Poetry & Prose

"About a guy I met in the nuthouse,
... /...'Oh, you're right. Yes, you are: I am a loner, a born one. And someday I will make it - that shack, I mean. Yes. I will, you'll see. But not like last time. Not to hide. No. Next time I try it it will be first because I choose to, then because it is where I am most comfortable. .../... A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose. I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans . . . .../...
..After you get so you can make it with other people, and make it with yourself, there's still work to be done; you still have the main party to deal with . . .'...".

"About a guy I met in the nuthouse, a Mr.Siggs, a nervous, quick-featured, self-schooled hick who had spent all his fifty or so years except for Service time in the eastern Oregon town of his birth. A reader of encyclopedias, a memorizer of Milton, a writer of a column called "Words to Adjust By" in the Patients' Paper . . . a completely capable and sufficient person, yet this intense little self-styled scholar was perhaps the most uncomfortable man on the ward. Siggs was terribly paranoid in crowds, equally hung up in one-to-one situations, and seemed to enjoy no ease at all except by himself inside a book. And no one could have been more shocked than myself when he volunteered for the job as Ward Public Relations Director. "Masochism?" I asked him when I heard of his new position, "What do you mean?" He fidgeted, hedging away from my eyes, but I went on. "I mean this Public Relations job . . . why are you taking on this business of dealing with big groups of people when you're apparently so much more at ease alone?"

At this Mr. Siggs stopped fidgeting and looked at me; he had large, heavy-lidded eyes that could burn with  sudden  unblinking  intensity. "Just before I came in here . . . I took a job, stock outrider, in a shack hid away outside Baker. A place a hundred miles from noplace. Nobody, nothing, far as I could see. Sweet, high country; beautiful . . . Not even a cedar tree. Took along complete set of Great Books. All the classics, ten dollars a month, book salesman took it out of my wages in Baker. Beautiful country. See a thousand miles any direction, like it was all mine. A million stars, a million sage blossoms-all mine. Yes, beautiful . . . Couldn't make it, though. Committed myself after a month and a half." His face softened and his blue stare dimmed again beneath his half-closed lids; he grinned at me; I could see him forcing himself to try to relax. "Oh, you're right. Yes, you are:  I am a loner, a born one. And someday I will make it - that shack, I mean. Yes. I will, you'll see. But not like last time. Not to hide. No. Next time I try it it will be first because I choose to, then because it is where I am most comfortable. Only sensible plan: sure of it. But . . . a fellow has to get so he can deal with these Public Relations, before he can truly make it. Make it like that . . . alone . . . in some shack. A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose. I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans . . . before he can make it with himself."

I had a therapeutic addition to this: "And vice versa, Mr. Siggs: he has to make it with himself before branching out."

He agreed, reluctantly, but he still agreed. Because at that time we both considered this addition pretty psychologically profound and - in spite of its chicken-or-egg overtones - the very last word in "Words to Adjust By" at that time.


Recently, however, I found that there were even further additions. A few months ago I was sage-hen hunting in the Ochoco Mountains - high, spare lonely plains country and certainly as far from noplace as any place I know - and I ran into Mr. Siggs again, a healthier, younger-looking Mr. Siggs, tanned, bearded, and calm as a lizard on a sunny stone. After overcoming our mutual surprize, we recalled our conversation after his acceptance of the Public Relations job, and I asked how his plans worked out. Perfectly - after some successful therapy he'd been discharged with honors over a year ago, had his outriding job, his Great Books, his shack . . . loved it. But didn't he still occasionally wonder if he were really choosing his shack or still just hiding in it? Nope. Wasn't he lonely? Nope. Well, wasn't he bored, then with all this sunshine and adjustment? He shook his head. "After you get so you can make it with other people, and make it with yourself, there's still work to be done; you still have the main party to deal with . . ."

"The 'main party'?" I asked, right then starting to suspect that statement about his being discharged "with honors." "What do you mean, Mr. Siggs? The 'main party'? You mean deal with Nature? God?

"Yes, it could be," he remarked, rolling on his rock to warm his other side and closing his eyes against the sun. "Nature or God. Or it could be Time. Or Death. Or just the stars and the sage blossoms. Don't know yet . . . ." He yawned, then raised his little head and fixed me once more with that same intense look, a demented bright-blue look galvanized by some drive beneath his leathery face that sunshine - or therapy - could never adjust . . . "I am fifty-three," he said sharply. "Took fifty years, half a century, just to get to where I could deal with something my own size. Don't expect me to work this other thing out overnight. So long."

The eyes closed and he seemed to sleep; a skinny back-country Buddha, on a hot rock miles from noplace. I walked on, back toward camp, trying to decide if he was saner or crazier than when I last saw him."

  Sometimes A Great Notion  
Ken Kesey

categories:     Poetry & Prose    -top-  

Ken Kesey Sometimes A Great Notion - Article from
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER BOOKS REPORTER:
Ken Kesey's true legacy is 'Sometimes a Great Notion'
Friday, November 16, 2001
By JOHN MARSHALL
"I think 'Sometimes a Great Notion' is the best thing I'll ever write," Kesey said from his home in Pleasant Hill, Ore. "Writing it was much different from 'Cuckoo's Nest,' which often seemed like filling in the blanks.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/46819_book16.shtml

From a review written found at Fantastic Fiction http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/:
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sailor Song is a wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan. A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers: Henry, the fiercely vital and overpowering patriarch; Hank, the son who has spent his life trying to live up to his father; and Viv, who fell in love with Hank's exuberant machismo but now finds it wearing thin. And then there is Leland, Henry's bookish younger son, who returns to his family on a mission of vengeance - and finds himself fulfilling it in ways he never imagined. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy."
http://books.fantasticfiction.co.uk/n0/n692.htm?authorid=1591

Read the book first - feel it in your "gut" - and then watch the movie:
I haven't seen this film in many years, but I remember it as having a powerful cast - directed by co-star Paul Newman. Beautiful Northwest setting and wonderfully complex story.
Internet Movie Data Base

About Ken Kesey

A thumbnail sketch posted by "Broklyn"
http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/profile.jsp?who=brooklyn

"As a cultural and literary figure, Ken Kesey stands exactly at the midpoint between the Beats of the 50's and the Hippies of the 60's. He was born on Sept 17, 1935 in La Junta, Colorado and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. An unusually confident and charismatic young man, he enrolled in a prestigious creative writing program at Stanford University and began tearing the place up almost upon arrival. A small counterculture that formed around him in Palo Alto turned into a nationwide counterculture whose effects are still being measured to this day."
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/People/KenKesey.html
http://www.litkicks.com/

Wonderful site for pictures - maintained by Zane Kesey:
http://www.key-z.com/

From CNN:

"In 1959 he volunteered for a government funded drug study, receiving $75 a day to be a human guinea pig. He quickly discovered that among the mysterious capsules was an experimental psychedelic called LSD.
'They gave me something. They didn't tell me what. And they tested my reflexes and they tested my blood and how I was breathing. Just whether I could do motor skills. Then they left me in this little room with only one window,' he said. Kesey eventually took a job on the ward and wrote 'Cuckoo's Nest,' the story of a wise-cracking mental institution inmate who leads a rebellion against the oppressive staff.
'High on those drugs, in that little room and looking out through that window, I could see those nuts knew something that the doctors didn't,' he said."
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/21/kesey/

Prankster History Project
"This is a site dedicated to collecting the memories and stories of anyone whose lives have been touched by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters."
http://www.pranksterweb.org/frontdoor.htm

The Passing of Ken Kesey:
Published on Saturday, November 10, 2001 at 3:22 PM by the Associated Press
by Jeff Barnard

Novelist, 60s Icon Ken Kesey Dead at 66
"Grants Pass, Ore. Ken Kesey, who broke into the literary scene with 'One Flew Over the Cucko's nest' and then helped immortalize the psychedelic 1960s with an LSD-fueled bus ride, died Saturday. He was 66. Author Ken Kesey poses in this April 24, 1997 file photo in Springfield, Ore., with his bus, "Further", a descendant of the vehicle that carried him and the Merry Pranksters on the 1964 trip immortalized in the Tom Wolfe book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Kesey, whose LSD-fueled bus ride became a symbol of the psychedelic 1960s after he won fame as a novelist with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," died Saturday, Nov. 10, 2001 in Eugene, Ore., following cancer surgery on his liver hospital officials said. He was 66.
Kesey died at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, two weeks after cancer surgery to remove 40 percent of his liver. .... "

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1110-05.htm

From http://www.intrepidtrips.com/ - a website devoted to the spirit and works of Ken Kesey:

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
-- Ken Kesey
http://www.intrepidtrips.com/

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