Collaboration: Letter to Charlie Chaplin

Our Dear Friend Charles:

Love letter for you. We are one happey poet & one unhappey poet in India which makes 2 poets. We would like come visit you when we get thru India to tickle yr feet. Further more King in New York is great picture, - I figure it will take about 10 yrs before it looks funny in perspective. Every few years we dream in our sleep we meat you.

Why don't you go ahead & make another picture & fuck everybody. If you do we could be Extras. We be yr Brownies free of charge.

Let us tell you about Ganesha. He is elephant-faced god with funney fat belley human body. Everyone in India has picture of him in their house. To think of him brings happey wisdom success that he gives after he eats his sweet candey. He neither exists not does not exist. Because of that he can conquer aney demon. He rides around on a mouse & has 4 hands. We salute yr comedy in his name.

Do you realize how maney times we have seen yr pictures in Newark & cried in the dark at the roses. Do you realize how maney summers in Coney Island we sat in open air theatre & watched you disguised as a lamp-shade in scratchey down stairs eternity. You even made our dead mothers laugh. So, remember everything is alright. We await your next move & the world still depends on yr next move.

What else shall we say to you before we all die? If everything we feel could be said it would be very beautiful. Why didnt we ever do this before? I guess the world seems so vast, its hard to find the right moment to forget all about this shit & wave hello from the other side of the earth. But there is certainly millions & millions of people waveing hello to you silently all over the windows, streets & movies. Its only life waveing to its self.

Tell Michael to read our poems too if you ever get them. Again we say you got that personal tickle-tuch we like-love.

Shall we let it go at that?

NO, we still got lots more room on the page - we still to emptey our hearts. Have you read Louis Ferdinand Celine? - Hes translated into english from French - Celine vomits Rasberries. He wrote the most Chaplinesque prose in Europe & he has a bitter mean sad uggly eternal comical soul enough to make you cry.

You could make a great picture about the Atom Bomb!

Synops:

a grubby old janitor with white hair who cant get the air-raid drill instructions right & goes about his own lost business in the basement in the midst of great international air-raid emergencies, sirens, kremlin riots, flying rockets, radios screaming, destruction of the earth. He comes out the next day, he cralls out of the pile of human empire state building bodies, & the rest of the picture, a hole hour the janitor on the screen alone makeing believe he is being sociable with nobody there, haveing a beer at the bar with invisible boys, reading last years newspapers, & ending looking blankly into the camera with eternal aged Chaplin-faced looking blankly, raptly into the eyes of the God of Solitude.

There is yr fitting final statement Sir Chaplin, you will save the world if ya make it - but yr final look must be so beautiful that it doesnt matter if the world is saved or not.

Okay I guess we can end it now. Forgive us if you knew it all before. Okay

Love and flowers,

Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg
1961 Bombay