Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/104

RV 96 (BIG SUR96) Francis Chronicle with my name in it all over—Hack a giant redwood log in half in the middle of the creek—That kind of day, perfect, ending up sewing my holy sweater singing “There’s no place like home” remembering my mother—I even plunge into all the books and magazines around, I read up on ’Pataphysics and yell contemptuously in the lamplight “’Tsa’n intellectual excuse for facetious joking,” throwing the magazine away, adding “Peculiarly attractive to certain shallow types”—Then I turn my rumbling attention to a couple of unknown Fin du Siécle poets called Theo Marzials and Henry Harland—I take a nap after supper and dream of the U.S. Navy, a ship anchored near a war scene, at an island, but everything is drowsy as two sailors go up the trail with fishingpoles and a dog between them to go make love quietly in the hills: the captain and everybody know they’re queer and rather than being infuriated however they’re all drowsily enchanted by such gentle love: you see a sailor peeking after them with binoculars from the poop: there’s supposed to be a war but nothing happens, just laundry

I wake up from this silly but strangely pretty dream feeling exhilarated—Besides now the stars come out every night and I go out on that porch and sit in the old canvas chair and turn my face up to all that mooching going on up there, starmooched firmament, all those stars crying with happy sadness, all that ream and cream of mocky ways with alleyways of lightyears old as Dame May Whitty and the hills—I go walking towards Mien Mo mountain in the moon illuminated August night, see gorgeous misty mountains rising the horizon and like saying to me “You dont have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking” so I sit in the sand and look inward and see those old roses of the unborn again—Amazing, and in just a few hours this change—And I have enough physical energy to walk back to the sea suddenly realizing what a beautiful oriental silk scroll painting this whole canyon would make, those scrolls you open slowly at one end and keep unrolling