The Rosy Crucifixion 2 - Plexus

by Henry Miller

  I could go on and on, do as I have done time and again—quote and quote until a veritable handbook accumulates. Almost twenty-five years since I made the first reading! And the magic is still there. For those who pride themselves on being always in the van, all that I have quoted, as well as all that lies between the quotes, is now old hat. What matter? For me Oswald Spengler is still alive and kicking. He enriched and uplifted me. As did Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Elie Faure.

  Perhaps I am somewhat of a juggler, since I am able to balance such incongruous ponderables as The Decline of the West and the Too Teh Ching. The one is made of granite or porphyry and weighs a ton; the other is light as a feather and runs through my fingers like water. In eternity, where they meet and have their being, they cancel one another out. An exile like Hermann Hesse understands this sort of juggling perfectly. In the book called Siddhartha he presents two Buddhas, the known and the unknown. Each perfect in his way. They are opposites—in the sense of Systematic and Physiognomic. They do not destroy one another. They meet and part. Buddha is one of those names which grazes the meaning of consciousness. The real Buddhas are without name. In short, the known and the unknown balance perfectly. Jugglers understand … When I think of it now, how remarkably this Untergang music corresponded with my underground life! Strange, too, that virtually the only person with whom I could then speak of Spengler was Osiecki. It must have been in Joe’s restaurant, during one of my promenades nocturnes, that we met again. He had not lost that weird gnomic grin—the teeth all loose and rattling louder than ever. As far as actualities went he was still off the beam. But he could take in the Spenglerian music with the same ease and understanding as he did the music of Dohnanyi for whom he had conceived a passion. To while away the long, weary nights he had taken to reading in bed. All that related to number, engineering, architecture (in Spengler) he had swallowed like pre-digested food. And money, I should add. Of this subject he had an uncanny knowledge. Strange to what ends the unfit develop their faculties! Listening to Osiecki, I used to think how sweet it would be to be locked up in the bug-house with him—and Oswald Spengler. What marvelous discussions we would have held! Out in the cold world all this grand music went to waste. If critics and scholars were interested in the Spenglerian view of things it was not at all in the way we were. For them it was but another bone to gnaw at. A juicer bone than usual, perhaps, but a bone nevertheless. To us it was life, the elixir of life. We got drunk on it every time we met. And of course we developed our own mutual morphological sign language. With each other we could cover huge tracts of thought in jig time, because of this code language. As soon as a stranger entered the discussion we got bogged down. To him our talk was not only unintelligible, it was sheer nonsense.

  With Mona I developed another kind of language. By dint of listening to my monologues she soon picked up the glittering tag ends, all the (to her) fantastic terminology—definitions, meanings, and, so to speak, morphological excreta. She often read a page or two while sitting on the stool. Just sufficient to emerge with a mouthful of phrases and outlandish references. In short, she had learned to bounce the ball back to me, which was pleasant and (for me) stimulating. All I ever required of a listener, when wound up, was a semblance of understanding. Long practice had developed in me the art of instructing my listener in the fundamentals, of giving him just enough of a stance to permit me to wash over him like a fountain. Thus at one and the same time I instructed or informed him—and mystified him. When I sensed that he felt himself on firm ground I would sweep the ground away from him. (Does not the Zen master endeavor to rob his disciple of every foothold he has ever had—in order to supply him with one that is really no foothold?)

  With Mona this was infuriating. Naturally. But then I would have the delicious opportunity of reconciling my contradictory statements; this meant expansion, elaboration, distillation, condensation. In this wise I stumbled on some remarkable conclusions, not only about Spengier’s dicta but about thought in general, about the thought process itself. Only the Chinese, it seemed to me, had understood and appreciated the game of thought. Passionate as I was about Spengler, the truth of his utterances never seemed so important to me as the wonderful play of his thought … Today I think what a pity it is that, as a frontispiece to this phenomenal work, there is not reproduced the horoscope of the author. A clue of this sort is absolutely requisite to an understanding of the character and nature of this intellectual giant. When one thinks of the significance with which Spengler weights the phrase—man as intellectual nomad—one begins to realize that, in pursuing his high task, he came close to being a modern Moses. How much more frightful is this wilderness in which our intellectual nomad is forced to dwell! No Promised Land in sight. Nothing on the horizon but empty symbols.

  That gulf between the dawn man, who participated mystically, and contemporary man, who is unable to communicate except through sterile intellect, can only be bridged by a new type of man, the man with a cosmic consciousness. The sage, the prophet, the visionary, they all spoke in Apocalyptic terms. From earliest times the few have been attempting to break through. Some undoubtedly have broken through—and will remain forever outside the rat trap.

  A morphology of history, valid, exciting, inspiring though it may be, is still a death science. Spengler was not concerned with what lies beyond history. I am. Others are. Even if Nirvana be only a word, it is a pregnant word, it contains a promise. That secret which lies at the heart of the world may yet be dragged into the open. Even ages ago it was pronounced to be an Open secret.

  If the solution to life is the living of it, then let us live, live more abundantly! The masters of life are not found in books. They are not historical figures. They are situated in eternity, and they beseech us unceasingly to join them, in eternity.

  At my elbow, as I write these lines, is a photograph torn from a book, a photograph of an unknown Chinese sage who is living today. Either the photographer did not know who he was or he withheld his name. We know only that he is from Peking: that is all the information which is vouchsafed. When I turn my head to look at him, it is as though he were right here in my room. He is more alive—even in a photograph—than anyone I know. He is not simply a man of spirit—he is all spirit. He is Spirit itself, I might say. All this is concentrated in his expression. The look which he gives forth is completely joyous and luminous. It says without equivocation: Life is bliss!

  Do you, suppose that, from the eminence on which he is poised—serene, light as a bird, with a wisdom all-embracing—a morphology of history would mean anything to him? No question here of exchanging the perspective of the frog for that of the bird. Here we have the perspective of a god. He is there and his position is unalterable. Instead of perspective he has compassion. He does not preach wisdom—he sheds light.

  Do you suppose that he is unique? Not I. I believe that all over the world, and in the most unsuspected places (naturally), there are men—or gods—like this radiant being. They are not enigmatic, they are transparent. There is no mystery about them whatever: they are out in the open, perpetually on view. If we are removed from them it is only because we cannot accept their divine simplicity. Illumined being, we say, yet never ask with what it is they are illumined. To be aflame with spirit (which is life), to radiate unending joy, to be serene above the chaos of the world and still be part of the world, human, divinely human, closer than any brother—how is it we do not yearn to be thus? Is there a role which is better, deeper, richer, more compelling? Then shout it from the roof-tops! We want to know. And we want to know immediately.

  I do not need to wait for your response. I see the answer all about me. It is not really an answer—it is an evasion. The illustrious one at my elbow looks straight at me: he fears not to gaze upon the face of the world. He has neither rejected the world nor renounced it: he is part of it, just as stone, tree, beast, flower and star are part of it. In his being he is the world, all there can ever be of it … When I look at those around me I see only the prof
iles of averted faces. They are trying not to look at life—it is too terrible or too horrible, too this or too that. They see only the awesome dragon of life, and they are impotent before the monster. If only they had the courage to look straight into the dragon’s jaws!

  In many ways what is called history seems to me nothing more than a manifestation of this same fearsome attitude towards life. It is possible that what we call the historical would cease to be, would be erased from consciousness, once we performed that simple soldierly movement of Eyes Front! What is worse than a backward glance at the world is an oblique one.

  When we speak of men making history we mean to say that they Lave in some measure altered the course of life. But the man at my elbow is beyond such silly dreams. He knows that man alters nothing—not even his own self. He knows that man can do one thing only, and that that is his sole aim in life—open the eyes of the soul! Yes, man has this choice—to let in the light or to keep the shutters closed. In making the choice man acts. This is his part vis-a-vis creation.

  Open the eyes wide and the stir must die down. And when the stir dies down then commences the real music.

  The dragon snorting fire and smoke from his nostril is only expelling his fears. The dragon does not stand guard at the heart of the world—he stands at the entrance to the cave of wisdom. The dragon has reality only in the phantasmal world of superstition.

  The homeless, homesick man of the big cities. What heart-rending pages Spengler devotes to the plight of the intellectual nomad! Rootless, sterile, sceptical, soulless—and homeless and homesick to boot. Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go ‘back’ to the land.

  Let me say it unequivocally—after a reading nothing in the world of actualities had meaning or importance for me. The daily news was about as remote as the dog star. I was in the very center of the transformative process. All was death and transfiguration.

  There was only one headline which still had power to excite me, and that was—THE END OF THE WORLD IS IN SIGHT! In that imaginary phrase I never sensed a menace to my own world, only to the world. I was closer to Augustine than to Jerome. But I had not yet found my Africa. My point of repair was a stuffy little furnished room. Alone in it I experienced a strange sort of peace. It was not the peace that passeth understanding. Ah no! It was an intermittent sort, the augur of a greater, a more enduring peace. It was the peace of a man who was able to reconcile himself with the condition of the world in thought.

  Still, it was a step. The cultured individual seldom gets beyond this stage.

  Eternal life is not life beyond the grave, but the true spiritual life, said a philosopher. What a time it has taken me to realize the full import of such a statement! … A whole century of Russian thought (the 19th) was preoccupied with this question of the end, of the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God. But in North America it was as if that century, those thinkers and searchers after the true reality of life, had never existed. True, now and then a rocket exploded in our midst. Now and then we did receive a message from some distant shore. Such events were regarded not only as mysterious, bizarre, outlandish, but as occult. This last label meant that they were no longer serviceable Or applicable to daily life.

  Reading Spengler was not precisely a balm. It was more of a spiritual exercise. The critique of Western thought underlying his cyclical pattern had the same effect upon me as the Koans have for the Zen disciple. Again and again I arrived at my own peculiar Western state of Satori. Time and again I experienced those lightning flashes of illumination which herald the break-through. There came excruciating moments when, as if the universe were an accordion, I could view it as an infinitesimal speck or expand it infinitely, so that only the eye of God could encompass it. Gazing at a star outside my window, I could magnify it ten thousand times; I could roam from star to star, like an angel, endeavoring all the while to grasp the unverse in these super-telescopic proportions. I would then return to my chair, look at my finger-nail, or rather at an almost invisible spot on the nail, and see into it the universe which the physicist endeavors to create out of the atomic web of nothingness. That man could ever conceive of nothingness always astounded me.

  For so long now the conceptual world has been man’s whole world. To name, to define, to explain … Result: unceasing anguish. Expand or contract the universe ad injinitum—a parlor game. Playing the god instead of trying to be as God. Godding, godding—and at the same time believing in nothing. Bragging of the miracles of science, yet looking upon the world about as so much shit. Frightening ambivalence! Electing for systems, never for man. Denying the miracle men through the systems erected in their names.

  On lonely nights, pondering the problem—only one ever!—I could see so very clearly the world as it is, see what it is and why it is the way it is. I could reconcile grace with evil, divine order with rampant ugliness, imperishable creation with utter sterility. I could make myself so finely attuned that a mere zephyr would blow me to dust. Instant annihilation or enduring life—it was one and the same to me. I was at balance, both sides so evenly poised that a molecule of air would tip the scales.

  Suddenly a most hilarious thought would shatter the whole set-up. An idea such as this: However deep one’s knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair flying in the vastness of space. A Japanese thought, this. With it came a return to a more ordinary sort of equilibrium. Back to that frailest of all footholds—solid earth. That solid earth which we now accept as being as empty as space.

  In Europe it was I, and I alone with my yearning for Russia, who was free, said Dostoievsky somewhere. From Europe, like a true Evangel, he spread the glad tidings. A hundred, two hundred years hence, the full import of this utterance may be realized. What is to be done meanwhile? A question I propounded to myself over and over.

  In the early pages of the chapter called Problems of the Arabian Culture, Spengler dwells at some length upon the eschatological aspect of Jesus’ utterances. The whole section called Historic Pseudomorphoses is a paean to the Apocalyptic. It opens with a tender, sympathetic portrait of Jesus of Nazareth vis-a-vis the world of his day. The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. So begins this section. In Jesus’ utterances, he points out, there were no sociological observations, problems, debatings.

  No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order…

  Then follows this: Religion is metaphysic and nothing else—’Credo quia absurdum’—and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic—that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is … His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled: the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the Last Judgment, a new heaven and a new earth. Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history … ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.

  It is at this point that Spengler voices his scorn for Tolstoy who elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. It is here he makes a pointed allusion to Dostoievsky who never thought about social ameliorations. (Of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?)

 
Dostoievsky and his freedom…

  Was it not in that same time of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky that another Russian asked—Why is it stupid to believe in the Kingdom of Heaven but intelligent to believe in an earthly Utopia?

  Perhaps the answer to this conundrum was inadvertently given by Belinsky when he said: The fate of the subject, of the individual, of the person is more important than the fate of the whole world and the well-being of the Chinese Emperor.

  At any rate, it was definitely Fedorov who quietly remarked: Each person is answerable for the whole world and for all men,

  A strange and exciting period in the land of holy miracles nineteen centuries after the birth and death of Jesus the Christ! One man writes The Apology of a Madman; another writes a Revolutionary Catechism; another The Metaphysics of Sex. Each one is a revolution in himself. Of one figure I learn that he was a conservative, a mystic, an anarchist, an orthodox, an occultist, a patriot, a Communist—and ended his life in Rome as a Catholic and a Fascist. Is this a period of historic pseudomorphosis? Certainly it is an Apocalyptic one.

  My misfortune, metaphysically speaking, is that I was born neither in the time of Jesus nor in holy Russia of the nineteenth century. I was born in the megalopolis at the tail-end of a great planetary conjunction. But even in the suburb of Brooklyn, by the time I had come of age, one could be stirred by the repercussions of that Slavic ferment. One World War had been fought and won. Sic! The second one was in the making. In that same Russia I speak of Spengler had a precursor whom you will scarcely find mention of even today. Even Nietzsche had a Russian precursor!

  Was it not Spengler who said that Dostoievsky’s Russia would eventually triumph? Did he not predict that from this ripe soil a new religion would spring? Who believes this today?