Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac Page A

tail, and I had prepared for myself future sojourns in the hell of murderers and all because of fear of rats—I thought of gentle Buddha who wouldnt fear a tiny rat, or Jesus, or even John Barrymore who had pet mice in his room in childhood Philadelphia—Expressions like “Are you a man or a mouse?” and “the best laid plans of mice and men” and “wouldnt kill a mouse” began to hurt me and also “scared of a mouse”—I asked forgiveness, tried to repent and pray, but felt that because I had abdicated my position as a holy angel from heaven who never killed, the world might now go fires—Methinks it has—As a kid I’d break up gangs of squirrel murderers, at risk of my own hurt—Now this—And I realize we are all of us murderers, in previous lifetimes we murdered and we had to come back to work out our punishment, by punishment-under-death which is life, that in this lifetime we must stop murdering or be forced to come back because of our inherent God natures and divine magic power to manifest anything we want—I remembered my father’s pity when he drowned baby mice himself one morning long ago, and my mother saying “Poor little things”—But now I had joined the ranks of the murderers and so I had no more reason to be pious and superior, for for a while there (prior to the mice) I had somewhat considered myself divine and impeccable—Now I’m just a dirty murdering human being like everybody else and now I cant take refuge in heaven anymore and here I am, with angel’s wings dripping with blood of my victims, small or otherwise, trying to tell what to do and I dont know any more than you do—
    Dont laugh—a mouse has a little beating heart, that little mouse I let live behind the cupboard was really “humanly” scared, it was being stalked by a big beast with a stick and it didn’t know why it was chosen to die —it looked up, around, both ways, little paws up, on hind legs, breathing heavily— hunted —
    When big cow-y deer grazed in my moonlight yard still I stared at their flanks as with a rifle sight—tho I would never kill a deer, which dies a big death—nevertheless the flank meant bullet, the flank meant arrow-penetrating, there is nothing but murder in the hearts of men—St. Francis must have known this—And supposing someone had gone to St. Francis in his cave and told him some of the things that are said about him today by nasty intellectuals and Communists and Existentialists all over the world, supposing: “Francis, you’re nothing but a scared stupid beast hiding from the sorrowing world, camping and pretending to be so saintly and loving animals, hiding from the real world with your formal seraphic cherubim tendencies, while people cry and old women sit in the street weeping and the Lizard of Time mourns forever on a hot rock, you, you, think yourself so holy, farting in secret in caves, stink as much as anybody, are you trying to show you’re better than man?” Francis might have killed the man—Who knows?—I love St. Francis of Assisi as well as anybody in the world but how do I know what he woulda done?—maybe murdered his tormentor—Because whether you murder or not, that’s the trouble, it makes no difference in the maddening void which doesn’t care what we do—All we know is that everything is alive otherwise it wouldnt be here—The rest is speculation, mental judgments of the reality of the feeling of a good or bad, this or that, nobody knows the holy white truth because it is invisible—
    All the saints have gone to the grave with the same pout as the murderer and the hater, the dirt doesnt discriminate, it’ll eat all lips no matter what they did and that’s because nothing matters and we all know it—
    But what we gonna do?
    Pretty soon there’ll be a new kind of murderer, who will kill