by Henry Miller
Here I had to interrupt. Excuse me, I said, but what did Dostoievsky represent, in your opinion?
I can’t answer that in a few words. Nobody can. He gave us a revelation, and it’s up to each one of us to make what he can of it. Some lose themselves in Christ. One can lose himself in Dostoievsky too. He takes you to the end of the road … Does that mean anything to you?
Yes and no.
To me, said Stymer, it means that there are no possibilities to-day such as men imagine. It means that we are thoroughly deluded—about everything. Dostoievsky explored the field in advance, and he found the road blocked at every turn. He was a frontier man, in the profound sense of the word. He took up one position after another, at every dangerous, promising point, and he found that there was no issue for us, such as we are. He took refuge finally in the Supreme Being.
That doesn’t sound exactly like the Dostoievsky I know, said I. It has a hopeless ring to it.
No, it’s not hopeless at all. It’s realistic—in a superhuman sense. The last thing Dostoievsky could possibly have believed in is a hereafter such as the clergy give us.
All religions give us a sugar-coated pill to swallow. They want us to swallow what we never can or will swallow—death. Man will never accept the idea of death, never reconcile himself to it … But I’m getting off the track. You speak of man’s fate. Better than any one, Dostoievsky understood that man will never accept life un-questioningly until he is threatened with extinction. It was his belief, his deep conviction, I would say, that man may have everlasting life if he desires it with his whole heart and being. There is no reason to die, none whatever. We die because we lack faith in life, because we refuse to surrender to life completely … And that brings me to the present, to life as we know it to-day. Isn’t it obvious that our whole way of life is a dedication to death? In our desperate efforts to preserve ourselves, preserve what we have created, we bring about our own death. We do not surrender to life, we struggle to avoid dying. Which means not that we have lost faith in God but that we have lost faith in life itself. To live dangerously, as Nietzsche put it, is to live naked and unashamed. It means putting one’s trust in the life force and ceasing to battle with a phantom called death, a phantom called disease, a phantom called sin, a phantom called fear, and so on. The phantom world! That’s the world which we have created for ourselves. Think of the military, with their perpetual talk of the enemy. Think of the clergy, with their perpetual talk of sin and damnation. Think of the legal fraternity, with their perpetual talk of fine and imprisonment. Think of the medical profession, with their perpetual talk of disease and death. And our educators, the greatest fools ever, with their parrot-like rote and their innate inability to accept any idea unless it be a hundred or a thousand years old. As for those who govern the world, there you have the most dishonest, the most hypocritical, the most deluded and the most unimaginative beings imaginable. You pretend to be concerned about man’s fate. The miracle is that man has sustained even the illusion of freedom.
No, the road is blocked, whichever way you turn. Every wall, every barrier, every obstacle that hems us in is our own doing. No need to drag in God, the Devil or Chance. The Lord of all Creation is taking a cat nap while we work out the puzzle. He’s permitted us to deprive ourselves of everything but mind. It’s in the mind that the life force has taken refuge. Everything has been analyzed to the point of nullity. Perhaps now the very emptiness of life will take on meaning, will provide the clue.
He came to a dead stop, remained absolutely immobile for a space, then raised himself on one elbow.
The criminal aspect of the mind! I don’t know how or where I got hold of that phrase, but it enthralls me absolutely. It might well be the over all title for the books I have in mind to write. The very word criminal shakes me to the foundations. It’s such a meaningless word today, yet it’s the most—what shall I say?—the most serious word in man’s vocabulary. The very notion of crime is an awesome one. It has such deep, tangled roots. Once the great word, for me, was rebel. When I say criminal, however, I find myself utterly baffled. Sometimes, I confess, I don’t know what the word means. Or, if I think I do, then I am forced to look upon the whole human race as one indescribable hydro-headed monster whose name is CRIMINAL. I sometimes put it another way to myself—man his own criminal. Which is almost meaningless. What I’m trying to say, though perhaps it’s trite, banal, over-simplified, is this … if there is such a thing as a criminal, then the whole race is tainted. You can’t remove the criminal element in man by performing a surgical operation on society. What’s criminal is cancerous, and what’s cancerous is unclean. Crime isn’t merely coeval with law and order, crime is pre-natal, so to speak. It’s in the very consciousness of man, and it won’t be dislodged, it won’t be extirpated, until a new consciousness is born. Do I make it clear? The question I ask myself over and over is—how did man ever come to look upon himself, or his fellow-man, as a criminal? What caused him to harbor guilt feelings? To make even the animals feel guilty? How did he ever come to poison life at the source, in other words? It’s very convenient to blame it on the priesthood. But I can’t credit them with having that much power over us. If we are victims, they are too. But what are we the victims of? What is it that tortures us, young and old alike, the wise as well as the innocent? It’s my belief that that is what we are going to discover, now that we’ve been driven underground. Rendered naked and destitute, we will be able to give ourselves up to the grand problem unhindered. For an eternity, if need be. Nothing else is of importance, don’t you see? Maybe you don’t. Maybe I see it so clearly that I can’t express it adequately in words. Anyway, that’s our world perspective…
At this point he got out of bed to fix himself a drink, asking as he did so if I could stand any more of his drivel. I nodded affirmatively.
I’m thoroughly wound up, as you see, he continued. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to see it all so clearly again, now that I’ve unlimbered to you, that I almost feel I could write the books myself. If I haven’t lived for myself I certainly have lived other people’s lives. Perhaps I’ll begin to live my own when I begin writing. You know, I already feel kindlier toward the world, just getting this much off my chest. Maybe you were right about being more generous with myself. It’s certainly a relaxing thought. Inside I’m all steel girders. I’ve got to melt, grow fibre, cartilage, lymph and muscle. To think that any one could let himself grow so rigid … ridiculous, what! That’s what comes from battling all one’s life.
He paused long enough to take a good slug, then raced on.
You know, there isn’t a thing in the world worth fighting for except peace of mind. The more you triumph in this world the more you defeat yourself. Jesus was right. One has to triumph over the world. Overcome the world, I think was the expression. To do that, of course, means acquiring a new consciousness, a new view of things. And that’s the only meaning one can put on freedom. No man can attain freedom who is of the world. Die to the world and you find life everlasting. You know, I suppose, that the advent of Christ was of the greatest importance to Dostoievsky. Dostoievsky only succeeded in embracing the idea of God through conceiving of a man-god. He humanized the conception of God, brought Him nearer to us, made him more comprehensible, and finally, strange as it may sound, even more God-like … Once again I must come back to the criminal. The only sin, or crime, that man could commit, in the eyes of Jesus, was to sin against the Holy Ghost. To deny the spirit, or the life force, if you will. Christ recognized no such thing as a criminal. He ignored all this nonsense, this confusion, this rank superstition with which man has saddled himself for millenia. He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone! Which doesn’t mean that Christ regarded all men as sinners. No, but that we are all imbued, dyed, tainted with the notion of sin. As I understand his words, it is out of a sense of guilt that we created sin and evil. Not that sin and evil have any reality of their own. Which brings me back again to the present impasse. Despite all th
e truths that Christ enunciated, the world is now riddled and saturated with sinfulness. Every one behaves like a criminal toward his fellow-man. And so, unless we set about killing one another off—world-wide massacre—we’ve got to come to grips with the demonic power which rules us. We’ve got to convert it into a healthy, dynamic force which will liberate not us alone—we are not so important!—but the life force which is damned up in us. Only then will we begin to live. And to live means eternal life, nothing less. It was man who created death, not God. Death is the sign of our vulnerability, nothing more.
He went on and on and on. I didn’t get a wink of sleep until near dawn. When I awoke he was gone. On the table I found a five dollar bill and a brief note saying that I should forget everything we had talked about, that it was of no importance. I’m ordering a new suit just the same, he added. You can choose the material for me.
Naturally I couldn’t forget it, as he suggested. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything else for weeks but man the criminal, or, as Stymer had put it, man his own criminal.
One of the many expressions he had dropped plagued me interminably, the one about man taking refuge in the mind. It was the first time, I do believe, that I ever questioned the existence of mind as something apart. The thought that possibly all was mind fascinated me. It sounded more revolutionary than anything I had heard hitherto.
It was certainly curious, to say the least, that a man of Stymer’s calibre should have been obsessed by this idea of going underground, of taking refuge in the mind. The more I thought about the subject the more I felt that he was trying to make of the cosmos one grand, stupefying rat-trap. When, a few months later, upon sending him a notice to call for a fitting, I learned that he had died of a haemorrhage of the brain, I wasn’t in the least surprised. His mind had evidently rejected the conclusions he had imposed upon it. He had mentally masturbated himself to death. With that I stopped worrying about the mind as a refuge. Mind is all. God is all. So what?
3.
When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide. Or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.
Amazing how active one can become when there is nothing to contend with but one’s own desperation. Events pile up of their own accord. Everything is converted to drama … to melodrama.
The ground began to give way under my feet with the slow realization that no show of anger, no threats, no display of grief, tenderness or remorse, nothing I said or did, made the least difference to her. What is called a man would no doubt have swallowed his pride or grief and walked out on the show. Not this little Beelzebub!
I was no longer a man; I was a creature returned to the wild state. Perpetual panic, that was my normal state. The more unwanted I was, the closer I stuck. The more I was wounded and humiliated, the more I craved punishment. Always praying for a miracle to occur, I did nothing to bring one about. What’s more, I was powerless to blame her, or Stasia, or anyone, even myself, though I often pretended to. Nor could I, despite natural inclination, bring myself to believe that it had just happened. I had enough understanding left to realize that a condition such as we were in doesn’t just happen. No, I had to admit to myself that it had been preparing for quite a long while. I had, moreover, retraced the path so often that I knew it step by step. But when one is frustrated to the point of utter despair what good does it do to know where or when the first fatal misstep occurred? What matters—and how it matters, O God!—is only now.
How to squirm out of a vise?
Again and again I banged my head against the wall trying to crack that question. Could I have done so, I would have taken my brains out and put them through the wringer. No matter what I did, what I thought, what I tried, I could not wriggle out of the strait-jacket.
Was it love that kept me chained?
How answer that? My emotions were so confused, so kaleidoscopic. As well ask a dying man if he is hungry.
Perhaps the question might be put differently. For example: Can one ever regain that which is lost?
The man of reason, the man with common sense, will say no. The fool, however, says yes.
And what is the fool but a believer, a gambler against all odds.
Nothing was ever lost that cannot be redeemed.
Who says that? The God within us. Adam who survived fire and flood. And all the angels.
Think a moment, scoffers! If redemption were impossible, would not love itself disappear? Even self-love?
Perhaps this Paradise I sought so desperately to recover would not be the same … Once outside the magic circle the leaven of time works with disastrous rapidity.
What was it, this Paradise I had lost? Of what was it fashioned? Was it merely the ability to summon a moment of bliss now and then? Was it the faith with which she inspired me? (The faith in myself, I mean.) Or was it that we were joined like Siamese twins?
How simple and clear it all seems now! A few words tell the whole story: I had lost the power to love. A cloud of darkness enveloped me. The fear of losing her made me blind. I could easier have accepted her death.
Lost and confused, I roamed the darkness which I had created as if pursued by a demon. In my bewilderment I sometimes got down on all fours and with bare hands strangled, maimed, crushed whatever threatened to menace our lair. Sometimes it was the puppet I clutched in a frenzy, sometimes only a dead rat. Once it was nothing more than a piece of stale cheese. Day and night I murdered. The more I murdered, the more my enemies and assailants increased.
How vast is the phantom world! How inexhaustible!
Why didn’t I murder myself? I tried, but it proved a fiasco. More effective, I found, was to reduce life to a vacuum.
To live in the mind, solely in the mind … that is the surest way of making life a vacuum. To become the victim of a machine which never ceases to spin and grate and grind.
The mind machine,
Loving and loathing; accepting and rejecting; grasping and disdaining; longing and spurning: this is the disease of the mind.
Solomon himself could not have stated it better.
If you give up both victory and defeat, so it reads in the Dhammapada, you sleep at night without fear.
The coward, and such I was, prefers the ceaseless whir of the mind. He knows, as does the cunning master he serves, that the machine has but to stop for an instant and he will explode like a dead star. Not death … annihilation!
Describing the Knight Errant, Cervantes says: The Knight Errant searches all the corners of the world, enters the most complicated labyrinths, accomplishes at every step the impossible, endures the fierce rays of the sun in uninhabited deserts, the inclemency of wind and ice in winter; lions cannot daunt him nor demons affright, nor dragons, for to seek assault, and overcome, such is the whole business of his life and true office.
Strange how much the fool and the coward have in Common with the Knight Errant. The fool believes despite everything; he believes in face of the impossible. The coward braves all dangers, runs every risk, fears nothing, absolutely nothing, except the loss of that which he strives impotently to retain.
It is a great temptation to say that love never made a coward of any one. Perhaps true love, no. But who among us has known true love? Who is so loving, trusting and believing that he would not sell himself to the Devil rather than see his loved one tortured, slain or disgraced? Who is so secure and mighty that he would not step down from his throne to claim his love? True, there have been great figures who have accepted their lot, who have sat apart in silence and solitude, and eaten out their hearts. Are they to be admired or pitied? Even the greatest of the love-lorn was never able to walk about jubilantly and shout—All’s well with the world!
In pure love (which no doubt does not exist at all except in our imagination,) says one I admire, the giver is not aware that he gives nor of what he gives, nor to whom he gives, still less of whether it is appreciated by the recipient or not.
With all my heart I say D’
accord! But I have never met a being capable of expressing such love. Perhaps only those who no longer have need of love may aspire to such a role.
To be free of the bondage of love, to burn down like a candle, to melt in love, melt with love—what bliss! Is it possible for creatures like us who are weak, proud, vain, possessive, envious, jealous, unyielding, unforgiving? Obviously not. For us the rat race—in the vacuum of the mind. For us doom, unending doom. Believing that we need love, we cease to give love, cease to be love.
But even we, despicably weak though we be, experience something of this true, unselfish love occasionally. Which of us has not said to himself in his blind adoration of one beyond his reach—What matter if she be never mine! All that matters is that she be, that I may worship and adore her forever! And even though it be untenable, such an exalted view, the lover who reasons thus is on firm ground. He has known a moment of pure love. No other love, no matter how serene, how enduring, can compare with it.
Fleeting though such a love may be, can we say that there had been a loss? The only possible loss—and how well the true lover knows it!—is the lack of that undying affection which the other inspired. What a drab, dismal, fateful day that is when the lover suddenly realizes that he is no longer possessed, that he is cured, so to speak, of his great love! When he refers to it, even unconsciously, as a madness. The feeling of relief engendered by such an awakening may lead one to believe in all sincerity that he has regained his freedom. But at what a price! What a poverty-stricken sort of freedom! Is it not a calamity to gaze once again upon the world with every day sight, every day wisdom? Is it not heartbreaking to find oneself surrounded by beings who are familiar and commonplace? Is it not frightening to think that one must carry on, as they say, but with stones in one’s belly and gravel in one’s mouth? To find ashes, nothing but ashes, where once were blazing suns, wonders, glories, wonders upon wonders, glory beyond glory, and all freely created as from some magic fount?