Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (51 page)

Get away from Pound . . . I dug him and he is deliberately Greek and fancy with his Oniothose Greek expressioni . . . balls. He and Hopkins suffer both from trying to show how fancy they are, and Yeats too . . . for Poets I like Dickinson and Blake . . . But even they are ignorant because they simply don't know that everything is empty in and out in ten thousand infinite directions of the undisturbed light. Please, Allen, wake up . . . if for one moment you doubt Buddhism because you're attached to I don't know how to say it, I just don't understand, I really thought you were intelligent and Bill too—like Neal is much more on the ball now with his Cayce who is after all close, Cayce is Purushabeliever but outside of that he is almost pure Buddhist. I'll explain Cayce to you. It's not that I'm so smart it's only that the light has been vouchsafed to me when I stopped thinking. I confess to a great deal of impatience seeing people receive the teaching and not absorbing it . . . habit-energy of ignorance has roots that get deeper and deeper as you get older, like tree.

6. No word from [William Carlos] Williams—at least write to him and ask him if he's read anything because if his wife read out loud all about the pissbottles it didn't work (old harridans) what they're doing married to prose and poem geniuses I shall never know.

7. Alene's [Lee] address is still where it was, Paradise, I think it's 501 E. 11.

8. About Joan [Burroughs] poem dream Lucien didn't see it, I forgot it here, then later he saw it in your letter but by then you'd dubbed him “drunk and golden” instead of just golden and anyway I wasn't there when he read it so no comment—generally I would say that Lucien loves you and considers you a charitable saint . . . don't get so hungup on what he thinks, Old Priesthead Monacchio knows him better than you do and his judgment is: “You don't realize that Lucien is a relatively simple guy trying to enjoy life—much simpler than you or Ginsberg, for instance.” Very very true. So I looked at Lucien and saw Tony was simply right. Like, Lucien spent a whole night describing to me how he beat a guy up in a fight even tho I told him I wasn't interested in who won—he's just a regular guy . . . Just, Tony says, an ordinary kid.

9. I hope I get to meet the Senora, I would like to try Chiapas in the winter in the summer I couldn't possibly stand it.

Turns out that all my final favorite writers (Dickinson, Blake, Thoreau) ended up their lives in little hermitages . . . Emily in her cottage, Blake in his, with wife; and Thoreau his hut. This I think will be my truly final move . . . tho I don't know where yet. It depends on how much money I can get. If I had all the money in the world, I would still prefer a humble hut. I guess in Mexico. Al Sublette once said what I wanted was a thatched hut in Lowell, a real wild thing to say. Anyways, I was headed strait for Mex City but now that Gene has sent the 25 I can afford Frisco and will come. I look forward to talks. Also chow mein and wine. Also walks. Neal. Maybe Miss Greenie [marijuana]. Also I want to spend one week in the river bottom at Chittenden pass. Also a week on the Santa Barbara channel coast. Also I want to visit the Buddhist Monastery at 60 Las Encinas Lane, Santa Barbara. Also I might try bhikkuing in early Salinas river bottom near Wunpost, very wild country. I just want a find some place, where, if I feel like being in a trance all day and don't wanta move for nothing, nobody there to stop me, nothin to stop me. I
know
that the secret lies in the old Yoga secrets of India, let alone Dhyana, and that any man who does not, as you, practice Dhyana, is simply wandering in the dark. The mind has its own intrinsic brightness but it's only revealable when you stop thinking and let the body melt away. The longer you can hold this position of cessation in light, the greater everything (which is Nothing) gets, the diamond sound of rich shh gets louder, almost frightening,—the transcendental sensation of being able to see through the world like glass, clearer; etc. All your senses become purified and your mind returns to its primal, unborn, original state of perfection. Don't you remember before you were born?

Read, as I'm doing, the Diamond Sutra every day, Sunday read the Dana Charity chapter; Monday, Sila kindness; Tuesday, Kshanti patience; Wednesday, Virya zeal; Thursday, Dhyana tranquility; Friday, Prajna wisdom; Saturday, conclusion.

By living with this greatest of sutras you become immersed in the Truth that it is all One Undifferentiated Purity, creation and the phenomena, and become free from such conceptions as self, other selves, many selves, One Self, which is absurd, “selfhood is regarded as a personal possession only by terrestrial beings”—no difference between that star and this stone.

Buddha Tells Us
has been received codly [coldly] by Cowley, Giroux, Sterling L. [Lord]—a great book. It will convert many when it is published and read. If I can get it thru the money changers, the people who sincerely read it will dig. I mean, I've read it over three times and it definitely has magical powers of enlightenment, it is truly a Lake of Light. I wish I had extry copy for you. It is now (supposedly) at Philosophical Library in NY, people who publish Suzuki. I'm really curious to know the fate of that one. I'm really amused now, finally, but childish ignorance of said Cowleys, Giroux, peopleses everywhere, but I entertain no lasting notion that it's anything but a dream from which they'll awake a little later than I and maybe none the worse for it I guess, being chill un. My sister got mad at me and said I thought I was God, I say “What are ya jealous?”—O what a dreadful household this is, I'm in . . . leavin again . . . everybody resenting my cool Sihibhuto sittings in the morning, cool trances, they work hard to show me how busy they are, they putter around, restless, proud, indignant, call me this and that, O if I were not greased cool by the wisdom of the Indes (which is French for Nothingness) I would be madder yet and have more reason to be madder than even in 1952 when I was mad at everybody even you . . . but I see it's a dream, a disagreeable dream.

As for a woman, what kind of man sells his soul for a gash? A fucking veritable GASH—a great slit between the legs lookin more like murder than anything else.

Really, my dear, every time I look at a woman now I almost get sick thinking of it. As for codpieces they can bury em in the cottonfield and let em sprout moons for alls I care. Nevertheless one drap of vino and I'm all for anything. But I'm really getting sick and tired of the Western World and I wonder what will happen to me in Ceylon or Burma or Japan (yes Tokyo, that's the place). Did you see the
Compassionate Buddha
, a pocketbook? by E.A. Burtt, there is a great sutra in there by a mighty Chinaman called Hsi Yun, on page 194. “Because the understanding of the people of the world is veiled by their own sight, hearing, feeling, and knowledge, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of the original substance.” I presume you know what this means, don't you?

It means, that there is One Essence, for instance every drop of rain contains infinite universes of existence the essence of which is undisturbed light. The essence of wood is the same as the essence of air. A hydrogen atom is arranged one way, another another way . . . both are empty in essence

PSPS: I also wanta dig the Buddhist church just south of Sun Hung Heung on Washington St. I helpt build one night drunk on wine with Al Sublette. We go in and sit and pray. I know a whole prayer to recite and chant in the church.

I ran into Jose Garcia Villa on street, he was with big loveboy of his, I converted both of them I think in White Horse bar, I mean both dug and were sad. Jose said he liked Hopkins best. He doesn't like Gregory. But nobody does, like Helen Parker put down G's book and said, “Well there's nothing to worry about there.”

I was with Helen a few days. At pad. Etc. She holding out good.

Then I ran into old Wasp Bingle Frankel. and he said [Alan] Ansen is causing worry everywhere, has disappeared in Africa, North, or Italy or somewhere, no word from him since Xmas and Frankel thinks he's dead. He also said YOU would die young too. He was depressed and sat in bar with head down. Finally he didn't notice me any more.

I wailed at him a whole night with what I would have like tape recorded, explaining High Mystery Poetic aspects of Buddhism to him which he dug yelling Bravos in bar but next day he didn't notice me. The Riviera is such a scene. I am really lookin forward tho to Frisco, Allen don't get mad but every night, most every night, I want to lie down with Pat Henry in my ear, and I hope green, and wine, and dig newest music, after all I am America's new jazz critic expert ain't I?—I also look forward to usual Frisco wigs like seeing Leonard Hall the Buddhist and Chris MacClaine and the crazy twisted poets and Ed Roberts and Charles Mew and all the hep kicks and me 'n Al singin in the street jazz . . . and yes I would love to fuck Sheila [Williams] and everybody else too why not. All's I need is a drink . . . I drink eternally. Drink always and ye shall never die. Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you; drink always before the thirst, and it will never come upon you. Argus had a hundred eyes for his sight, a butler should have (like Briareus) a hundred hands wherewith to fill us wine indefatigably. My apprenticeship is out, I am free man at this trade of wine bibbling. Come, my good buddy, fill me here some, and crown the wine, pray, like a cardinal. Would you say that a fly could drink in this? The stone called asbestos is not more unquenchable than the thirst of my paternity. Long clusters of drinking are to be voided without doors.

The river'll get none of it, I absorb it all.

Jacky Boy (Write)

Allen Ginsberg [n.p., San Francisco, California?] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Rocky Mount, North Carolina?]

after July 14, 1955

July zoom, 55

 

Racketyjack:

I'll study any ole bloomin langwish I want, be it Greek or Greak and I might consider Sanskrit if anybody knows how to pronounce it since its sound I'm after, SOUND, Sanskrit being the right language for every other reason except who knows is it still spoke? Yes I suppose so but there's time for Greek, Chinese, Indian gelatin and pali Afrikaans, ten years apiece, I have fifty to go and can study Sanskrit in eternity as well maybe I will in fact maybe I was going to study Sanskrit (it passed thru my mind) I haven't decided what, yet, only wanted another non Latin sound in my brain to bop with: and in addition, now that I can ride horse and mule and drive green autos (120 miles and five hours behind my black buggy to my credit) I would if I can still use rusty mind and study musique herself, find out about harmonies and hemidemisemiquavers and write my own operas and particularly Zoroastrian masses,—particularly here the study of physical sound of time—maybe, as understood thru structures of Bach—you should hear, will hear, my fantastic Bach records, nothing but the purest most elevated in fact irrational moments, I even thought of studying numbers, mathematics, but that's silly to see the conscious structure he had, the brick shithouse I take it to be—all this because in recent poems I'm coming across rhythms I heard of but don't really know difference between and maybe digging them be greater kicks than market research, also I get teachers papers maybe, and review in detail the whole fucking history of the development of English prosody from Chaucer to Kerouac. Be all this as it may I took this programme along with the fifty pages fresh complete and new of my presently being worked on new book of poems 1952-55, it's half done now, another fifty to go I'll still be working as I am now—at last again ten hours adesk per diem—when you arrive, when you can instruct and chastise me for red pencils—for reading Corso's original good book I see what good verbal imagination he has and how beautiful it can be and how I have neglected that I realize (a thought of two days ago, that in attempting to capture prophetic rock of the voice of rock I rocked down my poems to the absolutely literal beginning with Williams'
Empty Mirror
, so that a literal voice could be heard saying something literal, world-real, if it be only: this tree before me rocks and the baby birds cry at the same time, and not saying the boidies [birdies] is frightened in the tree, so that I (me self) would have nothing to add, I just want to begin by being an eye, in sound, later the eye will speak)—at any rate reducing the poetry to a monologue without images or music (title of long poem three years ago) and then when down to the bare bones of literal fact, adding music, which I'm working on now (or proposed to thru studying foreign sound and then music and prosody) and later add more enchanted hallucination rubber tires like the Denver, Dakar, and Holy Doldrums. Corso however has not only native genius for word slinging, marvelous delicacy, also an uncrystalized mystical thrill, if only he weren't such an egobugger, in his poetry. Still it's better than Hollander writes who is now a professor at Harvard I seen. Hollander's fault (I use this word as Faulkner says in [
A
]
Fable
in geological sense) was not that he's at Harvard but he isn't saintly enough to begin with—which reminds me of a Burroughsian phrase appeared to me in a dream, “We offer our goods to the market place and they are no not accepted by that cynical crew of confirmed fruits.” Be that as it may I WENT to Berkeley and saw Blake student professor Berkeley's Trilling, Mark Schorer and concisely laid my manuscript down on his desk and said I wanted to study prosody for an MA and probably some music and Greek to go with it—and he said nobody here ever done that, I'm not sure, in fact no, you can't do it in the English department, you can only study English in the English department, no more than three points per term otherwise in unrelated (Music, Greek and Buddha) fields—maybe try comparative literature dept. But they probably won't allow it, either. Well maybe he'll change his mind after he reads my book-half, but I very seriously doubt that, so I will do as I please and take what I want without an MA, but I want that for distinguished loot-source as possible teacher in future if necessary whether it be in Winesburg or Cambridge, better trade than market research. There is another angle, which is that if I do go to a school and stick it out for five months to a year I think probably I'll wind up with fellowship, or easywork teaching assignment, to enable me to live at say $1,500 per year for years, maybe take me to Europe on Fulbrights, or near orient for Sanskrit, whatever, I may study Chinese, however this is all provisional fantasy since my poor unemployment will give out in October or November and I'll need loot then, only. The only thing I don't want to do ever again is work in an office like this year, complete waste of time, except that if I didn't—I'm sure I never done it before—I'd have to be in one of Neal's or Lucien's other lifetimes. Since you'll be here I'll send no samples of poems, except this piece of rhythm: