Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz continues from here
AG: Does anybody know that line? – ” The earth is an Indian thing”
Student: (I think it’s) in Lonesome Traveler?
AG: Yes… It’s in On the Road, maybe Lonesome Traveler ?
Student: Yes it’s in On The Road, also
AG: I wonder if he put it in later. I don’t if he wrote it out then as part of it.. or.. there were a few phrases he did add in – but..maybe in Lonesome Traveler?, “Breakman on the Road,” (“October in the Railroad Earth“) is it in?
Student: No
Student(2): At the beginning.. There’s the trip to Mexico.. and “fellaheen”..
AG: Oh yeah, ” fellaheen” – You know that word “fellaheen”, right? – You know where that comes from?
Student: No I don’t, I always…
AG: Well “fellaheen” comes out of Spengler, Otto Spengler, the book of the big two-volume, (rather two-volumes-in-one), that Burroughs handed him when we went to visit Burroughs. “Fellaheen” is a word that Spengler uses for the non-city, the peasant pastoral outside of the city, the people that had been there (that were the same in Mexico, Egypt, Peru, China, people living diurnally, by the seasons, by the planets, by plants, by crops, by planting, by market, outside the centers of sophisticated power centers, of sophisticated power and the “uprisings of foam” of the central cities). So I guess Kerouac was identifying himself more and more with “Fellaheen)- And the Earth is “an Indian thing”. Actually, contact with the earth, as in America, I didn’t know what he meant. I thought… I got mad when I heard him say that at first. Actually, I was always getting mad at his works of genius! When I first heard him say that I thought he meant “white people are not supposed to be here, only the Indians have the earth, the earth is owned by the Indians, the earth an Indian thing”. And then later, it got to mean to me, “Oh the Indians, you know, walk, they know their own geography, they know all the buds and the plants and the medicines, and so they they actually know and the earth is an Indian thing, or, or like saying the earth, “the earth is a gardener’s thing”, or.. For one reason or other, I took it as political at first, as some anti-Semitic comment in my paranoia when I first heard it.
So then, years later,
“Yessir boy, the earth is an Indian thing but the waves are Chinese” – (I didn’t know what that meant either!) – “You don’t know what that means, ask the guys who drew those old scrolls..” – (Well, obviously, the squiggles of penmanship)
Mmm – and then there’s an odd little moment where he’s talking about.. a little thing about… a little flash revealing his feelings about LSD – (He’s still quoting his old journal about being on a ship, going past Greenland or Labrador and there are depth-charges booming out, trying to get German submarines):’
“As I was writing just now, I heard a hissing outside my porthole” – “We should be arriving off the coast of Labrador tomorrow. – As I was writing, just now, I heard a hissing outside my porthole..” – (*You’re following this? This is his early journal, and he’s quoting in his 1967 writing) – ” As I was writing just now, I heard a hissing outside my porthole, the seas heavy the ship just rocks and rocks real deep, and I thought – “Torpedo!”. I waited for one long second. Death! Death!” – (and then in parenthesis, 1967) – “think if your death scenes and death trips LSD users!) – (end parentheses) – “I tell you”, sez confident Jack London in his bunk, “I tell you it is NOT hard to face death” – No sirree..” – (1967) – (quote) -“I am patient, I shall now turn over to sleep. And the sea washes on, immense, endless, everlasting, my sweet brother..” – (question mark (?))- end sentence – (exclamation point (!)) – Sentencer? – “In the moonlight now in these dangerous waters, one can see the two Navy ships that are convoying us, two tawny seacoast, alert and lowslung” – (unquote) -” O gee” (1967, O gee…) – “Homeless waters in the North, the Aryan-Nordic up against his Chappy sea-net hands” – (his little comment at the end)
Audio for the following can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-six-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in