October 2009
27 posts
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
—Mark Twain (via kari-shma) (via teaandphilosophy)
“In those years at Columbia, we really did have something going. It was a rebellious group, I suppose, of which there are many on campuses, but it was one that really was dedicated to a ‘New Vision.’ It’s practically impossible to define. Maybe it a term we just told ourselves.”
—The Portable Beat Reader
“I am sitting in a bar on Market St. I’m drunk, well, not quite, but I soon will be. I am here for 2 reasons; I must wait 5 hours for the bus to Denver & lastly but, most importantly, I’m here (drinking) because, of course, because of a woman & what a woman! To be chronological about it…”
—Neal Cassady
“Fearlessness doesn’t really describe it. It was faith in his [Ginsberg’s] own experience and moral intelligence, exacerbated by a fascination with death. This was not a guy with a lot of self-doubt. And it wasn’t blind faith. He had tremendous clarity. He understood himself because he’d worked at it and paid for it in spades. He’d seen his mother go mad and had feared for his own sanity and had spent a year in the bug house and been analyzed to hell and back and had taken every drug under the sun and come through it all wiser. He’d been wrong, in the sense of not fitting the standard mold of American manhood, in so many ways over so many years, that he’d had to come through it or die, and he did come through it. In his poem America, he said “you made me want to be a saint.” He had to become a saint. It was that or go mad.”
—Steven Taylor on his friend Allen Ginsberg (via crookedindifference) (via heathermichele)
“The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal…that was something I learned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing… the cure for that is to write things down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. To write secretly… so you can actually be free to say anything you want….
It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up hope as hopeless— abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind… you really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself…, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.” —Allen Ginsberg (via jenna2step) (via sunbeamsinmasonjars)
It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up hope as hopeless— abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind… you really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself…, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.” —Allen Ginsberg (via jenna2step) (via sunbeamsinmasonjars)
Jack Kerouac's Letter to his Ex-Wife
I have lots of things to teach you now,
in case we ever meet,
concerning the message that was transmitted to me
under a pine tree in North Carolina
on a cold winter moonlit night.
It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry.
It’s all like a dream.
Everything is ecstasy, inside.
We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.
But in our true blissful essence of mind is known
that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.
Close your eyes,
let your hands and nerve-ends drop,
stop breathing for 3 seconds,
listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world,
and you will remember the lesson you forgot,
which was taught in immense milky ways
of cloudy innumerable worlds
long ago and not even at all.
It is all one vast awakened thing.
I call it the golden eternity.
It is perfect.
We were never really born,
we will never really die.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea
of a personal self,
other selves,
many selves everywhere,
or one universal self.
Self is only an idea, a mortal idea.
That which passes through everything, is one thing.
It’s a dream already ended.
There’s nothing from staring at mountains months on end.
They never show any expression,
they are like empty space.
Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away.
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space,
which is the one universal essence of mind,
the one vast awakenerhood,
empty and awake,
will never crumble away because it was never born.
The world you see is just a movie in your mind.(from oceanofmind)
