fpw Wrote:Hey, Mick C -- I like your sig file. Where's the verse from?
It's dark out, Jack!
the stations out there don't identify themselves
we're in it raw-blind like burned rats
it's running out all around us
the footprints of the Beast
one nobody has any notion of.
The white and vacant eyes of something above there
something that doesn't know we exist.
I smell heartbreak up there, Jack
a heartbreak at the center of things
and in which we don't figure at all.
- Kenneth Patchen
That poem seems appropriate for the Adversary Cycle, especially the Repairman Jack books, doesn't it?
Patchen (1911-1972) was one of the Beat Poets. I know the poem is in one of his collections published by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, but I can't remember which one. It might also be on one of the recordings he did for Folkways Records.
It's quoted in the Charlie Mingus autobiography
Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus:
"Not long before I worked with a poet named Patchen. He was wearing his scarlet jacket and sitting on a stool on a little stage in a theatre you walk upstairs to down on fourteenth street.
We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time 'It's dark out, Jack-' this was one of his poems-'It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all.' Patchen's a real artist, you'd dig him, doctor. 'I believe in truth' he said, 'I believe that every good thought I have, all men shall have. I believe that the perfect shape of everything has been prepared.'" [p.330] - Charles Mingus
Most of Patchen's poetry and art focused on a left-wing/socialist "progressive" view of the world, but peeking out here and there was a cosmic horror at the state of things that wouldn't have been out of place in the verse of H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard:
Let Us Have Madness
Let us have madness openly.
O men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time's dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear--
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day's evil darkness;
but We found extended hell and fog Upon the earth,
and within the head
A rotting bog of lean huge graves.