Visions of Cody
Page 57
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“…Now, ah, ahem, cunt, hm, look, ah, country Louanne.”…leads to the Celebrated Chapter Joan Crawford in the Fog Rawshanks Crawfish.
Rawshanks is panoramic observation of movie star, director machinery, crowd, geography Bay & Bridge & ocean, under sky for an hour—An hour’s flash analysed & detailed with all the sub-characters on balconies snapshotted a moment arranged in round—The mandala of Hollywood an instant before the bored death of All American imagery.
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This book is also an analysis & Disillusionment with all the heroic Imagery of U.S.—The personal experience & discovery from raw matters at private Hand, not from the general Concept. This leads to “generational” conceptualization by Jack and others later—but the personal matter at hand is the subject, which happens to be Jack’s experiences on the street with Nationalist Imagery of previous generations, & his familiarity, sympathy & Disillusionment with the American myth, even unto the hero, his Hero King, Neal.
There’s a Last Spurt of Fantasy Prose Love cunt babbling, getting to the womanish heart of the matter, adoration of pussy; couldn’t publish the book all these years because of that—
And text returns to the Exegesis of Neal—Many explanations here given, of Jack’s reasons for mythology—as for “holy Denver streets”—the lawns in “soft sad dusk at dark; in 1947.”—“Down in Denver, down in Denver, all I did was die”—
The explanation for his Journey to S.F. in 1949 here given complete: “At the junction of the state line of Colorado…go moan for man…go thou, go thou, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly.”—What American poet ever had more sad & beautiful directions, commands from the God muse? More prophetic, yet more anonymously erranded?
The Literary Method Explained: “…I suddenly looked from myself to this strange angel from the other side (this is all like bop, we’re getting to it indirectly & too late but completely from every angle except the angle we all don’t know) of Time—”
(In original mss. the typewriter changes from here on out over next hundred pages—by the way, O reader.)
Thence into the book Proper, a New Neal after On the Road—That period is covered for those who ever wish’d a historic sequel—What happened to Dean Pomeroy, settled and married, Kerouac’s golden dreams come true—His self conscious love (“In this dream I lie coiled under the hill like the snake”).
And a description of Neal’s roach & grass works—and a prophecy: “War will be impossible when marijuana becomes legal.” How truly lovely the primitive faith, in depths of 1951 national dope Fiend Hallucination, that his private experience of grass would become, as it did, a national experience?
These visions include times transshifting, cities trans-shifting, Denver ’40 superimposed on Denver ’48 on SF ’49 on “May dusks of Saturday” ’30s childhood Boston.
“Everything always all right”—on these afternoons together, two Americans working on the railroad—at that time no guilt, even the sticky hot tar and rail smoke soot a sort of golden afternoon’s honest perfume—before the murder of Indians came to consciousness, before the murder of nature, at last, the murder of human consciousness in America. This was just before Dulles and Ike & Everyone Spell-man started Vietnam War against Indochina.
Neal & 3 Stooges—Finished re-reading that fancy, I realize that many lacunae & unfinished explanations & facts of On the Road romanticism are herein filled in & detailed roundly—Aspects of mythology I’d taken for granted but never understood, here justified & order’d & explained or what worth’s left—which is the richness & sweetness & beauty & humor of Jack & 25 year old Neal & their relationship. A book to make Ken Kesey weep for pity & tenderness—the early-ripe fruit he never tasted with Neal, the innocence of 1940s intelligence.
I might not be setting here all afternoon in June in Montana with wind swirling green grass and yellow sunlight making grassblade shadows were it not for Jack’s pre-Buddhist Time-wise intelligence, & Neal’s blessing, his Courteous enthusiastic curiosity—all embodied in this Non-city western space. I might have stuck it out in the Lower East Side in a dank apartment & had my kidney-stones there.
Imitation of tape, this time truly in Heaven, continues with Discussion (after Kerouac introduces his T.S. Eliot quote on Fancy vs. Imagination) on the universality, applicability, accuracy & virtues of both early boyish cosmic consciousness or reality consciousness fantasy, and the validity of recalling these fantasies in public.
& that goes into pure Shakespeare-Joyce-Nicholas Breton poesy harpings, “— this my tale and descantation hear you now.” Which “tale & descantation” Ed White, one hero of the book, remembered 25 years thereafter, that phrase, from mss.
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“…‘he plays with himself too late’…or the time ma sneaked up on me in the Sarah Avenue House…—my mother was real rough on me in that respect, she wouldn’t allow any kind of sex in the house. They say that makes a man nutty. I guess I’m nutty then”—Jack spoke of this bathroom spying incident more than once, it’s real.
A little Joyce, a little Wolfe, a little witty-bop Shakespeare. and then new breaths into the story “Neal is the brother I lost,” meaning Visions of Gerard.
Naked observations of Neal the married man sitting listening to radio at dark, “rocking his children on all three knees”—looking at the “bloodred dial” or “at his wrist for signs of a hive or to examine a hair line or think,” in Puppy Love with Neal! That’s one theme of book.
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Jack’s naked original mind’s surreal cut-ups, prophetic of later Burroughs conscious efforts same. “…mutual co-benefiting subsidiary Chinese policies of the Kraft Memorial Industry of Insurances with central main branch offices in the middle of the parking district.”
A poem never published, of mine—he resurrected, I’ll look for it among dusty papers someday, I was reminded of it only by Jack’s text.
“Neal is dead…morose, secretive, grown old”—yes that was the impression 1950!!—so early—after first flush of lyrical play between them’d passed. That was a long period of Neal’s life—when he quit writing, & quit writing letters too, and began smoking too much grass, we thought, becoming abstracted—tho I didn’t pilgrimmage West to see Neal en famille in Calif. till 1953—two years later—So I’m grateful to have Kerouac’s so extensive report on Workaday Neal those days—K. felt himself a distraction—they didn’t have things to do together—but sit in house (later watch TV)—(oh that awful Los Gatos bedroom watching TV)
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Then sudden return of complete freedom, joy, tenderness, liberation of human light comes in the chapter Jack describing his love for Neal and Neal’s words to him “I love you” (was that scene in life in a urinal?). There’s a complete prophecy of “Abstract War” on television mothswarm, a list of Jazzgods’ Names; a resurrection of Neal’s humor listening on radio to Beethoven Revolutions, an American “mysterious as frost.”—These passages follow the perfect Imaginary & Heavenly Neal Soliloquy on “our common death in this skeletal earth and billion particle’d grey moth void and empty huge horror and glory isn’t it awful…. ‘Adieu Sweet Jack, the air of life is permeated with roses all the time.’” He had Neal say. “‘I love you, man, you’ve got to dig that, boy you’ve got to know.’” and Jack’s reply is “‘I heard you, I sure do know it now.’” Whitman’s adhesiveness! Sociability without genital sexuality between them, but adoration and love, light as America.
And there Jack sings of Music too, his jazz of his day eternalized in mouthy tongue, joyful lyric prose as Prayer—Heaven thy Jack tenor’d well his timeless vowels! his “melodic symphony that rings in my brain continually and is the great chord of the key…” And there’s a prophecy of “Abstract War, Television.”
Kerouac’s also completely written a Peyote text—In this book he jams on his secret realities, giving complete explanations of his states of conscious experience. An event. “I felt more like he was a ghost I’d come to see.” �
��Cactus with his big lizard hide and poison hole buttons with wild hair, grooking in the desert to eat our hearts alive, ack…” and the swift subjective Tightness of ordinary first reactions to Peyote—“this thing is the realization of suicide, your mind tells you how you can die, take your pick; I see”—perfect mind changes of peyote are recorded, a brilliant contribution to the literature, and early O Hippies, how early this tragic common sense & undrunk humanity squinting undismayed dismayed at the Cactus—“Cody, this is the end of the heart!”—There follows the funniest description of Peyote writ ever!
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“And rain sleeps,” is the crown phrase in this royal prose, after the Shakespeare-like section passing through peyote’s gates of wrath.
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Visions of Cody Reading Cont. 12 midnite, the Snow-Lion Inn, Teton Village, Wyoming, 9 June 1972. Back to—“the wildest bar in America, corner 3rd and Howard” has been torn down. He didn’t know when he wrote it that any advertising men’d 20 years later read it, especially when the very city Holy of Holies he described was already torn down, turned down as culture, like Larimer Street, and Blanked out, Amnesiaised from local History. Well Homer sung Troy’s Walls which only exist in his Iliad anymore, much less Troy’s wreckage; still the living Troy stands in Mind.
Tonight don’t sing me “Hoods of the Moon”…That mysterious fragment is Le Condamne a Mort, Genet’s great Villonesque criminal jail poem in Jack’s or my 1949 paraphrasing—
— So, & after Peyote Vision of their life together in moth wracked joyful trembling stomach ghost horror Glory, Jack begins to try nail down the exact places & Visions he loved Neal in—(Incidentally the Bus Station photographs described Neal in pinstripe suit—can be seen in Scenes Along the Road.) (Ed. Ann Charters, City Lights, San Francisco, 1985.)
Perfect memories of Christmas 1948, and complex crosscountry rendezvous of that season—& lovely prose echoes & homages to wordmasters Whitman & Melville, Yea Thoreau with “The Moon on the Pine Cone Glaze.” Followeth Jack’s classic description of the Soul enthusiasm of Jazz, the Bodhisattva forwardness & offering of Time-Self in it, both Neal’s comments & his. We already had discourse on Peyotl is Total. A book of Visions, essays, facts of 1948–1952.
— I always thought this next Bayshore highway text prose one of the perfect prose poems of all America, & have driven & passed a hundred times “The great spindly tinlike crane towers of trans-territorial electric power wires” I’ve seen marching upmountain year after year, remem bering Neal worked there, South San Francisco Hills, & Jack’s description of the transmission pylons as “pagodas of Japan hung in a grey mist”—and now oft a year fly into Bay Area on planes over their dead bodies ghosts & see those robots still “marching to the beat of Bethlehem Steel mill hammers.” I mailed this passage 1953 to C.H. Ford for New Directions Prosepoetry anthology—the three paragraphs ending with the Crickets & Cow’s faces in death—Jack’s sympathy with the body beast, himself in the end, myself later. I wonder how I’ll die.
“Cody had become, here among the remnant buddies of his Denver American raw youth in basements, junkheaps and lawns the great Idiot of us all…”
“There had been pictures taken of all of us, our shadows fell across grassplots; our children would re-visit these photos in their brown old age and guess we were in our prime and clarifying adulthood then…” which is true as witness Scenes Along the Road.
At last, reveal’d, Kerouac’s memory of the time Neal fuck’d the car-driving “Pansy” they traveled east with—a vigorous description & very Shakespeare-funny, tho Jack in the toilet watching quoting Celine, “It’s not in my line,” probably should have got in on the act for his own happy good, not drunk himself to death later seeing in youth vision thus:…“at one point it appeared Cody had thrown him over legs in the air like a dead hen”…ouch…no wonder “slambanging big sodomies that made me sick.” Well I enjoyed both Neal and Jack, many times in many ways, and wish Jack had been physically tenderer to Neal or vice-versa, done ’em both good, some love balm over that bleak manly power they both had, displayed, & were forced to endure & die with.
A later generation en masse amplifies & worships wall-sized Civil War photos of men with high cheekbones & black mustaches, or Indian Chiefs with dour brown brows—here see 1951 Jack prophecying & analyzing the same nostalgia-realization of Nature’s grandfathers photos: “…
“…in this Clark Gable mustachio old Civil War photo Neal would sit there, brushed and be-derbied, askew, whiskered…high cheekbones…glinting with Indian Mysteries…”
Jack examined his own mind from all angles including French Canadian, “the foot tired in climes so mysterious.” a perfect prose poem like Rimbaud, notice it—: “he’s not your brother, he’s not your father, he’s not your St. Michael, he’s a guy, he’s married”—Yes I remember that little harsh poem, so tender, Jack’s voice reading it maybe on tape somewhere now lost in Eternity—“A Neal, un corp.”
“I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die…my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.” This is the most sincere and holy writing of our age—at the same time for Pre-Buddhist Jack, a complete display of knowledge of Noble Truths he later discovered formulated oriental. the First Noble Truth: Existence is Dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, instability, suffering. June 9, 1972 Re Visions—‘Course that was all 1952, “Speak now or ever hold your peace” thought Jack, his “heart opened inward to the Lord” therefore.
Visions didn’t cover the ’50s and Neal’s calm teahead R.R. Brakeman work days & family life, nor later long affair with red-haired Natalie from 1954, nor speed, nor girlfriend Anne later & by 1963 his familiarity with Ken Kesey; nor his grass bust in late ’50s and his Railroad Career broken in two by corrupt Narcs (that aspect of Neal as a political figure in normal Americana not considered) while he spent several years in San Quentin for a couple of joints.
So Jack had another 18 years ahead with Neal, neither was dead, except this Visions book was all out youthful effort to understand, early in the midst of life, what Jack’s yearning & Neal’s response and both their mortal American energy was all about, was directed to—but only time could tell, & both got tired several times—Jack went on to write not only Dr. Sax but Mexico City Blues & then Subterraneans & Springtime Mary (Maggie Cassidy) and more and climaxed with 5 years later some fame and the brilliant Buddhist exposition Dharma Bums and also Desolation Angels subsequent, to keep the perfect chronicle going—“rack my hand with labor of Nada”—and many poems—not to speak of his Book of Dreams and giant as-yet-unpublished (1972) on earth Some of the Dharma* 1000 pages of haikus, meditations, readings, commentaries, brain-thinks, samadhi notes, scholarship in the Void—
Saying farewell to Neal Jack was saying farewell to the world, both of them gave up several times—(tho I met a Cassady “follower” a 100 ton Unit Rig operator in Butte Montana yesterday 26 years old who drove me to the Pit smiling and soft gleam-eyed enthusiastic with “I love life”—). But at that time 1952 both were lonely at wit’s end with the world & America—the “Beat” generation was about that time formulated, the Viet Nam War just about to begin its U.S. phase, the exhaustion of the planet by American Greed & Lust.—I didn’t get to San Francisco till two years later to find Neal in a quiet home, receptive and friendly but by then entered into a bland new insistent religiosity namely Edgar Cayce study— which reincarnation philosophy drove Jack to study Buddhism, original sources, in San Jose library’s copy of Dwight Goddard’s Buddhist Bible, a new phase not even recorded or mentioned in this vast essay on Early or Middle Period Neal.
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This prose experiment includes a lot of silly rhetoric of course, first personal fastwrite, but nearly always in the right spoken syntactic rhythm: “Saddle Mountain all crazy and jagged in the altitude, I never,” for instance.
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Excitement, their mind’s first trip to Mexico perfectly notated: “�
�yellow bananas gracing the mountaintops, was all small and green and funny like a child dream I was so high: the hugeness of the world became a joke in my mind, I thought these mountains were all in one quiet and massive room;…Times Square is in one livingroom of Time…Mexico drove me mad…. We were innocent.”
I remember these sleepless epiphanies of 1948—everywhere in America transcendental brain consciousness was waking up from Times Square to the Banks of Willamette River to Berkeley’s Groves of Academe: little samadhis and appreciations of intimate spacyness that later would be explained enlarged amplified as the Crazy Wisdom of the Whispered Tradition of the Kagu (or other) school of Black Hat Sect Tibetan Vajrayana Path after Mahayana Buddhist Doctrine—and spread all over the tinyness of the Grand Tetons Jack never prob’ly saw for all his country mountain boasts: but he prophecied truly, he saw all space universe whilst he entered Mexico Border, unlike 1948’s bewildered materialist “typical” tourist in Aircondition Nightmare—he saw all primitive Mexic space as Primordial Place, Dharmakaya, without knowing the truth he already felt was that same great Noble Formulation of Symmetric Buddhism he’d later proclaim, himself a Herald Messenger from West—Existence is suffering…All things dissatisfaction…all things transitory…Sarvam Dukkham Sarvam Annica, empty.
At last the conception of “Fellaheen Eternal Country Life”—out of Burroughs’ copy of Spengler the ken of Fellaheen. ‘Twas Jack’s mantra that part of that decade—Country Samadhi—country ken & Consciousness as distinct from Abstracter subway map-oriented city wisdom, dopey and dependent as city mind is on someone else’s fellaheen knowledge of Water Supply, Waste Disposal, Garbage compost if ever, & the entire poisoning of Earth’s atmosphere by Wise City Slickers early as 1948 known immediately to the most remote & dopey Australian Aborigine as a horrifying apocalyptic truth—as late as ’61 the Chama halfbreeds outside of Pucallpa Peru were looking up north of their vast rainforest home in their Death-Vine Ayahuasca trance dreams & seeing the bombs fall all over the North Hemisphere cities wondering if the poison cloud-drift would rain down reaching Amazon & Ukyali River innocence & meek jungle camp.