Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

  Being of the city, of the only city in the world and no place like Broadway anywhere, I used to walk up and down staring at the floodlit hams and other delicacies. I was a schizerino from the sole of my boots to the tips of my hair. I lived exclusively in the gerundive, which I understood only in Latin. Long before I had read of her in the Black Book I was cohabiting with Hilda, the giant cauliflower of my dreams. We traversed all the morganatic diseases together and a few which were ex cathedra. We dwelt in the carcass of the instincts and were nourished by ganglionic memories. There was never a universe, but millions and billions of universes, all of them put together no bigger than a pinhead. It was a vegetal sleep in the wilderness of the mind. It was the past, which alone comprises eternity. Amidst the fauna and flora of my dreams I would hear long distance calling. Messages were dropped on my table by the deformed and the epileptic. Hans Castorp would call sometimes and together we would commit innocent crimes. Or, if it were a bright freezing day. I would do a turn in the velodrome with my Presto bike from Chemnitz, Bohemia.

  Best of all was the skeleton dance. I would first wash all my parts at the sink, change my linen, shave, powder, comb my hair, don my dancing pumps. Feeling abnormally light inside and out I would wind in and out of the crowd for a time to get the proper human rhythm, the weight and substance of flesh. Then I would make a beeline for the dance floor, grab a hunk of giddy flesh and begin the autumnal pirouette. It was like that I walked into the hairy Greek’s place one night and ran smack into her. She seemed blue-black, white as chalk, ageless. There was not just the flow to and from, but the endless chute, the voluptuousness of intrinsic restlessness. She was mercurial and at the same time of a savoury weight. She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in lava. The time has come, I thought, to wander back from the periphery. I made a move towards the centre, only to find the ground shifting from under my feet. The earth slid rapidly beneath my bewildered feet. I moved again out of the earth belt and behold, my hands were full of meteoric flowers. I reached for her with two flaming hands but she was more elusive than sand. I thought of my favourite nightmares, but she was unlike anything which had made me sweat and gibber. In my delirium I began to prance and neigh. I bought frogs and mated them with toads. I thought of the easiest thing to do, which is to die, but I did nothing. I stood still and began to petrify at the extremities. That was so wonderful, so healing, so eminently sensible, that I began to laugh way down inside the viscera, like a hyena crazed with rut. Maybe I would turn into a rosetta stone! I just stood still and waited. Spring came and Fall, and then Winter. I renewed my insurance policy automatically. I ate grass and the roots of deciduous trees. I sat for days on end looking at the same film. Now and then I brushed my teeth. If you fired an automatic at me the bullets glanced off and made a queer tat-a-tat ricocheting against the walls. Once up a dark street, felled by a thug, I felt a knife go clean through me. It felt like a spritz bath. Strange to say, the knife left no holes in my skin. The experience was so novel that I went home and stuck knives into all parts of my body. More needle baths. I sat down, pulled all the knives out, and again I marvelled that there was no trace of blood, no holes, no pain. I was just about to bite into my arm when the telephone rang. It was long distance calling. I never knew who put in the calls because no one ever came to the phone. However the skeleton dance …

  Life is drifting by the show-window. I lie there like a floodlit ham waiting for the axe to fall. As a matter of fact, there is nothing to fear, because everything is cut neatly into fine little slices and wrapped in cellophane. Suddenly all the lights of the city are extinguished and the sirens sound their warning. The city is enveloped in poison gas, bombs are bursting, mangled bodies flying through the air. There is electricity everywhere, and blood and splinters and loud-speakers. The men in the air are full of glee; those below are screaming and bellowing. When the gas and the flames have eaten all the flesh away the skeleton dance begins. I watch from the show-window which is now dark. It is better than the sack of Rome because there is more to destroy.

  Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder. Is it the fall of the world? Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded? To see millions of skeletons dancing in the snow while the city founders is an awesome sight. Will anything ever grow again? Will babes come out of the womb? Will there be food and wine? There are the men in the air, to be sure. They will come down to plunder. There will be cholera and dysentery and those who were above and triumphant will perish like the rest. I have the sure feeling that I will be the last man on earth. I will emerge from the show-window when it is all over and walk calmly amidst the ruins. I will have the whole earth myself.

  Long distance calling! To inform me that I am not utterly alone. Then the destruction was not complete? It’s discouraging. Man is not even able to destroy himself; he can only destroy others. I am disgusted. What a malicious cripple! What cruel delusions! So there are more of the species about and they will tidy up the mess and begin again. God will come down again in flesh and blood and take up the burden of guilt. They will make music and build things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui! What blind tenacity, what clumsy ambitions!

  I am on the bed again. The old Greek world, the dawn of sexual intercourse – and Hymie! Hymie Laubscher always on the same level, looking down on the boulevard across the river. There is a lull in the nuptial feast and the clam fritters are brought in. Move aver just a little, he says. There, like that, that’s it! I hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside my window. Big cemetery frogs nourished by the dead. They are all huddled together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual glee.

  I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being. Hymie the bullfrog! His mother was at the bottom of the pack and Hymie, then an embryo, was hidden away in her sac It was in the early days of sexual intercourse and there were no Marquis of Queensbury rules to hinder. It was fuck and be fucked – and the devil take the hindmost It had been that way ever since the Greeks – a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death. People are fucking on different levels but it’s always in a swamp and the litter is always destined for the same end. When the house is torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar.

  I was polluting the bed with dreams. Stretched out taut on the ferro-concrete my soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on a little trolley such as is used in department stores for making change. I made ideological changes and excursions; I was a vagabond in the country of the brain. Everything was absolutely clear to me because done in rock crystal; at every egress there was written in big letters ANNIHILATION. The fright of extinction solidified me; the body became itself a piece of ferro-concrete. It was ornamented by a permanent erection in the best taste. I had achieved that state of vacuum so earnestly desired by certain devout members of esoteric cults. I was no more. I was not even a personal hard-on.

  It was about this time, adopting the pseudonym Samson Lackawanna, that I began my depredations. The criminal instinct in me had gotten the upper hand. Whereas heretofore I had been only an errant soul, a sort of Gentile Dybbuk, now I became a flesh-filled ghost. I had taken the name which pleased me and I had only to act instinctively. In Hong Kong, for instance, I made my entry as a book-agent. I carried a leather purse filled with Mexican dollars and I visited religiously all those Chinese who were in need of further education. At the hotel I rang for women like you would ring for whiskey and soda. Morning I studied Tibetan in order to prepare for the journey to Lhasa. I already spoke Jewish fluently, and Hebrew too. I could count two rows of figures at once. It was so easy to swindle the Chinese that I went back to Manila in disgust There I took a Mr. Rico in hand and taught him the art of selling books with no handling charges. All the profit came from ocean freight rates, but it was sufficient to keep me in luxury while it lasted.

  The breath had become as much a trick as breathing. Things were not dual merely, but multiple. I had become a cage of mir
rors reflecting vacuity. But vacuity once stoutly posited I was at home and what is called creation was merely a job of filling up holes. The trolley conveniently carried me about from place to place and in each little side pocket of the great vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of annihilation. I had ever before me boundless vistas. I began to live in the vista, like a microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope. There was no night in which to rest. It was perpetual starlight on the arid surface of dead planets. Now and then a lake black as marble in which I saw myself walking amidst brilliant orbs of lights. So low hung the stars and so dazzling was the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only about to be born. What rendered the impression stronger was that I was alone; not only were there no animals, no trees, no other beings, but there was not even a blade of grass, not even a dead root. In that violet incandescent light without even the suggestion of a shadow motion itself seemed to be absent. It was like a blaze of pure consciousness, thought become God. And God, for the first time in my knowledge, was clean-shaven. I was also clean-shaven, flawless, deadly accurate. I saw my image in the marble black lakes and it was diapered with stars. Stars, stars … like a clout between the eyes and all remembrance fast run out. I was Samson and I was Lackawanna and I was dying as one being in the ecstasy of full consciousness.

  And now here I am, sailing down the river in my little canoe. Anything you would like to have me do I will do for you – gratis. This is the Land of Fuck, in which there are no animals, no trees, no stars, no problems. Here the spermatazoon reigns supreme. Nothing is determined in advance, the future is absolutely uncertain, the past is non-existent. For every million born 999,999 are doomed to die and never again be born. But the one that makes a home run is assured of life eternal. Life is squeezed into a seed, which is a soul. Everything has soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains, rocks. Everything is sentient, even at the lowest stage of consciousness.

  Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss as at the top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa come to full consciousness. Between the bottom and the top there is no stop, no halfway station. The river starts somewhere in the mountains and flows on into the sea. On this river that leads to God the canoe is as serviceable as the dreadnought. From the very start the journey is homeward.

  Sailing down the river … Slow as the hook-worm, but tiny enough to make every bend. And slippery as an eel withal. What is your name? shouts some one. My name? Why just call me God – God the embryo; I go sailing on. Somebody would like to buy me a hat. What size do you wear, imbecile! he shouts. What size? Why size X! (And why do they always shout at me? Am I supposed to be deaf?) The hat is lost at the next cataract. Tant pis – for the hat. Does God need a hat? God needs only to become God, more and more God. All this voyaging, all these pitfalls, the time that passes, the scenery, and against the scenery man, trillions and trillions of things called man, like mustard seeds. Even in embryo God has no memory. The backdrop of consciousness is made up of infinitesimally minute ganglia, a coat of hair soft as wool. The mountain goat stands alone amidst the Himalayas; he doesn’t question how he got to the summit. He grazes quietly amidst the décor; when the time comes he will travel down again. He keeps his muzzle to the ground, grubbing for the sparse nourishment which the mountain peaks afford. In this strange capricornian condition of embryosis God the he-goat ruminates in stolid bliss among the mountain peaks. The high altitudes nourish the germ of separation which will one day estrange him completely from the soul of man, which will make him a desolate, rock-like father dwelling forever apart in a void which is unthinkable. But first come the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak …

  There is a condition of misery which is irremediable – because its origin is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale’s, for example, can bring about this condition. All department stores are symbols of sickness and emptiness, but Bloomingdale’s is my special sickness, my incurable obscure malady. In the chaos of Bloomingdale’s there is an order, but this order is absolutely crazy to me; it is the order which I would find on the head of a pin if I were to put it under the microscope. It is the order of an accidental series of accidents accidentally conceived. This order has, above all, an odour – and it is the odour of Bloomingdale’s which strikes terror into my heart. In Bloomingdale’s I fall apart completely: I dribble on to the floor, a helpless mess of guts and bones and cartilage. There is the smell, not of decomposition, but of mis-alliance. Man, the miserable alchemist, has welded together in a million forms and shapes, substances and essences which have nothing in common. Because in his mind there is a tumor which is eating him away insatiably; he has left the little canoe which was taking him blissfully down the river in order to construct a bigger, safer boat in which there may be room for every one. His labours take him so far afield that he has lost all remembrance of why he left the little canoe. The ark is so full of bric-à-brac that it has become a stationary building above a subway in which the smell of linoleum prevails and predominates. Gather together all the significance hidden away in the interstital miscellany of Bloomingdale’s and put it on the head of a pin and you will have left a universe in which the grand constellations move without the slightest danger of collision. It is this microscopic chaos which brings on my morganatic ailments. In the street I begin to stab horses at random, or I lift a skirt here and there looking for a letter-box, or I put a postage stamp across a mouth, an eye, a vagina. Or I suddenly decide to climb a tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly with real wings and I fly and fly and fly, covering towns like Weehawken, Hoboken, Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye. Once you become a real schizerino flying is the easiest thing in the world; the trick is to fly with the etheric body, to leave behind in Bloomingdale’s your sack of bones, guts, blood and cartilage; to fly only with your immutable self which, if you stop a moment to reflect, is always equipped with wings. Flying this way, in full daylight, has advantages over the ordinary night-flying which everybody indulges in. You can leave off from moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there is no difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave off, you are your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self. Only, as the Blooming-dale experience goes to prove, this whole self, about which so much boasting has been done, falls apart very easily. The smell of linoleum, for some strange reason, will always make me fall apart and collapse on the floor. It is the smell of all the unnatural things which were glued together in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative consent.

  It is only after the third meal that the morning gifts, bequeathed by the phony alliances of the ancestors, begin to drop away and the true rock of the self, the happy rock sheers up out of the muck of the soul. With nightfall the pinhead universe begins to expand. It expands organically, from an infinitesimal nuclear speck, in the way that minerals or star-clusters form. It eats into the surrounding chaos like a rat boring through store cheese. All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, but the self, microscopical at the start, works up to a universe from any point in space. This is not the self about which books are written, but the ageless self which has been farmed out through millenary ages to men with names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which is the worm in the cheese called the world. Just as the slightest breeze can set a vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the rock-like self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against it. It’s like Jack Frost at work, and the whole world a window-pane. No hint of labour, no sound, no struggle, no rest; relentless, remorseless, unremitting, the growth of the self goes on. Only two items on the bill of fare: the self and the not-self. And an eternity in which to work it out. In this eternity, which has nothing to do with time or space, there are interludes in which something like a thaw sets in. T
he form of the self breaks down, but the self, like climate, remains. In the night the amorphous matter of the self assumes the most fugitive forms: error seeps in through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched from his door. This door which the body wears, if opened out on to the world, leads to annihilation. It is the door in every fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out. Most important to note – there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth. One can feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home. But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel “established” the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, towards an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a core, a dead centre from which time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, for here it is seen to be divine.