I left the warehouse the same way I left the Plough in the Spring of 78 and San Diego in July of 80, burnt out and badly in need of a rest. But this time I didn’t go the three thousand miles to the sterility of Niagara Falls, but fourteen blocks up Ashby avenue, to the comfort of Steve’s vacant pad, thanking God I was advancing in common sense. You don’t have to travel thousands of miles to escape a situation. You can escape it just a few miles away, in a quiet place, where nobody knows you’re there.

There was one other self-revelation that sunk into my head after the experience of the warehouse: I never wanted to be poor again and living in a ghetto. It was too much pain and ugliness, life sapping and health destroying. And as luck would have it, all that was about to drastically change.

Here’s the abbreviated entry that starts it off at my lowest ebb. For background, it was a week of work with Bones and for the first three days I ate and got good rest. Then, on Thursday after the card game, I decided I’m going to start doing lines and stay up all night and read, even though I have one more day of work. I suppose I figured the weekend was close enough and it was time to start. So I sat alone in my room all night, reading Paul Valery, a book called ‘Mimesis’ and another ‘The Limits of Art’, also working on some poems and my journal, very content. I fill five pages with reading thoughts at 4:30 a.m., then turn to my incomplete poems.

“Friday 9 p.m. August 31st,: I was pulled this morning at 8 from inchoate verse, in the very pangs of literary parturition. Off to a bright day of work under the open sky. And even work was fine. The air was freshened by yesterday’s brief rain. Bones was in a happy, talkative mood and we talked a good bit during the day, of old friends, like Harry O., of work and of our good fortune of no accidents, of John’s and May’s characters and our present contractor boss, Avro, his clumsiness and ineptitude.

“We worked productively from 9 to 3:30. I didn’t begin to tire till 1:30. Then the hours seemed to stretch as I installed light fixtures by myself, still happy but mentally exhausted, singing bits of nonsense verse out loud. We were the only ones there. I couldn’t think above a comic book level and didn’t try. From 3:30 to 6 I was ferried about in Bones’ truck on errands, almost dozing at points but still able to appear sociable.

“Then home, ate a cold salad listening to a Robin Trower record and leafing through a poetry anthology, enjoying it lucidly. Then a shower.

“Next John Seebach is here, with people in and out of my room, excitedly with the rumor of our soon to be forced eviction. We do a few lines.

“Now I’m at an unpleasant crossroads. If I try to wake up and do more lines, it may hurt. But crashing too might be slow and dismal. I suspect this temporary recuperation will not last long, though I’m not sure. Experience tells me it won’t. But on rare occasions it burnt bright for long bouts.

“If I could somehow define ‘higher intellect’, note the features of it, then I could identify and separate it from lower mental functions.  It would be curious to gauge its life and time span against the greater whole. It only seems to light up now and then, irregularly, with long intervals of total inactivity. I might discover patterns, or causes, or aids, or detriments to it. But it’s so indefinable a quality, so fleeting, leaving little trace, that I can only sense the vaguest outline of it, as through a fog…

“Sometimes, after hours of speed induced stimulation, just as I’m dozing off, a profound perception will occur, often half-forgotten before I wake. But this dangerous chemical excitation might be riddled with self-delusions that fool me. My notebooks (most of them) are all a record of this exploration and this question is the greatest one I have.

I wrote this fine, little vignette on Friday at ten p.m., after I’d been up 38 hours. But this is just the beginning of the odyssey. I push on, either a brave explorer, or a fool. Most people would consider me a fool for not going to bed at this point. But if I had I never would have experienced what follows:

“Sat. 7 a.m. It’s the lack of a specific topic, not a failing of will or effort that makes me sloppy in thinking. This skipping from thought to thought, or book to book, what is that but idleness personified? And how can it hope to continue long and flourish when it serves to disperse energy rather than focus it? Where there’s no method there can hardly be progress. The two are synonymous. But ‘method’ can lurk in the back cellars of one’s brain and organize the most random readings and thoughts.

“Sat. 10 a.m.: What a strange and embarrassing entry this must be. I feel like a scientist so devoted to research and forwarding knowledge that he logs his own dying. I feel deathly ill right now O.D.ing on Speed. I got carried away with John. We were having a series of interesting conversations and doing line after line.

“About an hour ago I did three within a half-hour (but we are beyond keeping track). Then we left in my car to collect some of John’s video equipment. Driving up Adeline ave. I began to feel faint, consciousness wavering and a palpitation on both sides of my chest. I stopped for some orange juice and let John drive the rest of the way. I felt better walking about but sitting in the car again I felt deathly ill, like I ought to be taken to a hospital right away. And my car too was melting down, the exhaust noise louder than ever, at worst a bent rocker arm or plunger about to ruin the block, at best a bad gasket. But we got back.

“I ate some cookies (all I had) to calm down. I’m chain smoking cigarettes to the same end. But I’m so high and shaky that I feel like I might O.D. any minute. My vision is blurred. My focus is lessened, disturbed with fuzzy and imaginary moving spots. The amazing thing is that I can still write and think in this state. Remember the saying: “the near prospect of death will concentrate the mind wonderfully”. Perhaps this very effort is saving me from passing out. If true then I am ahead of the storm with this very pen motion, by inches.

“My last cigarette just went out, the first of three — just ten minutes ago — seemed to last ages as I did this and that about the room. This last one passed quickly. My sense of time is warped.

“What a strange conversation I had with John between 7 and 9 a.m. It seemed to reach depths of complexity like an Escher drawing and heights of sublimity that I could only fleetingly hold in my mind, meanings that words could only clumsily frame. But we did manage to delineate them enough to discuss, and I surprised myself a few times with lucky images.

“It’s a bit of an effort to record. John left 20 minutes ago. I hesitate to undertake it. But it must be preserved, even in a sketchy way. The thing was tenuous at best, like a ghost of a meaning, fading in and out. We tried to solve our life’s dilemmas, in this age of ours, talking for an hour or so, as I held the book ‘The Modern Temper’ in my hand, glancing in it here and there.

“I was just interrupted by a phone call, then the bathroom. I’ve moved from couch to desk. My ears are ringing, my head pounding and dizzy. I am reminded of Lucretius’ description of the plague, and Defoe’s. Now I’m drinking a little wine. Back to the topic

“The second hour we discussed the nature of contradiction in thought itself, how built in it might be, or necessary rather than an error on our part. At one point I went to the bathroom and within a minute had three or four insights, each into a more inner circle of the question (more broad in scope). I wanted several times to write them down then, but the speed of our talk (or talking at all) wouldn’t allow it. Now I must see what I can recoup.

“I began by showing the book ‘The Modern Temper’ to John and describing it, our loss of illusions which motivate and satisfy our artistic side, and which science destroys, leaving an uncomfortable void in our lives, how science annihilates what it dissects, leaving nothing for illusions or faith.

“But it occurred to me that there is a property innate in our thinking that operates on many levels, that creates a mirage or fallacy here, in our own so-called scientific progress. Perhaps it’s a principle but however much more we perceive, at the same time we invariably gain nine times as much consciousness of what we don’t yet perceive in the same direction. Thus as we advance in knowledge a greater void opens up before us, giving us the impression that we are losing the war.

“Just as we devise the tools to perceive something twice as small as before, we find that tagged to the certainty of finding many degrees of smaller things beyond that, heretofore undreamt of, but now perfectly clear. This gives one the depressing sensation of losing rather than gaining ground, digging one’s grave, expanding the void to unbearable degrees. Both John and I agreed that one response to this was ‘petrification’, closing one’s eyes to the whole matter, doing nothing, minding one’s own business, stepping back to faith or some other old, homely set of notions. John mentioned the ‘decerebrating’ effects of all the terrible T.V. shows, ever more popular with the masses.

“Another interruption — to the bathroom again. I’m amazed at how much I’m falling to pieces. I keep feeling tingles, imagining flees jumping on the skin of my neck and arms. My pants are foul. Last night at Mike H.’s, watching movies with John and a just met German couple, after a few glasses of wine I went to the bathroom but couldn’t find the light switch anywhere but I thought I could manage it in the dark. But coming out I noticed both pant legs of my jeans a bit wet near the knees, though I can’t conceive how that happened there. But I was high and tried to ignore it, sitting on the floor a little apart from the others, listening to records for 40 minutes before heading here with John. With him it didn’t bother me at all, as he’s much worse. But I still have them on _ sordid…

“When we got back to the warehouse we talked of whether speed scatters thinking beyond repair, whether the quality of thought is damaged. John argued ‘yes’, but I thought ‘not’, though it would be hard to determine. One would have to ‘clean up’ and live normal for a while and compare the two states in journal entries. Between 2 and 6:30 a.m. we sat around in my room feeling fine but not as clear headed as after 6:30. At first we warmed a bit on the subject of Shakespeare, marvelling at the rare and daring combinations of words, baffled at how he could ever think to pair them, noting how vividly they stuck in one’s mind. I read to him a few lines from ‘The Deserted Village’ and fragments from De Quincey. Then I showed him some Holderlin poems, then ‘To Sylvia’ by Leopardi which I had copied out in a blank book years before. This one really impressed him.

“By the way, there is a flea hopping on me. I almost caught it on my shirt just now.

“By now, 4 a.m. our minds are considerably dimming. I was reading Catullus and John doodling on a pad at my desk. Josh (a young lad from down the hall) wanders in, says a few words and falls asleep on a chair, then wakes up a half hour later and goes back to his room.

“Then begins our lucid conversation, starting about 8 a.m. After summarizing ‘The Modern Temper” John talked about his own view of this dilemma optimistically, how he was sick of ‘desponders, how we are at a unique height of awareness, a great vantage point to observe more than ever before in our evolution and state, that we should try to comprehend it all, though the world as we know it will all end soon, as we have meddled with nature so much that a chain reaction is started that will ruin all.

How prophetic we were back then in 1984. Too bad, John, you’re not around to see it, being twenty years dead. It’s called ‘climate change’.

“To these thoughts I added how much I dislike science as too narrow and narrowing, that whatever it can’t examine with its tools it claims: ‘does not exist’. I have many illusions I could live with joyfully, though our society intrudes upon them. John agreed that we are on a money-science road, a material world that crowds out such things.

“Then I said there is some chance of a holocaust soon. But, even if it doesn’t happen blatantly, human life as we know it is threatened with radical change, or extinction by replacement. We shall build our betters and make ourselves obsolete and become scraps in the machine. John mentioned some S.F. author, possibly Sturgeon.

“I continued with how we fool ourselves with this supposed progress. We think our better organization through science, our greater power and speed in the universe may be but disorder and chaos to its wiser purposes. We may be a destructive and spreading virus.

“We even have grounds to support this as we are ‘nature’s one ‘oddity’, (or in cruder terms her one ‘fuck-up’) in the system, jumping our niche and ruining all others. This strange feature in us, to see and feel nine times more questions than answers drives us painfully beyond all sanity and balance, or any comfortable, satisfied coexistence with the rest of nature. It drives us to tinker and probe and prod everything, piling up questions, expanding the known void, diminishing our own stature in the ever-widening system but making us rush ever faster and desperately into this bleak, black hole. Is this not disease, a defect in our composition, this insatiable dissatisfaction with ourselves, our place breaking all boundaries? It’s a sick feature of the human mind. It has a prurience to power which spreads like a rash all the faster the more one scratches it. A ‘Catch 22’ situation.

“I mentioned how all the promises of science, its rosy dawn of a century ago were blasted by the first world war. Later it promised to aggrandize us with new tools. But it diminished us. What was supposed to free us made us slaves.

“I pointed out how this ceaseless craving in former times was contained by religion and fables and arts with cathedral systems that puffed our pride and satisfied us, until we formed the terrible habit of popping bubbles like some malicious child.

“My mind quits. It’s 2:30 p.m. I walk to the store like a broken thing. Shall I ever recover?”

I wrote this full entry out as an example of the talks we had. Many I didn’t record. I had talks like this, (about half as long) with John almost every week and others quite as deep with Bruno lasting two or three hours. And sometimes the three of us would talk together. But this isn’t even the end of the Saturday yet:

“Sun. 9 p.m. Rested a few hours but sleep was impossible. I’m reclining on the couch and thinking of going to a nearby party, drink beer, socialize and sleep later. Though weary and aching, my mind is perfectly sober. I’ve experienced this before. In the confluence of several potent drugs there are intervals where the effects negate each other and briefly render one stone, cold sober — the eye of the hurricane”.

I was fine the next morning. But I never did two nights without sleep again. We have a fund of health in youth and love to go on spending sprees. But if you’re too wild you can bankrupt it. Some glimmer of sanity kept me from that.

This is one of my best essays, written 39 years ago and straight out of my journals.  I'm amazed at its breadth.  It deserves several re-readings.

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