I read this today,and i thought it was beautiful.
Letter to Sandra Alper Berrigan
By Ted Berrigan
Sunday afternoon on the East Side of New York and out the window kids are playing on a giant fifty-foot mound of sand in a building area. I want to go play too. I wish you were here. I wish, I wish you were here.
Dear Sandy,
I found a picture of a beatnik today in a history book. What do you think?
He's the captain of the Monitor which fought the Merrimac in the first battle between armored ships. Probably wrote his poetry between battles or during. (He must be a poet, look at his hair and beard. Probably was a horrible narcotics addict too.)
I wish I knew what a beatnik was so I could be one.
I've written three poems in the three days I've been here. O happy New York. And all the time I feel you. My writing is new, and better, and I know it's because of love. Which means you.
Last night I saw a bad opera based on Goethe's story "The Sorrows of Werther." Do you know it? It's the story of a tragic love ending in suicide. The opera was bad, but Goethe is great. Werther was the first romantic, or something like that. These days though, we who feel who live who love romance understand it through John Wayne's eyes. Which is good. (What am I saying?) I'm not really incoherent. I'm in a kind of trance from reading Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn." It is so great, I have to stop every few pages and wonder. After speaking of killing birds to eat (a fantasy) he writes:
If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to know about Timbuctoo or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate things of this place but I was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one could go in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and began to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable.
Sandy, my beautiful, innocent wife, Miller has just said simply much of what I have been struggling to tell you. If I eat dead birds in vacant lots, it is not because I am hungry, but because I need to discover Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, the fiery earth. I people my poems with nostalgia. They are in part my bright land. And through the past few months, and most of all through loving you, through marrying my soul, my self to yours as we preordained, I have now flared up like a burning rose, like a dove, and begun to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable, good to eat a thousand years. Thank you.
I send you this picture of a man. The faces of saints shine with a light that reveals them to you, and to me, and to whomever has eyes to see.
Camus has been dead two years. Dead at mid-life.
Tonight Dick and I and Joe are going to "Breathless" and "L'Avventura" in a double bill. You and I will see them again when you are here. Breathless is so frantic, so nervous, so controlled anyway. So alive. L'Avventura is like a dying life. Days take minutes. Seconds sometimes last for hours. In both pictures, from opposite sides of the coin, marvelous things are done with time. To rip out of the mind of human beings the dead concept of time as mathematical .. time is not arithmetical. Nor is it geometrical. It is magic. It is unexplainable, like the force of life, the elan vital, the primal drives. The revolutions of the Earth deceive us. Life is Space is Life. Einstein is the supreme poet. Korzybski is his prophet. Bergson and Whitehead went to the desert and came back to show us the way. Everyone does everything himself. All those who are going to make it will, all those who aren't won't. Miller writes:
And now here I am, sailing down the river (life) in my own little canoe. Anything you would like to have me do for you I will do - gratis. In this land, the bright land, the spermatazoon reigns supreme. Nothing is determined in advance, the future is absolutely uncertain, the past is nonexistent. For every billion born, 999,999 are doomed to die and never be born again. But the one that makes a homerun is assured of life eternal. Life is squeezed into a seed, which is a soul. Everything has a soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains, rocks. Everything is sentient, even the lowest stage of consciousness. Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss as at the top, chez god. The river starts somewhere in the mountains and flows on into the sea. On this river which leads to god the canoe is as serviceable as the dreadnought. From the very start the journey is homeward.
Honey, keep faith. They can't touch you, us, after all.
I'm waiting, waiting to hear from you, to hear what is going on, what is happening, what is going to happen. I am at an impasse, because I can do nothing until I hear from you, or your doctor, or your parents. I have no money, only New York, and Dick and Joe and always and ever our love. And because of that this life is all good. The hospital, your mother and father, the deputies, the Negro clerk at the Norfolk Hotel, the private detectives, the people outside I have not yet met, it's all somehow good in spite of itself. We have love, you and me, and that makes even separation be good. To be together is the same as to be separate when there is love that is love. No one can touch that love. We are never apart. I am with you, you are here even when we are not thinking of each other. Love is before thought, beyond thought. No one can understand that we ran off after five days. How can we expect them to understand that we loved each other before we even met? I loved you in Pat, and in Anne Kelper and in Dick and Dave Bearden, and Jim Sears, and in my mother, and in Rilke and Whitman and Mozart and Harpo Marx. You knew me as Dick and as Lenny, and as Leslie, as your father, as Stone, and Doris, and Antoine St. Exupery, as Ed Kaim, and as Hayakawa, and John Wayne, and Khatchatchurian. When we met when knew each other, had known each other for a million years. When you feel pangs for Lenny, it is because he is me, and I am him, and yet we are two different husks of body and to have one seems to be to lose the other. But it isn't to lose the other. I love him because he knew to look at you. My small mind may be jealous, but the me that is me know that we are all one another and one soul. I love you because to me you are everything, the good that is in everything. My sweet, my dear, we, the world, are all in love with you.
-Ted Berrigan 1962
By Ted Berrigan
Sunday afternoon on the East Side of New York and out the window kids are playing on a giant fifty-foot mound of sand in a building area. I want to go play too. I wish you were here. I wish, I wish you were here.
Dear Sandy,
I found a picture of a beatnik today in a history book. What do you think?
He's the captain of the Monitor which fought the Merrimac in the first battle between armored ships. Probably wrote his poetry between battles or during. (He must be a poet, look at his hair and beard. Probably was a horrible narcotics addict too.)
I wish I knew what a beatnik was so I could be one.
I've written three poems in the three days I've been here. O happy New York. And all the time I feel you. My writing is new, and better, and I know it's because of love. Which means you.
Last night I saw a bad opera based on Goethe's story "The Sorrows of Werther." Do you know it? It's the story of a tragic love ending in suicide. The opera was bad, but Goethe is great. Werther was the first romantic, or something like that. These days though, we who feel who live who love romance understand it through John Wayne's eyes. Which is good. (What am I saying?) I'm not really incoherent. I'm in a kind of trance from reading Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn." It is so great, I have to stop every few pages and wonder. After speaking of killing birds to eat (a fantasy) he writes:
If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to know about Timbuctoo or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate things of this place but I was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one could go in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and began to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable.
Sandy, my beautiful, innocent wife, Miller has just said simply much of what I have been struggling to tell you. If I eat dead birds in vacant lots, it is not because I am hungry, but because I need to discover Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, the fiery earth. I people my poems with nostalgia. They are in part my bright land. And through the past few months, and most of all through loving you, through marrying my soul, my self to yours as we preordained, I have now flared up like a burning rose, like a dove, and begun to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable, good to eat a thousand years. Thank you.
I send you this picture of a man. The faces of saints shine with a light that reveals them to you, and to me, and to whomever has eyes to see.
Camus has been dead two years. Dead at mid-life.
Tonight Dick and I and Joe are going to "Breathless" and "L'Avventura" in a double bill. You and I will see them again when you are here. Breathless is so frantic, so nervous, so controlled anyway. So alive. L'Avventura is like a dying life. Days take minutes. Seconds sometimes last for hours. In both pictures, from opposite sides of the coin, marvelous things are done with time. To rip out of the mind of human beings the dead concept of time as mathematical .. time is not arithmetical. Nor is it geometrical. It is magic. It is unexplainable, like the force of life, the elan vital, the primal drives. The revolutions of the Earth deceive us. Life is Space is Life. Einstein is the supreme poet. Korzybski is his prophet. Bergson and Whitehead went to the desert and came back to show us the way. Everyone does everything himself. All those who are going to make it will, all those who aren't won't. Miller writes:
And now here I am, sailing down the river (life) in my own little canoe. Anything you would like to have me do for you I will do - gratis. In this land, the bright land, the spermatazoon reigns supreme. Nothing is determined in advance, the future is absolutely uncertain, the past is nonexistent. For every billion born, 999,999 are doomed to die and never be born again. But the one that makes a homerun is assured of life eternal. Life is squeezed into a seed, which is a soul. Everything has a soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains, rocks. Everything is sentient, even the lowest stage of consciousness. Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss as at the top, chez god. The river starts somewhere in the mountains and flows on into the sea. On this river which leads to god the canoe is as serviceable as the dreadnought. From the very start the journey is homeward.
Honey, keep faith. They can't touch you, us, after all.
I'm waiting, waiting to hear from you, to hear what is going on, what is happening, what is going to happen. I am at an impasse, because I can do nothing until I hear from you, or your doctor, or your parents. I have no money, only New York, and Dick and Joe and always and ever our love. And because of that this life is all good. The hospital, your mother and father, the deputies, the Negro clerk at the Norfolk Hotel, the private detectives, the people outside I have not yet met, it's all somehow good in spite of itself. We have love, you and me, and that makes even separation be good. To be together is the same as to be separate when there is love that is love. No one can touch that love. We are never apart. I am with you, you are here even when we are not thinking of each other. Love is before thought, beyond thought. No one can understand that we ran off after five days. How can we expect them to understand that we loved each other before we even met? I loved you in Pat, and in Anne Kelper and in Dick and Dave Bearden, and Jim Sears, and in my mother, and in Rilke and Whitman and Mozart and Harpo Marx. You knew me as Dick and as Lenny, and as Leslie, as your father, as Stone, and Doris, and Antoine St. Exupery, as Ed Kaim, and as Hayakawa, and John Wayne, and Khatchatchurian. When we met when knew each other, had known each other for a million years. When you feel pangs for Lenny, it is because he is me, and I am him, and yet we are two different husks of body and to have one seems to be to lose the other. But it isn't to lose the other. I love him because he knew to look at you. My small mind may be jealous, but the me that is me know that we are all one another and one soul. I love you because to me you are everything, the good that is in everything. My sweet, my dear, we, the world, are all in love with you.
-Ted Berrigan 1962