Piled Up.

SITE, Highrise of Homes, 1972.

At first it's beautiful to just watch that white line reel in to Willie's snout but when I start looking around out the window there's just endless housing tracts and new blue factories everywhere - Sez Dave "Yes that's right, the population explosion is gonna cover every bit of backyard dirt in America someday in fact they'll even have to start piling up friggin levels of houses and others over that like your cityCityCITY till the houses reach a hundred miles in the air in all directions of the map and people looking at the earth from another planet with super telescopes will see a prickly ball hangin in space - It's like real horrible when you come to think of it, even us with all our fancy talks, shit man it's all millions of people and events piling up  almost unimaginable now, like raving babboons we'll all be piled on top of each other or one another or whatever you're sposed to say - Hundreds of millions of hungry mouths raving for more more more - and the sadness of it all is that the world hasnt any chance to produce say a writer whose life could really actually touch all this life in every detail like you always say, some writer who could bring you sobbing thru the bed fuckin bedcribs of the moon to see it all even unto the goddamned last gory detail of some dismal robbery of the heart at dawn when no one cares like Sinatra sings" ("When no one cares", he sings in his low baritone but resumes): - "Some strict sweeper sweeping it all up, I mean the incredible helplessness I felt Jack when Céline ended his Journey to the End of the Night by pissing in the Seine River at dawn there I am thinkin my God there's probably somebody pissing in the Trenton River at dawn right now, the Danube, the Ganges, the frozen Obi, the Yellow, the Panara, the Willamette, the Merimac, in Missouri too, the Missouri itself, the Yuma, the Amazon, the Thames, the Po, the so and so, it's so friggin endless like poems endless everywhere and no one knows any bettern old Buddha you know where he says it's like "There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you'd be scared and couldnt comprehend and you'd despair so much you'd drop dead", that's what he just said in one of those sutras - Macrocosms and microcosms and chillicosms and microbes and finally you got all these marvelous books a man aint even got the time to read em all, what you gonna do in this already piled up multiple world when you have to think of the Book of Songs, Faulkner, César Birotteau, Shakespeare, Satyricons, Dantes, in fact long stories guys tell you in bars, in fact the sutras themselves, Sir Philip Sidney, Sterne, Ibn El Arabi, the copious Lope de Vega and the uncopious goddman Cervantes, shoo, then there's all those Catulluses and Davids and radio listening skid row sages to contend with because they've all got a million stories too and you too Ron Blake in the backseat shut up! down to everything which is so much that it is of necessity dont you think NOthing anyway, huh?" (expressing exactly the way I feel, of course).

Jack Kerouac, Big Sur, Penguin Books, 1962 (1992), p.63-64.