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(I saw them briefly in the seventies at the UN environment Conference in Stockholm to which they came - with Stewart Brand and Gary Snyder and Wavy Gravy and but without Ken Kesey I think - and in the psychedelic bus or something like it.)

And Ken Keysey's novels, the ones I remember were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (in researching which I believe he faked madness to experience for himself some of the dangerous psychiatric drugs and the state of mental hospitals) and Sometimes a Great Notion from which I remember the obstinate craziness of the Stamper family of loggers made evident (on page 39) when Henry Stamper 'laboriously lettered his own personal gospel of NEVER GIVE A INCH!' on top of a copper bas-relief of Jesus carrying a lamb through a field of daisies with the raised words 'Blessed are the meek' which Henry obliterated with yellow paint... and nailed to the wall above (was it his son's?) bed, NEVER GIVE A INCH! - the hard motto of the Stampers who refused to move their house back when the river began to shift its course until eventually the house became an obstinate peninsula into the current while everyone else moved back...

Everything about his books and his doings, and the things he inspired others to do, was outrageous and seemingly crazy and actually dangerous but it inspired even me and some like me who never took the risk of taking drugs or meta-physically shaking the establishment ... I missed the peak of the sixties by disappearing to write Design Methods- but at least I was able to read those beat books and enjoy the new culture which had exploded into existence... (and they did review Design Methodsin The Whole Earth Catalog).

There was much more I know now to Ken Kesey, though I never met him, other writings, other doings, that didn't reach everyone - just the readers of small press poetry - I don't think he sold out in the late seventies and the dreadful eighties, but for me, and I guess for many, the memory of him and those brave and wild Americans changed the world, it really did, and for the better I feel sure - though I'd never have done that sort of thing myself... (but of course all actions change the world, there is no way to measure any whole, or holiness, or person ... he was just a man)

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more - let me see - more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider's web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps.... As prehistoric ferns grown from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody's next year's split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.

Yes, Ken Kesey was one of the main energies of the time, one of the makers of a something we inherit, though we may not know it in these so different times, the rightness of a man reacting to things felt to be unjust or crazy, things ready to be broken, and yet nourished by the previous energies of other writers, other doers, in the amazing and continuing streams of not only consciousness but action in the stories of our time - - - - - - where are we going now we do not know but still we are the better for those visions and those deeds! And we laughed a lot - it was incredible...

So thank you Ken Kesey, for what you were and what you did. It made a difference - and it continues.

But you are gone - and we are sad.