Crazy Cock

by Henry Miller

  Left to himself, ignored like a broken umbrella, the pain gradually easing up, because with time everything passes, Tony Bring discovered that it was pleasant to lie back and rehearse the drama of his life—a drama that began, as he vividly recalled, from that moment when, sitting in his high chair, he recited like a trained dog some verses of German poetry . . . recited in the barbarous tongue of his barbarous ancestors. So vivid, accurate, and complete were his recollections that with a fierce, proud, crazy exultation he said to himself: If I lie here long enough I can string my whole life together, day by day. And certain days which for certain reasons stood out from the others like milestones he did actually live over again, hour for hour, minute for minute. Women who had so completely dropped from memory that a week ago he could not have summoned their image now came to life in strictest detail—height, weight, resistance, texture of skin, the things they wore, the way they embraced . . . everything . . . everything. Retracing the curve of his life he saw that it was not the broad, circuitous arc that one imagined to himself, that it was neither an arrow shot toward death nor the parabolic kiss of the infinite nor yet the noble symphony of biology; it was rather a succession of shocks, a seismographic record of oscillations, of peaks and dips and broad, tranquil valleys that were like divine menopauses.

  LATE ONE afternoon, as if electrified, he sprang out of bed, consumed a hearty meal in which he violated all the rules of diet that had been laid down for him, and began to write. The louder they banged, the more they whistled and guzzled and sang, the better he wrote. The words rose up inside him like tombstones and danced without feet; he piled them up like an acropolis of flesh, rained on them with vengeful hate until they dangled like corpses slung from a lamppost. The eyes of his words were guitars and they were laced with black laces, and he put crazy hats on his words and under their laps table legs and napkins. And he had his words copulate with one another to bring forth empires, scarabs, holy water, the lice of dreams and dream of wounds. He sat the words down and laced them to chair with their black laces and then he fell on them and lashed them, lashed them until the blood ran black and the eyes broke their veils. What he remembered of his life were the shocks, the seismographic orgasms that said, “Now you are living,” “Now you are dying.” And the broad tranquil valleys that were coveted was the cud which cows chewed, was the love which women took between their legs and masticated, was a bell with an enormous clapper that broke the wind with its clangor. The peaks and the dips—there was the living, the rush of mercury in the thermometer of the veins, the pulse without a bridle. The peaks—saint going up to peep at the hinderparts of God . . . prophet with dung in his hands and foaming at the mouth . . . dervish with music in the balls of his feet, with snakes squirming in his entrails, dancing, dancing, dancing with maggots in his brain. . . . Not heights and depths, but ecstasy upside down, inside out, the bottom reaching as far as the top. Abasement not reaching just to the earth, but through the earth, through grass and sod and subterranean stream, from zenith to nadir. Everything that was loved being hated fiercely. Not the cold pricks of conscience, not the tormenting flagellation of the mind, but bright, cruel blades flashing, scorn, insult, contumely, not doubting God but denying Him, flaying Him, spitting on Him. But always God!

  AND THEN one night Vanya rose up like a dolphin covered with mud and she said, “I’ll go mad . . . go mad!” and he said to himself, Fine! Here we are at last . . . go mad! To go mad is to stop being a eunuch, to quit the fertile valleys, not to masturbate with paint or to change names. If she would only go mad he would embrace her in madness, she male and he female; he would put an infibulator on the house and they would die of excess. And the amphibious one, who changed sex with the seasons, who closed herself in like an oyster and called the two hard shells her mystery, she could nurse her mystery in iodine and mud. Colder than a statue, her voice lifeless, her eyes glassy, the one who was mystery stood beside the gut table. Like a sleepwalker stabbing herself over and over. A dress rehearsal before an empty house, an impromptu debacle in which the actress revenges herself upon the author. Wherever her feverish eyes turned there were arms and legs and purple wigs, and lying in a corner like an old mandolin was the Count and the Count had his ears cocked, straining to catch the gurgle of the drains, the fall of water falling, choked with ice and liquid fire and clots of blood and violets that muttered. She was like a sleepwalker stabbing herself over and over and out of the wounds that she gouged with a broken knife her magnificent ego spilled forth in sawdust gestures. Looking through the mist between her eyes she saw mountains and vast alkali sinks and mesas dotted with sagebrush where at night the thermometer dropped like an anchor and the wind moaned.

  Big Vanya sat down and shut her ears so that everything might begin over again; she doubled up and went slack and her body rolled into a knot, her body legs and arms all snakes, a ball made of rubber bands. Immobile, breathing like a fetus, and if there were any thoughts in her they were drowned in her navel, if she had been asked her name she would not have known were it Miriam, Michael, David, Vanya, Esther, Ashteroth, Beelzebub, or Romanoff. So deeply, blindly, savagely did she crawl into herself that she was both womb and fetus and what moved and quivered in the beyond was like the thumping upon a swollen belly . . . thump, thump . . . a wild mare stamping on her belly, her croup curved like the arc of the sky.

  With the statue standing there cold, eyes glassy, stabbing herself over and over, it was like a film in which the same shot is shot a hundred times. Every time the shutter clicked the eye plunged deeper into dream. Repetition death and the violence of death dream of living. Dream and death . . . the same shot shot a hundred times. With each click of the shutter the eye plunging deeper. Mute marble licked with eroticism, black ecstasy projected on screen-white fantasy. Hysteria. Hysteria of stone. Female stone shivering with music. Statue fornicating truth. Statue masturbating lies. Masturbation incessant, obscene . . . a rubber litany in a rubber dream. A hysterical woman with marble organs, a woman of marble with hysterical organs, a female stone spewing its guts is a fountain of fire breaking through ice. A hysterical woman may believe anything about herself—that she slept with Napoleon or offered her lips to God. She may say that she satisfied her appetite with goats or Shetland ponies, she may confess to loving six men at once and each of them with all her strength. She may shiver so with music that even the memory of her passions disintegrates, collapses like a burning building. Everything burns away that is not stone. The organs remain intact, mute marble licked with eroticism, ecstasy hung on a white screen. Lock all the doors and set the house on fire, where the statue stands masturbating lies there will still be music, the shiver of stone on fire, fire gushing through ice. Stab her over and over, plunge the eye deeper into dream, nothing but the repetition of death, eyes glassed with ecstasy, each click of the shutter a lie, a fornication. When women with marble organs essay to sleep with God, divinity arrives at menopause. What was ancient drama, noble music of myth and legend, ends in prophylaxis. Those who once felt themselves characters see their lines and gestures dribble away in sawdust. Once the world was young and the wounds one bore one displayed proudly, because God had put His finger in the wounds and they were not meant to heal—they were to be borne with courage and suffering. And now we are riding out like rotten sloops to the storm and you can poke an umbrella through the gaping holes of our wounds—but there is no suffering, and no courage. We and our characters—for we are our characters—go down like deserted ships, sloops too rotten to weather the first storm.

  Finis.

  *Editor’s note: There is some debate over who took possession of Crazy Cock and Moloch once Henry Miller left for Paris. For a different interpretation see Mary Dearborn’s Introduction, page xxii.

 

 

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