Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the East, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father’s mist.
I cried for it. That’s how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.
I saw letters he wrote at age 14 before his recent spell of silence: they were perfectly normal and better than average writings, in fact sensitive and better than anything I could have written at 14 when I also was an innocent introverted monster.
Everything was everlastingly loose and responsive, it was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond emptyspace blue.
There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look.
Life is not an apology.
They’ll eat your heart alive Every time.
He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.
I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.
Actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else.
I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.
There was something virile in her attitude toward tragedy, as though she were defying God to knock off the chip He Himself had placed on her shoulder.
Her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse.
One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.
I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara’s ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds.
I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men.
I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.
Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
It’s terrible never to find a father in a world chock-full of fathers of all sorts.
We’ve got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.