by Henry Miller
“There you are,” says Jabberwhorl, glaucous and glowbry. “That’s why I’m in the real estate business…. Go ahead and eat, you people…. I’m watching.”
He mixes another dose of cognac and pepper.
“I think you’ve had enough,” says Jill. “Jesus, how many of them have you had today?”
“Funny,” says Jabberwhorl, “I fixed her up all right a few moments ago-just before you came-but I can’t fix myself up….”
“Jesus, where’s that goose!” says Jill. “Excuse me, I’m going inside and see what the girls are doing.”
“No you don’t!” says Jab, pushing her back into her seat. “We’re gonna sit right here and wait … wait and see what happens. Maybe the goose’ll never come. We’ll be sitting here waiting … waiting forever … just like this, with the candles and the empty soup plates and the curtains and … I can just imagine us sitting here and some one outside plastering a wall around us…. We’re sitting here waiting for Elsa to bring the goose and time passes and it gets dark and we sit here for days and days…. See those candles? We’d eat ‘em. And those flowers over there? Them too. We’d eat the chairs, we’d eat the sideboard, we’d eat the alarm clock, we’d eat the cats, we’d eat the curtains, we’d eat the bills and the silverware and the wallpaper and the bugs underneath … we’d eat our own dung and that nice new fetus Jill’s got inside her … we’d eat each other….”
Just at this moment Pinochinni comes in to say good night. She’s hanging her head like and there’s a quizzical look in her eye.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” says Jill. “You look worried.”
“Oh, I don’t know what it is,” says the youngster. “There’s something I want to ask you about… . It’s awfully complicated. I don’t really know if I can say what I mean.”
“What is it, snookums?” says Jab. “Say it right out in front of the lady and the gentleman. You know him, don’t you? Come on, spit it out!”
The youngster is still holding her head down. Out of the corner of her eye she looks up at her father slyly and then suddenly she blurts out: “Oh, what’s it all about? What are we here for anyway? Do we have to have a world? Is this the only world there is and why is it? That’s what I want to know.”
If Jabberwhorl Cronstadt was somewhat astonished he gave no sign of it. Picking up his cognac nonchalantly, and adding a little cayenne pepper, he answered blithely: “Listen, kid, before I answer that question if you insist on my answering that question-you’ll have to first define your terms.”
Just then there came a long shrill whistle from the garden.
“Mowgli!” says Cronstadt. “Tell him to come on up.91
“Come up!” says Jill, stepping to the window.
No answer.
“He must have gone,” says Jill. “I don’t see him any more.”
Now a woman’s voice floats up. “Il est saoul … completement saoul.”
“Take him home! Tell her to take him home!” yells Cronstadt.
“Mon mari dit qu’il faut rentrer chez vous … oui, chez vous.”
“Y’en a pas!” floats up from the garden.
“Tell her not to lose my copy of Pound’s Cantos,” yells Cronstadt. “And don’t ask them up again … we have no room here. Just enough space for German refugees.”
“That’s a shame,” says Jill, coming back to the table.
“You’re wrong again,” says Jab. “It’s very good for him.”
“Oh, you’re drunk,” says Jill. “Where’s that damned goose anyhow? Elsa! Elsa!”
“Never mind the goose, darling! This is a game. We’re going to sit here and outlast ‘em. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam today…. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you people sat here just like you are and I began to grow smaller and smaller … until I got to be just a tiny, weeny little speck … so that you had to have a magnifying glass to see me? I’d be a little spot on the tablecloth and I’d be saying-Timoor … Ti-moor! And you’d say where is he? And I’d be saying-Timoor, logodaedaly, glycophos-phates, Billancourt, Ti-moor … 0 timbus twaddle down the brawkish brake … and you’d say….”
“Jesus, Jab, you’re drunk!” says Jill. And Jabberwhorl glausels with gleerious glitter, his awbrous orbs atwit and atwitter.
“He’ll be getting cold in a minute,” says Jill, getting up to look for the Spanish cape.
“That’s right,” says Jab. “Whatever she says is right. You think I’m a very contrary person. You,” he says, turning to me, “you with your Mongolian verbs, your transitives and intransitives, don’t you see what an affable being I am? You’re talking about China all the time … this is China, don’t you see that? This… this what? Get me the cape, Jill, I’m cold. This is a terrible cold … sub-glacial cold. You people are warm, but I’m freezing. I can f eel the ice caps coming down again. A fact. Everything is rolling along nicely, the dollar is falling, the apartments are rented, the refugees are all refuged, the piano is tuned, the bills are paid, the goose is cooked and what are we waiting for? For the next Ice Age! It’s coming tomorrow morning. You’ll go to the window and everything’ll be frozen tight. No more problems, no more history, no more nothing. Settled. We’ll be sitting here like this waiting for Anna to bring in the goose and suddenly the ice will roll over us. I can feel the terrible cold already, the bread all icicled, the butter blenched, the goose gazzled, the walls wildish white. And that little angel, that bright new embryo that Jill’s got under her belt, that’ll be frozen in the womb, a glairy gawk with ice-cold wings and the lips of a snail. Jugger, jugger, and everything’ll be still and quiet. Say something warm! My legs are frozen. Herodotus says that on the death of its father the phoenix embalms the body in an egg made of myrrh and once every five hundred years or so it conveys the little egg embalmed in myrrh from the desert of Arabia to the temple of the sun at Heliopolis. Do you like that? According to Pliny there is only one egg at a time and when the bird perceives that its end is near it builds a nest of cassia twigs and frankincense and dies upon it. From the body of the nest is born a little worm which becomes the phoenix. Hence bennu, symbol of the resurrection. How’s that? I need something hotter. Here’s another one…. The firewalkers in Bulgaria are called Nistingares. They dance in the fire on the twentyfirst of May during the feast of Saint Helena and Saint Constantine. They dance on the red-hot embers until they’re blue in the face, and then they utter prophecies.”
“Don’t like that at all,” says Jill.
“Neither do I,” says Jab. “I like the one about the little soul-worms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection. Jill’s got one inside her too … it’s sprouting and sprouting. Can’t stop it. Yesterday it was a tadpole, tomorrow it’ll be a honeysuckle vine. Can’t tell what it’s going to be yet … not eventually. It dies in the nest every day and the next day it’s born again. Put your ear to her belly … you can hear the whirring of its wings. Whirrrr … whirrrr. Without a motor. Wonderful! She’s got millions of them inside her and they’re all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrrr … whirrrr. And if you just put a needle inside and punctured the bag they’d all come whirring out … imagine it … a great cloud of soul-worms … millions of them … and so thick the swarm that we wouldn’t be able to see each other…. A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what’s inside of you … the great vertiginous vertebration … the zoospores and the leucocytes … the wamroths and the holenlindens … every one’s a poem. The jellyfish is a poem too-the finest kind of poem. You poke him here, you poke him there, he slithers and slathers, he’s dithy and clabberous, he has a colon and intestines, he’s vermiform and ubisquishous. And Mowgli in the garden whistling for the rent, he’s a poem too, a poem with big ears, a wambly bretzular poem with logamundiddy of the goo-goo. He has round, auricular daedali, round robin-breasted ruches that open up like an open barouche. He wambles in the wambhorst whilst the whelkin winkles … he wabbles through the wendish wikes whirking his wo
rstish wights… . Mowgli… owgli … whist and wurst….”
“He’s losing his mind,” says Jill.
“Wrong again,” says Jabber. “I’ve just found my mind, only it’s a different sort of mind than you imagined. You think a poem must have covers around it. The moment you write a thing the poem ceases. The poem is the present which you can’t define. You live it. Anything is a poem if it has time in it. You don’t have to take a ferryboat or go to China to write a poem. The finest poem I ever lived was a kitchen sink. Did I ever tell you about it? There were two faucets, one called Froid and the other Chaud. Froid lived a life in extenso, by means of a rubber hose attached to his schnausel. Chaud was bright and modest. Chaud dripped all the time, as if he had the clap. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went to the Mosque where there was a clinic for venereal faucets. Tuesdays and Fridays Froid had to do all the work. He was a bugger for work. It was his whole world. Chaud on the other hand had to be petted and coaxed. You had to say “not so fast,” or he’d scald the skin off you. Once in a while they worked in unison, Froid and Chaud, but that was seldom. Saturday nights, when I washed my feet at the sink, I’d get to thinking how perfect was the world over which these twain ruled. Never anything more than this iron sink with its two faucets. No beginnings and no ends. Chaud the alpha and Froid the omega. Perpetuity. The Gemini, ruling over life and death. Alpha-Chaud running out through all degrees of Fahrenheit and Reaumur, through magnetic filings and comets’ tails, through the boiling cauldron of Mauna Loa into the dry light of the Tertiary moon; Omega-Froid running out through the Gulf Stream into the paludal bed of the Sargasso Sea, running through the marsupials and the f oramini-fera, through the mammal whales and the Polar fissures, running down through island universes, through dead cathodes, through dead bone and dry rot, through the follicles and tentacles of worlds unformed, worlds untouched, worlds unseen, worlds unborn and forever lost. Alpha-Chaud dripping, dripping; Omega-Froid working, working. Hand, feet, hair, face, dishes, vegetables, fish washed clean and away; despair, ennui, hatred, love, jealousy, crime … dripping, dripping. I, Jabberwhorl, and my wife Jill, and after us legions upon legions … all standing at the iron sink. Seeds falling down through the drain: young canteloupes, squash, caviar, macaroni, bile, spittle, phlegm, lettuce leaves, sardines’ bones, Worcestershire sauce, stale beer, urine, bloodclots, Kruschen salts, oatmeal, chew tobacco, pollen, dust, grease, wool, cotton threads, match sticks, live worms, shredded wheat, scalded milk, castor oil. Seeds of waste falling away forever and forever coming back in pure draughts of a miraculous chemical substance which refuses to be named, classified, labeled, analyzed, or drawn and quartered. Coming back as Froid and Chaud perpetually, like a truth that can’t be downed. You can take it hot or cold, or you can take it tepid. You can wash your feet or gargle your throat; you can rinse the soap out of your eyes or drive the grit out of the lettuce leaves; you can bathe the new-born babe or swab the rigid limbs of the dead; you can soak bread for fricadellas or dilute your wine. First and last things. Elixir. I, Jabberwhorl, tasting the elixir of life and death. I, Jabberwhorl, of waste and H2O composed, of hot and cold and all the intermediate realms, of scum and rind, of finest, tiniest substance never lost, of great sutures and compact bone, of ice fissures and test tubes, of semen and ova fused, dissolved, dispersed, of rubber schnauscl and brass spigot, of dead cathodes and squirming infusoria, of lettuce leaves and bottled sunlight … I, Jabberwhorl, sitting at the iron sink am perplexed and exalted, never less and never more than a poem, an iron stanza, a boiling follicle, a lost leucocyte. The iron sink where I spat out my heart, where I bathed my tender feet, where I held my first child, where I washed my sore gums, where I sang like a diamond-backed terrapin and I am singing now and will sing forever though the drains clog and the faucets rust, though time runs out and I be all there is of present, past and future. Sing, Froid, sing transitive! Sing, Chaud, sing intransitive! Sing Alpha and Omega! Sing Hallelujah! Sing out, 0 sink! Sing while the world sinks …”
And singing loud and clear like a dead and stricken swan on the bed we laid him out.
Into the Night Life..
A Coney Island of the mind.
Over the foot of the bed is the shadow of the cross. There are chains binding me to the bed. The chains are clanking loudly, the anchor is being lowered. Suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder. Some one is shaking me vigorously. I look up and it is an old hag in a dirty wrapper. She goes to the dresser and opening a drawer she puts a revolver away.
There are three rooms, one after the other, like a railroad flat. I am lying in the middle room in which there is a walnut bookcase and a dressing table. The old hag removes her wrapper and stands before the mirror in her chemise. She has a little powder puff in her hand and with this little puff she swabs her armpits, her bosom, her thighs. All the while she weeps like an idiot. Finally she comes over to me with an atomizer and she squirts a fine spray over me. I notice that her hair is full of rats.
I watch the old hag moving about. She seems to be in a trance. Standing at the dresser she opens and closes the drawers, one after the other, mechanically. She seems to have forgotten what she remembered to go there for. Again she picks up the powder puff and with the powder puff she daubs a little powder under her armpits. On the dressing table is a little silver watch attached to a long piece of black tape. Pulling off her chemise she slings the watch around her neck; it reaches just to the pubic triangle. There comes a faint tick and then the silver turns black.
In the next room, which is the parlor, all the relatives are assembled. They sit in a semicircle, waiting for me to enter. They sit stiff and rigid, upholstered like the chairs. Instead of warts and wens there is horsehair sprouting from their chins.
I spring out of bed in my nightshirt and I commence to dance the dance of King Kotschei. In my nightshirt I dance, with a parasol over my head. They watch me without a smile, without so much as a crease in their jowls. I walk on my hands for them, I turn somersaults, I put my fingers between my teeth and whistle like a blackbird. Not the faintest murmur of approval or disapproval. They sit there solemn and imperturbable. Finally I begin to snort like a bull, then I prance like a fairy, then I strut like a peacock, and then realizing that I have no tail I quit. The only thing left to do is to read the Koran through at lightning speed, after which the weather reports, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the Book of Numbers.
Suddenly the old hag comes dancing in stark naked, her hands aflame. Immediately she knocks over the umbrella stand the place is in an uproar. From the upturned umbrella stand there issues a steady stream of writhing cobras traveling at lightning speed. They knot themselves around the legs of the tables, they carry away the soup tureens, they scramble into the dresser and jam the drawers, they wriggle through the pictures on the wall, through the curtain rings, through the mattresses, they coil up inside the women’s hats, all the while hissing like steam boilers.
Winding a pair of cobras about my arms I go for the old hag with murder in my eyes. From her mouth, her eyes, her hair, from her vagina even, the cobras are streaming forth, always with that frightful steaming hiss as if they had been ejected fresh from a boiling crater. In the middle of the room where we are locked an immense forest opens up. We stand in a nest of cobras and our bodies come undone.
I am in a strange, narrow little room, lying on a high bed. There is an enormous hole in my side, a clean hole without a drop of blood showing. I can’t tell any more who I am or where I came from or how I got here. The room is very small and my bed is close to the door. I have a feeling that some one is standing on the doorsill watching me. I am petrified with fright.
When I raise my eyes I see a man standing at the doorsill. He wears a gray derby cocked on the side of his head; he has a flowing mustache and is dressed in a checkerboard suit. He asks my name, my address, my profession, what I am doing and where I am going and so on and so forth. He asks endless prying questions to which I am unable to respond, first because I have lost my tongu
e, and second because I cannot remember any longer what language I speak. “Why don’t you speak?” he says, bending over me jeeringly, and taking his light rattan stick he jabs a hole in my side. My anguish is so great that it seems I must speak even if I have no tongue, even if I know not who I am or where I came from. With my two hands I try to wrench my jaws apart, but the teeth are locked. My chin crumbles away like dry clay, leaving the jawbone exposed. “Speak!” he says, with that cruel, jeering smile and, taking his stick once again, he jabs another hole through my side.
I lie awake in the cold dark room. The bed almost touches the ceiling now. I hear the rumbling of trains, the regular rhythmic bouncing of the trains over the frozen trestle, the short, throttled puffs of the locomotive, as if the air were splintered with frost. In my hand are the pieces of dry clay which crumbled from my chin. My teeth are locked tighter than ever; I breathe through the holes in my side. From the window of the little room in which I lie I can see the Montreal bridge. Through the girders of the bridge, driven downward by the blinding blizzard, the sparks are flying. The trains are racing over the frozen river in wreaths of fire. I can see the shops along the bridgeway gleaming with pies and hamburger sandwiches. Suddenly I do remember something. I remember that just as I was about to cross the border they asked me what I had to declare and, like an idiot, I answered: “I want to declare that 1 am a traitor to the human race.” I remember distinctly now that this occurred just as I was walking up a treadmill behind a woman with balloon skirts. There were mirrors all around us and above the mirrors a balustrade of slats, series after series of slats, one on top of another, tilted, toppling, crazy as a nightmare. In the distance I could see the Montreal bridge and below the bridge the ice floes over which the trains raced. I remember now that when the woman looked around at me she had a skull on her shoulders, and written into the fleshless brow was the word sex stony as a lizard. I saw the lids drop down over her eyes and then the sightless cavern without bottom. As I fled from her I tried to read what was written on the body of a car racing beside me, but I could catch only the tail end and it made no sense.