Ken Kesey would be 71 if he were alive right now. But he's dead. He drank too much and his liver gave out and he died November 10, 2001, at the age of 66. Like pretty much any man, he just crumbled one day, leaving a big huge mess for some woman to clean up.
It would be good if Kesey were here now. Sure, he was a drunk and a buffoon and a charlatan and a blowhard: shit: he was a weak man: he was a man. But in his very brief time he was the finest writer in the hemisphere. And he gave it all up. To, in the words of Lew Welch, "bandage the wounded and feed however many you can." He did a bodhisattva. You don't often find an arrogant asshole like a writer doing something like that. But Kesey did it.
Kesey lived in wine the last decades of his life, and unless you were in his karass--or blundered onto his doorstep--you didn't much get to hear the pure wisdom. What is transcribed here is pretty much fourth- or fifth-level. But the words, they sound all right anyway, at least to me, on this winter Sunday morning.
So these are some of the words that Kesey spoke, over a jug of wine, in conversation with David Gans, that were broadcast 12/03/88 over KFOG, on a "Day Of The Dead."
Don't just read the Bible, and say, "well, I've got it." As soon as somebody says, "well, I've got it"--you know he don't. You've got to continue to go on, and say, "well, okay, what's next, what's next, what's next?" And treat the stuff that's coming down as though it is meant especially for you.
We know enough about education to know that, if you're going to study God, you can't avoid Shakespeare. You've got to know something about Bach. You should have read the Tao Te Ching. You should know how tomatoes come up out of the ground, and how gravity works. What makes a reciprocal engine go. How you stop the flow of blood, how you revive a person that's drowned.
All that stuff is a form of worship. To stop short of that, and fall down on your knees and cross your hands—all you're doing is getting in God's way. God doesn't want a bunch of people on their knees. You can't do anything crawling.
Well, how do you account for this amazingly pervasive belief that some schmuck standing on a wooden box can dispense God's love to you, and that you should subjugate your entire existence to it? [sound of wine, Kesey having taken a long pull, gurgling back down to the bottom of the jug]Why are people so willing to surrender to that?
Because we're all trying to devise our own kind of fascism.
Fascism is a way of having big religion, big government, and big business, all together. That's the whole notion of the fasces, that wraps that Roman ax—that's the fasces: fascism means that. So when you see Reagan, and Billy Graham, talking with Lee Iacocca, about the way to run the United States, that, by definition, is fascism.
Fascism would like to see Christians, Baptists—coast to coast. All believing in the same stuff. But luckily Madison and Jefferson and all those guys, when they devised this country, said, "nope, we've got to keep the church and state separate, and the more diversity that we can get in this nation, the better off we'll be."
There's a great movement in this country to try to make people the same. But, you know the movie Brazil? That movie Brazil, really touches it, I think. Finally, the only way left open for freedom is—not terrorism exactly, but it's pranksterism. It's showing some kind of creative act, in the face of a bureaucracy, that wants everything to be the same.
Like I said: I miss Kesey.