Beschreibung:

Autograph Manuscript, 6 pp, legal folio, [Pacific Grove, CA], [August 15-22, 1965], being a draft of a lecture given by Kesey during a conference hosted by the American Unitarian-Universalist Association at Asilomar, with conference flyer and two mimeographed pages of an unidentified newsletter, stapled at upper left corner, mild age-toning and thumbing, corners creased. Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, spent 1965 as Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University, taking part in a summer conference held at a camp in Pacific Grove. This manuscript, from one of his lectures given at the conference, begins as an irreverent speech laced with bawdy limericks before transitioning into a parody of Walt Whitman. In part: “Oh glorious drug now pulsing, permeating around and thru my being—How are you called—oh dobs of chemicals, relaxing and liberating my Very Being, Posterior Pituitary, or oxytocin, are those your names? But no matter—nor does it, that the fools out there call it a spasmodic, muscle tightening, frightening, contracting agent. O, complete and whole hearted incestuousness, from which & soon to be released will carry a lasting taboo. Here I go—thrust out into the light of a snowy noel nite on this first day—my nostrils sensing hay and fodder because plugged there with, knowing that my now condition is to be alive in this world, in the beginning, and at both ends.”