by Henry Miller
The progress of humanity is so infinitesimally slow that it almost seems like no progress at all. But there is that which is called “conscience,” which is not an empty concept but a very real factor in the human make-up, and this conscience does indicate the existence of another and a higher urge. In its negative aspect it makes itself known through fatality, punishment, etc., but in its positive aspect it reveals the existence of an Absolute, of law. It indicates the hidden axis of our vertical life without which the “dreary round of predictable events” would make the world appear like a rat-trap. As Gutkind rightly says, we have never dared to face the world as we should—or one might say with equal truth that we have never dared to face the world-as-it-is. Why does the word “reality” always have such a sinister, gray, fatalistic ring? It is the realists—that is to say, the death-eaters—who are responsible for the pall which has come over the word. But the men who are thoroughly wide-awake and completely alive are in reality, and for there reality has always been close to ecstasy, partaking of a life of fulfillment which knows no bounds. Of them only may it be said that they live in the present. Through them is it permitted us to grasp the meaning of timelessness, of eternity which is victory. It is they who are truly of this world. Their victory is one which each man must win for himself: it is a private and at the same time a universal affair. Nothing which is of value can be handed down, bequeathed, preserved—as with our lamentable treasures of art. What happens must be realized anew by each man. The history of religions emphasizes the stupendous difficulty which man has in realizing this truth. Truth crystallizes quickly into idolatry, servility, surrender. Everywhere we see life being lived vicariously. And yet life everywhere and at all times for any and everybody is simple, startlingly simple. We live on the edge of the miraculous every minute of our lives. The miracle is in us, and it blossoms forth the moment we lay ourselves open to it. The miracle of miracles is the stubbornness with which men refuse to open themselves up. Our whole life seems to be nothing but a frantic effort to evade that which is constantly within our grasp. This which is the very reverse of the miraculous is nothing else but FEAR. Man has no other real enemy than this which he carries within him. Somewhere a French poet has written: “No daring is fatal.” Provided, he should have added, that one is unified. Divided, everything is fatal and leads to catastrophe. This has been the history of mankind, yet no man of vision and integrity has ever accepted it as ordained and ineluctable. Man has the power to renounce and to accept; he can refuse to be a pawn and he can make of himself a god. He holds his fate in his own hands—and not only his own fate, but the fate of the world. There is a justice which, fortunately, surpasses the comprehension of most men, else the world would go mad immediately. It is at the edge of madness that we attain to a glimpse of the overwhelming truth and simplicity of life. What confounds the mob, when confronted with a great figure, is the simplicity of the man’s behavior. I repeat, it is the utter simplicity of life which defeats man. He has turned the earth inside out in a frantic effort to attain security, to arrive at wisdom. But he has never really attached himself to the earth, never sufficiently venerated it. He has tried to subjugate when he has had only to observe and enjoy. Suffering is not the only way to victory—it is a way. And knowledge is the poorest way of all, for it means that only a part of man’s being is struggling forward. The whole man must be there, ready at all times to act (or not to act), to move with the certitude of a sleepwalker, to dare anything because he is convinced that life is now, this very moment, and that it is inexhaustible and unknowable.
Up to the present man has been an embryo, a unique one nevertheless, in that he possesses the power at any moment to leap forth into full being. At one jump he can leap clear of the clockwork, to borrow a phrase of Gutkind’s. I believe it absolutely. I know it to be so from my own experience. All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. Every sign of growth is a revolt against death. Even death itself, finally, is regarded as the means to another kind of growth. In one form or another man has always regarded death as a portal opening the way to a new and greater life. Man has postponed his real life here on earth for a life to come. Once he begins to realize that death is present here and now, in each and all of us, and that it is only necessary to open the door to have life immediately and in unqualified abundance and magnificence, what could possess him to withhold, to remain closed, to fear, to kill, to ding to his miserable possessions? Compared with the splendor and magnificence of that life which we are constantly denying this life which we now lead is a nightmare. Perhaps this alone explains why it is easier to enlist men in the cause of death, why they prefer to be dead heroes, dead saints, dead martyrs in every sense of the word. Life itself has lost its value its attraction. In a real sense, life is something which has not yet begun. Men are seeking life thirstily, but their eyes are in the back of their heads. Life can only be seized by the whole organism, as something felt, something which demands neither proof nor justification. Nobody can point the way. Life is, and in this sense a man is or he is not. Life is not an “it” to be grasped by the mind. “Whoever has not been fully alive in this life,” says Gutkind, “will not become so through death.” Or, as Jacob Boehme put it: “Who dies not before he dies is ruined when he dies.” It is the same thing.
This is the Apocalyptic Era when all things will be made manifest unto us. I am not dippy. I have not become what is erroneously called “religious.” I am against all the religions of the world as I am against all the nations of the world and all the teachings of the world. I speak illogically, intuitively, and with absolute certitude. Nothing will prevent the world from realizing its worst fears—nothing but the elimination of fear itself. The destruction of the world we have foolishly tried to preserve is at hand. The death which had been rotting away in us secretly and disgracefully must be made manifest, and to a degree never before heard of. As Father Perrault said to “Glory” Conway—“It will be such a storm, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are levelled in a vast chaos . . . The Dark Ages to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed.” This is the dread prospect which faces us and which is our hope at the same time. The wheel turns slowly, but it turns and turns, and not even death can arrest it. For death is a part of the endless process. For the time being there is no ceiling; if we are to make a real ascent we must break through the “metaphysical zenith.” We have remained too long at the level of culture subject to the law of evaporation by which everything freezes into the stagnant flux of civilization. “Our action,” says Gutkind, “must have its root in the mysterious center of our dumb, unconscious being . . . Our ascent must take its start in the depths of the body.”
All about us we see a world in revolt; but revolt is negative, a mere finishing-off process. In the midst of destruction we carry with us also our creation, our hopes, our strength, our urge to be fulfilled. The climate changes as the wheel turns, and what is true for the sidereal world is true for man. The last two thousand yean have brought about a duality in man such as he never experienced before, and yet the man who dominates this whole period was one who stood for wholeness, one who proclaimed the Holy Ghost. No life in the whole history of man has been so misinterpreted, so woefully misunderstood as Christ’s. If not a single man has shown himself capable of following the example of Christ, and doubtless none ever will for we shall no longer have need of Christs, nevertheless this one profound example has altered our climate. Unconsciously we are moving into a new realm of being; what we have brought to perfection, in our zeal to escape the true reality, is a complete arsenal of destruction; when we have rid ourselves of the suicidal mania for a beyond we shall begin the life of here and now which is reality and which is sufficien
t unto itself. We shall have no need for art or religion because we shall be in ourselves a work of art. This is how I interpret realistically what Gutkind has set forth philosophically: this is the way in which man will overcome his broken state. If my statements are not precisely in accord with the text of Gutkind’s thesis, I nevertheless am thoroughly in accord with Gutkind and his view of things. I have felt it my duty not only to set forth his doctrine, but to launch it, and in launching it to augment it, activate it. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. I am one man who can truly say that he has understood and acted upon this profound thought of Gutkind’s—“the stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do.”
* The Absolute Collective: A Philosophical Attempt to overcome our broken state. By Erich Gutkind. Translated by Marjorie Gabain.
THE ENORMOUS WOMB
AS THE dictionary says, the womb is the place where anything is engendered or brought to life. As far as I can make out, there is never anything but womb. First and last there is the womb of Nature; then there is the mother’s womb; and finally there is the womb in which we have our life and being and which we call the world. It is the failure to recognize the world as womb which is the cause of our misery, in large part. We think of the child unborn as living in a state of bliss; we think of death as an escape from life’s ills; but life itself we still refuse to regard as bliss and security. And yet, in this world about is not everything being engendered and brought to life? Perhaps it is only another of our illusions that the grave be regarded as a refuge and the nine months preceding birth as bliss. Who knows anything about the uterine life or the life hereafter? Yet somehow the idea has caught hold, and probably it will never perish, that these two states of unconsciousness mean freedom from pain and struggle, and hence bliss. On the other hand we know from experience that there are people alive and moving about who live in what is called a state of bliss. Are they more unconscious than the rest, or less so? I think most of us would agree that they are less unconscious. Wherein are their lives different then from that of the ordinary run of mankind? To my way of thinking the difference lies in their attitude towards the world, lies in the supreme fact that they have accepted the world as a womb, and not a tomb. For they seem neither to regret what has passed nor to fear what is to come. They live in an intense state of awareness and yet are apparently without fear.
It has been said that fear, which plays such a dominant role in our lives, was once a vague, nameless thing, an echo, one might almost say, of the life instinct. It has been said that with the development of civilization this nameless fear gradually crystallized into a fear of death. And that in the highest reaches of civilization this fear of death becomes a fear of life, as exemplified by the behavior of the neurotic. Now there is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him. There have been less than a handful of such men in the history of man. Whether they were forces for good or evil matters little: the fear which they awaken is the fear of the monster. In truth they were all monsters, whether they be called Tamerlane, Buddha, Christ or Napoleon. They were heroic figures, and the hero, according to myths was always born supernaturally. The hero, in short, is one who was spared the shock of birth.
The hero then is a sort of monster who is immune to pain and suffering: he is on the side of life. The world is for him a place where things are engendered, brought to life. Life reveals itself to him as art, and not as an ordeal. He enjoys life by rearranging it according to his own needs. He may say that he is doing it for others, for humanity, but we know that he is also a liar. The hero is a man who says to himself—this is where things happen, not somewhere else. He acts as if he were at home in the world. Such behavior, of course, brings about a terrific confusion, for as you may have noticed, people are seldom at home, always somewhere else, always “absent.” Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. And the simple reason for it is: FEAR.
As we see whenever a war breaks out, the fear of war is overcome the moment one is really in it. If war were really as terrible as people imagine it to be it would have been wiped out long ago. To make war is as natural for human beings as to make love. Love can make cowards of men just as much as the fear of war. But once desperately in love a man will commit any crime and not only feel justified, but feel good about it. It is in the order of things.
The wisest men are those who speak of illusion: MAYA. Illusion is the antidote to fear. In harness they render life absurdly illogical. But it is just this antinomian quality of life which keeps us going, which sends us shuttling back and forth from one womb to another. The world, which is not just the human world, is the womb of all, of birth and of life and of death.
It is this third and all-inclusive womb, THE WORLD, which man is perpetually striving to make himself a part of. It is the original chaos, the seat of creation itself. No man ever fully attains it. It is a condition of IS known neither to the foetus nor to the corpse. But it is known to the soul, and if it be unrealizable it is none the less true.
Curiously enough the verb which expresses being is in our language an intransitive verb. Most people think it quite natural that the verb to be should be an intransitive one. And yet there are languages, as we know, which make no distinction between transitive and intransitive. The spirit of these languages is more deeply rooted in symbol. Since it is only through symbolism that we apprehend anything profoundly, the more precise and conceptual a language becomes the more sterile does it become. The modern tongues, all of them, reflect more and more the death in us. They reflect only too clearly the fact that we regard life itself as a vestibule, whether to heaven or to hell makes little difference. It was against this stagnant automatism which Lawrence fought all his life; it is this surrender to the death instincts which enrages a man like Céline.
Real death is not a source of terror for the ordinary, intelligent, sensitive being. It is living death which is the great nightmare. Living death means the interruption of the current of life, the forestalling of a natural death process. It is a negative way of recognizing that the world is really nothing but a great womb, the place where everything is brought to life.
Everything that lives has will, that is, creativeness. Will is in the verb, which is the most important adjunct of our speech: a verb is ipso facto transitive. A verb, however, can be made intransitive, as the will can be rendered powerless, by the mind. But by its nature a verb is the symbol of action, regardless of whether the action be doing, having, breathing, or being.
Actually there is nothing but a steady stream of activity, a movement towards or away from life. This activity continues even in death, therein proving often to be the most fructifying of all activity. We have no real language for death, since we know nothing of it, have never experienced it; we have only thought concepts, counter-symbols which are expressive of life in a negative fashion. All that we really know is becoming, the endless change and transformation. Things are constantly being recreated. The real fear, the real terror, lies in the idea of arrest. It is a living idea of death.
Some people are born dead. Some people impress us as only half-alive. Others again seem radiant with energy. Whether one is on the side of life or on the side of death makes no difference. Life is just as wonderful on the minus side as on the plus side. The real miracle is to stand still. That would mean becoming God, or dead-alive. That is the only possible escape from the womb, and that of course is why the notion of God is so ingrained in the human consciousness. God is summation, which is the same as saying cessation. God does not represent life, but fulfillment, which is the only legitimate form of death.
In this legitimate form of death, which I say lies behind the notion of fulfillment, there is the completest subservience to the life instinct. This is the
idea which has obsessed all the religious maniacs, the very sensible one that only in living a thing out to the full can there be an end. It is a wholly unmoral idea, a thoroughly artistic one. The greatest artists have been the immoralists, that is, the ones who have been in favor of living it out. Of course they were immediately misunderstood by their disciples, by those who go about preaching in their name, disseminating the gospel of this or that. The idea with which these great religious figures were imbued is that of bringing things to an end. They were all ridden with an obsession about suffering.