Henry Miller

by Tropic Of Capricorn [lit]

  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 comer 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.

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  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, indeed. One wondered if she would ever take on, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming other 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-on, 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 abandon-

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  ing. 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.

  Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the life of a full blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed, because somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is something man-made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr'acte in which every hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimetre of skin itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous, as though elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood rushing up to the brain and pounding at the ear-drums like Himalayan devils with sledge hammers; I hear her flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk, and I know she is pushing on and on, ever further away, ever further beyond reach. It is so quiet in the room and so frightfully empty that I shriek and howl just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to lift myself from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the shapeless feet of the rhinoceros. The

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  heavier my body becomes the lighter the atmosphere of the room; I am going to spread and spread until I fill the room with one solid mass of stiff jelly. I shall fill up even the cracks in the wall; I shall grow through the wall like a parasitic plant, spreading and spreading until the whole house is an indescribable mass of flesh and hair and nails. I know that this is death, but I am powerless to kill the knowledge of it, or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive, some speck of consciousness persists, and, as the inert carcass expands, this flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and gleams inside me like the cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so that I am like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some slender hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the surface of the deep, but it is so far away, the upper world, and the weight of the corpse so great that, even if it were possible, it would take years to reach the surface. I move around in my own dead body, exploring every nook and cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless exploration, for with the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and drifting like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra firma, never for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it is a growth without landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes with every least move or shudder. It is this interminable filling of space which kills all sense of space or time; the more the body expands the tinier becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is concentrated on the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous dead mass which I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out of which it grows, is no bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, in the very heart and gizzard of death, as it were, I sense the seed, the miraculous, infinitesimal lever which balances the world. I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass.

  When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I,

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  the imperishable schizerino, a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death. Every day she thinks to find another means of sustenance, but there is no other, only this eternal seed of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. Fly, 0 devouring bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your nourishment glowing in the sickening emptiness you have created! You will come back to perish once more in the black hole; you will come back again and again, for you have not the wings to carry you out of the world. This is the only world you can inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness reigns.

  And suddenly for no reason at all, when I think of her returning to her nest, I remember Sunday mornings in the little old house near the cemetery. I remember sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the pedals with bare feet, and the folks lying in bed toasting themselves in the next room. The rooms opened one on the other, telescope fashion, as in the good old American railroad flats. Sunday mornings one lay in bed until one was ready to screech with
well-being. Towards eleven or so the folks used to rap on the wall of my bedroom for me to come and play for them. I would dance into the room like the Fratellini Brothers, so full of flame and feathers that I could hoist myself like a derrick to the topmost limb of the tree of heaven. I could do anything and everything singlehanded, being double-jointed at the same time. The old man called me "Sunny Jim", because I was full of "Force", full of vim and vigour. First I would do a few handsprings for them on the carpet before the bed; then I would sing falsetto, trying to imitate a ventriloquist's dummy; then I would dance a few light fantastic steps to show which way the wind lay, and zoom! Like a breeze I was on the piano stool and doing a velocity exercise. I always began with Czemy, in order to limber up for the performance. The old man hated Czemy, and so did I, but Czemy was the plat du jour on the bill of fare then, and so Czemy it was until my joints were rubber. In some vague way Czemy reminds me of the great emptiness which came upon me later. What a velocity I would work up, riveted to the piano stool! It was like swallowing a bottle of tonic at one gulp and then having someone strap you to the bed. After I had played

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  about ninety-eight exercises I was ready to do a little improvising. I used to take a fist-full of chords and crash the piano from one end to the other, then sullenly modulate into "The Burning of Rome" or the "Ben Hur Chariot Race" which everybody liked because it was intelligible noise. Long before I read Wittgenstein's Tractatvs Logico-Philosophicus I was composing the music to it, in the key of sassafras. I was learned then in science and philosophy, in the history of religions, in inductive and deductive logic, in liver mantic, in the shape and weight of skulls, in pharmacopeia and metallurgy, in all the useless branches of learning which gives you indigestion and melancholia before your time. This vomit of learned truck was stewing in my guts the whole week long, waiting for it to come Sunday to be set to music. In between "The Midnight Fire Alarm" and "Marche Militaire" I would get my inspiration, which was to destroy all the existent forms of harmony and create my own cacophony. Imagine Uranus well aspected to Mars, to Mercury, to the Moon, to Jupiter, to Venus. It's hard to imagine because Uranus functions best when it is badly aspected, when it is "afflicted", so to speak. Yet that music which I gave off Sunday mornings, a music of well-being and of well-nourished desperation, was born of an illogically well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the 7th House. I didn't know it then, I didn't know that Uranus existed, and lucky it was that I was ignorant. But I can see it now, because it was a fluky joy, a phony well-being, a destructive sort of fiery creation. The greater my euphoria the more tranquil the folks became. Even my sister who was dippy became calm and composed. The neighbours used to stand outside the window and listen, and now and then I would hear a burst of applause, and then bang, zip! like a rocket I was off again - Velocity Exercise No. 9471/2. If I happened to espy a cockroach crawling up the wall I was in bliss: that would lead me without the slightest modulation to Opus Izzi of my sadly corrugated clavichord. One Sunday, just like that, I composed one of the loveliest scherzos imaginable - to a louse. It was Spring and we were all getting the sulphur treatment; I had been pouring all week over Dante's Inferno in

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  English. Sunday came like a thaw, the birds driven so crazy by the sudden heat that they flew in and out of the window, immune to the music. One of the German relatives had just arrived from Hamburg, or Bremen, a maiden aunt who looked like a bull-dyker. Just to be near her was sufficient to throw roe into a fit of rage. She used to pat me on the head and tell me I would be another Mozart. I hated Mozart, and I hate him still, and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the sour notes I knew. And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real louse which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little gigue around him with my right hand, the noise had probably deafened him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble pyrotechnic. This trance-like immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided to introduce a chromatic scale coming down on him full force with my third finger. I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus' Dance in me. From then on the scherzo commenced. It was a pot-pourri of forgotten melodies spiced with aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once and pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception. Later, when I went to hear Prokofief, I understood what was happening to him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had never been a binomial theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of sprudel baths and fango packs. I understood very dearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in his blood, and that when you're handed a symphony or a fresco or a high explosive you're really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St. Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were written for an age to come, an age with less

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  instruments and stronger antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the new territory - one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations - to us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and indifferent to the Sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of a new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz. Music is still the antidote for the nameless, but this is not yet music. Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all-sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods, the abracadabra which the learned and the ignorant alike muff because the axle has been unhooked. Look to the bowels, to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is determined, nothing is settled or solved. All this that is going on, all music, all architecture, all law, all government, all invention, all discovery - all this is velocity exercises in the dark, Czemy with a capital Zed riding a crazy white horse in a bottle of mucilage.

  One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is that it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song the cunts were around me like flies. To begin with, it was largely Lola's fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous name and typical of the neighbourhood we were living in then. It sounded like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens, not to speak of the moustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness; she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late

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  in coming, being a conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me, however, I became exdted again, what with the stinking perfume she soused her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the tufts'of hair under her arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola's hair as a delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was hairy, that's what I want to sa
y and being hairy as a gorilla she got my mind off the the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let me have a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful than I had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the crotch, an enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went over it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn't seem to notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This time she caught on. She said, "I think you've forgotten something. Henry." I looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly what ? She pretended to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. Her hand came so close that I couldn't resist grabbing it and pushing it in my fly. She got up. quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole. Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and she took me by the ear and leading me to a comer of the room she turned my face to the wall and said, "Now button up your fly, you silly boy!" We went back to the piano in a few moments - back to Czemy and the velocity exercises. I couldn't see a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid she might tell my mother about the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy thing to tell one's mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided