Because on the fourth day i began to get bored and noted it in my diary with amazement, “Already bored?”—Even tho the handsome words of Emerson would shake me out of that where he says (in one of those little redleather books, in the essay on “Self Reliance” a man “is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best”) (applicable both to building simple silly little millraces and writing big stupid stories like this)—Words from that trumpet on the morning in America, Emerson, he who announced Whitman and also said “Infancy conforms to nobody”—The infancy of the simplicity of just being happy in the woods, conforming to nobody’s idea about what to do, what should be done—“Life is not an apology”—And when a vain and malicious philanthropic abolitionist accused him of being blind to the issues of slavery he said “Thy love afar is spite at home” (maybe the philanthropist had Negro help anyway)—So once again I’m Ti Jean the Child, playing, sewing patches, cooking suppers, washing dishes (always kept the kettle boiling on the fire and anytime dishes need to be washed I just pour hot hot water into pan with Tide soap and soak them good and then wipe them clean after scouring with little 5-&-10 wire scourer)—Long nights simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for 10 cents, all to me infinitely more interesting than the stupid and senseless “Steppenwolf” novel in the shack which I read with a shrug, this old fart reflecting the “conformity” of today and all the while he thought he was a big Nietzsche, old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late (he feels tormented in a “personal hell” he calls it because he doesnt like what other people like!)—Better at noon to watch the orange and black Princeton colors on the wings of a butterfly—Best to go hear the sound of the sea at night on the shore.
Maybe I shouldna gone out and scared or bored or belabored myself so much, tho, on that beach at night which would scare any ordinary mortal—Every night around eight after supper I'd put on my big fisherman coat and take the notebook, pencil and lamp and start down the trail (sometimes passing ghostly Alf on the way) and go under that frightful high bridge and see through the dark fog ahead the white mouths of ocean coming high at me—But knowing the terrain I’d walk right on, jump the beach creek, and go to my corner by the cliff not far from one of the caves and sit there like an idiot in the dark writing down the sound of the waves in the notebook page (secretarial notebook) which I could see white in the darkness and therefore without benefit of lamp scrawl on—I was afraid to light my lamp for fear I'd scare the people way up there on the cliff eating their nightly tender supper—(later found out there was nobody up there eating tender suppers, they were overtime carpenters finishing the place in bright lights)—And Id get scared of the rising tide with its 15 foot waves yet sit there hoping in faith that Hawaii warnt sending no tidal wave I might miss seeing in the dark coming from miles away high as Groomus—One night I got scared anyway so sat on top of 10 foot cliff at the foot of the big cliff and the waves are going “Rare, he rammed the gate rare”—“Raw roo roar”—“Crowsh”—the way waves sound especially at night—The sea not speaking in sentences so much as in short lines: “Which one? . . . the one ploshed? . . . . the same, ah Boom’. . . Writing down these fantastic inanities actually but yet I felt I had to do it because James Joyce wasnt about to do it now he was dead (and figuring “Next year I’ll write the different sound of the Atlantic crashing say on the night shores of Cornwall, or the soft sound of the Indian Ocean crashing at the mouth of the Ganges maybe”)—And I just sit there listening to the waves talk all up and down the sand in different tones of voice “Ka bloom, kerplosh, ah ropey otter barnacled be, crowsh, are rope the angels in all the sea?” and such[1]—Looking up occasionally to see rare cars crossing the high bridge and wondering what they'd see on this drear foggy night if they knew a madman was down there a thousand feet below in all that windy fury sitting in the dark writing in the dark—Some sort of sea beatnik, tho anybody wants to call me a beatnik for THIS better try it if they dare—The huge black rocks seem to move—The bleak awful roaring isolateness, no ordinary man could do it I’m telling you—I am a Breton! I cry and the blackness speaks back “Les poissons de la mer parlent Breton” (the fishes of the sea speak Breton)—Nevertheless I go there every night even tho I dont feel like it, it’s my duty (and probably drove me mad), and write these sea sounds, and all the whole insane poem “Sea.”
Always so wonderful in fact to get away from that and back to the more human woods and come to the cabin where the fire’s still red and you can see the Bodhisattva’s lamp, the glass of ferns on the table, the box of Jasmine tea nearby, all so gentle and human after that rocky deluge out there—So I make an excellent pan of muffins and tell myself “Blessed is the man can make his own bread”—Like that, the whole three weeks, happiness—And I'm rolling my own cigarettes, too—And as I say sometimes I meditate how wonderful the fantastic use I've gotten out of cheap little articles like the scourer, but in this instance I think of the marvelous belongings in my rucksack like my 25 cent plastic shaker with which I’ve just made the muffin batter but also I’ve used it in the past to drink hot tea, wine, coffee, whisky and even stored clean handkerchiefs in it when I traveled—The top part of the shaker, my holy cup, and had it for five years now—And other belongings so valuable compared to the worthlessness of expensive things I’d bought and never used—Like my black soft sleeping sweater also five years which I was now wearing in the damp Sur summer night and day, over a flannel shirt in the cold, and just the sweater for the night’s sleep in the bag—Endless use and virtue of it!—And because the expensive things were of ill use, like the fancy pants I'd bought for recent recording dates in New York and other television appearances and never even wore again, useless things like a $40 raincoat I never wore because it didnt even have slits in the side pockets (you pay for the label and the so called “tailoring”)—Also an expensive tweed jacket bought for TV and never worn again—Two silly sports shirts bought for Hollywood never worn again and were 9 bucks each!—And it’s almost tearful to realize and remember the old green T-shirt I’d found, mind you, eight years ago, mind you, on the DUMP in Watsonville California mind you, and got fantastic use and comfort from it—Like working to fix that new stream in the creek to flow through the convenient deep new waterhole near the wood platform on the bank, and losing myself in this like a kid playing, it’s the little things that count (clichés are truisms and all truisms are true)—On my deathbed I could be remembering that creek day and forgetting the day MGM bought my book, I could be remembering the old lost green dump T-shirt and forgetting the sapphired robes—Mebbe the best way to get into Heaven.
I go back to the beach in the daytime to write my “Sea,” I stand there barefoot by the sea stopping to scratch one ankle with one toe, I hear the rhythm of those waves, and they're saying suddenly “Is Virgin you trying to fathom me”—I go back to make a pot of tea.
Impatiently chewing
The Jasmine leaf
At high noon the sun always coming out at last, strong, beating down on my nice high porch where I sit with books and coffee and the noon I thought about the ancient Indians who must have inhabited this canyon for thousands of years, how even as far back as the 10th Century this valley must have looked the same, just different trees: these ancient Indians simply the ancestors of the Indians of only recently say 1860—How they’ve all died and quietly buried their grievances and excitements—How the creek may have been an inch deeper since logging operations of the last 60 years have removed some of the watershed in the hills back there—How the women pounded the local acorns, acorns or shmacorns, I finally found the natural nuts of the valley and they were sweet tasting—And men hunted deer—In fact God knows what they did because I wasnt here—But the same valley, a thousand years of dust more or less over their footsteps of 960 A.D.—And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words—We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a million years—The world being just what it is, moving and passing through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to complain about—Even the rocks of the valley had earlier rock ancestors, a billion billion years ago, have left no howl of complaint—Neither the bee, or the first sea urchins, or the clam, or the severed paw—All sad So-Is sight of the world, right there in front of my nose as I look,—And looking at that valley in fact I also realize I have to make lunch and it wont be any different than the lunch of those olden men and besides it'll taste good—Everything is the same, the fog says “We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,” and the leaves say “We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall”—Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say “We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season”—The tree stumps say “We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth”—Men say “We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same”—While the sand says “We are sand, we already know,” and the sea says “We are always come and go, fall and plosh”—The empty blue sky of space says “All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me”—The blue sky adds “Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise”—Can you imagine a man with marvelous insights like these can go mad within a month? (because you must admit all those talking paper bags and sands were telling the truth)—But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of “Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do”—And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my even hearing him.
- ↑ The complete poems written by the sea are to be found at the end of this book, in the appendix, entitled “Sea”: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur. JK