Read Online Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online Page B

coughs. I am working up a great brotherly feeling for him, he is pretty great, and really sad. He knows all the bars all over the city: he knows the city, and he doesn’t care, he is too thoughtful over the Soul in a theological way. He is going away to have his lung deflated up in Saranac 20 in a few days. I sit and tell him improvised stories about walks I take into Harlem, about seeing Lester Young at the Apollo, who Lester is, how he looks when he blows, about the landlady who is an old Jewess named Mrs. Bitter, etc.
    What happened to [Allan] Temko 21 in Frisco? Couldn’t take it? What does he know about Horror? What does he care, why doesn’t he get a job and stay there like an honest man? Why doesn’t he go to Paris and stay there and roll in the gutter? I can see him making a niggling fortune in the black market and sitting in Rumpelmeyers taking his perspectives. Tell him to take a pilgrimage to Aix (Cézanne) or Charleville.
    I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.
    If you want to see swirl come to Harlem.
    I am off this weekend to Paterson to dig poppa Louiay [Louis Ginsberg]. Come in anytime after that, say, Monday night or any night thereafter. I can be caught by phone on weekday mornings at the Academy of Political Science 22 if you call Columbia regular Universal number, and ask for Academy, and ask for me, anytime before 10:30 in the morn.
    I am struck by your ending. It might be great. It is the most promising if you just don’t fuck it up with Wolfe brooders.
    â€œAnything you do is great.”
    I wrote Neal a long letter, so long I had to send it in a package, and I copied out everything I’ve written beginning with “Dakar Doldrums.”
    Mop, Ow.
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    Editors’ Note: During the summer of 1948, while living in Russell Durgin’s apartment at 321 East 121st Street in East Harlem, Ginsberg experienced a series of cosmic visions and hallucinations. The first was of the voice of William Blake reciting poetry. That was followed by a period of heightened awareness that lasted on and off for a few weeks. These visions influenced Allen dramatically and were to occupy his thoughts for the next decade. In the following letter Ginsberg writes to Kerouac, trying to express what he has been going through spiritually.
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    Allen Ginsberg [East Harlem, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]
    Summer 1948
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    Dear Jack
    I hope you remember still with me the conversation we had last week on 14 St. There was an element that entered into it of something that, has not been so clearly realized in our previous conversation—namely that X which I have (and you, and everyone for that matter) continually harped on for the last few months. It is important that we clearly understand (if anything is important to understand intellectually) the complete other-ness of the other world. It does not at any time come into our conscious worlds—except perhaps at rare moments—but I believe it is the only valuable thing, the only possession, the only thought, the only labor of worth or truth, and to that I have dedicated my self or to make it less of a self-hood, to that somehow I have been dedicated—much as the Kafka hero who wakes up one morning to find that something mysterious has found substantial form and is persecuting or prosecuting him, giving no rest—a time life and death struggle. The unreal has become for me the most real, now. That is perhaps why my conscious thought-life is so far removed from yours. What you shuddered at as madness—what you glimpsed as the fantastic—the most fantastic possible—possibility is I have seen for several months the only thing, the inevitable—the one. There is no evasion of it for me—I can’t forget what I have seen, and seen by myself for a few disparate moments more clearly than we guessed