Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (34 page)

I am sending this by Kayuko ahead of me, will leave in a few days more. If you get this letter send me a note care of U.S. Embassy Mexico D.F.

Allen

 

Have no place on which to write and can't write comfortable so excuse this sloppy letter effort—can't concentrate and compose.

What is the situation in Frisco—I am dawdling here and will dawdle in Mexico as long as my money lasts—another two or three weeks perhaps? Then will go to your cheerful household—I have many photographs too with me I will develop in Frisco—about 200 photos, maybe 25 interesting ones.

I had a dream: Everyone I knew killed (by knife) frightening series of murders as in a movie—Gene, Jack, Bill. Police called me in for questioning.

Allen Ginsberg [Tacalapan, Mexico] to Neal Cassady,
Carolyn Cassady, and Jack Kerouac [San Jose, California]

February 18-19, 1954

Tacalapan, Palenque
Chiapas, Mexico
February 18, 1954

 

Dear Neal, Caroline [Carolyn], Jack:

Well I am still here in the state of Chiapas and don't know for sure when I will leave, maybe next week maybe next month. Doesn't depend on anything for sure, just when I come out of a sort of retreat or limbo and push on for bright lights alcohol and sex joys. Here, I am on the brush field surrounded by big forest trees looking over typewriter past leaning thin palm to a great long green mount, a tropical Greylock nobody's ever been on, supposedly Mayan and enchanted with gold and an old guardian and ruins near a white rocky bluff, triangle shaped, which can be seen on some days; and the contour of the mount changes daily, sometimes can be seen as being far far away, sometimes seems close up and detailed, especially in eerie cloud light of dusk; sometimes seen as a series of ridges with huge valleys unknown between, which it actually is, tho looks daily most like one solid long green mount, name of Don Juan.

In daily walks thru jungle (or nightly) saw a huge rust reddish colored spotted blossom which when smelt appalls the mind with a fetid charnel house odor, stink of flesh manufactured by blind blossom on vine to catch flies.

 

Feb 19, '54

Have a beard, a goatee, black and mustachio, long hair, heavy shoes, ride horses, go fishing at nite in streams with natives giggling with focos (flashlites) and long stick with prongs to catch great crawfishes size of lobsters. Or go walking midday naked up a mile of rocky clear stream, bluey sky, with lianas and elephant ear trees and angel hair trees of plantain leaves and giant saibol (mahogany) trees filled with monkeys, on bank or dank islands midstream, ankle or waist or neck deep walk. A few mosquitoes.

And every hour or so get up from hammock and sit and idle with my drums, especially at dawn, at dusk, and during dark hours by fire before mosquito net is opened over hammock. Drums: smallest is three and a half feet, longest is seventeen feet and stands on a vine and stick support for vibrations to hang free. I went out and tapped rubber trees for black hard balls to tip heavy foot long sticks with for proper bong. I play several hours daily, mostly very soft listening, and when a file of Indians rides in thru the trails from Agua Azul, Eden like little town in hills an hour ride away, I break out in African reverberations which can be heard for miles around. Am known as Senor Jalisco.

I read the
Cloud of Unknowing
, anonymous 14th century handbook of abstraction and in this limbo have developed a feeling again for possibilities of sitting and with stark blankness conceiving a familiar uncanny sensation which never comes to me whole, presumably too divine. Time spent here has been mainly contemplative of this fixed idea, and I had one day of excited agitation thinking I should go be a monk, but no need to do that, can develop anywhere and such agitations are passing. What hung me up on
Cloud of Un.
was the lovely and obviously true idea that a contemplative doesn't have to do anything but what he feels like, sit and think or walk and think, don't worry about work, life, money, no hang-ups, his job is to have no job but the unknown abstraction and its sensations, and his love of it. I have a tentative offer if I want to stay here till August alone when owner of ranch goes off to make money in states and manage it passively, no duties, just be here and see nobody sets fire to house or steals cocoa. Probably a very small pay like 100 pesos month, but perfect refuge and learn a lot. However want to get back to states and am lonely for someone to share pleasures with, wish someone were here to understand beauty of the drums, they're so big they would make Newman
⁹³
for instance cream if he were not beyond the creaming state in his bald sunburned pate age.

Plans: Every several nights I have a melancholy dream that I am embarking for the ancient parapets of Europe: passageways, captains, gangplanks, staterooms, bunks, huge decks cluttered with people in furs
a la
'20s or deckchairs, nite lunches, foc'sls, arrangements with family, breaking up of apartments, foghorns in N.Y. harbor mist near docksides, Front Street or Telegram Street; and one night as summary I had a picture of N.Y. in color, in oval frame, enclosing Hohnsbean, Kingsland, Dusty, Keck, Anton [Rosenberg], D. Gaynor or others, Durgin, Merims, was Cannastra?, a compressed proustian moment in oval frame of all characters in activity at a psychic party Technicolor, all NY in one picture as you, Jack (are you there?) must have had many times over from road to road.

So, after waking up from four of these in two weeks I realized (especially after dream of Burroughs on Italian 2nd class train going to Spain) that as soon as possible must go to live awhile in Europe—think of the marvelous facades and palaces of dank Venice alone for instance, which will be digged in spacious St. Mark's Square dusk by us among pigeons of Europe and Eyetalian beggars as in some slow silent stage presentation of melancholy cloaked Byronic traveler passing thru in sad ballet. To say nothing of hollow old Catholic Rome. Prague! the very name conjures a mirage of centuries, the Golem, ghettoes, stone kings and fountains of dark lions and grey cherubs, students drinking beer and dueling thru the night. And perhaps sweet Moscow. Then there is Paris. Paris! City of Light!
ici mouru
Racine! Here Proust sipped his delicate tea, here Jean Gabin stared out over the roofs with his mistress crying in bed, glum. Memories, ancient waltzes,
tristesse de la lune
, all the tenderness of antiquity and the angel gentility of civilization, with the Eiffel tower and strange city mystics
a la
Cocteau and Rimbaud and most the tearful reality of the old world places. Even wish to see Londres, London of great bells and banking houses old as time, where liveth still in silence Seymour [Wyse] waiting for a winking eye from us undoubtedly.

As I sit here under the mountain at the moment of noon, sun white in that green high palm tree leaves, butterflies in the meadow, contemplating a voyage to the old world, having seen a ruin in the new, head full of abstraction and memory, there are sitting beside me four Gauguin maids conversing in Spanish (I half understand and can follow) barefoot in bright store clothes, with big safety pins in bosom of dresses for ornament, complaining about their ailments to the senora who has medicines: codeine, barbiturates, W.C. Fields Wampole drink for the weary and worried, vitamins that would mystify and delight Burroughs. And last week a murderer, having avenged the death of his father (sister of one of these girls), young boy with bullet holes in hand and arm, came at dawn for refuge from law and help, and we operated, cutting open upper arm to take out bullet (I felt faint, watching her cut with a Gillette double edged blade) and put him up for two days till rumors of a posse (just like frontier) reached us one night and we sent him to the woods to hide. Two weeks ago we had a meteor so grand, big as star of Bethlehem, illuminated blue and red the whole half horizon. Same day my first trembler; which earthquake, I later found, had half destroyed the back-interior town of Yajalon (Yah-ha-lone), the church in ruins, lava coming up, a new volcano like Paracutin—though this is rumor, another man passing thru said the mountain top went to the bottom and the bottom went to the top—meaning a landslide?
Quien sabe
? however adding that the priest who was supposed to have perished screaming in the tottering cathedral four centuries old really was still alive though seriously wounded, as he had been konked by a single brick shook loose. As well as a perfect lunar eclipse I saw the nite I left Palenque.

I live among the thatch roof huts, eat tortillas and frijoles at every meal with mucho pleasure, amazing how a real strong taste for them can be developed, like for potatoes with eggs, meat, vegs. etc. I pass banana groves and work in them for an hour or so weekly, cutting, pruning, gathering the bunches, eat them fried and raw, daily also. And work a few hours or a day in the cocoa grove, cutting, washing, fermenting and drying cocoa (makes chocolate)—washing particularly, very pleasant, with group of injuns barefoot each with a woven basket swushing the gooey nuts around to rid them of guk, squatting in sunlite under hot greenery by rocky stream. Well not always a group of injuns, but often. And at nite I sit in huts by fires watching violin and drum, sometimes.

La Senora, in case I forgot to say last time, is a Giroux-Harcourt authoress, once wrote a best seller about jungle (
Three in the Jungle
). Ugh. Writing another about mystical Mayans, interesting facts for Bill but she's a strange case, some good and some nutty and some tiresome about her; her best feature aside from real (tho perhaps indefinite mystic hang-up) being pioneer type-operating-on-the-indians-grew-up-around-here-carries-a-machete-and-runs-plantation aloneness, real archeological pro.

Yesterday I laughed to myself with delight at the thought of finally leaving here sometime and really making it to Frisco; and tho I will, and arrival in Frisco is sure shooting barring unforeseen changes in soul atmosphere here or there or seismic phenomena unwonted or civil states and wars unheard of here as yet (no seen newspaper in two months) (me), I don't know when. It's like a dream of Europe. I ordered my mail sent down here from D.F. and other places so if you've written me, I'll get it this coming week. Can be reached here: HOTEL ARTURO HUY, c/o Karena Shields, Allen Ginsberg, Salto De Agua, Chiapas, Mexico. When I leave mail if any will be forwarded and I'll write then anyway.

Shutting up shop—man bit by bushmaster in next village and must find horses in field rush with razors and antiviperina. But eat first, we sent medicine ahead. Stupid corrupted blood Indians who play poor drums don't even know enuf to cut open and bleed snakebite. Older time real Indians know savvy more lore.

Croak.

A. Groan.

 

 

Jack Kerouac [San Jose, California] to
Allen Ginsberg [n.p., Mexico City, Mexico?]

ca.
March 1954

 

Dear Allen:

This large enclosed interesting letter from Burroughs in Tangier indicates that he needs a “completely new approach” and shows how all of us in only the past four or five months have suddenly changed and taken up new positions around what we like to think is the sun, or the moon, or the everything and zenith. Neal, for instance, has suddenly become religious and is espousing Reincarnation and Karma.
⁹⁴
Carolyn is firm on the subject of Karen Horney (“Inner Conflicts” or the later one.)
⁹⁵
. . . saying it's all the same thing, in different approach. In fact a general Bahiaism all over and even on the radio you hear a preacher say that it is “false individualism” that makes a man refrain from “labor.”—and so everybody getting wise to the terms “false” and “true,” “essence” and “form” and etc. I, on receiving your Chiapas letter, was high with Al Sublette and Neal, listening to Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, and read about your proper bong drums how the Indians come single file to the store and you jump up and drum popeyed to impress them and they call you Jalisco and you have an act with medicine. Did not ye find those secret eroticism you went there for? Is it worth visiting?

Shall I come down there and sit, or shall I go back to New York, or shall I live under a tree by the railroad track in California, or shall I move into an abandoned dobe hut in the Valley of Mexico and see [Bill] Garver every Saturday afternoon? Alone or with Al Sublette? Or go down to Chiapas with or without Al Sublette? Al says he wants to sit and let it all go but admits his weakness for drugs, lush, cunt and all the countless anxious intoxications of the jazz age and the machine. He's not an intellectual. I prefer going off alone on all counts for everything now but can't tear myself away from bondage and bondhood to friendhood ship and have long since realized that not only am I the Messiah deceived but you too, and Neal too, and Bill, and Zilen, and Zunkey, and Mush, and Crush. From the ten quarters of the universe it is said they come and lay radiant hands in a wheel on your brow. This is in appearance, like the moths of light, and that Atlantis radar machine we saw in the sky over the New School when you said it had been there since the beginning in eternity anyway, and now Neal claims they had atomic power in Atlantis and Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and Bill Keck and all the social details so drearsome come flooding in to repeat what we know has already happened and will happen again. A girl will come to me again; and I will be an accomplice after the fact to a crime again; and I will find rest again and sleep deep within the golden light in the womb of the mind again. But all of it has to be, we must have a conference, or nothing, east meets west or nothing; that's why, I want to arrange a meeting between us or none at all, naming place, time, laying bare plans for livelihood, ideas; I have the teaching to impart to you. The teaching, the Dharma, is lost to Neal. He has already and as I say at the same time espoused a teaching (of Edgar Cayce a supernaturalist recently dead who cured people by self hypnotic diagnosis) and is like a Billy Graham in a suit, and talks rapidly explaining that here at last is “scientific proof” of the truth of reincarnation and Neal's interest in the subject curiously Melvillean, “the world would be flooded with evil if there wasn't an inner good” and a wheel of justice turning us dog murderers from bad to worse till we repent and become dogs and are killed by dog murderers and are reborn contemplatives and perfect to finish. But let him tell you himself. That's the big main thing, that he tell you himself, so you'll judge for yourself (the nature of his what amounts to materialistic heresy here). But the difference amounts only to choice of celestial contacts, different connections, I suppose the pusher is the same. Neal begins there is no beginning and end to the world, the karmic etheric akasha essence substance vibrating continuously in all the billion universes and our atman-entities rushing around . . . and I believe that there was emptiness and silence, and will be, after this hassle ends, by our own volition undone thread by thread and our egos and entities vanish but so we took benny tonight and I'll write this big letter and empty my notebooks to you so you can judge and Neal will dictate later.