Black Spring

by Henry Miller

  Delaware and Lackawanna, Monongahela, the Mohawk, the Shenandoah, Narragansett, Tuskegee, Oskaloosa, Kalamazoo, Seminole and Pawnee, Cherokee, the great Manitou, the Blackfeet, the Navaho range: like a huge red cloud, like a pillar of fire, a vision of the outlawed magnificence of our earth passes before my eyes. I see no Letts, Croats, Finns, Danes, Swedes; no micks, no wops, no chinks, no polacks, no frogs, no heinies, no kikes. I see the Jews sitting in their crows’ nests, their parched faces dry as leather, their skulls shriveled and boneless.

  Once more the tomahawk gleams, scalps fly, and out of the river bed there rolls a bright billowy cloud of blood. From the mountain sides, from the great caves, from the swamps and Everglades pours a flood of blood-flecked men. From the Sierras to the Appalachians the land smokes with the blood of the slain. My scalp is cut away, the gray meat hangs over my ears in shreds; my feet are burned away, my sides pierced with arrows. In a pen against a broken fence I lie with my bowels beside me; all mangled and gory the beautiful white temple that was stretched with skin and muscle. The wind roars through my broken rectum, howls like sixty white lepers. A white flame, a jet of blue ice, a torchspray spins in my hollow guts. My arms are yanked from their sockets. My body is a sepulcher which the ghouls are rifling. I am full of raw gems that bleed with icy brilliance. Like a thousand pointed lances the sun pierces my wounds, the gems flame, the gizzards shriek. Night or day I know not which; the tent of the world collapses like a gasbag. In a flame of blood I feel the cold touch of a tong: through the river gorge they drag me, blind and helpless, choking, gasping, shrieking with impotence. Far away I hear the rush of icy water, the moan of jackals neath the evergreens; through the dark green forest a stain of light spreads, a vernal, prussic light that stains the snow and the icy depths of the stream. A pleasant, choking gurgle, a quiet pandemonium as when the angel with her wings outstretched floated legless under the bridge.

  The gutters are choked with snow. It is winter and the sun glares down with the low bright glint of noon. Going down the street past the flats. For an hour or two, while the sun lasts, everything turns to water, everything flows, trickles, gurgles. Between the curbs and the snow banks a freshet of clear blue water rises. Within me a freshet that chokes the narrow gorge of my veins. A clear, blue stream inside me that circulates from my toes to the roots of my hair. I am completely thawed out, choking with an ice-blue gaiety.

  Going down the street past the flats, an ice-blue gaiety in my narrow, choking veins. The winter’s snow is melting, the gutters are swimming over. Sorrow gone and joy with it, melted, trickling away, pouring into the sewer. Suddenly the bells begin to toll, wild funereal bells with obscene tongues, with wild iron clappers that smash the glass hemorrhoids of the veins. Through the melting snow a carnage reigns: low Chinese horses hung with scalps, long finely jointed insects with green mandibles. In front of each house an iron railing spiked with blue flowers.

  Down the street of early sorrows comes the witch mother stalking the wind, her wide sails unfurled, her dress bulging with skulls. Terrified we flee the night, perusing the green album, its high decor of frontal legs, the bulging brow. From all the rotting stoops the hiss of snakes squirming in the bag, the cord tied, the bowels knotted. Blue flowers spotted like leopards, squashed, bloodsucked, the earth a vernal stain, gold, marrow, bright bone dust, three wings aloft and the march of the white horse, the ammonia eyes.

  The melting snow melts deeper, the iron rusts, the leaves flower. On the corner, under the elevated, stands a man with a plug hat, in blue serge and linen spats, his white mustache chopped fine. The switch opens and out rolls all the tobacco juice, the golden lemons, the elephant tusks, the candelabras. Moishe Pippik, the lemon dealer, fowled with pigeons, breeding purple eggs in his vest pocket and purple ties and watermelons and spinach with short stems, stringy, marred with tar. The whistle of the acorns loudly stirring, flurry of floozies bandaged in lysol, ammonia and camphor patches, little mica huts, peanut shells triangled and corrugated, all marching triumphantly with the morning breeze. The morning light comes in creases, the window panes are streaked, the covers are torn, the oilcloth is faded. Walks a man with hair on end, not running, not breathing, a man with a weathervane that turns the corners sharply and then bolts. A man who thinks not how or why but just to walk in lusterless night with all stars to port and loaded whiskers trimmed. Gowselling in the grummels he wakes the plaintiff night with pitfalls tuning left to right, high noon on the wintry ocean, high noon all sides aboard and aloft to starboard. The weathervane again with deep oars coming through the portholes and all sounds muffled. Noiseless the night on all fours, like the hurricane. Noiseless with loaded caramels and nickel dice. Sister Monica playing the guitar with shirt open and laces down, broad flanges in either ear. Sister Monica streaked with lime, gum wash, her eyes mildewed, craped, crapped, crenelated.

  The street of early sorrows widens, the blue lips blubber, the albatross wings ahead, her gory neck unhinged, her teeth agibber. The man with the bowler hat creaks his left leg, two notches further down to the right, under the gunwales, the Cuban flag spliced with noodles and mock oranges, with wild magnolias and young palmetto shoots chaffed with chalk and green slaver. Under the silver bed the white geranium bowl, two stripes for the morning, three for the night. The castors crooning for blood. The blood comes in white gulps, white choking gulps of clay filled with broken teeth, with mucilage and wasted bones. The floor is slippery with the coming and going, with the bright scissors, the long knives, the hot and cold tongs.

  In the melting snow outside the menagerie breaks loose, first the zebras with gorgeous white planks, then the fowling birds and rooks, then the acacias and the diamond backs. The greenery yawns with open toes, the red bird wheels and dives below, the scrum-tuft breaks a beak, the lizard micturates, the jackal purrs, the hyenas belch and laugh and belch again. The whole wide cemetery safely sprinkled cracks its joints in the night. The automatons crack too with mighty suits of armor encumbered and hinges rusted and bolts unlocked, abandoned by the tin trust. The butter blossoms out in huge fan wreaths, fat, oleandrous butter marked with crow’s feet and twice spliced by the hangman John the Crapper. The butter yowsels in the mortuary, pale shafts of moonbeam trickling through, the estuaries clogged, the freights ashudder, the sidings locked. Brown beagled bantams trimmed with red craw and otter’s fur browse the bottom lands. The larkspur does a hemorrhage. The magnesia wells ignite, the eagle soars aloft with a cleaver through the ankle.

  Bloody and wild the night with all hawk’s feet slashed and trimmed. Bloody and wild the night with all the belfries screeching and all the slats torn and all the gas mains bursting. Bloody and wild the night with every muscle twisted, the toes crossed, the hair on end, the teeth red, the spine cracked. All the world wide awake twittering like the dawn, and a low red fire crawling over the gums. All through the night the combs break, the ribs sing. Twice the dawn breaks, then steals away again. In the trickling snow the oxide fumes. All through the street the hearses pass up and down, up and down, the drivers munching their long whips, their white crapes, their cotton gloves.

  North toward the white pole, south toward the red heron, the pulse beats wild and straight. One by one, with bright glass teeth, they cut away the cords. The duck comes with his broad bill and then the low-bellied weasel. One after another they come, summoned from the fungus, their tails afeather, their feet webbed. They come in waves, bent like trolley poles, and pass under the bed. Mud on the floor and strange signs, the windows blazing, nothing but teeth, then hands, then carrots, then great nomadic onions with emerald eyes, comets that come and go, come and go.

  East toward the Mongols, west toward the redwoods, the pulse swings back and forth. Onions marching, eggs chattering, the menagerie spinning like a top. Miles high on the beaches lie the red caviar beds. The breakers foam, snap their long whips. The tide roars beneath the green glaciers. Faster, faster spins the earth.

  Out of -black chaos whorls of light with portholes ja
mmed. Out of the static null and void a ceaseless equilibrium. Out of whalebone and gunnysack this mad thing called sleep that runs like an eight-day clock.

  Walking Up and Down in China

  Now I am never alone. At the very worst I am with God!

  In Paris, out of Paris, leaving Paris or coming back to Paris, it’s always Paris and Paris is France and France is China. All that which is incomprehensible to me runs like a great wall over the hills and valleys through which I wander. Within this great wall I can live out my Chinese life in peace and security.

  I am not a traveler, not an adventurer. Things happened to me in my search for a way out. Up till now I had been working away in a blind tunnel, burrowing in the bowels of the earth for light and water. I could not believe, being a man of the American continent, that there was a place on earth where a man could be himself. By force of circumstance I became a Chinamana Chinaman in my own country! I took to the opium of dream in order to face the hideousness of a life in which I had no part. As quietly and naturally as a twig falling into the Mississippi I dropped out of the stream of American life. Everything that happened to me I remember, but I have no desire to recover the past, neither have I any longings or regrets. I am like a man who awakes from a long sleep to find that he is dreaming. A pre-natal condition-the born man living unborn, the unborn man dying born.

  Born and reborn over and over. Born while walking the streets, born while sitting in a cafe, born while lying over a whore. Born and reborn again and again. A fast pace and the penalty for it is not death simply, but repeated deaths. Hardly am I in heaven, for example, when the gates swing open and under my feet I find cobblestones. How did I learn to walk so soon? With whose feet am I walking? Now I am walking to the grave, marching to my own funeral. I hear the clink of the spade, the rain of sods. My eyes are scarcely closed, I have barely time to smell the flowers in which they’ve smothered me, when bango! I’ve lived out another immortality. Coming back and forth to earth this way puts me on the alert. I’ve got to keep my body in trim for the worms. Got to keep my soul intact for God.

  Afternoons, sitting at La Fourche, I ask myself calmly: “Where do we go from here?” By nightfall I may have traveled to the moon and back. Here at the crossroads I sit and dream back through all my separate and immortal egos. I weep in my beer. Nights, walking back to Clichy, it’s the same feeling. Whenever I come to La Fourche I see endless roads radiating from my feet and out of my own shoes there step forth the countless egos which inhabit my world of being. Arm in arm I accompany them over the paths which once I trod alone: what I call the grand obsessional walks of my life and death. I talk to these self-made companions much as I would talk to myself had I been so unfortunate as to live and die only once and thus be forever alone. Now 1 am never alone. At the very worst I am with God!

  There is something about the little stretch from the Place Clichy to La Fourche which causes all the grand obsessional walks to bloom at once. It’s like moving from one solstice to another. Supposing I have just left the Cafe Wepler and that I have a book under my arm, a book on Style and Will. Perhaps when I was reading this book I didn’t comprehend more than a phrase or two. Perhaps I was reading the same page all evening. Perhaps I wasn’t at the Cafe Wepler at all, but hearing the music I left my body and flew away. And where am I then? Why, I am out for an obsessional walk, a short walk of fifty years or so accomplished in the turning of a page.

  It’s when I’m leaving the Cafe Wepler that I hear a strange, swishing noise. No need to look behind-I know it’s my body rushing to join me. It’s at this moment usually that the shitpumps are lined up along the Avenue. The hoses are stretched across the sidewalk like huge groaning worms. The fat worms are sucking the shit out of the cesspools. It’s this that gives me the proper spiritual gusto to look at myself in profile. I see myself bending over the book in the cafe; I see the whore alongside me reading over my shoulder; I f eel her breath on my neck. She waits for me to raise my eyes, perhaps to light the cigarette which she holds in her hand. She is going to ask me what I am doing here alone and am I not bored. The book is on Style and Will and I have brought it to the cafe to read because it’s a luxury to read in a noisy cafe-and also a protection against disease. The music too is good in a noisy cafe-it augments the sense of solitude, of loneliness. I see the upper lip of the whore trembling over my shoulder. Just a triangular patch of lip, smooth and silky. It trembles on the high notes, poised like a chamois above a ravine. And now I am running the gauntlet, I and myself firmly glued together. The little stretch from the Place Clichy to La Fourche. From the blind alleys that line the little stretch thick clusters of whores leap out, like bats blinded by the light. They get in my hair, my ears, my eyes. They cling with bloodsucking paws. All night long they are festering in the alleyways; they have the smell of plants after a heavy rain. They make little plantlike sounds, imbecilic cries of endearment which make the flesh creep. They swarm over me like lice, lice with long plantlike tendrils which sponge the sweat of my pores. The whores, the music, the crowds, the walls, the light on the walls, the shit and the shitpumps working valorously, all this forms a nebula which condenses into a cool, waking sweat.

  Every night, as I head toward La Fourche, I run the gauntlet. Every night I’m scalped and tomahawked. If it were not so I would miss it. I come home and shake the lice out of my clothes, wash the blood from my body. I go to bed and snore loudly. Just the right world for me! Keeps my flesh tender and my soul intact.

  The house in which I live is being torn down. All the rooms are exposed. My house is like a human body with the skin peeled off. The wallpaper hangs in tatters, the bedsteads have no mattresses, the sinks are gone. Every night before entering the house I stand and look at it. The horror of it fascinates me. After all, why not a little horror? Every living man is a museum that houses the horrors of the race. Each man adds a new wing to the museum. And so, each night, standing before the house in which I live, the house which is being torn down, I try to grasp the meaning of it. The more the insides are exposed the more I get to love my house. I love even the old pisspot which stands under the bed, and which nobody uses any more.

  In America I lived in many houses, but I do not remember what any house was like inside. I had to take what was happening to me and walk the streets with it. Once I hired an open barouche and I rode down Fifth Avenue. It was an afternoon in the fall and I was riding through my own city. Men and women promenading on the sidewalks: curious beasts, half-human, halfcelluloid. Walking up and down the Avenue halfcrazed, their teeth polished, their eyes glazed. The women clothed in beautiful garbs, each one equipped with a cold storage smile. The men smiled too now and then, as if they were walking in their coffins to meet the Heavenly Redeemer. Smiling through life with that demented, glazed look in the eyes, the flags unfurled, and sex flowing sweetly through the sewers. I had a gat with me and when we got to Forty-second Street I opened fire. Nobody paid any attention. I mowed them down right and left, but the crowd got no thinner. The living walked over the dead, smiling all the while to advertise their beautiful white teeth. It’s this cruel white smile that sticks in my memory. I see it in my sleep when I put out my hand to beg-the George C. Tilyou smile that floats above the spandangled bananas at Steeplechase. America smiling at poverty. It costs so little to smile-why not smile as you ride along in an open barouche? Smile, smile. Smile and the world is yours. Smile through the death rattleit makes it easier for those you leave behind. Smile, damn you! The smile that never comes off!

  A Thursday afternoon and I’m standing in the Metro face to face with the homely women of Europe. There’s a worn beauty about their faces, as if like the earth itself they had participated in all the cataclysms of nature. The history of their race is engraved on their faces; their skin is like a parchment on which is recorded the whole struggle of civilization. The migrations, the hatreds and persecutions, the wars of Europe -all have left their impress. They are not smiling; their faces are composed and what is written
on them is composed in terms of race, character, history. I see on their faces the ragged, multicolored map of Europe, a map streaked with rail, steamship and airplane lines, with national frontiers, with indelible, ineradicable prejudices and rivalries. The very raggedness of the contours, the big gaps that indicate sea and lake, the broken links that make the islands, the curious mythological hangovers that are the peninsulas, all this strain and erosion indicates the conflict that is going on perpetually between man and reality, a conflict of which this book is but another map. I am impressed, gazing at this map, that the continent is much more vast than it seems, that in fact it is not a continent at all but a part of the globe which the waters have broken into, a land broken into by the sea. At certain weak points the land gave way. One would not have to know a word of geology to understand the vicissitudes which this continent of Europe with its network of rivers, lakes, and inland seas has undergone. One can spot at a glance the titanic efforts that were made at different periods, just as one can detect the abortive, frustrated efforts. One can actually feel the great changes of climate that followed upon the various upheavals. If one looks at this map with the eyes of a cartologist one can imagine what it will look like fifty or a hundred thousand years hence.

  So it is that, looking at the sea and land which compose the continents of man, I see certain ridiculous, monstrous formations and others again which bear witness to heroic struggles. I can trace, in the long, winding rivers, the loss of faith and courage, the slipping away from grace, the slow, gradual attrition of the soul. I can see that the frontiers are marked with heavy, natural boundaries and also with light, wavering lines, variable as the wind. I can feel just where the climate is going to change, perceive as inevitable that certain fertile regions will wither and other barren places blossom. I am sure that in certain quarters the myth will come true, that here and there a link will be found between the unknown men we were and the unknown men we are, that the confusion of the past will be marked by a greater confusion to come, and that it is only the tumult and confusion which is of importance and that we must get down and worship it. As man we contain all the elements which make the earth, its real substance and its myth; we carry with us everywhere and always our changing geography, our changing climate. The map of Europe is changing before our eyes; nobody knows where the new continent begins or ends.