I looked up at the Heavens, supreme and resplendent with dark latticed clouds and found nothing truthful in Dr. Williams’ neatly turned phrase “an excrement of some sky.” For the smallest part of this one, the only one we’ll ever know until those other unknowing clouds come, could make nothing but midnight blue Silence—
I know.
The words are just a defense.
I promise I’ll step up the pace.
You’ve been so patient.
I suppose I am finding this more difficult than… anticipated.
I keep saying that.
It’s hard to focus.
Too much sadness.
Know who I was thinking about when I woke up just now? Basho the poet. Do you know Basho? Have you read the haikus? Basho was the absolute god of the Beats — they all wanted to be him. Kerouac came closest but I suppose Snyder’s taken the crown, out of sheer longevity. In sixteen-hundredsomething, Basho’s house burned down. That’s when he went on the road. I have it somewhere in the van, a chapbook, a lovely limited edition of Basho’s The Recordings of a Skeleton Exposed to Weather. Beat that, Beats!
Can I talk about my affair with Carolyn Cassady?
I know I’m skating around. Are you sorry you got yourself into this, Bruce? [laughs] I just can’t seem to approach it headlong. I suppose I could get right to it — the full catastrophe — I just don’t want to be rude and take too much of your time. But I promise I’ll get to it. Soon. First, let me tell you about this thing I had with Neal Cassady’s wife. It’s guaranteed to amuse. Then I’ll talk about… all the rest.
So there I was, falling for Kerouac head over heels — mind you, this wasn’t all that long ago! What can I say? I was a late-bloomer. The book that knocked me out, as I was telling you, was Big Sur. That novel’s actually become more of a draw for me to come back — here — than my Camaldolese hermit friends. When I make my pilgrimages, it’s to Jack’s spirit and the book that I come. To the beginner, I’d recommend Big Sur first… On the Road isn’t even on my shortlist! I know that sounds terrible. Did you know there are Madame Bovary haters? Mais oui. They’re of the opinion — people have beaucoup opinions out there! — that Flaubert loathed his own creations, from the Madame on down, and his contempt bleeds through and ruins the text. Corrupts his achievement. Another group considers Gatsby a novel that fails in its prose but triumphs in evoking a world and a time, a kind of ghost book that lingers like a scent made from flowers pressed between the lines, all fairy- and fingerprint dust. I’m in agreement! Oh, those F’d-up similes that fall so trippingly off the tongue! The glibness gets treacly once you’ve had your fill — which for me was around Page 2. Vomitous! I have a fitzsimile of my own, if you please: at his best, which is most often his worst (at least in Gatsby), Fitzgerald is like a too-congenial whore, wearing too many perfect gossamer gowns. Take that, Mr. Jazz Age! And you heard it here! (I actually believe I’d have made a pretty good critic. I really do think about books all the time and have formed my opinions with great care. Eventually, I may try my hand at an essay or two. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to publish a monograph with the “Vanzen” imprint?) To do what Fitzgerald did is an impossible trick and I’d put On the Road in the same camp. Does it evoke the ineffable? Does it evoke lost youth? Does it evoke the sights and sounds, the promise and magic of a time, an era, a world on the brink, of something mysterious and noble, numinous and new? Without question! Good Lord. Yes. Is it a wonderful novel? A resounding no! It’s an experience, not a novel. It’s a mess. Gatsby and On the Road are like owner manuals for products that can never be delivered. And yet, how beautiful! The spell they cast is diabolical, untouchable. The genius of it, to create a text, an illuminated text of words that somehow alchemize—atomize—into fragrance and music, that kick up the dust of the future and past, and the present too! Good Lord! Perfect mystery-tumbleweeds emitting the warm odor of nostalgia and the cold ardor of timeless, terrifying Silence… skeletons exposed to weather.
But enough about that.
I was telling you about my affair with the ancient widow of Neal Cassady aka Dean Moriarty, that square-jawed beefcake—Beatcake — bigamist fountainhead, automotive contortionist and cuckolded sex addict, that douche bag writer manqué who was Jack’s woman as well, his muse and creator. Jack’s man… who died on the wrong side of railroad earth’s tracks.
When I reached the end of Big Sur—“Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur,” the great heretical coda — when I finished reading that end-poem, awash in the Term Term Klerm Kerm Kurn Cow Kow Cash Cluck and Clock of it, oh what a staggering thing it is! — which, by the way, like wine and wafer, is no representation of Jack, but the very blood, body and brain of him, in those stanzas the man truly dug his own deathless, unintelligible, operatic, watery grave — when I got finis with Sur, I went straight to the Internet and found a website for the estate of Neal Cassady. And there it was… a real-time contact for Carolyn! I have no memory of the emotions that compelled me to send what I believed at the time to be a short, sweet, wryly seductive e-note. It was late, and I was actually here—at the hermitage — of course I was, on a star-tossed mercilessly typical Big Sur night. After firing off my communiqué, I went outside and stripped naked, delirious with joy, got my skin tasered by stellar wind while listening to the rapturous offstage massacre of waves being their usual demure, assassin selves — warriors unlike Arjuna, with never a moment of doubt.
Within an hour, I received a reply.
From her…
I was stunned out of my skin. Gob-smacked, as Carolyn would say, for she’d written back from England, where she made her home. ’Twas mid-morningtide in Blighty.