Medieval, yes; dark-aged, grim ecclesiastical spire-populated, spire-pointed, steeple-spired, gothic-inspired, a clawing toothy saber-toothy jag-ragged sky-scratching skyline, spear-clutching sky-bound city; soul fleeing earth. The slimy streets, the smeary streets, the slime-smear-shining streets: dung, piss, spit, snot and ever-present wetness, water, fish blood, foggy sky, smoky, pressed down by its own weight upon the city’s streets.

Dark.

Grave.

A dusky graveyard of the lithe lissome spirit, possibly—I’ll make no verdicts there. Smoke-fog everywhere, a heavy foggy smoggy sky pushed damply down upon the city under its own foul-filthy fatness, dump-lidded bosom-sky.

Scruff from an itching scalp.

A shod horse on a cobbled street is a whistling echo from the dimmest past, a fifty-years = fifty-thousand light-years ago past. Lost voices wind-borne from the ghostly past. The ghostly ghastly past, aghast against the past.

Prometheus Bounded Up and Down

From a Crag in the Caucasus

No More Of This Nonsense, Abbey!

THREE TRAMPS: A novel vindicating the philosophy of adventure & disorder, soaked in the democratic popular culture of contemporary U.S.A. (A modern Huckleberry Finn?) Three grown men, one a Negro, wander from California to Texas and Louisiana and back (maybe), singing, guitar-playing, whoring, stealing, talking, a paean to irresponsibility. The climax might be an attempted lynching in the South.

Philosophical Correlative = the values of the earthbound sensuous life (value in adventure, too) against a background of cosmic melancholia: freight trains, used cars, bad jobs, blues and hillbillies, out on the desert, mountain cabin, ghost town. Mexico, New Orleans, fine drunks (Tortilla Flat stuff?); rain on the roof, fire in the stove, venison hanging from the rafters, a case of beer on the floor; Pure Sentimentality, emphasizing equality, liberty, good living, brotherhood; change and adventure and uncertainty made both real and ideal.

Everything. I’ll throw everything in. Whole hog. Hog wild. A great big fat beautiful obscene book, the most hilarious, tear-jerking, side-splitting, throat-choking, belly-busting, heartbreaking book ever written. Don’t forget the book in the book. (The proper place for parody.)

Throw everything in? Maybe you’d better throw in the towel.

[MANUEL] DEFALLA’S Harpsichord Concerto; Greensleeves—another of the farawaymysticalstrangelyhauntinghearttroubling melodies.

Imagine the thrill of the composer, hearing a smudgefaced child in the street singing a tune of his; hearing, by the sea—the great curve of sand, leaning trees, clouds, gulls, crags, the wind-whistle, the waves larrup, the screebirds’ cry, the vaulting distance echo—a personal music.

There is a music in me, too, not much yet but growing. I’ll have to soon put in a stretch at some conservatory, getting the means to release this musical pressure. Nothing in the literary or ideational can fully express it. Two or three symphonies, a handful of songs, things for flutes, piano, guitar, timpani, harp, Indian drums, Indian themes, the Indian desert world.

THE WALKING WONDER, the PENTARACHNID, the rolling pictographic crypto-man, all legs, arms, backwardlooking head, all feet and hands, quintesticled. [Abbey’s sketches of this five-limbed anthropomorphic tumbleweed figure appear scores of times throughout the early journals.]

EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE converges upon me.

I radiate light upon everything in the universe.