I’m listening to an audiobook presentation of The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. It was written in the midst of WWII and the diarist’s voice that it contains is filled with disgust and rage at the United States, at Capitalism, and at humanity. It is compelling. It is the voice of someone who has fixated on the horror of what was happening in the war and as someone looking straight into the sun has been blinded by disgust. At one point the following dialog is recorded in the journal:
Man has been corrupted by his symbols; language has killed his animal.
And you are resurrecting it?
No. It has never had an opportunity to live.
What will you do about it?
I will continue to ask how.
How to what?
To this strange unborn thing which is in all men.
Mmm…You’ll be easy picking for the scoffers.
I have no interest in that. I see men engaged in activities that would shame a grub under a rock. Their codes and ambitions leave me sick with disgust.
I supposed you’d like to try your hand at being God.
No I’d like to try my hand at being…I’ve armed myself against their weapons. To be so indolent that the flies will bury the dead on my eyelids. Sit on a beach and let the waves calm all thought of endeavor out of me. To live in such a manner that I never make a single blood-rotted dollar. To study history in order only to have it to forget. Books all those big fat bottomed ash cans where men empty their lives…
