Hitchhiking, smitchhiking. Don't you see that it doesn't matter what activity Sissy chose? It doesn't matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn't matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I'm not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That's not it. That's tame and insular and severely limiting. I'm talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further--to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things. 241
If I flinch when you say you love me, it's both of our problems. My confusion becomes your confusion. Students confuse teachers, patients confuse psychiatrists, lovers with confused hearts confuse lovers with clear hearts. 328
Don't confuse symmetry with balance. 329
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. Perhaps there are times when the contradictions of love are so intermingled that the only way to see the truth of love is to pit it against the irreducible reality of lust. Of course, love can never be stripped bare of illusion, but simply to arrive at an awareness of illusion is to hold hands with the truth--and sometimes the hard light of lust affords just such an awareness. 330
Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax.
Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening. To limit oneself is a kind of suicide. To limit another is a kind of murder. To limit poetry is a Hiroshima of the human spirit. 333
Bonk! went the clockworks, and then it went poing! and unlike the chimes of a regular clock, which announce, on schedule, the passing--linear and purposeful--of another hour on the inexorable march toward death, the clockworks chime came stumbling out of left field, hopping in one tennis shoe, unconcerned as to whether it was late or early, admitting to neither end nor beginning, blissfully o9bvlivious of any notion of progression or development, winking, waving, and finally turning back upon itself and lying quiet, having issued a breathless, giddy signal in lieu of steady tick-and-tock, a signal that, decoded, said: "Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical with yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed against the wide grin of the horizon; and having experienced, thus, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanisms can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed. Poing! 236
Zoom in on this: These people, these clandestinely exiled Indians have no other ritual than this one: THE CHECKING OF THE CLOCKWORKS--the keeping/making of history. Likewise, they have but one legend or cultural myth: that of a continuum they call the Eternity of Joy. It is into the Eternity of Joy that they believe all men will pass once the clockworks is destroyed. They look forward to a state of timelessness, when bored, frustrated and unfulfilled people will no longer have to "kill time," for time will finally be dead. 190
Always in motion, ever-flowing (whether at stream rate or glacier speed), rhythmic, dynamic, ubiquitous, changing and working its changes, a mathematics turned wrong side out, a philosophy in reverse, the ongoing odyssey of water is virtually irresistible.
If you are a small girl in a low-income suburb of Richmond, Virginia, as Sissy was, and the other kids jeer at your hands, and your own brothers call you by your neighborhood nickname -- "Thumbelina" -- and your own daddy sometimes makes jokes about you being "all thumbs," then you toughen up or shatter. You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.
Perhaps sound carries farther across time than across space.
From Whitman to Steinbeck to Kerouac, and beyond to the restless broods of the seventies, the American road has represented choice, escape, opportunity, a way to somewhere else. However illusionary, the road was freedom, and the freest way to ride the road was hiking.
Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified. Then I began to juxtapose slow, extended runs with short, furiously fast ones--until I could compose melodies, concerts, entire symphonies of hitch.
You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live without nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters--or mice.
Maybe life is like a baby gorilla. It doesn't know its own strength.
If space is love, Professor, then is love space? Or is love something we use to fill space? If time eats the doughnut, does love eat the hole?
A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (but more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves--all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
An American loneliness, which is like no other loneliness in the world, was spreading out on all sides of the Cadillac, creeping out of the cooling soil, out of the air itself; smelling sweet, colored like the pinched feet of tired salesmen, tasting of sweat and beer and fried potatoes, haunted by chilhood dreams and the ghost of Indians - a lonering gloaming coiling like a smoky snake out of the busted suitcase of the continent. The limosine moved through the hush like a dentist's drill.
She grinned the invincible soft grin that some people associate with madness, that others attribute to spiritual depth, but that in reality is simply the grin that comes from the secret heart of a very private experience.
Kissing is man's greatest invention.
"Yam" became his mantra. Om mani padme yam. Hare yam-a. Wham, bam, thank you yam. Helfire and yam nation.
Why do people fear death so? Because they realize, unconsciously at least, that their lives are mere parodies of what living should be. They ache to quit playing at living and to really live, but, alas, it takes time and trouble to piece the loose ends of their lives together and they are dogged by the notion that time is running out.
Therefore, to live, one must be ready to die.
As the author sees it, the Earth is God's pinball machine and each earthquake, tidal wave, flash flood, and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.
The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts...
Of course I've contradicted myself. I always do. Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves. And in thier consistency, they contradict life.
Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol. It's an anti-life attitude. These 'simple' people who sit around in drab clothes in bleak rooms sipping pepermint tea by candlelight are mocking life. They are unwittingly on the side of death. Death is simple but life is rich. I embrace that richness, the more complicated, the better.
"But..." said Sissy. Sissy said "but" while sitting on her butt on a butte. The poetic possibilities of the English language are endless.
"Growing up is a trap," snapped Dr. Robbins. "When they tell you to shut up they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If Sissy is immature, it means she's still growing; if she's still growing, it means she's still alive. Alive in a dying culture."
For many people, maybe for most people, being in love simultaneously with an old hermit and a teenaged cowgirl might be a horrendous mistake. For other people it might be absolutely right. For most people, having oral sex with anteaters may be the wrong thing to do; for a few people it may be perfect. You see my point?
As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.
Lesbianism is definitely on the rise. I can't believe that the many who practice it are all suffering from preadolescent fixations. No, I'm more inclined to believe that it's a cultural phenomenon, a healthy rejection of the paternalistic power structure that has dominated the civilized world for more than two thousand years. Maybe women have got to love women in order to remind men what love is. Maybe women have got to love women before they can start loving men again.
The people who see miracles are the people who look for miracles, the people who open their eyes to the miracles that surround us always.
Every fear is part hope and every hope is part fear--quit dividing things up and taking sides.
The Clock People regard civilization as an insanely complex set of symbols that obscures natural processes and encumbers free movement. The Earth is alive. She burns inside with the heat of cosmic longing. She longs to be with her husband again. She moans. She turns softly in her sleep. When the symbologies of civilization are destroyed, there will be no more "earthquakes." Earthquakes are a manifestation of man's consciousness. Without manmade follies, there could not be earthquakes. In the Eternity of Joy, pluralized, deurbanized man, at ease with his gentle technologies, will smile and sigh when the Earth begins to shake. "She is restless tonight," they will say.
"She has dreams of loving."
"She has the blues."
From the walls of the middle level room, fresh pure water drips constantly. It is as if the walls are weeping. It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping.
Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for the magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.
It weeps
for the black people who think like white people.
It weeps
for the Indians who think like settlers.
It weeps
for the children who think like adults.
It weeps
for the free who think like prisoners.
Most of all, it weeps
for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.
At least two patients had received from Dr. Robbins the following advice: "So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as unsufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to live it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.
Those young women have been dipped in the events of our times, immersed from head to toe. You were born with your trauma and you survived it magnificently, but they've been shuttled from trauma to trauma most of their young lives. Their parents' culture failed them and then their own culture failed them. Neither drugs nor occultism worked for them; neither traditional politics nor radical politics lived up to their expectations. A whole banquet of philosophies has been nibbled at and found tasteless. Many of their peers have surrendered: jumped back with broken spirits into the competitive system or withdrawn into a private mushbowl--'spaced out' they call it, though 'amublatory catatonia' might be a more accurate description.
These ladies, however, they're making another attempt at something honorable, another try at directing their own lives. Jellybean...ha ha ho ho and hee hee...yes, that imcomparable Bonanza Jellybean, has taken a fiction and turned it into a reality. She has given form to a long-lost childhood dream. This is nurturing them. And that is why I watch them with such interest. To see where it leads them, and if they will be free and happy there.
Well, because I've lived in wilderness most of my adult life, they automatically conclude that I am gaga over Nature. Now 'Nature' is a mighty huge word, one of those sponge words so soaked with meanings that you can squeeze out interpretations by the bucketful; and needless to say Nature on many levels is my darling, because Nature, on many levels, is the darling. I was lucky enough to rediscover at a fairly early age what most cultures have long forgotten; that every aster in the field has an identity just as strong as my own. Don't think that didn't change my life. But Nature is not infallible. Nature makes mistakes. That's what evolution is all about: growth by trial and error. Nature can be stupid and cruel. Oh my, how cruel! That's okay. There's nothing wrong with Nature being dumb and ugly because it is simultaneously--paradoxically--brilliant and superb. But to worship the natural at the exclusion of the unnatural is to practice Organic Fascism--which is what many of my pilgrims practice. And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don't share their beliefs; thus, they foster the very kinds of antagonism and tension that lead to strife, which they, pacifists one and all, claim to abhor. To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon lipstick is sophistry; it's smug sophistical skunkshit. Lipstick is a chemical composition, so is berry juice, and they both are effective for decorating the face. If lipstick has advantages over berry juice then let us praise that part of technology that produced lipstick. The organic world is wonderful, but the unorganic isn't bad either. The world of plastic and artifice offers its share of magical surprises.