The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  Or one might put it still more figuratively and say it was the story of an egg which was splitting in two, that this egg went down into the darkness to become a single new egg made of the ingredients of the old. The diary then resembles a museum in which the world that made up the old split egg goes to pieces. Superficially it would seem as though every crumbling bit had been preserved in the pages of the diary. Actually not a crumb remains; everything that made up the former world not only goes to pieces but is devoured again, redigested and assimilated in the growth of a new entity, the new egg which is one and indivisible. This egg is indestructible and forms a vital component element of that world which is constantly in the making. It belongs not to a personal world but to the cosmic world. In itself it has very definite limits, as has the atom or the molecule. But taken in relation with other similar identities it forms, or helps to form, a universe which is truly limitless. It has a spontaneous life of its own which knows a true freedom because its life is lived in accordance with the most rigid laws. The whole process does indeed seem to be that union with nature of which the poets speak. But this union is achieved parabolically, through a spiritual death. It is the same sort of transfiguration which the myths relate of; it is what makes intelligible to us such a phrase as “the spirit which animates a place.” Spirit, in taking possession of a place, so identifies itself with it that the natural and the divine coalesce.

  It is in this same way that human spirits take possession of the earth. It is only in the understanding of this, which by some is considered miraculous, that we can look without the least anguish upon the deaths of millions of fellow men. For we do distinguish not only between the loss of a near one and a stranger, but also, and how much more, between the loss of a near one and the loss of a great personality, a Christ, a Buddha, or a Mahomet. We speak of them, quite naturally, as though they never had died, as though they were still with us, in fact. What we mean is that they have so taken possession of the world that not even death can dislodge them. Their spirit does truly pass into the world and animate it. And it is only the animation of such spirits which gives to our life on earth significance. But all these figures had to die first in the spirit. All of them renounced the world first. That is the cardinal fact about them.

  In the later volumes of the diary we note the appearance of titles. For instance, and I give them in chronological order, the following: “The Definite Disappearance of the Demon”; “Death, and Disintegration”; “The Triumph of White Magic”; “The Birth of Humor in the Whale”; “Playing at Being God”; “Fire”; “Audace”; “Vive la dynamite”; “A God who Laughs.” The use of titles to indicate the nature of a volume is an indication of the gradual emergence from the labyrinth. It means that the diary itself has undergone a radical transformation. No longer a fleeting panorama of impressions, but a consolidation of experience into little bundles of fiber and muscle which go to make up the new body. The new being is definitely born and traveling upward, towards the light of the everyday world. In the previous volumes we had the record of the struggle to penetrate to the very sanctum of the self; it is a description of a shadowy world in which the outline of people, things and events becomes more and more blurred by the involutional inquisition. The further we penetrate into the darkness and confusion below, however, the greater becomes the illumination. The whole personality seems to become a devouring eye turned pitilessly on the self. Finally there comes the moment when this individual who has been constantly gazing into a mirror sees with such blinding clarity that the mirror fades away and the image rejoins the body from which it had been separated. It is at this point that normal vision is restored and that the one who had died is restored to the living world. It is at this moment that the prophecy which had been written twenty years earlier comes true—“Un de ces jours je pourrais dire: mon journal, je suis arrivée au fond!”

  Whereas in the earlier volumes the accent was one of sadness, of disillusionment, of being de trop, now the accent becomes one of joy and fulfillment. Fire, audacity, dynamite, laughter—the very choice of words is sufficient to indicate the changed condition. The world spreads out before her like a banquet table: something to enjoy. But the appetite, seemingly insatiable, is controlled. The old obsessional desire to devour everything in sight in order that it be preserved in her own private tomb is gone. She eats now only what nourishes her. The once ubiquitous digestive tract, the great whale into which she had made herself, is replaced by other organs with other functions. The exaggerated sympathy for others which had dogged her every step diminishes. The birth of a sense of humor denotes the achievement of an objectivity which alone the one who has realized himself attains. It is not indifference, but tolerance. The totality of vision brings about a new kind of sympathy, a free, noncompulsive sort. The very pace of the diary changes. There are now long lapses, intervals of complete silence in which the great digestive apparatus, once all, slows up to permit the development of complementary organs. The eye too seems to close, content to let the body feel the presence of the world about, rather than pierce it with a devastating vision. It is no longer a world of black and white, of good and evil, or harmony and dissonance; no, now the world has at last become an orchestra in which there are innumerable instruments capable of rendering every tone and color, an orchestra in which even the most shattering dissonances are resolved into meaningful expression. It is the ultimate poetic world of As Is. The inquisition is over, the trial and torture finished. A state of absolution is reached. This is the true catholic world of which the Catholics know nothing. This is the eternally abiding world which those in search of it never find. For with most of us we stand before the world as before a mirror; we never see our true selves because we can never come before the mirror unawares. We see ourselves as actors, but the spectacle for which we are rehearsing is never put on. To see the true spectacle, to finally participate in it, one must die before the mirror in a blinding light of realization. We must lose not only the mask and the costume but the flesh and bone which conceals the secret self. This we can only do by illumination, by voluntarily going down into death. For when this moment is attained we who imagined that we were sitting in the belly of the whale and doomed to nothingness suddenly discover that the whale was a projection of our own insufficiency. The whale remains, but the whale becomes the whole wide world, with stars and seasons, with banquets and festivals, with everything that is wonderful to see and touch, and being that it is no longer a whale but something nameless because something that is inside as well as outside us. We may, if we like, devour the whale too—piecemeal, throughout eternity. No matter how much is ingested there will always remain more whale than man; because what man appropriates of the whale returns to the whale again in one form or another. The whale is constantly being transformed as man himself becomes transformed. There is nothing but man and whale, and the man is in the whale and possesses the whale. Thus, too, whatever waters the whale inhabits man inhabits also, but always as the inner inhabitant of the whale. Seasons come and go, whalelike seasons, in which the whole organism of the whale is affected. Man, too, is affected, as that inner inhabitant of the whale. But the whale never dies, nor does man inside him, because that which they have established together is undying—their relationship. And it is in this that they live, through and by which they live: not the waters, nor the seasons, nor that which is swallowed nor that which passes away. In this passing beyond the mirror, as it were, there is an infinity which no infinity of images can give the least idea of. One lives within the spirit of transformation and not in the act. The legend of the whale thus becomes the celebrated book of transformations destined to cure the ills of the world. Each man who climbs into the body of the whale and works therein his own resurrection is bringing about the miraculous transfiguration of the world which, because it is human, is none the less limitless. The whole process is a marvelous piece of dramatic symbolism whereby he who sat facing his doom suddenly awakes and lives, and through the mere act of declaration
—the act of declaring his livingness—causes the whole world to become alive and endlessly alter its visage. He who gets up from his stool in the body of the whale automatically switches on an orchestral music which causes each living member of the universe to dance and sing, to pass the endless time in endless recreation.

  And here I must return once again to El Greco’s Dream of Philip the 2nd which Mr. Huxley so well describes in his little essay. For in a way this diary of Anaïs Nin’s is also a curious dream of something or other, a dream which takes place fathoms deep below the surface of the sea. One might think that in this retreat from the daylight world we are about to be ushered into an hermetically sealed laboratory in which only the ego flourishes. Not at all. The ego indeed seems to completely disappear amidst the furniture and trappings of this subterranean world which she has created about her. A thousand figures stalk the pages, caught in their most intimate poses and revealing themselves as they never reveal themselves to the mirror. The most dramatic pages are those perhaps in which the gullible psychoanalysts, thinking to unravel the complexities of her nature, are themselves unraveled and left dangling in a thousand shreds. Every one who comes under her glance is lured, as it were, into a spider web, stripped bare, dissected, dismembered, devoured and digested. All without malice! Done automatically, as a part of life’s processes. The person who is doing this is really an innocent little creature tucked away in the lining of the belly of the whale. In nullifying herself she really becomes this great leviathan which swims the deep and devours everything in sight. It is a strange dédoublement of the personality in which the crime is related back to the whale by a sort of self-induced amnesia. There, tucked away in a pocket of the great intestinal tract of the whale, she dreams away throughout whole volumes of something which is not the whale, of something greater, something beyond which is nameless and unseizable. She has a little pocket mirror which she tacks up on the wall of the whale’s intestinal gut and into which she gazes for hours on end. The whole drama of her life is played out before the mirror. If she is sad the mirror reflects her sadness; if she is gay the mirror reflects her gaiety. But everything the mirrors reflects is false, because the moment she realizes that her image is sad or gay she is no longer sad or gay. Always there is another self which is hidden from the mirror and which enables her to look at herself in the mirror. This other self tells her that it is only her image which is sad, only her image which is gay. By looking at herself steadily in the mirror she really accomplishes the miracle of not looking at herself. The mirror enables her to fall into a trance in which the image is completely lost. The eyes close and she falls backward into the deep. The whale too falls backward and is lost into the deep. This is the dream which El Greco dreamed that Philip the 2nd dreamed. It is the dream of a dream, just as a double mirror would reflect the image of an image. It can as well be the dream of a dream of a dream, or the image of an image of an image. It can go back like that endlessly, from one little Japanese box into another and another and another without ever reaching the last box. Each lapse backward brings about a greater clairvoyance; as the darkness increases the inner eye develops in magnitude. The world is boxed off and with it the dreams that shape the world. There are endless trap doors, but no exits. She falls from one level to another, but there is never a final ocean floor. The result is often a sensation of brilliant crystalline clarity, the sort of frozen wonder which the metamorphosis of a snowflake awakens. It is something like what a molecule would experience in decomposing into its basic elements, if it had the ability to express its awareness of the transformation going on. It is the nearest thing to ultimate sensation without completely losing identity. In the ordinary reader it is apt to produce a sensation of horror. He will find himself suddenly slipping into a world of monstrous crimes committed by an angel who is innocent of the knowledge of crime. He will be terrified by the mineralogical aspect of these crimes in which no blood is spilt, no wounds left unhealed. He will miss the normally attendant elements of violence and so be utterly confounded, utterly hallucinated.

  There are some volumes, in which attention is focused almost entirely on one or two individuals, which are like the raw pith of some post-Dostoievskian novel; they bring to the surface a lunar plasm which is the logical fruit of that drive towards the dead slag of the ego which Dostoievski heralded and which D. H. Lawrence was the first to have pointed out in precise language. There are three successive volumes, of this sort, which are made of nothing but this raw material of a drama which takes place entirely within the confines of the female world. It is the first female writing I have ever seen: it rearranges the world in terms of female honesty. The result is a language which is ultramodern and yet which bears no resemblance to any of the masculine experimental processes with which we are familiar. It is precise, abstract, cloudy and unseizable. There are larval thoughts not yet divorced from their dream content, thoughts which seem to slowly crystallize before your eyes, always precise but never tangible, never once arrested so as to be grasped by the mind. It is the opium world of woman’s physiological being, a sort of cinematic show put on inside the genito-urinary tract. There is not an ounce of man-made culture in it; everything related to the head is cut off. Time passes, but it is not clock time; nor is it poetic time such as men create in their passion. It is more like that aeonic time required for the creation of gems and precious metals; an emboweled sidereal time in which the female knows that she is superior to the male and will eventually swallow him up again. The effect is that of starlight carried over into daytime.

  The contrast between this language and that of man’s is forcible; the whole of man’s art begins to appear like a frozen edelweiss under a glass bell reposing on a mantelpiece in the deserted home of a lunatic. In this extraordinary unicellular language of the female we have a blinding, gemlike consciousness which disperses the ego like star dust. The great female corpus rises up from its sleepy marine depths in a naked push towards the sun. The sun is at zenith—permanently at zenith. Space broadens out like a cold Norwegian lake choked with ice floes. The sun and moon are fixed, the one at zenith, the other at nadir. The tension is perfect, the polarity absolute. The voices of the earth mingle in an eternal resonance which issues from the delta of the fecundating river of death. It is the voice of creation which is constantly being drowned in the daylight frenzy of a man-made world. It comes like the light breeze which sets the ocean swaying; it comes with a calm, quiet force which is irresistible, like the movement of the great Will gathered up by the instincts and rippling out in long silky flashes of enigmatic dynamism. Then a lull in which the mysterious centralized forces roll back to the matrix, gather up again in a sublime all-sufficiency. Nothing lost, nothing used up, nothing relinquished. The great mystery of conservation in which creation and destruction are but the antipodal symbols of a single constant energy which is inscrutable.

  It is at this point in the still unfinished symphony of the diary that the whole pattern wheels miraculously into another dimension; at this point that it takes its cosmic stance. Adopting the universal language, the human being in her speaks straight out from under the skin to Hindu, Chinaman, Jap, Abyssinian, Malay, Turk, Arab, Tibetan, Eskimo, Pawnee, Hottentot, Bushman, Kaffir, Persian, Assyrian. The fixed polar language known to all races: a serpentine, sybilline, sibilant susurrus that comes up out of the astral marshes: a sort of cold, tinkling, lunar laughter which comes from under the soles of the feet: a laughter made of alluvial deposit, of mythological excrement and the sweat of epileptics. This is the language which seeps through the frontiers of race, color, religion, sex; a language which soaks through the litmus paper of the mind and saturates the quintessential human spores. The language of bells without clappers, heard incessantly throughout the nine months in which every one is identical and yet mysteriously different. In this first tinkling melody of immortality lapping against the snug and cozy walls of the womb we have the music of the still-born sons of men opening their lovely dead eyes one upon another.


  HANS REICHEL

  (FROM THE WISDOM OF THE HEART)

  Just a few months ago Hans Reichel died, in Paris; his remains were buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery, not far from which he lived and worked for many years. He was an artist through and through, a pure, devoted artist, whose life was one of poverty and neglect. But he had a circle of loyal, intimate friends who revered his work and who knew what the world at large never could know—that he was a unique individual, though a difficult one at times.