Jack Kerouac

“ —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”—And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my even hearing him. ”

“ I yell in the wind, nobody hearing—I feel like kicking the creek and screaming—I turn around and there’s the cabin with its warm interiors; the silent people inside all noticeably glum because they cant understand anyway what’s with the nut wandering in and out from cabin to creek, silent, wan faced, stupefacted, trembling and sweating like midsummer was on the roof and instead it’s even cold now—I sit in the chair with my back to the door and watch Dave as he lectures on bravely. ”

“ Monsanto that old woodsman starts a huge bonfire on the beach that can be seen flaring from miles away, cars passing across the bridge way up there can see there’s a party goin on in the hole of night, in fact the bonfire lights up the eerie weird beams and staunches of the bridge almost all the way up, giant shadows dance on the rocks—The sea swirls up but seems subdued—It’s not like being alone down in the vast hell writing the sounds of the sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ “And if I call her ‘that nut’ in my secret thoughts wonder what she calls me?”—O hell, I’m sick of life—If I had any guts I’d drown myself in that tiresome water but that wouldnt be getting it over at all, I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up in some other wretched suffering form eternities of it—I guess that’s what the kid feels—She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders. ”

“ 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 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 to connect with tears or anything: it’s like William Seward Burroughs’ ”

“ We try to make our way
in self reliance, aid
not ever comes too quick
from wherever & whatever
heaven dear may have
suggested to promise us—
But these waves scare me—
I am going to die
in full despair—
Wake up where?
On second breath in life
the atmosphere is dearer
maybe closer to Heaven
———O Paradise———
Is the sea really so bad?
Have you sent men
here for this cold clown
& monstrous eater at the
world? whose sound
I mock?
God I’ve got to believe in you
or live in death! ”

“ And as I say our songs grow mightier as the road grows darker and wilder, finally here we are on the canyon road the headlights just reaching out there around bleak sand shoulders—Down to the creek where I unlock the corral gate—Across the meadow and back to the haunted cabin—Where on the strength of that night’s booze and getaway gladness Billie and I actually have a good time lighting fires and making coffee and gong to be together in the one sleepingbag easy as pie after we’ve bundled up little Elliott and Dave and Romana have retired in his double nylon bag by the creek in the moonlight. ”

“ and in this intense silence I take a ride on a self propelled platform right downtown and out to the farms where a woman running a chicken farm invites me to join her and live with her—The little platform rolling quietly as the people are watching from windows in groups of profile like the profiles in old Van Dyck paintings, intense, suspicious, momentous—This Billie business reminding me of that but because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on—But this also an indication of the coming madness in Big Sur. ”

“ No human words bespeak
he token sorrow older
than old this wave
becrashing smarts the
sand with plosh
of twirléd sandy
thought—Ah change
the world? Ah set
the fee? Are rope the
angels in all the sea? ”

“ Carolyn by the Sea will go on being golden one way or the other—The little boy will grow up and be a great man—There’ll be farewells and smiles—My mother’ll be waiting for me glad—The corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow—On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars—Something good will come out of all things yet—And it will be golden and eternal just like that—There’s no need to say another word. ”

“ I stand by the window looking out on the glittering San Francisco night with its magic cardboard houses saying “And you have Elliott who doesnt like me and I dont like him and in fact I dont like you and I dont like myself either, how about that?” ”

“ Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night’s drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in—Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death) ”

“ All summer you were sitting here writing the so called sound of the waves not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is, you fool, you happy kid with a pencil, dont you realize you’ve been using words as a happy game—all those marvelous skeptical things you wrote about graves and sea death it’s ALL TRUE YOU FOOL! ”

“ I feel awful about everything . . . I dont think I can make it. . . I’m going crazy with Billie and Elliott and me too . . . maybe I’ll have to, maybe we’ll have to leave or something, I think I’ll die here”—And Dave is disappointed naturally and here I’ve already routed him up out of his own affairs to drive down here anyway, another matter to make me feel like a rat. ”

“ So now were sitting with Billie in her pad, outside the window you see the glittering lights of the city again, ah Urbi y Roma, the world again, and she’s got these mad blue eyes, arched eyebrows, intelligent face, just like Julien, I keep saying “Julien goddamit!” ”

“ In fact back at the cabin to make my bedtime hot Ovaltine I even sing “Sweet Sixteen” like an angel (by God bettern Ron Blake) and all the old memories of Ma and Pa, the upright piano in old Massachusetts, the old summernight sings—That’s how I go to sleep, under the stars on the porch, and at dawn I turn over with a blissful smile on my face because the owls are callin and answering from two different huge dead trunks across the valley, hoo hoo hoo. ”

“ STOP THAT BABBLING!—Because now the babbling’s not only in the creek, as I say it’s left the creek and come in my head, it would be alright for coherent babbling meaning something but it’s all brilliantly enlightened babble that does more than mean something: it’s telling me to die because everything is over—Everything is swarming all over me. ”

“ I go back to the beach in the daytime to write my “Sea,” I stand there barefoot by the sea stopping to scratch one ankle with one toe, I hear the rhythm of those waves, and they're saying suddenly “Is Virgin you trying to fathom me”—I go back to make a pot of tea. ”

“ So that I, “Ti Jean,” was the LAST Ti Jean left in the world, the last poor holy fool, those people at my neck were the devils of the earth among whom God had cast me, an angel baby, as tho I was the last Jesus in fact! ”

“ I just sit and marvel and stare at her mouth wondering where all the beauty is coming from and why—And we end up making love sweetly too—A little blonde well experienced in all the facets of lovemaking and sweet with compassion and just too much so that b’dawn were already going to get married and fly away to Mexico in a week—In fact I can see it now, a great big four way marriage with Cody and Evelyn. ”

“ O the ups and downs and juggling of women, blondes at that, all in the great magical City of the Gandharvas of San Francisco and here I am alone on a magic carpet with one of em, whee, at first of course it’s a great ball, a great new eye-shattering explosion of experience—Not dreaming, I, what’s to come—For with sad musical Billie in my arms and my name Billie too now, Billie and Billie arm in arm, oh beautiful, and Cody has given his consent in a way, we go roaming the Genghiz Khan clouds of soft love and hope and anybody who’s never done this is crazy—Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah’d and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love—Dont let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of love, it’s awful, were stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama—Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow—The secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under the fall leaves.
How strange in all, and making everything that’s happened in the past weeks, the backs and forths and pains of me in City and Sur, all piled up now rationally like a big construction whereon could be built a divingboard which would enable me clumsily to dive into Billie’s soul and therefore why complain? ”

“ “No I couldnt with her either, I’m just bound up inside like constipation, I cant move emotionally like you’d say emotionally as tho that was some big grand magic mystery everybody saying ‘O how wonderful life is, how miraculous, God made this and God made that,’ how do you know he doesnt hate what He did: ”

“ I say phone in hand, “the whole world’s coming on like a highschool sophomore eager to learn what he calls New things, mind you, the same old singsong sad song truth of death . . . because the reason I yell death so much is because I’m really yelling life, because you cant have death without life, hello Dave? ”

“ I feel like the most disgraceful and nay disreputable wretch on earth, in fact my hair is blowing in beastly streaks across my stupid and moronic face, the hangover has now worked paranoia into me down to the last pitiable detail. ”

“ It always makes me proud to love the world somehow—Hate’s so easy compared—But here I go flattering myself helling headbent to the silliest hate I ever had. ”

“ “I don’t know, after talking to me, I remember I said some silly thing like ‘the universe is a woman because it’s round’ but I think she cried because she was remembering her early days when she had a romance with some soldier who died, at least that’s what they say, she was the greatest woman I ever saw, big blue eyes, big smart woman . . . you could do that, get out of this awful mess and leave it all behind”— ”

“ I gulp to wonder why 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. ”

“ The fog thunders—We put
silver light on face—We
took the heroes in—A billion
years aint nothing—
O the cities here below!
The men with a thousand
arms! the stanchions of
their upward gaze! ”

“ About noon which is now the peak of a golden blurry new day for me we pick up Dave's girl Romana Swartz a big Rumanian monster beauty of some kind (I mean with big purple eyes and very tall and big but Mae West big) , Dave whispers in my ear “You oughta see her walking around that Zen-East House in those purple panties of hers, nothing else on, there’s one married guy lives there who goes crazy every time she goes down the hall tho I dont blame him, would you? she’s not trying to entice him or anybody she’s just a nudist, she believes in nudism and bygod she’s going to practice it!” ”

“ For she is the great enemy of Evelyn—She’s not satisfied just to be Cody’s lover and soul heart she wants to go right over there and lay Evelyn down on the line and take Cody away with her forever and to do this she’ll even have a deadend heaven deep love affair with old Jack (same pattern of old) —There’s not much difference between her and Evelyn when you listen to their talk about Cody except in Evelyn’s case I’m always fascinatedly interested—Billie actually bores me tho of course I cant tell her that—Evelyn is still the champ and I wonder about Cody. ”

“ I get mad and stomp up on the porch and throw myself in the canvas chair and close my eyes—Dave Wain says he’s going down the road to investigate the canyon a bit and when he comes back the girls will have finished packing and we’ll all leave—Dave goes off, the girls clean up and sweep, the little kid is sleeping and suddenly hopelessly and completely finished I sit there in the hot sun and close my eyes: and there’s the golden swarming peace of Heaven in my eyelids—It comes with a sure hand a soft blessing as big as it is beneficent, i.e. endless—I’ve fallen asleep. ”

“ The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! ”