Authors: Henry Miller
Either the world is too slack or I am not taut enough. If I became unintelligible I would be understood immediately. The difference between understanding and non-understanding is as fine as a hair, finer, the difference of a millimeter, a thread of space between China and Neptune. No matter how far out of whack I get, the ratio remains the same; it has nothing to do with clarity, precision, et cetera. (The
et cetera
is important!) The mind blunders because it is too precise an instrument; the threads break against the mahogany knots, against the cedar and ebony of alien matter. We talk about reality as if it were something commensurable, a piano exercise, or a lesson in physics. The Black Death came with the return of the Crusaders. Syphilis came with the return of Columbus. Reality will come too! Reality prime, says my friend Cronstadt. From a poem written on the ocean floor….
To prognosticate this reality is to be off either by a millimeter or by a million light years. The difference is a quantum formed by the intersection of streets. A quantum is a functional disorder created by trying to squeeze oneself into a frame of reference. A reference is a discharge from an old employer, that is to say, a mucopus from an old disease.
These are thoughts born of the street, genus epileptoid. You walk out with the guitar and the strings snap -because the idea is not embedded morphologically. To recall the dream one must keep the eyes closed and not budge. The slightest stir and the whole fabric falls apart. In the street I expose myself to the destructive, disintegrating elements that surround me. I let everything wreak its own havoc with me. I bend over to spy on the secret processes, to obey rather than to command.
There are huge blocks of my life which are gone forever. Huge blocks gone, scattered, wasted in talk, action, reminiscence, dream. There was never any time when I was living one life, the life of a husband, a lover, a friend. Wherever I was, whatever I was engaged in, I was leading multiple lives. Thus, whatever it is that I choose to regard as my story is lost, drowned, indissolubly fused with the lives, the drama, the stories of others.
I am a man of the old world, a seed that was transplanted by the wind, a seed which f ailed to blossom in the mushroom oasis of America. I belong on the heavy tree of the past. My allegiance, physical and spiritual, is with the men of Europe, those who were once Franks, Gauls, Vikings, Huns, Tatars, what not. The climate for my body and soul is here where there is quickness and corruption. I am proud not to belong to this century.
For those stargazers who are unable to follow the act of revelation I append herewith a few horoscopic brushstrokes in the margin of my Universe of Death….
I am Chancre, the crab, which moves sideways and backwards and forwards at will. I move in strange tropics and deal in high explosives, embalming fluid, jasper, myrrh, smaragd, fluted snot, and porcupines’ toes. Because of Uranus which crosses my longitudinal I am inordinately fond of cunt, hot chitterlings, and water bottles. Neptune dominates my ascendant. That means I am composed of a watery fluid, that I am volatile, quixotic, unreliable, independent, and evanescent. Also quarrelsome. With a hot pad under my ass I can play the braggart or the buffoon as good as any man, no matter what sign he be born under. This is a selfportrait which yields only the missing parts-an anchor, a dinner bell, the remains of a beard, the hind part of a cow. In short, I am an idle fellow who pisses his time away. I have absolutely nothing to show for my labors except my genius. But there comes a time, even in the life of an idle genius, when he has to go to the window and vomit up the excess baggage. If you are a genius you have to do that-if for no other reason than to build a little comprehensible world of your own which will not run down like an eight-day clock! And the more ballast you throw overboard the easier you rise above the esteem of your neighbors. Until you find yourself all alone in the stratosphere. Then you tie a stone around your neck and you jump feet first. That brings about the complete destruction of anagogic dream interpretation together with mercurial stomatitis brought about by inunctions. You have the dream for nighttime and the horse laugh for daytime.
And so, when I stand at the bar of Little Tom Thumb and see these men with three-quarter faces coming up through the trapdoors of hell with pulleys and braces, dragging locomotives and pianos and cuspidors, I say to myself: “Grand! Grand! All this bric-a-brac, all this machinery coming to me on a silver platter! It’s grand! It’s marvelous! It’s a poem created while I was asleep.”
What little I have learned about writing amounts to this: it is not what people think it is. It is an absolutely new thing each time with each individual. Valparaiso, for example. Valparaiso, when I say it, means something totally different from anything it ever meant before. It may mean an English cunt with all her front teeth gone and the bartender standing in the middle of the street searching for customers. It may mean an angel in a silk shirt running his lacy fingers over a black harp. It may mean an odalisque with a mosquito netting around her ass. It may mean any of these things, or none, but whatever it may mean you can be sure it will be something different, something new. Valparaiso is always five minutes before the end, a little this side of Peru, or maybe three inches nearer. It’s the accidental square inch that you do with fever because you’ve got a hot pad under your ass and the Holy Ghost in your bowels-orthopedic mistakes included. It means “to piss warm and drink cold,” as Trimalchio says, “because our mother the earth is in the middle, made round like an egg, and has all good things in herself, like a honeycomb.”
And now, ladies and gentlemen, with this little universal can opener which I hold in my hands I am about to open a can of sardines. With this little can opener which I hold in my hands it’s all the same-whether you want to open a box of sardines or a drugstore. It’s the third or fourth day of spring, as I’ve told you several times already, and even though it’s a poor, shabby, reminiscent spring, the thermometer is driving me crazy as a bedbug. You thought I was sitting at the Place Clichy all the time, drinking an aperitif perhaps. As a matter of fact I was sitting at the Place Clichy, but that was two or three years ago. And I did stand at the bar of Little Tom Thumb, but that was a long time ago and since then a crab has been gnawing at my vitals. All this began in the Metro (first-class) with the phrase -“l’homme que j’etais, je ne le suis plus.”
Walking past the railroad yards I was plagued by two fears-one, that if I lifted my eyes a little higher they would dart out of my head; two, that my bunghole was dropping out. A tension so strong that all ideation became instantly rhombohedral. Imagined the whole world declaring a holiday to think about static. On that day so many suicides that there would not be wagons enough to collect the dead. Passing the railroad yards at the Porte I catch the sickening stench from the cattle trains. It’s like this: all day today and all day yesterday -three or four years ago, of course-they have been standing there body to body in fear and sweat. Their bodies are saturated with doom. Passing them my mind is terribly lucid, my thoughts crystal clear. I’m in such a hurry to spill out my thoughts that I am running past them in the dark. I too am in great fear. I too am sweating and panting, thirsty, saturated with doom. I’m going by them like a letter through the post. Or not I, but certain ideas of which I am the harbinger. And these ideas are already labeled and docketed, already sealed, stamped and watermarked. They run in series, my ideas, like electric coils. To live beyond illusion or with it? that’s the question. Inside me a terrifying gem which will not wear away, a gem which scratches the windowpanes as I flee through the night. The cattle are lowing and bleating. They stand there in the warm stench of their own dung. I hear again now the music of the A Minor Quartet, the agonized flurries of the strings. There’s a madman inside me and he’s hacking away, hacking and hacking until he strikes the final discord. Pure annihilation, as distinguished from lesser, muddier annihilations. Nothing to be mopped up afterwards. A wheel of light rolling up to the precipiceand over into the bottomless pit. I, Beethoven, I created it! I, Beethoven, I destroy it!
From now on, ladies and gentlemen, you are entering Mexico. From now on everything will be wonderful and beautiful, marvelously beautiful, marvelously wonderful. Increasingly marvelously beautiful and wonderful. From now on no more washlines, no suspenders, no flannel underwear. Always summer and everything true to pattern. If it’s a horse it’s a horse for all time. If it’s apoplexy it’s apoplexy, and not St. Vitus’s Dance. No early morning whores, no gardenias. No dead cats in the gutter, no sweat and perspiration. If it be a lip it must be a lip that trembles eternally. For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it’s always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what’s dead is dead and no feather dusters. You lie on a cement bed and you sleep like an acetylene torch. When you strike it rich it’s a bonanza. When you don’t strike it rich it’s misery, worse than misery. No arpeggios, no grace notes, no cadenzas. Either you hold the clue or you don’t hold the clue. Either you start with pure melody or you start with listerine. But no Purgatory and no elixir. It’s Fourth Eclogue or Thirteenth Arrondissement!
A Saturday Afternoon
This is better than reading Vergil.
It is a Saturday afternoon and this Saturday afternoon is distinct from all other Saturday afternoons, but in no wise like a Monday afternoon or a Thursday afternoon. On this day, as I ride toward the Neuilly Bridge past the little island of Robinson with its temple at the far end and in the temple the little statue like a cotyledon in the mouth of a bell, I have such a sense of being at home that it seems incredible that I was born in America. The stillness of the water, the fishing boats, the iron stakes that mark the channel, the low lying tugs with sluggish curves, the black scows and bright stanchions, the sky never changing, the river bending and twisting, the hills spreading out and ever girdling the valley, the perpetual change of panorama and yet the constancy of it, the variety and movement of life under the fixed sign of the tricolor, all this is the history of the Seine which is in my blood and will go down into the blood of those who come after me when they move along these shores of a Saturday afternoon.
As I cross the bridge at Boulogne, along the road that leads to Meudon, I turn round and roll down thehill into Sevres. Passing through a deserted street I see a little restaurant in a garden; the sun is beating through the leaves and spangling the tables. I dismount.
What is better than reading Vergil or memorizing Goethe (alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, etc.)?` Why, eating outdoors under an awning for eight francs at Issy-les-Moulineaux. Pourtant je suis a Sevres. No matter. I have been thinking lately of writing a journal d’un Fou which I imagine to have found at Issy-les- Moulineaux. And since that fou is largely myself I am not eating at Sevres, but at Issy-les-Moulineaux. And what does the fou say when the waitress comes with the big canette of beer? Don’t worry about errors when you’re writing. The biographers will explain all errors. I am thinking of my friend Carl who has spent the last four days getting started on a description of the woman he’s writing about. “I can’t do it! I can’t do it! ” he says. Very well, says the fou, let me do it for you. Begin! That’s the principal thing. Supposing her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it’s a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you. Take Van Norden-he’s another case. He has been trying for two months to get started with his novel. Each time I meet him he has a new opening for his book. It never gets beyond the opening. Yesterday he said: “You see what my problem’s like. It isn’t just a question of how to begin: the first line decides the cast of the whole book. Now here’s a start I made the other day: Dante wrote a poem about a place called H H-dash, because I don’t want any trouble with the censors.”
Think of a book opening with H-dash! A little private hell which mustn’t offend the censors! I notice that when Whitman starts a poem he writes: “I, Walt, in my 37th year and in perfect health! … I am afoot with my vision…. I dote on myself…. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding… . Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs…. Here or henceforward it is all the same to me…. I exist as I am, that is enough….”
With Walt it is always Saturday afternoon. If the woman be hard to describe he admits it and stops at the third line. Next Saturday, the weather permitting, he may add a missing tooth, or an ankle. Everything can wait, can bide its time. “1 accept Time absolutely.” Whereas my friend Carl, who has the vitality of a bedbug, is pissing in his pants because four days have elapsed and he has only a negative in his hand. “I don’t see any reason,” says he, “why I should ever die-barring an untoward accident.” And then he rubs his hands and closets himself in his room to live out his immortality. He lives on like a bedbug hidden in the wallpaper.
The hot sun is beating through the awning. I am delirious because I am dying so fast. Every second counts. I do not hear the second that has just ticked off -I am clinging like a madman to this second which has not yet announced itself…. What is better than reading Vergil? This! This expanding moment which has not defined itself in ticks or beats, this eternal moment which destroys all values, degrees, differences. This gushing upward and outward from a hidden source. No truths to utter, no wisdom that can be imparted. A gush and a babble, a speaking to all men at once, everywhere, and in all languages. Now is the thinnest veil between madness and sanity. Now is everything so simple that it mocks one. From this peak of drunkenness one rolls down into the plateau of good health where one reads Vergil and Dante and Montaigne and all the others who spoke only of the moment, the expanding moment that is heard forever… . Talking to all men at once. A gush and a babble. This is the moment when I raise the glass to my lips, observing as I do so the fly that has settled on my pinkie; and the fly is as important to this moment as my hand or the glass it holds or the beer that is in the glass or the thoughts that are born of the beer and die with the beer. This is the moment when I know that a sign reading “To Versailles,” or a sign reading “To Suresnes,” any and all signs pointing to this or that place, should be ignored, that one should always go toward the place for which there is no sign. This is the moment when the deserted street on which I have chosen to sit is throbbing with people and all the crowded streets are empty. This is the moment when any restaurant is the right restaurant so long as it was not indicated to you by somebody. This is the best food, though it is the worst I have ever tasted. This is the food which no one but genius will touch-always within reach, easily digested, and leaving an appetite for more. “The roquefort, was it good?” asks the waitress. Divine! The stalest, the wormiest, the lousiest roquefort that was ever fabricated, saturated with the worms of Dante, of Vergil, Homer, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, all the worms that ever were and have passed on into cheese. To eat this cheese one must have genius. This is the cheese wherein I bury myself, I, Miguel Feodor Francois Wolfgang Valentine Miller.