Big Sur Read Free Page B

witless cars racing across it like dreams! From rock to rock! All the way down the raging coast! So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness , its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.

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    I T WAS EVEN FRIGHTENING AT THE OTHER PEACEFUL END of Raton Canyon, the east end, where Alf the pet mule of local settlers slept at night such sleepfull sleeps under a few weird trees and then got up in the morning to graze in the grass then negotiated the whole distance slowly to the sea shore where you saw him standing by the waves like an ancient sacred myth character motionless in the sand—Alf the Sacred Burro I later called him—The thing that was frightening was the mountain that rose up at the east end, a strange Burmese like mountain with levels and moody terraces and a strange ricepaddy hat on top that I kept staring at with a sinking heart even at first when I was healthy and feeling good (and I would be going mad in this canyon in six weeks on the fullmoon night of September 3rd)—The mountain reminded me of my recent recurrent nightmares in New York about the “Mountain of Mien Mo” with the swarms of moony flying horses lyrically sweeping capes over their shoulders as they circled the peak a “thousand miles high” (in the dream it said) and on top of the mountain in one haunted nightmare I’d seen the giant empty stone benches so silent in the topworld moonlight as tho once inhabited by Gods or giants of some kind but long ago vacated so that they were all dusty and cobwebby now and the evil lurked somewhere inside the pyramid nearby where there was a monster with a big thumping heart but also, even more sinister, just ordinary seedy but muddy janitors cooking over small woodfires—Narrow dusty holes through which I’d tried to crawl with a bunch of tomato plants tied around my neck—Dreams—Drinking nightmares—A recurrent series of them all swirling around that mountain, seen the very first time as a beautful but somehow horribly green verdant mist enshrouded jungle peak rising out of green tropical country in “Mexico” so called but beyond which were pyramids, dry rivers, other countries full of infantry enemy and yet the biggest danger being just hoodlums out throwing rocks on Sundays—So that the sight of that simple sad mountain, together with the bridge and that car that had flipped over twice or so and landed flump in the sand with no more sign of human elbows or shred neckties (like a terrifying poem about America you could write), agh, HOO HOO of Owls living in old evil hollow trees in that misty tangled further part of the canyon where I was always afraid to go anyhow—That unclimbably tangled steep cliff at the base of Mien Mo rising to gawky dead trees among bushes so dense and up to heathers God knows how deep with hidden caves no one not even I spose the Indians of the 10th Century had ever explored—And those big gooky rainforest ferns among lightningstruck conifers right beside sudden black vine cliff faces rising right at your side as you walk the peaceful path—And as I say that ocean coming at you higher than you are like the harbors of old woodcuts always higher than the towns (as Rimbaud pointed out shuddering)—So many evil combinations even unto the bat who would come at me later while I slept on the outdoor cot on the porch of Lorenzo’s cabin, come circle my head coming real low sometimes filling me with the traditional fear it’ll get tangled in my hair, and such silent wings, how would you like to wake up in the middle of the night and see silent wings beating over you and you ask yourself “Do I really believe in Vampires?”—In fact, flying