Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/185

 3em

with the owls suddenly calling back and forth in the misty moon haunt—And even worse than dawn is morning, the bright sun only GLARING in on my pain, making it all brighter, hotter, more maddening, more nervewracking—I even go roaming up and down the valley in the bright Sunday morning sunshine with bag under arm looking hopelessly for some spot to sleep in—As soon as I find a spot of grass by the path I realize I cant lie down there because the tourists might walk by and see me—As soon as I find a glade near the creek I realize it’s too sinister there, like Hemingway’s darker part of the swamp where “the fishing would be more tragic” somehow—All the haunts and glades having certain special evil forces concentrated there and driving me away—So haunted I go wandering up and down the canyon crying with that bag under my arm: “What on earth’s happened to me? and how can earth be like that?”

Am I not a human being and have done my best as well as anybody else? never really trying to hurt anybody or half-hearted cursing Heaven?—The words I’d studied all my life have suddenly gotten to me in all their serious and definite deathliness, never more I be a “happy poet” “Singing” “about death” and allied romantic matters, “Go thou crumb of dust you with your silt of a billion years, here’s a billion pieces of silt for you, shake that out of your shaker”—And all the green nature of the canyon now waving in the morning sun looking like a cruel idiot convocation.

Coming back to the sleepers and staring at them wild eyed like my brother’d once stared at me in the Rh