by Henry Miller
Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men, lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heaven with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard burns, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there – like a fissure in the bladder – and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the poom of the “other” world? Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – but finally, what then? Finally? What was finally? A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the vault … what? what? I’ll tell you – sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, pronged beams of the black star, horned, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic acuity of your interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist’s dummy could reproduce. I thought out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cock-eyed system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pin point with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day-race. But everything was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day – perhaps. We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck had been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction.
I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father, mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change, not once but several times. At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate almost like a cornflower, and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations – of skin, muscle, colour, posture, odour, gait, gesture, et cetera. She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she really was like because with each one she was an entirely different person. After a time she didn’t even know herself what she was like. She had begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later discovered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, of her charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were non-existent. She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace. She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her intonation, her accent, her phraseology. She conducted herself so skilfully that it was impossible even to broach the subject of origins. She was constantly on her guard, even in her sleep. And, like a good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defence is attack. She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her sentinels were stationed everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed.
Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers towards the fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without the slightest knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the conscious birth. She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions – she had only to bear in mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have to invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her. She was never outflanked by a direct question since she never presented herself to an adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the everturning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving. She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would reflect the myth she had created. She had no poise whatsoever; she was eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the self. She had not intended to make herself a legendary figure, she had merely wanted her beauty to be recognized. But, in the pursuit of beauty, she soon forgot her quest entirely, became the victim of her own creation. She became so stunningly beautiful that at times she was frightening, at times positively uglier than the ugliest woman in the world. She could inspire horror and dread, especially when her charm was at its height. It was as though the will, blind and uncontrollable, shone through the creation, exposing the monster which it is.
In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit, gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few moments. It was like a frantic long distance message, an S.O.S. from a sinking ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by flesh rubbing against flesh. I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without aspect. I know that we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck through an iron grate. I said that in the frantic grappling in the dark I sometimes forgot her name, what she looked like, who she was. It’s true. I overeached myself in the dark. I slid off the flesh rails into the endless space of sex, into the channel-orbits established by this one and that one; Georgiana, for instance, of only a brief afternoon, Telma, the Egyptian whore, Carlotta, Alannah, Una, Mona, Magda, girls of six or seven; waifs, will’o’-the-wisps, faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a dream, a memory, a desire, a longing. I could start with Georgiana of a Sunday afternoon near the railroad tracks, her dotted Swiss dress, her swaying haunch, her Southern drawl, her lascivious mouth, her molten breasts; I could start with Georgiana, the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work outwards and upwards through the ramification of cunt into the nth dimension of sex, world without end. Georgiana was like the membrane of the tiny little ear of an unfinished monster called sex. She was transparently alive and breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the avenue, the first tangible odour and substance of the world of fuck which is in itself a being limitless and undefinable, like our world the world. The whole world of fuck like unto the ever-increasing membrane of the animal we call sex, which is like another being growing into our own being and gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world will be only a dim memory of this new, all-inclusive, all-procreative being which is giving birth to itself.
It
was precisely this snake-like copulation in the dark, this double-jointed, double-barrelled hook-up, which put me in the strait-jacket of doubt, jealousy, fear, loneliness. If I began my hem-stitching with Georgiana and the myriad-branched candelabra of sex I was certain that she too was at work building membrane, making ears, eyes, toes, scalp and what-not of sex. She would begin with the monster who had raped her, assuming there was truth in the story; in any case she too began somewhere on a parallel track, working upwards and outwards through this multiform, uncreated being through whose body we were both striving desperately to meet. Knowing only a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, of inventions, of imaginings, of obsessions and delusions, putting together tag-ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished sentences, jumbled dream talk, hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid desires, meeting now and then a name become flesh, overhearing stray bits of conversation, observing smuggled glances, half-arrested gestures, I could well credit her with a pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too vivid flesh and blood creatures, men of perhaps that very afternoon, of perhaps only an hour ago, her cunt perhaps still choked with the sperm of the last fuck. The more submissive she was, the more passionately she behaved, the more abandoned she looked, the more uncertain I became. There was no beginning, no personal, individual starting point; we met like experienced swordsmen on the field of honour now crowded with the ghosts of victory and defeat. We were alert and responsible to the least thrust, as only the practiced can be.
We came together under cover of dark with our armies and from opposite sides we forced the gates of the citadel. There was no resisting our bloody work; we asked for no quarter and we gave none. We came together swimming in blood, a gory, glaucous reunion in the night with all the stars extinguished save the fixed black star hanging like a scalp above the hole in the ceiling. If she were properly coked she would vomit it forth like an oracle, everything that had happened to her during the day, yesterday, the day before, the year before last, everything, down to the day she was born. And not a word of it was true, not a single detail. Not a moment did she stop, for if she had, the vacuum she created in her flight would have brought about an explosion fit to sunder the world. She was the world’s lying machine in microcosm, geared to the same unending, devastating fear which enables men to throw all their energies into creation of the death apparatus. To look at her one would think her fearless, one would think her the personification of courage and she was, so long as she was not obliged to turn in her traces. Behind her lay the calm fact of reality, a colossus which dogged her every step. Every day this colossal reality took on new proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralysing. Every day she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic eyes. It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost from the start, and no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, ready in one lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground. It was so simple and obvious that it drove her frantic. Marshal a thousand personalities, commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the greatest minds, make the longest detour – still the end would be defeat. In the final meeting everything was destined to fell apart – the cunning, the skill, the power, everything. She would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse than anything, she would resemble each and every other grain of sand on that ocean’s shore. She would be condemned to recognize her unique self everywhere until the end of time. What a fate she had chosen for herself! That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the universal! That her power should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity! It was maddening, hallucinating. It could not be! It must not be! Onward! Like the black legions. Onward! Through every degree of the everwidening circle. Onward and away from the self, until the last substantial particle of the soul be stretched to infinity. In her panic-stricken flight she seemed to bear the whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines of the universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a mad witches’ revel.
In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face. Not a line in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms of the Creator. Who killed Cock Robin? Who massacred the Iroquois? Not I, my lovely angel could say, and by God, who gazing at that pure, blameless face could deny her? Who could see in that sleep of innocence that one half of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan? The mask was smooth as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like a petal open to the faintest breeze. So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and nevermore return. Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the moon itself. In her death-like trance of innocence she fascinated even more; her crimes dissolved, exuded through the pores, she lay coiled like a sleeping serpent riveted to the earth. The body, strong, lithe, muscular, seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human gravity, the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse. She was like one might imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years of mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh preserved from mortal decay. She lay coiled at the base of a hollow pyramid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of the past. Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber. She had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down to the level of the mineral world where animation is just a notch above death. She had so mastered the art of deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her. She had learned how to not dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off the current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one would have found it absolutely void. She kept no disturbing secrets; everything was killed off which could be humanly killed. She might live on endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in madness, discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. Sowing her own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the heinous stillness of her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the cold magma of the lifeless planetary worlds. She was magically intact. Her gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon gaze through which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire. The one eye was a warm brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, the magnetic eye which flickered a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye continued to flicker under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her.
The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake. She awoke with a violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were a shock. Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great python. What annoyed her was the light! She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the glare of reality. The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the the windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe. She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day. From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, in
deed. One wondered if she would ever take off, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming of her itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply allowing time for the functional processes of her marvellous machine so that once embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor. All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the take-off, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight towards some uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down into the grave. Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward towards those whom she was abandoning. Nor did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her; she took to the air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn’t even leave the breath of a sigh behind, not even a toe-nail. A clean exit, such as the Devil himself might make for reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on his hands. One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was left with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole day. Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling like the worm, one gathered rumours of her spectacular flight; she had been seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason no one knew, she had done a tailspin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet, she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so forth. Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done apparently without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life, on the behaviour of the ant-like creature man, viewed from another dimension.