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     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