Black Spring

by Henry Miller

  Filed under R for rat poison.

  And what by that? you say.

  Why just this…. Whenever it came time to visit Tante Melia at the bughouse mother would do up a little lunch, saying as she laid the bottle between the napkins-“Mele always liked a drop of Kiimmel.” And when it came mother’s turn to visit the bughouse and say to Mele well Mele how did you like the Kummel, and Mele shaking her head and saying what Kummel, I didn’t see any Kummel, why I could always say she’s crazy of course, I gave her the Kummel. What was the sense in pouring a drop of Kiimmel down Mele’s throat when she was so goddamned disoriented as to swallow her own dung?

  If it were a sunny day and my friend Stanley commissioned by his uncle, the mortician, to carry a stillbirth to the cemetery grounds, we would take a ferry boat to Staten Island and when the Statue of Liberty hove in sight overboard with it! If it were a rainy day we would walk into another neighborhood and throw it down the sewer. A day like that was a festive day for all the sewer rats. A fine day for the sewer rats scampering through the vestibule of the upper world. In those days a stillbirth brought as high as ten dollars and after riding the shoot-the-chutes we always left a little stale beer for the morning because the finest thing in the world for Katzenjammer is a glass of stale beer.

  I am speaking of things that brought me relief in the beginning. You are at the beginning of the world, in a garden which is boxed off. The sky is banked like sand dunes and there is not just one firmament but millions of them; the crust of every planet is carved into an eye, a very human eye that neither blinks nor winks. You are about to write a beautiful book and in it you are going to record everything that has given you pain or joy. This book, when written, will be called A Prolegomenon to the Unconscious. You will dress it in white kid and the letters will be embossed in gold. It will be the story of your life without emendations. Everybody will want to read it because it will contain the absolute truth and nothing but the truth. This is the story that makes you laugh in your sleep, the story that starts the tears flowing when you are in the middle of a ballroom and suddenly realize that none of the people around you know what a genius you are. How they would laugh and weep if they could only read what you have not yet written because every word is absolutely true and so far nobody has dared to write this absolute truth except yourself and this true book which is locked up inside you would make people laugh and weep as they have never laughed, never wept before.

  In the beginning this is what brings relief-the true book which nobody has read, the book which you carry around inside you, the book dressed in white kid and embossed with letters of gold. In this book there are many verses colossially dear to you. Out of this book came the Bible, and the Koran, and all the sacred books of the East. All these books were written at the beginning of the world.

  And now I’m going to tell you about the technical aspect of these books, this book whose genesis I am about to relate….

  When you open this book you will notice immediately that the illustrations have a queer pituitary flavor. You will see immediately that the author has forsaken the optical illusion in favor of a post-pineal view. The frontispiece is usually a selfportrait called “Praxus” showing the author standing on the frontier of the middle brain in a pair of tights. He always wears thicklensed spectacles, Toric, U-31 flange. In ordinary waking life the author suffers from normal vision but in the frontispiece he renders himself myopic in order to grasp the immediacy of the dream plasm. By means of the dream technique he peels off the outer layers of his geologic mortality and comes to grips with his true mantic self, a non-stratified area of semi-liquid character. Only the amorphous side of his nature now possesses validity. By submerging the visible I he dives below the threshold of his schizophrenic habit patterns. He swims joyously, ad lib., in the amniotic fluid, one with his amoebic self.

  But what, you ask, is the significance of the bird in his left hand?

  Why, just this: the bird is purely metaphysical-a quaternary type of the genus dodo, having a tiny, dorsal aperture through which it delivers homilies on the nature of all things. As a species it is extinct; as an eidolon it retains its corporeality-but only if maintained in a state of equipoise. The Germans have immortalized it in the cuckoo clock; in Siam it is found on the coins of the Twenty-third Dynasty. The wings, you will observe, are almost atrophied-because in the pseudocatalepsy of the dream it does not need to fly, it needs only to imagine that it is flying. The hinges of the bill are slightly out of order as the original ball-bearings were lost while flying over the Gobi desert. The bird is definitely not obscene and has never been known to foul its nest. It lays a speckled egg about the size of a walnut whenever it is about to undergo metamorphosis. It feeds on the Absolute when hungry, but it is not a carrion bird. It is exclusively migratory and, despite the vestigial wings, flies incessantly over great imaginary tracts.

  If this is clear we can now go on to something elseto the peculiar object swinging from the author’s left elbow, for example. With due humility I must admit that this is a little more difficult to explain, being an image of great subjunctive beauty haunting the scar tissues of the hind brain. In the first place, though contiguous to the elbow you will note that it is not suspended from the elbow. It lies at the junction of fore arm and upper arm asymptotally-that is, a symbol rather than a precise ideological concept. The numbers on the lowest pan correspond to certain Runic devices which have resulted in the pragmatic invention known as the metronym. These numbers lie at the root of all musical composition-as imponderable mathematic. These numbers lead the mind back to organic modalities so that structure and form may sustain the elegant perpetuity of logic.

  This much clarified, let me add that the conical object in the background must necessarily be capable of only one interpretation: laziness. Not ordinary laziness, as the Pauline doctrine would have it, but a sort of spasmic phlegm induced by the leaden fumes of pleasure. It is hardly necessary to specify that the halo above the conical object is not a quoit nor even a lifesaver, but a purely epistemological phenomenon-that is, a phantastikon which has taken its stance in the melancholy rings of Saturn.

  And now, dear reader, I wish that you would make ready to ask me a question before I file this portrait away under P for petunia. Won’t somebody please testify before we go down to have another look at that dear dead face? Do I hear some one speaking or is that a shoe squeaking? It seems to me I hear some one asking something. Some one is asking me if the little shadow on the horizon line might be a homunculus. Is that right? Are you asking me, Brother Eaton, if that little shadow on the horizon line might be a homunculus?

  Brother Eaton doesn’t know. He says it might and again it might not.

  Well, you are right and you are wrong, Brother Eaton. Wrong because the law of hypothecation does not permit of what is known as doing the duck; wrong because the equation is carried over by an asterisk whereas the sign points clearly to infinity; right because all that is wrong has to do with incertitude and in clearing away dead matter an enema is not sufficient. Brother Eaton, what you see on the horizon line is neither a homunculus nor a plugged hat. It is the shadow of Praxus. It shrinks to diminutive proportions in the measure that Praxus waxes great. As Praxus advances beyond the pale of the tertiary moon he disembarrasses himself more and more of his terrestrial image. Little by little he divests himself of the mirror of substantiality. When the last illusion has been shattered Praxus will cast no shadow. He will stand on the 49th parallel of the unwritten eclogue and waste away in cold fire. There will be no more paranoia, everything else being equal. The body will shed its skins and the organs of man will hold themselves proudly in the light. Should there be a war you will please rearrange the entrails according to their astrologic significance. The dawn is breaking over the viscera. No more logic, no more liver mantic. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. Man will be given absolution. Filed under A for anagogic.

  Megalopolitan Maniac

  Imagine having nothing on you
r hands but your destiny. You sit on the doorstep of your mother’s womb and you kill time-or time kills you. You sit there chanting the doxology of things beyond your grasp. Outside. Forever outside.

  The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls. Box within box she rears her dry walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph. In the vaults below the riverbed the gold ingots. A desert glittering with mica and the telephone loudly ringing.

  In the early evening, when death rattles the spine, the crowd moves compact, elbow to elbow, each member of the great herd driven by loneliness; breast to breast toward the wall of self, frustrate, isolate, sardine upon sardine, all seeking the universal can opener. In the early evening, when the crowd is sprinkled with electricity, the whole city gets up on its hind legs and crashes the gates. In the stampede the abstract man falls apart, gray with self, spinning in the gutter of his deep loneliness.

  One name branded deep. One identity. Everyone pretends not to know, not to remember any more, but the name is branded deep, as deep within as the farthest star without. Filling all space and time, creating infinite loneliness, this name expands and becomes what it always was and always will be-God. In the herd, moving with silent feet, in the stampede, wilder than the greatest panic, is God. God burning like a star in the firmament of the human consciousness: God of the buffaloes, God of the reindeer, man’s God…. God.

  Never more God than in the godless crowd. Never more God than in the early evening stampede when the spine rattling with death telegraphs the song of love through all the neurones and from every shop on Broadway the radio answers with megaphone and pick-up, with amplifiers and hook-ups. Never more loneliness than in the teeming crowd, the lonely man of the city surrounded by his inventions, the lost seeker drowning in the common identity. Out of desperate lonely lovelack is built the last stronghold, the webbed citadel of God formed after the labyrinth. From this last refuge no escape except heavenward. From here we fly home, marking the strange ether channels.

  Done with his underground life the worm takes on wings. Bereft of sight, hearing, smell, taste he dives straight into the unknown. Away! Away! Anywhere out of the world! Saturn, Neptune, Vega-no matter where or whither, but away, away from the earth! Up there in the blue, with firecrackers sputtering in his asshole, the angelworm goes daft. He drinks and eats upside down; he sleeps upside down; he screws upside down. At the maximum vitesse his body is lighter than air; at the maximum tempo there is nothing but the spontaneous combustion of dream. Alone in the blue he wings on toward God with purring dynamos. The last flight! The last dream of birth before the bag is punctured.

  Where now is he who out of endless nightmares struggled up toward the light? Who is he that stands on the surface of the earth with lungs collapsing, a knife between his teeth, his eyes bursting? Vulcanized by sorrow and agony he stands aghast in the swift, corrup tive flux of the upper world. With blood-soaked eyes how glorious it is to behold the world! How bright and gory the empire of man! MAN! Look, there he is rolling along on his little sledge, his legs amputated, his eyes blown out. Can’t you hear him playing? He is playing the Song of Love as he rolls along on his little sledge. In the coffee house, alone with his dreams and a revolver under his heart, sits another man, a man who is sick with love. All the clients have gone, save a skeleton with a hat on. The man is alone with his loneliness. The revolver is silent. Beside him is a dog and a bone, and the dog has no use for the bone. The dog is lonely too. Through the window the sun streams in; it shines with a ghastly brilliance on the green skull of the lovelorn. The sun is rotting with ghastly brilliance.

  So beautiful the winter of life, with the sun rotting away and the angels flying heavenward with firecrackers up their ass! Softly and meditatively we march through the streets. The gymnasiums are open and one can see the new men made of stovepipes and cylinders moving according to chart and diagram. The new men who will never wear out because the parts can always be replaced. New men without eyes, nose, ears or mouth, men with ball bearings in their joints and skates on their feet. Men immune to riots and revolutions. How gay and crowded the streets are! On a cellar door stands Jack the Ripper swinging an axe; the priest is mounting the scaffold, an erection bursting his fly; the notaries pass with their bulging portfolios; the klaxons going full blast. Men are delirious in their newfound freedom. A perpetual seance with megaphones and ticker tape, men with no arms dictating to wax cylinders; factories going night and day, turning out more sausages, more pretzels, more buttons, more bayo nets, more coke, more laudanum, more sharp-edged axes, more automatic pistols.

  I can think of no lovelier day than this in the full bloom of the twentieth century, with the sun rotting away and a man on a little sledge blowing the Song of Love through his piccolo. This day shines in my heart with such a ghastly brilliance that even if I were the saddest man in the world I should not want to leave the earth.

  What a magnificent evacuation, this last flight heavenward from the holy citadel! Looking downward the earth seems soft and lovely again. The earth denuded of man. Unspeakably soft and lovely, this earth bereft of man. Rid of God-hunters, rid of her whoring progeny, the mother of all living wheels her way again with grace and dignity. The earth knows no God, no charity, no love. The earth is a womb which creates and destroys. And man is not of the earth, but of God. To God then let him go, naked, broken, corrupt, divided, lonelier than the deepest gulch.

  Today yet a little while Progress and Invention keep me company as I march toward the mountain top. Tomorrow every world city will fall. Tomorrow every civilized being on earth will die of poison and steel. But today you can still bathe me in God’s wonderful love lyrics. Today it is still chamber music, dream, hallucination. The last five minutes! A dream, a fugue without a coda. Every note rotting away like dead meat on the hooks. A gangrene in which the melody is drowned by its own suppurating stench. Once the organism feels death within its grasp it shudders with rapture. A quickening which mounts to triumphant agony-the agony of the death rattle, when food and sex are one. The whirlpool! and everything that is sucked into it going down with it! The wild, unknowing savage who began at the circumference in pursuit of his tail drawing in closer and closer in great labyrinthine spirals and now reaching the dead center where he whirls on the pivot of self with an incandescence that sends a blinding flood of light through every gutter of the soul: spinning there insane and insatiate, the ghoul and gouger of his soul, spinning in centrifugal lust and fury until he sputters out through the hole in the center of him; going down like a gas bag-vault, cellar, ribs, skin, blood, tissue, mind, and heart all consumed, devoured, blottoed in final annihilation.

  This is the city, and this the music. Out of the little black boxes an unending river of romance in which the crocodiles weep. All walking toward the mountain top. All in step. From the power house above God floods the street with music. It is God who turns the music on every evening just as we quit work. To some of us is given a crust of bread, to others a Rolls Royce. All moving toward the Exits, the stale bread locked in the garbage cans. What is it that keeps our feet in unison as we move toward the shining mountain top? It is the Song of Love which was heard in the manger by the three wise men from the East. A man without legs, his eyes blown out, was playing it on the piccolo as he rolled through the street of the holy city on his littlc sledge. It is this Song of Love which now pours out of millions of little black boxes at the precise chronological moment, so that even our little brown brothers in the Philippines can hear it. It is this beautiful Song of Love which gives us the strength to build the tallest buildings, to launch the biggest battleships, to span the widest rivers. It is this Song which gives us the courage to kill millions of men at once by just pressing a button. This Song which gives us the energy to plunder the earth and lay everything bare.


  Walking toward the mountain top I study the rigid outlines of your buildings which tomorrow will crumple and collapse in smoke. I study your peace programs which will end in a hail of bullets. I study your glittering shop windows crammed with inventions for which tomorrow there will be no use. I study your worn faces hacked with toil, your broken arches, your fallen stomachs. I study you individually and in the swarm-and how you stink, all of you! You stink like God and his all-merciful love and wisdom. God the maneater! God the shark swimming with his parasites!

  It is God, let us not forget, who turns the radio on each evening. It is God who floods our eyes with shining, brimming light. Soon we will be with Him, folded in his bosom, gathered up in bliss and eternity, even with the Word, equal before the Law. This is coming about through love, a love so great that beside it the mightiest dynamo is but a mosquito buzzing.

  And now I take leave of you and your holy citadel. I go now to sit on the mountain top, to wait another ten thousand years while you struggle up toward the light. I wish, just for this evening, that you would dim the lights, that you would muffle the loudspeakers. This evening I would like to meditate a bit in peace and quiet. I would like to forget for a little while that you are swarming around in your five-and-tencent honeycomb.

  Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with youMYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.

  Louveciennes;-Clich y;—Villa Seurat.

  1934-1935.