin and wait, maybe they got
a message to come and see you all two thousand of em -- But getting used to
the bee drone finally which seems to happen like a big party once a week...
And so everything eventually marvelous.
Even the first frightening night on the beach in the fog with my
notebook and pencil, sitting there crosslegged in the sand facing all the
Pacific fury flashing on rocks that rise like gloomy sea shroud towers out
of the cove, the bingbang cove with its seas booming inside caves and
slapping out, the cities of seaweed floating up and down you can even see
their dark leer in the phosphorescent seabeach nightlight... That first
night I sit there and all I know, as I look up, is the kitchen light is on,
on the cliff, to the right, where somebody's just built a cabin overlooking
all the horrible Sur, somebody up there's having a mild and tender supper
that's all I know... The lights from the cabin kitchen up there go out like
a little weak lighthouse beacon and ends suspended a thousand feet over the
crashing shore -- Who would build a cabin up there but some bored but hoary
old adventurous architect maybe got sick of running for congress and one of
these days a big Orson Welles tragedy with screaming ghosts a woman in a
white nightgown'll go flying down that sheer cliff -- But actually in my
mind what I really see is the kitchen lights of that mild and tender maybe
even romantic supper up there, in all that howling fog, and here I am way
below in the Vulcan's Forge itself looking up with sad eyes -- Blanking my
little Camel cigarette on a billion year old rock that rises behind my head
to a height unbelievable -- The little kitchen light on the cliff is only on
the end of it, behind it the shoulders of the great sea hound cliff go
rising up and back and seeping inland higher and higher till I gasp to think
"Looks like a reclining dog, big friggin shoulders on that sonofabitch" --
Riseth and sweepeth and scareth men to death but what is death anyway in all
this water and rock. I fix up my sleeping bag on the porch of the cabin but
at 2 A. M. the fog starts dripping all wet so I have to go indoors with wet
sleepingbag and make new arrangements 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. "
6
Though there are faults to Monsanto's cabin like no screened windows to
keep the flies out in the daytime just big board windows, so that also on
foggy days when it's damp if you leave them open it's too cold, if you leave
them closed you cant see anything and have to light the lamp at noon -- And
but for that no other faults -- It's all marvelous -- And at first it's so
amazing to be able to enjoy dreamy afternoon meadows of heather up the other
end of the canyon and just by walking less than a half mile you can suddenly
also enjoy wild gloomy sea coast, or if you're sick of either of these just
sit by the creek in a gladey spot and dream over snags -- So easy in the
woods to daydream and pray to the local spirits and say "Allow me to stay
here, I only want peace" and those foggy peaks answer back mutely Yes... And
to say to yourself (if you're like me with theological preoccupations) (at
least at that time, before I went mad I still had such preoccupations) "God
who is everything possesses the eye of awakening, like dreaming a long dream
of an impossible task and you wake up in a flash, oops, No Task, it's done
and gone'... 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" (remembering that
awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a
third time under the hot lights of the Steve Alien Show in the Burbank
studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Alien
watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce's
stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, "I dont have to R E H E A
R S E for God's sake Steve! " -- "But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone
of your voice, just this last time, I'll let you off the dress rehearsal"
and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody
watches, finally I say, "No I cant do it, " and I go across the street to
get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job
of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out
with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me
her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)...
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
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.
Even when one night I'm so happy sighin to turn over to resume my sleep
but a rat suddenly runs over my head, it's marvelous because I then take the
folding cot and put a big wide board on it that covers both sides, so I wont
sink into the canvas confines there, and place two old sleepingbags over the
board, then my own on top, I have the most marvelous and rat free and in
fact healthy-for-theback bed in the world.
I also take long curious hikes to see what's what in the other
direction inland, going up a few miles along the dirt road that leads to
isolated ranches and logging camps -- I come to giant sad quiet valleys
where you see 150 foot tall redwood trees with sometimes one little bird
right on the topmost peaktwig sticking straight up -- The bird balances up
there surveying the fog and the great trees -- You see one single flower
nodding on a cliff side far across the canyon, or a huge knot in a redwood
tree looking like Zeus" face, or some of God's little crazy creations
goofing around in creek pools (zigzag bugs), or a sign on a lonely fence
saying "M. P. Passey. No Trespassing', or terraces of fern in the dripping
redwood shade, and you think "A long way from the beat generation, in this
rain forest'... So I angle back down to the home canyon and down the path
past the cabin and out to the sea where the mule is on the sea shore,
nibbling under that one thousand foot bridge or sometimes just standing
staring at me with big brown Garden of Eden eyes -- The mule being a pet of
one of the families who have a cabin in the canyon and it, as I say Alf by
name, just wanders from one end of the canyon where the corral fence stops
him, to the wild seashore where the sea stops him but a strange Gauguinesque
mule when you first see him, leaving his black dung on the perfect white
sand, an immortal and primordial mule owning a whole valley -- I even
finally later find out where Alf sleeps which is like a sacred grove of
trees in that dreaming meadow of heather -- So I feed Alf the last of my
apples which he receives with big faroff teeth inside his soft hairy muzzle,
never biting, just muffing up my apple from my outstretched palm, and
chomping away sadly, turning to scratch his behind against a tree with a big
erotic motion that gets worse and worse till finally he's standing there
with erectile dong that would scare the Whore of Babylon let alone me.
All kinds of strange and marvelous things like the weird Ripley
situation of a huge tree that's fallen across a creek maybe 500 years ago
and's made a bridge thereby, the other end of its trunk is now buried in ten
feet of silt and foliage, strange enough but out of the middle trunk over
the water rises straight another redwood tree looking like it's been planted
in the treetrunk, or stuck down into it by a God hand, I cant figure it out
and stare at this chewing furiously on big choking handfulls of peanuts like
a college boy -- (and only weeks before falling on my head in the Bowery) --
Even when a rancher car goes by I daydream mad ideas like, here comes Farmer
Jones and his two daughters and here I am with a 6o-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... I pass a cow
which turns to look at me as it takes a big dreamy crap -- Back in the cabin
I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves skittering on the tin
roof, it's August in Big Sur -- I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake
up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly
remember them from long ago, even to the particular clumpness of the
thickets, stem by stem, the twist of them, like an old home place, but just
as I'm wondering what all this mess is, bang, the wind closes the cabin door
on my sight of it! So I conclude "I see as much as doors'll allow, open or
shut" -- Adding, as I get up, in a loud English Lord voice nobody can hear
anyway, "An issue broached is an issue smote, Sire, " pronouncing 'issue"
like "iss-yew" -- And this has me laughing all through supper -- Which is
potatoes wrapped in foil and thrown on the fire, and coffee, and hunks of
Spam roasted on a spit, and applesauce and cheese -- And when I light the
lamp of after-supper reading, here comes the nightly moth to his nightly
death at my lamp... After I put out the lamp temporarily, there's the moth
sleeping on the wall not realizing I've put it on again. Meanwhile by the
way and however, every day is cold and cloudy, or damp, not cold in the
eastern sense, and every night is absolutely fog: no stars whatever to be
seen... But this too turns out to be a marvelous circumstance as I find out
later, it's the "damp season" and the other dwellers (weekenders) of the
canyon don't come out on weekends, I'm absolutely alone for weeks on end
(because later in August when the sun conquered the fog suddenly I was
amazed to hear laughing and scratching all up and down the valley which had
been mine only mine, and when I tried to go to the beach to squat and write
there were whole families having outings, some of them younger people who'd
simply parked their cars up on the high bridge bluff and climbed down) (some
of them in fact gangs of yelling hoodlums)... So the rainforest summer fog
was grand and besides when the sun prevailed in August a horrible
development took place, huge blasts of frightening gale like wind came
pouring into the canyon making all the trees roar with a really frightening
intensity that sometimes built up to a booming war of trees that shook the
cabin and woke you up -- And was in fact one of the things that contributed
to my mad fit.
But the most marvelous day of all when I completely forgot who I was
where I was or the time of day just with my pants rolled up above my knees
wading in the creek rearranging the rocks and some of the snags so that the
water where I stooped (near the sandy shore) to get jugfuls would, instead
of just sluggishly passing by shallow over mud, with bugs in it, now come
rushing in a pure gurgly clear stream and deep too -- I dug into the white
sand and arranged underground rocks so now I could stick a jug in there and
tilt the opening to the stream and it would fill up instantly with clear
rushing unstagnated bugless drinking water -- Making a mill race, is what
it's called -- And because now the water rushed so fast and deep right by
the sandy stooping place I had to build a kind of seawall of rocks against
that rush so that the shore would not be silted away by the race -- Doing
that, fortifying the outside of the seawall with smaller rocks and finally
at sundown with bent head over my sniffling endeavors (the way a kid
sniffles when he's been playing all day) I start inserting tiny pebbles in
the spaces between the stones so that no water can sneak over to wash away
the shore, even down to the tiniest sand, a perfect sea wall, which I top
with a wood plank for everybody to kneel on when they come there to fetch
their holy water -- Looking up from this work of an entire day, from noon
till sundown, amazed to see where I was, who I was, what I'd done -- The
absolute innocence like of Indian fashioning a canoe all alone in the woods
-- And as I say only weeks earlier I'd fallen flat on my head in the Bowery
and everybody thought I'd hurt myself- So I make supper with a happy song
and go out in the foggy moonlight (the moon sent its white luminescence
through) and marveled to watch the new swift gurgling clear water run with
its pretty flashes of light -- 'And when the fog's over and the stars and
the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight. "
And such things -- A whole mess of little joys like that amazing me
when I came back in the horror of later to see how they'd all changed and
become sinister, even my poor little wooden platform and mill race when my
eyes and stomach nauseous and my soul screaming a thousand babbling words,
oh -- It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.
7
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 the 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 big stupid stories like
this) Words from the 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" --
And when a vain and malicious philanthropic abolitionist accused him of
being blind to the issues of slavery he said "Thy love afar is spite at
home" (maybe the philanthropist had Negro help anyway) -- So once again I'm
Ti Jean the Child, playing, sewing patches, cooking suppers, washing dishes
(always kept the kettle boiling on the fire and anytime dishes needed to be
washed I just pour hot hot water into pan with Tide soap and soak them good
and then wipe them clean after scouring with little 5-&-10 wire scourer) --
Long nights simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire
scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for 10
cents, all to me infinitely more interesting than the stupid and senseless
"Steppenwolf novel in the shack which I read with a shrug, this old fart
reflecting the "conformity" of today and all the while he thought he was a
big Nietzsche, old imitator of Dostoevsky fifty years too late (he feels
tormented in a "personal hell" he calls it because he doesnt like what other
people like! )
-- Better at noon to watch the orange and black Princeton colors on the
wings of a butterfly -- Best to go hear the sound of the sea at night on the
shore.
Maybe I shouldna gone out and scared or bored or belabored myself so
much, tho, on that beach at night which would scare any ordinary mortal --
Every night around eight after supper I'd put on my big fisherman coat and
take the notebook, pencil and lamp and start down the trail (sometimes
passing ghostly Alf on the way) and go under that frightful high bridge and
see through the dark fog ahead the white mouths of ocean coming high at me
-- But knowing the terrain I'd walk right on, jump the beach creek, and go
to my corner by the cliff not far from one of the caves and sit there like
an idiot in the dark writing down the sound of the waves in the notebook
page (secretarial notebook) which I could see white in the darkness and
therefore without benefit of lamp scrawl on -- I was afraid to light my lamp
for fear I'd scare the people way up there on the cliff eating their nightly
tender supper -- (later found out there was nobody up there eating tender
suppers, they were overtime carpenters finishing the place in bright lights)
-- And I'd get scared of the rising tide with its 15 foot waves yet sit
there hoping in faith that Hawaii warnt sending no tidal wave I might miss
seeing in the dark coming from miles away high as Groomus -- One night I got
scared anyway so sat on top of 10-foot cliff at the foot of the big cliff
and the wa