I left the beat bookshop as evening approached, and dreamed of a different time, as I walked up towards Settler's Park. The sun was setting forming a collage of colors in the night sky. My thoughts went back to the poetry of Richard Brautigan. What would cause such a great artist to self destruct ? It has often been stated that the Beats were a fairly self destructive lot. Many of them did die from various forms of hard living and substance abuse, and many of them lived lifestyles that surfaced around the edge of self destruc- tion, which seemed to be a quality inherent in a majority of American writers: Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Jack London. The list might continue forever, throughout the literary American landscape. Search the American plains, walk through the words, traverse ancient plateaus for the American writer of every generation, and chances are that he or she will self-destruct by the waysides of youth. They seem to burn their candles, until the wax has melted in the night, once having turned to face the mirror of morning, their ghosts seem to dissipitate with the edge of memory.
Literature, the word seemed to convey with it some inner hidden quality tearing at the inner hearts of the poet to breathe the passion of youth, and then to expire in that passion in some final burst of anguished relinquishment. Theories abound by scholars on the reasons behind the self destructive quality of these men and women. The Beats also had not been without their share of hearts dying on the silence of the morrow. Neal Cassidy had succumbed to the recesses of his own speed addiction, running down a railroad track in the infinity of night. Last words. They are sure that he said them, but noone was there to listen. Then, there was Jack Kerouac, drinking himself into the oblivion of alcoholism; unitl his poetic flame faded away to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies, while William F. Buckley sat in his chair on Firing Line singing frozen stale chants to the Vietnam War. Ginsberg had also walked down the path of fire and thorn, walking through the center of the abyss unscathed.
I sat upon a rock looking over Boulder, as the sun set, wondering what may have saved him from a fate that had taken so many other writers. His interest in the Zen Buddhist teachings of the East, a love of life that boardered on the sublime, the acceptance of defeat without being beaten, an
