Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (49 page)

[ . . . ]

In the solitude of the love life of reality—Truly you have nothing to do but rest and be kind and telepathize Samantabhadra's Unceasing Compassion. Samantabhadra's Unceasing Compassion is the transcendental sound of silence, hushsshhhhhh. The same Compassion is realizable in transcendental sight, the heaven rays of mothlight mentioned here. Transcendental thought is the Samadhi high thought, the Samapatti transformations and ray-ings . . . the other three transcendental senses, smelling, tasting, feeling, are on a more bestial level and on their level I do not know as yet how the Unceasing Compassion is manifested.

So for krissakes send me $25 and I'll hitch hike to Salt Lake City and from there ride Southern Pacific freights straight on in to the desert in Oakland . . . with a few free meals in Denver—en route—and we will all have ball—wine, women, and song—I'll bring my brakeman's lantern in case the railroad needs work for later for me—then from there, I'll go on down to Mexico—My big hope is that we can go to Tangiers together and see Junoesque Proportions Burroughs and maybe we make it anyway—my mother dreamed last night that I sold
Beat Generation
to Hollywood for 100,000 dollars.

I will, I have to go to NY to see Lord, Cowley, others, so I will look up [Dick] Davalos and say “Lookie here boy I want you to show
Beat Generation
to Perlberg and Seaton and tell em we'll make a great script of it for screen with Dick Davalos as Dean Moriarty (as Neal) and Montgomery Clift as Sal Paradise (Jack) and Marlon Brando as LuAnne and Allen Ginsberg as Carlo Marx and our second production will be
Burroughs On Earth
.”

Incidentally I have a concrete idea for Hollywood, it concerns a brand new writing form that combines novel with movie, the THE MOVIE NOVEL will explain—it will I think be the answer for you (and me) moneywise and Shakespeare-art wise—if anybody wants to do it—wait till I outline you the way—meanwhile, send that $25 and more if you can, if I had the bus fare I'd roll right on out now. As for my trip to New York, that's on my mother's poor $10 and I'll have to hitchhike both ways and stay on Stanley Gould's floor. Please write back at once, sending me John K [Kingsland]'s phone number and address, I called Kingsland last time and phone had changed. I will look up Kingsland, Davalos, and all. If you think the prose sample I sent you for Williams isn't good enuf let me know and I send some thing even better. I would write you greater letter today but my eyes hurt and I write you one grand doozy next week before I start packing for your couch. O boy I can hardly wait for the kicks and the good old buddyhood you me Neal.

I have phlebitis . . . but I think it will be gone in time for me to hitch hike to Denver . . . will stay there in Bev [Burford]'s basement, high . . . see [Justin] Brierly . . . then thumb on thru to Salt Lake Nealbirth City . . . Tell Neal, anything he might want done in Denver, like looking up his Dad, message, I will do, or anything else . . . Can you really get me that money? It means I can come out and be on the Coast with you and we go to chow mein together which is an old dream of mine and I want to dig Subterraneans Hep Frisco with you so much, Neal and I always goofed that end of Frisco with wild Folsom Street gogogogs . . . I really do believe now, that this world is just a mental dream rayed out from the Honey Womb of Heaven, even ugly lobsters know it . . . I say that, because, I have decided to go on wine and green again but not with goof, with conscious decision to remember center compassion I told you Holy Honey Nirvana and not get gone and hard on everybody (impenetrable lard-ass) because on green I always was ashamed of the natural kindness of my non-tea personality . . . natural, “forced,” but official, religious, gay kindness, like with Jamie and Cathy [Carolyn and Neal Cassady's children] my wine-glasses and tapes and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? Or that the Mountain is a Pipi?

Jack

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

June 5-6, 1955

June 5, 1955

 

Dear Jack:

My twenty-ninth birthday having passed June 2, I woke up the night after a wine drunk 2 AM in the silence of the void, birthday nite, with “I filled with woes the passing wind,” concluding line of the mysterious Blake Crystal Cabinet: a poem I had never understood until that moment, as meaning he had dwelt in the crystal cabinet of his mind for years, but, though “another London there I saw”—I can barely complete a straight line of thought—when

This is another letter, I feel the most important of them since I am on the verge of true despair, and if only I could express . . . or better still accurately describe the mental state I am in, accompanied as it is with a sense of the void, headaches floating thru my brain like a thought for over two weeks now, at least since I return'd from Hollywood, and a daily wakening into the monstrous nightmare of my life, reminded continually by my own inevitable recurrent dreams that—but how can I express the desolation of the state, can't hardly define it, the repetitions of meaningless thoughts, the sense of living in a dream, which must now end or be broken by some bleak harsh realization of a great mistake of consciousness that I have daydreamed within for decades, now I am passing like all others out of youth, into the world where everybody else is the same, faced with financial problems that must be solved or will remain to nag all the rest of allotted span of 60-70 years, wherein Art, what little of it I can eke out, for I am blocked and burdened by this emptiness and so for the time can find no other subject, and this a deadly one, no one's interested and I haven't anything to say except complain, trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, though I had a vast fantasy of writing a modern
Crystal Cabinet
, in modern verse, with a big dream structure from which I wake to express in the end the sudden wareness

June 6, 1955

Mostly my hangup with Peter, usual woes of lovelack, he won't sleep with me, finally last nite I made it with the girl downstairs who loves me, I feel better today, because I worked myself in hole with Peter—you must consider him when you get here.

And also finally a letter from Bill today, I hope its true: “Just back from a fourteen day cure in clinic—lost thirty pounds—usual plus a substantial case of the horrors. Still sick and sensitized to the point of hallucination. Everything looks sharp and different like it was just washed. Sensations hit like tracer bullets. I feel a great intensity building up and at the same time a weakness like I can only keep myself
here
, back now in a doughy, dead flesh I have been away from since the habit started. I feel like I was back from years in a concentration camp. No sex. No hunger. Just not alive yet, but feel like I never felt before. Junk is death I don't ever want to see it or touch it or commerce in it. Way I feel now I'd rather sell lottery tickets than touch The Business.”

He also mentions, “I have a long letter from Jack,” and has by this time undoubtedly written you. It seems obvious from the above that it does make a difference what we do, that Bill has been in a hole as we all are, and that he at least for the moment, seems inspired with the apparent, obvious, need to do the necessary to get out of it. God knows what's the obvious for me or you but the cessation of junk death seems to be the thing for him, I only hope it lasts.

I sent your dreams to [William Carlos] Williams and also I sent with that manuscript a copy of twenty pages of
Visions of Neal
, “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog,” which I had typed up a while ago. That ought to cover a lot, if he can only patiently read it, it may be that his wife has to read to him, in which case not much will get through since she may not be as receptive as he, it may not work out, thru accident. I hope he likes it though I don't know what he can do in his weak condition even if he does like it, it didn't help me any earlier. But it would be nice to get some appreciation for what is written down.

Neal seems not to be good for any money, or anything—he's there all right but not reacting, to me, you, at any rate not outwardly reacting tho he does assure me he's there and aware of me etc. but for instance I sit at his side all nite at The Place, a bar, and he plays chess, there seems to be nothing else interests him, and I feel helpless to invent any kick other to do with him.

I think it would help me a great deal if you could come out, how I know not, but wish you could. I am so disorganized. I am writing my brother asking him to send you some money and I don't know whether he can be counted on to do so or not, but I am not ashamed or afraid to ask. We'll see what happens. I hate to sound so ragged, dragged with life, but I have been hollow eyed for a week with worry over what has seemed to be a blind alley (of love and of writing, and living) (seemed more than the normal feeling of life for everybody as a blind alley to death) and not known what to do, just dragged myself.

A little note from the past: sketch:

“Back of the real R.R. yard, S. Jose in view dim of the white foothills beyond, in the foreground a factory with serried V roofs,—a flower on the hay on the asphalt—the dread hay flower perhaps, a brittle tough black stem like a vine, a halo of brown spikes like Jesus crown, several dozen, an inch long each, corolla of yellowish dirty spikes, and soiled and dry in the center cottony tufts sticking out like a dry dirty shaving brush that's been under the garage for a year—yellow, yellow flower, flower of industry, tough spiked ugly flower—but it has the form of the great yellow rose in its brain, it's a flower none the less—so brittle on the bench the wind keeps brushing it away from me where I sit near the shack in the sunlight writing—I have to get up and get it again. This is the flower of the world, ugly, worn, brittle, dry—yellow—miracle of gravel life springing to the bud.—Thistles.”

There is also the possibility that Neal can get you a RR pass ticket to get out here, I have to check with him on that.

See Meyer Schapiro perhaps too?

Maybe visit Carl in Pilgrim State. Perhaps my brother will want to drive out to visit Naomi. But why these lacerating visits?

I can't make Miss Green often, I get too depressed and anxious. Every time I get on I come to a new deeper horrible realization of my life. Every thing seems too real, like it must be with Bill
off
junk.

I swear no real kicks here, they're all available, but I can't make the repetition of the scene unless you can buoy me up to enthusiasm, since Neal's so withdrawn still.

I liked “the saint grieves.”

The trouble is that the money problems of reality are not ghostly at all, they're solid as rock, I keep hitting my head on. How the hell are we going to get up $$ to get to Europe, and when that $$'s gone what are we going to do? How can we live with no future a building? That's what's bothering me. Especially since no poetry I might possibly write will ever produce enough $$ to even think of that as solving any problems. Prose may be somewhat different, your situation seems to me remediable in the course of things.

Aw well on this lousy note I sign off. I've reread your outlines in last letter on Tathagata, but then I look out my window in the sunlight and realize that I will have to be eager and vigorous and full of plans for supporting myself in five months. I'm bewildered. And it's no joke.

Yours,

Allen, The Geek.

Jack Kerouac [Rocky Mount, North Carolina] to
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

 

ca
. June 10, 1955

 

 

Dear Allen:

Just a card, letter follows few days. Yes, the best idea of all is to get Neal's railroadpasses, tell him to get on the ball and put them together and repeat instructions, since now I know the routine lingo and jargon of railroading I can certainly pass as brakeman Cassady. (He knows). Tell him ole Sal Paradise wants to come out and re-visit the jazz scenes of Dean. As to your sad letter, yes, there's no hope, no money, feeding yourself is one “reality” essence doesn't have to bother with and since begging is illegal in the West, true absent-minded concentration on Essence is only just about possible in the nuthouse, since even in a hermit age such as I will have in Mex I'll have to come out every six months for turista and work problems even if only 8 $ month. But don't despair. You and I and Bill are in same hole and can help one another out when breaks come writing-wise. Now I'm going to NY to see Cowley with my Ray Smith “Road” A new one—and Giroux with Buddha book, etc.

Yours,

Jack

 

 

 

Jack Kerouac [New York, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

 

June 27-28, 1955

June 27 '55—Jim Hudson's Pad

 

Dear Allen:

Am all alone in this charming pad over Washington Square in window of which yesterday I wrote big poem “MacDougal Street Blues in Three Cantos.”—Lots happenin, usually nothin.—First, I went and lost page three of your letter which Lucien said mentioned $25 and train tickets so in your answer repeat said information for I will be in Rocky Mount day after tomorrow ready to start thinkin of rollin west.

My news is beat, I guess—Davalos is in Provincetown.—An elegant gay publisher almost took
Beat Generation
but now Cowley wants it back—re-changed my writing name to Jack Kerouac, offered
New World
two new stories (“Joan Rawshank”, and last chapter of
Subterraneans
)—Sold “CityCity” to David Burnett's
New American Reader
for $50, payable tomorrow.—Big drunks with Gregory [Corso] and everybody—sex everywhere but I have declined in general and on principle and
au naturel
.—Still I understand that Samsara is same as Nirvana, and Nirvana same as Samsara, but I came here I wanted my rightful [?] and money for Mexican loafs . . . tho I am wise I have to wait and endure like any other fool—Love to see you in Frisco, coming, soon, wait for me.