by Jack Kerouac
Temple Dharma Eye
May unfold from
Pacific Center
Inward Out and Over
The Essence Center World.
This is from my new book of poems San Francisco Blues that I wrote when I left Neal’s in March and went to live in the Cameo Hotel on Third Street Frisco Skidrow—wrote it in a rockingchair at the window, looking down on winos and bebop winos and whores and cop cars—and I quote it to draw your attention to the fact, we have consistently been clairvoyant of each other’s minds for years now, this poem has “bubble” in it which you used with Buddha in your letter (tho you deleted it for “balloon”)—and it hints of the temple, the inner chamber, of the Mongolia wall, of which, incidentally, I too have a dream, in Book of Dreams (which I’m now finishing the typing of )—[ . . . ]
A thousand other examples of our clairvoyance oneness later.
LUCIEN I saw, as I say, went to his house one Sunday afternoon, bringing a pint of whiskey cause I owed him three bucks from another night, and tho Cessa was like displeased, I insisted we mix it all up with ice in a bottle to take to the park with us, where she wanted to sun child, so on the park Lou and I are belting from this magnificent huge cocktail and here comes HELEN PARKER and BRUCE and TOMMY [Parker’s two boys] and sits with us, and then I got to go for a leak in Washington Park toilet so I walk with Tommy across, and we pass STANLEY GOULD who says, “Who is that, Tommy Parker?” and here comes GREGORY CORSO with black skin tan of Scandinavian ships and cut his hair off in crew cut and looks like great beachcomber poet and he takes my Buddha book and reads one line coldly, but then says, “I know it’s great, you can’t lend it to me can you?”—“No, I gotta have it by my side all the time.”—“I know,” he says, and we talk about you, and he says, “When Allen gets back I won’t pay no attention to him, fuck him”—I say, “Why do you talk like that about Allen, whatsamatter with you and Allen”—“Fuck him” he says, like agonized over something . . . I warn Mary Ackerman not to hate Gregory, like she wants to do, I tell her, “He’s no different than you, all is the same essence,” and over comes hepcat to talk to us.
I was at HELEN PARKER’S and had a ball and then ALAN ANSEN came with WILLIAM GADDIS and I didn’t like Gaddis cause it seemed to me he was making Ansen unhappy . . . I put my hand on A’s head and rubbed his head and he went off with Gaddis and came back again to me and Helen and we got drunk in the night and danced the mambo . . . sweet Helen in the morning put on her Easter bonnet and went to work down the streets of Village—good brave gal—Finally got rid of JACK ELIOT the singin cowboy who apparently was costing her a lot of money but poor Jack, he can’t work, he’s like the robin, he sings . . .
So I walk down the streets of the village with JACK ELIOT and we just been banging two colored sisters all night, and he’s playin the Memphis Special, and other songs, and we run into BILLY FAIR a great five string banjo genius from N’Awrleans, and bang ? BILL FOX drives by and I stop him by yelling at his car, and he comes out, and I say, “Bill, give these boys an audition for Esoteric” and we have a songfest and a hundred and two school children gather around to listen and up comes an old Frisco wino with his bottle and broken pulpy nose and he likes Jack Eliot’s singing so much he says, reach in in his shirt, by god, boy, I’m gonna give you my lass sandwich.”—“I’m from Oklahoma meself”—and the sun goes down—and I have a pimple on my nose.
ALENE LEE calls me on the phone, it seems she’s now a hardworking waitress at Rikers restaurant on Columbia campus at 115 and Broadway, so I go to her house, bringing manuscript of Subterraneans, as promised, and I tell her I still love her and we hold hands going down the street, cause you know, boy, I love all women . . . but instead of being big swain I get drunk with JORGE D AVILA Ed White’s boy and his great buddy from Porto Rico HERNANDO, who is the very first peron I have met in this world who has completely and instantly understood the words of Buddha . . . a great cat, you meet later, architect, so far . . . You see Allen all there is to Buddha, is this,—All life is a dream—but later, I’ll explain later . . . it isn’t AS IF it was a dream, it IS a dream . . . see? So I get drunk with the boys in the West End [Bar] and JOHNNY THE BARTENDER is still asking for his copy of The Town and the City, and at midnight I take a peek in Rikers, and there’s Alene rushing around on little twinkling legs with her arms sawing along her thighs, real intent on being “sane” and just madder than ever if you asks me . . . all this tainting and defiling these lesbian psychologists are putting down on these poor innocent avant guarde negresses, really my dear, the things I could tell that little cunt and won’t.
JOHN HOLMES, I rush up to his place at 123 Lexington and ring the door-bell and he’s laboring up the stairs with a bagful of gin, and we go in, there’s Shirley [Holmes], we get drunk, I rush out and fetch Mary, she jolts, we go back, we play old Billies, old Lesters, it goes on, we pass out, next day when Shirley goes to work me and Mary and John go to a 3rd Avenue bar and drink and talk all that day and I say to John brothers forever, and mean it.—Shirley comes home at night, sees three drunk lushes bums in her room, sighs, leans against door just like Marian [Holmes], and all it’s the same thing again as Marian, and John “writes” during the day, and they haven’t published Go in pocketbooks, for some reason, and he’s “broke”—he says, “In 1952 I had a lot a money” “but now” . . . and he is sad, and for money I guess, but we talked, and made up okay, and of course he asked about you with concern and intelligence. But he is suspicious of the reason for my visits—so I’ll leave him alone.
JETHRO ROBINSON I haven’t seen.
HENRY CRU is back, has a pad on West 13th Street and Mary stayed there awhile and regularly on Saturday afternoons he goes out looking for stray furniture in the streets and lays $50 bills on bookies in front of Remo (keeps losing on Correlation) and on Saturday nights has barrels of beer and Mucho Coukamongas, Kerouac, don’t you DARE bring any males to my party, you know I’m not fruit don’t you, I want you to bring every last couchkamongo you can find to my beer party but God help you if like the last time you bring these fruits (I had brought Pete Butorac and Chester Kallman, at four)—Kerouac, I’m going to have to REPRIMAND you, do you hear me, I’m going to have to” etc. and Mary was taking nude baths in front of him, and he does an imitation of it, and he keeps drinking beer in giant glasses a foot tall and has cases of it around and is constantly eating and fat and when he has his blessed couckamongos at night he never touches them and when presented with the opportunity as Mary and I done, when we turned on two Mexican sixteen year old sisters in the dark room, he blushes and makes jokes, poor old lost Henri.
SEYMOUR [Wyse] I done heard about, from SAM KAINER, I was over to Mark Van Doren’s house to pick up Doctor Sax where I’d left it, with his son CHARLES, Mark wasn’t there and had already written me a note saying that Sax was “monotonous and probably without meaning in the end,” saying, at first, “quite a work but I don’t know where to place it,” whereby I realized he is really nowhere, face it, but Charles was friendly, he is having a novel published by Giroux soon (my dear) and he had his sweetheart with him VARDA KARNEY who is all gushing and fascinated in my talk about Buddha and wants to know how to practice dhyana and samadhi and samapatti and in comes a gang of young kids, and Sam Kainer, I say “Sam Kainer, where’d I hear that name?” and of course!! it’s the cat who lived in Seymour’s pad in St. John’s Wood all this time, blasting with him, conducting bop session, he wears a goatee and is very cool and Philip Lamantia like and hep—and says Seymour for awhile was Ted Heath’s band manager, Ted Heath big band like Woody Herman in England.
JERRY NEWMAN I went to Sayville with him and we cultivated his vast crop o couckamonga green and corn, and I went with him to antique shops where he got lamps for his huge new CBS style by-his father-billfooted studio which is the most beautiful, vast thing you’ve ever seen with soundproof walls so we could have screaming agonized orgies in there and nobody’d ever know (right around the corner from Holmes) and
where he is makin big records and big money now—and says he will have big sessions with Brue Moore and Alan Eager and Al Haig.
BRUE MOORE I finally met, with Gould my Buddy, and Brue says he’s from Indianola, Mississippi, not far from Greenville, on River, and says “Let’s you and me drink wine, you think I drink whiskey, you ought to see me drink wine, we’ll go down to the Bowery and light a fire in the alley and drink wine, and I’ll play my horn”—with Gould, we’ll do this, in October. Be sure to be with us, Melville. I’m in Love With You Always.
NOW LISTEN ALLEN, do NOT FAIL to look up, if possible, Al Sublette, at the Bell Hotel at 39 Columbus St. Frisco, with, or without Neal, so Al can take you around the Great Frisco and show you, remember and don’t fail . . . he’s a great boy, and sell me to him, please, he mad at ma, at me—big mad good by and maybe the first hep Negro writer in America maybe, if he digs—Not that he’s avant guarde, he’s, understand a straight simple hepcat with a GIANT FLAIR FOR WORDS, a wordslingin fool, don’t know it, a real POET in the sense in which it was known in Elisabeth’s time, and, not surprisingly, a wino, and jolts too. I just could write epics about his vision of America, ’s, what I mean, Al.
PHILIP LAMANTIA, Ed Roberts, Leonard Hall, Chris McClaine, Rexroth,97 look them up while you’re in Frisco. Its your big chance to dig the Berkeley axis,—Is Saint there? . . . Jaimie d’Angulo’s house . . . big peotl heroes like Wig Walters obtain from there; dig Wig if you can, the “Cash” of Bill’s JUNKIE novel.
[ . . . ]
Jack
P.S. Sal Paradise On the Road, which I re-titled Beat Generation so I could sell it was just turned down by Seymour Lawrence at Atlantic Monthly—Little Brown with the same little tune about “craftsmanship” he sang in 1948 about “The Death of George Martin” I’d sent to Wake—remember? Book is now at E.P. Dutton’s—Arabelle New World Writing is sitting on four of my pieces—All the others are in my agent’s drawers unread and dusting—what the hell’s the use?
Allen Ginsberg [San Jose, California] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
ca. July 10, 1954
Dear Jack:
Thank you for your letter. I always delight when we get on kick of immense letters.
Now I am trying to finish and conclude and type the poems I mentioned to you, a fragment of which I put in Kingsland’s letter which you saw. So don’t want to take a day to write you now, except for general gossip, which will do so at length.
I will study Buddhism with you. I can’t get the fucking books here. I haven’t been to main San Jose Library yet but will in day or so and find what I can. The Warren98 is probably there. Eliot mentions it in Wasteland notes. Send me your document, let me begin with that.
“Let me see you imagine nothing, and I give you heaven.” I understand perfectly. Am not joking, but the fixed principles of destroying my imaginations of paradises and god and systems has been the one block or wall which since my 1949 visions of whatever they were—perhaps your samhadi?—has prevented me from entering any deeper unknowing. I hope you are not offended by my recurring to my 1949 [sic: 1948] flashes. They were the strongest experiences that have occurred to me. I would appreciate your thinking on them and commenting. We have never had an understanding on that. If you feel they are in the way of your blackboard or present awareness I will put them aside. (They were however the consummation of sensations of Forest of Arden and Billboard monsters) I willingly put them aside however.
Neal does not understand unknowing, he thinks cornily that it is a negative approach to life, which obviously it could be in the wrong mind. I mean a negative blah blah, just words.
Your vision of two pages. Is the clarity of it new? You have shadows of this in end of Sax (walk thru backyards) but do I understand correctly that this sensation came to a crystallization more overwhelming than before?
Van Doren is wrong. What else did he say? I will write him sooner or later and try and explain he had mistaken judgment.
I enclose Bill’s letter. The new approach seems to have hit him with all these credos in his first page about the forces of death destroying, I wrote him to come out here if he wished, a kind letter, though really I shudder at the problems, but I said I would be happy to see him, which I naturally will, though I am aweary and he may be wearying. He seems better. He wrote yesterday and said he was sick, some bone trouble, arthritis perhaps.
I will correspond in details soon, I beg you excuse me to prepare my poems for you.
I spent three days and two nites laid up in Hotel Bell with Al Sublette, who received me with great delicacy of feeling and we drank two gallons of tokay and talked, slept, walked to Coit Tower. He asked about you fondly, bears absolutely no ill will, no selling job was necessary. Yes I dug Sublette, now, it’s complete, that circle. Will write more later.
Carolyn and I dig and understand each other. I am Myshkin with Neal to the best of my ability though often the pain of losing love and naked body lusts drives me wild, yet am trying to give soul, heart, feeling irrespective of returns, a universal problem. This formula Carolyn is picking up on and seems that Neal responds and opens up a little.
I applied for a brakeman’s job and there are none at the moment, but I will wait a few weeks and reapply. I think I can make it if I get a job. Should I who have entered the Cave of Night be afeared of an engine? Send more NY gossip. Love to Lucien.
Allen
PS: My regards to Holmes, Ansen and Helen [Parker] and everybody. Show Holmes or Ansen whatever of my letters they’d be interested. Tell Alan specifically please I would like him to let me know what he saw of Bill in Europe. He added a note to an early letter that was very funny. If he has time to write. I have piles of miscellaneous correspondence left over from Mexico and want to stop all this, except to Bill and yourself, however.
Don’t show anyone neurotic sex stuff.
What does Lucien say?
When I am thru collectivating my book I will think about publishers again. Meanwhile I advise by all means keep trying to peddle your works thru regular and irregular channels as they rise. You never can tell what accident. Probably something by law of averages will happen. When this method has been completely exhausted we will invent our own. But maybe you will have some luck. Have you also done this, maybe it’s a good idea: who in NY of any power might dig it? Who, who? Not Hershey. Faulkner is far far away. Try to get hold of Faulkner, maybe. The really great will dig. Let’s cut out piddling with intermediaries like Cowley. Go to the horses mouth. Can you think of any? Off hand I can’t. By the way did we finish trying New Directions? Ah, I know you’re sick of it but for moment let’s try do something.
I can’t write a Visions of Bill, I haven’t your imagination and heart for detail, you are after all the greater driver. It is all I can do to sit down and scribble fragments of thoughts for poems. When I write prose I get so deliberate it turns out bare and hopeless really nowhere like the Acavalna paper. I wrote it for facts for Lucien. Bill and Ansen tell me to try prose but I don’t understand what they’re talking about, it’s impossible, it would kill me to keep sitting at a desk going off into abstract tangents writing and writing and writing. I’m too sick at heart for such an effort. I do what I can without putting myself thru torment. It doesn’t seem to torture you to write prose but it is really nerve-wracking for me. It seems such shit, prose I’ve written. I’m not being humble like Neal who can, either. I admire your prose but feel too hopeless to ever catch up with all the massive detail and freedom and blowing.
Love, Baby.
Allen
Jack Kerouac [New York, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [n.p., San Jose, California?]
July 30, 1954
July 30,
Dear Allen,
I’ve been very depressed all day and now I’m having a well needed rum and coke; I wondered if you’ve been depressed all this day too, Friday July 30th, judging from our past telepathies . . . I’ve been so generally down all week I have n
ot yet mailed the [Some of the] Dharma to you, which I do Monday when I buy a big envelope . . . I hope you like it; I hope it instructs you . . . Myself, having really just reach’d the nadir of Nirvana-understanding, am probably depressed as an aftermath . . . I tell you I had a vision of emptiness to put an end to all of em . . . More later in the letter.
Lucien came to my house one night, sneaking in the door like my old Paw’s buddies used to do, squeaking followed by Jim Hudson and Jim Crayon and quarts of Irish Whisky. We drank in my lil room and Lucien took your big letter, your 2nd smaller letter and all the pictures he could find and stuffed them in his pocket . . . [Here, four lines of the letter are completely blacked out, with a marginal notation “He read Neal’s letter and didn’t like it.”] I saw Lucien again several days later, after, that first night, we drove wildly around Long Island looking for newspapermen, squeaking wheels, Lou making wild U-turns right on the turfed dividers of superhighways, fast, leaping over curbs and just missing park benches, reminding me of your Mexico hayride and I wasn’t scared . . . several days later Kells Elvins called Lou to get me, and we all met in Sellman’s, then Lucien kindly offered to drive Kells to a girl’s house in New Jersey, tho he had to be at Cessa’s at 10 . . . at 10 we were sneaking and whispering down his street in the Village and getting into his car, Kells, him, me, three girls, and Hudson—went out to New Jersey and had a good time. Generally Lucien seems fine and the same as ever, which means, he is Lucien and indefatigably manly.
I passed the Swiss Oaks bar and peeked in and Dusty [Moreland] saw me and came out and wanted me to take your pictures to her and tell her what you’re doing and show her your letters. I confess I ain’t done this. Please write to her, she’s anxious to hear. She looked good.
Alene [Lee] turned out to be a real little tit, called me and asked me to bring The Subterraneans and then we were sposed to discuss it and instead she had Sherman Hikox in her sack when I knocked on the door, he made cracks, such as, “She’s gone to publish The Subterraneans,” so I started to break the door down and got my Subs back. However every tom dick and harry read it while she had possession of it, including Gregory [Corso], who is contemptuous of it, and Gould,99 who is very charming to me now and I think is a full-blown Cannastra saint by now. I recommend Gould to you when you get back to NY. But Gregory’s aright too, he ran into Kells and me in the Village and had a “novel” with him, short looking, written like Saroyan, and was humble and asked about you even.
