Lew Welch

Lew Welch, 1926 - 1971

“Lew Welch moved with his mother to California following his parents' divorce. Following a stint in the Air Force, Welch attended Oregon’s, Reed College in 1948 where he met poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. His senior thesis was about American poet Gertrude Stein which greatly impressed William Carlos Williams who had visited the college and met the three poets. He admired Welch's early poems and tried to get his Stein thesis published. Welch later made a trek east to visit Williams at his home in New Jersey.

After a brief period of wandering, Welch was accepted into the University of Chicago and attempted to earn his Master’s degree. Welch hated Chicago. By 1951 he had a nervous breakdown. He went into analysis and psychotherapy. He married and worked as an advertising copywriter for Montgomery Ward, where he came up with the famous Raid slogan "Raid Kills Bugs Dead." He was working here at the time of the famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.

His friends Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen were gaining prominence as Beat poets and Welch felt a renewed interest in writing again. His entry into the San Francisco poetry world coincided with the end of his marriage and loss of his white-collar day job. To support himself he drove a cab in San Francisco. His experiences behind the wheel would inspire the poems Taxi Suite. Lew Welch is included in many Beat Generation anthologies. His book of collected poems Ring of Bone was first published in 1973.

In 1959 Welch met Jack Kerouac and took to the road with Kerouac, also on this trip was friend Albert Saijo. They drove from San Francisco to New York. Welch would appear in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur as the "lean rangy red head" Dave Wain, always ready for a good time.

Like many creative individuals, Welch was troubled by the need to earn a living while keeping his mind and time free for creative expression. Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s, and taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970. But the old inner demons were never far.


Despite his burgeoning success his bouts with depression and heavy drinking continued and after the break up of another relationship in 1971 Welch returned to the mountains. On May 23, 1971, Gary Snyder went up to Welch's campsite and found a suicide note in Welch's truck. Despite an extensive search Welch's body was never found. He left the following note, found by Snyder:


"I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it - never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor- use MSS at Gary's and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America - use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don't owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch." [online sources]


♣ In fact nobody knows for certain what happened to Lew Welch. He simply disappeared.



The Chicago Poem




I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
dignity. It's a place that lets you
understand why the Bible is the way it is:
Proud people cannot live here.


The land's too flat. Ugly, sullent and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. They
stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
terrible sky. In country like this there
can be no God but Jahweh.


In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames
bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
The stench stabs at your eyeballs.
The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town.


Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men
doing strong things in
showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light
and the furnace door opening with a
blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange?


It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or
a Nazi who wished there were people
behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers,
whose old man spent most of his life in there,
remembers a "nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand."


It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity.
Friends helped me. Then I put some
love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes
and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.


Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat.
Smaller than raindrops, and only here and there,
the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away -
and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon
lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel in its ear
belly gold so bright you'd swear he had a
light in there. His colour faded with his life. A small green fish...


All things considered, it's a gentle and undemanding
planet, even here. Far gentler
here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is
always and only with what we build on top of it.


There's nobody else to blame. You can't fix it and you
can't make it go away. It does no good appealing
to some ill-invented Thunderer
brooding over some unimaginable crag.


It's ours. Right down to the last small hinge it
all depends for its existence
only and utterly upon our sufferance.


Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I
knew again that never will the
man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel
monstrosity. It snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake
like a blind, red, rhinoceros.
It's already running us down.


You can't fix it. You can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it.
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
a small part of it will die if I'm not around.


feeding it anymore.




Lew Welch

Lew

♣♣♣

1959 – Jack Kerouac & Lew Welch . . .
from Jack Karlos ‘Eternity Unzipped’1966, (unpublished manuscript).

“A couple of days after my ship docked at Brooklyn and I had squared away the work that had to be taken care of before I could get leave I took off for Manhattan and found Jack in the Cedar Tavern, he was with another guy he introduced as Lew Welch. The Cedar Tavern was in Greenwich Village and the main hang out for the abstract expressionist painters and to a lesser degree writers – like John Ashberry, Gregory Corso, Leroi Jones, and Frank O’Hara. The Cedar bar had no TV and no jukebox.

In ‘54 Jackson Pollock had been barred after one of his drunken violent rages, and around the same time so had Kerouac – for pulling his dick out and pissing in a jug of beer on the table of a well dressed party who were there ‘digging the scene’. There were lots of fist fights in this bar. It had a genuine undercurrent edge of violence and unpredictability to it. Later, after he became famous with the publication of On The Road, Jack was allowed back in the Cedar because of the amount of people that were drawn to him like a magnet, crowding the bar and spending up big.”

♣ An aside: 1957 - Jackson Pollock - from Jack Karlos, Journals 1957 – 1972]
‘Back in 1954 . . . Jack introduced me to the painter Jackson Pollock who I jokingly referred to as Bollocks. Pollock didn’t get it, maybe because he was a yank and bollocks was an English slang term. Thereafter Jack, with a straight face, would say bollocks instead of Pollock. He didn't know that Jack was taking the piss out of him. Jack really liked his paintings though, he reckoned they were saturated with Tathagata and that just by standing in front of one of Pollock’s paintings it was possible for a viewer to have an instant awakening. Whenever Jackson came in the door Jack would yell out “Hey – Bollocks ! over here man, come and have a drink.” and Jackson would come unsmiling towards Jack’s table, loaded with drinks and empty glasses. I heard later that Jackson eventually found out what ‘bollocks’ meant and one night drunk he confronted Jack out the front of the San Remo where he had been lurking. He threw a punch breaking Jack’s nose. Jack lost his cool and punched Pollock decking him and then sat on his chest and grabbing Pollock by both ears began bouncing his head off the footpath – two or three times – before Norman Mailer and William de Kooning dragged him off. Jack had been drinking heavily and on Benzedrine which might explain his explosive reaction. Gregory Corso was with Jack and he’d been drinking and on bennies too and he proceeded to ‘sink the slipper’ into Pollock’s ribs as Jack was bouncing the head.” Jack Karlos, Journals 1957 – 1972

“The three of us hung out together for a few days, then Lew wasn’t around anymore, but while he was it was him and Jack who did all the talking – (and most of the drinking). Talk of all kinds of things most of which went right over my head. But one theme that came up a lot with them and it stuck with me thereafter was – “HOW FUCKED EVERYTHING WAS” – how fucked America and the world in general was – and how fucked the ‘beat scene’ was becoming.

Jack was also disillusioned with Ginsberg’s predilection for public fame and acclaim, which they talked about – surprisingly both thought Ginsberg’s poetry was overrated. Jack said Allen was a ‘show pony’ prancing and dancing to his ego’s need for public love – his driving force rather than poetry. They said the only half decent thing he had ever written was Howl. They also talked about Ginsberg’s arrogant and ignorant dismissal of Buddhism as being something worth looking into. Buddhism came up a lot in their talks. I had no idea of what they were on about. But from then on I was curious and began to take an interest, and later got hold of a couple of books on Buddhism. These two guys were riveting to listen to when they were together.

Watching and listening to them was entrancing – at times the hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end. Once the drinking started though they went through the night till dawn before crashing. Like Jack, Lew Welch had depth about him. You felt a lot was happening under the surface. He had laughing eyes and he was quick to laugh, but there was an undercurrent of sadness about him too, just like Jack. He was a gentlemanly guy and very likable. Another thing that was talked about was personal powerlessness and hopelessness. When I asked about Lew a few days later Jack said he’d gone back to the west coast. He missed Lew, and went quiet for the remaining days that I was in town.

There were always a bunch of others around Jack wherever he went, guys and women. But every now and again he would suddenly just get up and leave, simply walk away without a word – when he wasn’t totally pissed and still had some control. Couple of times he grabbed me aside and told me to wait outside for him, then five minutes later he would come out and we would head off to an apartment he used as a sort of refuge in an old building on East 7th Street, Jack grabbing a bottle of wine on the way. He let himself in with a key that was stashed somewhere on the stairs or landing? Later I found out the flat was Allen Ginsberg’s. Jack said it was the perfect beat pad, that it was just what the Dr Sax had ordered.

When he didn’t want to be with anyone else but also not wanting to be alone he liked to have my company. Though he never told me why and I never asked. But once when he wasn’t drunk he said it felt good to have me around, but nothing about why. Maybe it was because we only saw one another in between long spells away. Or maybe it was because I was younger than he was and I took an interest in what he had to say – sort of getting educated by him. He had a way with words did Jack, his talk flowed off his tongue as smooth as a shot of Drambuie goes down your throat – and his insights hit your brain just like that shot of Drambuie does – with a sudden jolt of clarity and the feeling of being connected to the world soul – like a veil that you never even knew was there is suddenly lifted away from your eyes. He wasn’t hard to be around.

It was only when my ship was docked in America either on the East or the West coast that we got together for a few days. After that first time in Harlem in ’54 he told me if I was ever on the west coast, how to find him. Maybe another reason was the block of hash the size of a cigarette packet that I brought in whenever my ship in came via one of the ports where it was readily available – Karachi, Bombay, Aden, Port Said. The stuff from Karachi was the best because that came down from Afghanistan and was very pure and strong.

With Lew Welch and Jack, we roamed from bar to bar, jazz joint to jazz joint, beat café to beat cafe – that’s how he described these places - this beat hangout, this subterranean joint, this hipster joint – but it was the San Remo where he mostly hung out. The San Remo was on the corner of MacDougal and Bleeker Sts in the Village, it had wooden booths, a black and white tiled floor, and a pressed-tin ceiling. A lot of other writers hung out there too, some painters too - like Larry Rivers, and sometimes musicians. Some of these characters I met briefly or had a few drinks with, some I got to know better later, others I knew by sight and whose names I picked up listening to the talk while I was in Jacks company. Jack yelling out and waving his arm when someone came in the door “Hey - Gore [Vidal] – over here man, come over and drink with us.” Or John Clellon Holmes. Tennessee Williams was often there. Miles Davis would come in sometimes usually with a couple of other black guys and women. It was mostly only creative people there – writers, musicians, painters – but there was also those who weren’t artists themselves and like me loved being around the high energy of the creative crowd. There was a lot of talk about what each one was doing – what they were working on, plays, novels, poems, paintings, music.

Charley Parker and Miles Davis.

In New York I knew that I could always find Jack in the San Remo and if he wasn’t there I could find out where he was – everyone knew him, everyone liked him. There was an electricity about Jack that spilled off him even when he was quiet, it touched everyone who came anywhere near him. In his company you had the feeling that everyday life itself was an awesome thing, that just to be alive and on the street was a kind of miracle. But he was also a contradiction – he had a definite sense of naivety and simplicity about him and also he had deep insight into things – but he had darkness in him too. There were times when he came out with a lot very pessimistic stuff – like ‘how fucked it all was’. “Everything is fucked.” he would sometimes suddenly yell out of nowhere and anywhere, wherever he was at the time. Then he would simply get up and walk away without another word to anyone, leaving everyone behind – including me.” Jack Karlos – ‘Eternity Unzipped’ 1966, (unpublished manuscript).

Jack

♣♣♣

Lew Welch . . . poems






Taxi Suite (excerpt: 1. After Anacreon)


When I drive cab
I am moved by strange whistles and wear a hat


When I drive cab
I am the hunter. My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures


When I drive cab
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do


When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air


When I drive cab
A revelation of movement comes to me. They wake now.
Now they want to work or look around. Now they want
drunkenness and heavy food. Now they contrive to love.


When I drive cab
I bring the sailor home from the sea. In the back of
my car he fingers the pelt of his maiden


When I drive cab
I watch for stragglers in the urban order of things.


When I drive cab
I end the only lit and waitful things in miles of
darkened houses








Not Yet 40, My Beard Is Already White.


Not yet 40, my beard is already white.
Not yet awake, my eyes are puffy and red,
like a child who has cried too much.


What is more disagreeable
than last night's wine?


I'll shave.
I'll stick my head in the cold spring and
look around at the pebbles.


Maybe I can eat a can of peaches.


Then I can finish the rest of the wine,
write poems 'til I'm drunk again,
and when the afternoon breeze comes up


I'll sleep until I see the moon
and the dark trees
and the nibbling deer


and hear
the quarrelling coons






The Image, As In A Hexagram.


The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.
He keeps the cabin warm.


All winter long he sorts out all he has.
What was well started shall be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.


In spring he emerges with one garment
and a single book.


The cabin is very clean.


Except for that, you'd never guess
anyone lived there.

Lew

♣♣♣

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world -

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

(End verse of The Diamond Sutra)

♣♣♣

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lew Welch poems previously published at following sources:
http://www.americanpoems.com/

The Lew Welch Papers – Online Archive of California

Lew Welch Poetry – Poemhunter.com

http://americanpoetry.suite101.com/

The Portable Beat Reader ed. Ann Charters, Viking Penguin, 1992

♣ ♣ ♣

Jack Keroauc & Jack Karlos' unpublished papers

Jack Karlos

Jack Karlos died in 2006 aged 74 in Brisbane, where he lived the last ten years of his life. He worked all his life as a merchant seaman since he first shipped out from Glasgow as a young man of twenty in 1952. After jumping ship in 1954 in New York City, where he lived for two years as an illegal immigrant, he arrived in Australia and made his home base in Melbourne.


Jack Karlos’s papers (contained in a single small suitcase) were passed on to me when he died – including the unpublished manuscript ‘Eternity Unzipped’ (1966) and note books and journals. For the past few months I have been reading them obsessively. It seemed that I was in a dream – lodged more in the Dreamtime than in everyday reality. Desolation angels are in all generations and from all creative urges and surges, not just the Beats, and in all walks of life - are they not? So I will roam wide and include those who are well known, those not so well known and, those in my own locale - Australia. From time to time I will also post up more from Jack Karlos' manuscript.

Dharma Jack Kerouac

1946, this photo was taken ten years before the other classic shot of him that was used on the back cover of his early books - the one taken in San Francisco right after he had just come down from the Cascade mountains and firelookout job in 1956.

♣ ♣ ♣


Holy Skid-Row Blues . . .


“2

The awakened Buddha to show the way, the chosen Messiah to die in the degradation of sentience, is the golden eternity. One that is what is, the golden eternity, or, God, or, Tathagata-the name. The Named One. The human God. Sentient Godhood. Animate Divine. The Deified One. The Verified One. The Free One. The Liberator. The Still One. The settled One. The Established One. Golden Eternity. All is Well. The Empty One. The Ready One. The Quitter. The Sitter. The Justified One. The Happy One.”

Jack Kerouac [The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 1953]



♣

John Clellon Holmes - On his way

I surveyed the people moving in and out of the sleazy little grocery up ahead (dark, good-looking men in sport shirts, most of them, with bags full of beer), but saw no one I would have identified as the author of a novel, weighing twenty pounds in the hand [the munuscript of On The Road], that was being seriously touted to publishers by people I respected.

But Kerouac was one of those men — the one who looked like the serious, tee-shirted younger brother of the others; the brother they were proud of because he played the violin as well as he played basketball; the young John Garfield back in the neighborhood after college, absolutely at ease there, but just as absolutely separated from it now by some weaning knowledge he could not communicate. He was making the run for more beer, he said with a hesitant smile, and, while [Alan] Harrington bought a contribution of big, brown quarts, he and I talked a little there on the sidewalk.

I don’t remember anything we said. It was probably no more than that gauging, neutral chat beneath which young men take each other’s measure, but I do remember my first impression. Under the boyish forelock, his strangely tender eyes noted me as we spoke, but all the time I felt that he was more keenly attuned to the tangled life of that street than to anything we were saying. It seemed to distract and stir him; he was at once excited and somehow emptied by it. Though he was just as straightforward, personable, buoyant, and attractive as I had been led to expect, there was a curious shyness under his exuberance; there was the touch of a moody thought around his mouth (like the reveler’s sudden foretaste of the ashen dawn to come), and, above all, there was that quietly impressive intensity of consciousness. All of which made me understand his friends’ enthusiasm in a flash: he was so evidently on his way toward some accomplishment, or some fate, that it was impossible not to warm to him immediately. [...]

We became friends more quickly than I have ever become friends with anyone else. Everything about him was engaging in those days. He days. He was open-hearted, impulsive, candid and very handsome. He didn’t seem like any other writer that I knew. He wasn’t wary, opinionated, cynical or competitive, and if I hadn’t already known him by reputation, I would have pegged him as a poetic lumberjack, or a sailor with Shakespeare in his sea locker. Melville, armed with the manuscript of Typee, must have struck the Boston Brahmins in much the same way. Stocky, medium-tall, Kerouac had the tendoned forearms, heavily muscled thighs, and broad neck of a man who exults in his physical life. His face was black-browed and firm-nosed, with the expressive curve of lip and the dark, somehow tender eyes that move you so in a loyal, sensitive animal. But it was the purity in that face, scowl or smile, that struck you first. You realized that the emotions surfaced on it unimpeded. Mothers warmed to him immediately: they thought him nice, respectful, even shy. Girls inspected him, their gazes snagged by those bony, Breton good looks, that ingathered aura of dense, somehow buried maleness. (New York, 1948)
http://www.wordsareimportant.com/meetingjack.htm

                  
                                                                        ♣♣♣

"Around 1952 Jack Kerouac stumbled onto Buddhism and as was his wont he went deep and intensely into a study of it over several years, accessing original texts of Buddhism in the best libraries in New York City. Kerouac was no dill, he was very intelligent - and empowered by his desire for liberation - salvation from the worldly life - he had become profoundly sick of it all and with himself and his own personal life … he was profoundly disillusioned – but at that stage he still had hope and optimism about transcending it all, of finding a genuine way out.
Probably his biggest ball and chain was his heavy regular drinking . . . his alcoholism was his downfall just like his contemporary - Jackson Pollock the beat alcoholic enfant terrible of action/abstraction painting who was also based in NYC - in the immediate environment of the best bop jazz and blues music going – the New York beat hipsters – right there at the beginning . . .
Neal Cassady apparently had a genius level intelligence. Neal, the hippest of the hip, the Holy Hipster, the V8 horsepower heart, who burned with Kerouac flash for flash, dash for dash.


Keroauc burned out fast “…like a roman candle that shoots high, a long trailing tail of flame arcing and at its zenith suddenly bursts with the colours of the rainbow exploding in the dark night …and everyone goes aaaah!” (Kerouac). Jack Karlos (Eternity Unzipped’,1966, unpublished manuscript)

1954 Dharma and Meditation on Buddha nature in the North Carolina woods after New York booze binges wild bebop wailings and womanisings.

Who wouldnt be struck with this guy . . .

"I met Jack Kerouac in 1954 in the Black Gypsy club – a jazz an blues bar in Harlem when I jumped ship in New York City – he was with a black woman maybe Mardou? (The Subterraneans)… we talked for a while, he said it “was like looking in a mirror, ten years back” - later we got very drunk but before that he took me backstage where all the musicians talked with him - they loved Jack’s love for and understanding of their music. They liked what he had to say in his writing - we turned on with Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker I think Miles Davis was there too but I don’t remember now him touching the weed.


Jack Keroauc was such a turned on guy - talking to him lit up my mind like one of those multi coloured 1950s style jukeboxes - playing the best music I ever heard – the only one who maybe matches his certainty of stance and existential interaction with life and quality of soul as a writer is Bob Dylan. – aint that the Beatest of the Blues - that Dylan should be a musician : - Yes Jack . . . ironic hey.

Talking to him in 1954 [Kerouac] you got the feeling that this guy for sure had a date with destiny - and that it was waiting just down the road. But who could foretell the darkness and desolation. After that last time, when he doubted his destiny as a writer - 1946, when he had possession of a gun and for a week or two while holed up in a cheap hotel down South seriously considering armed robbery of a petrol station!


The crossroads -  Yes he met those Desolation Angels and was taken up by them. He returned to New York City and worked on his manuscripts – the rest is as they say, all over now baby blue."
Jack Karlos, (Eternity Unzipped’,1966, unpublished manuscript)

1946, The Deal at The Crossroads - - when the deal went down.

Crossroads Deal

jumping swinging gates of wails

rolling dice

poverty or halls of jails

redeeming angels

take my pale

I have something to give

surely cant fail

the tanker ship's horn baughs

coming up from the docks

a mile from my doors

on the other side of the semi

wild industrial parklands

without within without

within

ten violins

                                     karl gallagher

                                             

Pete Hamill - ‘Jack, Jack’

"(...) For an hour, I drank beer alone at the bar [of the Cedar Street Tavern] and listened to arguments over centerfielders. Suddenly Kerouac and his friends came in, shouldering through the door, then merging with the other drinkers, three deep at the bar. Kerouac edged in beside me. He was drunk. He threw some crumpled bills on the bar. I said hello. He looked at me in a suspicious, bleary way and nodded. The others were crowding in, yelling, Jack, Jack, and he was passing beers and whiskeys to them, and Jack, Jack, he bought more, always polite, but his eyes scared, a twitch in his face and a sour smell coming off him in the packed bar that reminded me of the morning odor of my father in the bed at 378. Soon he was ranting about Jesus and nirvana and Moloch and bennies [amphetamine], then lapsing into what sounded like Shakespeare but probably wasn’t, because his friends all laughed." (New York, 1957)
http://www.wordsareimportant.com/meetingjack.htm

1956, the famous image taken when he had only just come down

off the mountains and the firelookout job.

1960 the Dharma is lost, Jack's lost too - the booze madness, and despair. By 1955 he had left behind the beat scene - he had been tired of it anyway since as early as 1949 - that's clearly stated in his early journals. His involvment with Buddhism; and then his interactions with Gary Snyder was really the last 'scene' that he associated with with any enthusiam. Its true that as his alcoholism progressed and his feelings of loneliness increased with it - and that for a few years he missed Gary Snyder. But Snyder effectively ended any further connection via a thoughtless and ignorant  letter he sent Kerouac in effect telling him he was dumb - that he had no understanding at all of Buddhism. But Kerouac had a very good understanding of Buddhism. What Kerouac, or Snyder, did'nt understand was alcoholism, and it was that that brought him undone - not his grasp, or otherwise, of buddhism.

Kurt Vonnegut - Thunderstorms in the head

"I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, "a blue-gummed nigger." He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the Communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was.

This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think—one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane, one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen." (Hyannis, Mass., mid-1960s)
http://www.wordsareimportant.com/meetingjack.htm

Norman Mailer

“ He was gone for all money, by 1958 he was talking jibberish after only two or three drinks. He was away with the fairies, sometimes he would be seen leaning on a bar talking to someone who wasn’t even there – sometimes for an hour at a time. The only reason he lasted as long as he did was he had stopped going out so much and mostly drank at home in front of the television set at his mother’s where he lived. Also, by then almost all of his books had already been written, if all not yet published. It was so sad and terrifying to see what had happened to him – he who had so much going for himself for everyone – so much greatness draped around him like a magic shaman’s cloak – probably the best writer of us all. Those later years - seeing Keroauc in a bar was scary. He was like one of those punchdrunk fighters that had taken a few too many bad beatings in the boxing ring. It scared the shit out of me – it haunted me for a long time. "
Norman Mailer (‘Advertisments for Myself’, 1959, the original manuscript: edited out).

1959

18

There is a blessedness surely to be believed, and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.

19

Mother Kali eats herself back. All things but come to go. All these holy forms, unmanifest, not even forms, truebodies of blank bright ecstasy, abiding in a trance, "in emptiness and silence' as it is pointed out in the Diamond-cutter, asked to be only what they are: GLAD.

20

The secret God-grin in the trees and in the teapot, in ashes and fronds, fire and brick, flesh and mental human hope. All things, far from yearning to be re-united with God, had never left themselves and here they are, Dharmakaya, the body of the truth law, the universal Thisness.

21

"Beyond the reach of change and fear, beyond all praise and blame," the Lankavatara Scripture knows to say, is he who is what he is in time and time-less-ness, in ego and in ego-less-ness, in self and in self-less-ness.

22

Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.

Jack Kerouac [The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 1953]

1941

                                             
                                                                                ♣



★★★★★ five star hit

http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/cendrars.html


The 'Trans-Siberian' of Blaise Cendrar,
Introduction and translation by Ekaterina Likhtik