by Jack Kerouac
Why?
In fact why do I fight myself? Let me begin with a confession of my first murder and go on with the story and you, wings and all, judge for yourself—This is the Inferno—Here I sit upside-down on the surface of the planet earth, held by gravity, scribbling a story and I know there’s no need to tell a story and yet I know there’s not even need for silence—but there’s an aching mystery—
Why else should we live but to discuss (at least) the horror and the terror of all this life, God how old we get and some of us go mad and everything changes viciously—it’s that vicious change that hurts, as soon as something is cool and complete it fall apart and burns—
Above all, I’m sorry—but my sorriness wont help you, or me—
In the mountain shack I murdered a mouse which was—agh—it had little eyes looking at me pleadfully, it was already viciously wounded by my stabbing it with a stick through its protective hidingplace of Lipton’s Green Pea Soup packages, it was all covered with green dust, thrashing, I put the flashlight right on it, removed the packages, it looked at me with “human” fearful eyes (“All living things tremble from the fear of punishment”), little angel wings and all I just let her have it, right on the head, a sharp crack, that killed it, eyes popped out covered with green pea dust—As I hit it I almost sobbed yelling “Poor little thing!” as though it wasn’t me doin it?—Then I went out and dumped it over the precipice, salvaging first those packages of soup which were not crushed open, soup I later enjoyed too—I dumped, and then put the dishpan (in which I’d stashed destroyable food and hung it from the ceiling, nevertheless the clever mouse somehow jumped into it) put the dishpan in the snow with a pailful of water in it and when I looked in the morning there was a dead mouse floating in the water—I went to the precipice and looked and found a dead mouse—I thought “Its mate committed suicide in the pan of its death, from grief!”—Something sinister was happening, I was being punished by little humble martyrs—Then I realized it was the same mouse, it had stuck to the bottom of the pan (blood?) when I dumped in the dark, and the dead mouse in the ravine of the precipice was simply an earlier mouse that had drowned in the ingenious water trap invented by the previous fellow in my shack and which I’d halfheartedly set (a can with a rod, with bait on top, mouse steps to nibble and can turns over, dumping mouse, I was reading in the afternoon when I heard the fatal little splash in the attic right over my bed and the first preliminary thrashings of the swimmer, I had to go out in the yard not to hear it, almost crying, when I came back, silence) (and the next day, drowned mouse elongated like a ghost worldward reaching scrawny neck to death, the tail hairs streaming)—Ah, murdered 2 mouses, and attempted murder on a third, which, when finally I caught it standing on little hind legs behind the cupboard with a fearful upward look and its little white neck I said “Enough,” and went to bed and let it live and romp in my room—later it was killed by the rat anyway—Less than a handful of meat and flesh, and the hateful bubonic tail, and I had prepared for myself future sojourns in the hell of murderers and all because of fear of rats—I thought of gentle Buddha who wouldnt fear a tiny rat, or Jesus, or even John Barrymore who had pet mice in his room in childhood Philadelphia—Expressions like “Are you a man or a mouse?” and “the best laid plans of mice and men” and “wouldnt kill a mouse” began to hurt me and also “scared of a mouse”—I asked forgiveness, tried to repent and pray, but felt that because I had abdicated my position as a holy angel from heaven who never killed, the world might now go fires—Methinks it has—As a kid I’d break up gangs of squirrel murderers, at risk of my own hurt—Now this—And I realize we are all of us murderers, in previous lifetimes we murdered and we had to come back to work out our punishment, by punishment-under-death which is life, that in this lifetime we must stop murdering or be forced to come back because of our inherent God natures and divine magic power to manifest anything we want—I remembered my father’s pity when he drowned baby mice himself one morning long ago, and my mother saying “Poor little things”—But now I had joined the ranks of the murderers and so I had no more reason to be pious and superior, for for a while there (prior to the mice) I had somewhat considered myself divine and impeccable—Now I’m just a dirty murdering human being like everybody else and now I cant take refuge in heaven anymore and here I am, with angel’s wings dripping with blood of my victims, small or otherwise, trying to tell what to do and I dont know any more than you do—
Dont laugh—a mouse has a little beating heart, that little mouse I let live behind the cupboard was really “humanly” scared, it was being stalked by a big beast with a stick and it didn’t know why it was chosen to die—it looked up, around, both ways, little paws up, on hind legs, breathing heavily—hunted—
When big cow-y deer grazed in my moonlight yard still I stared at their flanks as with a rifle sight—tho I would never kill a deer, which dies a big death—nevertheless the flank meant bullet, the flank meant arrow-penetrating, there is nothing but murder in the hearts of men—St. Francis must have known this—And supposing someone had gone to St. Francis in his cave and told him some of the things that are said about him today by nasty intellectuals and Communists and Existentialists all over the world, supposing: “Francis, you’re nothing but a scared stupid beast hiding from the sorrowing world, camping and pretending to be so saintly and loving animals, hiding from the real world with your formal seraphic cherubim tendencies, while people cry and old women sit in the street weeping and the Lizard of Time mourns forever on a hot rock, you, you, think yourself so holy, farting in secret in caves, stink as much as anybody, are you trying to show you’re better than man?” Francis might have killed the man—Who knows?—I love St. Francis of Assisi as well as anybody in the world but how do I know what he woulda done?—maybe murdered his tormentor—Because whether you murder or not, that’s the trouble, it makes no difference in the maddening void which doesn’t care what we do—All we know is that everything is alive otherwise it wouldnt be here—The rest is speculation, mental judgments of the reality of the feeling of a good or bad, this or that, nobody knows the holy white truth because it is invisible—
All the saints have gone to the grave with the same pout as the murderer and the hater, the dirt doesnt discriminate, it’ll eat all lips no matter what they did and that’s because nothing matters and we all know it—
But what we gonna do?
Pretty soon there’ll be a new kind of murderer, who will kill without any reason at all, just to prove that it doesnt matter, and his accomplishment will be worth no more and no less than Beethoven’s last quartets and Boito’s Requiem—Churches will fall, Mongolian hordes will piss on the map of the West, idiot kings wil burp at bones, nobody’ll care then the earth itself’ll disintegrate into atomic dust (as it was in the beginning) and the void still the void wont care, the void’ll just go on with that maddening little smile of its that I see everywhere, I look at a tree, a rock, a house, a street, I see that little smile—That “secret God-grin” but what a God is this who didn’t invent justice?—So they’ll light candles and make speeches and the angels rage. Ah but “I dont know, I dont care, and it doesnt matter” will be the final human prayer—
Meanwhile in all directions, in and out, of the universe, outward to the neverending planets in never ending space (more numerous than the sands in the ocean) and inward into the illimitable vastnesses of your own body which is also never ending space and “planets” (atoms) (all an electromagnetic crazy arrangement of bored eternal power) meanwhile the murder and the useless activity goes on, and has been going on since beginningless time, and will go on never endingly, and all we can know, we with our justified hearts, is that it is just what it is and no more than what it is and has no name and is but beastly power—
For those who believe in a personal God who cares about good and bad are hallucinating themselves beyond the shadow of a doubt, tho God bless them, he blankly blesses blanks anyway—
It’s just nothing but Infin
ity infinitely variously amusing itself with a movie, empty space and matter both, it doesnt limit itself to either one, infinitude wants all—
But I did think on the mountain, “Well” (and passing the little mound where I’d buried the mouse every day as I went to my filthy defecations) “let us keep the mind neutral, let us be like the void”—but as soon as I get bored and come down the mountain I cant for the life of me be anything but enraged, lost, partial, critical, mixed-up, scared, foolish, proud, sneering, shit shit shit—
The candle burns
And when that’s done
the wax lies in cold artistic piles
——s about all I know
49
So I start trudgin down that mountain trail with full pack on my back and think from the thap and steady whap of my shoes on stone and ground that all I need in this world to keep me goin is my feet—my legs—of which I’m so proud, and there they start giving way not 3 minutes after I’ve taken one final look at the shuttered (goodbye strange) cabin and even made a little kneel to it (as one would kneel to the monument of the angels of the dead and the angels of the unborn, the shack where everything had been promised to me by Visions on lightning nights) (and the time I was afraid to do my pushups from the ground, face down, hands, because meseems Hozomeen’ll take bear or abominable form and bend down on me as I lay) (fog)—You get used to the dark, you realize the ghosts are all friendly—(Hanshan says “Cold Mountain has many hidden wonders, people who climb here are always getting scared”)—you get used to all that, you learn that all the myths are true but empty and mythlike aint even there, but there are worse things to fear on the (upsidedown) surface of this earth than darkness and tears—There’s people, your legs giving way, and finally your pockets get rifled, and finally you convulse and die—Little time and no point and too happy to think of that when it’s Autumn and you’re clomping down the mountain to the wondrous cities boiling in the distance—
Funny how, now the time (in timelessness) has come to leave that hated rock-top trap I have no emotions, instead of making a humble prayer to my sanctuary as I twist it out of sight behind my heaving back all I do is say “Bah—humbug” (knowing the mountain will understand, the void) but where was the joy?—the joy I prophesied, of bright new snow rocks, and new strange holy trees and lovely hidden flowers by the down-go happy-o trail? Instead of all that I muse and chew anxiously, and the end of Starvation Ridge, just out of sight of house, I’m already quite tired in the thighs and sit down to rest and smoke—Well, and I look, and there’s the Lake still as far below and almost the same view, but O, my heart twists to see something—God has made some little thin cerulean haze to penetrate like unnamable dust the spectacle of a pinkish late-morning northern cloud reflected in the lake-body-blue, and it comes out rose-tint, but so ephemeral as almost not worth talking about and thus so evanescent as to tug at my heart’s mind and make me think “But God made that little pretty mystery for me to see” (and no one else’s there to see)—The fact, that it’s a heartbreaking mystery makes me realize it’s a God-game (for me) and I see the movie of reality as a vanishment of sight in a pool of liquid understanding and I almost feel like crying to realize “I love God”—the affair I’ve had with Him on the Hill—I’ve fallen in love with God—Whatever happens to me down that trail to the world is all right with me because I am God and I’m doing it all myself, who else?
While meditating,
I am Buddha—
Who else?
50
And meanwhile there I’m sitting in the high alpine, leaning in my straps against the pack against a hump of grassy knob—Flowers everywhere—Jack Mountain same place, Golden Horn—Hozomeen now out of sight behind the peak Desolation—And far off at the head of the lake no sign yet of Fred and the boat, which would be a little bug-funnel in the circular watery void of the lake—“Time to go down”—No time to waste—I have two hours to make five miles down—My shoes have no more soles so I have thick cardboard slip-ins but already the rocks have cut into that and already the cardboard slip’t so I’ve already tread on rocks (with 70 pounds on back) in my stockinged feet—What a laugh, for champeen mountain singer and King of Desolation cant even get down his own peak—I heave up, ugh, sweating and start again, down, down the dusty rocky trail, around switchbacks, steep, some switchbacks I cut and just sliver down the slope and slide to ski on my feet to next level—filling my shoes with pebbles—
But what a joy, the world! I go!—But the aching feet wont enjoy and rejoice—The aching thighs that quiver and dont feel like carrying down anymore from the top but have to, step by step—
Then I see the boat’s mark coming 7 miles away, it’s Fred comin to meet me at the foot of the trail where two months before the mules’d clambered full-packed and slipslided up rocks to the trail, off the tug-pushed barge, in the rain—“I’ll be there right on the button with him”—“meet the boat”—laughing—But the trail gets worse, from high meadow swing-along switchbacks it comes to bushes that tug at my pack and boulders in the trail that murder the pinched squeezed feet—Sometimes a knee-deep weed trail full of invisible hurts—Sweat—I keep hitching my thumbs through the packstrap to hunch it high on my back—It’s much harder than I thought—I can see the guys laughing now. “Old Jack thought he’d make it down the trail in two hours with his pack! He couldnt even make it halfway down! Fred waited with the boat an hour, went to look for him, and had to wait all night till he come in by moonlight cryin ‘O Mama why’d dyever do this to me?’”—I appreciate suddenly the great labor of those smokefighters at the big Thunder Creek burn—Not only to stumble and sweat with firepacks but only to get to a burning blaze and work even harder and hotter, and no hope anywhere in rocks and stones—Me who’d et Chinee dinners watching the smoke 22 miles away, hah—I was getting my come-on-down
51
The best way to come down a mountain is like running, swing your arms free and fall as you come, your feet will hold you up for the rest—but O I had no feet because no shoes, I was “barefooted” (as the saying goes) and far from stomping down on big trail-singin steps as I bash along tra la tra la I could hardly even mincingly place them the soles were so thin and the rocks so sudden some of them with a sharp bruise—A John Bunyan morning, it was all I could do to keep my mind on other things—I tried to sing, think, daydream, do as I did by the desolation stove—But Karma your trail is laid out for you—Could have no more escaped that morning of bruised torn feet and burning-ache thighs (and eventual searing blisters like needles) and the gasping sweats, the attack of insects, than I can escape and than you can escape being eternally around to go through the emptiness of form (including the emptiness of the form of your complaining personality)—I had to do it, not rest, my only concern was keeping the boat or even losing the boat, O what sleep on that trail that night would have been, full moon, but full moon was shining down on the valley too—and there you could hear music over the waters, and smell cigarette smoke, and listen to the radio—Here, all was, thirsty little creeks of September no widern my hand, giving out water with water, where I splashed and drank and muddled to go on—Lord—How sweet is life? As sweet
as cold
water in a dell
on a dusty tired trail—
—on a rusty tired trail—bestrewn with the kickings of the mules last June when they were forced at stickpoint to jump over a badly hacked pathway around a fallen snag that was too big to climb, and Lord I had to bring up the mare among the frightened mules and Andy was cursing “I cant do this all by myself goddamit, bring up that mare!” and like in an old dream of other lifetimes when I handled the horses I came up, leading her, and Andy grabbed the reins and heaved at her neck, poor soul, while Marty stabbed her in the ass with a stick, deep—to lead the frightened mule—and stabbed the mule—and rain and snow—now all the mark of that fury is dry in September dust as I sit there and puff—A lot of little edible weeds all around—A man could do it, hide in these hills, boil wee
ds, bring a little fat with him, boil weeds over small Indian fires and live forever—“Happy with a stone underhead let heaven and earth go about their changes!” sang old Chinese Poet Hanshan—No maps, packs, firefinders, batteries, airplanes, warnings on radios, just mosquitoes humming in harmony, and the trickle of the streamlet—But no, Lord has made this movie in his mind and I’m a part of it (the part of it known as me) and it’s for me to understand this world and so go among it preaching the Diamond Steadfastness that says: “You’re here and you’re not here, both, for the same reason,”—“it’s Eternal Power munging along”—So I up I get and lunge along with pack, thumbed, and wince on ankled pains and turn the trail faster and faster under my growing trot and pretty soon I’m running, bent, like a Chinese woman with a pack of faggots on her neck, jingle jingle drunning and pumping stiff knees thru rock underbrush and around corners, sometimes I crash off the trail and bellow back on’t, somehow, never lose, the way was made to be followed—Down the hill I’ll meet thin young boy starting out on his climb, I’m fat with hugepack, I’m going to get drunk in the cities with butchers, and it’s Springtime in the Void—Sometimes I fall, on haunches, slipt, the pack is my back bumper, I burnst right along bumbing for fair, what words to describe hoopely tootely pumling down a parpity trail, prapooty—Swish, sweat—Every time I hit my bruised football toe I cry “Almost!” but it never gets it straight so’s to lame me—The toe, bruised in Columbia College scrimmages under lights in Harlem dusks, some big bum from Sandusky trod on it with his spikes and big boned calf all down—Toe never recovered—bottom and top both busted and sore, when a rock prods in there my whole ankle will turn to protect it—yet, turning an ankle is a Pavlovian fait accompli, Airapetianz couldnt show me any better how not to believe I’ve strained a needed ankle, or even sprained—it’s a dance, dance from rock to rock, hurt to hurt, wince down the mountain, the poetry’s all there—And the world that awaits me!