Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/60

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52BIG SUR

gory detail of some dismal robbery of the heart at dawn when no one cares like Sinatra sings” (“When no one cares,” he sings in his low baritone but resumes):—“Some strict sweeper sweeping it all up, I mean the incredible helplessness I felt Jack when Céline ended his Journey To The End Of The Night by pissing in the Seine River at dawn there I am thinkin my God there’s probably somebody pissing in the Trenton River at dawn right now, the Danube, the Ganges, the frozen Obi, the Yellow, the Paraña, the Willamette, the Merrimac in Missouri too, the Missouri itself, the Yuma, the Amazon, the Thames, the Po, the so and so, it’s so friggin endless it’s like poems endless everywhere and no one knows any bettern old Buddha you know where he says it’s like “There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you’d be scared and couldnt comprehend and you'd despair so much you’d drop dead,’ that’s what he just about said in one of those sutras—Macrocosms and microcosms and chillicosms and microbes and finally you got all these marvelous books a man aint even got time to read em all, what you gonna do in this already piled up multiple world when you have to think of the Book of Songs, Faulkner, César Birotteau, Shakespeare, Satyricons, Dantes, in fact long stories guys tell you in bars, in fact the sutras themselves, Sir Philip Sidney, Sterne, Ibn El Arabi, the copious Loge de Vega and the uncopious goddamn Cervantes, shoo, then there’s all those Catulluses and Davids and radio listening skid row sages to contend with because they've all got a million stories too and you too Ron Blake in the backseat shut up! down to everything which is so much that it is of necessity dont you think NOthing anyway, huh?” (expressing exactly the way I feel, of course).

And to corroborate all that about the too-much-ness of the world, in fact, there’s Stanley Popovich also in the back mattress next to Ron, Stanley Popovich of New York suddenly arrived in San Francisco with Jamie his