Pretty soon there’ll be a new kind of murderer, who will kill without any reason at all, just to prove that it doesn’t matter, and his accomplishment will be worth no more and no less than Beethoven’s last quartets and Boito’s Requiem—Churches will fall, Mongolian hordes will piss on the map of the West, idiot kings will burp at bones, nobody’ll care then the earth itself’ll disintegrate into atomic dust (as it was in the beginning) and the void still the void wont care, the void’ll just go on with that maddening little smile of its that I see everywhere, I look at a tree, a rock, a house, a street, I see that little smile—That “secret God-grin” but what a God is this who didnt invent justice?—So they’ll light candles and make speeches and the angels rage. Ah but “I dont know, I dont care, and it doesnt matter” will be the final human prayer—
Meanwhile in all directions, in and out, of the universe, outward to the neverending space (more numerous than the sands in the ocean) and inward into the illimitable vastness of your own body which is also never ending space and “planets” (atoms) (all an electromagnetic crazy arrangement of bored eternal power) meanwhile the murder and the useless activity goes on, and has been going on since beginningless time, and will go on never endingly, and all we can know, we with our justified hearts, is that it is just what it is and no more than what it is and has no name and is but beastly power—
For those who believe in a personal God who cares about good and bad are hallucinating themselves beyond the shadow of doubt, tho God bless them, he blankly blesses blanks anyway—
It’s just nothing but Infinity infinitely variously amusing itself with a movie, infinitude wants all—
But I did think on the mountain, “Well” (and pass the little mound where I’d buried the mouse every day as I went to my filthy defecations) “let us keep the mind neutral, let us be like the void”—but as soon as I get bored and come down the mountain I cant for the life of me be anything but enraged, lost, partial, critical, mixed-up, scared, foolish, proud, sneering, shit shit shit—
The candle burns
And when that’s done
The wax lies in cold artistic piles
——s about all I know
–– Jack Kerouac from Desolation Angels p 70-71
