Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/174

RV 164 (BIG SUR164) my eyes become mad wide and black like they are now, my nerves OO ouch, this is what I’m thinking—Still they sit there by the fire in dead silence, when I tromp into the cabin in fact they all start up again talking: sure sign—I walk out again, “I’m going down the road a ways—“Okay”—But the moment I’m alone on the path a million waving moony arms are thrashing around me and every hole in the cliffs and burnt out trees I’d calmly passed a hundred times all summer in dead of fog, now has something moving in it quickly—I hurry back—Even on the porch I’m scared to see the familiar bushes near the outhouse or down by the broken treetrunk—And now a babble in the creek has somehow entered my head and with all the rhythm of the sea waves going “Kettle blomp you’re up, you rop and dop, ligger lagger ligger” I grab my head but it keeps babbling.

Masks explode before my eyes when I close them, when I look at the moon it waves, moves, when I look at my hands and feet they creep—Everything is moving, the porch is moving like ooze and mud, the chair trembles under me—“Sure you dont wanta go to Nepenthe for a Manhattan Jack?—“No” (“Yeh and you’d dump poison in it” I think darkly but seriously hurt I could ever allow myself to think that about poor Dave)—And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are “happy,” O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warmed me not to think the madhouses are full of “happy nuts,” “There’s a tightening around the head that hurts, there’s a terror of the mind that hurts even more, they’re so unhappy and especially because they cant explain it to anybody or reach out and be helped through all the hysterical paranoia they are really suffering more than anyone in the world and I think in the universe in fact,” and Irwin knew this from observing his mother Naomi who finally had to have a lobotomy—Which sets me thinking how nice to cut away therefore all that agony in my forehead and STOP IT! STOP THAT BABBLING!—Because now the bab-