Tropic of Capricorn

by Henry Miller

  Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at meal times to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal. The only way I can describe it is to say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual act with her cunt. You’d be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it would reach out for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too, this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal.

  Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most “personal” hard-on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it wasn’t quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with her legs spread open offering a bright green leaf to the first-comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does it’s volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wild-cat. Now and then one hears it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself – and watch out that you don’t get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry, but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy: it means that she will lay herself down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull it down in a night. She will pull it down and pee on it, and nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest. And when I said about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most “personal” hard-on imaginable I meant it; she would break down the personal erection and hand you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod. You might not get very far with Veronica herself, but with what she had to give you could travel far and no mistake about it. Once you came within earshot of her it was like you had gotten an overdose of Spanish fly. Nothing on earth could bring it down again, unless you put it under a sledge-hammer.

  It was going on this way all the time, even though every word I say is a lie. It was a personal tour in the impersonal world, a man with a tiny trowel in his hand digging a tunnel through the earth to get to the other side. The idea was to tunnel through and find at last the Culebra Cut, the nec plus ultra, of the honeymoon of flesh. And of course there was no end to the digging. The best I might hope for was to get stuck in the dead centre of the earth, where the pressure was strongest and most even all around, and stay stuck there forever. That would give me the feeling of Ixion on the wheel, which is one sort of salvation and not entirely to be sneezed at. On the other hand I was a metaphysician of the instinctivist sort; it was impossible for me to stay stuck anywhere, even in the dead centre of the earth. It was most imperative to find and enjoy the metaphysical fuck, and for that I would be obliged to come out on to a wholly new tableland, a mesa of sweet alfalfa and polished monoliths, where the eagles and the vultures flew at random.

  Sometimes sitting in a park of an evening, especially a park littered with papers and bits of food, I would see one pass by, one that seemed to be going towards Tibet, and I would follow her with the round eye, hoping that suddenly she would begin to fly, for if she did that, if she would begin to fly, I knew I would be able to fly also, and that would mean an end to the digging and the wallowing. Sometimes, probably because of twilight or other disturbances, it seemed as though she actually did fly on rounding a corner. That is, she would suddenly be lifted from the ground for the space of a few feet, like a plane too heavily loaded; but just that sudden involuntary lift, whether real or imaginary it didn’t matter, gave me hope, gave me courage to keep the still round eye riveted on the spot.

  There were megaphones inside which yelled “Go on, keep going, stick it out,” and all that nonsense. But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would set the alarm dock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up and about? Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved. Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of the earth, wouldn’t it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and just board an aeroplane for China? But the body follows after the mind. The simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it gets particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two start going in opposite directions.

  Labouring with the trowel was bliss; it left the mind completely free and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like old shoe laces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and overexasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the promised tableland would hove in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that’s holy. These misadventures happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began to approach it. Everybody had at one time or another planted the flag in this territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently. It disappeared overnight – sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. It was No Man’s Land and it stank with the litter of invisible deaths. If a truce were declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But the truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency was the “zone between” idea. Here the bullet flew and the corpses piled up: then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a stench.

  This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable. What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt; it must be mentioned only in de luxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart. What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. But fuck, the real thing, cunt, the real thing, seems to contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than nitroglycerine. To get an idea of the real thing you must consult a Sears-Roebuck catalogue endorsed by the Anglican Church. On page 23 you will find a picture of Priapus juggling a corkscrew on the end of his weeny; he is standing in the shadow of the Parthenon by mistake;
he is naked except for a perforated jock-strap which was loaned for the occasion by the Holy Rollers of Oregon and Saskatchewan. Long distance is on the wire demanding to know if they should sell short or long. He says go fuck yourself and hangs up the receiver. In the background Rembrandt is studying the anatomy of our Lord Jesus Christ who, if you remember, was crucified by the Jews and then taken to Abysinnia to be pounded with quoits and other objects. The weather seems to be fair and warmer, as usual, except for a slight mist rising up out of the Ionian; this is the sweat of Neptune’s balls which were castrated by the early monks, or perhaps it was by the Manicheans in the time of the Pentecostal plague. Long strips of horse meat are hanging out to dry and the flies are everywhere, just as Homer describes it in ancient times. Hard by is a McCormick threshing machine, a reaper and binder with a thirty-six horse-power engine and no cutout. The harvest is in and the workers are counting their wages in the distant fields. This is the flush of dawn on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world, now faithfully reproduced for us in colour thanks to the Zeiss Brothers and other patient zealots of industry. But this is not the way it looked to the men of Homer’s time who were on the spot. Nobody knows how the god Priapus looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the end of his weeny. Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he undoubtedly fell a-dreaming of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness of the corkscrew and the threshing and reaping machine; he must have grown very silent within himself and finally he must have lost even the desire to dream. It is my idea, and of course I am willing to be corrected if I am wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the Angelus peal and lo and behold there appeared before his very eyes a gorgeous green marshland in which the Chocktaws were making merry with the Navajos: in the air above were the white condors, their ruffs festooned with marigolds. He saw also a huge slate on which was written the body of Christ, the body of Absalom and the evil which is lust. He saw the sponge soaked with frogs’ blood, the eyes which Augustine had sewn into his skin, the vest which was not big enough to cover out iniquities. He saw these things in the whilomst moment when the Navajos were making merry with the Chocktaws and he was so taken by surprise that suddenly a voice issued from between his legs, from the long thinking reed which he had lost in dreaming, and it was the most inspired, the most shrill and piercing, the most jubilant and ferocious cacchinating sort of voice that had ever wongled up from the depths. He began to sing through that long code of his with such divine grace and elegance that the white condors came down out of the sky and shat huge purple eggs all over the green marshland. Our Lord Christ got up from his stone bed and, marked by the quoit though he was, he danced like a mountain goat. The fellaheen came out of Egypt in their chains, followed by the warlike Igorotes and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar.

  This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world. Since then things have changed a great deal. It is no longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is it permitted even to condors to shit purple eggs all over the place. All this is scatological, eschatological and ecumenical. It is forbidden. Verboten. And so the Land of Fuck becomes ever more receding; it becomes mythological. Therefore am I constrained to speak mythologically. I speak with extreme unction, and with precious unguents too. I put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white marigolds, the oleanders and the rhododendrons. Up with the thorns and the manacles! Christ is dead and mangled with quoits. The fellaheen are bleaching in the sands of Egyptis, their wrists loosely shackled. The vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh. All is quiet, a million golden mice nibbling at the unseen cheese. The moon is up and the Nile ruminates on her riparian ravages. The earth belches silently, the stars twitch and bleat, the rivers slip their banks. It’s like this … There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk: there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap: there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive: there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside: there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy: there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time: there are telegraphic cunts which practise the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried breadcrumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter: there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?

  And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country to which we were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and the tall reeds bend with the wind. It is here that great father of fornication dwells, Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis sprang the race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now for the aluminium wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time. We are travelling faster than the lightning calculator, faster than starlight, fester than the magician can think. Each second is a universe of time. And each universe of time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed. When speed comes to its end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully undenominated. We shall shed our wings, our clocks and our mantelpieces to lean on. We will rise up feathery and jubilant, like a column of blood, and there will be no memory to drag us down again. This time I call the realm of the super-cunt, for it defies speed, calculation or imagery. Nor has the penis itself a known size or weight. There is only the sustained feel of fuck, the fugitive in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar. Little Nemo walks around with a seven day hard-on and a wonderful pair of blue balls bequeathed by Lady Bountiful. It is Sunday morning around the corner from Evergreen Cemetery.

  It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to the world on my bed of ferro-concrete. Around the corner is the cemetery, which is to say – the world of sexual intercourse. My balls ache with the fucking that is going on, but it is all going on beneath my window, on the boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest. I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn’t know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there on the farthest rim of the universe. She thought it
was sheer laziness that kept me riveted to the bed. She threw the bucket of water over me: I squirmed and shivered a bit, but I continued to lie there on my ferro-concrete bed. I was immovable. I was a burned-out meteor adrift somewhere in the neighbourhood of Vega.

  And now I’m on the same bed and the light that’s in me refuses to be extinguished. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck. It seems to me that I hear the clanking of a great machine, the linotype bracelets passing through the wringer of sex. Hymie and his nymphomaniac of a wife are lying on the same level with me, only they are across the river. The river is called Death and it has a bitter taste. I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I have neither been petrified nor immortalized. I am still burning brightly inside, though outwardly dead as a planet. From this bed I have gotten up to dance, not once but hundreds, thousands of times. Each time I came away I had the conviction that I had danced the skeleton dance on a terrain vague. Perhaps I had wasted too much of my substance on suffering; perhaps I had the crazy idea that I would be the first metallurgical bloom of the human species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was both a sub-gorilla and a super-god. On this bed of ferro-concrete I remember everything and everything is in rock crystal. There are never any animals, only thousands and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they utter I have an answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of their mouths. There is plenty of killing, but no blood. The murders are perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in silence. But even if every one were killed there would still be conversation, and the conversation would be at once intricate and easy to follow. Because it is I who create it! I know it, and that is why it never drives me mad. I have conversations which may take place only twenty years hence, when I meet the right person, the one whom I shall create, let us say, when the proper time comes. All these talks take place in a vacant lot which is attached to my bed like a mattress. Once I gave it a name, this terrain vague: I called it Ubiguchi, but somehow Ubiguchi never satisfied me, it was too intelligible, too full of meaning. It would be better to keep it just “terrain vague” which is what I intend to do. People think that vacuity is nothingness, but it is not so. Vacuity is a discordant fulness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes reconnoitering. As a boy I remember standing in the vacant lot as if I were a very lively soul standing naked in a pair of shoes. The body had been stolen from me because I had no particular need of it. I could exist with or without a body then. If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to know about Timbuctoo or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate things of this place, but I was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one could go in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and began to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable. Here began the real cannibalistic excursions which have meant so much to me; no more dead chippies picked from the bonfire, but live human meat, tender, succulent human flesh, secrets like fresh bloody livers, confidences like swollen tumors that have been kept on ice. I learned not to wait for my victim to die, but to eat into him while talking to me. Often when I walked away from an unfinished meal I discovered that it was nothing more than an old friend minus an arm or a leg. I sometimes left him standing there – a trunk full of stinking intestines.