by Henry Miller
So much for the dream, in which I am helplessly rooted. But in actuality, when the dear uterine relatives come, I am as free as a bird and darting to and fro like a magnetic needle. If they ask me a question I give them five answers, each of which is better than the other; if they ask me to play a waltz I play a double-breasted sonata for the left hand; if they ask me to help myself to another leg of chicken I dean up the plate, dressing and all; if they urge me to go out and play in the street I go out and in my enthusiasm I cut my cousin’s head open with a tin can: if they threaten to give me a thrashing I say go to it, I don’t mind! If they pat me on the head for my good progress at school I spit on the floor to show that I have still something to learn. I do everything they wish me to do plus. If they wish me to be quiet and say nothing I become as quiet as a rock: I don’t hear when they speak to me, I don’t move when I’m touched, I don’t cry when I’m pinched, I don’t budge when I’m pushed. If they complain that I’m stubborn I become as pliant and yielding as rubber. If they wish me to get fatigued so that I will not display too much energy I let them give me all kinds of work to do and I do the jobs so thoroughly that I collapse on the floor finally like a sack of wheat If they wish me to be reasonable I become ultra-reasonable, which drives them crazy. If they wish me to obey I obey to the letter, which causes endless confusion. And all this because the molecular life of brother-and-sister is incompatible with the atomic weights which have been allotted us. Because she doesn’t grow at all I grow like a mushroom; because she has no personality I become a colossus; because she is free of evil I become a thirty-two branched candelabra of evil; because she demands nothing of any one I demand everything; because she inspires ridicule everywhere I inspire fear and respect; because the is humiliated and tortured I wreak vengeance upon every one, friend and foe alike; because she is helpless I make myself all-powerful. The gigantism from which I suffered was simply the result of an effort to wipe out the little stain of rust which had attached itself to the family skate, so to speak. That little stain of rust under the clamps made me a champion skater. It made me skate so fast and furiously that even when the ice had melted I was still skating, skating through the mud, through asphalt, through brooks and rivers and melon patches and theories of economics and so forth. I could skate through hell, I was that fast and nimble.
But all this fancy skating was of no use – Father Coxcox, the pan-American Noah, was always calling me back to the Ark. Every time I stopped skating there was a cataclysm – the earth opened up and swallowed me. I was a brother to every man and at the same time a traitor to myself. I made the most astounding sacrifices, only to find that they were of no value. Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was expected of me when I did not want to be any of these things? Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem – to be yourself! And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim. There is no suffering any more because there is nothing which can threaten your security. And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought. Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke counts for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don’t become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don’t pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a happy rock in the midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.
This is the musical life which I was approaching by first skating like a maniac through all the vestibules and corridors which lead from the outer to the inner. My struggles never brought me near it, nor did my furious activity, nor my rubbing elbows with humanity. All that was simply a movement from vector to vector in a circle which however the perimeter expanded, remained withal parallel to the realm I speak of. The wheel of destiny can be transcended at any moment because at every point of its surface it touches the real world and only a spark of illumination is necessary to bring about the miraculous, to transform the skater to a swimmer and the swimmer to a rock. The rock is merely an image of the act which stops the futile rotation of the wheel and plunges the being into full consciousness. And full consciousness is indeed like an inexhaustible ocean which gives itself to sun and moon and also includes the sun and moon. Everything which is is born out of the limitless ocean of light – even the night.
Sometimes, in the ceaseless revolutions of the wheel, I caught a glimpse of the nature of the jump which it was necessary to make. To jump clear of the clockwork – that was the liberating thought To be something more, something different, than the most brilliant maniac of the earth! The story of man on earth bored me. Conquest, even the conquest of evil, bored me. To radiate goodness is marvellous, because it is tonic, invigorating, vitalizing. But just to be is still more marvellous, because it is endless and requires no demonstration. To be is music, which is a profanation of silence in the interests of silence, and therefore beyond good and evil. Music is the manifestation of action without activity. It is the pure act of creation swimming on its own bosom. Music neither goads nor defends, neither seeks nor explains. Music is the noiseless sound made by the swimmer in the ocean of consciousness. It is a reward which can only be given by oneself. It is the gift of the god which one is because he has ceased thinking about god. It is an augur of the God which every one will become in due time, when all that is will be beyond imagination.
CODA
Not long ago I was walking the streets of New York. Dear old Broadway. It was night and the sky was an Oriental blue, as blue as the gold in the ceiling of the Pagode, rue de Babylone, when the machine starts clicking. I was passing exactly below the place where we first met. I stood there a moment looking up at the red lights in the windows. The music sounded as it always sounded – light, peppery, enchanting. I was alone and there were millions of people around me. It came over me, as I stood there, that I wasn’t thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I wrestled with this question of “truth”. For years I have been trying to tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.
I remember the first time we were ever separated this idea of totality seized me by the hair. She pretended, when she left me, or maybe she believed it herself, that it was necessary for our welfare. I knew in my heart that she was trying to be free of me, but I was too cowardly to admit it to myself. But when I realized that she could do without me, even for a limited time, the truth which I had tried to shut out began to grow with alarming rapidity. It was more painful than anything I had ever experienced before, but it was also healing. When I was completely emptied, when the loneliness had reached such a point that it could not be sharpened any further, I suddenly felt that, to go on living, this intolerable truth had to be incorporated into something greater than the frame of personal misfortune. I felt that I had made an imperceptible switch into another realm, a realm of tougher, more el
astic fibre, which the most horrible truth was powerless to destroy. I sat down to write her a letter telling her that I was so miserable over the thought of losing her that I had decided to begin a book about her, a book which would immortalize her. It would be a book, I said, such as no one had ever seen before. I rambled on ecstatically, and in the midst of it I suddenly broke off to ask myself why I was so happy.
Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her – and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an “end” is intolerable to me.
Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and remorseless. We can know the truth and accept it, or we can refuse the knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again. In this manner it is possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom. And if we pursue this road far enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe itself fall apart
For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have started out I have chosen a different route. I am like an explorer who, wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it unnecessary to carry even a compass. Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over, am outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too exhausted to enter. And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story is situated eludes me perpetually. Always in sight it nevertheless remains unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds. From the soaring, crenellated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in steady, wedge-shaped formation. With the tips of their blue-white wings they brush the dreams that dazzle my vision. My feet move confusedly; no sooner do I gain a foothold than I am lost again. I wander aimlessly, trying to gain a solid, unshakeable foothold whence I can command a view of my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a groping, confused encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just been lopped off.
Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think inevitably of the girl I first loved. It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair. A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous and tragic at the same time. Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess. Perhaps I saw her alone several times. Certainly she could never have dreamed that for over a year I walked past her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the window. Every night after dinner I would get up from the table and take the long route which led to her home. She was never at the window when I passed and I never had the courage to stand in front of the house and wait. Back and forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of her. Why didn’t I write her? Why didn’t I call her up? Once I remember summoning enough pluck to invite her to the theatre. I arrived at her home with a bunch of violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a woman. As we were leaving the theatre the violets dropped from her corsage, and in my confusion I stepped on them. I begged her to leave them there, but she insisted on gathering them up. I was thinking how awkward I was – it was only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she stooped down to pick up the violets.
It was a complete fiasco. In the end I ran away. Actually I was running away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see her once again. It was mid-afternoon and she came out to talk to me in the street, in the little areaway which was fenced off. She was already engaged to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind as I was, that she wasn’t as happy as she pretended to be. If I had only said the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps she would even have gone away with me. I preferred to punish myself. I said goodbye nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man. The next morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life.
The new life was also a fiasco. I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista, the most miserable man that ever walked the earth. There was this girl I loved and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity. I had been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like a lifetime. I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six. Every time I looked at her I said to myself – when I am thirty she will be forty-five, when I am forty she will be fifty-five, when I am fifty she will be sixty-five. She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but wrinkles just the same. When I kissed her they magnified a dozen times. She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad. They were Armenian eyes. Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde. Otherwise she was adorable – a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal lovable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was fifteen years older. The fifteen years difference drove me crazy. When I went out with her I thought only – how will it be ten years hence? Or else, what age does she seem to have now? Do I look old enough for her? Once we got back to the house it was all right. Climbing the stairs I would run my fingers up her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse. If her son, who was almost my age, were in bed we would close the doors and lock ourselves in the kitchen. She’d lie on the narrow kitchen table and I’d slough it into her. It was marvellous. And what made it more marvellous was that with each performance I would say to myself – This is the last time … tomorrow I will beat it! And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the cellar and roll the ash barrels out for her. In the morning, when the son had left for work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding. Both she and the son had T.B. … Sometimes there were no table bouts. Sometimes the hopelessness of it all got me by the throat and I would put on my things and go for a walk. Now and then I forgot to return. And when I did that I was more miserable than ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for me with those large sorrowful eyes. I’d go back to her like a man who had a sacred duty to perform. I’d lie down on the bed and let her caress me; I’d study the wrinkles under her eyes and the roots of her hair which were turning red. Lying there like that, I would often think about the other one, the one I loved, would wonder if she were lying down for it too, or … Those long walks I took 365 days of the year! – I would go over them in my mind lying beside the other woman. How many times since have I relived these walks! The dreariest, bleakest, ugliest streets man ever created. In anguish I relive these walks, these streets, these first smashed hopes. The window is there, but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold. Pass and repass, the window always vacant. The evening star hangs low; Tristan appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon. The hydra-headed dog barks with all his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking everywhere. Same houses, same car-lines, same everything. She is hiding behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or doing that … but she is not there, never, never, never. Is it a grand opera or is it a hurdygurdy playing? It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is the Rubaiyat, it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at dawn, it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa, it is fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the throat, in the soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of Christ, just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the window-pane, something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to stop this walking up and down … Walking homeward. Same houses, same lamp posts, same everything. I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past the gas tanks, past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open country. I sit beside the road with my head in my hands
and sob. Poor bugger that I am, I can’t contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.