Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, book 1)

by Henry Miller

  Reflections of this order always excited me to the breaking point. Ten minutes of introspective reverie and I was bursting to write a book. I thought of Mona. If only for her sake I ought to begin. And where would I begin? In this room which was like the lobby of an insane asylum? Begin with Kronski looking over my shoulder? Somewhere I had read recently about an abandoned city of Burma, the ancient capital of a region where, in the compass of a hundred miles, there once flourished eight thousand thriving temples. The whole area was now empty of inhabitants, had been so for a thousand years or more. Only a few lone priests, probably half-crazed, were now to be found among the empty temples. Serpents and bats and owls infested the sacred edifices; at night the jackals howled amidst the ruins.

  Why should this picture of desolation cause me such painful depression? Why should eight thousand empty, ruined temples awaken such anguish? People die, races disappear, religions fade away: it is in the order of things. But that something of beauty should remain, and be powerless to affect, powerless to attract us, was an enigma which weighed me down. For I had not even begun to build! In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another. In some freakish way I and the goofy messengers who were to aid me were prowling about the abandoned places of the spirit like the jackals which howled at night. We wandered amidst the halls of an ethereal edifice, a dream stupa, which would be abandoned before it could take earthly shape. In Burma the invader had been responsible for driving the spirit of man into the ground. It had happened over and over in the history of man and it was explicable. But what prevented us, the dreamers of this continent, from giving form and substance to our fabulous edifices? The race of visionary architects was as good as extinct. The genius of man had been canalized and directed into other channels. So it was said. I could not accept it. I have looked at the separate stones, the girders, the portals, the windows which even in buildings are like the eyes of the soul; I have looked at them as I have looked at separate pages of these books, and I have seen one architecture informing the lives of our people, be it in book, in law, in stone, in custom; I saw that it was created (seen first in the mind) then objectified, given light, air and space, given purpose and significance, given a rhythm which would rise and fall, a growth from seed to flourishing tree, a decline from shrivelled leaf and branch to seed again, and a compost to nourish the seed. I saw this continent as other continents before and after: creations in every sense of the word, including the very catastrophes which would make their existence forgotten...

  After Kronski and Ghompal had retired I felt so wide awake, so stimulated by the thoughts which were racing through my head that I felt impelled to go for a long walk. As I was putting on my things I looked at myself in the mirror. I made that whistling grimace of Sheldon's and felicitated myself on my powers of mimicry. Once upon a time I had thought I might make a good clown. There was a chap in school who passed as my twin brother; we were very close to one another and later, when we had graduated, we formed a club of twelve which we called the Xerxes Society. We two possessed all the initiative—the others were just so much slag and driftwood. In desperation sometimes George Marshall and I would perform for the others, an impromptu clowning which kept the others in stitches. Later I used to think of these moments as-having quite a tragic quality. The dependency of the others was really pathetic: it was a foretaste of the general inertia and apathy which I was to encounter all through life. Thinking of George Marshall, I began to make more faces; I did it so well that I began to get a little frightened of myself. For, suddenly I remembered the day when for the first time in my life I looked into the mirror and realized that I was gazing at a stranger. It was after I had been to the theatre with George Marshall and MacGregor. George Marshall had said something that night which disturbed me profoundly. I was angry with him for his stupidity, but I couldn't deny that he had put his finger on a sore spot. He had said something which made me realize that our twinship was over, that in fact we would become enemies henceforth. And he was right, though the reasons he had given were false. From that day forth I began to ridicule my bosom friend George Marshall. I wanted to be the opposite of him in every way. It was like the splitting of a chromosome. George Marshall remained in the world, with it, of it; he took root and grew like a tree, and there was no doubt but that he had found his place and with it a relatively full measure of happiness. But as I looked in the mirror that night, disowning my own image, I knew that what George Marshall had predicted about my future was only superficially correct. George Marshall had never really understood me; the moment he suspected I was different he had renounced me.

  I was still looking at myself as these memories flitted through my head. My face had grown sad and thoughtful. I was no longer looking at my image but at the image of a memory of myself at another moment—when sitting on a stoop one night listening to a Hindu «boy» named Tawde. Tawde too had said something that night which had provoked in me a profound disturbance. But Tawde had said it as a friend. He was holding my hand, the way Hindus do. A passer-by looking at us might have thought we were making love. Tawde was trying to make me see things in a different light. What baffled him was that I was «good at heart» and yet... I was creating sorrow all about me. Tawde wanted me to be true to myself, that self which he recognized and accepted as my «true» self. He seemed to have no awareness of the complexity of my nature, or if he did he attached no importance to it. He didn't understand why I should be dissatisfied with my position in life, particularly when I was doing so much good. That one could be thoroughly disgusted with being a mere instrument of good was unthinkable to him. He didn't realize that I was only a blind instrument, that I was merely obeying the law of inertia, and that I hated inertia even if it meant doing good.

  I left Tawde that night in a state of despair. I loathed the thought of being surrounded by dumb clucks who would hold my hand and comfort me in order to keep me in chains. A sinister gayety came over me as I drew farther away from him; instead of going home I went instinctively to the furnished room where the waitress lived with whom I was carrying on a romantic affair. She came to the door in her night shirt, begging me not to go upstairs with her because of the hour. We went inside, in the hallway, and leaned against the radiator to keep warm. In a few minutes I had it out and was giving it to her as best I could in that strained position. She was trembling with fear and pleasure. When it was over she reproached me for being inconsiderate. «Why do you do these things?» she whispered, snuggled close against me. I ran off, leaving her standing at the foot of the stairs with a bewildered expression. As I raced through the street a phrase repeated itself over and over: «Which is the true self?»

  It was this phrase which accompanied me now, racing through the morbid streets of the Bronx. Why was I racing? What was driving me on at this pace?

  I slowed down, as if to let the demon overtake me...

  If you persist in throttling your impulses you end by becoming a clot of phlegm. You finally spit out a gob which completely drains you and which you only realize years later was not a gob of spit but your inmost self. If you lose that you will always race through dark streets like a madman pursued by phantoms. You will always be able to say with perfect sincerity: «I don't know what I want to do in life.» You can push yourself clean through the filament of life and come out at the wrong end of the telescope, seeing everything beyond you, out of grasp, and diabolically twisted. From then on the game's up. Whichever direction you take you will find yourself in a hall of mirrors; you will race like a madman, searching for an exit, to find that you are surrounded only by distorted images of your own sweet self.

  What I disliked most in George Marshall, in Kronski, in Tawde and the incalculable hosts which they represented, was their surface seriousness. The truly serious person is gay, almost nonchalant. I despised people who, because they lacked their own proper ballast, took on the problems of the world. The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has
no problems of his own or has refused to face them. I am speaking of the great majority, not of the emancipated few who, having thought things through, are privileged to identify themselves with all humanity and thus enjoy that greatest of all luxuries: service.

  There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in —work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play, and which just because it has no raison d'etre other than itself is the supreme motivating power in life. Has any one ever said that God created the universe in order to provide work for Himself? By a chain of circumstances having nothing to do with reason or intelligence I had become like the others—a drudge. I had the comfortless excuse that by my labors I was supporting a wife and child. That it was a flimsy excuse I knew, because if I were to drop dead on the morrow they would go on living somehow or other. To stop everything, and play at being myself, why not? The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning—a completely fatuous, egocentric notion!—was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all.

  The world would only begin to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became— myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it till death—and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it «life». If you asked any one to explain or define life, what was the be all and the end all, you got a blank look for answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, «the plugs in harness,» had no time for such idle questions. «You've got to eat, haven't you?» This query, which was supposed to be a stop-gap, and which had already been answered, if not in the absolute negative at least in a disturbingly relative negative by those who knew, was a clue to all the other questions which followed in a veritable Euclidian suite. From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity—creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life—not the simulacrum which those about me worshipped.

  I had understood all this—with my mind at the very brink of manhood. But there was a great comedy of life to be gone through before this vision of reality could become the motivating force. The tremendous hunger for life which others sensed in me acted like a magnet; it attracted those who needed my particular kind of hunger. The hunger was magnified a thousand times. It was as if those who clung to me (like iron filings) became sensitized and attracted others in turn. Sensation ripens into experience and experience engenders experience.

  What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over. I had lost even the right to become ill—because «they» needed me. I wasn't allowed to remain inactive. Had I died I think they would have galvanized my corpse into a semblance of life.

  «I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: 'I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed.'»

  These words of Richter's, when I first came upon them, made and indescribable commotion in me. As did the following, which seems almost like a corollary of the above—from Novalis:

  «The seat of the soul is where inner world and outer world touch each other. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.»

  «To take possession of one's transcendental I, to be the I of one's I, at the same time,» as Novalis expressed it again.

  There is a lime when ideas tyrannize over one, when one is just a hapless victim of an other's thoughts. This «possession» by another seems to occur in periods of depersonalization, when the warring selves come unglued, as it were. Normally one is impervious to ideas; they come and go, are accepted or rejected, put on like shirts, taken off like dirty socks. But in those periods which we call crises, when the mind sunders and splinters like a diamond under the blows of a sledge-hammer, these innocent ideas of a dreamer take hold, lodge in the crevices of the brain, and by some subtle process of infiltration bring about a definite, irrevocable alteration of the personality. Outwardly no great change takes place; the individual affected does not suddenly behave differently; on the contrary, he may behave in more «normal» fashion than before. This seeming normality assumes more and more the quality of a protective device. From surface deception he passes to inner deception. With each new crisis, however, he becomes more strongly aware of a change which is no change, but rather an intensification of something hidden deep within. Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the distant personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated.

  When a ship founders it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible.

  Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion. Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the minds, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we follow their intricate patterns, enslaved or possessed if we try to subjugate them.

  Everything external is but a reflection projected by the mind machine.

  Creation is the eternal play which takes place at the border-line; it is spontaneous and compulsive, obedient to law. One removes from the mirror and the curtain rises. Seance permanente. Only madmen are excluded. Only those who «have lost their mind,» as we say. For these never cease to dream that they are dreaming.

  They stood before the mirror with eyes open and fell sound asleep; they sealed their shadow in the tomb of memory. In them the stars collapse to form what Hugo called «a blinding menagerie of suns which, through love, make themselves the poodles and the Newfoundlands of immensity.»

  The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had writte
n of it ecstatically —and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer-blows of truth.

  There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself.