We understood each other on other levels of madness.
We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.
They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-“Where are you going?” which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, “Where are you going?“-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society “Looking for peace.
What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just go along. I dig life.
There is nowhere to go but everywhere.
Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears.
The old tree brooded over me silently, a living thing. I heard a mouse snoring in the garden weeds. The rooftops of Berkeley looked like pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the enternality of the heavens which they feared to face. By the time I went to bed I wasn’t taken in by no Princess or no desire for no Princess and nobody’s disapproval and I felt glad and slept well.
Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don’t dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they’re angels.
An art dies when it describes itself instead of life – when it turns from the expression of man’s feelings in the void, to a mere description of the void.
That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That’s what I was trying to tell you – that’s what I want to be. I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.
At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.
Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it’s poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.
I wonder why our life must quiver between beauty and guilt, consummation and sadness, desire and regret, immortality and tattered moments unknowable, truth and beautiful meaningful lies.
He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. ‘Look’, he said. ‘You’re a fish in a pond. It’s drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything’s going to be all right.
I’m back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it’s my one and only world, and I’ll do the best I can.
Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?
But no matter, the road is life.
I looked up at the sky; the pure, wonderful stars were still there, burning.
It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.
As for his hobby, drawing, he was better at that than most artists alive today and I always knew he was really a great young artist pretending to be withdrawn so people would leave him alone, also so people wouldn’t ask him to get a job.