Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues continued from here
AG: This (the 32nd Chorus) is one of the most inventive, verbally, one of the more interesting of all of his choruses, and, in fact, it has two lines that I remember as being so completely knocked out (by) and( so) incomprehensibly beautiful that it blasted apart any theory of poetry (that) I had at that time, when I read it in ’56. It was just pure poetry out of pure strange words that didn’t seem to make sense but actually, after a long time, did.
When he’d written On the Road there was one great line that he set forth as an example of pure poetry coming from the inside of the mind, that wasn’t understood by the poet when it was written down but should not be touched because later on it would turn out to be intelligent and prophetic and meaningful. And the line in On the Road was something (about).. (it was a long line but it had within it a sort of terminal phrase), “trucks rolling down the overpass in a great seizure of tarpaulin power” – and it was that phrase, “tarpaulin power”, which sounded to him like American speech, like redneck Okie speech – “tarpaulin power, kid. You ain’t got no tarpaulin power”. But he didn’t know what “tarpaulin power” meant until he realized maybe a month after he’d written it that trucks in the back that go flappy in the wind are covered with tarpaulin in the end. The goods. Not logs, necessarily, but, say, machinery, or whatever else you bind into the back of a long, hauling truck which is bound with tarpaulin power. Wood.
Peter Orlovsky: Wood.
AG: So.
PO: Yeah, but if a truck’s going down there, if the tarpaulin is really tied on tight …
AG: Yeah.
PO: … it doesn’t … it’s only the lazy truckdrivers that don’t tie it on tight.
AG: Well, he saw the tarpaulin flap outside of Salt Lake. So his exemplary phrase which he wrote in a letter to me was “a seizure of tarpaulin power.” There are phrases in here that are like that.
“Newton’s theory of relativity/and grave gravity/Is that rocks’ll fall on your head” – (It’s very simple and straightforward. It’s the best explanation of Newton I ever heard – “Is that rocks’ll fall on your head”)
Actually, also what it’s saying is that because of cause-and-effect (or karma), cause-and-effect, that there’s gravity, and gravity follows laws, and because gravity follows laws, and because of the laws of actuality, you’re going to suffer – “rocks’ll fall on your head” – (not apples but rocks!).
“Newton’s theory of relativity/and grave gravity..” – (“Grave”, as in the grave, or serious gravity. Serious seriousness, as distinct from balloons) – like balloons it’s – “Newton’s theory of relativity/and grave gravity/Is that rocks’ll fall on your head” – (Because Newton never wrote the Theory of Relativity.
“Pluto is the Latest Star” – (I think Pluto was the last star that was discovered, n’est pas? [ [Editorial note – Pluto is not, of course, a star but a planet, or rather, now acknowledged as a “dwarf planet”. It was, however, at the time, the final planet discovered, and the only one not discovered by the human eye – its existence was necessary to explain the movement of the other planets and then independently collaborated] .
So he was saying, “Pluto is the Latest Star”, as if there will be more, as if it’s a magical universe. As if the whole scientific description of the universe is all a bunch of nutty poets trying to figure out what’s the latest star, instead of the stars being eternal).
Well, what’s “the Latest Star”?
“Astronomical facts/from under the bar’ – (Meaning, like, served out under the bar, served out to a drunkard by the bartender. But also “under the bar” – “Astronomical facts/from under the bar” – there’s an astronomical bar, isn’t there? Yeah, there’s some sidereal bar, or whatever.
PO: Could it be the neighborhood bar?
AG: No, I mean there’s some astronomical term about the bar. I’ve forgotten what it was.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately sixty-three minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty-six-and-a-quarter minutes