Chapter 2
"Truth and understanding are not such wares as to
be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes
and standards." -John Milton "AEREOPAGITICA"
I felt like Elmer Fuddle-Duddled Gantry as I
remembered Sinclair's sinfulness that had been as
Bugsy as me, an oiled gull staggering across the slick
Sahara on the bitch hurling insults and threats to
anyone who'd listen to my Bible Baby Talk. I hawked
on the dying tar and feathered though they were only
peaceful doves who were Middle-Aged but like the Popes
I was right with my true wit from Urizen, the Satanic
Church God which organizes all ignorance and only
on Christmas is it a bit of a bliss with. I liked the
little Dickens story about fearing the ignorant boy
on that day.
My mind was meandering and left crazy tracks on
the beach, like coloured cob-webbed words and patterns
perhaps Charlotte would have loved. But they were
scaring me as my distant eyes searched the gulf that
had taken my love away, maybe even to the Mexican one.
I should not have taken the Acid Test because that's
what drugs can do: send you to the Cuckoo's Nest. But,
I had never heard of it then even though most of it
was B.S. for as far as the eye ken see out into the
depths of the human mind's Surfacing which my mother
taught me was more real. She'd Jonesed after witnessing
Death By Water. Earlier, bitter by the water, we both
had boldly cracked a Blue Oyster Cult and ate, but we
had escaped with very little Satisfaction, still starved
to find a precious soulmate who sang so sweetly like a
female Angel.
I had vaguely remembered leaving the beach the
night before for pissing. I thought I was being Paged
but I wanted to "spin in my skin" preparing to leave
rather than going up the Stairway To Heaven to darkness
visible. Then, I had gotten even more pissed with some
other bird until my mind was blotted with images, like
a collage that would only make sense in college. Later,
the drunken oil tanker was seen by the drunken S. Taylor
Coleridge who released the Albatross with blessings
of the baptised snakes, God's creatures, too. It would
be years until I could almost forget the mod Jimmy's
suffering - and? - my own Freudian fuck-upped voice in
the village Philosopher Square - yet maybe that's the
way everything needs to be: "full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing." But from Descartes to Townshend
we know nothing IS something. I loved Pete's quote:
"Abandonment is the key to rock: when we lose ourselves
we ironically find our real selves".
I chirped away the King James version which wasn't
totally real and my guilt fell like a crazy Monty Python
sixteen ton block off my back. I cried then for the
dying souls that had washed up on the existential shore
and I stared sadly, remembering all the fallen poets who
had been forgotten when most needed now. Wordsworth's
"London 1802" called out to the heroic spirit of Milton:
"Milton thou shouldst be living at this hour/ England
hath need of thee." Few poets know that Milton read with
his total photographic memory many languages and retained
everything in his mind even when blind, and he knew the
Hebrew, Greek and English versions of the Bible. What he
probably would have found is that any church or organized
religion using "Lord" for Christ is a noble English term
and had been translated from the Hebrew so it does not
have spirituality except to the Archie Bunker types who
belong "to the right religion." Then, pacified, I suddenly
fell asleep like Dylan's white dove in the sand...
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